iD

by Madeline Ashby

  Holberton smirked. “Then it looks like I’m your man.”

  ELEVEN

  The Suburbs

  “Have you ever heard of CITE?”

  Holberton drove a greened-up 1967 Impala sedan, black. Holberton told him something about going all the way to Detroit to get it printed from the original pattern, when an auction in Vancouver fell through.

  “CITE was a prototype city, out in Lea County,” Holberton said, now. “Urban environment, suburban, everything. A place for companies to test new products, basically, without a lot of toxic internal corporate culture to fuck things up.”

  Javier watched the desert blur past. “That’s the city I saw in your suite?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And now a bunch of Amy’s clademates live there.”

  “Yes.” Holberton moved to an on-ramp. “They’re mostly in one suburb, Macondo. That’s part of why the families agreed to go. More space.”

  Amy had wanted a backyard. She had told him that, once. She kept designing the same treehouse, over and over, knowing she’d never see it. She and his youngest were working on one, together. They had been, anyway. When they were alive.

  “At first, it was like any other product recall,” Holberton said. “Except the vN were all willing. FEMA sent out a message asking for them to come in and do an interview, after what happened with Amy and Portia, and they did. If they were already living with humans, that is. The homeless ones, that was different.”

  “I know,” Javier said. “You rounded them up in trucks.”

  Holberton adjusted his position in his seat. “They went willingly,” he repeated.

  Vultures circled overhead. Of course they’d gone willingly. The failsafe made them incapable of doing anything else. “Yeah,” Javier said.

  “But we couldn’t just split up the families. We didn’t want to do that. Nobody wanted to do that.”

  “So you moved them here.”

  “FEMA moved them here. I’m just a design consultant.”

  Javier turned to him. He said nothing, just stretched his arm out the window to get the sun.

  “What’s it like? When you’re in the sun?”

  Javier searched the right word. “Fizzy.”

  “But you were intended for work in the woods, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And now you’re here, in the desert. Where there’s nothing.” Holberton clicked his tongue. “I guess that’s what Vegas is for. Reinvention.”

  The changed lanes, and Holberton pointed. It was there, up ahead. In the dun-coloured desert it was a field of sudden green and silver, its edges as sharp and exact as pixels. It looked like a motherboard forgotten on a stretch of burlap. There were skyscrapers and strip malls, steeples and domes and golden arches. Javier thought of the city Amy kept hidden underwater. He liked that one better.

  They drove along a ring road that circled the entire complex. Eventually they came to a simple checkpoint with a red and white bar that lowered as they drove close. The man inside was organic. He was very old, and Latino, with a pockmarked face and hair that reeked of gardenia-infused petroleum jelly. Until this moment, Javier was unaware that anyone still made Tres Flores, much less used it.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Holberton.”

  “Good afternoon. I’m bringing my friend with me, today. He’ll need a guest pass.”

  “Does he have a radiation detector?”

  Holberton winced. “Ooh… No. Yeah, he needs one of those.”

  The guard handed them both lapel pins with red squares of film inside. “If that turns black, you run,” he said. “Now there’s more paperwork…”

  “Oh, come on. I cut short my time in Vegas just to show all this to my friend.”

  The words my friend seemed to trigger something in the guard’s mind. Instantly, his face went from anxious to sheepish. He handed Holberton a pass marked GUEST without so much as looking at him, and lifted the gate.

  “Goodness,” Holberton said. “I don’t know why that had to be so awkward.”

  “He thought you were trying to impress me,” Javier said.

  Holberton turned to him with raised brows. “Am I not?”

  Javier smiled.

  Pastures formed the outermost edges of the city. Drones hovered above them, moving in time with the herds of alpaca that appeared to be making their homes there. The ring road picked up the interstate, and they followed it out of the farmland and over the rest of the complex. On the right, Javier watched a series of long, rectangular buildings disappear under the concrete. “MACONDO MALL” the sign read. Only a few cars were parked in the lot.

  They turned off the interstate, taking an offramp marked only “MACONDO.” It curved down away from the highway and led into a suburb of one-story houses. Javier’s experience with suburbs was minimal. But he doubted most of them looked like this.

  “I decided to go for a retrofuturist theme.”

  Holberton gestured at the houses. They looked like snowflakes: all white, all edges, all angles. Faux stone and slab roofs that tilted strangely, doorways that opened to the diagonal corners of front yards rather than the street. White archways and colonnades and windows, endless windows.

  “The thing about these people, the people who choose vN, is that they don’t want something real. If they wanted reality, they would have chosen reality.”

  Even the storefronts looked a little wrong. Rather, they looked like they were from the past – but a past Javier didn’t understand. A place where everything was white and gleaming and the fonts were all that stylized drunken slant that was neither print nor cursive. The signage was huge and neon.

  “Most emergency housing tries to replicate everything about your old housing, in miniature,” Holberton said. “But that’s a mistake. That’s a setup for an Uncanny Valley reaction at the architectural level. It’s like your house, but it’s not your house. It’s literally unheimlich. The familiar, defamiliarized. So you have to make something completely different. Something so far off the mark that people get into it as an alternative, rather than a straight replacement.”

  Javier opened his window and looked out. Even the trees had been pruned to meet a certain standard size and shape. The lawn furniture, what he could see of it on porches and concrete patios, was comprised of chairs like eggs and tulips. The tables all looked like they’d been cast of a single piece.

  “Where did you find all this stuff?” Javier asked.

  “We had to replicate a few museum pieces. Mostly Buckminster Fuller stuff, and a lot of Eames and Jacobsen, but also some demo furniture and fabrics from the original Playboy mansion. And the Playboy townhouse. Did you know there was supposed to be a Playboy townhouse? In 1962?”

  “Playboy?” Javier asked.

  “They were actually extremely helpful. I really wish I could have worked for their interiors division, back then, when they tried their home design revival. It was so trashy, all leopard-print and mohair. They needed a better team.”

  “Right,” Javier said, as though those words meant something to him.

  “Anyway, my thinking was that we should really dig into that sense of wonder and optimism that pervaded the Mid-Century Modern period. Because it was all about this one approach to the future, before we knew how hard the future was going to be. Like space, for example.”

  “Space?”

  “Well, space travel. I mean, these people still believed in space travel.”

  Javier watched the houses rolling by. Their floor-to-ceiling windows exposed all the goings-on inside, when the sun’s glare went the right way. Inside, there was always an Amy. Amy, watching a display. Amy, checking a cupboard. Amy, watering a succulent. Amy, but not Amy. Just a constant reminder of what he’d lost. He had his doubts about God, but Hell was looking like a distinct possibility. There was no other word for an entire community planned around housing multiple copies of the woman he’d loved and betrayed.

  “Space travel? You mean like generatio
n ships?” Javier asked.

  “Yeah, like those,” Holberton said. “Although, these people, these Jetsons types, they were into domed cities on the moon. Can you imagine that? Domed cities? On the fucking moon? Jesus Christ.”

  The lawns were fake. Children played on them nonetheless. Holberton stopped at an intersection, and as Javier watched, three small versions of Amy led a group of human children across the street. The Amys watched the intersection with narrow eyes and perfect posture: heads high, chins up, shoulders back, spines straight. Their alertness only diminished when the organic kids had all made it to the sidewalk. They looked exactly like the lionesses Amy had designed to guard the Veldt.

  “They’re deeply focused,” Holberton said. “It’s a leftover from the original nursing programs. It has to do with problem-solving. They prioritize goals differently. They’re long-term thinkers.”

  Well. That would explain some of Portia’s behaviour.

  They drove past a park with a swingset and a bunch of toys. Amys of different sizes played there, swinging impossibly high, climbing cargo nets with grim determination, swinging from monkey-bars like zealous humans at a terrorist training camp. Javier used to take his sons to playgrounds. He considered it a key part of their social development. Apparently the parents here thought the same. The adult Amys watched from the sidelines. They clustered together, watching the human children and their own iterations with the same precision that their daughters exhibited while crossing the street.

  “It’s not a bad life,” Holberton said. “There’s a school. And a library. And a grocery store full of vN food.”

  “All home comforts,” Javier said.

  “Don’t take that tone. I know what real poverty – real lack of privilege – looks like.” Holberton gunned the engine and started driving toward the centre of the city. “Under Las Vegas, there’s a whole network of flood tunnels. There were hundreds of people who lived down there. Humans. Before the vN came along. When I first came to Vegas, I ran a haunted house down there. It was cash only, and you got a text an hour before it started telling you which entrance to take. No one under eighteen allowed.”

  “But you were eighteen,” Javier said.

  Holberton turned to him. “Someone’s done his homework.”

  Javier shrugged. Holberton continued staring at him, but he said nothing. Eventually, Holberton turned away and focused on the road.

  “Anyway, I guess you could say that’s how I got started in all this.” He gestured at the houses with their prickly pear and rhododendron in the front yards. “And this is not that. Do you see an inch of flood water everywhere? No. Do you see parents on drugs? No. A few alcoholics, maybe, but we’ve even got some AA meetings over at the church.”

  “Did these people quit their jobs to come here?”

  Holberton shrugged. “I’m sure some of them did. A lot of them didn’t have work. They get paid a stipend to stay here. It’s not much, but they can spend it any way they like. And there’s no shortage of businesses who want to take their money. It’s not all government cheese, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Government cheese?”

  “It’s a term. It means…” Holberton’s mouth opened, then closed. “Who the fuck knows what it means. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not all that bad. It could be a lot worse. It could be fucking Warsaw, and it’s not.”

  Javier didn’t know what Warsaw meant, either, but the length of the vowels and the sharpness of the consonants made it sound unpleasant. He didn’t want to ask, either. He didn’t like how much liked Holberton. He didn’t want to start liking him even more.

  The car chimed.

  “Chris?”

  “Yes, Rosie?”

  “You have a call from Washington.”

  “… State?”

  “… No.”

  Holberton sighed. “Well, shit.” He made a quick turn. “I guess we’ll have to save the tour for another time. Are you OK coming to my office?”

  They pulled up at a campus of buildings whose sign proclaimed it the “CITY LAB.” No one there wore lab coats, though. It was mostly cargo shorts and climbing shoes and T-shirts with beer slogans on them.

  “In the summer, we have a lot of students,” Holberton said. “Things get pretty casual.”

  Holberton led him into a main building. It was all steel and glass and polished concrete, with big walls in hacienda colours with huge displays of art that faded in and out as humans passed. Javier paused to examine one of the displays. It hung over a dead fireplace, and as he watched it switched from Diego Rivera to a mobile shot of a group of Amys at the playground.

  “Come on. I’ll give you the full tour later. For now, you’re kind of stuck here.”

  Holberton fobbed open a steel door set in glass at one end of the hallway, and ushered Javier through. Once inside, the air was much quieter and cooler, and the art completely nonexistent.

  “I know I should do more to encourage team spirit,” Holberton said, pointing at the bare walls, “but I don’t do interiors for free.”

  Holberton fobbed open yet another door. It opened onto his office. The sheer number of greys made the entire room look as though it had emerged fully formed from an ancient strip of film. The only spots of colour available were in the assistant’s clothes: a single turquoise scarf delicately arranged over a boat-neck T-shirt and a pair of capri pants. Javier had the feeling that Holberton had chosen her solely for her sense of style.

  “Hi, Georgia.”

  “Chris!”

  Georgia stood up at her desk. She blinked. Her skin was very deep black. She reminded Javier of a woman he’d met in Panama. He’d just iterated Matteo and Ricci, and she’d been very helpful, and all she wanted in return was somebody nice who could be gentle. She’d been sewn up, down there. Javier almost failsafed just looking at it: the perforated labia, the vanished clitoris. She came from Sierra Leone. He’d named Léon after her, sort of.

  “What are you doing here? You’re not due back until tomorrow.”

  “I found a new consultant,” Holberton said, and nodded Javier. “Let’s work up some papers for him. And some food too, OK? It’s a long drive.”

  The food arrived shortly: a salad for Holberton, and a selection of vN tea sandwiches for Javier. The sandwiches came with different stripes of feedstock tinted and sculpted to look like smoked salmon and whisper-thin wedges of cucumber.

  “Printed on site,” Holberton said. “In another lab, a couple of miles from here.”

  “They taste like shit.”

  Holberton laughed. “I’ll pass that right along.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin. Then he stood up, and checked something on the surface of his desk. “OK. Now that you’re taken care of, I have to get going. Turns out it’s just an exit interview.”

  “FEMA called you for an exit interview?”

  Holberton rolled his eyes. “I know, I know. They hate my work at the casino. I’m willing to bet they logged me coming in when we went through the checkpoint, and decided to fuck with me since I was close by.”

  It was a pathetic story. Javier’s own children told him better lies by the time they were a week old. But he nodded and smiled anyway, and said: “Wow. That sucks.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ll be right back. Georgia can take care of you, if there’s anything you need.”

  “I’ll be OK. I think I’ll take a nap, actually.”

  “God, I’ll kill for one of those.” Holberton winced. “Not really, though. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s OK. I know what you meant.” He gave his most compassionate smile. “Go on ahead. The sooner you finish up, the sooner you can give me the tour.”

  “Right! The tour! I’ll get right on that, as soon as I get back.”

  Javier watched him leave. He waited by the window, to see Holberton exit the building and enter his car. It was a distinctive make, so it wouldn’t be any problem to follow. Not from the rooftops, anyway.

  Holberton didn’t drive far
.

  The rooftops of downtown Macondo were mostly empty. Panels, but no gardens. And hardly a botfly in sight. All the surveillance was likely in the suburbs, with all the Amys. This left Javier free to bounce between the glittering towers. Their grey water cladding rang hollow. Their offices stood empty. The peregrines nesting in the abandoned buttresses of each building were the only ones to protest his presence.

  Javier followed Holberton to the edge of the downtown, to where a cluster of apartments stood. It reminded him eerily of La Modelo: the same mid-rise concrete blocks. For all he knew it was the same plan, the same design firm responsible. It would make sense. Or maybe all these places just looked the same, even when one was fake and the other was real.

  Holberton jogged up to the fourth floor of the apartment building at the northwest corner of the courtyard. Javier jumped there easily, walked to the other side, and looked down.

  On the balcony below him was Jack Peterson. Amy’s father.

  “… it’s wrong, Chris,” Jack was saying.

  “I know it’s wrong, Jack,” Holberton said. “But it’s what we have to do.”

  “No, it’s what you have to do. I don’t have to do shit.”

  Holberton leaned over the balcony. “I know you want to save them all, Jack, but we can’t. We just can’t.”

  Javier sat back. They were going to kill all the Amys in Macondo. Or FEMA was, probably. That was why they’d all been rounded up here. So they could be easily disposed of.

  “A train derailed in Massachusetts this week, Jack. Ten people died. Then there was the outage in Chile, and the reactor diagnostic, or whatever the fuck they called it, in Germany. It’s fire and brimstone out there. FEMA wants to end it, and so does every other emergency management agency on the fucking planet.”

  “That was all Portia!” Jack’s voice was unnaturally high. “It wasn’t Amy! Amy’s…”