Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  As cocktails go, this one sounds treacherous, but if Billy wants to meet for a drink, then he can sure as hell call the round.

  53

  The bar lies on the border of the Lower East Side and Chinatown. It’s unmarked save for the customary mortar-and-pestle glyph molded in wrought iron on the building’s side gate. Behind the railing, a steep staircase leads to the basement. Apothecary’s interior maxes out the medical history theme with specimen jars of preserved animals, organs, and ambiguous polyps mixed in among the liquor bottles.

  A little out of breath from having jogged over, I take a second to text McClaren about this, though I doubt he’ll have time to arrange a shadow for me.

  Inside I find a man with a stringy beard and beady eyes who has the mien of a Renaissance Faire staffer. Someone who lives by stringing together a patchwork of marginal gigs well on the outskirts of conventional theater. He’s polishing the marble bar top with a studied diligence that I’ve never observed in a real bartender.

  Where does Billy find these people?

  Of course he’d never make things easy by just meeting me at the bar. Though if I had Blake for a sibling, I would handle one of his agents with a snare pole as well.

  I sit down in front of him, and he looks into my eyes with sugary solicitude. “What shall it be?”

  His delivery makes me want to punch him, but I stick to the script. “I’d like a Rabbit Hole.”

  I can tell he wants to ad-lib theatrical flourishes but has been warned against improvisation. So much so that he places a beaker in front of me and pours a stream of muddy brown liquid into it from a cocktail shaker. The pre-mixed beverage seems obviously wrong under the circumstances. And Billy is exactly the kind of guy who has a Kool-Aid recipe several lines longer than it should be.

  I lean over to smell it. “I don’t suppose there’s anything unusual in here?”

  “Like what?” He makes a visible effort to suppress the phrase “pray tell.”

  “A sedative would be traditional.”

  He grins like I’ve just nailed a Daily Double. “No sedative in there.” He reaches into a pocket of his dirty apron, pulls out a large light-blue capsule, and places it on the napkin beside my drink. “There is in this though.”

  “You want me to take a pill?”

  This is too much for him to resist breaking character. He bugs his eyes and smiles. “Just like The Matrix, man.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  He frowns. “Then I guess we can have a nice talk. May—” He wants to say “mayhap” but stumbles over it. “Mayha-be . . . I can regale you—”

  The prospect of being regaled depresses me enough that I pop the pill and wash it down with the suspicious drink. It tastes like a black rum and cider fusion with some odd herbal tones. Delicious really.

  The guy tilts his head toward a green velvet couch in the back. “You might want to lie down, sir.”

  54

  As was only to be expected, I wake up in a cage.

  A cage packed into a reinforced crate. I’m curled up in a ball, but the space is tall enough for me to sit Indian style in relative comfort. Feeling around in the darkness, I learn I’m surrounded by a grid of iron bars covered over with planks that smell of new lumber. I sense the quiet vibration of motorized transport.

  Taking me somewhere.

  Also, I’m completely naked. Not that I fear for my safety, though I am concerned about splinters; my nudity just highlights how bizarre my job has become now that I find myself so frequently disrobed in the line of duty.

  Those concerns are interrupted as the truck stops and my crate rolls down a steep ramp. I’m wheeled around with teamster brusqueness until I bang gently into a wall. Then I wait for what feels like several hours.

  Someone prying off the front side of my crate yanks me back to alertness. I’m in an abandoned construction site well lit by the cool blue glow of an almost full moon. Billy Randall squats before my cage. He’s holding the same crowbar with which he attacked Blythe. He raps it against the bars.

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Billy looks worse than when he was electrocuting himself. His hair has grown longer and now sticks up in greasy dinosaur spikes. The bags under his eyes stand out like makeup, but the eyes themselves reveal a manic fire that makes me start to worry a little. He’s sweating profusely.

  “I can’t believe you actually took the pill. Seems foolish for you to assume I’ll be gentle.”

  “I’m foolish? Your game will have you exchanging your glass house for a concrete cell. When your lunatic horde really hurts someone, it’ll be your fault.”

  “Amazing that my brother’s rent boy has the gall to lecture me about morality.”

  “Rent boy? You’ve got our relationship all wrong. Think of it more like the one between your marquis and his valet Latour.”

  Billy coughs out a chuckle. “Really? How’s that?”

  “It’s true I do errands for him. But under the right circumstances, I’m also willing to fuck him.”

  “And what happens the morning after?”

  “He won’t know what happened. He’s unaware I’ve got your friend Gina’s farewell address. I know you need it. Though I have to ask, would she really want to star in your sophomoric melodrama? Seems like the last project you cast her in had some unfortunate—”

  “You better watch your fucking mouth.”

  “Fine. But if you ever want to see the sequel she made, you’ll stop patronizing her demented daddy and deal with me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A hundred thousand in cash. Delivered by you. In person. No one else and no more games.”

  Billy considers this for a moment. His lips twist into something resembling a smile. Then he slams the tapered end of his crowbar down into the juncture at the hinges to the door of my cage. Splinters graze my forehead.

  “I’ll be . . . in touch.”

  He leaves the crowbar, allowing me to begin the long, blistering process of prying my way out.

  55

  Billy showed unexpected courtesy in also leaving my clothes, so I’m able to ooze home without making an undue spectacle. I arrive at my door exhausted, but assuming that Blake doesn’t look kindly upon well-rested employees, I again choose my coffeemaker over my bed.

  To follow up on the figurine Ruth Delaney gave me, I check to see if Gina’s Ines_Idoru account is still alive. I pull up NOD’s sign-in page and enter her NODName, hitting the link for the password hint, which comes back as: d@d.

  That seems obvious enough that I should be able to finesse it quickly. I have a program called [p]ass_crack that will spit out intelligent variations on a given string of characters. For example, when I give it “Charles Delaney,” it tries “CH@r135 D3!@n3Y,” among many other combinations. But none of them are right, so I open up the parameters to include leading and trailing numbers and feed it his birth date, her birth date, and both social security numbers. Still nothing.

  Knowing her father’s personal deficiencies, I suppose it’s unlikely that she’d have wanted to bring him to mind each time she logged in. So let’s take the avatar itself: Ines_Idoru. Idoru is the title of a William Gibson novel, about a holographic person that a Japanese progressive rocker is planning to marry. Acting out fan fiction is a favorite NOD activity, though most of the energy flows to space opera and X-rated anime. But it makes sense that an intellectual like Gina would name-check a character from one of the classier sci-fi authors. So maybe her hint meant the idoru’s father.

  The web has only poor plot summaries, so I torrent a copy and start skimming. I gather that Rei Toei, the virtual woman in question, was created by a media conglomerate, not a specific person. I try jamming the corporation name and a number of characters and places from the book into [p]ass_crack. It chugs for a while, but again I get nada.

  Frustration warring against fatigue, I check her av name to see if she turns up on any NOD blogs that might give me a clue. Nothing comes back but hits from
some Cyrillic language I don’t recognize. I’m about to pack it in for the evening when I notice Google asking if, by chance, I might have meant “anesidora” rather than “Ines Idoru.”

  I didn’t, but mindful of NODlings’ penchant for wordplay, I click through.

  The name, I’m informed, is an alternate spelling for the woman whom Eve displaced as the most significant female ever: Pandora. She of the fabled box that when opened brought everything evil into the world. I pick up Gina’s figurine and realize that what I’d blithely assumed was a kimono is actually a stylized ceremonial toga. The jewel-like container’s placement over her pelvis refers to a common feminist interpretation of the myth: Pandora’s box represents the womb, and the tale is a crude expression of male sexual anxiety.

  So who was Pandora’s dad? A little reading tells me that while the creation of Pandora was a joint venture, with several deities bestowing various gifts, Hephaestus, that ugly god of fire, blacksmiths, and of course technology, gets the primary credit.

  Seconds later, a NOD scene graph is rezzing, and I’m entering the world in Gina’s skin.

  But Ines_Idoru is a big disappointment. Like a newborn, she’s almost completely blank. No inventory, no friends, no favorite places. No evidence of the woman who made her.

  Did Gina scrub Ines before she died? But then why would she leave the account alive? Or if this was just a random alt that Gina never really used, why would Billy pick this av to place in her coffin for all eternity?

  I’m about to give up in disgust when I notice the box that the av is holding. It doesn’t show up in Ines’s NObject inventory because she’s actually wearing it as an accessory. I select it and bring up the thing’s property page. That’s where I hit pay dirt. Contained by this box is a list of scripted NObjects. The first lines read:

  20140203_F0001.215

  20140206_M0000.9.3

  20140207_F0002.215

  20140209_M0000.9.4

  20140211_F0003.0

  20140213_M0001.0.0

  They look like successive entries for two objects in an ad hoc version archive, which could be this alt’s only purpose. While Gina wanted to obliterate even online traces of herself, perhaps she liked the idea of a little bit of her work surviving in a forgotten corner of NOD. Maybe this was her last project and held some kind of significance for her, so that she couldn’t bear to drag it with her into the void.

  I teleport to my private dev sandbox and block-rez a bunch of the NObjects out into the world. When they all finally appear, I’m reminded of that spurious diagram called “The Ascent of Man” that tries to explain how we changed from chimpanzees to Homo sapiens. They’re a series of 3D sketches that show a clear evolution from the barest glimmer of a design to two fairly polished mechanisms.

  The experience is like seeing baby pictures of your fiancée for the first time. I’m looking at snapshots from the childhood of the Dancers. The last examples show Fred and Ginger very nearly in their current form.

  The create dates on all the objects start in early February of last year, and they end four weeks before Gina killed herself.

  Five weeks before Olya called the first iTeam meeting.

  56

  At ten AM, Olya’s not in her office or the Orifice. When I call her, I’m surprised to hear that she’s working out.

  The room on the top floor where I find her is beautiful in the way of ruins. A former dance studio with crumbling brick walls and worn oak flooring. The far side is a huge mirror that has a barre running down its length. The glass is violently cracked, perhaps from the meltdown of a high-strung ballerina. Olya has installed herself in the cool morning rays coming through a mansard window. She’s wearing a pale pink halter-style ballet dress and is en pointe doing leg lifts. She sees me enter but doesn’t stop.

  “Zhimbo. What did you want to see me about?”

  I watch her for a while, getting lost in her rhythmic movements. Finally I ask, “Our Erotobot operation here was your idea?”

  “Idea? They are my children.”

  “Yeah, but who conceived them?”

  One thing I love about Olya is that she catches on quick. You don’t have to waste a lot of time with the initial stupid lies. She squints at me and snaps out another couple leg lifts. “You know, I wish you’d spend as much time thinking about our glorious future as you do wallowing like a pig in the past.”

  “Olya, did you steal Fred and Ginger from your dead girlfriend?”

  That irritates her. She turns and says, “What is this you’re asking? Did I work with Gina on this? Yes, of course, but it was our project, and she’s not here anymore. So what do you want me to tell you?”

  “Just tell me all of it.”

  I’m expecting an angry defense, but what comes out is more like an elegy. It’s revealing to hear Olya speak without aggression, outside of the imperative case. Her voice is slower and softer; she closes her eyes as if she’s really trying to call up the past.

  Olya says, “Gina, she is very pretty and nice, and at NYU everyone likes her, but she doesn’t have any friends. Other than this shit-head Billy, who uses her for his stupid videos. He takes over her apartment for days to make that thing. He forces her to act like this high-tech whore on camera. And then she keeps that horrible torture device afterward to give her dark thoughts. All this because she doesn’t know how to say no. I used to see her every day during lunch sitting by herself at this tiny café. I don’t know why I care, but it starts to drive me crazy. A woman with these gifts, you know? I decide that we will be friends. I want to help her. So I start sitting with her at boring coffee place.”

  Olya relates to me how Gina eventually began asking her abstract questions regarding her specialty in exotic materials. Ever direct, Olya soon ferreted out that she was dancing around the idea of simulating flesh, and it became obvious what this inhibited prodigy had in mind. Gina was an engineer. She was looking for a material solution to problems residing in her mind. But being a pathologically shy girl overwhelmed with religious guilt, she couldn’t take the first step.

  Olya sure as hell could, however. When they graduated, she convinced Gina to accept a GAME residency. Their cover project was to create tactile games for blind children, but really they started working in earnest on what would become the Dancers. Gina already had the basic idea and much of the design mapped out. So over the summer, they started prototyping.

  She describes how after weeks of searching fruitlessly for a trustworthy source of start-up capital, Gina rolled in and laid a cashier’s check for forty thousand dollars on her desk. She said it was from an “anonymous patron,” but of course Olya forced Billy’s identity from her. She yelled at her that this asshole could not be a partner in their enterprise. But Gina replied, “No, it’s a grant. He doesn’t even know what the project is.” Then she blushed and said that when the Dancers were done, she was going to surprise him with them.

  Olya says, “Ginushka goes red as beet. With this silly man she is again acting like a prostitute. But this time for real. I do not like Billy, but this is a lot of money, so I think, We must be practical.”

  But while Olya couldn’t abide the thought of Billy as a long-term partner, she also couldn’t help but wonder about the source of his seemingly unlimited wealth. In researching its origins, she figured out who his siblings were and learned from Gina of the estrangement between them. And rumor had it that Blake was an easy touch when it came to new media.

  “I think, Why not? I have a unique product, maybe he will understand. So I go to his office. You maybe understand that I can get meetings with most men easily. Blake has this very bitchy secretary, so I sit in his waiting room for a long time. Then I see him walk by. She tries to stop me, but for a bitch, she is only a Chi-hua-hua. So I take his arm and say, ‘Maybe I know a very good way to torture your little brother.’ Blake is interested, so we come to an arrangement.”

  They worried that Billy knew too much about the project, but they eventually concluded that he proba
bly wouldn’t want to mess up their plans out of loyalty to Gina. So he’d be furious he’d been displaced, but impotent—a prospect Blake had found especially appealing. In the end, they decided it didn’t matter what Billy did. Blake said, “I can handle my brother.”

  Everything seemed perfect to Olya.

  “So I set up surprise meeting with Gina to tell her this very great news that we finally have a good investor. I think she will be happy, maybe to get rich. She is from poverty, you know. Blake when we meet is smooth, but Gina . . . she is crazy. She says nothing and runs away. I apologize to Blake. He told me before they have this history. Maybe they fuck ten years ago. I tell him I’ll talk to her and make everything okay. It’s no problem.

  “I go back to her place. You know what she is doing? She’s in the bath, drunk like a moose. And she is sawing her wrists with a knife. The water is bloody, but they are . . . not deep cuts. She babbles all this religious shit. Verses from the Bible, I think. This is all from her parents, you know. I can understand nothing, so I haul her out and bandage her wrists. I put her in bed . . .”

  Olya falters here in her story.

  “What?” I ask. But Xan has already told me what’s coming.

  “And then I make love to her.”

  She closes her eyes, playing back the evening in her head. Her lips seem to want to tug upward. Then she shrugs. “Ai. It sounds very bad maybe, but I think it works. Gina is not like normal person. She doesn’t care about food, clothing, money, where she lives. All she needs is hard problems for her head, and a little love for her heart. But you know, she’s so strange, she doesn’t get much of that. And she is a wonderful girl. I do love her in certain way.”