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  Hazel began rubbing her face in thorough circles with both of her hands. “And did I ever tell you he liked using the phrase ‘global domination’? He did. Heavily. Who, besides crazed sociopathic dictators, comes home to his partner after a meeting and says, ‘I love the taste of global domination! Want to taste it? Give me a kiss!’ I felt like I lived with a cartoon villain. Worst of all, since I had no idea how to respond, I’d go along with it like I was proud of him. ‘Cheers to you, global dominator!’ I can’t count the number of times I raised a water glass in his direction and said that.”

  “All right, well. Sorry your marriage was a shit show, kid. Sounds like you need another drink even more than I thought.” He returned his face to the sanctuary of Diane’s hair and began mashing around in it, lifting up individual pieces and almost polishing his cheeks and chin with them. “Scram for now and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Hazel felt a deep sigh building inside. She wanted it to be her father’s fault if she walked out the door and got kidnapped or worse by Gogol thugs, but it wouldn’t be, and her father knew it wouldn’t be, and he would therefore fail to feel the inordinate amount of guilt she’d like to think he’d feel for sending her out of his home when she really didn’t want to leave. “Sure, Dad. I’ll go to the bar. Words every father longs to hear his daughter say: I’m off to the tavern until way past your bedtime.”

  “You have to actually go,” he specified. “No pretending to leave and sitting on the steps for a few minutes and coming right back in.” The Rascal beeped its loud message of backward motion; he performed a turnaround maneuver and the new couple sped off to the bedroom. “I know,” Hazel could hear him whispering to Diane, “I’d say she’s lost it too.”

  Hazel grabbed her father’s house key from the wooden dachshund key holder that hung by the front door. The keys dangling from the dog’s belly made them look like oversize metal udder caps were milking the creature to death. The dog’s wide glued-on eyes were begging Hazel to rescue it from a life sentence of indentured lactation.

  Hazel liked the feel of her father’s key in her hand, the way its teeth hurt her palm if she gripped too tightly. Entry to The Hub, Byron’s special name for their domestic compound, was controlled through a combination of voice and retinal detection. Certain rooms required a fingerprint and a keypad code; their cars were controlled via remote.

  Little things like physical keys made Hazel feel as if she were going back in time, which she realized was exactly what she wanted to do. Get away from the futureworld she’d lived in with Byron, away even from the technological present. From now on she wanted no part of what Byron and his cohorts liked to call the Bionic Revolution, though they frequently slipped—was it a slip?—and said Byronic.

  The more she could live a strictly manual and basic life, the more distant she’d be from him, and that was a hopeful thought: there was a way to feel like she was reclaiming herself.

  She was having less hopeful thoughts too. It was a humid night and she was sweaty and anxious and really did not look her best. This somehow made the thought of a stranger coming to kill her even sadder than it had to be.

  HAZEL SUPPOSED SHE COULD TRACE THE BEGINNINGS OF HER father’s desire for companionship post-widowerhood back to an excited midnight phone call she’d gotten from him several years ago.

  It was nearly 2 AM when she received it. “Hazel!” he’d repeated into the phone. “Hazel! Hazel! Hazel!” Like her name was a word he’d just managed to learn.

  Coming out of a dead sleep, her brain hadn’t been awake enough to distinguish alarm from enthusiasm. She’d been convinced her father was having a stroke.

  “Let me call 911, Dad,” she’d instructed; “I’ll have a helicopter meet you at the hospital.” The ER he’d be taken to was a little over a two-hour drive from The Hub, but it had a helipad, and Gogol doctors could start working on him during the flight to the medical facility adjacent to The Hub. It was state of the art to the point of hilarity. Concealed speakers throughout the premises pulsed a series of soothing yet definitively upbeat ambient sounds—it really seemed like a noise that could keep death at bay, the way certain low frequencies drive off vermin and insects. I tell you what, one patient said in a promotional video; Hazel thought she remembered Byron saying he was an oil baron. It’s like you get to time travel to the future and go to the hospital thirty years from now, this place. I had a quadruple bypass two days ago and it was the most relaxing thing I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to have another!

  “Hazel! Hazel! Hazel!” her father had continued. “It’s not an emergency. I mean it is, but not in a medical way. I had what those artist types call an epiphany.”

  At that point, a large blinking question popped up on the bedroom wall in red neon letters; it had been sent by Byron’s Sleep Helmet, detecting her alert state of increased stress. WAKE BYRON? it asked. The helmet didn’t automatically roust Byron when she woke in the middle of the night with a racing pulse because every single dream she had at The Hub was a nightmare, and if the helmet woke Byron every time she sat up in bed gasping in panic he’d never get any rest. So the helmet made it her choice.

  She’d never once decided to wake Byron.

  When Hazel slid two fingers to the left in the air, the question went away. “So you’re all right, Dad?”

  “I’m better than okay,” he’d said. “I’m going to start dating strangers! My friend down the street set up a profile for me on a Web site!”

  Hazel looked down at sleeping Byron and felt a pang of jealousy for her elderly widower father’s new shot at amorous joy.

  Since Hazel got married, her capacity for envying others was one of the few areas in which Hazel had experienced growth rather than paralysis, to such an expansive degree that she was able to disconnect and observe it from afar with a sense of pride, like a racehorse set loose and dominating the track: Can you believe how fast that marvelous beast can RUN? She felt justified in describing her emotional impoverishment as “gifted.” It was definitely in the top percentile.

  Hazel tried not to watch Byron’s Sleep Helmet, but it was hypnotic. Tiny strips of blue light ran upward from the helmet’s base across the main facial panel, parting into separate paths at the top of the head. The glass was dark; it made him look larval and unfinished in a way that made her afraid to disturb his sleep. She’d had nightmares where he’d removed the helmet to reveal a half-formed face with his skin’s internal layers showing.

  But waking Byron unintentionally would be difficult. Inside the helmet, a soothing delta-wave-beat pattern was interacting with his REM sleep cycle, guiding it along like a set of training wheels to make sure it didn’t get disrupted; no light whatsoever could penetrate the helmet’s glass. Hazel didn’t like to wear hers; it sat on a pedestal on their dresser and seemingly watched her all night in a creepy vigil. When she put the helmet on, she felt like she was practicing being dead, and it was a little too convincing for her taste. It seemed too easy to go along with, was the scary thing. The average user fell asleep in less than two minutes of helmet engagement. “I don’t want to be such a convincing understudy that I get the role,” she’d told Byron, but of course his gadgets had an answer for everything; they always did: Sleeping inside a sensory dome was the safest sleep possible because it monitored your vital signs. If your pulse were to dip dangerously low, an alarm within the helmet would attempt to wake you; if your vitals were still nonresponsive, it would wirelessly alert emergency medical personnel. And even though she didn’t wear her helmet, since Byron wore his, Hazel’s safety was covered: their model, the Omega, had been programmed for partner awareness. It monitored all detected life within a set radius. If Hazel experienced a problem, Byron’s helmet would know.

  The following week, her father had tried three different dates with three different women but gave up when all of them opted to call it a night within the first ten minutes of meeting him. “I’ve never been much of a conversationalist,” he told Hazel.

  Th
is was true. She’d sometimes had the urge to confide in him about the state of her marriage, but his style of sympathy was very “back-bar sports commentator on a satellite delay”; had she said something along the lines of, Dad, I think I made a mistake marrying Byron, he probably would’ve talked about something else for a few minutes, to the point that she’d decide he hadn’t been listening and had failed to hear what she’d just said, and she would feel partly hurt but partly relieved by this. Then, just as she’d begun to relax and think of something more benign to talk about, his entire body would suddenly bolt to life: Wowza! Miserable, are you? Huh! Ho! That’s a tough one. Better to avoid this talk until it was unavoidable, she’d decided.

  Which had now happened.

  It was strange to feel sad leaving his house instead of giddily emancipated. Perhaps this was the first time it had ever happened. During her marriage, she sometimes visited her father just so she could feel better about her life when she left. A trip to his home always made a pretty convincing argument that his gruff personality, heavy flaws, and the shortcomings of her childhood were fixed roadblocks that would prevent her from ever experiencing true joy, so her choices and lack of personal ambition or work ethic or relative sobriety didn’t really have to matter. Her mother was at fault too, of course, but dying had reassigned the parameters of her mother’s despotic reign. She couldn’t actively ruin Hazel’s life anymore because Hazel, like all living things, now fell outside her mother’s jurisdiction.

  Maybe this was partly why Hazel decided to marry Byron after her mother died. It was a way to pick up some of the slack—to make her own life awful all by herself.

  3

  MAY 2008

  MEETING BYRON HAD BEEN AN ACCIDENT. ONE OF HAZEL’S GO-GETTER friends in college had been assigned to interview Byron for their campus newspaper. He was coming to graduation to give what he’d termed “a digital commencement speech.”

  What he’d done had been innovative, Hazel had to admit—she hadn’t been at the ceremony but she’d heard about it on the news and from throngs of her matriculating friends who had stayed on course creditwise. Byron had gotten up on the podium wearing a suit and sunglasses, which was what he wore when he wanted to look cool. First he stated that he didn’t have a speech prepared because they were all going to write the speech together. He asked everyone in the stadium to think of one word that best described their time at college, and to shout it on the count of three.

  Next, he had everyone yell a word that summarized their greatest hope for the future, and then, finally, a word describing what frightened them most about the life changes they’d face after graduation. (“Would you like to guess,” Byron had later confided in her, in an almost-flirtatious way, “how many people yelled ‘bong water’ for all three questions? Another counterintuitive statistic: ‘titties’ was a more popular answer for what scared people most about the future than for describing their time at college. As in thousands more people. Wrap your head around that. The other surprise to us, particularly to our interns, who are more ‘of the people’ in their expectations, was how few graduates yelled—excuse my language here, this is a direct quote—‘pussy’ to summarize their collegiate experience. Maybe ‘titty’ is easier to yell in front of one’s grandparents than ‘pussy.’ More people actually yelled ‘potato chips’ than ‘pussy.’”

  “Did anyone yell ‘cock’?” Hazel had asked.

  “That’s why you should’ve graduated,” he’d said.)

  Thanks to a new Gogol vocal-recognition software, every individual voice was able to be heard, analyzed, and statistically ranked for relevance, then an algorithmic speech was composed. It discussed the worth of the university experience, the challenges that lay ahead, and the dreams the students were on course to pursue, all using the most popular answers to heavily resonate with the crowd. It was funny and poignant. It was also a tearjerker due to a new aspect of the software. Onstage with Byron were the parents of a student who had died in a car accident during his junior year. Had he lived, he would’ve been graduating. Using one two-minute home-video clip, the software was able to anticipate with almost perfect accuracy what his pronunciation of nearly any word would be, and the auto-composed speech was given in his voice while his touched parents wept in disbelief on the Jumbotron and the crowd lifted their hands to their chests in an attempt to soothe their hearts. The standing ovation at the speech’s conclusion was the longest in the school’s history, at least those that were digitally recorded—this was suggested and then confirmed by Byron’s analytical team, who combed through the footage of every speech and event ever given at the college.

  “It was a risk,” Byron told Hazel off the record after she’d finished interviewing him.

  Her friend Jenny, the responsible/motivated one who was supposed to be getting to interview Byron, had gotten a horrible stomach flu. Hazel was essentially the stunt double.

  “Of course we tried it with the parents beforehand and made sure they were good with it. Afterward they told me it was an incredible experience. They felt like they’d just gotten to spend a little more time with him. But voices are complex triggers. Emotions can turn. In trials, many relatives stated to us that hearing the voice of a deceased loved one started to feel unwelcome, violating.” Hazel remembered thinking about Byron’s voice the whole time—why didn’t his voice seem sensitive when he was saying very sensitive things?

  Jenny hadn’t been shy about letting Hazel know she wasn’t her first choice. “But I know you’ll do it because you need money, right?”

  She sure did. At that point in her life, Hazel had never been married to a millionaire. She’d been waitressing a little at a diner near campus earlier in the semester, but the job turned out to be filled with pressure from men. They’d be in town for the evening and would ask her to take them out and she’d need to decline without losing her tip, which was almost impossible. Or they would say something like, “I don’t even think I’m going to get food. I just want to sit here and flirt with you all day,” and then the bill would be almost zero because they’d sit there drinking coffee and winking, and even a generous tip on a cup of coffee was not enough to buy the things Hazel tended to use her money for, like electricity or beer. Or they’d say something sad like, “Actually, I was having a really hard day and you being kind to me right now is meaning more to me than you will ever know,” and then she’d have to keep faking kindness, extreme kindness in fact; or they’d be in a terrible mood and when she set their silverware down they’d accuse her of having touched their fork with her soiled hands, which she wasn’t sure how to interpret—were they implying that she’d been masturbating? That she’d been doing sexual acts with her hands prior to her work shift and hadn’t washed them? Did they hope for a confession they could follow with an offer to punish her? In almost every situation, it was awkward to produce a plate of lukewarm French fries and try to move things along, and this was what she almost always had to do. After a month she quit.

  “I need to have this interview on my résumé,” Jenny had insisted. She’d been delirious with fever, and wildly dehydrated, but still more organized and personable and attractive than Hazel. “It won’t really be a lie since I wrote the questions. All you’re doing is asking him the questions I wrote and recording what he says. I’m paying you to be an extension of a tape recorder.” Hazel just wanted the money, but thought she should feel like it was an amazing opportunity, so she’d told her friend how excited she was. She pretended to love the suit her friend forced her to wear although it didn’t fit and made Hazel’s torso look like a rectangular plaid couch cushion.

  Upon arriving at the gig, she even contorted her face with an expression of feverish enthusiasm. All of Byron’s employees stood out—they had a clean sleekness that made them seem more recently showered than anyone else; their tailored clothes looked made of special fabrics (and actually were; there was an in-house catalog of sorts they all shopped from in order to meet hypoallergenic, antibacterial office sta
ndards plus effortlessly avoid lint, wrinkling, and odor). They all seemed to be thinking much harder than Hazel herself had ever thought. “Hello.” She’d smiled and greeted the handlers who were waiting for her on a couch inside a vast lobby. “I’m Jenny Roberts,” she’d told them, “and I’m so grateful for this opportunity.”

  “You are not Jenny Roberts,” they’d responded. “You are Hazel Green.”

  Their scanners had read all the cards in her wallet; they’d gleaned online information to instantaneously confirm her identity. “Okay,” she said. “But I am so grateful.” Hazel wondered if the scanners could tell that was a lie too.

  She explained her friend’s predicament and was asked to have a seat. Eventually Byron agreed to see her anyway, despite the deception. He told her later it was because he found her confusing in a fascinating way. When I looked at you, I was just delighted. I had no idea what to think of you. I could tell you were wearing another person’s clothes but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t imagine who you were or what you wanted.

  Here was the thing: Hazel had not delighted her parents, ever. Nor had she delighted herself. But when she walked into the room and Byron had said, “Hazel Green,” her name sounded new coming out of his mouth. Upgraded. Precise and scientific. “I wasn’t expecting you. Hazel Green.” He said her name like she was a species of rare insect.

  Hazel had never intrigued her parents or herself either. But Byron couldn’t stop asking her questions—although she was supposed to be interviewing him, things soon took on the feel of him interviewing her.

  “Is that a Band-Aid?” He pointed to her panty hose. She’d cut herself shaving before putting them on and hadn’t been able to wash off the bloodstain—Jenny had given her only one pair—so she’d tried to cover it with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. “You placed it on top of your stockings,” Byron had said, amused. “You’re a little remarkable.”