side effect of the country’s collective shock. But the mental fog kept rolling in, thickening, spreading. Finally, a study was soberly unveiled. It linked the use of personal screens—phones, tablets, anything that aimed blue light at the human eye from point-blank range—to a rapid dementia doctors predicted would eventually devastate Marlow’s parents’ entire generation. The millennials. Overnight, a company called Apple went under, and its products went away. And shortly thereafter, a nineteen-year-old genius who had been taking apart her parents’ phones since birth stood on a stage in a crop top and unveiled the thing that would replace them: the device.
On her seventh birthday, like everyone else she knew, Marlow had one of the blank, black square-inch gems pressed into the softer side of her wrist. The device did not make a sound; the device did not have a screen. It did everything the old phones had done, and all it needed was brain waves. It did all its work inside its user’s head.
Marlow could still recall the sample prompts her device came with, could still remember working through them with her eyes closed. Tell me where to find delivery pizza. Tell me the current weather conditions at the Great Wall of China. Show me a photo of the president in college. The staticky nudge at her skin, and the sudden bubbling-up of the very first answer in her brain: Flower Crust Express, two-point-one miles. Am I hungry? Would I like to place an order? Then the instant doubt of: Her brain knew that already, didn’t it? It was where she got pizza all the time. But after that came the swoon at her next thought, natural as her own name: It is currently eleven degrees Celsius at the Great Wall of China. And finally, materializing on a backdrop in her head she hadn’t known existed: the sixty-nine-year-old president, many decades earlier. She stood jauntily on the Princeton quad, fingers curled into the belt loops of her high-waisted blue jeans, her hair rounded in a neat, soft afro. Would I like to see more? “It’s so weird,” Marlow had said to Floss, who was watching her daughter anxiously, as if Marlow had swallowed a party drug. “It’s calling me ‘I.’ Or it’s saying it’s me.” A week later, there was nothing strange about it. Gone was the line between who she had been before and who she was now, what she had known before and what she knew now. Which was, for all intents and purposes, everything.
Inside the restaurant, Ellis and Marlow ate quietly while their mothers engaged in passive battle.
“My maternal grandfather,” Floss said, waving a forkful of dripping kale, “had a full head of naturally dark hair until he died. Never lost a strand of it. Never went gray.” She cast a sympathetic look at the top of Ellis’s sparsely covered head.
“Wonderful,” Bridget returned. “I think they would be wise to use a lot of your family’s physical attributes.” She scraped the dressing off of a blade of her salad and turned to Marlow and Ellis. “Now, you two do know that my father was a distant cousin of Stephen Hawking’s, yes? I’m told that the designers can go through Ellis’s input and find his genes specifically.”
“The skateboarder?” Floss screwed up her face. “From like, a million years ago?”
“The genius,” Bridget said. She looked at Ellis, only Ellis, and laughed.
“Well,” Floss said, patting Bridget’s hand, “I agree that when it comes to you guys, it’s best to concentrate on the brains. Marlow shared your story with me.” Floss shook her head, maudlin. “About your buck teeth. It couldn’t have been easy, being ugly as a child. But I’m sure it toughened you up, too. You have such a strong, almost masculine energy.”
Marlow drew back her leg to kick her mother, but her foot only found empty space. Floss had seen the hit coming, and reeled back from the table in time. She flounced off to the bathroom with an arrogant pulse in her step, as if the followers who were no doubt fawning over her bitchiness were actually there in the room with her.
Once Floss was far enough away, Bridget looked between Ellis and Marlow, her face taut and disapproving. “When are the two of you going to tell her?”
“That’s our business, Mom,” Ellis snapped through a forkful of eggplant.
“We’ll tell her soon,” Marlow said. And she meant it. Guilt had been gnawing her over this breach of bloodline protocol: no matter how Floss drove her crazy,