Fatherless: A Novel (10 page)

“I’m afraid
you only have two choices,” the elderly woman squeezed through grinding teeth, her thinning patience on overtime. “Keep the
seat you’ve been assigned or wait for the next flight later this afternoon.”

Julia’s brow furrowed at both options. Booking at the last minute had forced the humiliation of a middle seat in coach, probably
cramped between two armrest hogs. Despite her gold status with the airline, she couldn’t get an upgrade to either first or
business class. But Angie Tolbert expected her to arrive before six o’clock. The later flight wouldn’t depart Denver International
Airport until four thirty, landing in DC after eight p.m. East Coast time.

She checked her bag and headed toward a security line much longer than usual while opening the airline app on her tablet.
Twenty-three minutes and seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen seconds until takeoff. There were twelve impatient travelers
between her and the body scanner, each glaring at the front of the line, where a pregnant mother awkwardly removed her squirming
toddler from a stroller while her husband scolded an older brother. The kid had climbed onto the baggage treadmill, hoping
to ride one of the personal belongings tubs through the X-ray machine.

“Breeders!” Julia heard someone say with a sneer.

“Sure hope they aren’t on my flight,” added another.

After three unsuccessful attempts to move through the scanner, the unruly clan finally cleared security thanks to a supervisor
who overruled an entry-level officer trying to validate his existence. Nineteen minutes and fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one
seconds remained for twelve others to pass before Julia could sprint to her gate. Still too close to call.

Julia pulled up Angie’s message to consider her options should she miss the flight.

Julia smiled, then panicked. She hadn’t intended to spend the entire weekend with Angie. One evening would have been more
than enough. But she had accepted the offer anyway. Time with the family might prove helpful. Who better to gain access to
Kevin’s bright spots coalition than his wife’s former, renewed best friend?

The cabin door closed moments after Julia found a space to stuff her carry-on bag. The flight attendant seemed eager to get
his final passenger seated before the last two minutes and forty-one seconds drained from the on-time-departure countdown
clock. A heavyset woman shimmied herself out of the aisle seat, clearly disappointed by Julia’s arrival.

Julia looked beyond her temporary torture chamber to see her other tormentor, an ornery looking five-year-old boy freshly
incensed by a father’s tongue-lashing—the same kid who had delayed the security line to turn the X-ray machine into an amusement
park ride. Noticing the child’s flustered parents and baby sister seated across the adjoining aisle, Julia decided to take
a shot. “Want to sit in the middle seat to be closer to your mommy and daddy?”

“I wanna look out the window!”

Of course.

Buckling her belt while the large woman squeezed back into her seat, Julia breathed a sigh of relief over having made the
flight.

“Welcome aboard American United Flight two-five-five to Washington, DC,” the voice said with haste. Julia tuned out the captain
to plan her next three hours. She needed to act preemptively before either seatmate could initiate conversation. Remembering
the journal files Jeremy Santos had given her a few days before, she reached for the tablet buried in the shoulder bag she
had stuffed in the space beneath her feet. A quick retrieval provided the ideal excuse to lock herself behind an invisible
wall of solitary confinement.

“My name is Tyler. What’s yours?”

In no mood to chat, Julia placed her index finger over her lips to imply the captain expected silence from every passenger.

“Can I play a game?” the boy asked, after glancing to make sure his parents weren’t listening to his hushed request. “My daddy
lets me play games on his tablet in the car.”

Ignoring the question, Julia searched her bag for an age-appropriate consolation prize. “Would you like a breath mint?”

The boy nodded eagerly before forcing a mock gag at the wintergreen scent.

The lights dimmed for the video safety instructions. Seven minutes later Julia opened the Santos folder while the kid admired
his bird’s-eye view of the snowcapped mountains below.

The folder contained two icons. The first, labeled
SYLVIA SANTOS’S JOURNAL
, contained files sequenced from August of 2023 through a final entry entered the morning of Antonio’s transition. The second,
titled
ANTONIO’S MUSINGS
, contained less than half as many files.

Julia chose the mother’s journal. Tempted to read the last date first, she decided to start at the beginning out of respect
for Jeremy’s intent.

The further Julia read the larger the gaps became, once or twice per week at the beginning dwindling down to once every few
months toward the end. Either Sylvia Santos lacked journaling discipline or, more likely, Jeremy had screened and selected
specific entries to reveal a central narrative. Julia scanned through the newborn years, trying to piece together the main
plot of Act One.

Scene One: A young wife tries to preserve her sexually charged marriage despite a husband who resents the interruption of
two kids.

Scene Two: Sex becomes infrequent as she becomes less available to him and he seems less interested in her.

Scene Three: The husband becomes more patient with their waning passion. Too patient. She fears he has been having his needs
met elsewhere but is too frightened to risk confrontation.

Scene Four: Early signs something is wrong with Antonio trump concerns about the marriage. Mom hides her worries and avoids
genetic testing because she doesn’t want to further disenchant an increasingly detached dad.

After nearly thirty minutes of reading, Julia noticed a long gap between the next two journal dates. She clicked the first,
which was much longer than prior entries. The start of Act Two.

Julia opened the next journal entry, propelling her more than six months forward in time.

A tap on her wrist startled Julia, reminding her of her imprisonment. She looked up to notice the flight attendant handing
her a small carton of chocolate milk.

“Would you pass this, please?”

She handed the drink to the eager child. He punched the tab and took his first sip, a tiny trickle of brown escaping the side
of his mouth. It dripped onto the corner of a half-finished coloring book page.

Julia studied the boy’s carefree face, trying to imagine him in place of another five-year-old watching a father pack, weeping
after another cancellation of a promised visit, pleading with his mother to let Daddy come back home. She turned and looked
across the aisle at Tyler’s father, a plain-vanilla husband rubbing his wife’s arm as she stole a nap while their baby gulped
a bottle of juice.

The kind of man her sister Maria would never notice, let alone date.

The kind of breeder her best editorials scorned.

The kind of daddy the boy seated beside her would kiss good night.

The eighth
and final pretzel clung stubbornly to the bottom of a tiny plastic bag, resisting Julia’s attempt to secure one last tease
of nourishment. She should have eaten before boarding the plane but had failed to account for the two-hour time difference.
Landing in DC at one o’clock eastern meant flying right through her usual lunch. A diet soda and mini carb packet couldn’t
compete with the aroma of a turkey-and-salami sandwich her plump seatmate pulled from a large lap purse or the apple slices
Tyler had consumed between sips of chocolate milk. Her stomach growled beneath the hum of jet engines propelling 350 passengers
toward the most powerful city on earth.

With more than an hour remaining on the flight Julia debated between reading more of the Santos journals and compiling a list
of questions for her upcoming interviews. Despite the human drama of the Santos story, her career depended on understanding
and exposing the cryptic Bright Spots proposal. She closed the journal folder to open her calendar, where she found two Monday
appointments.

Paul had arranged the interviews with both longtime acquaintances. He had said Nicole Florea would be a great voice to counter
any anti–Youth Initiative rhetoric. Florea was a respected fiscal conservative, so she would be difficult for anyone on the
radical right to marginalize. Trisha Sayers, a heroine of capitalism who embodied the dramatic ascent of the fairer sex, could
bring celebrity and glamour to the debate. Together they would provide a strong voice for progressive ideas. That was the
easy part. Getting inside the mind of anti-progressives would likely prove much more difficult.

Before drafting a list of interview questions, Julia immersed herself in the topic. She had compiled a CliffsNotes version
of the Youth Initiative controversy starting with the 2036 presidential election cycle.

It was the heyday of the new conservative movement that won elections in landslides by promising an economic utopia. It took
credit for curtailing restrictive governmental regulations on the burgeoning genetic technologies industry. Nearly a hundred
thousand ideas had been filed with the global patent office since 2031, when the movement had managed to pass the Genomic
Frontier legislation removing many restrictive ethical safeguards from university and corporate scientists. Most inventions
had attracted massive infusions of research and development funding from aging venture capitalists hoping to cash in on a
gold rush of health-care and life-enhancement innovations.

Julia recalled one of her earliest editorials. She had been a young journalist at the time. She reluctantly praised fiscal
conservatives who had courageously defied their religiously rigid base. “It’s high time level heads started to find common
ground with social progressives,” she had written.

RAP Syndicate ran a daily feature in the Life and Tech department highlighting some of the most promising new developments.
She recalled several headlines.

Lance Lowman rode a wave of optimistic speculation into the White House in 2036, his party ushering in what some described
as a return to Camelot: no wars, terrorist attacks in decline, and stock markets soaring. Within a few short years, said common
wisdom, decades-old deficits would evaporate in the wake of unprecedented economic growth.

Then the bubble burst. Too few patents delivered on their promises, causing skittish seniors to pull out of stocks to salvage
what remained of their dwindling retirement savings. The few genetic advances that turned a profit did so on the backs of
taxpayers because they served the federally subsidized senior-care industry. Federal and state entitlement spending mushroomed.
The boom brought very little of the new growth that had been projected. A bullish gen-tech stock boom turned bearish overnight,
losing nearly half of its value in less than a month.

The crusading radicals on the far right seemed to gloat. “Demographics control destiny,” they chided, claiming falling fertility had undercut what little growth had come from all those seniors’
investing in their own longevity. “More 80-year-olds performing in bed can’t mask our true impotence,” wrote a particularly obnoxious columnist. “We are paying the price for neglecting
to produce a new crop of entrepreneurs and taxpayers.”

Whatever the reason, optimistic growth projections slammed into the wall of massive spending increases, leaving the president’s
fiscal conservatives holding the gun at the very moment people wondered who had killed the economy.

To his credit, the president took decisive action. He proposed a solution that angered his far-right-wing supporters but that
united the far left and moderate elements of both political parties. The Youth Initiative seemed based on a commonsense and
compassionate idea: to give seniors and other dependent adults the right to transition resources to the younger generation
rather than hoard it for their own preservation. Rejecting the failed policies of other developed nations with aging populations,
the president said, “America should chart a boldly different course that continues our unique legacy of individual autonomy
and concern for the common welfare.” In other words, reduce entitlement spending and incentivize wealth transfer from those
draining the economy.

The proposal passed both houses of Congress with a two-thirds majority. If even 5 percent of ailing seniors opted for transition,
projected the Congressional Budget Office, the initiative could reduce federal entitlement spending by hundreds of billions
per year. It would also improve the economic situation for millions of younger workers while generating a healthy revenue
stream that would keep the program in the black. A win-win-win.

Not surprisingly, however, some religious leaders expressed moral outrage and called the Youth Initiative “a Nazi-like solution
that diminishes the dignity of human life.”

Julia had never understood their objections. She wondered how letting each person choose his or her expiration date takes
away dignity. Wasn’t personal autonomy a great American value? Why would anyone want to stop a sickly, aging senior from giving
scarce resources to others by transitioning?

But, unbelievably, many protested. The usual suspects: religious zealots who would rather thump Bibles than solve problems,
frumpy moms who would rather pollute the planet than use birth control, and patriarchal men who thought the only good female
was a pregnant one. This same backward thinking had come to inform growing opposition to the transition industry.

Opening a blank document file, Julia proceeded to capture questions that could steer interviewees toward the expectations
of one person, Paul Daugherty. It was his view, not theirs, that would dominate the feature. It was his opinion alone that
would determine her professional fate. It was his agenda, not the facts, that would dictate success.

Five minutes later a friendly voice asked all those on board to return their seats to the upright position and place digital
devices in safe mode. Julia quickly scanned her work. Satisfied, she powered down the tablet and returned it to the bag at
her feet.

Peering through the small gap of window above Tyler’s glass-pressed face, she saw the outskirts of the nation’s capital. Adrenaline
surged as she anticipated walking the halls of power. The boy turned, extending his right index finger toward Julia.

“What should I do with this?”

As she searched frantically for a tissue, a man’s hand appeared from across the aisle. It was Tyler’s father passing an airline-branded
napkin he must have saved for just such an occasion.