Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich Read Free Book Online Page B

ecause he wouldn’t understand, we left Mom’s German shepherd Toby leashed to the big black roll bar in the back of Ada’s pickup truck, and because Mom’s hands were tied behind her back and because her ankles were lashed together, we had some trouble wrestling her out of the cab and onto the bridge.
    My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.
    The breeze sweeping down the gorge made the gray curls above her forehead quiver. The wind seemed to move the steel bridge a little, too, but that may have been my imagination. Even from up here, I could smell the river and hear its gravelly whisper. Black birds circled and complained in the clear blue sky above us. The sun was a hot spotlight in the chilly thin mountain air. Toby paced back and forth in the truck bed, whining and pulling at his leash and watching us closely.
    “What about the glasses, Barry?” Ada tapped a fingernail on the lenses of Mom’s fragile wire-rimmed glasses.
    “Please, don’t do this, children.”
    “Shut up, Jessica.” Ada spoke not to our mother but to Mom’s interface with her nanopeople. When Dr. Holly Ketchum (Mom, that is) introduced a colony of nanopeople into her own body, it was seen by many as a bold new step. It had, after all, never before been done under controlled conditions. Nanotechnology held such promise—long life and good health, a kind of immortality, really.
    So how did it work out? What one word would sum it all up?
    Well, “whoops” might be a good choice.
    The problem was that after a few generations, that is to say, after a few hours, the nanopeople became convinced that their world shouldn’t take any unnecessary chances. It made no sense to the nanopeople to let their world endanger herself. Jessica claimed that individually, nanopeople were as adventurous as anyone else. “But put yourself in our place, Barry,” she’d once said to me. “Would you let your world put sticks on her feet and go speeding down a snowy mountain at 60 miles an hour? Or swim with sharks? Be reasonable.”
    Mom looked like a TV grandmother these days—plump, rosy cheeks, and translucent white skin. Her nanopeople could have fixed her vision easily enough, but they thought the glasses would make her more cautious in most situations. They could have left her appearance at its natural 48 years or even made her look younger, but they chose this cookie-cutting, slow-shuffling granny look to discourage relationships that might turn out to be dangerous. They could have left her mind alone; instead they struck her silly. A slow-moving stupid world is a world that takes no chances.
    Jessica had been created to explain things to Mom. She was really a network of nanopeople working in shifts to produce the illusion that called itself Jessica. The nanopeople, invisible, sentient, self-replicating robots of nanotechnology, simply thought more quickly than big people. If Mom were struggling to access a multisyllabic word, there could be a week’s worth of shift changes among the nanopeople running the Jessica interface. In fact, a nanoperson could come into existence, grow up, get trained, find a mate, write poetry, procreate, rise to the top of a career, screw up a relationship, get cynical, and die in the time it took Mom to cook up a batch of brownies.
    The real horror, I suppose, was that while individual nanopeople might come and go, as a society, they intended to keep Mom alive and stupid pretty much forever.
    I plucked the glasses from her face. “I’ll save these for you, Jessica, just in case you ever need them again.” I gave her a look I hoped was menacing and let my remarks just sit there for a moment, then I sat Mom up and leaned her against the