“Our mother, Val, is a teacher.” Val gave a hesitant wave. “She never got a Pilot, either, but not because she couldn’t. She looked at the technology and decided it wasn’t something she wanted to do. I admire that about her, her willingness to stand firm when there was pressure everywhere to conform.”
Val still remembered the day she’d made that promise to Sophie. It had never been hard for her to keep, but she knew now how much it had mattered.
“This is our other mother, Julie. She got a Pilot because she wanted one. It helped her in her job, and it never gave her one moment of trouble that I know of. I know that’s true of a lot of you. Come up here a second?”
Julie had agreed to this part. She walked to Sophie, making sure to keep her Pilot-lit side to the cameras as she hugged her daughter. If Sophie’s light was a stab wound, Val didn’t know what to call Julie’s almost-there. The implant was disconnected, she’d said as much, and Val believed her, but it was hard to divorce the light from the left-behind feeling, even knowing there was nothing behind it, and there were who knew how many people walking around with lights and no Pilots. The Julie who walked back into the waiting room was the same person who had walked out, just as she had been all those years ago. The Julie who reached for her that night, after the deactivation, who recognized that she needed to touch and be touched precisely because of the Pilot and everything it had been in their lives, did not feel any different. That, too, had been trust.
“She always liked it, but she decided to get her Pilot turned off when all the trouble with David happened. You see that light on the side of her head? It means nothing. She got the Pilot deactivated, but left the light on. If I wasn’t spilling the secret right now, she could go to work every day like that and her boss would never be the wiser.”
That was the first reveal, the reason they wanted to do this while they had cameras interested in David’s celebrity. Sophie had promised not to scoop Toledo; his article on the on/off permutations was scheduled to come out simultaneously with the rally.
“So that’s our family, but we also have a larger community. Come on up here, everyone.” She waited as a group of about thirty people assembled on the stage, Piloted all. Gabe grinned and gave her a thumbs-up. “My other family is the people without Pilots, whether because of religion or health condition or choice, who have been working tirelessly for years to bring attention to the inequities of Pilots. The people who have protested and written letters to Congress and raised their voices.
“Now, you may be wondering how I could be standing here, a Pilot light glowing on my head, talking about being part of the community of people without Pilots, with all these Piloted people standing here with me, but here’s the thing—”
At that signal, the spotlight went out, leaving a sea of blue lights in the audience and on the stage, and the steady red eyes of the news cameras, watching.
And then the stage went completely dark. There was a gasp from the back as every blue light extinguished on stage. Practical magic; Val was close enough to see everyone on stage reach up and press their glue-on LEDs, turning them off, and Julie cover hers with her hand. Only a handful of blue lights remained, mostly behind the cameras.
The spotlight came on again. Sophie stood tall, the false light gone. “Those were fake Pilots. The exact same blue light you all have to show your status, but it’s a simple LED. Did you know these things could lie? I didn’t until recently, but it turns out anyone can put a blue light in their head and pretend they have a Pilot. There’s an investigation going public tonight that can show you proof.
“So what does that mean? It means you can have a light without a Pilot, and a Pilot without a light. It means those blue bulbs mean nothing. They’re status symbols, nothing more, so maybe we can stop playing games with our brains.”
She stepped back, and David returned to the spotlight. “All of which is to say I’m running for this office to be your voice in Congress on all the issues you care about, but first we need to know what they’re putting in our heads, so we can decide for ourselves what to do about it. I’m starting with this: accountability from BNL, on everything. My name is David Geller-Bradley, and I’m running to get answers.”
The audience roared, and a dozen friends bear-hugged Sophie and David. At the room’s fringes, the reporters who had been promised a national-level story talked excitedly into their cameras. The reporters all had Pilots, the better to keep up with the pace of news. Would they even want to hear this? It made them part of the story. Val was still concerned that BNL ad dollars might affect what was said, but the information was loose in the world.
Sophie and David were going to be there for a while, hugging and shaking hands and giving interviews. Julie raised an eyebrow at Val, and Val nodded. They didn’t need to stay.
EPILOGUE
