by Sean McGinty
“Well, in order to transmit information safely to an embedded subcutaneous receiver, the F.C.C. required an extremely low frequency and modulation signal. All well and good, except for the fact that it’s beginning to look like the migratory navigation system evolved by birds may utilize the very same signal.”
He paused for dramatic effect, and I knew I was supposed to say something at this point, so I did. “Huh. Interesting.”
“Isn’t it? Our hypothesis is that the signal-to-noise ratio is being raised to the point where certain vulnerable groups are unable to maintain a cohesive migratorial integrity. We aren’t sure of the exact mechanism, but based on autopsies in the field, we believe it has something to do with a low-frequency signal and the avian nictitating membrane.”
At which point the dude basically lost me as far as details went. But I understood the overall point.
“Basically, the birds are getting lost and dying because of FUN®.”
“Yes. Exactly. I was being unnecessarily abstruse, wasn’t I? You know, we sometimes jokingly refer to the field as ‘Chinese algebra,’ which is actually relevant, as the majority of the research is out of China. At any rate, if you aren’t acquainted with the jargon, it can seem pretty convoluted. But yes, exactly what you said: we think the birds are dying because of FUN®.”
So that was a bummer of a thought, but then Evie and Shiloh drifted into view. They bumped up onto the sandbar, both of them grinning and wiggling their legs. The tie-dye was gone. Shiloh had on a bikini now. The top was yellow and the bottom was blue with yellow polka dots, and my eyes traced the acute angle where it disappeared between her legs. Above this, streaming upward were a series of tattoos. Stars. This series of inky blue stars, 10 of them, like a map of a distant galaxy. A tattooed Latham sister! It was hard to not look.
The river was low, and we kept bumping up onto sandbars, or more like mudbars, and then at one point it widened into another giant field of rocks, all glittery with water around them, and it looked like miles before the river might be floatable again. We waded across the rocks, carrying our tubes over our heads like refugees from a water park. Evie kept apologizing, but it really wasn’t necessary. Everyone was having a good time. I kinda hung back to take in the view. Blue sky and sparkling water. Sagebrush and fence posts. Shiloh kept sliding her fingers under her bikini bottom to adjust it on her butt.
Funny. It was kind of turning into a beautiful day.
The river narrowed again, though still not quite enough that you could float it. The rocks were gone and it was all mud now, or more like muck, river muck, and at some point Shiloh’s flip-flop was sucked into the muck and I stopped to help her dig it out—and by the time we made it to where you could float again, Isaac and Evie had drifted away on a current of love and river water.
As we floated down the river I could tell Shiloh was having a lot of FUN®, skin all glistening in the light, so I left her alone and YAY!ed Sunsoft® PureRadiance™ moisturizing sunblock. After a while the current became a little less slow and we came to the cool part of the river, this wide ravine with sandstone cliffs, where people had spray-painted their names. Way up at the top where eagles soar, and partially covered by a newer tag, you could still see Oso’s old signature, the creeper skull. I turned to Shiloh to point it out, but her gaze was blank, hands gliding through the air, off in her own little world.
As the walls rose above us, the FUN® began to flicker and Homie™ popped up to say,
> oh no!
no more service!
Shiloh blinked in the light like she’d just woken up.
“You lose the signal?” I asked.
“Yeah—you?”
“Yeah.”
“How are you sitting like that?” she asked. “Like, all the way in your tube? This valve thingy keeps getting me. No matter how I sit, it’s either jabbing me in the butt or in my back.”
“Flip the tube over so it’s facing down.”
Shiloh laughed. “Duh. Flip it over. I’m so dumb sometimes! I guess I’ll just have to wait until it’s shallow again.”
“Nah. You could get out and flip it right here. I mean, it’s what, two feet deep at most?”
“You think? We’re going kinda fast now.”
Not really. But she had the twitches pretty bad by this point, and when she got out of the tube, she wobbled for a second, then plunged butt-first into the water. Squealing, she righted herself and emerged dripping out of the water like some kind of sexy swamp creature. I guess I had a smirk on my face.
“That was not funny,” she said.
“It was kinda funny.”
She put her hands on my tube, pushed, and flipped me into the icy water.
“There! Now we’re even!”
It was a pretty exhilarating feeling, being dunked by a Latham sister like that, and now that we were both wet and shivering and twitching, we started to have fun. Like, we just started talking about stuff. She’d heard about my little school escapade and asked me about living in San Francisco, and what the hivehouses were like, and if I missed my friends there.
“I didn’t really have any friends. It was actually pretty lonely.”
“Oh. Really? I just thought because your last two moods were LOVESTRUCK and LOVESICK that there was maybe like a special someone….”
“Oh. Right. No, that was just—I was just goofing around.”
“Oh,” she said.
We floated down the river, twitching and chatting until we were back in service again, and then around the next bend was the parking area. I had a message from Evie. We’d just missed them. She and Isaac were driving Shiloh’s Volkswagen up to get Evie’s car.
We set our tubes on the grass and waited by the creek. Lazy current drifting by. Soft murmur. I unzipped my bag.
“Want a drink?”
“Um, I don’t really drink.”
“Oh. I thought—”
“Well, I’ve tried it. But I didn’t really like it.”
“OK. Fair enough.” I took a sip and coughed.
“But hey,” she said. “Just because I don’t drink doesn’t mean I don’t do other things.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“You know,” she said. “Other things.”
“What, like you smoke weed?”
“No!”
Then what was it? Cigarettes? Pills? Shoplifting? What was she getting at?
Shiloh’s brown eyes watched me with amusement.
And finally I was like (to myself in my head):
Holy shit! You idiot! Don’t you get it? This girl—this Latham sister—she’s hitting on you!
I couldn’t believe it. But another look confirmed it. There was that electricity again, the spark, the same one I’d felt with Katie, only this time I was the one kind of holding back. Funny how that works. Well, but she was Sam’s sister. And what about Katie? Did I not just give her a big speech about how much I liked her? But did I also not just say I was only goofing around with all the love stuff?
There was still time to pull back.
There was still time to end the fun.
But then Shiloh’s hands were on the back of my head and I was touching her shoulder and the hormones were taking over and we were almost kissing and it was almost too much, the guilt and hesitation and desire. But then we were kissing—soft lips, sweet breath—and I forgot about all the other stuff because that wasn’t me, this was me, and I was a signal-to-noise ratio and I was a cohesive migratorial integration and I was as hard as Chinese algebra.
It was decided that Evie and Isaac would take their car and Shiloh would give me a ride to my grandpa’s. When we got there I gave her the tour—living room, kitchen, bathroom, spare bedroom, and then my grandpa’s bedroom where Katie’s stuff was stacked in boxes. Katie’s stuff! What was I doing?
Back in the spare bedroom we sat on the bed and made out. Mashed faces. Smooched in mutual duration. My hands were shaking—my whole body was shaking—but not from the twitches.
; Shiloh drew back and touched her hand to my leg. “Hey,” she whispered. “Wanna doink?”
“What?”
“Doink.”
“Doink?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t doinked before.”
Wow. Here I’d thought she was this goody-goody Mormon girl. But this was really direct. Doink? I’d never heard anyone call it that before. It made it sound like a brief collision or something.
“Yeah, I haven’t ever really…”
She smiled. “So you’re a doink virgin!”
“Um, pretty much.”
“This is going to be fun! Wanna give it a try?”
God, she didn’t beat around the bush.
“Oh, and don’t tell my brother. Sam teases me about being a black sheep, but really he’s got this, like, way-too-perfect image of me. Are you OK? You’ve got this look on your face.”
“Um, there’s one thing….I don’t really have any protection.”
“Protection?” said Shiloh. “Like condoms? Hold your horses, pal! I said doink—not do it.”
“What?”
“You know—doink. With our ARSEs.”
“Doink with our arses?”
“ARtificial Sex Emulations—an avatar of yourself. You can get them from the FUN® Shop.”
YAY! for ARSEs, but when I logged in to the Shop and tried to download one, I was denied.
> users in FAIL not allowed!
“That’s OK,” she said. “I’ll just scan you. You won’t be able to do any upgrades—a lot of guys, you know, upgrade—but it’s OK with me if it’s OK with you.”
“Um, OK.”
“Good,” said Shiloh. “Take off your clothes.”
“My clothes?”
“I have to scan you, right?”
So there I was, butt-naked with my arms outstretched like a T as she ran her gaze over me—and I mean all of me—and my mind kept jumping back and forth between these two thoughts, and the first was, Wow, this is like kind of clinically erotic. And the second thought was, No, buddy. This is two steps beyond weird.
My only consolation was that when she was done I would get to scan her—but when I asked her about that, Shiloh just laughed again.
“I’m already scanned, silly. Look. There I am.”
And there she was, standing in the corner of the room. Shiloh’s ARSE. The resolution was actually pretty good. It looked the same as her—same face, same body, same star tattoos—only with blue hair, bigger boobs, and a raccoon tail.
“I’m sending you your ARSE,” she said. “Load it when you get it.”
> new message original boy_2!
I loaded my ARSE, and there I was. Me, Aaron O’Faolain, naked and pale, no upgrades or enhancements. I raised my hand—my ARSE raised his hand. I touched my lip—so did the ARSE of me. I examined this strange mirror of myself, and it examined me, both of us thinking the same thing: Do my balls really look like that?
And then Shiloh’s ARSE was in my arms, boobs and hair and raccoon tail and all—just like I’d imagined it might be, except completely different, and crazy weird. We sat down on the bed—me and Shiloh’s ARSE on one side, Shiloh and my ARSE on the other—two couples facing different directions. As the four of us were making out or whatever I kept catching glimpses of her, the actual Shiloh, and I longed for something real. Real skin. Real hair. The worst part was the eyes of the ARSE—all big and brown and dead in the middle. Like looking into the eyes of a fish. They never quite manage to get the eyes right.
So we did the thing, the four or us, two real and two not, and it was crazy weird but also better than anything I’d ever done before—sort of—and after it was over I heard the lonely cry of the train whistle way out by town. Our ARSEs faded into the walls.
Shiloh lay on the bed, typing something in the air. She finished it up and smiled. “I rated you nine point eight stars.”
“Rated me?”
“Yeah. I took off a little because you’re a noob and you seemed kinda, um, distracted. I expect you’ll do the same or better when you rate me.”
“Yeah, OK.”
She rolled lazily on the bed. “You should probably do it now before you forget.”
“Do what?”
“Rate me.”
“Right. Of course.”
So I gave her 10 out of 10. I wasn’t going to be the one to mess up her perfect score. I left the comments blank, though, because what was there to say? I couldn’t think of anything. The right words just didn’t exist. The silence pooled around us.
Someone had to say something, so I asked her about the stars on her hip.
“What’s the story behind those?”
“What? The stars?”
“Yeah, the stars.”
“There isn’t really a story.”
“No? It’s not like a constellation or anything?”
“Not really.”
“Oh.”
“I just like stars.”
Huh. I just like stars. From the tone of her voice it sounded like she’d heard the question before. Maybe she had. Maybe more than once. Maybe all the guys who made it this far asked about the stars.
Shiloh came over again the next day, and we doinked again, and then she came over the next day, too. And the next. Every time I almost ended it, but a little voice inside my weiner was like, No, you idiot!
Crazy. Here I was, finally, after all these years, after all the false starts, having real, actual, almost intercourse. I should’ve been stoked. But I wasn’t. So why’d I do it? Why’d I keep doing it? Maybe because it was like a game, and this was the crazy part of the game, and maybe I could make it out alive. Maybe everything would be OK.
But in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn’t. Every time we were done with doinking, in the clarity that followed, a little voice shouted from inside my skull—End this! And I almost did, I really almost did, but then one day when we were done and our ARSEs were fading into the light and Homie™ was asking me to YAY! new ♥less™ face accessories, she turned and sort of snuggled up to me.
“You’re getting better,” she said. “I’d say you’re almost ready for the next level.”
My ears perked right up.
“Next level?”
Shiloh sat up on her elbows. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together, haven’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s been—fun, right?”
“Yeah, it has.”
“So, OK.” She tilted her head. “Does this mean we’re kind of a thing?”
“A what?”
“You know—a thing. You and me.”
“I don’t know—does it?”
“I’m asking you,” she said.
And I couldn’t stop myself, the words just came out: “Sure. Yeah, I guess it does.”
And then we kissed, only it was a different kind of kiss, a deeper kiss, and when we were done, Shiloh put her lips to my ear. “I’ve got protection.”
And my whole being instantly snapped into a single exclamation point like: !
And then we were kissing again.
And then we did it.
Only, we didn’t really do it. We almost did it. We almost really actually did it.
I think.
The whole thing was crazy. I was so amped up I was practically floating outside of my body, looking down on myself and Shiloh, thinking, Holy shit! I can’t believe this! This is a thing that is happening!
And then just at the crucial moment, something else happened.
There was a flash, and the audio dropped out and the visuals dropped out and everything went black. And it took me a moment in the nothingness to realize what was going on: full-on TSD glitch-out! I couldn’t believe it! Robbed of my shining moment by FUN®!
And then I was back, and it was over, whatever had happened was over, and Shiloh was sitting up looking at me all kind of like she was embarrassed for me, because it had clearly ended before it had even really begun.
In the moments after, wit
h the excitement all gone, the terrible feeling crept in again. What was I doing here? I liked someone else. I liked Katie. I just couldn’t help it. I think that’s how you know if you really like someone, if you can do it—or almost do it—with another person and not be happy about it. Shiloh was hot, but all I could think about was Katie. But when Shiloh snuggled against me and told me we could maybe try again tomorrow, I put my arms around her and was like, “Yeah, sure.” And that sounds kind of ♥less™ of me, and the truth is, it was.
This all happened right around the time of the next big wave of the Avis Mortem—thousands of seabirds washing up on the coast of Oregon. I remember because when I was at the store that night I had to watch and give a YAY! for CNN Action IU™ Important Update. It was a pretty bleak scene, all right: waves white with birds, bulldozers crisscrossing the sand, smoldering incineration piles—a stunning ecological collapse to be sure, but I had other things on my mind.
Katie was coming home soon. She was coming home in a week, then she was coming home in a couple days, and then she was coming home tomorrow. Never in my life had time passed so quickly. It was like standing in a freakin’ wind tunnel.
Instead of telling her the truth, I told her I’d come down with something and it was probably contagious, and then I decided to go see what other kinds of trouble I could get into—which is how I ended up at the King Cowboy Casino that night, sneaking shots of dead man’s liquor into my jumbo iced tea, watching the Lakers get their asses handed to them by the Jazz in the second game of the Western Conference play-offs. I was waiting for Oso to show up. He’d sent me a message earlier:
unidentified: hey bro i got some stuff meet me at king cowboy if u want to go on an adventure
He arrived in the middle of the third quarter dressed all in black—black turtleneck, black jeans, black shoes—and holding in his hands what appeared to be a block of Valu-Best® medium cheddar cheese (YAY!). He draped an arm over my shoulder.
“It’s the birds, right?”
“What?”
“The melancholy pose, bro! The slumping shoulders. It’s the whole bird die-off thing, right? I know just how you feel. That shit will drill a hole in the middle of your head and suck out all the fun.”
