Extreme Makeover

by Dan Wells

  “We can’t change the whole lighting scheme for one girl,” the man on the lift called down. “You’ve got fifty girls in this show.”

  “And half of them are Vicky!” Kerry shouted back. He turned and shouted off stage. “Hannah? Where’s Hannah?” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dammit, Hannah, you’re the stage manager, why aren’t you on the stage?”

  The sound system squealed, and a woman’s voice boomed over the speakers. “I’m in the booth, Mr. White, what do you need?”

  “I need Vicky.”

  “Which one?”

  “Why would I care which one? They’re identical—that’s the point.”

  “I think they’re in the dressing room.”

  “Well, get them out here! We’re doing a lighting test!”

  There was a pause, then the speakers boomed again. “You need more red.”

  “I know I need more red!” Kerry stormed off the stage. “Vicky!”

  Sunny frowned. “I always hate these shows. We’ve been working on this for months, and we’re still not ready.”

  “You don’t have to go onstage,” said Decker/Lyle. “I’m the one giving the science speech.”

  Sunny raised an eyebrow. “You mean there’s still science in that speech? I thought Cynthia cut out everything more complex than ‘it makes you pretty.’”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” said Decker/Lyle. “I kept what I could, but you know her.”

  “What I wish we’d gotten was ‘Mr. DNA,’” said Sunny. “You know, the little cartoon guy from Jurassic Park? He could explain this whole thing.”

  Decker/Lyle laughed drily. “And then a swarm of Vickies would charge off the stage and eat the audience.”

  Sunny’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen. “It’s Cynthia. Hang on.” He tapped the screen and held it up to his ear. “What do you need?” Pause. “You’re kidding. Hang on, we’ll find a TV.” He stood up quickly, dropping his phone back into his pocket. “Come on, we’re on TV.”

  Decker/Lyle stood and followed him. “We’ve been on TV all summer.”

  “Not the ads,” said Sunny, weaving a path through chairs and electrical equipment toward a side door. “This building—this event. There are protesters outside.”

  Decker/Lyle followed him through the twisting side halls to the sound booth, where Hannah, the event center’s stage manager, was reviewing a list of sound cues with a room full of technicians. Sunny walked to an angled screen and tapped on it. “Is this connected to the satellite?”

  Hannah swung around on her chair and clicked a switch. “Should be, what do you want to see?” The screen flickered to life.

  “Local news,” said Sunny.

  Hannah clicked a few buttons, flipping rapidly through channel after channel, stopping on a scene of the Manhattan Center. The street outside was filled with protesters, many of them carrying signs. A young, black reporter named Amber Sykes was speaking in the foreground.

  “… suspected to be members of the same religious watch group that picketed the Yemaya Foundation headquarters earlier this evening.”

  Amber walked to the side, and as the camera followed her a man came into frame: older, maybe early fifties, with a salt-and-pepper blend of close-cropped hair. “This is the Reverend Joseph Wade,” said Amber, “leader of the protesters. Reverend Wade, can you tell us what, exactly, you’re protesting here?”

  “I represent a multidenominational Christian society called the Holy Vessel,” said the man, “formed last month when the so-called Guru Kuvam, really just a failed surgeon named Brett Halley, began spreading his dangerous philosophy of ‘secular salvation.’”

  “And you’re here at the Manhattan Center…?” Amber prompted.

  “What he’s really promoting,” said the reverend, ignoring her and speaking straight to the camera, “is the use of unregulated drugs, and an attitude of outright blasphemy against the sacred nature of our God-given bodies.”

  “That’s…” Amber paused, seeming unsure of what to say.

  “They’ve linked us,” whispered Sunny. “They’re protesting Kuvam at our event; they know it’s the same lotion.”

  “They don’t even know that it’s lotion,” said Decker/Lyle.

  “But they know it’s the same substance,” said Sunny. “Kuvam’s been too aggressive with his New Age angle; people have been connecting our hospital stunt to his for weeks, but now this group is connecting us to him, personally, and that’s bad. The red states are gonna hate us.” He leaned forward and pressed the button for the PA. “Kerry, come to the sound booth right now. Drop whatever you’re doing.”

  The reporter was still trying to get a straight answer from the reverend. “So you are, in fact, the same group that protested the Yemaya Foundation earlier today?”

  “We are,” said the man. “His actions, and the actions of NewYew, cannot be tolerated.”

  “So you believe there’s some kind of connection between Guru Kuvam and tomorrow’s announcement from NewYew?”

  Lyle is the one who went to Kuvam, thought Decker/Lyle. NewYew suspected it, but Ibis figured it out for certain. What was he trying to accomplish?

  The reverend straightened up, looking directly into the camera. “The evidence is all too clear: the Pickett family in Jersey, and the Shaw twins from here in New York, are all part of the same thing. They’re cloning human beings, and it’s an affront to God.”

  Sunny’s cell phone buzzed, and he fished it back out of his pocket. He sneered and showed the screen to Decker/Lyle. “Cynthia again.” He held it up to his ear. “Yeah.” Pause. “Yes, of course I heard it. What do you expect me to do? It’s not like I can walk out and tell her to stop.” Pause. “No, he’s still backstage somewhere—oh, here he is.”

  Kerry rushed into the room. “What’s so urgent? We have a huge problem with the Vicky costumes, and the whole sequence at 15:30 is going to be ruined if we can’t fix it.”

  Hannah and her technicians shuffled through their papers, looking for 15:30.

  Decker/Lyle pointed at the screen, drawing Kerry’s attention. “This is worse.”

  Kerry looked at the screen; the reverend was still talking. “I’m not saying they killed the little girl,” said the man, “heaven knows I hope they didn’t. But the one they have now isn’t the one they started with: she’s an exact copy of her sister, grown in a lab somewhere. It’s the same with the cancer lady: she’s an exact copy of her daughter. These aren’t people, they’re clones—they’re artificial constructs, designed to look like us and act like us and, ultimately, to replace us. It’s not a salvation, it’s an abomination.”

  Kerry watched the screen intently. “Protesters?”

  “Obviously,” said Decker/Lyle.

  “At least they’ve got it wrong,” said Kerry. “If they’re protesting something we’re not actually doing, what do we care? It’s free advertising, and this time tomorrow they’ll look like idiots.”

  “Yes,” said Sunny in the background, still talking on the phone, “Kerry just said the same thing.”

  “She’s asking all the wrong questions,” Kerry muttered. “Come on, lady, talk more about the girls! We saved that baby’s life!”

  The reverend was still talking. “Of course the clones don’t have souls. This guy Kuvam—I refuse to call him a ‘guru’—is preaching a specifically antireligious message. This is the Tower of Babel all over again: they’ve decided they can get to heaven without God, without doing anything He says, so they’re building an empire of something—of drugs, or some other substance—so they can circumvent the commandments and ignore all the rules and build salvation all on their own.”

  “I know he sounds crazy,” said Sunny, hissing into his phone. “It’s still going to hurt us.”

  Decker/Lyle looked at Kerry. “I thought you said this kind of coverage was good?”

  “The cloning stuff was good,” said Kerry. “This religious stuff is poison: the only good press we had that Kuvam didn’t was the c
onservative angle. Churches still liked us, because we were saving babies without any crazy talk about New Age cults. Now this guy’s telling the world we’re part of Kuvam’s cult, and that’s bad.”

  “Press is press,” Sunny insisted to his phone. “And any press is good press, right? We don’t care what Ma and Pa Kettle think, tonight or tomorrow. All we have to do is play this down and sell to the trendsetters, and a few weeks from now the yokels will fall right into line.”

  “This sucks, but it’ll pass,” said Kerry. “We’ve got to get back to the show.”

  “Wait,” said Hannah. She looked at her assistants, then back at the three executives. “Okay, I’m just going to come right out and ask it: we all thought the cloning stuff in your show notes was a joke, but now this guy on the news is saying the same thing.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is it real?”

  Sunny looked back at her. “Does it matter?”

  She shrugged. “For what you guys are paying, I’d manage a show for Captain Baby Killer and His Puppy-Stomping Pirates.”

  Sunny smiled. “It’s all real. And if it stays real, and stays good, we’ll double your fee.”

  Hannah saluted. “Arrr, Cap’n.”

  26

  Tuesday, July 3

  11:00 A.M.

  Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan Center, Manhattan

  164 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD

  The lights went down, and the crowd fell silent. Backlit screens around the edges of the theater began to glow, and a low bass rumble shook the floor; Decker/Lyle could feel it in his shoes and up his legs, humming at the base of his spine.

  “Everyone wants to be something.”

  The voice poured out from the speakers, rich and deep and dripping with effortless authority. They’d paid good money for that voice—not just in hiring him, but searching for months in advance to find the perfect combination of warmth, trustworthiness, and hipness. They needed this event to say “Our product is revolutionary and edgy and exactly what you’ve always wanted,” and this guy’s voice said it right from the first syllable.

  The screen on the stage exploded with light, shapes, and colors whirling over and around and through each other in a frenzied dance, resolving at precisely the right moment into a close-up shot of a model’s face—one of the Vickies, eyes sultry, hair swept dramatically across her cheek. The screens on the walls pulsed with life, and abruptly all the lights cut out and the room fell dark again.

  “Good job,” said Hannah’s voice, tinny and distant in Decker/Lyle’s headset. “Prep the shatter, cue voice-over in three, two, one, go!”

  “Everyone wants to be young.”

  “Screen two!” shouted Hannah, and once again the stage erupted in light and sound as the shapes reappeared, whirling around each other in a subtle double helix before resolving again into a quick succession of images: a man on the beach, shirt unbuttoned and chest shaved; a girl in tight jeans with one leg propped up on a motorcycle; another close-up of Vicky, eyes eager, lips parted.

  “Shatter!” shouted Hannah, and the image broke apart with a bright audio hit of tinkling glass, plunging the theater into darkness a third time.

  Decker/Lyle could feel the energy in the audience—not much, but it was growing. They were willing to be impressed, but they’d seen this kind of thing before.

  You haven’t seen anything yet.

  “Ready video on screen one, slide reel on my mark, cue voiceover in three, two, one, go!”

  “Everybody wants to be thinner. Taller. Shorter. Happier.” Images surrounded the audience, not just on the main screen but on every side, on the backlit screens and on the walls and in subtle projections on the floor, subconscious bursts of light and collective memory defining HEALTH and YOUTH and BEAUTY and HAPPINESS in their most iconic incarnations. “We want better curves, softer lips, harder abs, smoother hair. We spend billions of dollars every year to become exactly who we want to be.” The flashing images shifted, becoming charts and graphs and product shots: Dove and L’Oréal and Axe and Botox, arms and thighs and breasts sectioned off with the black dotted lines of a surgeon—interspersed, almost subliminally, with a diagram of butcher cuts on a cow. “We spend our lives in the pursuit of a body our body was never meant to be, filling our homes with tubes and bottles and treadmills that give us the illusion of perfection without producing any real change. It’s time to stop.”

  One of the side screens froze on an image of ReBirth.

  “It’s time to escape the tyranny of our DNA.”

  Another screen froze on ReBirth, and then another.

  “It’s time for a whole new you.”

  More screens stopped, one after another, the high-speed chaos of images locking one by one into the single image of their bottle and logo.

  “It’s time … for ReBirth.”

  “Hit it!” shouted Hannah. The giant screen at the front, the last one still flickering, stopped abruptly, showing the ReBirth bottle towering over the audience, then slowly dissolved into a video of a heavy American housewife. Small white titles in the corner of the screen identified her as BETTY YORK.

  “I’ve always tried to be thinner,” said Betty in voice-over. On the video she was moving through her kitchen, preparing a meal for her family.

  “Nice job, everyone,” said Hannah. “Let’s bring down the side screens.” The backlit screens faded slowly to black, and the theater fell silent as the video kept talking.

  “I want to be healthier. I want to be happier.” The video showed the whole family—pure American heartland, with two handsome boys and a blond-headed girl—eating some kind of hearty casserole, while Betty picked at a salad. “I want to look good for my husband.” The video showed the couple together, smiling happily but carefully framed to emphasize the woman’s weight. “I tried diets and exercise and everything I could think of, but it’s this body.” The video showed her walking up the stairs, each step waddling and laborious. “I’m not lazy,” said Betty. “I’ve done everything I can, with diets and exercise and every product out there. Isn’t there anything that can help?”

  Betty stopped on the stairs, defeated, and the image dissolved to another woman—thin this time, but with a short, dark face and an overprominent nose. She spoke directly to the camera. The titles in the corner read KATHERINE BAIRD.

  “I know I’m not attractive,” said Katherine. “It’s okay, I can admit it: five decades of feminism have hammered home that I don’t have to be beautiful to be valuable, and I believe that. That still doesn’t change what I see every day. That doesn’t change the way others see me. You know what else I learned from feminism? That I could be anything I wanted. Well, I want to be pretty, dammit.” She looked away, eyes distant. “I want to be pretty.”

  There were more women in the video, one after another, each an average American woman with average American problems: they were too heavy, or too short, or flat chested, or hairy, and on and on. The last woman—number ten, Pamela Dillon—was five foot two and stocky, her ankles thick as moon boots and her waistline straight and masculine. “I used to be a model,” she said, “back when I was a kid in college, but twenty-five years and three kids later I just … that’s life, I guess. I just wish it didn’t have to be.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “I just wish there was some way I could get that back. I wish there was some way to look like a model again.”

  Decker/Lyle leaned forward, peering around the curtain. If this next part worked, it would blow their socks off.

  “House lights up a bit,” said Hannah. “Cue the spot on dream girl.”

  A woman walked onto the stage: tall and striking, with long legs, a rich mane of honey-colored hair, and a body that looked like it had been poured into her tight red dress. She smiled and waved at the audience, and Decker/Lyle heard a murmur of recognition; this was Victoria Carver, the model from the still photos at the beginning of the presentation. She was stunningly gorgeous, but more than that the buildup had conditioned the audience to see her as gorgeous—it had define
d her as the ideal to which the other women aspired. Her red dress sparkled subtly in the spotlight. She took the center of the stage and called out energetically.

  “How about those women, huh! Aren’t they beautiful!”

  The audience cheered, eating out of her hand. She smiled devilishly, clapping with them until the applause died down.

  “Those women are America,” said Vicky. “In an industry defined by fashion models and skinny actresses and rugged, hard-bodied men”—her eyes twinkled—“those ten women are the real customers. They are the ones who buy our makeup, they are the ones who buy our clothes, and they are the ones we think about when we design our products. How can we help them? What can we do to meet their needs?” She took a few steps, engaging the audience casually as she spoke. “Did you know I had the chance, thanks to NewYew, to meet each and every one of those women, and do you know how much they spend on health and beauty products in a single year? You have hand lotion, eye cream, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, facial cleanser, foundation, lipstick, eye shadow, eyeliner, blush, lip gloss, a hundred other makeups and colors and haircuts and lip waxes and other waxes, and that’s not even mentioning the exercise bikes and the treadmills and the gym memberships and the tucks and the nose jobs and—I’m running out of breath.” The audience laughed, and she milked it with an expert pause.

  How much did we pay for this girl? Decker/Lyle wondered. I haven’t seen a model this charismatic in … ever. She’s almost as good as the woman Ibis hired last year for the trade show, and she was the … wait. He closed his eyes and listened to her speak.

  “So what’s the point, you’re saying, get to the point. We’ve already seen the women and we’ve already seen the products in the little light show, and we’ve been here for how long now and still no one’s just come out and told us what this ReBirth thing is.”

  Decker/Lyle’s jaw dropped. That is the woman from the trade show. It’s the way she talks—the voice is new, but the cadence and phrasing are all the same. He opened his eyes and peered at her. She’s a Vicky now?