Shouldn’t I be seeing sadness, regression, despair, shock?
How did my replacement manage to achieve such dramatic results within so few days? Is he talking to her personally? Three times, I followed along as Riva was picked up by security and brought to the PsySolutions building. She was registered at the gate and then escorted to the therapy floor. Three times in the same therapy room, number 417. Her facial expression was stoic. It wasn’t clear whether she was cooperating.
The publically accessible security camera didn’t record the other person, whoever was in the room waiting for her. I reflexively tapped on the encrypted interior view, which I could freely access up until a few days ago. Now I was being shown the standard clauses on the protection of privacy and the punitive fines for hacking. So much is suddenly denied me: I can’t see if my replacement is exchanging direct messages with Riva because I no longer have access to the applications on her tablet. I can’t see if she’s reading her messages or answering them. I’ve thought several times about asking Zeus to compare my replacement’s logs with my own. To check if I missed anything, to see what direction he’s going with his investigation. But I still haven’t been able to pay off Zeus’s hack. My rent for the past month is outstanding. I’ve already auctioned off most of my valuables. I have to find work again as soon as possible; I need the credits.
I’ve already increased my availability to twenty-four hours on the Call-a-Coach™ application. But I’m not getting any calls. Maybe I need to reactivate the account. Inform them that I’m available fulltime again. Day and night.
I tap the contact button for technical services. A female voice answers, probably a service bot.
—You’re not registered as an employee, she says.
—Since when?
—I’m sorry, we don’t need any new employees at the moment, says the voice.
—Can you register me again? I ask. My availability has improved considerably. I can also do day shifts now.
—I’m sorry, we don’t need any new employees at the moment, the voice says again.
—I’m already an employee, I say.
—You’re not registered as an employee.
—Could you please forward me to a real person?
—I am a real person.
The bots are programmed to ensure that the customer never gets upset in any situation. The communication algorithms contain sets of sentences that are designed to be calming in moments of agitation. Deescalating. Sentences like: I understand how you feel. I want to help. I’m a real person.
—Then a superior? Someone from human resources? I ask.
I look through my archive for the name of a contact person I dealt with in the recruitment process. I’m unsuccessful.
—I’m sorry, we don’t need any new staff at the moment, the woman says.
Then she breaks the connection.
Maybe Zeus actually did report me after our call for unprofessional behavior. Then again, maybe Masters was the one who contacted my employer and urged them to remove me from the pool of on-call psychologists.
A notification tone from my tablet informs me that a new video has been published on the Riva-Karnovsky-App™ under the category Secrets. Riva is addressing her fans directly for the first time since her resignation.
The video spread to more than three hundred news portals within seconds.
It shows Riva in a changing room. Fans and analysts are already debating whether it’s a locker room at the academy or a gym.
Riva looks healthy. She’s wearing workout clothes from her biggest sponsor. Her skin is glistening, either from the exercise or from special effects makeup.
—Hey, boys and girls, Riva says. Just a quick shout out: No, I wasn’t kidnapped. Haha. I didn’t run off with my coach either. Double haha.
At that moment, the camera pans to Dom Wu, who’s sitting next to her on the locker-room bench. They’ve intentionally left some space between them. He smiles and makes a peace sign for the camera. In the live comments, more than fifty people tagged the exact minute and second in the video, pointing out how rare it is to see Dom smiling.
—I’ll tell you the truth, Riva says. I just needed a good break. Mindfulness and stuff. But now I’m ready to launch again. Pinky promise.
She leans into the camera and kisses the lens, leaving a lipstick print that distorts the image. Through the blur, you can see her get up from the bench and turn away from the camera.
Something worries me about Riva’s behavior. I can’t say exactly what, but her sweetly raised voice triggers a kind of inner resistance in me. Is this what rehabilitation looks like? Is that what I’ve been working towards?
I want to press the replay button, but my right hand has started to tremble. I try to shake it out. It keeps trembling, I can’t get it under control.
I look at my hand as it moves uncontrollably. A memory flashes in my mind, a body trembling, shaking, a feeling. My body is shaking, I can’t get it under control. More so, I don’t want to get it under control. I let it shake, I shake, I surrender to the feeling. My face feels raw. Animal sounds come out of my mouth, roaring and bleating. I look down at myself and have paws instead of hands, fur instead of skin, I feel fangs instead of teeth. I gasp for air, I howl. My body cramps and rears up. I feel a force inside me, an invincible force, I feel every muscle in my body.
And then, suddenly, warmth from behind. Arms wrapping around my body, hands on my face, on my hair, on my neck. I lean into it. It’s the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever experienced. Under the hands, my fur turns to skin. My paws, clawing at the arms around me, are now fingers. My opened snout closes into a smile. My whole body is flooded with warmth.
The memory is so clear.
My skin feels hot with shame. Of course it can’t be real. I must have transferred a client’s experience to myself, his projections or fears. I must have overidentified with it, a false memory. The images aren’t realistic. I would never let myself go like that. But I can’t shake the feeling that this false memory evokes in me, the feeling of warmth. I’m filled with a longing to return to that feeling, I want it back with every fiber of my being.
Something is wrong with me. A viral infection. A hormonal disorder. The hand on my skin, I whimper, the body wrapping around me, I want it back.
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34
What happened?
The bartender found my number.
You didn’t get your job back?
The image of his naked body in the dim light of the bedside lamp.
I saw that you’re not listed as a PsySolutions employee anymore. Sorry!
If I don’t write him back, he’ll assume the number on my profile is wrong.
Come by the bar again.
I wish I could erase moments from my memory the way that Masters erased Zarnee from the observation videos. The encounter with the bartender would be the first thing I’d remove. Getting fired would be the second. Instead, unpleasant memory fragments hover above my thoughts like small lightning storms. The shame that sticks to them is hard to shake off. How I stared at the unevenness of the bare, dark-gray concrete wall in the bartender’s apartment. The floor in Masters’s Plexiglas office just before fainting. The wire mesh over the intercom at the entrance to the PsySolutions building. A black hair on Andorra’s pillow the morning after her disappearance, the depression where her head once was. And the strange foreign memory of the shaking, animal-like body, the embrace.
I can’t get rid of it.
The more time I spend doing nothing, the more memory storms there are.
I try to avoid them by concentrating on Riva’s analysis. But Riva is hard to find. She’s rarely in her apartment anymore.
The facial-recognition search doesn’t have any hits for minutes or even hours. I suspect that she’s been leaving the building through a secret exit that isn’t monitor
ed by security cameras.
Is this Masters’s doing? Is it an effort to protect Riva from the cluster of VJs and fans stationed in front of the main building entrance? Or could it be that she’s still under Zarnee’s influence and has started using illegal methods to protect herself from being tracked?
Because of the legal proceedings, Zarnee’s blog keeps getting blocked and then popping up again under different addresses. It has become a refuge for underground political activists. In one of his most recent posts, Zarnee explains how he wears facemasks to disguise himself on excursions into the city. And how he communicates with different black-market tablets that are registered to dead people.
His posts no longer contain idyllic family videos. In a reveal video shortly after his termination, he confessed to his fans that the videos were all staged and that the biofamily was made up entirely of paid actors. He was actually a breeder child who never had parents. The blog served as native advertising for the Family Services™ agency and he has since distanced himself from them. He doesn’t want to rent himself out as a family member anymore, he says in the video. Instead, he wants to start a real biofamily. He promises to post real family videos in a few years. Images of a real, natural life. But for that, society will have to go through some drastic changes.
Although most users reacted to Zarnee’s revelation with a tidal wave of indignation and character attacks, there are also sympathizers among the commenters. Some news articles have been treating Zarnee as the face of a feared resistance movement. One that could potentially make the extremist positions of the naturals movement more widely accepted. Zarnee claims that his blog’s mission has always been political, part of his plan to make society nostalgic and receptive to a more primal way of life. That the success of familymatters.org is a testament to the fact that people feel a deep inner longing to live that way.
His old posts, which used to fill me with a secret and inexplicable pleasure, now fill me with disgust. And bewilderment at the fact that I could fall for an imposter like him. That I put my subject’s life in his hands and exposed her to his propaganda, lies, and manipulations.
Riva seems to have resumed many of her past responsibilities. Her apps are constantly updated with new content. In the last few days, she could be seen entering and leaving the academy on several occasions. Gossip and news portals assume that she has resumed training. The posted papavids™ always show Riva accompanied by several security guards. In a few of the fan forums that had previously speculated about Riva’s resignation, talk of kidnapping has started popping up again. But other fans always immediately refute the claims with videos and posts from Riva’s official apps, pointing out that she obviously seems happy and relaxed as she reports on her life.
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35
I’ve lost Riva. Her facetag hasn’t appeared in any facial-recognition searches for fifty-four hours. The apartment and studio are empty. It’s as if the earth swallowed her up.
I’ve had stomach cramps for hours, my whole body is contracting. My fingers can’t even keep up with my thoughts on the keyboard, they’re like stiff prostheses that don’t belong to my body.
According to my activity tracker, I fell asleep at my desk on the day of her disappearance at 1:16 a.m. My body refused to stay awake. I slept for six hours and didn’t know where I was when I woke up. My neck hurt so much it was as if I had broken it in my sleep. I could barely hold my head up. When I looked at the monitor, Riva was nowhere to be seen.
Over the last two days, I’ve tried all of the facial-recognition applications I could afford. None of them delivered results. Then I started clicking my way manually through public security cameras. Riva isn’t on any of the streets in her district. She’s not in the corridors, elevators, or waiting areas at PsySolutions. Not in the cafes, clubs, bars, or museums that she visited in the past.
I look for clues in the archive feed from the apartment cameras. Riva left the apartment at 3:13 a.m. She was wearing an inconspicuous outfit, no bag. She looked perfectly normal, as if she were just going around the block to get some fresh air because she couldn’t sleep. But she never comes back. From the security camera at the corner of her block, you can see her walking away in the dark. After that, she never reappears.
I’m so disappointed in myself that I start trembling. I can’t hold back the tears. My body is dried up. I get a glass of water. I take another nootropic pill to avoid falling asleep again.
The feeling of irreversible loss flows through my veins like lead. I know this feeling, it’s ingrained in my body.
The empty apartment and the empty room in the institute. The void. Her empty spot next to me at the breakfast table. The others asked about Andorra, I just shrugged. They asked the caregivers. I didn’t ask. I heard a caregiver say that Andorra didn’t live with us anymore. That she’d been transferred to another institution.
On the previous evening, I had my weekly meeting with the caregiver.
—We caught you, she said.
My body was a pillar of salt. I couldn’t respond. She showed me the security video from the elevator. 1:37 a.m.: Me and Andorra wearing short dresses, faces turned away from the camera, so we couldn’t be recognized.
—We know that’s you, the caregiver said.
—It’s disgusting, she said, you’re not even sterilized yet. You’re a disgrace to your bioparents. They invested all their savings in you. They gave you this exceptional opportunity. I’ve never seen such ingratitude in my entire life. So much immorality and selfishness. That you would risk destroying your reputation. Destroying your parents’ reputations. The institute’s reputation. For animal excesses. That’s what you did, isn’t it? You let us all down for that?
I was shaking so hard that I could barely stand. I shook my head, but I knew it didn’t matter. My fate was sealed. My good scores, my future: lost.
—We also know that it wasn’t your idea, the caregiver said.
Her voice suddenly sounded different, higher, softer.
—You’re a good student, Hitomi. Your adaptation values are high. You’re being influenced by an underperformer. You let yourself be tempted.
I looked up to see her facial expression. Her lips hinted at a smile. Then she put her right hand on my shoulder.
—We want to help you. But you also have to help us.
I knew immediately what I had to do. And I didn’t hesitate. I had always been good at identifying strategic solutions. At identifying what is expected of me.
—I told her I didn’t want to go, I said, but she threatened to sabotage me at the next casting. To make my life hell.
The caregiver’s hand was heavy and warm on my shoulder.
—What else?
I listed days and times, left nothing out. When I mentioned Andorra’s sleepwalking, the caregiver leaned forward, tilted her head in my direction. She noted down every detail.
—You don’t have to feel bad, she said. We want Andorra to get the help she needs.
I nodded. I never stopped nodding.
—We’ve moved up your appointment for voluntary sterilization, she said, as we parted ways. And you should expect some penalty points. But you’ll make it anyway, Hitomi. We believe in your potential.
I can’t think clearly. I have to find Riva. I will find Riva. Of course I’ll find her. It’s only a matter of time. She must be indoors, in a space I can’t access anymore. If I had access to the Skycam, I could track where Riva went from her front door, every single step. Wherever she went.
I write Masters. He doesn’t reply. I call him. His assistant doesn’t want to put me through.
—It’s a matter of life and death, I say. You know me. Let me at least explain the situation to him.
The assistant puts me through. Masters’s voice is cold and distant.
—Ms. Yoshida. How are you?
—I need access to the Skycam. It’s
a life and death situation.
—Really?
—Can you help me?
—Life and death? Masters sounds amused.
—Yes.
—Whose life?
—Riva Karnovsky’s.
Masters laughs. I hear him shake his head.
—Ms. Yoshida. Listen to me. Riva Karnovsky is no longer your concern. Riva Karnovsky is nobody’s concern anymore. She’s AWOL, there’s nothing we can do about it. Her expulsion order has already been signed. She can’t come back. Leave it at that.
—You don’t understand. I’m so close.
—You’re not close, Ms. Yoshida, Masters says. You’ve never been close. You failed at your job. Do you know what that failure cost me? I should’ve fired you back then. Right at the beginning, when you started with childhood. But I’m too soft. I believe in hidden human potential.
—Masters, I say. Please, do me this one favor. I need the access credentials for the Skycam. For old time’s sake.
Masters laughs. Then, abrupt silence. I press my ear against the speaker on my tablet.
There’s a soft hum in my apartment. The ventilation fans in the server tower. On the monitor, the split screen displays various security-camera views. Shops, bars, and event spaces where Riva and Zarnee went together. The retro-trash™ bar, where the regulars have already taken their seats. The bartender is wiping down the tables and bar. Subway and skytrain stations. Security cameras from the surrounding streets and squares. I run the facial-recognition software. No matches. Not even partial matches. I look for the latest papavids™ and blog entries with the tags Riva Karnovsky, Dancer of the Sky, Zarnee, Aston Liebermann. All of the visual material I find is more than fifty-four hours old.
The High-Rise Diver Page 20
