We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange direction. We don’t know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves. ― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

Chicago, IL

As soon as Adam settled in the classroom, Michelle went straight to the office, notifying the security systems she was on the way intending to meet with her editor, Jonah Cramer, to let him know about the trip to Idaho and get his blessing for some time away from work. Even for her, advance notification was essential to clear the multiple layers of protective systems enveloping Jonah’s office.

She stopped at the coffee shop on the ground floor and spent time chatting with the proprietor, Abuela Sarita. Then she spent more time at a table, sipping her coffee and nibbling a freshly fried churro, keeping the sugar off her device as she ‘researched’ but mostly wasted time reading celebrity news and Chicago politics. She made some notes about projects to continue work on while she was away, then realized she was avoiding the conversation with Jonah. She steeled herself and went upstairs and cleared the layers of hardened doors and ID screens.

A wall of scents greeted her at his door – garlic from the half-eaten plate of leftover scampi on the corner of his desk, mildew, body odor, cologne. As she knew he would want, she dove right in and posed the question, holding her breath as much from anticipating his answer as the smells. Jonah Cramer, as always, had advice.

“Where you going now?”

“Rexburg, Idaho. To a new school for my brother.”

“Idaho, huh? You sure about that? Things are pretty dicey out there. At least, they would be for me. Maybe you can pass,” he concluded with a basso chuckle.

Michelle’s heart sank. It occurred to her that she hadn’t thoroughly vetted the area around the school. Except for a few trips to South Bend, which by then was under the protection of the Lake States Convention, she’d never really ventured beyond the Illinois Protectorate. The recent troubles out there between Native groups and white supremacists near the reservations didn’t seem like it should have any impact on a school for people with special needs. But then, in the Compact States anything could be possible. Jonah consulted his screens.

“Rexburg… no, it’s cool. The crazies are all on the other side of the state.” He looked up, lost in thought. “Still, you could do something on that Article 7 business…”

“I’m going to be pretty busy with my brother. I don’t know…” Michelle objected gently.

Jonah smiled. “Take care of your brother. We’ll be fine without you for a few days. Just stay in touch.”

Michelle exhaled and resisted the urge to throw her arms around the burly man’s thick brown neck and give him a big kiss. Such exuberant expressions of affection had not been well received in the past. Squeezed behind his cluttered desk, her boss usually kept her alert and wary by merely knitting his bushy dark eyebrows, and Michelle usually conducted herself around him as if he actually was the unkempt grizzly bear he outwardly resembled.

She knew he valued direct communication, so she always made the extra effort to have important conversations face to face, “old school” as he called it. She had also witnessed firsthand how ferocious this bear could be, but for some reason, she’d never been the object of that fury. Sensing his moods correctly was key. Jonah scanned his screens, continuing his research on Idaho.

“Read up on it on your way out. Maybe something will pop while you’re there,” Jonah concluded, looking back at his screens, scrolling. Michelle waited to see if he had further instructions.

She looked around the office at the awards crowding the walls, many for work she contributed to, some she lead. Mulitiple IRE awards, a Selden, a Polk, a Kennedy, neatly arrayed on the wall, the one manifestation of order, evidence of Jonah’s pride in their work. Then she noticed one centered directly in his line of sight: her nomination for the Don Bolles medal, for the work she did exposing the organized crime links to a member of the City Council. She didn’t win, but that early recognition of her professional bravery was a big step in her rapid ascent and seeing it at the center of Jonah’s glory wall gave her a bump of pride.

From that first moment during the seminar at Northwestern her junior year they clicked. She asked a question during his guest lecture, triggering a back-and-forth discussion that commandeered the rest of the class. From her people reading intuition she sensed a warmth and compassion in him beneath his intimidating exterior which emboldened her interrogation. He offered her an internship, then a job after graduation, and it was Jonah who pushed her to study and apply for her PJL, the youngest person at the company to earn the coveted credential, giving her unfettered access and the privileges of a Professional Journalist.

He looked up suddenly from his device. “You all set with your friend? Don’t get me in trouble with that thing.”

“It’s working really well and it really helps. Tink manages a bunch of aliases and feeds the content generators which deflects attention from the stuff I’m really working on. When someone starts getting too nosey, it spoofs a bunch of noise to distract them. So far, so good.”

“Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s working. Just this side of legal, so be careful.”

“Always.”

Since the strict AI regulations in the aftermath of The Near Miss, the machines still couldn’t match the best reporting, especially when it came to the analysis that led to the next questions, the ones about motives, and human emotions, and the layered meanings and rationales that drove all sorts of you-can’t-make-this-up behaviors. Humans still told the best stories, but having a barely legal AI assistant sure made it easier.

Jonah picked up the plate of scampi and pushed back from the desk. “What’s holding you up, sweet pea? You better get moving.”

Michelle backed up, bumped into a box almost spilling a pile of dusty paper documents. Flustered, she attempted to organize the tower, but Jonah waved her off.

“Scoot. Get moving with your brother.”

***

She planned to pack during breaks from work, but was quickly distracted by other errands and chores, tying up loose ends before the unexpected trip. Finishing other assignments ahead of deadline; looking at bills with Tink, scheduling payments, always with an eye on her balances; creating several profiles and training the content generators on the new personas to mislead any of her competitors monitoring her activities.

One of the downsides of her privileged credentials were the omnipresent blogarazzi, stalking her to pick up morsels or get a jump on a story. With the international treaties constraining the AIs, it was the humans she had to watch out for. Sometimes they, or their paid surrogates, emerged out of the digital ether into her neighborhood, skulking and snooping. Situational awareness, Jonah taught her, as well as giving her Sparky, her little but lethal stunner always hidden in her purse.

Ambitious freelancers looking for a scoop or a scalp could occasionally become too aggressive. Sparky was there for the ones in the real world, Tinkerbell handled the ones online, routinely sweeping and guarding her devices, using all manner of spoofing and encryption for her communications, all to ensure that her research and writing remained secure until published and unaltered afterward. Tink’s most valuable skill was zealously defending Michelle’s work from misappropriation, as well as keeping her physically safe.

She picked up Adam from school and they ate dinner. Mostly, Adam ate, with his usual gusto, while Michelle pushed her food around and worried. She planned to cut his hair after dinner, the one electric razor he would tolerate, only in her hands, with the barber scissors and comb laid out next to it. Then she realized not a thing was ready for their departure. That’s when Connie volunteered to come over and help pack after they cut Adam’s hair.

She showed up grinning, waving bottles of their favorite pinot grigio in each hand. After a short spurt of furious packing and organizing, they were soon lounging on the couch, sipping and chatting, like the old days, haircut forgotten. Connie was her lifeline during The Year of Dead Parents, the irruption of random disaster that orphaned her and Adam.

“On the sidewalk. You drove the car,” Connie said, pointing one finger while holding her glass. Michelle snorted into her wine, giggling and nodding with the glass in front of her face, already buzzed. They were halfway through the first bottle, travel preparation forgotten. Adam was asleep in his room.

“How did you do that?” Connie demanded, slapping the couch and leaning forward. Michelle shushed her with a finger to her lips, then laughed and waved dismissively.

“Oh, c’mon, you just grab the steering thing and do it. It’s not that hard. Spirit driving.”

Connie shook her head.

“I’ve never touched that thing in my life, or not since I took my test. You are either the bravest or craziest person I know. If the car doesn’t want to go there, I’m not interested either. How much is that one going to cost?”

Michelle smiled.

“For me? Nothing. The company covers it.”

“What? That’s bullshit. What else can you get away with? Geez, if I did that, they’d suspend my license.”

Michelle shrugged.

“Hey, I can’t help it. I don’t make those rules. Besides, I didn’t hurt anyone. Not that I didn’t think about it.” She frowned and shook her head. “Those people….”

“Nobody got mean, did they?”

“No, not physically. Just a lot of yelling. It was all so… stupid. Useless. Like any of them really know what they’re talking about.” They sat in silence, swirling their wine. Connie watched and waited out Michelle’s mood shift.

“What am I doing to him?” Michelle asked, looking down into her glass. Connie refilled her glass for the third time and leaned back on the couch.

“Oh, Mish, you said it yourself. It’s a great chance for him. Who knows when you’ll have this kind of opportunity again. Think of how happy he could be.”

“You really think so?”

“I told you, it was amazing when I was out there. I’ve never seen kids so…happy. No, that’s not it. Peaceful. Yeah. Serene. Know what I mean?” Connie turned to Michelle as if for help. “What about the savant stuff? That’s not Adam. Is it?”

Michelle squinted at her friend, uncertain. Compared to the many other kids Michelle interacted with through the years, Adam was neither the most gifted nor the most troubled. His aggressive behaviors were mild compared to some she’d seen, but he also had never demonstrated the wildly prodigious talents some others possessed, either. Reportedly, the McJames Institute gathered the savant kids and nurtured and directed their talents, producing amazing results. But what of the kids who just seemed like, well, typical neurodivergents? Despite her profession, she hated the constant fight over what words to use when discussing the diversity of difficult-to-classify experiences out of the mainstream.

Connie furrowed her brow, then continued.

“Y’know, come to think of it, we didn’t see many when we were there. There was one boy who played the piano beautifully, and some girls who sang, but most of it looked pretty ordinary. Except, the kids were so neat and clean, and everyone was so calm. No moaning or crying, no biting or hand flapping, no rocking. They were quietly doing all their little chores in class, ADL type stuff, some classroom stuff. Oh, but the dancing. That was something. They put on a performance for us, and it was just beautiful.” Connie’s eyes grew distant at the memory.

“But here’s the thing…” she continued. “You know that stuff about ‘not a disease, a disability’?

“Yeah, and then there’s the ‘not a disability, a difference’ folks.”

Connie nodded.

“Yes, exactly. Well, those McJames people are more like, ‘not a difference, an advantage’. They treat the kids not like they’re just special because of their challenges, but because of their potential. It’s hard to describe.” She paused. “Like, a reverence. As if they know something, that, the kids are…better. That’s the feeling I get.”

It was Connie’s visit last year that started this process. They became friends years before through mutual contacts from support groups. Connie was a national administrator for the United Way in Chicago and attended some of the meetings as their representative. She and Michelle hit it off the instant they met. Connie visited the McJames Institute as part of the evaluation for a similar grant Adam’s school received.

“I don’t know, I just don’t know,” Michelle fretted.

“Yes, you do. What’s your gut tell you? Use your Michellovision,” Connie teased.

Her friend put too much faith in Michelle’s intuition, but she wasn’t the only one. Her father encouraged her story telling as a child and defended her in the early scrapes at school when she too pointedly captured for the school paper the dynamics of otherwise typical school dysfunction, irritating her teachers. Jonah said she had it, called it The Nose, that ability to sniff out the truth or the bullshit in all the noise. Michelle had to admit it was something, her knack for coming up with one-word summations of a person after a brief interaction, and those impressions were unfailingly correct.

Her friend Connie? Loyal.

Jonah? Sad.

Long before she knew about Jonah’s divorce and problems with his kids, she knew what dominated his life. It all came from her ability to read faces and intuit the emotions beneath, or more usefully, the disconnects between expressions and words, revealing concealed truth.

The defining moment of her early career was when she listened, along with all of Chicago, to the airtight explanations of the Southside alderman caught with another woman and heard something different than the rest of the nodding supporters. Chicago was booming after the chaos of the twenties, growing further into a regional powerhouse with the creation of the Lakes States Convention, one of the many alliances around the country protecting regional interests. Listening to the speech, the first word that came to her mind: liar. She didn’t let it go, quietly pursued the story, dug up new leads, followed the faint trail, interviewed and re-interviewed associates, until the contradictions started piling up. Then the hidden finances surfaced, the payoffs, leading back to a group of commodity exchange megas attempting to infiltrate and subvert Chicago government. The shadow war between the tech oligarchs, transnational crime syndicates and national governments waxed and waned, while the Professional Licensed Journalists and intelligence agencies tried to uncover the plots and scheming faster than the efforts to overthrow the remaining democratic governments around the world. It got Michelle a promotion, awards, death threats, and a host of new AI tech to maintain her many cover identities.

“My gut right now is saying Level II on the Shank Citrus Scale,” Michelle answered. Connie knew about Michelle’s anxious knot and the counseling well enough they joked about it.

“Oh, stop. You’re fine. What did you think of the lady from the school, what’s her name?”

“Dr. Elspeth.”

“Yeah. Quick, what’s your gut?”

Michelle sipped her wine and thought. “She’s…different. Strange. Odd.”

“In a good or bad way? Odd, like, serial killer odd, or what?”

Michelle shook her head. “No, not bad. She was just…remote. Y’know, kinda aspie. You know how with the kids you look in their eyes, and they’re off somewhere? Sort of like that, but…different. Same, or similar distance, but a big mind in there. Definitely someone home, but maybe preoccupied? Does that make sense?” Michelle looked at Connie hopefully.

Connie laughed and shook her head. “I’ve never seen you at such a loss. She really must be a weirdo! But no bad vibe, right?” Connie cocked her head speculatively.

Michelle immediately shook her head. “No, no bad vibe. I felt comfortable.”

“Then you’re doing the right thing. Drink to that.”

They raised their glasses and clinked them. Connie gestured toward Michelle.

“What do you want me to tell The Moor if I see him while you’re gone? Desdemona will return?”

Michelle blushed at the teasing. “Oh, please. If you haven’t found him by now, he’s never going to turn up.”

“Well, if you’d just use your magic powers to get inside all those databases, we could track him down like that,” Connie chided, snapping her fingers.

“And then how would your friend pay for all this wine? If I got caught, and I would, using my press pass like that to track down a cute boy, they’d fire me in a heartbeat.”

“Oh, you know they do it all the time, all your nosey reporter friends.”

Michelle shook her head, smiling, once again defending her profession against the common misunderstandings about her privileges and responsibilities.

“There’s a difference between investigating and snooping. Believe me, I’d love to find him, but there are rules.”

“Ah, I notice you didn’t say ‘no way’. There’s always hope. I will reapply myself while you’re gone. Tiff will help, she’s convinced he’s the one. We are going to get you laid if it kills us!”

“Stop it!” Michelle shushed her, blushing.

***

Almost two years ago, after the Fun Times ended with the deaths of her parents, her friends had taken her to Kingston Mines for some blues and drinking to break her out of the funk she’d been stuck in. It was also the first time they’d successfully persuaded her to leave Adam with a sitter.

They listened to music, laughed, flirted with the Marines from Great Lakes and the Prairie Defense soldiers who always seemed to be in the bars, picking fights with the traders and finance boys. It achieved the effect her friends had hoped for, and Michelle got quite drunk. Then they noticed the handsome Black man watching them from across the bar. Every few minutes they would turn and he’d move to a different spot, always watching, and eventually it became clear it was Michelle he was fixated on. While her two friends were in the bathroom, he approached Michelle and put his hand on her back. She turned and looked at him.

“Yes?”

He had big dark eyes, and she gave him a tipsy shy smile, waiting for some response. He stood close but looking down, avoiding eye contact, close enough she could feel his body heat and smell his faint body odor, enticing. She grew warm under the attention.

“What’s your name?” she asked, trying to spark some conversation. After a moment, he leaned in with his face next to her as if he were going to tell her something. He held there for a few moments, his breath on her ear, then he pulled away, looking off. After a brief pause, he leaned in again and kissed her, a long lingering contact that she reciprocated somewhat tentatively at first, then gave in to, turning her head to face him directly. She parted her lips further and welcomed his gently probing tongue and lost herself in the warm intimacy, oblivious to the clamor of the bar crowd around her. The hooting of her friends returning from the bathroom interrupted them and the stranger broke off the kiss and disappeared into the crowd.

From then on, he was The Moor, and she was Desdemona, christened by Tiffany. She moved heaven and earth with her vast social network and connections to track him down. Her friends helped and spent the next several weeks working to discover his identity, scouring social media and the wider internet. Their efforts came to naught and the dark stranger was never seen again, now only a fun shared memory.

***

“And you are so coming with us to Mexico.”

“I don’t know Connie. I just can’t plan that far ahead. What if this doesn’t work out? We’ll be right back here, and you know I can’t leave him alone.”

“Stop being so negative! It’s going to work. I can feel it, and so can you. C’mon, it’s going to be so fun! And you need to get away. Tell you what, we’ll plan it when you get back.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, you’re going!” ‘See that girl! Watch that scene! Digging the Dancing Queen!’” Connie sang too loudly, twirling with her wine, while Michelle giggled and shushed her. “We’ll get you out on that dance floor and all your problems will be solved.”

Michelle could feel bleary tears welling, overwhelmed by her friend’s love and support. “You suck,” Michelle stammered, laughing and crying at the same time, wiping her eyes.

Connie grinned mischievously. “That’s what he said, Dancing Queen.”

Michelle wiped her eyes and clinked her glass to Connie’s. “Friend.”

“Let’s drink to that!”

By the time Connie stumbled out the door, it was well past midnight and Michelle still hadn’t finished packing. She spent some time clumsily cleaning, then got distracted looking at old pictures of friends, her parents, and all of them together from before, when things were happier.

She leaned back on the couch and daydreamed about that night at Kingston Mines and the stranger’s kiss. Was he going to say something to her?

Unbidden, the thought came: before he kissed her, he wasn’t leaning in to say something. He was sniffing her!

She smiled at the thought with her eyes closed, reliving the memory.

What was that?

She fell asleep on the couch with a picture album open on her chest.

She woke the next morning with a blinding headache, a full bladder, and Adam standing over her holding an empty cereal bowl. The electric razor sat on the kitchen table, a silent rebuke for her drinking with Connie. The day was a blur of preparations, rushing back and forth with Adam to the school and back, talking to herself and him, second guessing everything, fighting through the hangover, but then there he was, ready to go.

Chapters 5 and 6