by Simon Ings
This is the three martinis talking. Rein in, rein in, rein in the guy tech-piling the girl when she starts to show some science.
“But humans are visual animals, so we operate the ROVs through a screen-based analogue, but in reality, it’s all chemicals. We really hunt by sense of smell. Like sharks. Sharks hunt by chemical trails in the water. And electrical fields. That’s us. Top predators.”
“I was thinking of those dogs they have in France,” she says. “The ones they train to hunt down truffles. I read someplace that they’re better than pigs, because they have better noses and they don’t eat the truffles like pigs do.”
“I would rather be a shark than a truffle-hunting dog,” I say. “And a pig? What are you saying?”
She giggles. She covers her mouth with her hand when she giggles, like she is scared some of her soul may spill out. I love that in a woman. And we’re even. Tech-dump versus ego-puncture. I’m starting to think where to take her afterward.
“It is kind of clever,” I say. “They paid a bunch of animators from Pixar to come up with the interface. It looks like a game. I suppose, in a sense, it is a game. One of those types where you have to work your weapon combos to get the max effect, because the AI learns from you and adapts the bosses to your fighting style.”
“I’m not really that into gaming. My housemate’s got that Kinect thing and it’s fun, but all it really gets used for is Dance Yourself Thin.”
For a moment, a dread moment, a sick-up-in-your-heart moment, I feared she was going to mention a boyfriend. The male roomie. Then it’s dancercise and I am sailing clear. There’s a Latin American place with a dance floor upstairs and a good DJ. Tango never fails. It’s the combination of passion and strict discipline.
“Well, it’s like that but with a lot more screens, and we use pull-down menus on a 3-D heads-up display rather than bashing the X button. But we have gamer chairs. You know? Those low ones where you’re more or less on the floor, with built-in speakers? And we wear our own clothes.”
“Really?”
I flash my lapels, which are narrow and correct for the season.
“This is my superhero suit. The thing is, it’s really not like a war at all. I mean, a war means someone shoots back. I mean, they take out our drones. But they’re only nanodrones. No one shoots back at us. We just sit there in our chairs in our really good clothes and shoot things. So it is like a game, or comics. No one really gets hurt.”
“I’m glad,” she says.
Time. It’s time. I lean toward her and the light from inside the bar gleams from my cross. And she, too, leans toward me.
“Do you like Argentinian food?” I ask.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had it,” she says.
“It is the food of passion,” I say. “Red and raw and flamboyant.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“We could go there. I know a place. Not far from here.”
“Okay,” she says. “I think I will. Yes. Let’s give the spirit of old Buenos Aires a try. But first, I owe you another drink.”
*
I press the buttons and the biochemical rockets streak out ahead of me. Blam! I dive through the hole in the curtain of death-subs. Before me, below me, are the endothelial cell walls and the rigs, driving their way through, molecule by molecule. Once they’re into the cerebrospinal fluid, the death-subs can scatter through the hypothalamus’s many nuclei. Total control of the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems. We’ll never be able to flush them out of the deep, dark neural jungle.
I line up the first pair of drill rigs in my sights.
Missiles away.
Wham! They explode in slo-mo, sending plates and girders and gantry work fountaining upward.
And the next two.
Bam!
Proximity detectors shriek. I roll the drone, and death-sub torpedoes streak past me. I was a hair’s breadth from death. I drop micromines behind me and listen to the shrieks as the death-subs come apart.
To my right, Twyla is on a rig-busting run. They look mighty pretty, toppling like trees or factory chimneys as she takes them out.
“Miko! There’s one on your tail!” Twyla shouts. I flick to the rear cameras. The death-sub comes barreling through the twinkling wreckage. I drop mines. Flick flick flick. I can’t see what the death-sub does, but now my mines are gone. Every single one.
It’s gaining. It’s lean and mean, a steampunk shark, and fast fast fast. I load up torpedoes in the rear tubes. Fire one. Fire two. Death-shark rolls this way, that way. Easy. Easiest thing in the world. This is not good. This is exquisitely bad. This I have not seen before. This death-shark, it knows us. It’s new, it’s smart, it’s evolved. Its evil shark head unfolds a battery of grippers and claws and shredders and impalers. It’s like a death-crab-beetle killing-thing. Close-in defenses. I stab the shotgun button. Eat molecular death, evil shark-thing. And it shrugs me off. My blasts don’t even take the shine off its skin. And my haptics jolt me with a sudden deceleration. It’s got me. A giant hook is stabbed into my rear control surface and little by little it is hauling me in. I gun the flagella. Molecular motors scream.
And then I dive forward as the restraint is released, and when I can call up the rear camera I see the death-shark unraveling like ink dropped into water. Then Elis blasts through the squid-black ink and disperses it with her flagella.
“Got you, Miko!”
After that, it’s killing time. We burn, we blast, we wham and bam! The death-subs scatter, knowing their evil plan is thwarted, but Garret and Elis stalk the outer fringes of the sella turcica, covering the exits, while far below, the pituitary gland shines like a vast endocrinal moon. We sow death, we salt the fields. Wave upon wave of chemicals sterilize the survivors. Those evil death-subs will never reproduce and try to possess the President of the United States.
We won.
We won.
I hear Garret’s voice shouting “Victory! We have victory!” like that English actor at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
We saved the President’s brain. Go Eagles of Screaming Death.
I blink out of sim and push up my goggles. I lift up my cross and kiss it. In the next chair, Elis, her own goggles up on her hair, grins in a way that is very ungroomed and non-glossy but totally honest and right.
“Now for the Pope!” she says. “But first, we just earned ourselves some serious R&R.”
*
“So, no to Argentinian food?” I ask.
This is weird. This is unexpected. This is not in the script—not that I use a script, understand. But I come back from the men’s room—they have this little spritz of cologne, which is a nice touch, a nice extra freshness and confidence—and she is standing with her bag and her wrap. “How about Egyptian? Jamaican? I know a really good Greek Cypriot restaurant out in Bethesda—the owner comes from the next village, we have the same priest.”
“No, I guess I’m not hungry. Those olives filled me up.”
And I feel a little stunned. A little dazed. Woozy. Not four-martini woozy. World-woozy. What happened? It was flying right, on the glide path in, landing on autopilot. Now she is leaving without a word, an explanation, a mobile number.
“I’m sorry, I was talking about myself? Yadda yadda yadda? I know, it’s a terrible fault.”
“Well, yes, it is,” she says, which makes me feel worse. “But, you know, I have enjoyed talking to you, and thanks for all the drinks…”
“Half the drinks,” I say. Modern. I feel like the room is telescoping away from me, like that shot in Jaws. This is crazy. It’s like every voice in the bar is in my head.
“Thank you for letting me do that, but, well, I do have work tomorrow.” She turns away, turns back. “Miko, tell me. What you’re saying about the nanobots—the tiny death-subs. Is it always the rich? I mean, do ordinary people ever get them as well?”
“You’d need to be a lottery winner or some kind of mad day trader. Never happens.”
“Yo
u sure?” she says. She taps the top of my martini glass. “Have you ever thought, maybe they have started to shoot back?” Tap tap tap. Then she throws her wrap around her and out she walks, heels tap tap tap.
(2014)
MASKED
Rich Larson
Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain. He now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he has sold over a hundred stories, most of them science fiction. Out of the genre, he has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Journey prizes and was a semifinalist for the 2013 Norman Mailer Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction, was published in 2018. His debut novel, Annex (2018), the start to his Violet Wars trilogy, follows a transgender girl who has discovered that an alien parasite has given her strange powers.
It’s been a whole month since anyone’s seen Vera, and the circumstances of us finally seeing her this weekend are going to be ultra grody-odd, so I deliberate forever doing my Face. In the end I decide to go subtle: an airbrushed conglom of three of my most flattering private snaps, plus Holly Rexroat-Carrow’s lips and Sofia Lawless’s cheekbones from that Vogue shoot she did on the Moon. Nothing too recent, nothing that’ll make Vera feel like she is way, way unsynched and missing out on all kinds of hot shit. Which she has been, obviously.
I do the rest of my Face the same way, kind of sous radar. I set my wardrobe to cycle four or five outfits, one of which includes the Chanel inside-out jacket Vera gifted me a week before the accident. It is now kind of gauche, so she better appreciate the gesture like whoa. Boob-wise I go small, because obviously Aline is going to be there, too, and she always goes chesty and is way way more than welcome to the unsolicited profile taps, thanks.
Lastly, I prune the digital cloud of updates shuffling around my shoulders. A few instant-regret purchases, plus the many many snaps of me and Aline and Estelle wearing our wetsuits in Venice, disappear in a drizzle of code. The result looks a little barren. But barren can also be construed as, like, minimalist, which may or may not be coming back now.
Either way, I am not going to be rubbing Vera’s nose in the fact that a viral strike took her Face offline and she is stuck hiding from the world for at least another week according to technicians. Aline probably will, but whatever.
*
Vera’s parents are really fucking rich, if I didn’t mention that. As in, rich enough to rent a reefhouse on some secluded beach for Vera’s first weekend out of neural recovery, and also send me and Aline there in a big black shiny autocab to spend it with her. When said cab pulls up outside my house, Aline leans out the open door with Curacao in a martini glass, because she likes to pretend she’s an alcoholic, and welcomes me to her chariot.
“Yeah, strump, okay, strump,” I say, but when I climb in and see the chiller bar and the curved screen and the plush upholstery and all, I sort of have to agree. Me and Aline swap kisses. Her Face looks total wattage, as usual, wearing a high concept summer dress that is entirely foaming water, and keeping with the theme our Venice vacay snaps are ribboning off her in big graceful arcs.
Which I think is like, whoa, spinal cringe, because Vera’s parents bought us the sub-orbital tickets, and Vera had been wanting to dive Venice for-fucking-ever, and I felt somewhat Judas doing it without her.
“Are you sure you want to be, like, shouting those vacay snaps at her?” I say. “She might be suicidal enough already.”
“Bessandra. We are going to be there to support her.” Aline’s facial is painful pretty—between you and me, I think it’s a full model blend, like, none of her in it at all—and her Naufrage Blue TM eyes are full of sympathy. “But we are not responsible for her highbrowsing on deep webs and getting fucked up by some grody-odd virus. That was just straight-up unclutch of her to do right before we were supposed to go to Venice.”
But Aline wasn’t chatting her that night, so she doesn’t really know the extent of this grody-odd virus shit. I was.
*
The reefhouse is made of slick purple coral and looks like a big twisty conch, grown from a designer geneprint and way way chic, but me and Aline are both a bit quiet when we get out of the cab. Instead of, you know, being watted out of our minds to be weekending in a reefhouse with our dearly missed best/second-best friend.
I met Vera when we were ten, meaning we already had Faces, and neither of us knew Aline until high school. Although apparently her and Vera did kindergarten together—they can’t remember each other, so whatever. Basically, none of us have ever seen each other without a Face. The only people I have seen without a Face are those small, dim, barely there people who dive the trash or rap loco religious tracts outside 7–11.
Then Vera steps out onto the porch, holding a Bacardi Slush, and waves a familiar wave. “Hey, strumpets, you coming in or what now?”
My heart seriously lozenges in my throat, partly because of how good it is to hear her voice in actual airtalk and partly because she is so, so brave to strut outside like everything’s glacial when it is so obviously not.
I mean, her facial, or I guess her small f face, looks like her, because she’s pretty enough to never toy with it much anyway. But now it’s all wan and colorless and loaded with pores, and I think her nose is bigger, too. Her eyes seem smaller and not so shiny, and they’re brown, which they haven’t been for at least a few years.
Her hair is also brown, and totally lank, hanging off her like something dead instead of style-shifting or turning into digital snakes or even just doing a standard Pantene Ripple TM. And her swimsuit body is like, oh no. Hip-to-waist ratio’s all fucked up and there are little rolls of flab under her arms and around her middle.
But the worst thing is that she has no update cloud. As in none. The space around her shoulders and her head is totally empty of Trottr notifications, food snaps, Whispas, party-streams, profile taps, purchases, and everything else. I can’t even see my reassuring BFFF status that always pops up over her head. There is no way of knowing where Vera has been for the past month, if she has been drinking Bacardi Slushes the whole time or mixing it up with Lemogrenades, what she’s been buying, what she’s been wearing, who she’s been chatting. It’s all this horrible gaspy void.
It looks like she’s been dead for a month, and I can’t think what to say. Fortunately, Aline takes the pressure off me by doing a shatter-glass squeal and bounding up the steps to hug her, Face spouting these big cartoon tears. “You are an inspiration, Vera. An inspiration. And as soon as they fix you up, I am going to get you so synched, and we are going to party so hard, and we’re all going to look so fucking wattage, okay, love?”
There’s a glimmer in Vera’s brown eyes, and it takes me one to realize they are actual tears, like the saline kind. “Oh, Aline,” she says. “I missed the shit out of you.” She smiles, then catches my eye through Aline’s cascade of updates. “Hey, strump. How’s you?”
“Hey, V,” I say, coming up the steps. “You know, um, minimalism may or may not be back. So there’s that?”
Vera laughs, which sounds really good in my ears. We airkiss, but for some reason I don’t quite manage to actually hug her, maybe because I’m not sure what it’s going to feel like. Aline’s already bounced past us into the reefhouse, gushing about organic architecture and the fact that there is a minibar.
Me and Vera follow her in, and as long as I keep her in the periphs I figure I can make an effort at pretending everything’s normal.
*
Vera says we should do the beach while there’s still sun, so we head out the back door, which shutters shut behind us, and down to the pale gray sand. Me and Aline are justifiably worried about people seeing her. Not everyone digisigned a no-snaps waiver in sight of her lawyer parents, and some asshole taking snaps of her without her Face would be, obviously, disastrous.
“I’ve been here since yesterday,” Vera says, resettling the strap of her swimsuit. “It’s absolutely zero tremor. Like, there’s one Finnis
h family with little kids and then an old man who does maintenance shit.”
“Oh, good,” Aline says, but she looks somewhat disappointed and drops a cup size when my head is turned.
We pick a spot on the smoothest stretch of beach and camp it, unrolling our mats and stretching out. Me and Aline do our best to get Vera synched the old-fashioned way, like, telling her about how Dalia is now dating Sedge Vandermeer, and she’s rigged her Face to project his facial beside hers when they’re not actually together so she looks like some kind of two-headed monster but it’s love so whatever. We do not mention Venice, and Vera does not bring it up, so it will probably stay submarined until everyone’s drunk.
Eventually Vera wants to swim, so she sloshes out into the waves while me and Aline elect lifeguarding instead. Vera doesn’t seem to mind going solo. In fact, she looks really fucking blissy just dashing around out there, laughing through a mouthful of water when the tide bowls her over. Her skin has this ruddy thing going on, which actually looks sort of hot, and her smile is not as white, but seems bigger somehow.
“She’s medded,” Aline concludes. “Like, sky-high.”
“You think so?” I say, because I’ve seen Vera medded and usually she’s more sluggish.
“Um, has to be?” Aline shakes her perfect head. “Nobody just, like, bounces that kind of trauma.”
Vera wades back up to the beach, wringing water out of her hair, and it reminds me of something I can’t quite stick a finger on. “Come on,” she calls. “The water’s warm, you imps. And you owe me for Venice!”
Me and Aline swap looks.
“It smelled really bad,” I say. “The whole time. There was a heatwave.”
“Serves you right,” Vera says, but grinning.
Then we all go splash around for a bit, and it is sort of funtime, even for Aline, at least until her hair, which was doing this big wind-tunnel look, freezes up trying to interact with the water physics. And I get my finger on what Vera reminds me of: ancient clips of yours truly as a little kid, before I got my Face, running around wild with an ugly gappy smile big as the Moon.
