Aston begins to take photographs again in order to conceal the explosive nature of the moment. A violation of the rules of interaction can mean a professional ban.
—The shimmer is added in the post-production, Roma says.
—You can find the terms for the post-production in your release contract, says a voice from the group of assistants, who seem to have relaxed again.
—I think you’re even prettier like this, Aston says. Roma laughs using her bashful schoolgirlgiggle™.
Aston dares to get up and leave his chair. He walks around her, maintaining the specified distance.
When he leaves, she waves from her seat and winks at him.
—You can be glad that we aren’t reporting you to the press authorities, an assistant says as the hotel-room door clicks shut behind him. Luckily for you, Roma didn’t take it personally. Others would not be so accommodating.
Aston apologizes several times, squeezes her hand.
—All right, she says almost sympathetically. You got away with it this time.
As he rides down in the elevator, I enter Roma’s name into the search field and look at hundreds of images of her body. Corpo vitreous is among the keyword tags, glass body, Roma, star, fragile, deadly disease. You can also find the release contract for her photos. The tools for creating the shimmer effect, the ordered sequence of editing steps, the color and light values, brush strength, and degree of transparency are all listed in detail. Unedited images are destroyed by a data cleaning service. I suddenly wonder whether they just invented the disease. Whether this is all just a gigantic advertising campaign.
The thought of touching her to see if she breaks pops into my head. The image of a body shattering, bloody fragments on the hotel carpet.
You should’ve touched Roma, I write to Aston via our encrypted communication channel without thinking.
From the security camera in the hotel elevator, I watch as he reads the message, shakes his head, and then puts the tablet in his pocket. His facial expression indicates disapproval. He looks around the elevator and crosses his arms in front of his chest. His reaction is perfectly understandable. He must think I’m tactless and incompetent. Why would I write that to him?
Aston, I type to correct my absurd impulse, Riva needs your help.
He pulls the tablet out again, reads my message, puts it back in his pocket.
She desperately needs medication.
This time, he holds the device in his hand a little longer before letting it disappear into his pocket. He hesitates.
You can see for yourself how thin she’s gotten. That she’s not sleeping properly. That her fitness values have rapidly deteriorated.
I think I can make out a hint of concern in his facial expression.
You’re the only one who has access to Riva. The only one she trusts.
I see him shaking his head slowly from left to right.
Aston, she needs medication. To help her mood.
Her motivation. Her appetite. Her sleep.
The elevator arrives at the lobby, but Aston doesn’t move. The doors close again. Aston holds the tablet’s microphone up to his lips and dictates an answer: No.
If she continues this way, she’ll die, I write.
He stands in the elevator, the doors open and close again because no floor has been selected. His expression becomes more introspective. He moves his knees as if he were walking in place.
How do you imagine that happening? I hear him dictate quietly, the message appears almost simultaneously.
I’ll send you a prescription and then you mix the medicine into Riva’s drink. Ideally in water, so you can add ice cubes. A man enters the elevator and presses a button to go to a different floor. Aston pushes past the man to get out. He leaves the hotel, taking short quick steps until he’s out of range of the security cameras.
Okay, his message appears a few seconds later on my tablet. I’ll try.
-
15
—Is it my fault? Aston asks.
Partner exhibits feelings of guilt, I note. Riva doesn’t respond. She’s sitting cross-legged at the window and watching traffic.
—At least tell me what I did wrong, Riva, and I’ll make it up to you. If you don’t go at some point, they’ll take away our housing privileges.
—Fine with me. I’ll live somewhere else.
—We have a credit union, Riva. My credits are your credits. If you go down, I go down.
—The credit union was your idea, Riva says.
Aston grabs his hair and pulls at it so hard that individual strands come loose. He bends down to Riva and holds the hair up to her face.
She starts to laugh. She lifts her head and looks him straight in the eye for the first time today. As far as I can remember, it may even be the first time since the project started. Eye contact, I note.
Aston opens his fist, lets his hair drop on the floor in front of Riva, and leaves. He slams the studio door so hard behind him that one of the photo frames comes loose and falls to the ground. Riva stares at the frame. She fixates on it for nearly a full minute with an emotionless expression on her face. Then she jumps up.
Within fractions of a second she’s already on the other side of the room. She lunges at the frame and kicks it with full force. It slams against the wall. A crack forms across the display surface and the head in the image is split in two. It’s a photo from Dancer_of_the_Sky™.
Riva grabs the partition wall closest to her and throws it to the ground with all her might. Frames slide across the designer floor. The second partition clatters against the wall, a loud crash suggests that there’s more damage that isn’t visible. One wall falls after the other, shards fly through the room.
I don’t see Aston come in. He’s suddenly there, amidst the chaos, screaming her name, but she isn’t listening. She smashes his digiframes with a systematic determination that reminds me of her training videos. Aston doesn’t try to stop her, just stands there and watches, as I sit here and do the same.
Riva lets go of the display panels, throws herself on the floor, drags her fingernails hard across the surface until she starts bleeding. She doesn’t make a sound, but her face is twisted with rage. The teeth clenched together, the corners of her mouth pulled back. Her skirt is torn and has slipped upwards, so that it barely covers her thighs. The blouse that was previously tucked into the skirt is hanging out in some places.
Aston watches her as if he’s lost all connection to himself. And even when he finally embraces her and pulls her close, his eyes look past her at the fallen furniture, the shards, the trails of blood. Riva squirms out of his grip, lets herself fall, just lies there. I zoom in until I can see only Aston, his stiff, empty expression, eyes frozen somewhere on the opposite wall. I can see the tears welling up in both of his lower eyelids and then streaming down his face at the same time. My hand intuitively moves towards the monitor. I pull it back and dictate a message: We have to adjust the medication.
At first he doesn’t react to the vibrating notification on his tablet, but he eventually pulls it out.
Riva looks almost as if she’s asleep on the floor.
No, writes Aston. I won’t go along with it anymore. I won’t give her anything else.
I send him links to studies that prove the effectiveness of the drugs. I highlight the sections that talk about the initial period of time required until the medication starts to take effect.
No, Aston writes.
Then he drops his tablet on the floor next to Riva and leaves.
At night, Riva appears before me as a grunting creature. I open my eyes and see her crawling on the ground a few steps away from me. She rears up like an animal, pants, claws at the vinyl flooring in my apartment until her fingernails come off and bones emerge.
I wake up, I’m hyperventilating, my body is engulfed in fear. I f
ind the light switch, but even the warm orange-yellow glow of my bedside lamp does little to calm my pulse. I count seconds, slowing each breath down until time and space have normalized. Until I know where I am and what happened.
The sheer force of the strange rage sticks to me like sweat. It feels as if it’s aimed directly at me, as if I alone am its target, Hitomi behind the monitor. And then I recognize the feeling.
Riva’s rage is Andorra’s rage. She hits the wall with her fist and the dull sound reverberates throughout my body. Riva’s fingers are curled into Andorra’s fist, pounding against the bedroom wall at the institute. Riva’s lips, pressed tightly together, are Andorra’s mouth. Torn open, screaming shit, shit, shit, saliva dripping out, mixing with tears and snot. Her fist hitting the wall until the skin on her knuckles tears and tiny droplets of blood are left behind on the plaster. Until she sinks into her bed and buries herself under the blanket and everything is quiet. How often I saw Andorra so beside herself in the months before her disappearance, sudden attacks of uncontrollable furor. And how I felt responsible, begged her to stop.
Andorra’s numbers on the adaptation scale were always lower than mine. In the end, though, they even dropped below the minimum values. During our weekly efficiency reviews, she regularly received penalty points and additional assignments. She was threatened with expulsion, and I was afraid that it wasn’t just an empty threat, as Andorra claimed. High adaptability is essential to success in life, as we were told time and again.
I remember how Andorra laughed and then shrugged
—What can I do? she said. I am what I am. Our trainers saw it differently. Among the institute’s core convictions was that personality was changeable. You just had to work on yourself hard enough. As Andorra’s adaptation values got worse, mine steadily got better. On my final diploma, I had achieved the highest marks in my class.
-
16
Riva’s diary app has been decrypted. The data analyst uploaded a total of two hundred and seventy-nine text files, all of which were written by Riva. His research shows that she had everything deleted shortly before her breach of contract.
The entries are from the last five years. The usage chart shows phases in which Riva wrote down thoughts and experiences daily, sometimes even several times a day, then times when she didn’t compose a single entry for months.
The analysis provides new psychometric data. Riva’s psychograph has changed considerably over the last two years, contradicting the analysis of the media data in many respects. Maybe the downside to her extensive media coaching is that Riva has managed to manipulate her public image over a period of time.
In the first three years of app usage, Riva’s entries correspond to the image that she presented to the outside world. But then it changes drastically, the texts become note-like, fragmented, and inaccessible. Riva appears less balanced, more irascible, less goal-oriented. Her willingness to perform, her self-discipline, and her enthusiasm for competition diminish. Instead of descriptions of her progress during training, she started creating more and more numbered lists of what are presumed to be memories with no apparent purpose.
Archive No.: LK1514_a-l
File Type: SuperSecretOnlineDiary™
User: @GoKarnovsky (Riva Karnovsky)
Relevant sampling of keywords: neuroticism—motivational deficit—aggression—frustration—fear—pessimism—passivity—diminished ability to cope with stress—limited willingness to perform—psychosomatic symptoms—nostalgia
Sample_ jk6h1
Blue silver. Like the sea of metal. Like the flickering of the shooting star online, 17 CP, but it’s worth it, it’s really worth it. Blue silver and not aqua orange. The investor wants the blue silver suit. The investor WANTS the BLUE SILVER suit. The investor is angry because I’m wearing the wrong suit at media training. 250 CP penalty. Dom’s face is red. Can’t you read.
Sample_ jk6h2
Diligence and care. Diligence and care. Diligence and care. Diligence and care. Diligence and care. Diligence and care.
Sample_ jk6h3
1. The plant arms in the concrete. The house is gray. Greenish gray or bluish gray. A rectangular box with rectangular black windows. Plants grow into the house from below. They come out of the windows or grow in from outside.
2. The girl. The girl is spinning in a circle. It’s completely dark. The girl is holding sparklers and spinning, she doesn’t stop spinning. A sister? Probably not. Where did she come from and where is she now?
3. The wall. It’s dirty and sticky. Someone cleaned it in some spots and painted little people with blue and green paint. If I take several steps back and stretch my neck, I can see a narrow strip of city behind it. The tops of the highest skyscrapers, their lit-up windows. The city lies behind the fog. It lights up the fog from the inside. It looks blurry, hazy.
4. The woman. I can’t see her face. She’s holding her arm over her eyes because she’s looking at the sun. In the background, the block of gray houses with black windows. The woman is strong, she stands tall.
5. Burning skin. Heat and dust. Breathing is difficult, as if there isn’t enough air in the air.
Sample_ jk6h4
Avoid the following topics: politics, religion, sexuality. Avoid personal opinions, jokes, rumors. Avoid sharp edges. Avoid direct sunlight. Avoid the feeling of hopelessness. Avoid the outer districts. Avoid touching unwashed hands. Avoid make-up brands if you don’t have a marketing contract from them. Avoid squinting or opening your eyes too wide. Avoid the signature triple turn in bad wind conditions. Avoid overestimating yourself, otherwise you’re worm food, otherwise they’ll have to scrape you off the ground.
Sample_ jk6h5
Penalty for violation of team spirit, soon I’ll be out of credits. You’re a role model, damn it. I laughed, I don’t know why, I felt so helpless. Stella got a warning for violating the hygiene rules because she didn’t change her tampon for over four hours.
Sample_ jk6h6
1. The stage in the peripheries. Stairs that you have to climb. Starting numbers, my name written on lists. (Does that mean I could already read then?)
2. A person whispering in my ear: Try hard. Do your best. This is your chance. The rest of the person is no longer there, her face, her hands. Only her voice.
3. Stumbling and catching myself. Hot blood shooting into my head. I stumble and I smile, I don’t lower my head. I catch myself, just as I learned.
Sample_ jk6h7
The girl with the short-shaven hair screams: You’re famous! Fresh from the peripheries, shaved for transport. Happiness in her eyes. I see her spot me and then scream. You’re famous! I give her an autograph card. She bobs up and down. When I walk over, her outpouring of joy surrounds her like a puddle.
Sample_ jk6h8
I can’t get rid of the image, lava hitting the ground. We had post-fatality training and got blockers. But I can’t stop thinking about her. The wind was actually good. Dom thinks she did a sloppy job packing. There’s a rumor that it was a technical failure. The new model malfunctioning. I wonder what she was thinking when she realized she wouldn’t make it. Whether she was disappointed in herself.
Sample_ jk6h9
Like my blood caught fire and is burning me from the inside out. Dom always tells everyone that I never get sick. I told him: Dom, I’m sorry, I’m sick now. Really.
Sample_ jk6h10
1. Dom, picking me up from the transport and leading me through the academy. He says: This is your new home. Are you happy? I’m completely intoxicated.
2. Dom’s office before the morning training, and I say: Do you remember when I arrived and you picked me up? And he nods and smiles, and suddenly everything is good between us again.
Sample_ jk6h11
I can’t find the off switch. The only time there isn’t any noise is when jumping, total silence, only the gray
-blue of the sky and the city below me.
Sample_ jk6h12
1. A woman dancing, two kids. On the street, in the spray of a sprinkler. The wet fabric against her massive body. A bent little finger. Her mouth open. Water on her lower lip. The asymmetry of the laughing face. A child reaches out to her, she picks him up and whirls him around in a circle.
2. Round holes in the smog, the sunlight piercing through. Cones of light, falling like searchlights on dry land. That’s why everything is black, only those spots are chosen by the light.
3. The sound of rain. Open roads. Landslides. Rain that never stops. Drumming on the roof. I fell asleep in the rain, under the rain. When I lie in bed now and can’t sleep, I long for that sound. Maybe I should download one of those audio files that simulate nature sounds, so I can fall asleep.
-
17
—I don’t agree with your diagnosis, Masters says.
I try to cover up my insecurity by straightening a crease in my blouse. After the successful diary analysis, I was expecting praise and extra credits.
—You mean the analysis of the diary data? That’s not a diagnosis per se.
—The investors will understand your report as a diagnosis. Dom Wu has made explicit statements about which terms should not be used in the reports in order to prevent any legal claims against the academy on the basis of damages. Burnout is on the blacklist.
Masters’s potted plant has disappeared. There’s now a small golden Buddha statue in its place. In front of it, there are several small bowls with offerings and incense sticks that haven’t been lit.
—Those were the findings from the psychometric data analysis, I say.
—Change them.
—I don’t understand what the findings have to do with Dom Wu.
—Ms. Yoshida, burnout is not a valid diagnosis. Ms. Karnovsky has completed various happiness and resilience trainings as part of her training program, far more than those recommended by the health authorities. The academy implements a rigorous mindfulness program. Riva Karnovsky has always received high resilience scores on her aptitude tests. Your diagnosis is obsolete and plain illogical, Ms. Yoshida. Riva Karnovsky is only twenty-four years old. That would be like diagnosing yourself with burnout. Fresh out of training. Not a year on the job market yet.
The High-Rise Diver Page 11
