Echoes

by Therin Knite

  In the early hours, the micro-shop strip relies only on an abundance of security cameras and a nearby police station to take care of petty criminals, because the crime rate in this area is extremely low and rich people love to cut corners.

  “I’d like to buy a nice outfit,” I say. “Shirt. Pants. Shoes. Coat.”

  She considers talking back to me, but I open the banking app on my Ocom and show her I have enough to afford it all. Fifteen minutes later, I’m wearing the most expensive clothing I’ve ever owned, the cashier is draining eighty percent of my hard-earned money, and the freebie shirt Lana gifted me is in a trashcan under the checkout counter, along with my dirty pants and shoes.

  Anyway, Beacham Inn.

  Wealthy men and women filter in and out of the three-story building as I approach. I try my best to blend in with them, but although I mimic their postures and facial expressions, I still don’t quite fit into their world of perfect people. I’m a bronze coin in a bucket of gold, and they spot my tarnish a mile away. Several young women smile when they first notice me, but after a few seconds of scrutiny, their confidence wavers, and they start whispering doubts. I cannot replicate the atmosphere of this social brand. It’s something developed through decades of conditioning.

  The lobby of Beacham Inn branches off in two directions. On the right is the inn itself, a few guests lingering here and there in a collection of glass-walled lounges. To the left is the restaurant. Despite the time of day, it’s hopping. I count about seventy people on the first floor alone. Once inside, I’ll be able to disappear into the crowd with ease and find my way to Lady Svi’s private top-floor dining room.

  It’s getting inside that’s the hard part. The place has a waiting list a light year long, and anyone with less than a million in the bank is laughed right out the door.

  I break off to the right. Nodding politely at the receptionist manning the front desk, I turn the corner, pick up my pace, and proceed to run straight into a middle-aged man emerging from the closest lounge. We tumble over in a heap of flailing limbs and distressed swears.

  A second later, I recover my balance and roll off him, apologizing profusely. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Good gods, boy! Watch where you’re going.” He stands, straightens his suit jacket, sniffs in the most conceited manner possible, and marches off down the hallway toward the elevator. He doesn’t even notice I stole his Ocom.

  Since Ocoms have biometric locks to prevent fraud, the only place a person not keyed into one can go is the non-user ID page headed “Please Return to Owner.” After the man’s tablet defaults to that page, I tuck myself into a short hall that leads to a bathroom and use a trick Jin taught me a few months back. Press the on button six times, then hold down the emergency key for ten seconds, and finally type in a sixteen-digit sequence of ones and zeroes. A developer’s naughty trick that allows anyone to convert the non-user ID page into an exact replica of the actual ID page. Fake IDs made easy.

  Once I’ve got…Martin Rickman’s ID page up, I head for the restaurant.

  “Name?” The hostess garbed in a sea-green suit gives me a brief once-over, offers me a fake smile, and returns her attention to the reservation list on the Oscreen embedded in her podium.

  “Martin Rickman,” I say. I’m aware of the possibility that the hostess has seen the real Rickman before, but considering the number of people who enter this restaurant on a daily basis, I’m betting the likelihood of her remembering his face is low. And as I watch her scroll through the non-guest reservation list, only to realize that Rickman is in fact an inn guest, I seek comfort in the fact that my gambit worked without a hitch.

  She switches to the inn list and locates his name. “Ah, there you are, Mr. Rickman. Please scan your Ocom ID.”

  I wave my jury-rigged tablet over the podium’s scanner, and the hostess’s screen blinks green in response. “All good?” I ask.

  “Yes, sir. Enjoy your meal.”

  And I’m in.

  I bypass dozens of yawning socialites and flirting couples and waiters kept awake with toxic cocktails of energy pills, heading straight for the fancy spiral staircase in the back. My ascent passes in a blur of muted gold and gray and green, the restaurant’s color scheme reflected in every element of its décor. At the top of the staircase, I find my destination. In a special dining room walled off with lightly tinted glass is the honorable Lady Svipul and her entourage of hypermodders.

  A dozen ways to approach her cross my mind, but in the end, I don’t have to make the first move. As she’s sipping her red wine, she rolls her multicolored eyes at a joke made by the man sitting next to her, and coincidentally, they land on me. Recognition immediately floods her gaze.

  She sits her wine glass down and makes a bewildered expression, but the shock doesn’t last long. She recovers with a wide, flirty grin and beckons me to come hither with a single finger.

  So I come.

  After Lady Svipul’s bodyguards determine I’m not a threat, the club patron invites me to sit down in an empty seat next to her. All eyes in the room are locked on to me, some curious, some wary, some jealous, some hostile. The woman herself taps a fork against her wine glass to signal order and silence before introducing me as the boy who broke her heart at Valkyrie the other night. Her friends are scandalized. And instantly find me attractive.

  Lady Svi runs a finger down the collar of my coat, examining the fine detailing on the seams. “This is an expensive piece.” She knows it’s brand new. Just like she remembers I wasn’t this well dressed the night we met. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Some boutique designer store on the strip. Won a bit of money in the market last week and thought I’d reward myself with a little something.”

  “I see. Are you a risky investor?”

  “Oh, very risky.”

  She plucks a garlic roll from the basket in the center of the table and cuts it open with her knife. “Lovely.” Her attention shifts to my sling. “What happened to your arm?”

  “Tragic jogging accident.”

  “Interesting.”

  For a woman neck deep in mod culture, Lady Svipul is sharp. Most hypermodders I’ve met are airheaded and unconcerned with the world around them. They live to alter their looks, to be admired for doing so by others who alter their looks, and to scrape by with enough money to continue altering their looks on a weekly basis. But Lady Svi is an upper-class modder. Money is no object to this woman. She was born with it, and she retains it through smart business practices like pitching patron bids at modder clubs that’ll score her numerous modeling and escort invitations. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

  She immerses herself in mod culture from a distance, unwilling to mix fully with the lower classes. As in the real world (outside the confines of the modder scene), she sees herself as a queen among commoners. She interacts with low-class modders just enough to earn a reputation of benevolence and generosity. They fulfill her need to be complimented and adored.

  Most of this she tells me within our first five minutes of conversation. Most of it is subtext.

  “So, do you do anything besides investing?” The rest of her wine disappears in one delicate gulp.

  “I work at Chamberlain Corporation.” Dynara would appreciate the jest. “The Ocom design team.”

  “Really?” She places her empty glass on the table, lips curling up in coquettish disbelief. “You look a bit young for that.”

  “I have four PhDs.”

  A pink eyebrow rises. “Are you modded to look younger, or are you just a smart boy?”

  “The latter.”

  Her laughter bounces off the glass walls, and I know for a fact no one in this room would dare laugh louder. “You get more intriguing by the minute. Poor friends. Rich clothes. Smart brain. Dull job. You’re a regular conundrum, aren’t you?”

  I ignore the fact she outright called Jin poor and reply, “My name is Adem, by the way.”

  “A simple name. It suits you.” Her
attention lingers on my hair again, and I can tell she’s trying to decide whether it’s natural or a mod. Before she reaches a conclusion, someone knocks on the door in a quick cadence. Lady Svi waves to the modder on the other side and beckons for her to enter. The young woman clack-clacks in with sky-high heels and heads for an extra chair one of the guards brought in a minute ago. This was supposed to be a five-person dinner.

  I’d apologize for crashing it, but I’m not sorry.

  Finally, Lady Svi signals for the real party to begin, and the lights near the walls dim while the chandelier above the table brightens. The flared light illuminates the faces of the strangest crowd of people I’ve ever sat with in my life. I tried my best to ignore them for the first few minutes, but with the latest addition, I can’t stop myself from cataloguing every off-the-wall mod decorating their bodies.

  The two men in the room are not twins, but they’ve been modded to look like they are. They sport the same exact facial expressions and reply to everything the same way at the same time. I’m almost convinced they’ve had some sort of illegal chips implanted into their brains to make them capable of acting in unison.

  One woman has hair down to her waist, half of it blue, half of it pink, split in color at her central part. Her lips are the same, dyed to match her hair. In fact, every bit of color on her person maintains the “cotton candy” effect: nail polish, eye shadow, clothing. If she walked into a circus, children would try to eat her alive.

  Although I guess that’s marginally better than children screaming in terror. Which is what would happen if they came into contact with the girl who just arrived. She’s a living nightmare. Black hair. Black lips. Black eyes, sclera included. And white as paper skin. When she smiles at me, pretending to notice me for the first time, she reveals that all her teeth have been filed to sharp points.

  I feel like I’ve walked into a dark fantasy graphic novel.

  When the first course is served, the group gets down to business: drinking and gossiping. Most of what they say goes over my head. They mention people off-handedly that I’m sure are members of modding circles but whose names I’ve never heard, not in Bod Mod Monthly or on TV or anywhere on the sixty-five news sites I subscribe to. I’m witnessing talk of the modding underground, the “stars” and “daredevils” who never gain mainstream fame, those who would be labeled real-life monsters if they dared to walk the streets during the day, those who perform less-than-legal mod surgeries for people willing to pay for the next global trend months in advance, just so they can claim they were first.

  It’s about the time they start debating the latest trends in genital mods that I notice something isn’t quite right. When nightmare girl starts mouthing off at cotton candy woman in defense of penis enlargement, her voice isn’t as steady as it was when she first came in. And she hasn’t had a single drink. Suspicious, I scan the room in detail and home in on the vents in the corners. The vents surrounded by a low-hanging mist.

  I’ve been drugged, goddammit.

  It’s a normal feature of these sorts of places, I’m sure, to help stressed-out rich people relieve the tension built up from their busy days. But there is nothing I dislike more than mood-altering drugs. They dampen my ability to read people. They make me liable to say things best left unsaid. I can’t control my behavior when drugged any more than Jin can when he binges on the weekends and ends up on my couch.

  “I think I should go,” I say.

  The mindless chatter grinds to a halt.

  Lady Svi sets her second glass of wine next to her Ocom on the table and gives me a hurt look. Her pupils are blown. “Why, honey? We’ve just gotten started.” She rests her hand on my left thigh, squeezing gently. “We’ve got two more courses. Plus dessert.” The hand slides up my leg, closing in on my crotch. The fake twins giggle, and nightmare girl nudges cotton candy woman with her elbow.

  “No, really. I have a long day coming up. One…”

  I lose my train of thought.

  Uh-oh.

  This is the point at which I’d usually run from the room, down the stairs, out the door, and into the nearest taxi, but before I can budge, Lady Svipul grabs me by the coat collar and draws me into a kiss. Her friends snigger and whistle as she captures my bottom lip with her teeth and bites it softly. The sensation blows a circuit in my drugged brain, and something akin to a needy groan works its way out of my throat. Her other hand is still resting an inch from my groin, and there’s no way she can’t feel my hard-on.

  She pulls back, grinning, and blinks those mismatched eyes at me in an inviting manner. “Come on. At least stay for one more course. Please, Adem?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the vents have ramped up their drug dispersion, but the implications don’t even register. My brain is mush. The kind of mush you throw out with the garbage. All the threads of thought I’ve been working through for the past hour have melted into it. Mush. The only coherent thought left is a single word, which I can’t remember the significance of.

  “Man…” Manson?

  “Feel better now?” Lady Svi wears a devious smile.

  “Ah, yeah.”

  “So you’ll stay?”

  “Ah, yeah.”

  “Fantastic!”

  I’m in a car. It zips down 42nd Street and turns onto the ramp for Interstate 95, merging into the early morning traffic from every club, bar, and concert block in the city. Images float through my foggy head as the car weaves around party buses and dump trucks and tractor trailers: me sitting between nightmare girl and cotton candy woman while they feed me chocolate chunks from a three-hundred-dollar dessert, me dancing with Lady Svi to a high-paced hop-top song in a ballroom made for classical music, me using the fake twins for support as I’m led through an expansive parking garage. I don’t know what time it is, but I know I remember less than half of what happened inside Beacham Inn.

  In the window reflection of the car’s interior, Lady Svi is busy texting. The car is dark, and her Ocom lights up her face with an eerie blue glow that warps her modded features. Her black blouse is transparent, but she’s wearing a bra this time. Some days she wants to reveal all of herself to her beloved peasant worshippers. Some days showing off is more of a chore than anything else. This morning, she stands on some middle ground.

  She notices me staring. “Honey, you awake now?”

  My lips are dry, and I recall my morning at the hospital. Drugs. Fucking drugs.

  “Was I ever asleep?” The words are a raspy murmur.

  “For a bit. Had to get Jacobin and Raphael to carry you to the car. You’re a lightweight, huh? Don’t get high much?” She keeps on texting.

  “Is it obvious?”

  “Extremely.”

  The car turns off the interstate, cutting through four lanes of traffic until it reaches the turnoff for a suburban neighborhood called Grant Acres. It’s a gated community, and the car rolls to a stop behind a convertible waiting for said gate to open. When it does, the convertible continues down the road, and our car moves up to the little scanner on a pole that verifies the identity of anyone attempting to enter the exclusive neighborhood.

  Lady Svi rolls down the window and waves her Ocom in front of the scanner. “Welcome back, Ms. Williams,” the automated voice says. “Do you have a guest with you today?”

  “Yes,” she replies.

  “Have a good day, Ms. Williams and guest.”

  Williams. Her surname.

  We accelerate through the open gate, the car maneuvering around a flower garden in the middle of the community’s central roundabout. It turns left then right then left again into a small cul-de-sac, coming to a brief stop in front of a two-story mini-mansion. Another car passes us, its headlights burning my drug-addled corneas, and once the street is clear, our car finishes the parking job by backing into the driveway and settling inside a roomy garage. The garage door closes as the car shuts down, cutting off my view of the street.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

 
; “My house, honey.” Williams opens her door and chuckles. “Can you get out by yourself?”

  “I can try.” My legs are wobbly, my head spinning as I stand, and I have to lean against the car to prevent myself from falling over.

  Williams takes my arm and helps me up the garage steps, leading me into a wide hallway decorated with expensive artwork. The hallway ends at a combined kitchen, dining room, and living room area with a vaulted ceiling and luxurious furnishings. Williams guides me to a plush, cream-colored sofa and lowers me onto it, using her Ocom to switch on a screen embedded in the wall above the fireplace. Battle Game is on.

  “Is that okay?” she says. “I can change it to a movie or something, if you’d prefer.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Great. I’ll go whip up some coffee. It’ll help you come down.” She scuttles off into the kitchen, grabs two mugs from a cabinet, and turns on a massive coffee maker that has more brew options than the average café and probably cost more than my rent. While she’s waiting for the machine to finish, she whistles a new wave rock tune I recognize as her Ocom ringtone. I heard it over and over throughout the morning, and oddly, it pervaded even the blackout gaps, where there was nothing else but murkiness, heat, and the sensation of someone violating my personal space. It’s a popular song though, high up on the charts. That’s probably why it stuck with me.

  Atop the fireplace mantel is a series of digital frames, each one with a different theme. The one on the far left contains a set of nature photographs; the inscription on the frame proclaims they were taken by Williams herself during her college years. Next to that frame is one displaying two smiling older people, a man and a woman, who must be her parents. On the far right is another with a slideshow of Williams’ modder friends, nightmare girl and cotton candy woman among them. The fourth and final frame has a single picture of a man in a prim business suit.