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Godiva can do many things, I continued. Each individual satellite in its worldwide grid is dubbed a God. That's
engineer humor for you. The cluster of Gods can feel out the ocean floor; they can trace force-five hurricanes
on their way to Florida; they can give GPS data to every golf course on the planet and see through murk and muck
the countless golf balls that splashed-down in every water hazard.
The keyboard rattled and clicked under my fingers, like chattering teeth. During lunar and solar eclipses, tens
of thousands of people gaze up at the sky at the same time, and with a miniscule sweep of gyroscope-assisted lenses,
all of their rapt faces are mapped, modeled, beamed to earth, and digitally stored. Point a couple Gods at a World
Cup soccer match in Barcelona and you get 100,000 identities organized by eye color, skin color, nose width, pockmark
density, baldness patterns, you name it. Whoever is already in the system can be sorted by name. The hooligans
are red-flagged. Humbled is how you feel when you see those instant mug shots pour in. Thrilled.
Awed is how you feel when you see ten pages of women who all look like they could be your girlfriend's sisters.
And the game you create for yourself is to tell her apart from the imposters. And you lose, more than once. So
you study her face until a police line-up of her doppelgangers shoulder-to-shoulder with her long-lost identical
twins couldn't fool you.
Clarissa, I still work at GodivaGrid. You still give dance lessons to rich kids. I know because I watch you go
to work-I watch from above the exosphere. I have twenty-nine eyes, and they're taller than Olympus. They watch
your Toyota zig-zagging its way haltingly through the intersections like a pixel in an eight-bit video game. You
spiral around the loops and figure-eights of the freeway interchanges. From up there, the off- and onramps look
like petals, and you're an ant crawling over, then slipping under an overpass. You reach the dance studio, spring
out of your car, and for a second I pray that you'll look up. Just one skyward glance as you hop to the curb. No
luck. You disappear into the building. I multitask until you come out again. Electronic solitaire flickers in front
of my aching eyes, and the online forums scroll into blurs, but my mind is elsewhere.
In the afternoon the parents arrive to pick up their daughters from the dance studio. Octagonal shapes of umbrellas
sprout on the screen; the drizzle has turned into a light rain, by now. Stratus clouds thicken and darken, but
Godiva sees through it effortlessly. Finally you reemerge, and you look up into the air. Freeze frame. Godiva traces
the outline of your face and measures your features-it reads your beauty marks and minute, semi-permanent blemishes
exactly like constellations. It checks your hairline, the way your hair parts, compares the hint of teeth you show
to your dental records. In the time it takes you to grimace at the rain and open your umbrella, Godiva calls you
Clarissa Earnhart. I love to receive this confirmation. I save the frozen image for later viewing.
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