It was funny because there were no stoppers in the sinks, so you couldn’t wash your hands in a proper sink of water. Sheena said she could make the sink fill up, and Oginga dared her to do it, so she took off her sweater and put it in the sink, and sure enough, it filled up with water and started to overflow, and then she couldn’t get the sweater out of it, so she called a monitor over. “This sink is overflowing,” she said, as if it were all the sink’s fault. A group of children stood around and watched while the monitor fished the sweater from the drain and wrung it out.
“That’s mine!” said Sheena, as if she had dropped it by mistake. She grabbed it away from the monitor, shook it, and nodded knowingly to Elizabeth. “It dries real fast.” The monitor wanted thumbprints from Sheena and Elizabeth and everyone who watched.
The monitors then took the children to the auditorium, and led the whole group in singing songs and playing games, which Elizabeth found only moderately interesting. She would have preferred to learn to spit. At one o’clock, a monitor announced it was time to go back to the classrooms, and all the children should line up by the door.
Elizabeth and Sheena and Oginga pushed into the same line together. There were so many kids that there was a long wait while they all lined up and the monitors moved up and down the lines to make them straight.
“Are you going to go to the Asia Center?” asked Sheena. “My mom says I can probably go to the Asia Center tomorrow, because I’m so fidgety.”
Elizabeth didn’t know what the Asia Center was, but she didn’t want to look stupid. “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my dad.” She turned to Oginga, who was behind her. “Are you going to the Asia Center?”
“What’s the Asia Center?” asked Oginga.
Elizabeth looked back at Sheena, waiting to hear her answer.
“Where we go to sleep,” Sheena said. “My mom says it doesn’t hurt.”
“I got my own room,” said Oginga.
“It’s not like your room,” Sheena explained. “You go there, and you go to sleep, and your parents get to try again.”
“What do they try?” asked Elizabeth. “Why do you have to go to sleep?”
“You go to sleep so they have some peace and quiet,” said Sheena. “So you’re not in their way.”
“But what do they try?” repeated Elizabeth.
“I bet they try more of that stuff that they do when they think you’re asleep,” said Oginga. Sheena snorted and started to giggle, and then Oginga started to giggle and he snorted too, and the more one giggled and snorted, the more the other did. Pretty soon Elizabeth was giggling too, and the three of them were helplessly choking, behind great hiccoughing gulps of noise.
The monitor rolled by then and told them to be quiet and move on to their assigned classrooms. That broke the spell of their giggling, and, subdued, they moved ahead in the line. All the children filed quietly out of the auditorium and walked slowly down the halls. When Elizabeth came to her classroom, she shrugged her shoulders at Oginga and Sheena and jerked her head to one side. “I go in here,” she whispered.
“See ya at the Asia Center,” said Sheena.
The rest of the tests went by quickly, though Elizabeth didn’t think they were as much fun as in the morning. The afternoon tests were more physical; she pulled at joysticks and tried to push buttons quickly on command. They tested her hearing and even made her sing to the computer. Elizabeth didn’t like to do things fast, and she didn’t like to sing.
When it was over, the monitors told the children they could go now, their parents were waiting for them at the front of the school. Elizabeth looked for Oginga and Sheena as she left, but children from the other classrooms were not in the halls. Her dad was waiting for her out front, as he had said he would be.
Elizabeth called to him to get his attention. He had just come off work, and she knew he would be sort of confused. They wiped their secrets out of his brain before he logged off of the system, and sometimes they took a little other stuff with it by mistake, so he might not be too sure about his name, or where he lived.
On the way home, she told him about her new friends. “They don’t sound as though they would do very well at their lessons, princess,” said her father. “But it does sound as if you had an interesting time at lunch.” Elizabeth pulled his hand to guide him onto the right street. He’d be OK in an hour or so — anything important usually came back pretty fast.
When they got home, her dad went into the kitchen to start dinner, and Elizabeth played with her dog, Brownie. Brownie didn’t live with them anymore, because his brain was being used to help control data traffic in the network. Between rush hours, Elizabeth would call him up on the system and run simulations in which she plotted the trajectory of a ball and he plotted an interception of it.
They ate dinner when her mom logged off work. Elizabeth’s parents believed it was very important for the family to all eat together in the evening, and her mom had custom-made connectors that stretched all the way into the dining room. Even though she didn’t really eat anymore, her local I/O was always extended to the table at dinnertime.
After dinner, Elizabeth got ready for bed. She could hear her father in his office, asking his mail for the results of her test that day. When he came into her room to tuck her in, she could tell he had good news for her.
“Did you wash behind your ears, punkin?” he asked. Elizabeth figured that this was a ritual question, since she was unaware that washing behind her ears was more useful than washing anywhere else.
She gave the correct response: “Yes, Daddy.” She understood that, whether she washed or not, giving the expected answer was an important part of the ritual. Now it was her turn to ask a question. “Did you get the results of my tests, Daddy?”
“We sure did, princess,” her father replied. “You did very well on them.”
Elizabeth was pleased, but not too surprised. “What about my new friends, Daddy? How did they do?”
“I don’t know about that, punkin. They don’t send us everybody’s scores, just yours.”
“I want to be with them when I go to the Asia Center.”
Elizabeth could tell by the look on her father’s face that she’d said something wrong. “The what? Where did you hear about that?” he asked sharply.
“My friend Sheena told me about it. She said she was going to the Asia Center tomorrow,” said Elizabeth.
“Well, she might be going there, but that’s not anyplace you’re going.” Her dad sounded very strict. “You’re going to continue your studies, young lady, and someday you’ll be an important executive like your mother. That’s clear from your test results. I don’t want to hear any talk about you doing anything else. Or about this Sheena.”
“What does Mommy do, Daddy?”
“She’s a processing center, sweetheart, that talks directly to the CPU. She uses her brain to control important information and tell the rest of the computer what to do. And she gives the whole system common sense.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, and Elizabeth could tell that she was going to get what her dad called an “explanatory chat.”
“You did so well on your test that maybe it’s time we told you something about what you might be doing when you get a little older.” He pulled the blanket up a little bit closer to her chin and turned the sheet down evenly over it.
“It’ll be a lot like studying, or like taking that test today,” he continued. “Except you’ll be hardwired into the network, just like your mom, so you won’t have to get up and move around. You’ll be able to do anything and go anywhere in your head.”