“Don’t even think about that,” Tiffany said, with that eerie way she had of knowing exactly what Ashleigh was imagining. Ashleigh folded up the menu and put it down beside her.
Tiffany flopped down on the bed. She wriggled herself up against the pillows. They weren’t like normal hotel pillows – they were covered in eyelet shams, as though someone’s grandmother had made them. They smelled vaguely grandmotherly too, to Ashleigh, like rosewater. As though a priest had come by just to bless them. Tiffany scowled, turned the pillows over, and looked at Ashleigh.
“Go check and see if they gave us nightgowns. They’re supposed to give everybody nightgowns.”
“Nightgowns? Really?”
“Yup. Big long flowy ones with tons of ruffles and cleavage. It’s what we get instead of bathrobes.”
“What do the men get?”
“They get to see us wearing the nightgowns.”
Ashleigh rolled her eyes and opened the wardrobe. Inside, as promised, were two nightgowns on stuffed hangers. Ashleigh pulled them out and held them against herself. They matched the colors of the window glass: a soft candy pink and a seafoam green, like a mixed bag of cream mints poured into an elderly lady’s cut-glass dish.
“Which one do you want?”
Tiffany narrowed her eyes for a moment before seeming to decide. “The pink one. I’m the one who has to document her experience here, and pink looks better on camera than green.”
Ashleigh waited until she’d turned back to the wardrobe before making a face. Two sets of dresses with puffy sleeves and narrow waists hung in the wardrobe, and she brought them out next. “What are these for?”
“For downstairs. We came in the traveler entrance. The whole inn is a lot bigger than what we got to see. We get access to the rest of it once we dress the part. It’s required, the first night. Helps everybody get into character.”
“So, no room service the first night?”
Tiffany shook her head. “Nope. We have to be warned, after all.”
“Warned?”
“About the vampires!” Tiffany began listing threats off on her hand. She’d had special nails done for Hammerburg. They looked like talons. They gleamed, suddenly opalescent, when the candlelight hit them.
“And the werewolves,” she was saying. “And the witches. And the witch-finders. That’s a whole other package. Super popular with the extremophile people. I mean there’s a reason we’re in Eastern Europe, right? You can tie your girlfriend to a stake, the whole bit. Otherwise they just give you a vN to play with. It costs a fucking fortune. Or it did, until recently.”
Ashleigh’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. So you can burn a vN? Alive? If she’s a witch? I mean, if she’s playing a witch?”
Tiffany blinked. “Obviously.”
Dinner took place in the Badstein’s pub downstairs. A kindly old-looking vN with mutton chop whiskers sat them down at one end of a long harvest-style table and recited the menu for them: “Our bill of fare is simple. Hot goulash, a dish of sauerkraut, and our own red wine from the valley.”
“Oh? What grape is that?” Ashleigh asked, and Tiffany kicked her under the table.
“My friend is being cheeky,” Tiffany said. “These city girls, you know. They can’t keep a civil tongue in their heads.”
“Oh, we cater to all sorts around these parts,” the vN said. “But just you be careful, now. There’s things about at night that even the city folk have no ken of.”
“Like what?” Ashleigh asked.
“We shall be very careful,” Tiffany said, grinding the heel of her boot into Ashleigh’s toes.
“God bless you, miss. It’s a kind girl who listens to an old man’s worries.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Tiffany said, and watched him depart. She levelled her gaze at Ashleigh. “Don’t do that again,” she warned. “Don’t take your damage about Simon’s wife out on the other robots. Stop trying to trip them up. They’re just here doing a job like all the other poor sons of bitches working at an immersive participatory fiction.” Tiffany drained her wine. “This isn’t some anthropological exercise. I fucking forbid you from working while we’re here.”
“I can’t help it,” Ashleigh said, because she couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault that she’d devoted her career to synthetic anthropology. That was the new terminology, as she’d recently explained to her parents – it wasn’t about “artificial intelligence” anymore. “Artificial intelligence” was an offensive term. Now it was all about how the vN related to each other. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t tell the difference between a vN and a human; what mattered was whether they could tell you were a human being.
And then their basket of black bread and cultured butter came, and they had something else to talk about. The food was good – good in the way that resort food always seemed to be, in that there was a lot of it and it came with a smile, and seemed expensive because everything that surrounded it was expensive. It was just goulash, like the robot had said. Beef and paprika and mushrooms and sour cream. But somehow it was the most tender and nourishing thing Ashleigh had enjoyed in months. The pink riesling helped. It just didn’t seem to stop coming.
After the goulash was when the show started. The plates had just been cleared, when a man burst into the room. He was pale and wild-eyed. “Don’t go outside!” he shrieked. “For the love of God, don’t go outside!”
“Here, now, sir, you’re scaring my customers,” said the mutton-chopped vN. He tried to fake a laugh. It was a strange thing, watching a fake person do a fake laugh. “I’ll thank you not to put ideas in their heads.”
“These are not mere figments!” the other man said. He was dressed like a traveler – a long cloak, a tall hat, mud-spattered boots that went to the knee. “I saw something out there in the forest. Something I cannot possibly explain. Something beyond the knowledge of mere mortals!”
“Aye, you just need a brandy to settle yourself,” said a buxom blonde vN lady wearing a crown of braids and a corset. She looked a little bit like Britt Ekland. Not enough like her that the park would actually have to pay Ekland’s estate for the use of her likeness, but just enough. She doubted most of the visitors would even really recognize Ekland. Britt was there for the keeners, like a synthetic humanoid Easter egg nestled carefully in the franchise fiction that was the park.
The man took a seat as the Britt-vN handed him a tiny snifter of brandy. He tossed it back in one gulp. “My cart threw an axle,” he said. “The sun was setting and I was keen to reach this place before nightfall. I was not heeding the road.”
A rumble went through the crowd – nervous titters from the other guests, and rueful sighs of recognition and disappointment from the Hammerburg villagers. It was fascinating, how quickly they played along. Now Ashleigh wondered if she really should be viewing it as a semiotician. Certainly there were plenty of articles on what Hammerburg meant, semiotically, and just as many travel pieces on the park. But few of them had been written by women her age, with her level of training in the subject. It was evidence of how distracted and messed-up she’d been lately that she’d not thought of this herself. It wasn’t a breakup so much as a breakdown.
And wouldn’t it serve Simon right, if she scored a major publication just for finding a better lay? She hadn’t necessarily planned to hook up, as it were, while she was there. Obviously Tiffany was encouraging her to, just to get her mind off the breakup. Maybe she had been wrong to discount the idea so quickly. I just wanted to test your hypothesis, she’d tell Simon, eyebrow confidently arched, about how much better the vN are. At everything.
Maybe she could do a series of articles. She’d start pitching once dinner was over. Unlocked platforms, first. Maybe she’d even get a drama deal. It was exactly the sort of story certain platforms enjoyed telling and re-telling: heartbroken human girl finds (self)-love in the strong titanium arms and bulging aerogel muscles of a humanoid in search of a soul. The story practically wrote itself.
“I thought to rep
air the damage myself,” the traveler said. The rumble rose. Poor fool, Ashleigh heard someone mutter. “So I lit from my cart, and a shadow overtook me.”
“A shadow?”
“Yes. A terrible shadow. So dark I could scarcely see my hands before my face. And cold. A bitter, awful cold, like the breath of winter itself. Then I heard the singing.”
“Singing?”
“It sounded so lovely, at first. Like a group of girls playing at being May Queen. I turned, and there they were. They were… swaying. Dancing, if you can call it dancing. Their arms…” He raised his arms halfway and then let them fall abruptly, as though the very evocation of their movement had somehow shamed him. “Naked as the day they were born, they were.”
“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” someone shouted from a corner. Guffaws followed.
“No! This was no dream! I saw it! I saw them! I saw him!”
Silence. This was the routine’s magic word, apparently. Him.
“We do not speak his name,” the Britt-vN said, right on cue.
“He materialized out of the shadow itself. Melted out of the darkness, like he was the darkness, like he was made of darkness. And he raised his arms and they drew closer to him, and they fell to their knees, and–” He broke off with a sob. The vN surrounding him reached out and patted his hands. Some made the sign of the cross.
“There are stories about this part of the world.” The traveler’s tone was bewildered but reverent. “Until tonight I thought they were nothing more than fairy tales. But they’re real! The legends! They’re true!”
“He’s right,” said an old woman sitting on a low stool by the fire. Ashleigh wasn’t entirely sure she’d been sitting there five minutes ago. Nor was she certain how the old woman had gotten there without her seeing it. And, strangest of all, she couldn’t tell whether the woman – her face riven with crags and wrinkles – was vN or not.
Did they make old ones? Grandmotherly ones, like this one? There was a short story about that, somewhere. She’d read it in school. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember the title, or who wrote it, only that a robot grandmother had come and cared for two wayward children.
“It was thirty years ago tonight I lost my girl,” the old woman said. “She was walking home alone from the market. I had never sent her alone before. But I was poorly that week, and she said she would be home well before dark. I didn’t see her again until the next morning. Said she’d slept in the woods. Brambles in her hair, scratches on her knees. And her neck…”
Again, the vN crossed themselves. Did they even believe? Ashleigh wondered. They’d been dreamed up and funded by a megachurch, but had they programmed in belief? Could they? Was such a thing even possible? Suddenly the air in the room seemed heavier. A log on the fire popped loudly, and as a whole, the room started.
“I’ve seen her a few times since. At least I thought I did. Out of the corner of my eye. She hasn’t aged a day. Not in thirty years. She’s still the same girl I sent to the market. On the outside.”
“And on the inside?” the traveler asked.
“Inside, she is his,” the grandmother said, and spat into the fire.
Now that she had a goal, Ashleigh’s enjoyment of the park – it was more than a park, she reminded herself, it was a real and functional village – became more than just a distant possibility. The next morning, she was up long before Tiffany, and luxuriated in the claw-foot tub and odd apothecary jars full of salts and powders. The washroom had a quaint little paper guide telling her how to put up her hair, and that she was welcome to take home the combs and clips necessary if she wished; the charge was minimal and would be added directly to her bill.
The affordances didn’t end there. As the guide printed inside her bureau told her, the cameo brooch at her throat could also be used as a communication device, if she became lost. All she need do was tap it, and someone from Guest Services would come and find her. The guide stressed that she should feel free to use it under any circumstance in which she felt uncomfortable, even if she thought doing so would be silly. That her comfort was paramount.
It was the horniest place on earth. And as such, the ones who ran it knew how to respect boundaries. It was as though they had designed this entire theme park – village, city, urban space, fiction, immersion, experience – for women. Like Westworld, but devoted to the female orgasm.
And so she ventured out into Hammerburg. This close to the holidays there was a Christmas market. Mulled wine was available at all hours of the day and night, although there was no day and no night – only an eternal twilight. Handicrafts and delicate blown glass ornaments and pentagram wreaths and nutcrackers painted like werewolves were sold on every corner. Carollers sang things in German and Czech and accents that Ashleigh associated with tattooed bad guys in overwrought actioners. Everything was illuminated by fairy-lights and candles and greasy torches, their golden glow flickering in gentle contrast to the anemic blue shadows stretching across the scattered snow.
By the second day, she forgot to miss the sunlight. The stars of Hammerburg spread themselves so thickly across the violet sky, their light interrupted only by clusters of bats taking wing. Here all light was flattering. Compared with the ghastly paleness of the cast member vampires, Ashleigh had never looked more alive.
She picked up a collection of cards with Krampus on them, and then another depicting the Icelandic monster-cat that roamed the land on the night of Christmas Eve, and the twelve trolls that preceded its appearance. She took ice-skating lessons. She went on a sleigh ride with real reindeer with real silver sleigh bells. She ate roasted chestnuts and thick slices of aromatic panettone smeared with butter and a Russian salad of olives and hardboiled eggs and printed ham, all bound up with decadent lashings of mayonnaise.
And everyone else was doing the same. When she looked around, her fellow guests seemed to be genuinely happy. It didn’t matter that most of the vampires had the same facial features – that was how you knew they were safe, and what their limits were. It didn’t matter that the ingenues all had the same cut of dress – that was how you knew they were available. The humans loved the vN and the vN loved the humans. The humans left satisfied and the vN left with money in their accounts. It really was like living in another, earlier era – an era with rules that were clear and easy to understand. All you had to do was play by those rules, and nothing bad could possibly happen.
It was Christmas the way all Christmases should be, she thought, all pomanders and mild intoxication and never having to have a conversation you didn’t want to have. No absurdly romantic Christmas songs – because most Christmas songs, as she had discovered this year, were absurdly so. None of that. Just secular, verging-on-pagan traditions, celebrated in the company of self-replicating humanoid robots. Just like baby Jesus would have wanted. Probably. If you went in for that sort of thing.
“Are you real?” one of the other visitors asked her, on the third day. (Was it day? Or was it night? She wasn’t entirely sure. And even less certain that it truly mattered.) They were in a public washroom in a pub. Back in the bar, the other patrons were singing a folk song about something called the Night of the Wolf. “I mean, are you a human being?”
“Of course I am,” Ashleigh said, and she looked in the mirror at her transformed self, and wasn’t entirely sure. This was not the Ashleigh she knew; this pink-cheeked girl with hair piled atop her head, her neck and shoulders demurely hidden by lace, her lack of makeup pushing her back ten years at least. She looked more innocent than she had ever truly been.
“Are you?” Ashleigh asked, looking at the other woman in the mirror. Two fat raven curls escaped her chignon to frame her dark face. In the mirror they were dark and light, night and day. The other woman was too beautiful, too perfect, Ashleigh decided. This had to be a test of some kind. An assessment of her openness to seduction. Or maybe it was just a prank. Maybe Tiffany had put her up to it. No human woman – no human being of any gender – had ever made this dire
ct a pass at her. “Are you… for real?”
“What if I weren’t?” the other woman asked. She laid a hand over Ashleigh’s. Her nails were sculpted into perfect squares. They were the color of the first day of a bad period. It made the lace at her sleeves look starkly, virginally white. “Would it matter?”
“But what brought you here?” Ashleigh asked. She spoke to the other woman’s reflection, which was easier somehow than meeting her eyes.
“The same as you,” the other woman said. She stroked the lengths of Ashleigh’s fingers. “Fantasy.”
Her hand was warm and her skin was smooth in a way that the vN skin was not. The vN skin was like sharkskin, or so she’d heard. Soft but also rough. Alive but also not. In the mirror, she moved behind Ashleigh. She swept back the errant strands of Ashleigh’s hair. For so long, Ashleigh had thought of it as a boring dishwater blonde color. Now it seemed almost flaxen.
The woman’s lips descended to her neck. They were hot and wet and soft and plush. Ashleigh closed her eyes and waited for fangs. She held her breath. Warm fingers closed gently around her throat. They crept up and turned her at the chin. The bite she had anticipated never came.
For a long moment, or maybe five, they kissed. Ashleigh felt the other woman’s tongue cooling as the moments ticked by. They broke apart when someone else entered the washroom. The woman gave her a passcode to a luxury suite. Later when she told Tiffany about it, Tiffany beamed.
“See?” she said. “I was right. This was exactly what you needed.”
That night, they went to the Grand Guignol. They rented formal velvet gowns with white satin gloves that came up to their elbows. They left their necks bare.
“You could even get a blood pack, if you wanted,” Tiffany said. “I mean, the vN can’t really bite you. Not hard. The failsafe would go off if they drew blood. Some of them have fangs, and the fangs tickle, but that’s about it. According to the reviews.”
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