“Mom, you’re being ridiculous. I swear there’s nothing weird going on.”
“Nothing weird?” Mom pointed at the screen. “Then why are you typing only in pictographs?—”
“—it’s called emoji. We’re playing a game—”
“—you have no idea how dangerous—”
They stopped shouting. Mom stared at the screen intently. Then she typed:
What?
“They won’t answer unless you use emoji,” said Maddie.
Her face stony, Mom used the mouse to pick out an icon:
An even longer pause, then a line of emoji appeared across the screen:
“What the hell—” Mom muttered. Then she swore as her face flicked from shock to sorrow to disbelief to rage. Maddie could count on one hand the number of times her mother had sworn in front of her. Something was really wrong.
Looking over her mother’s shoulder, she tried to help her translate. “What are lips?… a man’s lips…”
But her mother surprised her: “No, it’s ‘
What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why…
’”
Her hand shaking, Mom picked out an icon:
The window winked away and there was nothing left on the screen.
Mom sat there, unmoving.
“What’s wrong?” Maddie said, nudging her mother’s shoulder gingerly.
“I don’t know,” Mom said, perhaps more to herself than to Maddie. “It’s impossible. Impossible.”
• • • •
Maddie tiptoed up to the bedroom door. Her mother had slammed it shut an hour ago and refused to come out. For a while she could hear her mother sobbing behind the door, and then it grew quiet.
She placed her ear against the door.
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Peter Waxman please,” said her mother’s muffled voice. A pause. “Tell him it’s Ellen Wynn, and it’s very urgent.”
Dr. Waxman was Dad’s old boss at Logorhythms.
Why is Mom calling him now?
“He’s still alive,” Mom said. “Isn’t he?”
What?
thought Maddie.
What is Mom talking about?
“Don’t you dare use that tone with me. He reached out to me, Peter. I
know
.”
We saw Dad’s body in the hospital
. Maddie felt numb.
I watched his casket go into the ground
.
“No, you listen to me,” Mom said, raising her voice. “
Listen!
I can tell you’re lying. What have you done with
my husband
?”
• • • •
They went to the police and filed a missing persons report. The detective listened to Maddie and her mom tell their story. Maddie watched his face shift through a series of expressions: interest, incredulity, amusement, boredom.
“I know this sounds crazy,” her mother said.
The detective said nothing, but his face said everything.
“I know I said I saw the body. But he’s not dead. He’s not!”
“Because he texted you from beyond the grave.”
“No, not
text
. He reached out to Madison and me through chat.”
The detective sighed. “Don’t you think it’s more likely that this is another prank being played on you by the kids who are messing with your daughter?”
“
No
,” said Maddie. She wanted to grab the man by the ears and shake him. “He used
emoji
. It was a joke that Dad and I worked out between ourselves.”
“It was a poem,” said Mom. She took out a book of poetry, flipped to a page, and held it in front of the detective’s face. “The opening line of this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s my favorite poem. I used to read it to David when we were still in high school.”
The detective put his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “We’re very busy here, Ms. Wynn. I understand how painful the loss of your husband must have been and how stressful it is to find your daughter being bullied. This should be addressed by the teachers. Let me recommend some professionals—”
“I. Am. Not. Crazy,” Mom gritted her teeth. “You can come to our place and examine my daughter’s computer. You can trace the network connections and find out where he is. Please. I don’t know how this is possible, but he must be alive and… he must be in trouble. That’s why he can’t speak except through emoticons.”
“I agree that this is a cruel joke, but you have to see how you’re making it worse by falling for it.”
When they came home, Mom crawled right into bed. Maddie sat on the edge and held her mother’s hand for a while, the way her mother used to do with her when she was little and had trouble going to sleep by herself.
Eventually, Mom fell asleep, her face damp.
• • • •
The web was vast and strange, and there were corners of it where people who believed in the most extraordinary stories congregated: government cover-ups of alien encounters, mega-corporations that tried to enslave people, the Illuminati, and the many ways the world was going to suffer an apocalypse.
Maddie signed on to one of these sites and posted her story. She tried to lay out the facts without embellishment. She recovered the transcripts of her emoji chats; she reconstructed the odd-looking window from the swapfile on her hard drive; she tried to trace the network connection from “Emo” as far as she could—in other words, she provided more hard data to support her story than most of the other posters in the forum had. She wrote that Logorhythms had denied everything, and that the police, representatives of the government, hadn’t believed her.
For some, no evidence shored up her claim more compellingly than such denials.
And then the forum regulars began to make their own connections. Every poster thought Maddie’s story supported their own pet theory: Centillion, the search engine giant, was engaging in censorship; Logorhythms was creating military artificial intelligences for the UN; the NSA scanned people’s hard drives. The thread she started exploded with follow-ups amplifying her tale.
Maddie knew, of course, that no matter how big the thread grew, most people would never see it. The big search engines had long ago tweaked their algorithms to bury results from these sites, because they were deemed untrustworthy.
But convincing people wasn’t Maddie’s goal.
“Emo”—her father—had claimed to be a ghost in the machine. Surely he wasn’t the only one?
• • • •
There was no name, no avatar. Just a plain chat window, like a part of the OS.
She was disappointed. Not her father. Still, it was better than nothing.
Maddie smiled as she parsed the response.
<We’re from the cloud. Everywhere in the world.>
She typed a follow-up:
You don’t know where he is either
, she thought.
But maybe you can help?
The response was swift and unambiguous:
<Hang on, we’ll make a big wave and bring it crashing down.>
• • • •
The knock came Sunday morning.
Mom opened the door to reveal Dr. Waxman standing in the hallway.
“I’ve come to answer your questions,” he said coldly in lieu of a greeting.
Maddie wasn’t really surprised. She had seen the news that Logorhythms’s stock had crashed the previous Friday, so much so that trading had to be halted. Machine trading was being blamed again, though some thought it was the result of manipulation.