Human Sister

directed toward something else—the purring of the biorecycler as near as I could tell—and my patience began to fray.
    “Brother, what were my new words for the week?” I asked, imitating the kind of question Grandpa would ask and the stern tone he would use whenever he sensed my attention waning.
    I was surprised when First Brother listed all twenty words without hesitation. And then I was struck with a realization: “You can think about more than one thing at a time, can’t you?”
    “I think about many things at once,” he replied, still staring at the recycler.
    “What else were you thinking about when I read you my new words?”
    He glanced at Mom, then looked back at the recycler. “Such things are not to be discussed with my sister.”
    When they left that day, I hugged and kissed Mom and Dad. First Brother extended his hand—to shake good-bye, I suppose—but I asked him to pick me up. He did, and I put my arms around his neck and hugged him and kissed his cool cheek.
    He became rigid, as if suddenly transformed to a statue.
    “I’ll think up a new game for the next time you come,” I whispered into his ear.
    He said nothing and, after a few inert seconds, set me down, leaving me, as he so often would in years to follow, with an empty, wanting feeling.

First Brother

    T hrough the eyes of the pigeonoid, I see a submersible break through the surface of the ocean. Six seconds later its top hatch opens and a flotation device is ejected—at 784 meters west, 139 meters north of the center of the mouth of the Russian River on the northern California coast.
    The flotation device bobs for 18 seconds, then distends and flattens out to an elongated raft, in the middle of which Sara sits cross-legged. She wears soft-soled, blue-and-white striped cloth shoes; white socks; faded blue jeans; an item of clothing (highest correlation: sweater) gray in color, wrapped and tied around her waist; and a long-sleeved white shirt, on which each button, including the top, is buttoned. Goggles with lenses tinted dark gray cover her eyes. On her hands are white gloves. A white hat with neck drapes shelters her head. A white pack is attached to her back with straps that come over her shoulders and wrap under her arms. The wide brim of the hat casts a shadow down her face and ventral trunk. A cloth band tied under her chin secures the hat on her head.
    She is not decorated with any of the jewelry or skin enhancements of contemporary teenage female humans.
    It is midday minus 26 minutes, 11 seconds on 20 June.

Sara

    “A ir France-KLM flight number 1147 departing for Amsterdam is ready for boarding at gate number E73.” The announcement was made in a pleasant-sounding, probably artificial, woman’s voice, perfect in its soothing mellowness.
    It was the middle of June, and for my sixth birthday Grandpa was taking me to visit my only cousin, Elio, who had moved to the Netherlands about half a year earlier with his mother after his father had been shot and killed by a policeman in New York City. The city’s chief medical examiner had determined that the shooting had been an accident: Uncle Marcus had been running away from a homosexual assignation in Central Park, and the policeman chasing him had stumbled and fallen, accidentally discharging his gun. But Grandpa believed that what lay behind the unusual surveillance and pursuit of Uncle was Uncle’s continuing involvement with the creation of androids for the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The circumstances of Uncle’s death had been told to me matter-of-factly by Grandpa—after, that is, he’d secured my promise not to tell Elio; Aunt Lynh wanted my cousin to believe that his father had died in a car accident.
    Before they moved to the Netherlands, I had seen Aunt Lynh and Elio on Vidtel a few times each year, usually on one of our birthdays. Uncle Marcus, Mom’s stepbrother, had been Dad’s roommate in college and one of Grandpa’s favorite students. During the years I’d known him, he’d spoken with Grandpa on Vidtel about once each week, usually about evolutionary organic nanoneuralnets. I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I knew what they were talking about had something to do with my brothers; and each time they spoke, I listened carefully, trying to pick up a few words and concepts I would later ask Grandpa to explain—and he would, in language appropriate for a student much more advanced than I. Unlike Grandma,