Ever since childhood, Abby Fogg had wondered why she was herself instead of somebody else. She’d lie on her bedroom floor staring at the circle within a circle within a circle of the ceiling light fixture, freaking herself out with the fact that she was Abby Fogg. And while this Abby Fogg accumulated thoughts and memories, went to college, fell in love with archival films and a man named Rocco Petrone, the suspicion persisted that there’d been some mistake, that somehow Abby Fogg had been dropped into the wrong body. Since the age of five or six, Abby had suspected she’d been born in the wrong era, aching as she watched the grain of early-twentieth-century footage. But the previous century wouldn’t have her, with its artists’ salons and movie palaces and celebrity sex tapes. Nope. Abby’d been born into this era yet to be named, in the years that followed that dark period known as the Age of Fucked Up Shit.
Nowadays Abby rose early to make breakfast and spy on her neighbours from the Vancouver condo she shared with Rocco. Even though the place had a view of Granville Island, she preferred to sit in her undies in the dining nook, where she could read the news and glance through horizontal blinds angled at the precise diagonality to allow her a view into a condo across the courtyard and three stories down. The occupants of this condo were about the same age as Abby and Rocco, maybe a little older, not yet sinking into their thirties. The couple bore the same demographic characteristics as Abby’s parents: she Asian, him sorta Latinoish Caucasian. The woman usually rose first, around 6:30 a.m., mounted a green fit ball in her panties and tank top, drank coffee from an ugly brown mug, caught up on email. The guy rose about half an hour later, shirtless, a landing strip of chest hair marking his sternum. He shuffled into the living/work space scratching himself through plaid pajama bottoms, planted a kiss on his girlfriend’s neck, and performed a few push-ups and stomach crunches on the rug. The woman worked at home, doing something design-related. The man left around 8:30 for a job that didn’t require him to wear a tie but sometimes he wore a collared shirt and a sport coat with jeans. Abby suspected these were days in which the man met with clients, whoever they might be.
This morning Abby watched the couple while periodically glancing at job listings on her laptop. An English muffin sat half-eaten on a Fiestaware saucer beside a glass residued with grapefruit juice. She punched “archivist” and “data retrieval” and “digital forensics” into the engine.
Across the alley three stories down the young woman sprang from her fit ball to answer the phone. She retrieved the phone from a kitchen counter Abby couldn’t see, then walked back to the computer desk, inspecting the fronds of a nonnative perennial while she spoke. She was still in her underwear. Abby squinted to read her lips but the woman was too far away. The lips looked like a little pulsating blob of ochre in a milky female face.
At no point in their three years together had Abby confided to Rocco that she suspected she was supposed to be somebody else, mostly because he appeared to love her as she was. She doubted he ever woke up with the odd feeling that he lived in the wrong body and wrong time. He appeared devoid of insecurities, particularly when expressing ostensible insecurities, as if he knew he was supposed to have them and felt compelled to share fake ones lest he appear as confident and well-adjusted as he truly was.
The woman had a snazzier computer than Abby’s. She collected expensive art books. Sometimes the couple used chopsticks to eat things that weren’t Japanese.
Rocco entered the living space. Like the man across the alley, he tended to be lax about shaving. His broad face went through several test expressions.
“You forgot to make coffee again?” Rocco said.
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay, I wanted tea.”
“You have a test today?”
“I have a test today.”
Behind her Rocco assembled the apparatus for turning dried leaves into flavored water. Three stories down, the young woman was off the phone, leaning over her fit ball to finish another email before she darted to the bedroom to presumably shower and get dressed. Abby wished the couple’s bedroom blinds were open. She wanted to see them doin’ it. Or at least nekkid. Every time she looked away, to her computer or to the clock on the wall, she wondered if this might be the moment the woman was surreptitiously flashing a breast, or the man was taking his penis out of his pj’s to pluck an irritating bit of lint from the tip. She wanted to break into their apartment, run her hands over the surfaces they took for granted, smell their disgusting toothbrushes. It terrified her, this voyeurism, but it was a candy-coated feeling, something she could sneak when Rocco wasn’t looking.
Watching people.
Watching people who might not even be people at all.
Rocco said, “Some guy called for you last night when you were out. I got his name and number.” He thumbed the Post-it note to Abby’s forehead.
Abby peeled it off. “I don’t know anyone named Dirk Bickle,” she said, “Pickle?”
“He said it was about a job. You want tea, right?”
“What kind of job?”
“Okay, let me tell you how the conversation went. Me: Hello? Guy on phone: Is Abby Fogg available? Me: No, may I ask who’s calling? Guy on phone: My name is Dirk Bickle. I’m calling with regard to a job opening. Me: Sure, let me get your number. Guy on phone: My number is, etc., etc. Thanks, good-bye.”
“You’re making Darjeeling, right?”
“I’m making the kind with the frog on the box.”
“I hate that kind.”
Gently mocking: “Who do you think you are, Ms. Fogg? Telling me what kind of tea to make?”
“I hate the frog tea.”
“That’s why I made the Darjeeling.” He set the cup before her. “I know your likes and dislikes better than you do.”
“Like that’s an accomplishment.”
“You hate olives, you dream in black and white. I’m the world’s most esteemed authority on Abby Fogg.”
“I know you, too.”
“You have no idea who I am.”
“Is this Rocco Petrone guy not a Bionet dork? Does he not obsess over cycling and artisanal lagers?”
“You could be describing anyone.”
“Does he not like it when I put my finger up his—”
“I really wanted coffee.”
“Aren’t you late for school?”
“It’s Thursday, right?”
“It’s Friday.”
“Merde.”
Rocco stumbled through the condo slapping on clothing, quickly kissed Abby half on the lips and grabbed his bike helmet on the way out. Somehow this was the same dude who knew his way around the human brain like a motherfucker.
“You’re right,” Abby said when he was gone. “I have no idea who you are.”
Abby poked digits into a keypad. Dirk Bickle answered on the first ring. A dog’s bark echoed in the background. They arranged to meet on Granville Island later that morning.
She passed through the steeled angles of Vancouver, clouds of falafel smoke and deep-fried exhaust. Near the pier a couple bike cops knelt on the sidewalk getting a Bionet reading from a passed-out homeless guy. He’d soon find himself in a detox center downtown where he would get wrung out like a dishcloth, be given a vitamin-rich meal, and suffer through some boilerplate therapyish remonstrations delivered by a bored staffer. The next day he’d get dumped back onto the concrete grid where he’d hit up a dealer for a decryption code to illegally download painkillers. A newman nanny maneuvered a double-wide stroller around the prone addict. A billboard featured a man’s head, his hair all Einsteined-out, word-bubbling the message, “Holy Shit! Telepathy! For Real!” A seagull bashed its beak into some spilled popcorn. At the pier Abby hopped onto a water taxi and five minutes later stepped onto Granville Island, a maze of art galleries and fruit stands. Café Lumiere was at the end of a twisty walkway between a toy store and an herbalist. Abby ordered her usual and pulled a chair up next to a framed photograph of a smug-looking Georges Méliès.
An old man sat down across from her. Black jacket, white dress shirt, no tie, hair spiky white, tanned face drooping down at the corners a bit. He removed his sunglasses and placed them in his pocket. An old guy. Obviously a FUS survivor.
“Hi, Abby. I’m Dirk. Thanks for meeting me. This is one of your haunts?”
“My early-films club meets here.”
“Before my time, even. I read your paper on the restoration of Edison kinetoscopes. I won’t even attempt an intelligent comment. It went right over my head. I’m curious why you’re not working in Hollywood.”
“I’m staying in Vancouver until my boyfriend finishes grad school.”
“Rocco, is it? Guy I talked to? Studying to be a Bionet engineer?”
“Yes.”
“You want to know why I’ve contacted you. Here it is. I represent a client, another FUS survivor who lives in Victoria in this grand old hotel. Kylee Asparagus. She’s been holed up there for over a century and has accumulated a big old archive. Books, periodicals, digital content going back to the late twentieth century. A lot of it beyond repair.”
“You’d be surprised,” Abby said.
“Well, so right, that’s why I wanted to get in touch with you, Abby. The organization I represent has been interested in these archives for some time but Ms. Asparagus keeps turning down our offers for a full audit. Until last week, when a water pipe burst and destroyed a lot of her records. Her people cleaned it up as best they could but there are certain pieces of digital content in states that may or may not be salvageable. USB drives, DVDs, diskettes, videocassette tape. We need you to assess the damage, write a report, and take the steps necessary to save what can be saved.”
“I’m going to need a team. I know some people—”
Bickle shook his head. “You’re going to have to fly solo. Kylee Asparagus won’t have a team crawling over her property.”
“Why are you interested in these archives? How will I know what kinds of content to prioritize?”
“Before the FUS I worked for an organization called the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. We thought of ourselves as an incubator for geniuses. I was one of the scouts who travelled around the country looking for youngsters who fit our profile, who exhibited potential to become innovative business leaders, artists, scientists. In the early 1990s I identified a boy living outside Seattle named Nick Fedderly. I recruited him and he joined the academy. His best friend was this guy named Luke Piper. At some point Luke was interviewed and we have reason to believe there’s a copy of it in Ms. Asparagus’s archives.”
“You want me to find the interview while I’m sorting through the mess.”
“We’re prepared to pay off your student loans.”
“Why is this interview so important?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Who conducted the interview?”
“We honestly don’t know.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“I still represent Mr. Kirkpatrick.”
“What if I don’t find the interview?”
“We’ll pay you the same amount for trying. Oh, and by the way, their names are Steve and Winnie. He’s twenty-nine, she’s twenty-seven. He’s a consultant for a company that specializes in stealth-brand penetration. She’s a designer, as you’ve probably guessed from the kind of work she does on the computer. They’ve been together three years, moved in just before you and Rocco moved to the apartment across the street. She’s half-Japanese, half-Korean. He’s Russian, British, French, Spanish. They met at a professional event, a conference. They both love sushi and Cajun food. His favorite author is Peter Ng, hers is Yasutaka Tsutsui. At home they listen to late-twentieth-century jazz and world music. They typically make love about three times a week. She’s on a Bionet fertility plan. He’s color-blind, wears contact lenses to correct it. When they go to movies they prefer lighter comedies. They’re saving up for a trip to Italy. I can go on like this for a long time if you want.”
“You’ve been spying on me.”
“How is this information about your neighbours about you?” Bickle said. “I understand people like you, Abby. I know what it means to desire another person’s life. Don’t be embarrassed. Your interests are why we approached you. I think you’ve got enough information to make a decision. Call me when you’ve thought it over.”
Bickle stood and stretched, then disappeared into a Native art shop. Abby checked her wrist for her pulse. Seemed high and what the Chinese doctor she consulted would have called “slippery.” She left her coffee unfinished and let her body go through its routine of visiting her favourite shop, the one that sold old music and movies on formats only geeks like her bothered with anymore.
All her student loans, paid off!
That night Abby watched an episode of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin. She hated herself for liking it, and prided herself on recognizing that she hated it. This was the opening episode to the second season, the establishing sequences padded with expository dialogue. A quick flash of credits then a fade-in to reveal two women reviewing a contract in the back of a limousine. One woman wore a powder-blue pantsuit and matching lipstick, blonde hair a hive held aloft with chopsticks, permanent eyeliner tattooed onto the ridges of her eyelids. This was Henrietta Stoner, agent for Third Eye Communications. (Nobody on the show ever explained what Third Eye actually did. Some minor character in season two, episode three, opined that the organization “made stuff happen metaphysically,” whatever that was supposed to mean.) Henrietta penned an X next to each line Stella was to sign. Stella Artaud wore a tiredly sexist anime getup: dog collar, black push-up bra, latex skirt, stiletto boots. Both of her arms up to the elbows were covered in tattooed reproductions of Gustave Doré’s woodcuts from the illustrated Inferno, souls in torment in the inner ring of the seventh circle. A close-up of Stella’s pen leaving her signature on the contract, ink seeping from glossy to matte black.
Henrietta. “When you arrive there will likely be some rough suffocation play. Just pretend you can’t breathe. The client may knock you around a bit. You need to make sure to react appropriately, crying out, gasping. It’s important that you approximate, as closely as you can, a typical human response to consensual sadism.”
“I’m a professional.”
“Intercourse may occur at this point. You should do what you can to prevent him from ejaculating. He will want to ejaculate later, into your dead body or dismembered head or neck cavity.”
Stella initialed the line.
Henrietta. “At this point he may want to start dismembering you. Most likely this will begin with the fingers and toes, and move on up the extremities. You are expected to react with appropriate terror and beg for your life.”
Stella. “I can do that.”
Henrietta. “Then he will likely decapitate you. Please, at this point, if you could, feign death. As I mentioned, it may occur to him to copulate with the orifices of your dismembered head. You are encouraged to reduce your body temperature and remain still, human-like, while this occurs.”
“Not a problem.” Stella stared out the window. The art director had done a pretty decent job re-creating Central Park. The limo pulled up to an apartment building across the street from a CGI Guggenheim. It was raining, a cinematic drizzle originating from sprinklers above. Stella stood for a moment in the rain, staring up at the penthouse as the doorman opened the door. The camera followed her gaze to a shadow of a man who was watching her from one of the high windows.
The elevator doors opened into the penthouse. Stella emerged in slo-mo, stilettos Foleying hardwood. Three of the client’s assistants appeared, each of indeterminate gender and with a shaved head, monk-like in loose-fitting garments. Eunuchs. Quickly they towelled Stella off and took her handbag and vinyl jacket. One clasped her hand and led her to a sitting room. The penthouse was done up as one might imagine the digs of a 1970s porn magazine publisher. A lot of neo-Classical faux Greek shit, ornate tapestries, chandeliers, marble columns, fountains.
Abby pulled her knees up to her chin. This next part chilled her every time.
The client appeared from behind a shoji screen. A young white guy, boringly handsome, wearing a white cotton bathrobe, tan, confident. “You’re the new one,” he said.
“I am here to fulfill your pleasures,” Stella said.
“My name is Quinn Hunt. You’ve no doubt heard of Hunt Investments, owner of practically all the world’s energy sources?”
Stella was silent.
Hunt continued. “Of course you haven’t. You never do. The last time you were here I asked you the same question. I got the same blank look. Tell me, Stella, how many times have you been here?”
“This is my first time.”
“Well, good. I’m glad they’ve got you thinking that. I want to show you something.”
Hunt waved his hand and a screen descended from the ceiling. With a couple more motions images appeared. Here was Hunt mounting Stella, or a previous version of Stella, on a plush canopied bed.
“We had fun the last time you were here. See?”
More pornographic images. A close-up of the in-the-present Stella’s expressionless face as the reflections swam over her corneas. The camera remained on her as, off-screen, the recording of her previous self cried out, the sound of a cane striking artificial flesh, begging, more beating. A close-up of Quinn Hunt’s cold face. “Here comes the fun part.” The buzz of an electric blade, screams at a higher pitch. A close-up again of Stella’s face, unbudged from its blankness.
Hunt. “You wonder why I’m like this. Why I keep bringing you out here to abuse you. I was designed this way. I was an experiment. They isolated the serial-killer profile and engineered me in utero in the lab. But they also engineered incredible health and an astounding mathematical mind. Someone who could swim freely in the world of high finance. Someone with real earning potential. But my pleasure centers are wired to light up in the presence of others’ suffering. And they get really lit up when I’m inflicting that suffering. And when I’m lucky enough to kill someone, why, then it’s a state of pure nirvana. Do I wish it were another way? Certainly. I curse these pleasures! I pass people on the street and observe their uncomplicated motivations, their children and possessions. I wish I could be one of them. My life would be so much less demanding if I could get off on what everybody else gets off on. It’s a hassle bringing you out here every week. It’s expensive. It’s become a chore. But it’s something I’ve been designed to do. And since killing flesh-humans involves breaking laws, I have to make do with the likes of you.”
The eunuchs rushed to disrobe Hunt and Stella. Soon the two stood naked before one another, Hunt’s cock erect. The camera lingered on their bodies. Hunt took a step forward. Then a quickly edited series of shots. Stella reached to her crotch. An outburst of brass on the soundtrack. The eyes of a eunuch going wide with shock. Stella whipping out a short dagger she’d smuggled inside herself. Hunt, startled. The dagger flashing, then buried in one of Hunt’s eye sockets. Screaming. The eunuchs opening their robes to reveal machine pistols and—why not?—samurai swords. Stella whirling naked through the air, landing roundhouse kicks. Hunt screaming, twitching on the floor. Stella having some difficulty retrieving the dagger, as it appeared to be stuck in Hunt’s eye, having to brace her foot on his neck to get the proper leverage while one-handedly jiujitsuing the shit out of those sword-wielding eunuch guys. The knife slurped out. Stella swiped it like a debit card across Hunt’s throat. A blood puddle spread across the floor. Close-up of a eunuch lifting his machine pistol, getting off a smattering of shots, a round ripping through Stella’s bicep, revealing the machinery and circuitry within. Stella backflipping, snagging one of the eunuch’s swords while midair and upside down, then decapitating all three with a single swipe of the blade. An alarm. Stella snagging a couple machine pistols just in time to blast the security guards appearing in a nearby doorway, globules of flesh spattering oil paintings of landed gentry.
Stella turned to the camera. “The newman uprising is on.”
Then, firing both machine pistols and running backward, Stella propelled herself out the nearest window and some twenty stories down, still firing, the angry faces above screaming their threats to her bodily self, a body she didn’t necessarily need because they could just give her a new one anyway. These questions getting somewhat obscured by the muzzle-lit ejaculations of fist-held firepower. Then through the sunroof of a waiting limousine, landing naked, covered in blood and glass, next to Dr. Uri Borden, played by supernaturally handsome Neethan F. Jordan.
Commercials.
Rocco returned after midnight smelling like his bike commute. After his shower he crawled into bed alongside Abby, who slept and dreamed of horses. He woke her by touching a nipple. She clambered into semiconsciousness and asked how studying had gone. He mumbled something and kissed her. They were supposed to make love now, this is what this meant. She spooned her back into him. He slid his hand over her belly, letting his pinkie rest in her belly button.
“I got offered a job,” Abby said, then sleepily doled out the details, except for the part about Bickle knowing that she spied on their neighbours. Rocco gave her shoulder a little shake. “No more student loans. Wow. You’re going to take it, right?”
“I think so.”
“What is there to think about?”
Did Rocco have some secret reason for wanting her to leave for a few months? Some chick in the Bionetics department at UBC she didn’t know about? He kissed her again, and the brevity of the kiss communicated there’d be no lovemaking. She listened to his breathing as he entered sleep, precipitously, plunging into REM in under five minutes. Down there, in his dreams, he would continue studying, reviewing lecture notes and sometimes mumbling aloud about the amygdala or basolateral complex.
Rocco liked to say that cerebral Bionetic enhancement was the scalpel edge of the next stage of human evolution. Putting it in terms Abby could understand, he explained that the fuck-or-fight, R-complex reptilian brain had evolved first, then the limbic system with its anxieties and need for hugs, then the rational neocortex, which was now working to develop the next stage of cognition—the Bionetic neural extension. Each component of the triune model had reached a point when it started to understand what the species needed next and so invented its own neural progeny. Instinct demanded emotion, emotion demanded rationality, and rationality demanded… what, exactly? This was what Bionet engineers debated after hours while downing Labatts. Some speculated that the brain was in the process of internalizing the Internet. A fringe faction asserted that this new stage would answer philosophical and spiritual questions that had haunted humanity since at least the Greek dudes. His was a brain, Rocco liked to say, that thought about how to build a better brain. But brains could forget and, by extension, cultures could forget. Abby’s brain struggled to locate artifacts that had been lost by the collective brain of civilization, archaeologically scrambling into the washed-out past, while Rocco’s brain clawed its way into some sort of future. From this nexus of memory and yearning and logic sprang their attraction to one another. They totally made each other cognitively and biologically horny. Usually.
Abby cursed herself for not telling Rocco about what Bickle had said about the neighbours but now it was too late. If she brought it up now she’d be admitting that she was ashamed of her voyeuristic streak. She’d missed her chance to drop that bomb in an offhand way.
“No more student loans,” Abby whispered in the night. That was her excuse for taking the job. The real reason, the one she dared not articulate even to herself, was curiosity.
The city of Victoria appeared to have regressed in age, its green-built skyscrapers brought to heel, malls and parking garages and condominiums razed, all replaced by roiling wilds. What remained standing were the buildings worthy of the city’s heritage—the Parliament, some Tudor-style B&Bs, a replica of Shakespeare’s house. This was a city that had once aspired to London’s botanical gardens and double-decker buses but had negotiated with the tribal culture that preceded it, arriving at an aesthetic truce, a fusion of potlatch and high tea. Here and there totem poles and longhouses materialized from the Emily Carr mists rolling off the harbour, monuments of extinctions far more distant than the end times of recent memory.
Abby disembarked, suitcase in one hand, a duffel containing her tools in the other. Up ahead was the Empress Hotel, a stately, ivy-clad structure that smugly lorded over the geography as if glaciers had sculpted the harbour for its benefit alone. It used to be a hotel, anyway. In recent centuries it had survived fires, vandalism, drug-addicted architects who’d added wings and bunkers. A scorched tower stood proudly unbowed. Abby ascended to the lobby entrance, skipping every other step.
Once inside, a fit, middle-aged man with gouts of grey chest hair frothing under his chin, wearing a silver tracksuit with the words “Official Delegate” stitched upon the breast, wearily took her bags. “So the entertainment has finally arrived,” he said, sounding disappointed as he led her down the hall. “The lady of the house has been waiting impatiently. Federico #37? Costume, please?”
Abby scrambled to get her bearings. A floor of river rock, walls paneled in extinct woods, scents of imitation campfires, dried flowers, decaying leather chesterfields. The man led her through the lobby of distressed furniture, down a hall, and into a dressing room disheveled with clothing. Another man wearing an identical tracksuit—actually this looked to be a twin of the man currently pointing her in the direction of a changing screen—stumbled into the claustrophobia-inducing room wheeling a creaking rack laden with costumes.
“The bunny? I think it’s supposed to be the bunny,” the first man said. Federico #37 rifled through the clothes and pulled out a pink fake-fur bunny costume with a grinning head-piece.
“I think this is a mistake,” Abby said.
“The bunny costume usually is,” Federico #37 said.
“Oh, by the way, I’m Federico #18,” the first man said. “This is #37.”
“There are other Federicos?”
“Don’t get us started,” #37 said. “You’re going to want to get down to panties and bra. It gets hot inside these suckers.”
Abby ducked behind a screen and changed into the bunny costume. She took this for some kind of initiatory protocol, a little good-natured hazing. When she emerged she turned and held out her arms. “How does it look?”
“Could use some filling out in the ass,” #37 said, “but we work with the entertainment options we have, not the ones we want.”
“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else,” Abby said. “I’m not an entertainer. I was sent here to work on a project.”
The Federicos paused. “A project?”
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.”
“Whatever. We’re just the entertainment coordinators. This way, please.”
One at each arm, grim-faced, the Federicos jogged Abby down a hallway. Through the bunny head’s eye holes she glimpsed garishly colored oil paintings and sconces crafted from ungulate hooves. They passed through several rooms—parlours and game rooms, a library, a room that appeared decorated solely with bowling trophies and a sculpture of a bird. At the end of a long hallway they skidded up to a black door marked STAGE, patted Abby on the shoulder, mumbled “Break a leg” in unison, then pushed her into the spotlight.
Abby found herself onstage in a theater before an audience that applauded as she made her entrance. The theater probably seated two or three hundred, the main floor and balconies filled to capacity. It was a three-layer affair, high and oval, gilded and bedecked in red velvet, gold ropes, rosette-print carpet, chandeliers the size of your more fuel-efficient compact cars. Abby, having no clue where to stand, stumbled, eliciting chuckles from the audience. Her throat went dry.
“I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake,” Abby stuttered. “I’m not an entertainer. My name is Abby Fogg and I was sent here by a man named Dirk Bickle.”
The audience cheered and whistled loudly.
Abby waited for the applause to die down. “I don’t know what I’m doing here dressed as a bunny but this has been the weirdest twenty-four hours of my life.”
Assorted chuckles.
“I live in Vancouver. I recently graduated from the University of British Columbia with a master’s degree in data recovery. I’m here for a project that requires my expertise in restoring digital content. Is there someone I can talk to about this? I’m really sorry I’m not the entertainer you thought I was supposed to be. I’m not even sure if I’m in the right place. Are you in need of a digital recovery expert?”
The audience howled. As the laughter died down, some guy in the back yelled, “You’re in the right place all right!”
Abby tried to get a good look at the audience through the bunny eye holes. They were dressed formally, as for an opera, in tuxedos and satin ball gowns, with furs and top hats, monocles, clutch purses, and, here and there, a lap poodle. Every face exactly the same. Six hundred Federicos waited for her to deliver her next line. Things got blurry. Dramatically—this being a stage after all—Abby swooned and fell over, the bunny head providing a soft landing as she passed out and the audience rose to an ovation.
She woke to seagull cries, in a third-floor suite facing the harbour, her suitcases set beside the king-size bed. The open window let in a warm, salted breeze. There was a desk, a lamp, a chair, two bedside tables. In the chair sat one of the Federicos, reading a book. This Federico looked younger and had longer hair than the previous ones she’d met. When he noticed Abby stirring he set the book aside and folded his hands over his crossed knees.
“You hungry?”
“No,” Abby said. “Maybe a little.”
“Bring the girl something to eat,” Federico said to no one in particular.
“What is going on here?”
“I don’t blame you for being confused,” Federico said, “and I have to apologize. I was supposed to orient you, but numbers 37 and 18 got to you first. I expected you to arrive later.”
“What is this place?”
“We call it the Seaside Love Palace.”
“You’re all twins or—”
“Clones.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Six hundred and thirty-one.”
“I thought the quota was two.”
“It is in the United States and Canada. Vancouver Island seceded, remember?”
“Where’s Kylee Asparagus?”
“You’ll meet her straightaway.”
An older Federico arrived with a cart laden with snack foods. Abby, still wearing the body of the pink bunny, sat up in bed and scratched her chest. The head lay nearby on a bedside table, gazing out to the water.
“Until recently I was under the impression that Kylee Asparagus was dead,” she said.
The Federicos shook their heads and spoke in unison. “Not exactly. Sometimes she thinks she is.”
“How’d you guys do that?” Abby said.
The younger of the Federicos smiled. “We’re connected wirelessly. When you speak to one of us—”
The other Federico finished the thought. “—you’re really speaking to all of us.”
Abby smeared some hummus on a piece of crusty bread. “Why’d she have you cloned?”
Both Federicos said, “The original Federico was one of Ms. Asparagus’s backup dancers, her most loyal companion.”
“Can you point me in the direction of the data that’s supposed to be restored?” Abby said.
The older Federico nodded and said that would be discussed in time. Tonight she was to have dinner with Ms. Asparagus.
Without the filter of the bunny head Abby got a better look at the manse. She passed one room where an old nonfunctional plasma TV took up much of one wall. Nearby, a Federico wearing a repairman’s overalls busily reupholstered a chair. On her way to the dining room she passed several more Federicos, each absorbed in a task, each man a little different from the others but bearing the same brown eyes squinting in concentration. She even glimpsed a room where an older Federico was busy using magic tricks to entertain a group of five or six child-size Federicos.
“Who is your mother, if you don’t mind me asking?” Abby said to a Federico leaning on a broom.
“Our source mother was a woman named Esther Gonzales, of Los Gatos, California. A cleaning lady, raised six children on one income. She died many, many years ago. Our midway mothers are all in Africa or Asia.”
“Have any of you met your midway mothers?”
Federico sighed. Elsewhere in the house other Federicos sighed, too, having heard the comment. “Of course we haven’t. We’re happy to know they received the best medical care in the world for leasing out their uteruses and we greatly appreciate their generosity. Dining room’s right up those stairs, Ms. Fogg.”
She came to a restaurant with a view of the gardens. A Federico dressed as a host seated Abby at a table across from a woman so petite she could have been a child, though her wrinkled skin hung off her face in powdery folds. Her face was mostly obscured by a pair of gigantic sunglasses, her head wrapped in a scarf, neck bristling with necklaces, shoulders covered in synthetic chinchilla. She extended a spindly hand to lift her water glass to her lips. How old was this woman? A hundred and fifty maybe?
“Ms. Asparagus, I’m—” Abby started.
Kylee shushed her. “That prick Bickle sent you against my wishes. You can go back to your mainland little existence and take your bag of cheap electronic shit with you. If it were up to me I would have had the Federicos murder you as soon as you set foot on the estate. Unfortunately they’re bred to care, not to kill.”
A waiter Federico appeared. “How are you guys doing tonight? Would you like to start out with a bread basket?”
Abby nodded. Federico the waiter set down the bread and poured some olive oil and herbed balsamic into a little saucer. Kylee sulked behind her sunglasses.
“Dirk Bickle said—”
“He’s a toadie. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s yes-man. Are you blind? And they expect you of all people to recover the archives. Give me a fucking break.”
“What happened to the archives?”
“So I get to explain the whole can of worms to you. I see. The archives are in the basement. I’m not the first inhabitant of this house, you know. This used to be called the Seaside Love Palace, home of Isaac Pope, the dot-com nerd. It’s his artwork you see up all over the place. Artwork he commissioned anyway. Isaac stored all sorts of useless shit, in formats no one knows anything about anymore. DVD-ROMs and stuff. We keep it all in the basement. A couple weeks ago a pipe burst and flooded the dump. The Federicos worked overtime to get it cleaned out but we lost about half the archive. That’s why you’re here. To tell us what we lost.”
“I’ll be happy to get started on it right away. When can I see the—”
“We haven’t even ordered yet!”
“By the way, I’m a huge fan of your music.”
The waiter Federico arrived to take their orders.
“Before you take our orders, Federico, we would like to see a menu,” Kylee said. “And if you could bring me a brush and some soapy water so I can scrub this young thing’s lip prints off my ass.”
“No, I really am a fan. My friends make fun of me for being into old music but—”
“Old music!”
“What I mean is I especially love The Glamorous Life of Kylee Asparagus. It’s got some great—”
“I’d give my left tit to get back in the studio with the Satan Brothers. They weren’t so much studio sessions as artistic retreats. We rented a castle in Scotland and stayed up till five in the morning on shrooms. We swam naked together in the pool, my band and me, and wrote such beautiful music on that bitchin’ Steinway. Those were the albums when I started getting close to Federico.”
“Federico and you were—”
“Lovers? Oh, no, young thing. Let’s just say that it’s easy to genetically engineer a Federico to develop a tendency to enjoy gardening, or pottery, or repairing gutters, or cooking, but it’s near-impossible to engineer one into craving pussy.”
The waiter Federico showed up with the menus, a bucket of soapy water, and a sponge and proceeded to recite the specials. When he left, Abby said, “So that performance today—”
“Your timing. You need to work on it.”
“The audience. Those were all the Federicos?”
“What am I supposed to do? I have this huge theater and when I want a show I don’t want to be the lone person clapping up there in the balcony. The Federicos like their entertainment and some of them get to dress up in drag, so it’s pretty special for them. I’m just disappointed your performance was so pathetic. You’ve really got to take the time to prepare, young thing. You’ve got to know your material sideways.”
“But I’m not an entertainer.”
“You said it, not me. What looks yummy tonight?”
Abby scanned the menu and saw the same thing repeated twelve times. “Looks like the breaded rock cod with a leafy green salad and rice pilaf.”
“Oh, I got that the last time I was here and it wasn’t very good.”
“What else is there?”
“Young thing, they can make you something even if it’s not on the menu. Don’t worry, I’ll order for you.”
The waiter Federico reappeared. “Have you decided?”
“I’d like for us to start with an order of Gruyère bruschetta and bring an assorted sashimi platter as well. For our entrées I’ll take the grilled halibut not too dry this time and she’ll have the salmon special you featured last night. To drink I’ll have a Diet Coke with a lemon wedge and she’ll just have water. Cheerio.”
The waiter bowed deeply and hustled to the kitchen.
“I don’t particularly care for salmon,” Abby said.
“You were saying something about how much you loved my album The Glamorous Life of Kylee Asparagus? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No, I was finished talking about that.”
“I don’t think so. I think you were asking about the number of number-one hit singles off that album.”
“Right. How many—”
“Five. Count ’em five hit singles. That album dominated. But how could I top that? By releasing seven albums in the next three and a half years, that’s how. Boom, boom, boom, and four booms after that. Each album captured the vibe of a different continent. I recorded with the greatest musicians living on each continent at that time.”
“The Africa album was pretty incredible.”
“It was, wasn’t it? Africa had a lot of momentum coming off the Glamorous Life album. South America was solid too—”
“That album was way underrated.”
“By who? I want names! We were able to work with such a killer crew on Europe but there were all these distractions. Sound engineers ODing and shit. We thought Asia would be better but then the trade embargo and the Chinese cloning crisis and everything went to shit. It was about the right time to record Oceana. Basically an EP. Hardly anyone bought it. So we brought it all home and recorded the North America double album, which was supposed to be the comeback, the biggie. Oh well.”
“I thought Antarctica was pretty good.”
“True, that marine biologist played a mean harmonica.”
The appetizers arrived. Abby tried to repress her disgust as Kylee’s powdery lips curled around raw fish, her mouth a graveyard of teeth the color of coffee with two creamers. The woman made little moaning noises as she ate, as if discovering sashimi for the first time.
Kylee said, “Eventually I sobered up, bought this place from Isaac, and started thinking hard about what I had gone through in twenty years. I had fucked some of the most beautiful men on the planet. I had received the love of people who just wanted to touch me, eat my used Kleenex. The paparazzi were never really the source of my problems. They were just the in-between step. I was on one side of them, and on the other were exhausted shoppers in grocery store checkout lines. Ugly housewives and mouth-breathing teenagers. Week after week they’d see me while standing in line to buy their disgusting microwave food. I was beautiful. They wanted to be like me. And the reason they wanted to be like me was that they didn’t love themselves. They wanted to be someone like me who never shopped for groceries. And when designer drugs and nipple slips and Twitter rants and passing out at Cannes started to do me in, I began to remind them of who they really were and they started to hate me. Because it was easier to hate me, to ridicule my ‘bizarre behaviour,’ than to look into themselves and realize that they really were a bunch of fucked-up ugly bitches.
“When things got really out of control, when I started throwing goblets through plate-glass windows, Isaac himself showed up. He wasn’t much more than a teenager, seemed to me. A lumpy dork who could have afforded more fashionable glasses, but for whatever reason chose not to spend a smidgen of his billion-dollar fortune on designer eyewear. Go figure. Stinky hair stuck to his forehead, fidgety, would sort of hop up and down in his chair when he got excited about something. He wore T-shirts with pictures of dragons on them under his sport coats. I think he spent fifteen hours a day in front of his computers, five hours of that masturbating. Of course I seduced him. In a way I did it to punish myself for going so off the map. I’d fucked Jude Law. I’d fucked George Clooney. I’d been the guest of honor at numerous exclusive orgies. Now I was fucking this nerd with his shriveled little prick. I was doing it because I hated myself as much as those women standing in line at the grocery stores hated themselves.
“But then something really fucked-up happened. I started to fall in love with him. He showed me such tenderness. I was like an onion, with all these, like, layers of celebrity and shit. He peeled them back and found the girl within, and when he loved that child I gave myself to him completely. Suddenly I was back on the world stage. I was by his side at the Golden Globes. I completely reinvented myself. I rebuilt everything from the ground up. I made carefully crafted, self-deprecating comments about myself in the press. A new generation discovered my work and it started getting played at clubs. The fags embraced me anew. And best of all, we went on a shopping spree. We bought all those media companies that owned the tabloids that had dragged me through so much mud, and I personally visited their offices, one by one, and fired the editors and photographers who had so busted my balls. I decided to get smart. I’d never gone to college, remember. So we hired a private staff of professors to live here and instruct me in art history, philosophy, literature. I started working out again, five hours a day. I was a machine manufacturing my own self-actualization. Around this time we decided to turn the estate into an artists’ colony. We invited sculptors, composers, playwrights, poets, and painters to spend time here creating their work. We hosted dinners for Pulitzer winners and Nobel laureates. We held fund-raising retreats and charity balls. Oh, it was such a marvelous time!”
Kylee paused, seeming to revisit the era in the privacy of her thoughts. Abby let the silence last as long as Kylee needed. Outside, the sun settled into its horizon. After a time, Kylee began renegotiating with her meal and continued. “Of course, when you’re in those years you don’t expect the world to take a turn for the worse, do you? You expect the world to ride along on your own happiness, as if you had any control. But the Age of Fucked Up Shit reminded us that we’re just parasites on this planet and, like parasites, we can be easily exterminated. We were lucky. We kept to ourselves on this island, Isaac, Federico, and me. Once all the artists had gone we spent days in the parlour playing Barbie’s Shopping Mall Adventure. In those years it was best if you lived on an island, away from major population centers. The horror of it still makes me tremble. And it was during this time that my sweet Isaac, oh…”
Kylee began to cry, her leathery lips quivering into the shape of an hourglass tipped on its side. The waiter Federico brought a box of tissues. Kylee dabbed one beneath her glasses, pulling away gobs of teary mascara. Abby touched the woman’s hand. Kylee grabbed her wrist and dug acrylic fingernails into the soft flesh. She leaned closer and hissed, “He was murdered. I’m convinced of it. They said it was a heart attack brought on by too much Red Bull and Mountain Dew but I know it was murder! My poor sweet Isaac!”
“I had no idea,” Abby said. “Who did it?”
“We don’t know!” Kylee cried. “A hundred and fifty-five years I’ve stuck around and still we don’t know who did it! Why do you think I’ve kept this body alive? Why do you think I’ve cloned Federico hundreds of times? I need protection. I need someone to take care of me while I find out who killed my husband!”
The waiter Federico leaned over the table, clearing their plates. “Did you guys save any room for dessert?”
“I’ll have the triple chocolate decadence,” Kylee said. “Give our guest the rhubarb pie à la mode.”
Abby said, “So the police were never able to—”
“Police? You think there were freaking police involved? During the Age of Fucked Up Shit? You are young, young thing. The authorities fried bigger fish. Oh, I don’t know. Solve a homicide or deal with widespread rioting and looting. No, it was entirely up to us. We read up on forensic science, watched a lot of police procedurals. But we kept coming up cold. We combed the archives as best we could for clues as to who might have a motive for killing my husband. We barely made a dent in all those files. Then a burst pipe, oh hell. Now you, young thing, supposedly you are the one who is supposed to help us get to the bottom of this abomination. Why Mr. Kirkpatrick thinks you’ll be of any help is beyond me. You might as well hop on that boat and head back to wherever you came from. Everything worth knowing about this rotten place disappeared a long time ago.”
An almost-full moon hung close to the water and a feathery breeze skittered across the waves. Abby’s dreams were chopped-up pieces of grade school, trees, beaches, pink fur. She woke around three in the morning convinced she was being watched. Keeping her eyes closed, she reached across the bed for Rocco then remembered she wasn’t in Vancouver. She opened her eyes. The ghost hovered just beyond the window, bobbing a bit, as one would imagine ghosts to do. His form consisted of roiling wisps of translucence in the shape of a man. He appeared balding, with a bad comb-over, and he wore a T-shirt with the barely legible logo for a Comi-Con convention from over a century ago. He rubbed his eyes beneath spectral bifocals.
“Say something,” Abby said.
“Oh, sorry. Yeah, so, I guess you’re here to solve my ‘murder.’”
“Isaac Pope?”
“So they say.”
“Who killed you?”
“I actually buy the Red Bull and Mountain Dew theory, myself. You’re kind of hot, you know that? What do you say about flashing me a boob?”
“No thanks. What do you know about the archives?”
“You waste no time,” the ghost of Isaac Pope said. “What is it about the archives you want to know?”
“Can they be salvaged?”
“Come on, just one booby.”
“I’m looking for a transcript of an interview with someone named Luke Piper.”
“Oh, that,” Isaac said. “All I’m saying is just a tit. What harm can come of it? I’m a dead dude.”
“Will you tell me about the transcript?”
“I’ll tell you everything I know about the transcript.”
Abby considered this a moment, then pulled aside her nightgown to reveal her left breast.
“Oooooh…” Isaac moaned, sounding like a real ghost for the first time. “That’s what I’m talking about. Touch the nipple, make it hard.”
Outside the window the ghost rose and fell as if mounted on a spring, slowly, then faster, his right hand pumping what Abby assumed was his small, ghostly prick. Isaac grabbed the sill with his other hand, moaned, grunted, and ejaculated some phosphorescent ghost semen onto the foot of the bed. Revolted, Abby tucked her breast back in and crawled away from the ectoplasmic splooge.
“Gross! Why’d you have to do that?”
“Don’t tell me you weren’t at least a little bit turned on, baby,” Isaac said. “Seriously—how many times did you come?”
“Jesus! Now you can at least tell me about the transcript.”
“As promised, here’s everything I know about the transcript. I know absolutely nothing about the transcript. You’ll need to talk to the archivist. Besides, rubbing one off isn’t the real reason for this supernatural visit or whatever you want to call it. I’m supposed to get all Hamlet’s dad on you. You’ve got to get out of here, Abby, before you get trapped in the play. You’re getting sucked into a loop. Your selfhood, it’s in superposition.”
“But the archives.”
Isaac sighed. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And thanks for the flash.”
“Get out of here,” Abby said.
“Suit yourself, baby,” Isaac said, “You know you liked it.”
The spirit dispersed in the wind.
The next morning Abby passed through halls decorated with eye-violating phantasy art. In each one a muscled warrior defended a barely dressed maiden from some sort of dragon or monster or many-tentacled space-being. On closer look Abby recognized the maidens as Kylee, and the buff heroes as Isaac, whose bespectacled and combed-over head topped each rippling, sweaty torso.
A Federico stopped alongside her. “They were commissioned,” he said. “Isaac hired some of the most acclaimed science-fiction-and-fantasy cover artists of his day and presented these great works of art as gifts to Kylee.”
“I think the period-appropriate word to describe these paintings is ‘rad,’” Abby said.
“You’d be one to know. I know very little about those times.” The Federico stiffened and gazed into the middle distance as if he’d heard something alarming. “Oh dear. In the billiard room? Oh dear, oh dear.” He scurried up a spiral staircase with Abby trailing behind. “You don’t need to see this,” Federico called over his shoulder. “Really. You’d best be enjoying complimentary refreshments in the dining room.”
Abby kept on his heels, coming to a room where a crowd of Federicos had gathered. Kneeling on the floor, Kylee jaggedly wailed and lamented. Abby pushed her way to the front of the scrum. On a billiard table with balls frozen midgame lay the prone body of a Federico, his head ringed with sleeping pills.
“He’s dead,” a Federico whispered beside her, and several other Federicos, mostly the younger ones, began softly to weep. Kylee clawed the floor, blubbering and writhing. An older Federico came to the lady’s side and carefully lifted her, directing her to an overstuffed chair.
Kylee blubbered, “Did he leave a note? Did he at least say why he did it?”
The suicide note was conveniently located in the body’s left hand. One of the Federicos retrieved it and read it aloud. “My dear Kylee and brothers Federico. It is time for me to pass from this world to the next. I found it too hard to be myself in a place where so many other people were me. Is it too much to ask that I be treated as an individual for once? Is it? I mean, come on. Well, anyway, I leave all my personal effects to Federico #270, whose kindness I will cherish into the grave. See you on the other side, bitches!”
Shoulders heaved, palms rubbed backs in consolation, and a nearby box of tissues was quickly depleted. To be polite, Abby pretended to sniffle. It all felt disingenuously theatrical. Kylee fainted and was borne away by six sobbing Federicos. When they were gone the remaining Federicos cleared their throats and started discussing various household tasks and funeral arrangements. Abby tapped an older Federico on the shoulder.
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” she said.
The older Federico shrugged. “We’ll miss him, I guess, but there’s always another Federico to take his place.”
“I need to talk to the Federico who was supposed to show me to the archives.”
“I’m afraid you’re out of luck. That was the Federico who just offed himself.”
“Is there another Federico who can—”
The older Federico scowled. “We’ve got a family tragedy on our hands here, miss. The archives are the least of our problems. If you want to make yourself useful, you’ll join the funeral party at noon. We’ll drop a dress and a veil off at your room and convene in the great hall.”
The Federicos, dressed in black suits and ties, gathered in hushed clumps of conversation. Kylee sat in a creaking wheelchair, clad in a black dress and superwide hat with a veil. In the center of the room, on a couple of collapsible luggage stands, sat a varnished cedar coffin. Six older, pallbearing Federicos hoisted it on their shoulders and solemnly bore it out the front doors. Kylee followed immediately behind, pushed by a young Federico. The Federico children trailed, holding the hands of their older brothers. Abby merged into the procession, which heaved along a path through the posturban woods. Two Federicos who’d been bred with a special gene for bagpipe prowess played a mournful dirge. The music was elegiac, the sky overcast, the wind a union of pine and sea salt. The party progressed about a mile up the path, hemmed in on either side by swirling conifers, then turned onto a path carpeted with rust-colored fir needles. Winding around the stumps and nurse logs of the cool forest they entered a patch of salmonberry and huckleberry bushes, still wet with morning dew. They proceeded single file now, a black, melancholy swath through the greenery. At last they came to a clearing of sorts. Abby crept through the gaggle to glimpse the proceedings.
They were in a vast cemetery, maybe forty or fifty acres square. Hundreds of headstones marked the graves that dotted the anally maintained grassy expanse. Abby looked to her feet and read the one nearest.
Nearby, a couple of Federicos in mud-spattered overalls began lowering the coffin into a freshly dug grave. Kylee sat graveside in her chair, honking into a lacy black handkerchief. Another Federico had taken the role of minister, reading the ashes-to-ashes stuff. In groups of twos and threes the surviving Federicos clutched each other, wiping tears, pressing their foreheads together in the solidarity of grief. Abby glanced at other headstones. Federico #301, Federico #425, Federico #16, Federico #27, Federico #153. Each of them a beloved friend. After the coffin came to rest the survivors took turns tossing in shovels full of dirt until the cavity in the earth was filled. A light mist began to coalesce. A Federico unfolded a black and Gothic umbrella over Kylee’s head as they made their way from the cemetery to the path. As they proceeded a Federico sidled up to Abby and explained how the numbering system worked.
“We’ve all got a number, sure, but the number changes based on deaths. So if Federico #1 dies, all the other Federicos move up a number. So #2 becomes the new #1, #3 becomes the new #2, and so on. That way there are no gaps in our numbers. Now it looks like I’m going to be Federico #178.”
“What about the little Federicos?” Abby asked. “How often do they arrive?”
“Every couple months or so. We’ll put in an order for a new Federico now that we’ve lost one. When the boat shows up with a new Federico, it’s quite a big deal. Maybe you’ll be here to see the arrival of a new little one.”
The Seaside Love Palace popped and groaned as it settled in the cold night. Abby flipped through a stack of celebrity biographies until after midnight, when she rose and slipped into the hallway. There was a whole wing of the manse she hadn’t seen yet; now would be a good time to check it out. Every ten feet or so along the hall hung one of Isaac’s garish phantasy paintings, each lit by a single halogen bulb. Here was Isaac in a fishbowl helmet and space suit, firing a laser gun, Kylee in a gold bikini clutching his thigh, fending off what appeared to be a bad seafood experience. In another he raised a sword to deliver the coup de grâce to a kind of furry, maybe-dragon sorta thing that had Kylee in its talons. Abby imagined the couple posing for these portraits, frozen in war-gaming gear while a bearded and kilted graphic designer sketched them onto canvas. After studying five or six of these paintings she got the crazy idea that they’d actually loved each other.
Abby descended a flight of stairs and heard music. Sort of a disco/house beat, a track off one of Kylee’s old albums. She maneuvered around shadows of furniture, past a dormant kitchen and a reading room where taxidermy animal heads gawked from the walls. At the end of a short side hall she came to a black door through which she could feel the pulse of the bass. She pushed it open a crack and peeked into a ballroom that smelled like a mashup between a gymnasium and a health clinic. From speakers thumped a hit single about promiscuity and shopping for luxury goods. Abby’s eyes widened. From a chintzy-looking throne atop a dais Kylee barked through a megaphone, directing the Federicos in a mammoth, gay clone orgy!
From her hiding place, for over an hour, Abby observed the carnal ritual like an anthropologist, finding the grunting contortions much like the underground Bionet parties she had attended in college. News of those parties had spread by word of mouth, directions changing and conflicting, secret passwords whispered into ears. One rainy night Abby had piled into a car with three of her friends—Jadie, Megan, and Heather—and headed across the Lions Gate Bridge into a zone of murky abandoned industry. Out here the streets eventually gave up and ended in tangles of debris and broken concrete. They parked in an alley and followed the directions to a metal door marked with a crop-circle glyph. The four friends looked at one another, questioning whether they were really up for this, a quartet of graduate students in a downpour, willingly giving someone else—a stranger—complete control over their bodies. Abby opened the door.
They called these kinds of places pleasure centers. This particular pleasure center was down a musty-smelling flight of stairs that opened into a subterranean space lit with purples and reds, forms gathered around pillars checking out the newcomers, the periphery fuzzed-out visually with hushed conversations and lips occasionally sipping glasses of energy drink. A dance floor, if one wanted to call it that, framed by spotlights. No music, just a low rumble of whispers and body noises. On the dance floor was a human pyramid—three men on the bottom, two in the middle, and a single man standing on his hands, which were planted on the two men beneath him. The pyramid remained stationary for several minutes. The man standing on his hands pulled in one of his arms to balance on one hand. Abby watched the man’s forearm tremble. Was he going to fall? No, actually, he was extending his index finger so that it was the only part of his body touching the man beneath him. He balanced a full minute as a ripple of applause went through the spectators and a patch of blood spread on the leotard of the man beneath him. Carefully, the human pyramid disassembled itself and a couple women carrying towels rushed to the one who’d been the pyramid’s apex. He looked exhausted, slumping into their arms as they wiped his face. A violent shudder racked his body like an epileptic seizure, but short, a jolt.
Over a PA system a calm and reedy voice intoned, “He’s going to be just fine. His nervous system is confused and it will take about an hour before he’s back to feeling like himself. And tomorrow his arms will be a little sore. Don’t worry. We’ll take loving care of him.”
Another flutter of applause. Abby looked around trying to determine the source of the voice and found it in a shaded corner of the room, the DJ’s booth. The DJ stood behind a bank of three laptops, GUIs reflected off the surfaces of his glasses.
Heather pinched Abby’s arm. “No freakin’ way I’m letting the DJ take over my implants. How do you know he won’t make you kill somebody?”
Megan said, “Or worse, fuck somebody?”
Jadie said, “You believe that USA Today bullshit? They’re already breaking the law hacking other peoples ’plants, it’s not like they’re going to completely screw themselves with a murder or rape charge.”
“It’s based on SM,” Abby said. “Every participant has a safe word to break the hack.”
Jadie added, “And the DJ would be ripped apart by the crowd if he tried anything stupid. Everyone’s looking out for everyone else.”
Onto the dance floor marched six hairless eunuchs. This ought to be good, Abby thought. For the next twenty minutes they danced, their eyes miles away, letting themselves get thrown into a choreography controlled remotely from the corner of the room. They leapt, pinwheeled, jerked. Contentwise it wasn’t unlike a lot of archival footage of modern dance Abby had seen. Once the routine concluded the eunuchs wobbled off, regaining their gross motor skills in an almost narcotic fugue. This stuff was often compared to a kind of addiction. The hard-core Bionet abusers begged for DJs to control their every move, even eating, defecation, sex. Abby’d heard about a man in Boise who’d entered into an abusive arrangement with his neighborhood Bionet hacker and given him carte blanche over his vitals. Guy by the name of Paul Garza. The hacker, who went by the handle Salo, set up scripts to run automatically and induce Garza to eat, sleep, take a shower, groom himself, speak, masturbate, read, watch TV. At first Garza thought this was heavenly, watching his body go about its prescribed routines as if from a distance and yet from within himself. He described it as feeling like Salo’s flesh-and-blood embodiment. Garza found himself waking up at a regular time, taking care of his business in the bathroom, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work at the recycling plant, chatting with coworkers with Salo’s distantly typed words in his mouth, making wittier jokes than he’d ever made, going to a bar after work, hooking up with some hottie chick who was herself under 24/7 remote control, maybe even by Salo also, screwing like crazy at her place, coming home, falling asleep, and dreaming. Dreams, though. Dreams were the one thing Bionet hackers couldn’t control, and Garza’s started taking on a panicked element. In the dreams he watched himself as if on a security-camera monitor, painstakingly executing the most mundane rituals of his day. His subconscious was freaking out, saying, Whoa, hold on, buddy, I thought I was calling the shots around here! Alarmed at being usurped, his subconscious sent out these distress calls in the middle of deep REM. As the days dragged and Salo’s routines changed little, if at all, Garza wondered if he should utter his safe word and break the hack. But it was so dreamy, living like this. He was making more friends, getting fit with a daily workout, eating well. The scripts Salo had laid out were truly working the wonders the hacker had promised when they first met in a booth at Game Zone. Somewhere across town on a laptop in a guy’s rec room, Garza’s entire life was being mapped out and executed perfectly. He even got a promotion. He began looking at the life he’d led before giving over his daily routine to Salo as one filled with foibles and inadequacies. This new Garza strode confidently, spoke up for himself, ate right, and bedded the ladies. But the dreams. Full-on thrashing nightmares now, with slaughtered animals and self-castration, the pollution of Hell vomited up through his brain stem. He woke trembling and saw his hand moving toward a bottle of pills prescribed to blunt the edges of these terrors. But I like not being in control, Garza told himself, and told one of his dates, who was far beyond where he was, her eyes gone milky, as mechanically they began to screw. “With the Bionet,” she said, “you can experience another person’s orgasm. Would you like to experience mine?” Garza consented and deep in their brains the software flipped their perceptions of their sense organs so whatever was happening to the date’s body was going into Garza’s brain and vice versa. Garza, disoriented, felt himself being penetrated in a new concavity, understanding the swinging weight of breasts, opening his eyes expecting to see himself pounding away on his now-female form, but finding his date drifting into a somnambulist’s version of sexual intercourse, her eyes like monitors tuned to static, face twitching minutely upon his ejaculation. And the real shitty part was that he never made her come, so Garza missed out on his own orgasm. Or hers. Whatever. Then the next day a crazy thing happened. Salo, the hacker, died. Car wreck, nothing fancy. The scripts ran as per usual, leading Garza through his day on autopilot, then the next day and the next until Salo’s family handed the laptops over to the cops, whose Bionet enforcement division quickly figured out Salo was operating several flesh-and-blood embodiments and put the brakes on the whole operation. One minute Garza was making himself a mango fruit smoothie, the next he sensed a great silence within. The blender kept going on PUREE. He wanted to turn it off but found the only things his hands appeared to be good for were to look at. He stood in the kitchen for an hour, during which time the blender melted down and stopped functioning and great strings of drool dripped from his catatonic face. The cops traced the signal and found Garza with his pants full of excrement, unable to speak or even close his mouth, immobile in the middle of his kitchen. They’d seen this kind of stuff before, and ferried him to the Bionet wing of the nearest hospital where, Abby supposed, he remained to this day, undergoing a battery of physical and psychological therapies to relearn how to take charge of his own nervous system.
After the eunuchs’ dance the DJ spoke again. “Welcome to the uncharted waters of the Biological Internet. Your heart rate. Your electrolytes. The electricity that flows through your muscles. We control every part of you but your soul. Turn off your mind, children, relax and float downstream.”
Heather was in a corner having her neck massaged by a eunuch who was asking her the model numbers of her implants. Jadie stayed glued to a pillar, looking kind of terrified. And where was Megan? Abby very suddenly didn’t want to be here. She looked frantically for the exit. Some guy grabbed her bicep and spoke into her ear.
“You don’t belong here. Quick, let’s get out. The cops are on their way.”
The guy, who would have been more threatening had he been less handsome, steered her through the crowd toward the restrooms, then through a service door and up some crumbly wood stairs. Behind them, the pleasure center erupted in panicked screaming. Abby stumbled through a door onto a street of boarded-up ex-businesses. Down the block, cop cars spun their blues and reds.
“Just walk at a normal speed,” the guy said, “like we’re a couple on a date. By the way, my name’s Rocco.”
Abby shook his hand reluctantly. “What about my friends? We should go back and help them.”
“They’re probably getting cuffed right now.”
“Why’d you pull me out of there?”
“I could tell you were just checking it out, not into the whole scene. And I think I recognize you. We get our coffee around the same time at Lumiere’s.”
They passed beneath a streetlight, giving Abby a better look. Skin the color of an Idaho potato, scruffy jet-black stubble, a pair of dark eyes squinting in the half-light. Abby said, “You’re the guy who got the last Asiago bagel when I was there a couple days ago.”
“Sounds like me,” Rocco said.
“How’d you know the cops were coming?”
“I’m an informant. I do it sort of on the side while I’m getting my Bionetics doctorate. Plus it’s good for me to see what kinds of applications are being developed at a grass-roots level. Pretty impressed by that guy who supported his whole body weight on one finger. But those DJs are amateurs. They know enough to encode the implants but have no clue—or just don’t give a shit—about dendrite deintegration or channel-flow erosion. It pisses me off. You just don’t muck around with the human brain like that. I hope that guy spends his life in the slammer.”
“Why do you trust me with this information?” Abby said.
“It gives me an excuse to ask if you’d be interested in getting a drink somewhere.”
They traversed patches of stink and bubbling urban lava, then found a cab back to the more or less healthy interior of Vancouver, where the city sort of shook them a while until they settled at a café decorated with posters from Italian movies. Which gave Abby a perfect entry point into her area of expertise. She would have normally evaded the topic of Italian neorealism in the company of a dude, had seen too many boyfriends’ faces glaze over, but this guy seemed interesting enough that she’d test his endurance for twentieth-century cinema trivia. If he stared into space and nodded politely she’d relegate him to that category of men who’d passed through her life burdened by their passions for full-immersion video games and the bracketeering of college basketball. The only guys she’d met who shared her love of Brakhage and Jodorowsky and Maddin and the Brothers Quay tended to hide in clouds of their own flatulence in the netherworld of the university library.
“Bicycle Thieves,” Abby translated from a poster behind Rocco’s head. “What a heartbreaking film, right?”
Rocco paused a sec, stared at the salt and pepper as if listening to a distant voice, then nodded. “Vittorio De Sica, right? 1948? Quintessential work of Italian neorealism?”
“I’ve never met anyone else who’s actually seen it.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Rocco said, “but I know it concerns an impoverished family man (Lamberto Maggiorani) who takes a job in postwar Rome pasting posters on buildings around the city. When his bicycle—his only mode of transportation—is stolen, he embarks on a fruitless search for it with his young son (Enzo Staiola). That’s the one, right?”
Abby looked over her shoulder. “Where are you reading that?”
Rocco sipped his au lait. “It came to me.”
“No, really. How’d you know the summary?”
“I’ll tell you, but I can’t tell you here. The only place safe enough to tell you is my apartment.”
“That’s a new one.”
“That sounded bad. What I mean is, I know my apartment is free of surveillance. We can’t be sure about this restaurant. Come back to my place and I’ll fill you in on the details. I’m not asking you to sleep with me.”
You’re not? Abby thought. Damn.
Rocco’s apartment wasn’t far, and he spent the interim five blocks warning and preparing Abby for the wretched state of the living space. The kitchen hadn’t been cleaned in some time, he warned, and there might be a spaghetti-type situation in one of the sinks. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a tree-ringed, green-built, post-FUS building, with windows overlooking the retinal-rape neon of a takeout Szechuan hole-in-the-wall.
And good thing he’d prepped her for the disaster of his personal living space. He’d actually oversold the sloppiness of the pad, so now it didn’t look that bad. Rocco opened the fridge and pointed out some beverages. Abby agreed to something with pomegranate in it.
“Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger cheesiness,” Rocco said. “I’ll just get really busted if they find out I helped someone escape from the sting. Worse, that I’ve told you as much as I have. The deal with my line of study is we test a lot of our own applications on ourselves. You know how the Bionet works, right?”
“Not really. I have an emergency implant, that’s about it. I know 911 will be called with a GPS signal if I have a heart attack.”
“Right, so that’s basically where the Bionet started. For years people chipped their dogs and cats so if they ran off the Humane Society could scan them and get an address and a phone number. That was the beginning, pretty much. Then when the baby boomers started going into retirement homes, a few of them got chipped with files including their whole medical histories. Better than wearing a bracelet with all that info engraved on it. Then the next wave of innovation went down and these implants, still incredibly crude by today’s standards, got networked using the rudimentary Wi-Fi and Internet of the day. Pretty easy to monitor heart rate and transmit the data via the Web. Then, like you said, all this GPS-enabled, vitals-monitoring software went into the implants and now you can get hit by a truck and two seconds later your body calls an ambulance for you. The Bionet’s saved lives. That’s why I wanted to get into it in the first place. Now we can download hormones, enzymes, and antigens remotely through implants and upload our immunities for other people to share.”
“What’s that have to do with you knowing about Bicycle Thieves?”
“We’re on to the next stage, Bionet 2.0. Neurology. The development of this stuff hasn’t been all that smooth. For years we’ve stuck these implants in volunteers’ heads that make them hear voices in other languages, pick up phone transmissions, radio stations. We’ve been trying to wire the frontal lobes into the Internet so everyone can eventually become their own Wikipedia or, rather, share the Wikipedia with others who are logged in. The software itself has improved by several orders of magnitude, for sure, but for the past ten years or so the industry has been driving test subjects crazy, paying out huge lawsuits. It’s been a disaster.
“Three, four years ago a group of neuroscientists and Bioneticists at the University of Montreal published a paper that changed everyone’s thinking about neural implants. They proposed that the problems we were seeing in clinical trials weren’t all that related to the implants themselves, but to the parts of the brain we were seeking to integrate with. Rather than trying to plug those implants into the parts of the brain that produce consciousness, we needed to start plugging them into the parts of the brain that produce subconsciousness. And this makes a lot of sense for two reasons. One, the subconscious is built to process a shitload of information, a quantity that overloads the conscious mind. It doles out information judiciously into our conscious thoughts. Second, Jung believed that the individual subconscious tapped into a level of consciousness all living beings shared, the collective unconscious. And one cool way to think of the collective unconscious is as a giant, biological Internet.”
“So you plugged the real Internet into the subconscious Internet?”
“We’re trying to. Instead of plugging these implants into people’s heads that just scream trivia at them 24/7, we’re finding that these subconscious implants work far more mysteriously than we imagined. You know that feeling when you can’t remember a word? When you say you feel there’s something on the tip of your tongue? That’s what this implant feels like all the time. Like there’s always information just behind the screen waiting to burst out but the subconscious is acting in your best interest to hold it back. So tonight, when you said Bicycle Thieves, my implant probably did a quick search of IMDb, then served up that little summary for me.”
“That feeling, though, doesn’t it drive you nuts?”
“I’m learning to manage it. And my implant is only turned on a few hours a day. Started out just a minute or two a day at first, and even at that level it left me exhausted. I got these hellish nightmares. My subconscious had to learn how to use this new tool, this piece of hardware thrust like a space probe into my skull. You can imagine, after millions of years of evolution, suddenly the mind has to deal with this weird little sesame-seed-sized thing that shows up in the cranium. And you’re right, I’d go crazy if I walked around all day feeling like I’d just forgotten what I was going to say.” Rocco paused, but not like he was listening to a distant signal. More like he was listening to something that only came from within himself. “I like you, Abby.”
How romantically science fictiony this all was! Abby leaned in to kiss him.
Abby confronted Kylee as she jerked along through the great hall in an antique-looking electric wheelchair that smelled of burning lubricant.
“Either I see the archives or I’m leaving,” Abby said.
Kylee bumbled into one of the phantasy-art-lined passages. “That would be a shame. You at least have to stick around to see the musical we’re producing in your honor.”
“If there isn’t work for me to do I’ll get out of your way and head home to Vancouver.”
A great bell clanged somewhere on the property. Kylee quickly wheeled herself to the nearest elevator. Federicos rushed through the house, assembling on a balcony overlooking the harbour. Abby pushed her way to the front and saw a squat little freighter pull up to the pier. The captain, a bronzed man in a red-striped shirt and captain’s hat, waved up to the spectators as six Federicos rushed to help unload crates of supplies. There emerged a young nurse carrying a bundle in her arms—the newest Federico. A cheer went up, hugs all around. Accompanied by Federicos beside themselves with excitement, the nurse strode the length of the pier and ascended the steep path to the house with the infant Federico in her arms. When she came to the balcony she handed the baby to Kylee, who quivered in her wheelchair, suppressing tears. The pop star pulled the blanket away from the baby’s face and said, “Oh, my heavens, he’s the most precious baby I have ever seen.” The other Federicos elbowed one another to get a better look, oohing over Federico #631, freshly expelled from the womb of a desperate third-world woman. Once the nurse and the boat departed, and after a few seconds of tickling and cooing, Kylee handed the baby over to one of the Federicos in charge of childcare and wiped her hands on her shawl. “That one seemed a bit underbaked,” she said. “A rush job. We’ll see how he grows. Disperse, everyone. Off to your stupid, like, responsibilities and shit.”
Alone with Kylee, Abby watched the ship disappear on the horizon as a procession of Federicos hauled the supplies to the house. A breeze lifted some strands of hair from Abby’s face and laid them across her shoulder.
“There are no archives,” Abby said.
“True, but I was going to show you what’s left of them. Ready?”
The domed solarium, three stories of steel and glass, was by far the most meticulously maintained wing of the Seaside Love Palace. A hundred species of butterflies colored trees, vines, and blossoms of endangered flora. The thick, peaty air smelled ripe with the sweet scent of decay. A tiled trail led through the foliage to a room-sized peninsula encircled by a crescent-shaped koi pond. When Kylee, Abby, and a Federico arrived at the pond they found a table set for afternoon tea and an ancient man napping in a wheelchair. That he wasn’t actually a corpse astonished Abby. Rare species of moths alighted on his shoulders.
The young Federico poured tea for the group while Kylee shouted at the old man, “Wake up! Wake up, you old queen!” After a minute of this the ancient man began to stir, opening an eye a crack.
“You don’t have to wake him for me,” Abby said.
“Oh, but I do,” Kylee said. “You wanted to see the archives, didn’t you?”
“This is your archivist?”
“No, young thing. This isn’t the archivist. This is the archive. This is Federico #1.”
Abby looked puzzled.
“Ask him something,” Kylee continued. “His brain is a server. You have to put your ear close to his mouth, though. He can only whisper. And you have to shout your question.”
Abby knelt beside the source of all Federicos. “What was Errol Flynn’s first starring role?” she asked.
“Louder, honey,” Kylee said.
“What was Errol Flynn’s first starring role!”
Federico #1’s mouth began to move, just a subtle tremor of the lips and a slight breeze of rank air rising from his throat to indicate words were about to be formulated. “Captain Blood, 1935,” he whispered.
“I thought I was here to recover digital data,” Abby said. “How am I supposed to know what’s lost if it’s all stored in this man’s head?”
“They said you were the best,” Kylee snickered.
“I retrieve digital content, not memories. How am I supposed to figure out what was lost?”
The archives went back to sleep. Kylee shrugged and scooted away, chuckling, with the younger Federico in tow, leaving Abby and #1 alone. Abby checked the level on her recorder then shouted into the archive’s ear, “Recite the Luke Piper transcript!”
After a moment of silence the archive’s lips began to move. Abby positioned her microphone and turned up the volume, listening through the ear buds. “… the tape roll a bit here before we get… Luke? You need anything, Luke? No, I’m fine. I thought we could first talk…” the archive began. Hours vanished into the story of Luke’s search for Mr. Kirkpatrick. Why anyone would go through the trouble to send her here to record this tale was beyond her. She turned the recorder off when it was clear the transcript was complete, then rose to leave. The old Federico grabbed her wrist and trained his gummy eyes on her. “You aren’t the person you think you are,” he said, his voice rising barely above a whisper.
“Let go of me.”
“You’re in superposition.”
A young Federico appeared and removed Abby’s arm from Federico #1’s grip. “Now, now, #1,” he said. “Let’s not traumatize our guest.”
As he was wheeled away, Federico #1 shook his finger at Abby. “You’re somebody else entirely.”
On the stage, gradually brightening footlights brought an abstract cityscape into view. A light burned in the window of an apartment tower where a Federico in a black wig sat drinking tea, clicking on a laptop. Another Federico wearing fake stubble appeared beside the wigged Federico and rubbed his shoulder. Abby, sitting in the balcony beside Kylee, realized these actors were supposed to represent Rocco and herself.
What are you doing, sweetheart?
Looking for a job. I sure wish there was a better market for a digital-media restorer!
Hey, you’ll find something soon. Don’t give up. Which reminds me. I got this phone call last night from some guy named Dirk Bickle. He wanted to talk to you about an opportunity.
Well, why didn’t you say so?
The stage Abby leaped to her feet and grabbed a jacket and hat, then pranced down from the skyscraper to center stage, where a grey-haired Federico in dark sunglasses rose from a café table.
Nice to meet you, Abby. My name is Dirk Bickle and have I got an opportunity for you. To Victoria! Posthaste! To recover a bunch of archives and jazz like that!
Dirk hustled Abby onto a cardboard boat that glided along behind rolling, saw-toothed stage waves. A couple of anthropomorphized clouds with Dizzy Gillespie cheeks descended from the rafters while offstage a Foley artist faked the sounds of waves, wind, and thunder with sheets of metal and hand-cranked barrels of rice.
ABBY
Wait! What am I actually supposed to do?
The boat came to rest, stage right, in front of the art director’s baroque vision of the Seaside Love Palace. Abby belted a couplet.
The front doors popped open and out pranced two younger Federicos playing the older Federicos who’d greeted Abby upon her arrival a few days prior. They hurriedly dressed the stage Abby in the bunny outfit as stage elements rolled into new configurations, forming a mirror-image version of the auditorium they now occupied. Her back to the real audience, the Abby onstage addressed a painted backdrop of faces as a staticky, poorly recorded laugh track guffawed.
You’ve got me mistaken for someone else! I’m here to see the archives!
After which she collapsed, was dragged stage left by a Federico, and dumped on a bed on rollers. Ominous music! From the rafters, on wires, descended a Federico made up corpse-like, costumed in billowing white organza.
Hey, baby. Show me a little skin.
Stage Abby woke with a start.
Who are you? What is this place?
I’ll tell you all the secrets of the Seaside Love Palace if you flash me a nip.
There followed an industrial-metal number in which the ghost of Isaac Pope, joined by the ghosts of other dot-com CEOs, sang about rounds of financing, server farms, and the importance of accepting cookies and clearing one’s cache when encountering a technical problem. Then, with barely a transition, stage Abby sang a duet with a Federico costumed as Kylee, to the great amusement of the audience. There was a death scene with the suicidal Federico, who took his life via this house’s preferred method of Red Bull/Mountain Dew OD. There were several Kylee costume changes. It seemed to the spectator Abby, shocked at watching events of her own recent experiences poorly dramatized, that the dramaturge had run out of time and lost control of the mise-en-scène, resorting to cramming scenes together with little transitional tissue. Unpracticed players blew lines and missed cues. The orgy sequence erupted in a chaotic whirl of puppetry and full-body nude-colored suits. There was the arrival of the baby Federico—all of it hurried, half-assed, blurry with a score that couldn’t figure out what time signature it wanted to be in. Then came the scene that had happened little more than an hour before, with a Federico playing the wheelchair-confined archive whispering the transcript into a microphone. Federico-as-Kylee appeared and summoned her to the theater. A chaotic reshuffling of scenery later, Abby now watched her avatar watching a puppet version of the performance she had just seen. The same meeting with Bickle, the boat ride, the dressing up as a bunny, ghostly visitations, dance numbers, etc., except at half the previous scale. In this iteration even more lines were blown, even more cues missed, even more dramatic corners cut, the action sped up to an amphetamine hum as the Federicos in the orchestra pit sawed madly at their stringed instruments, everything faster, miniaturized, coming to the point in the story again when the puppet version of Kylee summoned Abby to the theater, upon which an even smaller puppet theater appeared within the first puppet theater. Abby could barely make out the little figures dancing within. Finally, the spectator version of Abby, overcome with nausea, turned to Kylee and asked, “How do I make it stop?”
“It’s easy, young thing,” Kylee smiled, snapping her fingers. “You wake up in a field.”