First, the wall: thirty feet thick, twenty stories of reinforced poured concrete, constructed to reconfigure the coastline without Puget Sound’s tidal meddling. A dozen locks spaced around the wall sucked in barges loaded with raw materials and spat out barges laden with soil, entire houses, coils of telephone wire, murdered trees. This brand-new ancient city appeared in mists as Abby held tight to the ferry’s upper-deck rail. Buildings clawed their way cloudward and the work songs of newmans echoed through the streets as battalions with numbers in the faceless thousands marched in formation to celebrate new conquests of engineering. Cranes and helicopters lowered masonry and I-beams, great steel frames and slabs of granite and tinted glass and wiring, countless right angles, sun glinting off the geometry. After passing through the locks the ferry docked at Battery Park, lurching awkwardly to a stop. Not a person who disembarked could do so without craning his or her head at this miraculous rebuttal to the forces that poisoned dreams, this gobsmackingly contradictory, otherworldly, ingenious masterpiece. Abby’d seen footage of the late New York City, watched movies set in its boroughs, scrutinized cinematic representations of its shrieking subways and museums and trading room floors, but nothing, nothing, nothing could have prepared her for the scope of this majesty. She felt she might die of awe.
A long row of rickety fold-out tables staffed by disabled newmans in wheelchairs processed the newcomers. These were former workers whose limbs had given out, been amputated or lost in accidents. They were, however, still capable of speaking and processing social information—all they needed for that was a brain and a pair of eyeballs. When Abby reached the head of the line, a male newman with a name tag that read “Neal” prompted her to fill out her information on a note card with a pencil stub.
“How long do you expect to visit?” Neal asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple months?”
“Are you interested in staying in any particular neighborhood?”
“Maybe Greenwich Village?”
“Ah, yes, here we are, Abby Fogg. We’ve got a nice nine-hundred-square-foot condo in the Village, fully furnished, with the amenities of a woman in publishing. Her name was Sylvie Yarrow.”
“Works for me.”
“Fantastic. Here’s your orientation packet! Cabs are to your left.” The newman handed Abby a manila folder containing a key to her new apartment, a two-month E-ZPass, some coupons for pizza and dry-cleaning, and a map of the city. Taking a deep breath, Abby stepped into the fractured grid.
The apartment was nothing special but it suited Abby fine. Everything in the place appeared as it had the morning before the city vanished from the face of the earth, the morning of Manhattan’s last scan and backup, from the stone and steel composing the building to the six inches of dental floss curled in the bathroom sink. The scan—involving some really far-out software and a butt-load of satellites—had been performed under quasilegal circumstances by a company called Argus Industries, who’d intended to replicate New York City for a full-immersion gaming environment. The transformation of Bainbridge Island into Manhattan wasn’t so much a matter of building a to-scale model as downloading the backed-up version of the city in which every molecule was accounted for. There’d been some glitches. Abby spotted a few in Sylvie’s apartment right away. A cross section of an incompletely rendered coffee cup sat on the kitchen counter, and the aquarium had been filled with concrete instead of water. A few of the books on the shelves were missing actual words. Everything down to the graffiti and faded posters on the walls was being resurrected by insanely efficient and tireless newman labor, but there were still spots here and there that needed work.
Standing in the bedroom Abby thought this was the closest she’d ever get to living in the era to which she truly belonged.
Abby spent two hours studying the contents of the apartment with an intruder’s giddy concentration. Sylvie Yarrow had been an editor at a publishing company headquartered in midtown. Single, with a taste for Japanese-print clothing that looked to be Abby’s size exactly. Three bookcases dominated the space, bursting with hardbacks. The kitchen table had yielded its surface to manuscripts under consideration, great cursed reams of paper bearing words doomed to obscurity. The kitchen was fully stocked, and apparently Sylvie’d had a thing for olives, there being a dozen varieties preserved in jars in the fridge door. Abby hated olives. These would have to go.
Pictures of Sylvie’s parents.
A framed, signed broadside of John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around.”
A TV set, a Japanese cat figurine. Birth-control pills.
Abby took a seat on the sofa and spoke to the previous owner. “Even though this is a re-creation of your stuff, I’ll take care of it like it still belongs to you.”
She felt stupid as soon as she said this prayer of thanks or whatever it was. It appeared that Sylvie Yarrow had just stepped out and would return at any moment, that she hadn’t in fact died in a flash hundreds of years before. Miraculously, the clothes in the closet still smelled like a woman.
The phone rang. A chunky black thing connected to the kitchen wall, with a coiled cord running from the receiver to the box. After the sixth ring Abby picked up and said hello.
A man’s voice coughed out a greeting and said Sylvie’s name like a question.
Abby replied, “No, I mean, yes, this is her apartment.”
“Right, right. I know you’re not Sylvie. But her apartment is occupied now, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess. Who is this?”
“Sorry, I’m Bertrand. I was Sylvie’s boyfriend before the FUS.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yes, no, I mean I’m not really Bertrand. But I landed Bertrand’s apartment up here on West Sixty-third. My name’s actually Gavin? I got here last month? I’ve been going through Bertrand’s stuff, trying to figure out who he was, who he knew, what kinds of things he did. I’m wearing his clothes. He’s got a pretty sweet apartment. How’s yours?”
“Mine’s fine.”
“Bertrand was some kind of industrial designer. Designed stuff like computer printers and cell-phone cases. I’ve got a picture of him and Sylvie right here. You’re cute. I mean she was.”
Abby touched a picture of Sylvie and Bertrand magneted to the fridge. Even though Gavin was talking about someone else, Abby still protectively folded her arms over her chest as if Bertrand/Gavin was bringing secrets of her own out into the open.
“Bertrand was a bald guy?” Abby said, “Kind of tall? Black-frame glasses?”
“That was me all right,” Gavin said.
“I thought you were Gavin.”
“Right, right. It’s tricky. You know, a month ago there was me—Gavin—and there was Bertrand, and we were two separate people. I mean, I’m gay. It’s a little freaky to me to represent a straight guy. But I don’t know, something about wearing his clothes, eating his food, reading his books. Now it’s like I inhabit the guy. As if I just stepped into a museum but instead of exhibits there are all these lives on display. And the whole place is run by newmans, the ones actually doing all the work, so we humans just get to come in and start acting out the lives of people who died at the beginning of the FUS.”
Gavin reminded Abby of old boyfriends, guys of limited intelligence and half-baked ambitions. Guys who got too excited about plans that never came to fruition. College sports enthusiasts. “Like we’re wearing ghosts,” she said.
“Exactly,” Gavin said. “Can I trust you with something? As someone representing the girlfriend of the guy I’m representing?”
“Sure, okay.”
“I think I’m having Bertrand’s dreams. I dreamed about you two nights ago. In the dream you were Sylvie but your voice was exactly the same as your voice right now. I thought I could figure out what I was supposed to do with my life in this city. But it got hijacked by Bertrand’s life. I’m eating different foods. I listen to strange old German electronic music. I make references to books I’ve never even read.”
Abby nodded. “This city is a kind of afterlife.”
None of this belonged to her. Not the asphalt and billboards she could see from the window, not the furnishings of this one-woman apartment. It was as though she had come into possession of an artifact she had no idea how to protect. Stepping from the building into the street she inhaled to the point of flattening her nostrils and swallowed particles of dust from the infancy of construction. Two cabbies conducted a shouting match in a long-extinct African tongue. She picked a direction—uptown—and started walking. Everywhere these false-looking humanoid figures with Manga features and plastic hair trotted out of buildings and conveyed themselves earnestly toward new projects. Here and there empty spots where buildings were supposed to go gaped like horrible wounds. The rectangle comprised of Tenth and Eleventh streets and Fifth and Sixth avenues remained as it had been on Bainbridge, a grassy patch of suburban houses and part of an elementary school. It appeared as though a gigantic buzz saw had cut around this swath of the island. The cross section of a two-story house immediately bordered Sixth Avenue, its rooms like chambers of a heart revealed in ultrasound. Behind that house, part of a crumbled two-lane road abutted what was now Eleventh. It wouldn’t be long before the contents of this block were scraped like icing off a cupcake and dumped onto one of the outgoing barges, the leftover space erupting in mirrored office buildings. A garbage truck loaded with meticulously replicated pieces of the dead city’s trash—Styrofoam packing material, fast-food cups, kitty litter—lumbered by. Abby paused in a doorway to catch her breath. This place, this dream, what was it? A video game mating with physical reality? A movie set? The overcrowded basement of some demented dreamer’s vision of Heaven?
The next day after a fitful sleep she found the nearest subway station and rode uptown to the Upper West Side amid others who, like her, warily occupied apartments of the dead. In exchanged glances they communicated how long they’d been here, conveying the jitters of a newbie or the resigned calm of those who’d grown comfortable in their new personas. Abby climbed the stairs at an uptown stop, emerging from the piss-scented station into deep forest, where gilded light streamed through boughs of red cedar and hemlock. A bunny appeared, regarded her, and sniffed the air as if it were animatronic. Abby steadied herself with a stick and tried to avoid sinking into the forest floor in Sylvie’s Jimmy Choos. She came to a clearing of sorts, where stood the overgrown ruins of a house, a tool shed, and what appeared to be a heap of lumber. The hardened ground, covered in crosshatches of fossilized tire treads, trembled as a subway passed underfoot. A newman, pale, weak, ribs showing from decades of hibernation, emerged from the shed, supporting himself on the door frame. His hair was black, a thinning bob, his nails yellow and long. Black dirt ringed his mouth. He chewed purposefully, occasionally reaching to the ground to gather another handful of soil. He made it only a few steps toward Abby before he had to sit down in grass that buzzed with fat, dumb bumblebees. As Abby stepped closer the thing looked scared, flinching as if expecting to be struck.
Abby assured the newman their races were no longer enemies. She told him her name.
The newman said, “I’m Eo. Is he close?”
“Who?”
“The king. I woke hearing his call. He must be close.”
“Wait,” Abby said, squinting at the overgrown shack, “is this Star and Nick’s house?”
“You know about Star and Nick?”
“I listened to a story about them…”
Inside the shack, a voice. Abby asked the newman who was inside.
“Star is inside.”
Abby crouched into a tunnel through the brambles and emerged in the shack’s sparse kitchen. A black girl about eight years old, her hair in pigtails, wearing a bright yellow dress, sat on an easy chair in the middle of the living room, staring straight ahead. Abby slowly approached and said, “Star?”
The voice that came out of the girl belonged to the long-dead woman. She said, “We were mostly happy otherwise, the three of us. Little Nick, Marc, and me. During the day my husband was friendly and intelligent and witty. He worked hard for us, drafting. He loved Nick. But at night he spoke in a demon’s voice, in a language of hisses and barks. Nick, he slept through everything. At first I’d wake Marc and he’d get angry and confused and deny he’d been talking in his sleep. He spent the long summer nights and weekends working on the new house. And it seemed the more he worked on it the more he talked in his sleep in that strange language. The tone of his voice changed in his sleep, became more menacing, more vehement. Marc would lie in bed shaking while he spoke, spitting out words, cold sweat dripping off his body. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to convince him to see a doctor but he refused.
“One day I checked a tape recorder out from the library, brought it home, and put it under the bed. That night when his crazy talking started I recorded twenty minutes of it. But I didn’t tell him about it right away. I waited a couple days then got up the courage to take the tape to the University of Washington, where I met with a linguist. She had done some research into the phenomenon of speaking in tongues and I thought she might be able to shed some light on what Marc was doing. I played the tape for her and she just looked puzzled, then asked if she could borrow the tape and play it for some of the other professors in her department. I figured she’d never get back to me. For weeks after that I continued to go to bed every night terrified. I read about night terrors and anything I could get my hands on at the library that had to do with sleep.
“Finally I’d had enough and recorded Marc again, this time for about half an hour. The next night after we’d put Nick down for bed I played the tape for him. First he looked confused, then shocked, then afraid. I didn’t tell him I’d already shared the tape with someone at UW. Then I got a letter from the woman—we had no phone—asking that I come to the university as soon as I could. She wanted to introduce me to somebody.
“On the drizzly day I showed up on the campus, the linguist introduced me to someone named Dr. Pliss. A Native American man, he specialized in recording and preserving languages that were on their way to extinction. We met in his office over coffee and he seemed excited. He said that he was pretty sure Marc was speaking in a language that hadn’t been spoken in over a hundred years, one that belonged to a tribe whose last known members were slaughtered in eastern Washington in the late 1800s near Lake Chelan. Dr. Pliss was a broad, heavy man but his voice wavered as he spoke about how rare and miraculous this was. He only knew about the language because a missionary had written a document in 1890 in which he instructed other missionaries how to communicate with the tribe.
“This was all fascinating but I wanted to know what Marc was saying. That’s when the linguist—sorry, I can’t remember her name—and Dr. Pliss looked at one another in a strange way. Then Dr. Pliss pulled a piece of paper from his file drawer and slid it across his desk to me. It was filled with words in all capital letters. They said: KILL THE BOY, HE WILL BRING ABOUT THE LAST DAY, HE WILL DESTROY THIS WORLD, KILL HIM NOW, KILL THE CHILD, KILL HIM BEFORE HE BRINGS DARKNESS AND SUFFERING, YOU MUST KILL HIM, YOU MUST STOP HIM BEFORE HE BRINGS ABOUT THE DEATH, STOP HIM STOP HIM, HE BRINGS DEATH, KILL HIM, KILL YOUR SON, KILL YOUR SON NOW, KILL HIM NOW, KILL KILL KILL HIM, YOU DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME, KILL THE BOY, KILL THE SON, KILL HIM STOP HIM NOW.
“The linguist led me out of the building, supporting me as I stumbled down the hall and out onto Red Square. I was terrified to go home but my terror for my own safety was nothing compared to my fear that my husband was going to hurt my boy.
“When I got home, Marc was sitting in the living room holding the letter from the linguist. He asked what it was. In ten minutes our world unraveled. I told him about the tape I had sent to UW, and of the conversation I’d just had with Dr. Pliss. I told him about what the transcript said. Marc was furious. I watched his face waver between fear and rage. The shack became too small to contain his emotions, so he went outside. I sat on the couch and cried. A while later I heard the echoes of hammering and I looked out the window to see him pounding nails into plywood, working on the interior walls of the new house. He worked well into the night. I went to bed and lay awake waiting for him. When he finally came to bed, smelling of sawdust and sweat, I tried to touch him but he shrugged me off. I listened to him fall asleep and that night he didn’t talk in his sleep for the first time in a long time.
“The next morning Marc got up early and went out to work on the house again before he went to his job. I walked Nick to the bus stop, returned home, and made some tea. As I pulled the teabag from the cup I heard Marc cry out. I raced outside, knowing he’d been hurt. When I found him he was lying unconscious on the concrete foundation. He’d fallen from the second story. Blood was coming out of the back of his head, pooling on the foundation.
“In the hour I watched my husband die I lost my mind. I could have gotten in the truck and driven to the nearest house with a phone. I could have run down the driveway and flagged the first passing car. But I chose to stand and do nothing and let him die. I felt for his breath with the back of my hand. I felt it coming from his nostrils at first, in little bursts. The halo of blood grew wider. Then his breath stopped and his skin grew cold.
“I chose my son over my husband. As I watched Nick grow I remembered Marc’s dark prophecy in the language of a long- extinct people. I locked his shedful of silly plans. My world grew dark and small. Nick was all I had, my only reason to live. Until one day his friend, who’d suffered the loss of his whole family, became my lover. For a brief moment our darknesses canceled each other out. Then Luke had to leave.
“Nick returned home from time to time as I became an old woman. He spoke of a glorious new age. He barked and paced, drunk on philosophy and the future of man.
“I just wanted to protect my little boy. I didn’t want—please, I didn’t want those horrible words to be true. Please don’t let them be true.”
As the little girl sobbed, Abby quietly retreated from the shack, rattled, convinced in her gut that this testimony was not hers to witness. Why had she, of all people, been privy to the story of the onset of the FUS? And what ever became of the recording she’d made at the Seaside Love Palace? Rather than illumination, all this information about Luke, Nick, and Star promised an ever-encroaching darkness. It was as though the very thing preventing her from acting on these stories was her inability to remain herself. She kept slipping, lightly superimposed over her own body, the borders of her self and her physical form not quite jibing. While snooping on other people’s lives, her own had come under increasing, unnerving, and invisible scrutiny.
Eo was gone. Up ahead, through the trees, came street noises, honks, a river of rubber and asphalt. Between the trunks of trees materialized the gray faces of buildings. Abby stepped from the woods onto Broadway, across the street from Lincoln Center, and rubbed her eyes.
Later, at home with bouillabaisse and a sandwich purchased from a deli around the corner from her apartment, Abby watched some early films by Thomas Edison on Sylvie’s ancient television set. A man played a violin for fourteen seconds. An elephant, electrocuted. A steam train charged the camera, sending early-twentieth-century audiences scurrying for cover. Rightly, she thought.
In Central Park Abby watched children. Gleefully unaware that they inhabited a simulation of a once-vibrant city, the children appeared to understand that this was their world to take. The adults, far less so, as they meandered paths and contemplated the skyline from benches and hills, enraptured by the illogic of it all. Abby overheard gossip about some of the older people, folks who’d actually lived in or visited the original Manhattan, reduced to inconsolable weeping, begging to be returned to Seattle, away from this reminder of the greed and weaponry and genocides that had once infected the world. These elderly visitors to the city were doubly troubled at the sight of newmans busily at work, the former enemies of human beings now rebuilding and making amends. That the newmans had developed a sense of altruism struck them as a colossal hoax. Abby sat on a bench with a bag of popcorn and watched one FUS survivor go insane in front of her eyes, clawing at his face and screaming of terrors inexpressible. A couple citizens representing police officers escorted him from the park.
Woo-jin, meanwhile, found himself in a penthouse on Park Avenue, in one of the homes of Isaac Pope, a residence the late billionaire had never even actually visited. The closet was stocked with wing tips, French-cuffed dress shirts, tailored suits, and a row of pressed fantasy-themed T-shirts shrugging on wooden hangers. In the bathroom various scented things in bottles stood on polished marble shelves. After a shower of confusing shampoos, Woo-jin found a suit that fit and did the best he could to make his face look like a real face. Clothed, back in the master bedroom, he nudged a door that opened onto a hallway lined with art he didn’t have the patience to glom on to brain-wise. In a library, hardback techno-thrillers squatted in exotic hardwood bookcases. A couple of replicated contracts sat unsigned on the desk. Woo-jin wandered to the kitchen, where he paused to eat some things like sandwiches and puddings, then into a living area with an enormous movie screen. He thought of how less cramped Patsy would have been in here. Patsy growing eyeballs in her armpits, braying for gingersnap cookie dough. Smushing his face to a window and watching cars far below, Woo-jin whispered her name. After a while he pulled his face from the glass, leaving two dripping patches of tears, then wearily pushed his cart laden with the pizza box manuscript to the elevator.
On the street buildings moaned, harboring their captive ghosts. Woo-jin passed the Met, its doors open to a psychic blast furnace. Disturbed, he jogged across the street to get out of range of all the art howling from inside. Finally he found what he suspected he was searching for, a lonely and molested-looking phone booth. For some reason this one had been allowed to remain standing, an upright coffin reminder of how people used to conduct conversations while immobilized in public. A Yellow Pages sandwiched in a taco-like plastic shell dangled from the low shelf. He picked it up and looked for the Ls. Here: Literary Agents: See Agents, Literary. He found the Agents, Literary. Was anyone else going to need this section? Guiltily, Woo-jin tore the pages out of the book and stuffed them inside his coat, then hustled as fast as he could from the scene of his theft, pushing his rattly cart, until he was sure no cops were on his tail.
For days Woo-jin pushed his manuscript, from the Upper East Side to Tribeca, from the Financial District to SoHo to Midtown, proceeding alphabetically through the list of literary agents. In every instance, all the way into the D section, he found empty offices. Apparently the newmans weren’t in a hurry to assign anyone to represent former representatives of novelists and memoirists. He parked his cart in Washington Square Park, revising, slicing through whole sections with his Sharpie. It seemed that while he had been otherwise engaged, his book had begun to fall apart. It wasn’t that he’d accidentally shuffled the order of the pizza boxes—which, as it turned out, had actually improved the thing—but that the thoughts captured in it appeared to belong to someone far stupider than he. Overnight he’d lost confidence in his capacity to write the instructions he’d been assigned to write. Who the hell was he to tell anyone how to love people?
A parade tumbled through the park. A shambling thing, composed of salvaged clothes hanging from the angled frames of newmans, some of them playing instruments: battered brass and wind, a violin, an untuned guitar that struggled to assemble a chord. They looked beaten down, these unenthused servants of humanity, as if they’d been dry-humping existence to death. The instruments conspired to produce an off-key dirge and Woo-jin came to see that it was a funeral, with six pallbearers bearing aloft an aluminum casket. One of the newmans peeled off from the rest and slumped onto the bench beside Woo-jin. She sported a shaved head, fidgety hands, and something in her back that repeatedly clicked as if broken.
“Who died?” Woo-jin asked.
“Our great leader Stella Artaud! An old soldier from the FUS is capturing and torturing and killing my kind! Oh, how terrible, my heart can hardly bear it! Alas! A great violence has descended upon our creation! Oh, it’s horrible! I thought our races had resolved their differences. I thought we lived in peace! But still, oh! The horrors persist!” Artificial tears spurted from her ducts as from an overactive windshield washer on a car. The newman shuddered, and a piece of her face fell off. Frantically, she began picking at parts of her body, taking off a digit here, a chunk of fake flesh there, yanking wires from her gut, sensors from her skull, and in less than a minute all that remained was a grief-induced pile of components, not a single part connected to any other part.
The funeral passed and deposited in its wake a raggy heap that resolved itself into a man. As the man shuffled toward Woo-jin his very self seemed to generate garbage—a trail of soda cans and fish skeletons and fast-food wrappers and horseflies. His head looked like a giant beard with some eyeballs thrown in as a bonus. He took a seat beside Woo-jin to offer a few moments of pointless dialogue, all the while generating trash, which accumulated in piles around him, from the folds of his smelly garments. He eyed Woo-jin’s manuscript-on-wheels somewhat skeptically, as if it were a piece of public art that tested the boundaries of collective community standards. His filthy hand emerged from his rags. Woo-jin shook it. The man said his name was Glyph.
“So have you figured out the deal with this place, yet?” Glyph said. When Woo-jin shook his head, Glyph rolled his eyes. “They’re building this joint just to tear it down again, man. As soon as the last brick is laid, the whole shitty thing becomes one giant history lesson. They’re luring us humans in here so they can screw us over once again, getting it all populated and pretty as a picture before they reenact the FUS. Then they’ll rebuild it again and reenact it all over, on and on into the end of civilization. Get out while you can, brother.” A half-empty can of creamed corn fell out of Glyph’s pants and rolled along the cobbles. “What do you have going on here? Some kind of artwork?”
“It’s supposed to be a book. About how to love people,” Woo-jin said. At that moment the clouds opened overhead like they’d been gutted with a filleting knife. Desperately he pushed the cart, searching for an awning somewhere to protect the manuscript from the rain. Within seconds his fancy new clothes were soaked through. Suddenly the world went slapstick. Woo-jin slipped on a turkey bone jettisoned from Glyph’s garments and the cart teetered, then spilled its contents on the ground. On his hands and knees, Woo-jin tried to gather the pizza boxes with their words bleeding before his eyes. Here was his chapter about loving foster sisters who demand cookie-dough ice cream at two in the morning. Here were some sentences about washing dishes, about how not to eat your own tongue, about finding yourself ignored and alone in a trailer hauled into the sky.
By the time he was able to muscle the cart under the awning of a bodega the rain had lifted, leaving rainbows in its wake. Woo-jin pawed through the pile of wet cardboard looking for something salvageable but the words had turned into inky puddles and the pages had begun to disintegrate. As the manuscript fell apart, as the words grew more unintelligible, so too became the ideas those words had once propped up. How were people supposed to love one another? Woo-jin hadn’t a clue. All he had was his love for one person, the flawed, hideous human being his foster sister had become. How could loving someone as nasty as Patsy help him draft a treatise on loving anyone else? He remembered the message his future brain had left for him, that it was his responsibility to provide the Last Dude with reading material. What would a guy at civilization’s end need to know about loving people? And why would he need a guide book if there was no one around to love? In the rain, with the manuscript turning to mush, it came to Woo-jin what he had to write. All this time the book’s title had misled him. It wasn’t supposed to be about how to love people. It would be about how, at one time, we loved people. Woo-jin imagined the decrepit old man at his campfire, eating from the refrigerator’s never-ending bounty, his messages spread on the desert floor far below. To this audience of one, Woo-jin would write that there used to be human beings here. We used to love one another. Or we tried to love, we wanted to love, but we kept screwing up. We stumbled toward love but fear led us into shadows. When we found the capacity to love those who’d wronged us, those who seemed most undeserving of our love, in those delicate moments, marginalized by the sweep of history, our future appeared almost hopeful. His book, Woo-jin realized, would be the only thing telling the Last Dude that he too was loved. This distant retard’s voice recorded on brittle paper would be the only source of light in that final man’s heart. Whatever he’d done to earn this fate, this eternal hauling of rocks in a vast waste, Woo-jin would assure him that his suffering wasn’t for nothing, that as a human being he still deserved love, despite the fact that anyone who could possibly love him was long dead.
A voice came through Sylvie’s phone.
“I’ve got your boyfriend,” the man rasped. “Let me give you the address.”
Half an hour later, facing a theoretical New Jersey, Abby walked briskly across the planks of a pier toward a squat structure, the temporary office of a building contractor. She entered the building without knocking, squinting to adjust to the dark.
This kind of room had appeared many times in movies. Empty but for a chair in the center, with a battered man tied to it. Scribbly explosions of blood spattered the floor. Abby didn’t immediately recognize that this was Rocco, his face was so fucked-up. A figure stepped out of a shadow, a man seemingly composed of three bodies. His head was gray and old, sorrowful, unblinking. This head rested on the torso of a bodybuilder, a shirtless gristle of muscles, veins, and scars. This torso in turn sat atop a pair of legs that moved in spastic jerks, almost dancing toward her.
“This is your boyfriend?” Skinner asked.
Abby nodded.
“Should I let him go?”
Rocco was unconscious, his chin against his chest, his breath going in and out of his body in irregular sputters and coughs.
“What did you do to him?”
“He’s a DJ. He’s got hundreds of embodiments. Including you, before the monks snipped your connection.”
“He’s not a DJ. He’s just a Bionet technician.”
In the anime version, Skinner touched a key on a remote, bringing banks of monitors to life on every wall, the room’s darkness bleached by surveillance-camera shots of human figures going about their routines. This didn’t prove anything, really. It could have been footage of anybody. Here and there a person sat motionless in a chair or at a table. Others walked in circles, did jumping jacks, pounded their heads repeatedly against walls. Skinner pointed at a monitor displaying Abby sitting on her chesterfield, watching television. “These are just some of his embodiments,” Skinner said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Watch this.” Skinner fiddled with the remote some more, muttering grumpily at the buttons. For a second the screens went blank, then sequences popped open, shots of this room with the chair and Rocco more or less confined to it. Each monitor ran a different clip culled from hours of torture. In some Rocco was conscious and talking, or not talking. In others he screamed and writhed and passed out from the pain. Abby shielded her eyes but the violence came through the audio, the smack of flesh getting rearranged, bones snapping beneath muscles, the high-pitched panic of dental extraction. Bile curled in her throat. She turned her eyes to Skinner, expecting to see the smugness of a torturer, but finding his face defeated.
“I inflict violence on the world,” Skinner said.
“You’re a monster.”
“That’s about right.”
“Did you get the information you wanted from him?”
“He gave me a name, an address. I have no way of knowing if it means anything.”
“I still love him.”
“That may be true.”
“You think I should hate him because I was his embodiment.”
“I don’t care what you feel about him,” Skinner said. “I was just doing him a courtesy. Someone was going to have to retrieve the guy after I finished with him. He gave me your name.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “You think I do this because I’m strong and you’re weak? I do this because it’s my only recourse. I don’t enjoy this.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo for you.”
Skinner fiddled some more with the remote and all the monitors went blank except for one, in which Rocco, close-up, blood gushing out of his nose, spilled the beans. Off-camera, like a mobster-hunting detective from the world of noir, Skinner asked who he worked for. “Mr. Kirkpatrick. There have always been the slaves and the enslavers. The passives and the actives. I’m just a technician. I don’t pick the slaves. I get assignments. I establish their routines. When they wake up. When they eat. When they sleep. When they fuck. What they buy.”
The off-camera Skinner in the clip said, “I’m going to ask again why they took my boy.”
“There’s been talk there’s a clone baby with super-admin privileges. Not good. With super-admin privileges you can take down the whole ’net. You can lock out all the DJs or turn admins into embodiments.” Rocco spat out a gob of blood. “There’s only one super-admin, and that’s Kirkpatrick.”
A new clip. Rocco with his head cocked a different way, making a noise like laughing or crying, hard to tell which. “I saved Abby from getting arrested because I thought she was cute,” he said. “I wrote a program that kicked up her hormones to make her fall in love with me. Then I got tired of her. That fucker Bickle needed someone to babysit Kylee Asparagus so I volunteered her. While she was away we ran routines on the whole city. A massive orchestration. Every citizen an embodiment, their daily lives planned out for them without their knowledge. Just think of what you can make an economy do. Then she returned before she was supposed to. We stuck her in the apartment watching TV.”
Another clip, more violence. Coin-sized pieces of skin removed from the surface of Rocco’s body. Skinner turned it off midscream, then pulled a Bionet transmitter from his pocket and tossed it to Abby. “Most of the heavy organ damage has already been fixed,” he said.
“What address did he give you?”
“I’m not telling you. I don’t want to put you in any danger.”
“You’re a relic. You should have died in the FUS.”
“You’re probably right,” Skinner sighed. “Have you ever thought about why the world had to end? That once we hit nine billion people living on this rock, the only honorable thing to do was for most of us to kill ourselves off? And yet somehow the likes of you and me survived. Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He pranced, skipped, and twirled his way to the exit. Abby peeled away the duct tape binding Rocco’s hands and legs and pressed his bloody face to her white shirt.
“You’re safe now,” she whispered.
“Now?” Rocco wheezed. “Now I’m definitely not safe.”