Olympia did some of her best thinking in the car and she had a lot to think about. As she pulled out of the university lot, a camera recorded her license plate and a photo of her face. Instead of heading to her condo, she turned toward the expressway, driving out of the gentrified area around the campus, through areas full of old, cavernous buildings that had been converted to data warehouses back in the heyday of the floppy disc. Now, they stood mostly abandoned again.
The surveillance cameras mounted on their crumbling facades stuck out like gadgets from the future. Which, to the buildings, they were.
As she drove through a Latino neighborhood, she pretended to tip her hat, as she always did, to the statue of Alexander von Humboldt, standing in the middle of the park named after him. Parks named after Humboldt dotted the Americas, but she doubted if any of the people who spray-painted their initials on the statue knew who he’d been…. The worn pandemic circles around it reminded her of the Gather Spaces in earthquake-prone cities, except these were meant to keep people apart.
Then she was accelerating onto the expressway, merging with traffic beside an AlphaCar, its driver asleep at the wheel.
She accelerated to get ahead of it—a lot of people hated AlphaCars because, like those Japanese soldiers discovered to be fighting WWII decades after the war ended, the ex-cabbies and ex-truck drivers they displaced still took potshots at them. Last week, someone had rigged a toy drone with a handgun and was shooting iTaxis on the highway until police shot it down.
Billboards changed as she approached, their lasers directing ads tailored specifically to her. 55.7 said the radar gun of the first surveillance trap she drove through, she knew. It was on a drive like this that she began to believe her project was possible. 53.4 said the second, her plate number and face being added at each point to the data banks of car ownership, authorized drivers, potential buyers, or potential terrorists, and who knew what else. Some blogs complained that the owners of the billboards were using the personal information of drivers they gleaned from the car’s computers, but what else did they expect?
Everyone trying to get theirs.
If all went well, she’d be able to paddle her little project as far down river as possible, maybe all the way to the sea where she’d jump ship, just as Brian said. And not just onto any ship, but onto one of the Luxury Liners that corporate office buildings always reminded her of: glass and white buildings, each on a trip to a different promised land: Make My Anxiety Go Away; Make My Face Beautiful; Make My Penis Erect; Cure My Memory Loss…. Most of all, there was: Doctor, I Don’t Want to Die.
Driving along, she could see some sort of machine sticking out of the trunk of another car. A red machine that looked familiar, with handles like on a lawnmower, but that she couldn’t place. So she kept drawing closer, trying to get a better look. Then she realized: it was a snow blower, like her father used to own. He’d pull it out during snowfalls to clear the driveway, the machine throwing up great white plumes as he walked behind it. Then he only had to use it for the odd, freak snowstorm.
Then not at all. Instead of Virus Days, kids used to get off school for Snow Days. And she wondered what had happened to that old machine?—there must have been millions of them.
The memory stirred others. When Olympia’s grandmother was a girl, she used to say, the McGills still had a horse. And a goat. Back then, it was still possible for a kid to get on her bike and ride past strip malls and gas stations until she was out in farmland. With farmhouses. No more. That bike ride kept getting longer and longer, the distance between farmhouses widening until the entire state was paved by one vast agribusiness. Field insects had been so plentiful, she’d said, that she’d close her mouth to keep from breathing them in.
What would Gram say now, Olympia wondered, to see the patchwork of family farms transformed into an industrial landscape: agri-factories of GMO crops, automated tractors, goats that gave antibiotics…. Her crystal clear windshield reminded Olympia how even she could remember using the wipers to clean off squashed insects, butterflies stuck in the grill…. Then came the Insect Apocalypse: 87% of insect biomass lost in a decade, entire flocks of birds who depended on them dropping out of the sky, having starved in midair. Flocks of purple martins sometimes tried walking to South America, augmenting their diets with ground insects, the country air perfumed by shit and dead animals because there weren't any flies to consume them. A row of giant, white wind turbines stood motionless and stoic as monuments to a lost civilization.
So okay, Olympia hadn’t needed much persuading to come along. The company Brian and Sid incorporated—a paper company at this point—no labs, no offices, no nothing—would be called BioShield. Or maybe Small Bore Biotherapeutics, set up as a defense contractor. When she was ready, she would join as its principle director in the avian flu Prevention project. Salary?—to be negotiated. But it would include a mix of cash and stock options. While they laid the capital foundation for the company, she’d simply continue what she’d been doing, the various parties sharing such information as would be mutually beneficial. “As a gesture of good faith, it would be nice if you pulled your article from The Journal of Entomology.”
The request gave her pause. First, how had they known about that article? Second, every part of her was oriented to making the information she discovered known. That’s why scientists in academia did what they did. Why discover a new species if you’re only going to hide it under a patent? “Are you serious?” As soon as she asked, she could hear how naive she sounded.
Now here she was, gliding to the full meal—actual investors: real people with real money looking for a project—reality to be determined. “It’ll just be a little meet-and-greet affair,” Brian had said when he invited her. Mr. Colfax and his wife, Ms. Smyth–Jakarta, just want to meet the primary investigator, you, have dinner and talk. Very low key.”
They were bringing their lawyer.
NO.IT.AN.EVIL, the anti-concert. Gabe grabbed her helmet and hurried out.
After working in the hermetically sealed insectarium all day, she loved the freedom of her bike. No roof, no walls… And the rush she got dodging traffic. Less than a year since they’d put up ghost bikes for those guys who’d been killed in last year’s Da Tour, she understood why they had blown through that red light. After working all day in cubicles, it was the thrill of having no seatbelt, no safety net… In their honor, she shot through an intersection, cheating by looking both ways—she wasn’t stupid—but loving her ability to hop a curb when the traffic snarled. She loved the way jumping back into traffic could cause one of those AlphaCars to jerk, jarring its ‘driver’ who was usually texting or whatever. Most people saw the cars as robots, but she knew better: the cars were traveling nodes of AI—and that’s why she loved throwing a monkey wrench into their works.
But what she loved most about riding her bike was the feel of shape-shifting: being on the sidewalk, a pedestrian one moment, then in the street, traffic, the next. It was like being a cyborg, its simple mechanics an extension of her legs, her heart and lungs and legs pumping energy into the machine, and the machine multiplying her strength. Riding a bike, they said, is what gave a sickly Orson Wells his idea for the alien machines in War of the Worlds….
Twenty minutes later she slowed before a massive warehouse. Spotlights down the block announced the entrance to the LIVE.NATION concert. Even from this distance she could tell that the people going in were beautiful: trim bods sheathed in designer versions of Bottom Billion chic: like there had been a casting call for the latest iFlex commercial. A car that looked like it had been driven through a garbage storm went by—an iTaxi—it must have passed through a mob of NGers. It pulled up to the entrance and a bunch of slick, iEverything groupies got out, the latest iFoney’s between their legs, vibrate function set on high, Gabe imagined, so they could get off by calling each other. There was probably an app for that. The Jesus Phone they’d called it while awaiting its second coming to market. After it went obsolete, owners could plant it and the sunflower seeds embedded in its case would sprout. Earth Friendly. Who said, It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?...
As Gabe coasted by, a couple were arguing with door-apes who wouldn’t let them in because they weren’t fresh enough or thin enough or something. Were they trying to get into the wrong concert?
She stood up on the pedals to make herself taller, trying to find the anti-concert. No map pin, no check-ins, or even anything that could be tracked—almost everyone who came to these things went by the name Anonymous. She wasn’t sure what shape the portal would take, but somewhere around here there’d be an alleyway, or maybe a fire escape jammed into its down position so people could use it to get onto a rooftop, or some other passage that would guide the tribe to the real action. She had no idea how big the anti-concert would be. She’d been to one that was so small it was held in an old, dilapidated rooftop water tank and another that was so large it filled the gym of an abandoned insane asylum. They were into that kind of anti-marketing marketing.
She did a U-turn, and pedaled back past the main entrance, past the couple who had been turned away and were walking fast, complaining loudly. Then Gabe saw a drippy, red circle spray-painted at the entrance to an alley: a crude version of the Red Marble Earth tattoos a lot of NGers got. Just beyond was a pile of bikes. As she glided up to the pack, she saw a bike exactly like hers, chained to the post with a chain exactly like the one she’d just bought—as though she’d already arrived. She had congratulated herself for figuring out how to give the chain a Mobius-like twist to lock up both the front and rear wheels, but looking at the other bike she could see that its owner had come to the exact same solution. Then she saw a third, and a fourth bike, all with the same chain and the same solution. No one told them how to do it, they all just got the same idea independently, each one of them, like her, no doubt thinking they’d come up with something unique—the kind of thing that in big ways and small gave a person the illusion of individuality when really they’d just been running along rails laid down for them by the physics of how cable coils. She tried to suppress that sinking feeling she got every time she came to a concert and saw how many people dressed like her: lots of black; combat boots; arty glasses; tats…. One million Elvis fans can’t be wrong….
Then she spotted it: behind a dumpster, someone had caved in the doors of a freight elevator to create a large, open manhole. Standing at its lip, she found a chain knotted to form a ladder, dangling down into the darkness.
The couple who’d been turned away at the front door suddenly appeared at the entrance to the alley, still pissed.
“Hey,” she yelled to them. “Hey!” she yelled again. When they looked her way, she waved for them to follow her. They hesitated. Maybe she’d been wrong about them. The politics of clothes changed so fast she could never keep up, but the guy seemed solid enough, dressed in one of those military jackets that RedHatters wore with business ties when the U.S. invaded its first conflict-mineral zone, while the peace-warriors, eco-terrorists, and others who got those discarded hats from Goodwill started wearing them as a reminder of all the lies and scandals and corporate deals that stoked ‘policing actions’ to take over militia-run mines, forests, and ‘jungles of interest’ even as the policing actions ground on into the unpopularity of last year’s band. But his f-friend looked more iffy, dressed as she was in those camouflage patterns fashion models strutted at the height of the war’s popularity.
Now, hardly anyone wore that stuff, other than anarchists or the
fashion-challenged—the reason the woman and her m-friend couldn’t get into the club, Gabe figured. Just like the people who wore facemasks because they didn’t want to breathe in the latest virus, and those who wore one as an up-yours to Redhatters, it was hard to tell who was which sometimes.
She climbed down into the shaft, then waited a moment at the bottom, wondering if they were going to come along. It was dark here: a utility tunnel full of power cables ran off into darkness in both directions. Maybe this wasn’t the way after all. She started humming Can You Show Me the Way to the Rage? when from the street level came the woman’s voice, “Does this look right to you?” Gabe wanted to laugh. She had wondered the exact same thing at her first portal. Once inside, though, it was easy to see that it was the rest of the world that was crazy, and you knew that, Yeah, it was exactly right, the portals being NO.IT.AN.EVIL’s way of keeping out Young-Lawyers-in-Love, RedHatters, and every other fuck who wanted everyone on the grid so they could sell them more shit.
Unlike the LIVE.NATION bouncer, though, the NO.IT.AN.EVIL filter was self-selective. Anyone who wanted to come down that ladder could. If the couple up above was right for the rage, they’d come. If not, fuck ’em.
She spotted a sure sign that she was on the right track: a city power line had been hacked to supply industrial-strength juice. Just then, the chain ladder tinkled. The guy’s foot descended. Despite herself, she gave a little smile for the company, his sandals proving she’d been right: huaraches like those that had begun appearing on the feet of hard-core NGers, their soles cut from old military-issue bulletproof vests.
“I think it’s this way,” she called back to them, moving deeper down the tunnel, leading them on like Alice’s rabbit….
The lab was eerily empty at night. Quiet as a lab in a horror movie. Maybe one about a virus that turns everyone into zombies. The only sound was the buzz of the fluorescent lights, and the soft, rhythmic hum of the agitator Mohammed left running to vibrate a petri dish overnight. The glassed off area where Silpa did her blood work looked like a large aquarium at Sea World, drained of its water. Meadow could imagine the flies and mosquitoes sleeping in their insectarium three floors below, the lab rats asleep, the mice and rabbits in the eternal night of their pens. From her backpack, she retrieved the VR goggles she’d bought to let her see in 360° 3D, speak and dance and listen in real time and with a fidelity that wasn’t possible on the regular Internet.
She first surfed to a lo-fi site so she could see what difference the VR headset made: a YouTube video that Jak had shown her earlier in the day of one of those exotic birds that didn’t belong in Paraguay but somehow ended up there anyway. On-screen, the bird began screeching, cawing through the speakers of her computer.
Then she had the creepy sensation of being watched. As she turned around—a man standing there made her heart leap. It was Bill. The janitor. “Christ, Bill, you scared me.”
“Sorry,” he said, leaning on his push broom; one of the last human janitors left, he clutched it like a security blanket, insisting that he needed it to get the spots the bots missed, though no one else could ever see them. “I thought a bird had got loose in here or something. Working late?”
“Not really. I just wanted to use the computer,” she said, her pulse still fast but returning to normal. Scared by a janitor in a horror movie: what a cliché. She didn’t want to get into a conversation with him because he’d talk all night given the chance. But she didn’t want to be rude either, and he was gazing at the bird on her screen. It made that cawing noise, then a chirping. “It’s called a lyrebird.”
“How come it lies?”
“Lyre. Like the harp. But I like to think of it as the mockingbird. It only tells the truth.”
The bird began making a revving sound like a motorcycle.
“What was that? Did they add that?”
That’s what Meadow had thought when Jak showed it to her, his main comment being, ‘Isn’t that wild?’ But listening closer she could tell that the audio hadn’t been doctored—not unless they’d done a lot of sophisticated sound editing to keep the background noises of the jungle seamless. “No, it only imitates the sounds that it grew up hearing in the forest.” Then the bird mimicked the sound again: the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw. “That’s why I call it the mockingbird.”
After Bill left, Meadow logged into W.2. The W.2 Earth rotated on her screen, the North-American Midwest in darkness as it was outside the windows of the lab. During the day, those same windows framed the center’s quad. But now the night made them mirror-black and she watched herself reflected in them, putting on her goggles. Her entire field of vision filled with her screen, the globe on it smoothly speeding up, zooming in on where she was, the concert only a few miles from the lab. Watching the satellite view zoom in to her own town always reminded her of the time she’d been nursing Nico, the TV on to pass the time. A news flash switched to live coverage of the U.S. bombing of Caracas; beneath those bombs, she knew, there were mothers, like her, and ever since, her own town zooming up on-screen gave her the uneasiness of seeing it through the crosshairs of one of those smart bombs—a screaming comes across the sky—as it screeched down at her head. The grid of Chicago streets rapidly became a checkerboard of rooftops, then the roof of a warehouse that the camera passed right though, placing her avatar inside a virtual club.
Her ears filled with the party. She looked to the right, then the left, seeing the party from the viewpoint of her avatar, people talking, beer bottles clinking, the crowd of avatars she was in all having the impossible Barbie & Ken bodies of W.2, but dressed better than most avatars in W.2, the avatars this event drew having the money to buy the custom programming it took to dress in high-end fashions, their bodies, jewelry, and clothes minutely detailed. When she looked down at her own avatar’s body, the standard clothes it was dressed in made her feel like a hayseed. Compared to the fine-grained programming she could see in the stitching of hemlines, she may as well be dressed in a sack. People immediately turned away from her. Most of their operators were probably also using the VR goggles Meadow had just bought. She’d never been in a space so audibly rich, the sounds coming not from one but dozens of others, all around her, and with more fidelity than if she were actually there. The building, though, was as devoid of detail as the lo-fi version of W.2: brick pattern instead of individual bricks.
The dance floor was so crowded it was hard to see the stage. A huge video screen was mounted above it, streaming video of the real concert that was going on in a real warehouse with real people in the real-world counterpart of this W.2 concert. A center screen displayed live video of the real TJ: a Rastafarian white guy with long green dreadlocks. He danced about, directing the music, using a Z-Game controller like a conductor’s baton. As Meadow made her way closer, she could see his avatar on the stage in W.2, exactly mimicking his movements in the live video of the simulcast. Motion sensors mapped his movements onto his avatar, which mimed him exactly.
She made a walking motion with her fingers to get closer to the huge red flutes supporting the stage canopy: logos. The flutes were the logo of a sponsor, she realized. She almost had to laugh at herself. What a dope.
Just as she began to log out, though, a voice came through her headset, clearly directed at her: “Would you like to dance?” When she turned to see who was talking to her, the avatar she faced looked so much like her husband it made her suck in her breath.
“William?” she asked.
No response.
Unlike all the other avatars in the club, he was dressed in jeans. Flannel shirt. Buttoned at the neck, the way her husband wore it. The way he had worn it in the photo he’d emailed her. Only not so. More like a SIMS character or a sketch by a street artist who got the general face more or less right, but no better than a poor caricature. The distortions made him look younger than he appeared in his photo: but not quite a younger version. No, not William. More like a younger brother, or cousin, or—before she could stop herself she’d thought it: Or an older version of Nico. Coincidence, she said, not wanting to let herself believe.
“No,” she said, watching to see what he’d do. “I don’t dance.” No reaction. He stayed still for so long that she began to think he had frozen. Then he said, “You’re not from here, are you?” The voice sounded familiar, almost like her husband, almost like her son. Somewhere in between, but faintly synthesized. “What are you looking for?”
The question caught her off guard. “Who says I’m looking for something?”
“Everyone’s looking for something.”
His answers seemed real if vague, like VOˆCO when it just fed back different versions of your questions to make you think you were having a conversation with a real person. She decided to play along. “Yeah, well not everyone knows what it is.”
“True.” He began to look around, as though checking out the scene for someone more fun. Or better looking. Maybe he was real after all. Then he walked away from her—manners of a robot—joining the crowd out on the dance floor. The way he said it though gave her the sense that he knew something he wasn’t saying, so she continued to wander among the avatars, keeping him in view.
He began dancing with an avatar modeled after a famous influencer, doing a dance that involved grinding their hips together. Even if he was some kind of ghost image of Nico, would he be able to recognize her? Seeing how much younger all the other avatars were, or made themselves out to be, she knew she’d aged too.
The live feed showed the real TJ, sweeping his Z-Game controller as though it were the handlebars of a motorcycle while his Lego-like avatar mirrored his motions in the W.2 version on-screen. Live video showed the real-people counterparts of the avatars, dancing in a real warehouse. Though not as perfectly shaped as their avatars, the real people were surprisingly close: twentysomethings—all of them so young she felt like a chaperone, though her avatar’s body was the same age as theirs.
Some of the avatars danced with the novice Frankenstein-like motions available from the W.2 control panel, the people controlling them activating moves like ‘The NASDAQ’ or ‘The Fraq.’ Some had gotten really good at combining these in ways that made the avatar’s moves look unique. At least to someone who didn’t know any better. Some avatars competed in worldwide dance contests, she knew. But the real dance pros were nerds who had gotten into the programming itself, designing code that would make their avatars spin like ballerinas or figure skaters unbound by the laws of gravity, and do so in time with the music.
She searched for the guy she’d spoken to. As she wandered through the crowd, she also kept looking for?... For what? Some sign of Nico?
Then she saw someone moving with robotic-like motions: an avatar keeping his feet fixed in place, his legs stiff and bending at the waist, rotating through minor degrees of arc with the speed of a robotic arm run by servos. Nico liked robots. And as she watched this avatar dance, she remembered where she’d seen those robotic dance motions before: it was in one of the animations Nico made, downloading an animation program to make the robot he drew dance. As she neared to get a clearer look, she could see that his face and arms were red—the same red Nico used to color his robots. Did this mean anything? Or did it just mean that both animation programs shared some code? Or was she just losing her mind, relating everything to everything else even if there were no relation?...
The couple caught up with Gabe when she paused at a candle burning near the end of the corridor. Up close she got the joke of the woman’s pantsuit: camouflage fabric marked up to turn its patterns into interlocking flowers: Ecouflage.
“Hey,” the guy said in greeting, stepping up to see what Gabe was looking at: Instead of the fishbowl of condoms that a lot of hosts placed at the entrance to their parties, the candle’s glow illuminated a bucket of industrial earplugs.
The sight gave Gabe pause. No Production events always skated a line between excitement and danger. Their manifesto claimed that the only way to wake up consumer zombies was to scare them into realizing that they’d been sleepwalking.
The concerts or performances or whatever you called them were always loud, and involved cobbled-together machinery. The organizers never tried to hurt anyone, even though accidents sometimes happened. If earplugs were being passed out, something big must be planned.
“This is going to be great,” Gabe told the couple, grabbing a pair.