The woman with the exuberant bosom came into the kitchen in her nightgown. She was displeased with my presence. I pointed at the screen. “That’s not me. An impostor,” I told her. “I am here, obviously, not there!” And she was yelling and shooing and reprimanding me in Russian until I was up the stairs, back in my room. I forgot that I was hungry, and then I tried the handle, locked from the outside.
I shouted, “Clarence!”
It was a while before Bo unlocked the door and stuck her head in. “May I enter?”
* * *
We sat on the edge of my bed.
“You are companion,” she said, so matter-of-fact I’m still not sure whether it was poor English or her personality. “Of the skin variety. Top model, I might add, very expensive. You have heard of companions, no?”
I scoffed a hearty ha. I’d fallen in love with one in a film—hadn’t she seen it? The part may have been played by a human, but I did my research. I knew companions, with their funny alert posture, a slight bounce in the step, easily unfooted, and the eyes, not the look of them—that was a flawless design—but the way they looked out at the world, as if scanning, taking in data, restless and hungry.
“That can’t be true. I have the scar to prove it, from years ago. See?” I stood, unbuckled my pants, showed her my hip. “From when I donated bone—” I saw the smooth perfect skin, the scar gone, never there in the first place, and I dropped back down onto the bed, afraid my legs might go beneath me.
“You come from Moscow. It took year and many credits to build you a proper body.”
“To build me?”
She reached out, gently stroking the hair over my ear. The touch—it sprouted true feeling. How was it possible? I could not pull away, not even when she dug a nail into the skin at my neck, wheedled her finger inside me, a cord. I felt it—a surge of energy thrumming through my body, feeding my hunger. Cruelly, she pulled the cord from my neck, and my whole body sagged onto the bed. She looked down into my face. “You see?”
“But you can’t—it’s illegal—there can be no copies.” Hell, you had to die first if you wanted to upload, and that left such a tiny sliver of a window that most people opted to prearrange. There was an endless waiting list, lots of disappointed potential customers, but everyone agreed there was no room in our shrinking world for copies.
“It is illegal, yes,” Bo said, “but not impossible to upload the living. In fact, much easier, no ticking clock to brain death.” She tapped my temple with the long nail of her index finger, tic-toc. “And once you are uploaded, you become data, easy to copy, just key commands and memory.”
“So who is that on the screen?”
“He is companion too. Your original is dead.”
I was shaking my head, I was shaking—why was I shaking? No memory of dying, no way. Bo pressed her hand into my thigh to calm me.
“We want only your help with polar bears.” She touched the tip of my nose, flashed her teeth. “Will you help polar bears?”
I nodded vigorously.
* * *
After Bo left me, I stood at the window, snow fluttering its way to the earth. If I focused, I could see every snow crystal, each unique fractal in the dim moonlight. My eyesight, it was remarkable.
When Clarence came, holding his Soviet Sean to his chest, I said to him, “It was obvious, you know.”
“What?”
“You’re no agent.”
He gave me a tired smile. “Shall we go?”
“I would like to ask you a question, if that’s all right.” He did not tell me no; I could feel him waiting, so I asked it: “What happened to—” I wasn’t sure what to call myself, him. “—my original?”
“Why, he died, silly. You know Metis won’t take a living soul.”
“But I never signed anything. I mean, I never gave my consent.”
“The studio. It was part of your contract. In case of premature death. You didn’t read it?”
It made me sick, literally, the anger, and I could hardly utter the words: “Of course I didn’t read it. That’s what agents are for!”
“You silly little fool.”
“Where’s Sydney?”
“Sydney’s in Los Angeles. He’s done quite well for himself, actually. Left the agency to take on a new position—head of studio, I hear. Very prestigious. Happened right around the time your consciousness came onto the market, in fact.”
I understood at once his meaning: Sydney did this to me—to my original, I reminded myself—and was rewarded handsomely for it, head of studio! It was his dream, to rule over the entire process from start to finish. “I should kill him.”
“He probably deserves it.”
“But—” I thought of the one on the screen, in Ibiza, the anointed one the I8s followed. Clearly he belonged to the studio. So, what was I? “Sydney wouldn’t—the studio—they wouldn’t have sold me, would they?”
“Course not. We bought you from a Metis tech looking to make some extra credit. A celebrity consciousness is worth plenty, you know. You’re certainly not the first.”
“I want Greta.” I was getting hot, revving up, the sick feeling in my stomach, my head, sending me to my knees. “Greta!”
“Stop it with the melodramatics. Your Greta is married and pregnant. Here, take a look.” He thrust his phone into my hand, and it felt a little like a dare, but I took it anyway. There she was at some premiere, arm in arm with the Maldivian! God, he was handsome, and her belly, it was enormous—pregnant, she was pregnant! Her face so happy, so impossibly beautiful. I retched on the carpet, but nothing came.
* * *
It was sunrise when we drove to the refineries, coiling rust-orange out of the white, strange and animal and alone, a dreary monument to life. Then the great gaping hole of the mining pit, the white rising bodies of the polar bears on its lip, its many ridges like a terraced rice field. Behind it crackled a half-frozen river.
“The sea is just past that ridge there. I can show you when we’re finished, if you like,” Clarence offered, as if I hadn’t seen the ocean a million times.
“I thought polar bears were solitary creatures.”
“Less ice coverage means less time to catch seals. Already their season has ended, but they’ve found a new prey. Geese. They migrate here all the way from Sacramento.”
Snow-white and everywhere, the ice teeming with birds, their relentless squawking.
“Amazing how some animals adapt under dire conditions,” Clarence said, and I knew he was talking about me.
The film crew was already set up under a billowing tent as we rumbled to a stop. They appeared unperturbed by the presence of such deadly creatures, busying themselves with the camera, the lighting. Then I got to wondering whether a polar bear would attack me. Would it know by my smell I wasn’t meat? I didn’t want to find out. The truth was I didn’t know the first thing about living. My whole childhood I’d been groomed for the screen, handled, and when I was ready, I was handled some more. I had no money, nothing to my name—not even that, a name, claimed by someone else.
Clarence put on his fur hat. “Ready?”
“I’m not doing it.”
Bo swiveled in her seat to glare at me. In that moment, I saw how she hated me, how ugly and awful I was to her.
“Go on,” Clarence told her. When we were alone, he shifted his knees to face me, readying his pitch.
I beat him to it. “How did I die?”
“Do you want to remember?”
Again with his dares. “I do.”
“Jakob, recall your last living memory.”
“Oh, look at that.” There was a scene playing in my head and I narrated to Clarence what I saw.
* * *
I’m in Greta’s pool, floating on her water chair, a cold glass of juice in my hand. God, I can even feel it—amazing! Though it’s not helping this fierce hangover headache, really throbbing. I can see in the reflection of the poolside screen that I have a solid shiner. We must’ve had quite
a night. Greta is floating on her back in the pool. That’s right. She’s been passed over for another film and she keeps saying how ugly and old she feels, and I keep telling her, “You’re only twenty-four!”
She swims over to rest her head on my legs, weeping as I comb my fingers through her long, sun-damaged hair. She tells me she’s sorry.
“Why are you sorry?” I have that prickly knowing feeling—she’s cheated. Again. How many times have I forgiven her?
I suppose other me, the lucky companion living it up in Ibiza, got tired of her philandering, but I couldn’t have done that. I would never have let her take up with the Maldivian, have a baby while she could still work—none of it makes sense!
Greta retreats to the bedroom for a nap. I’m floating in the water chair, worrying at the empty sky, I8s trailing younger, brighter stars, when Sydney screens me. He’s worked up, all ruddy and sweat-soaked. He begs me to give the script another read. That’s right. I’d turned down the sequel, the part that had made me famous, the pirate who fell in love with the companion.
“Lots more action,” Sydney says, “and aliens, and a budget so big it’ll give you an erection.” It’s such a bald pitch. I can hardly stand to look him in the screen as I give him a firm no. “I’m trying to work away from sci-fi,” I tell him. That’s why I picked the gritty original in the first place, with its controversial love story, hoping to set myself up for something with teeth, maybe even direct.
Sydney says, “I know I told you I’d support you no matter what, but this? It’s suicide.” God, he’s trying to warn me.
So bigheaded and certain they need me, I don’t see it. Jesus, I am a fool. I tell Sydney I’m sorry and sign off. Then I go inside for my massage. Cleo is already setting up her table in the living room. Someone is with her, a man. He’s talking into his phone. When he sees me, he ventures into the foyer.
I ask Cleo who he is, and she says, “Doctor. Here to hydrate you.”
“Ah, how lovely.” The studio knows me too well, what kind of night I’ve had, what I need to function for—is there an event tonight? I slip out of my swim trunks, get comfortable on the cushioned table under Cleo’s heated blanket, turning onto my stomach, my face held in the donut pillow. I can see the ground below me, Cleo’s bare, leathery feet, the faint traces of fading henna circling her ankle, then the doctor’s well-worn loafers, mustard brown, splitting at the toe. He’s near my elbow, and he says, “A slight pinch,” and I’m used to that part, but the drip—ow, it burns! Then the pain melts away, and Cleo’s rubbing me down, humming pleasantly, incense smoke folding around me—I get a little woozy, raise my head. “Darling, could you please…” The sliding, I keep going, into the black.
* * *
“Jakob,” Clarence called, and I came back to him, the Hummer, the giant strip mine coated in white. I had been so calm and trusting, so easily duped. “The IV—”
“I know! I’m not stupid. But why?”
“The sequel. They made it.” He handed me his phone, an image of Mr. Ibiza in a gauche melon-colored suit, at a film screening of that second-rate clone of a movie, with aliens.
I was so angry and I wanted to throw up, only I could not. I looked to Clarence, who knew all along, who’d lied to me, and I had the quick thrill of an urge to kill him. It nearly toppled me, the sick-stomach feeling that came with each violent thought—security programming. Still, it felt real.
Clarence straightened the Soviet Sean on his head and opened the door, filling the car with the cold, the whooping wind and geese squawks. “You’re not going to act in any films. You’re never going to be a star. There’s only this.”
How did he know what I needed? It was a pitch, but it was also true.
“I want to go back to LA.”
“You’ve never been to LA.”
He was right, though my memories said otherwise. “Well, I want to go there now.”
“As it happens, I’m headed to San Francisco. Not easy to get the travel permits while it’s under quarantine, but since you’re a companion.” He patted my hand. It was the first and only time he had touched me, his palm cool and damp. “Jakob, if you were to cooperate, I might be able to arrange for you to join me.”
I sighed, emitting no white cloud of breath, remembering myself. “Mist me.”
He smiled, pulling from his coat pocket the spray bottle of spring water that gave me a dewy onscreen glow. I’d gushed about it in plenty of interviews, wanting to appear more human. It was misleading, I know, a cheat, the memories too, from another life, this one film my sole credit. Spritz. Spritz. I opened my eyes, unable to stop myself from asking, “How do I look?”
2 THREE MONTHS SINCE QUARANTINE ENDED
GABE
MENDOCINO, CALIFORNIA
The ocean’s everywhere in this flat beach town, Mendocino, farther south than we’ve ever gone. Rich people, loads of credit. We cruise the streets for houses with Anthem Security. That’s the easiest system to hack, the cheapest, and the most common. But here in Mendocino it’s all fancy Shelter systems, and Nat doesn’t know how to break through those. We’re about to give up when we find a house with the old Anthem “A” in the window. No cars out front. No movement behind the curtains. Perfect.
Nat gets on his screen. Two minutes, that’s all it takes for him to ping the security system, become friends, disarm. A quick jab to the screen and the doors unlock remotely. He sets the security cams to loop the last ten minutes and I slip on my gloves, my mask. Quarantine ended months ago, but nobody leaves home without them, when they leave home. Who can blame them? It’s not the first time quarantine’s been lifted, and after the third virus hit San Diego two years ago, I don’t fault people for being afraid.
I slink into the backyard, make sure there are no neighbors nosing about, no barking dogs. I may have grown but I’m still a sneaky fox, no one seeing me. After I’ve checked the windows, seen no sign of the living, I wave to Nat in his hidey spot along the side of the house.
Nice place, curtains all sun-faded, a big boat of a couch. The owners must like ships—they’ve got all sorts of paintings, tiny models crammed into bottles on the shelves. Nat works away at their screen and I pocket one of the ships in a bottle.
“Get to work,” he says, so I hop up the stairs, curious about the bedrooms. Plus, that’s where the jewelry is.
At the top of the stairs I get another round of gut pain—I’ve been having them all morning. I worry I have some new virus that starts in the stomach instead of the sinuses like the coughing and wracking illnesses so new to the world they needed naming.
I breathe through the pain and crack the door to a child’s room, walls sky blue, soccer trophies crowding the dresser, a man on the twin bed, sprawled on his stomach, naked. He’s moving, grunting quietly, hair everywhere, and hold on, there’s a woman underneath him, and her hands, they’re tied to the headboard, her feet to the posts at the end of the bed.
Nat’s warned me plenty about rape. And to do it he had to explain sex, well sort of. Just a hand gesture, a bit of back and forth. It was so awful I would’ve torn my face off if I thought that might’ve stopped him.
I take a few steps back, the floorboards moaning under me. The man lifts his head in my direction and I see that he’s wearing a gas mask. Lunging, he comes at me, chasing me down the stairs. His penis is hard and bobbing like a diving board, like Nat’s in the morning, something I try not to notice through his boxers. I’m shouting, “We gotta go, we gotta—” when I hear a hard smack behind me. The man’s on the floor, Nat holding on to a golf club.
* * *
In the van, I tell him, “She was tied up. We have to help her!”
Nat’s driving fast in the direction of the One. “Was she screaming?”
“No.”
“Was she gagged?”
“I don’t think so.”
He heads south on the two-lane highway and sits a little easier. “Well then? Maybe it’s not what you think.”
“What else
could it be?”
He tugs on the curled end of his beard. I’ve never seen his face without it—I have no idea what he looks like under there. “You know how kids play games? Like cops and robbers? It’s a little like that.”
“They were naked. She was tied up. It wasn’t make-believe.”
“Well, actually.” He sort of laughs at the roof of the van. “Listen, that woman, lots of women in fact, like to get tied up. Men too. Not my thing personally, but you know, to each his own.”
I feel sick, the ache in my stomach back again.
“What’d you get?” Nat asks. I hand him the only thing I collected, the ship in the bottle.
“This is junk.” He tosses it out the window.
“Hey!”
“What a bust.”
I want to be mad at him for casting my treasure, but I’d been daydreaming around that house. I should’ve taken the job more seriously. I get the feeling we’re running low on funds, skimping on sweets, eating out of cans. “Sorry,” I say. I mean it even if it comes out like I don’t.
“Don’t sulk.”
“I’m not sulking. I don’t feel well.”
“What’s wrong?” He scrunches his forehead all concerned, the wriggly scar in his eyebrow from a bike accident when he was twelve. Three years later he left the flood-wrecked coast of Pensacola on that bike. He got as far as Mobile, some sixty miles west, before he stole his first car.
The Companions Page 7
