All was not lost.
It wasn’t like Sonia had blown their money on lottery tickets, the way grandma used to before she got too tired to walk to the Texaco on the corner. In fact, the last time she’d borrowed cash without asking, she’d paid it all back by the end of the week. Abuela didn’t even notice it had gone missing from behind the Virgin Mary statue in the living room, anyway. And you had to spend money to make money, isn’t that what everyone says? Yes, these were all good things to remember to point out, just in case she got caught.
Sonia’s walk from the bus stop was more difficult than usual. She was carrying a backpack that probably weighed as much as she did and seemed to get heavier with each step, like it wanted to push her straight into the ground. She adjusted the strap a little bit tighter, noticing the sweat gathering under her arms. Why did it always have to be so hot outside? She took her silver wig off even though she knew it wouldn't be enough to cool down.
If abuela found out how she paid for this backpack full of junk, she’d definitely be grounded for at least twenty years. But Sonia was willing to bet that before abuela even knew what had happened, they’d be living in a new house — a two-story that smelled like fresh paint and construction. All paid for by her only granddaughter.
Sonia would buy the house on the North Side. That’s where the nicer H-E-Bs were, the ones rich people went to and they let you sample sausage on toothpicks and fresh guacamole and even craft beers — all for free on Sundays, just around the time everyone gets out of church. Abuela would never say no to a beer on a Sunday afternoon. Just so long as it was light.
Thinking of the two of them together at H-E-B made her backpack feel a little less heavy. And before she knew it, she was already home.
Their front yard was protected by a short chain-linked fence. Its small door was frozen in place by overgrown weeds, leaving a space just wide enough for Sonia to squeeze her small frame through. A twisted metal rung caught her bag and split its zipper halfway open. Two wires spilled out — their plugs bobbed like unsure pendulums.
“Qué no traiga esa brujería into la casa! I already tol’ you ayer!” her abuela screeched from inside the house. She sounded coarse, like she was yelling through a string-and-cup telephone. That meant she was only a little bit agitated at this point.
Sonia caught a glimpse of her grandma’s sunspotted forearms, folded across her sunken torso, secure in their most comfortable position. Why was sneaking out of the house so easy but slipping back in so impossible?
“Oh my god, ‘buela. It’s not witchcraft. They’re just a couple of old physicals— phones and computers and stuff,” she said over the piercing barks of the neighbor’s chihuahuas, “for my Halloween costume. Voy hacer un robot.” She swung her arms mechanically.
Her grandma squinted at her and said, “Y tienes muchos muerdes en sus brazos! Ten cuidado!” She ambled into darkness in the direction of the kitchen, mumbling some mixture of complaints and regrets.
“Ah, I can’t control the mosquitoes from biting me!” Sonia looked down at three big bug bites near her elbow. Geez. She opened the screen door to the house, and remembered the watermelon she’d cut up earlier waiting for her in the fridge.
The foil-topped bowl was cold in her hand as she reached for a slender bottle of Chamoy powder in the cupboard.
“Ya empecé la cena. Put it back, Sonia! Quítate de aquí.” Her grandma slapped a heavy dose of calamine lotion on her arm.
Sonia wiped her arm off with a paper towel and decided not to whine.
“Fine, fine. I’ll wait just for you,” she said and stamped softly to her bedroom without the watermelon.
She kicked her pink sneakers off and swung the heavy pack onto the bed, then sat with her legs crossed next to it. The mattress squeaked.
The way to buying her grandma a new house was possibly right there on her bed. Now that real-time data on most Texan’s Mists were automatically logged on Rangers’ servers, people had taken to storing their dirty secrets on old electronics. If her data extracting skills were good enough, she might find a fortune hidden in the zeros and ones of their memories. Even mundane data that could boost the performance of predictive algorithms could be worth a week of groceries, or at least traded for a coupon booklet.
Of course she’d need to figure out how to sell the data to Rangers or maybe even criminals. But no use worrying about that right now.
If she got a real break today maybe she’d tell her grandma about how she hadn’t graduated classes last year. No. No sum of money could save her butt in that situation.
She pulled out the two easiest pieces to work on first: a red Nokia phone and a Tamagotchi game, its egg-ish case cracked and yellowing.
She put the price of the items out of her mind, donned her oversized headphones and plugged them into a Raspberry Pi computer.
There was something comforting about getting her hands on material objects that held data, something like how it felt to thumb through abuela’s People en Español magazines.
Using a rubber mallet, she delivered a soft bump to pop open the brick phone. She wiggled the memory stick loose and transferred it into an adapter linked up to the console, fitting it snugly. After flipping a few toggles, she pressed a button on a projector the size of a matchbox. A hovering glowscreen booted, which flashed what looked like a palimpsest of random characters. She pointed at the edge of the floating display, pinched and pulled with her fingers to see more of the information. The characters erased and reformed repeatedly, and, through the headphones, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom played at full volume.
“Ahh! FUCK!” She tore off her headphones, breaking the connection.
Abuela appeared in the doorway as if on cue. “Y ahorra no fuiste a iglesia, también!” she shrieked. It was obvious she’d been waiting to let that one out for a while.
“Yah, amá! Déjame!” Then she whispered to herself, “A Bidi-warning glitch on the first download, solo mi suerte.”
Her grandma glared at her and disappeared back to the interior of the house.
Sonia calmed down, hooked the headphones back up, and loaded a script of her own design to unlock the information now saved inside the console. The glowscreen flickered and centered five low-res thumbnail photos of a brown Pomeranian. Jesus, it made no sense to put a lock on that. Unless.
She ran her script, which made dozens of copies of the photos and renamed their file extensions. The new copies were then forced to open on an emulation suite of a hundred or so vintage programs. Her glowscreen vibrated as though it was more than just a projection, a custom alert she’d written for when the computer snagged a successful hit. Right there, plainly on her glowscreen was a series of text conversations in Spanish and English.
She dug into the phone’s previous service information. A secondary, pink glowscreen flashed: Julián Castro.
“Fuuuuck…” she whispered to herself, then shouted, “Buela!”
“Qué?” abuela said from the kitchen, distracted by cooking, but loud and clear.
“Ven, ven aca!”
Her abuela showed up wearing a sarcastic look Sonia suspected she’d picked up from watching the child actors of American television.
“Mira, los personal texts de el senator pasado. That’s a year of college paid for right there. What did I tell you?”
It was the pay off Sonia was hoping for after putting up with the dimple-cheeked vendor at la pulga, who’d been all dilated pupils and grabby hands. He’d definitely charged her an unfair premium, on account of her being young and poor and in need. Snakes like that could smell your situation the second you entered the building. Maybe she’d invest in a more realistic wig color soon, something an adult would wear. Anyway, Castro’s private texts would find many high bidders. Joke was on dimples.
Grandma looked worried, “Qué ‘Halloween costume’ y qué nada! You lied to me otra vez! Pero no es peligroso? It’s not your phone.”
“No, no. Anyone who finds it, it belongs to. It’s a law,” Sonia lied again.
Grandma relaxed for the first time today. “Ah, ta bueno. Despues quieres atole o no?”
Sonia looked at her with a face that said ya sabes, then she said, “Sí, sí,” a sweet child, again. Abuela disappeared from the door frame.
“And now I can pay you back some of what I owe,” she said to the empty room.
What a score this’d been. And easy to crack. Not enough for a house, but it would pay the water and light bill at least for a year. Maybe she'd get some more RAM for her computer, too. She transferred the information onto a thumb drive before tossing the phone into a small industrial shredder.
Sonia heard the kitchen stove click on and the cupboards open and close. The smell of cinnamon and a new humidity filled the room.
She eyed the Tamagotchi virtual pet. These novelty games were written on such a small memory chip and in such a clunky language that there was hardly room for any kind of firewalls or encryption. What could a little, unassuming, flattened sphere be hiding?
She hunted for the right power adapter and plugged it in, just to see if the game would start up. Tamagotchi data cards were notoriously difficult to free from their protective cocoons. It clicked on and the little blob pet was projected onto the main glowscreen. It spoke through her headphones and in subtitles on her glowscreen:
Nema. Olam led sonarbil onis y on son sejed reac ne la noicatnet… and on.
Through the vanity mirror situated behind the glowscreen, Sonia watched the reverse image of the text animate alongside the sounds. She knew the passage very well. It was the Lord’s prayer.
When the prayer ended, the text morphed into a burning, watchful eye. She’d heard of the ojo glitch, but didn’t believe it existed, even now when she was staring straight at it.
Its patterns invaded Sonia's neurological system through her eyes. She grabbed her throat as if to stop it from constricting and her eyes rolled back. Her body trembled—enough to throw her from the bed to the floor.
Finally, she lay still, holding on to the smell of her abuelita’s atole and to the sound of clanking pans and utensils in the kitchen.
+++++
Sonia regained some control of her thoughts, finding herself cradled in the arms of a handsome paramedic with white and black stubble, caught in his kind gaze. He spoke while checking her vitals, but she couldn’t quite hear him, and really, she didn’t need him to explain anything. The last hour was burned into her memory.
Frozen, she’d watched her grandma try to wake her and then listened to her shout in broken English into the phone at the emergency dispatcher. Abuela lost her voice after a few minutes, exasperated, and leaned against the wall, shifting on her weight in a way Sonia had never seen before. Then she collapsed, the color gone from her face.
The only person that mattered in Sonia’s life was dead and she would never be able to return even a fraction of the love that she’d received.
Sonia coughed and said to the paramedic, “Don’t log me here.”
“Now, slow down there, girl. You’re waking from a sensory attack,” he said.
“Promise me you won’t log me here on your Mist,” she said and held his wrist.
“You’re a victim. It’s my job to make sure we have all the info we need to catch whoever— ” he started.
“They’ll find a way to pin it on me. I’ll get thrown onto the Barcaza, locked up, helping the Rangers with their computers. I’m too valuable,” Sonia said. She stumbled around her bed and dresser, shoving her computer equipment into a Spurs duffel bag.
“Not so fast — ”
“They won’t find who did this. I can,” she said, making eye contact with the older man.
She pushed herself out of the house and down towards the nearest bus stop, breathing in the neighborhood air, which was tainted with the smell of her tears. When the next bus arrived, she paused while boarding, checking to see whether the USB stick full of her best scripts was in her bag. She felt the edges of it with her fingertips and sat in the back.
Todo no estaba perdido.
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