As Brian handed Olympia the wine list, she thought she could get used to meetings in private rooms with oak paneling instead of dry-erase boards. A sommelier instead of grad students. Over filet de boeuf, Brian and his partner Sid went into their pitch for the benefit of the couple who were thinking of investing: Mr. Colfax and his wife Ms. Smyth–Jakarta.
They dumbed down the science to the level of a magazine article you might read in your doctor’s waiting room. But the couple listened closely, as though they truly were more interested in genes than dollars. They weren’t what Olympia had expected: young—not at all like the gray-haired and bejeweled matrons she imagined at opera or museum benefits. The kids—she couldn’t help but think of them that way since they were barely older than her students—the kids were multi millionaires who’d made their fortune off of the software he created in his dorm room as an undergrad so he and his friends could remotely control each other’s model railroads. The software went on to form the basis of the most elegant and profitable system there was for all sorts of other remote-control applications: controlling robot repairmen on the exterior of the space station; last year, a doctor in California used it to perform a hernia operation on a patient in Hong Kong.
Apparently, Mr. Colfax, the inventor, was leaning toward pouring millions into a state-of-the-art model-railroad museum. Satellite links and his software would allow kids from all over the world to play with its trains. But his wife wanted to invest in one of those humanitarian projects that were trendy among the neo-rich. No, that was unfair, Olympia realized, once she got to talk to her. Even before Ms. Smyth-Jakarta—or Jackie as she insisted Olympia call her—even before Jackie’s future husband figured out a way to remotely play with toy trains, she’d already used her allowance to open an orphanage in her home country. High-end designers met with locals there, Olympia learned, to develop products that would have both the eye-candy sleekness to attract investors and the ability to employ the Bottom Billion. She proudly showed Olympia the dress she was wearing, made from a satin-like fabric extracted from coconut husks. “High-concept design applied to Bottom Billion materials to solve Bottom Billion problems,” she said, showing Olympia a sleek brochure. On it, a celebrity hawked a line of golf balls made of compressed fish scales used at the eco-resort she owned in Paraguay. At least her intentions seemed sincere. They’d brought their lawyer: a guy from the ringtone business, whom Mr. Colfax had roomed with in college.
For the benefit of his recorder, Brian reintroduced himself and Sid as serial entrepreneurs whose role was to find the capital to launch promising projects. “With a social component,” Sid pointed out, adding a detail Olympia couldn’t remember coming up before. He described to the Colfax Smith-Jakartas a few of their projects in an effort to lay out the range of their portfolio: everything from small start-up operations—like the $9 million in Series B funding they’d raised to exploit extracts from the Chinese Thunder God Vine—to up-and-running projects—like Medical Ventures, $230 million in committed capital to finance early-stage heart-replacement technologies. Mainly they were bridge builders, they explained: for example, linking Polar Ventures, Accelerton, and Alnylma Pharmaceuticals to develop cholesterol blockers; or putting Advent Capital Management together with Momenta Pharmaceuticals, and other companies with names that sounded like financial institutions that sold drugs or drug companies that were also financial institutions in a joint effort to exploit resveratrol, the molecular compound in red wine that was shown to extend the life span of mice by 24%, and of the flies and fish by 60%. “If that ship comes in, whoever dominates the resveratrol space could reshape the entire pharmaceutical industry.” Sirtris, a four-year-old startup that had only done some preliminary work on a synthetic version of resveratrol had been bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million—$720 million for access to preliminary studies about a compound that might not ever work.
Subtext: on that scale, the exploratory five million they were asking the Colfax Smyth-Jakarta Foundation to throw at her project was probably less than what some of their friends put into school-board elections.
There must have been more than one entrance, Gabe realized, when she and the couple she’d met emerged into a large storage yard behind an abandoned warehouse. The yard was already packed, a lot of people wearing surgical masks as they did in any gathering even though there wasn't an active pandemic at the moment. Those who went to protests to fight cops were already wearing identical black clown masks and those electronic necklaces that scrambled facial recognition software. On stage, a Korean woman in a wetsuit bobbed before a huge screen full of pixelated Aliens, Centipedes, Pac-Man ghosts, and the icons of other enemies from first-gen shooter-games. Silent and enigmatic as Easter Island statues, a pair of huge mechanical men bookended the stage. They’d been built from junkyard parts, old hydraulic equipment, rocket nozzles, and truck fenders, welded up in that rough style that had become the No-Tech Production signature. One of the metal giants had the face of the Trump: goof-ass orange hair, a pout like a puckered anus, made of old casino marquees. The other puppet, the larger one to the right of the stage, was a generic CEO, Mr. Monopoly, wad of cash in one hand, a bouquet of drones in the other.
All of it had been set up along the back wall of the warehouse that LIVE.NATION had rented for their concert, she could tell, the frosted glass of its industrial windows flashing green, then blue, in time with the thumps of techno-trance coming from the massive theater speakers out here in the yard. The outdoor rhythm was being driven by the Korean woman on stage, BubblyFish: red helmet-hair, black wetsuit, a one-woman band named after its single member, her. Her reed-thin body swayed like a long, undersea plant in a current of sound waves she made wash from one speaker to the next.
BubblyFish was famous in Pirate culture for the songs she composed by hacking into the sound cards of Gameboys, PlayStations, XBoxes, Pong, Donkey Kong, Nintendo, and other low-tech or Soviet knockoffs like Game&Watch from the last century, looping their antique blips, happy bonus points bleeps, collaging swooshes, and sad, sinking electronic game-over wa-wa sounds to form compositions that slid between electro-jazz and punk, disco and new-wave, riding over the thump of the up-tempo pop that seemed to stream endlessly out of Asia. They said she was trained as a classical violinist.
At the moment, she was into a goof on the LIVE.NATION techno-trance thumping inside the factory, using the massively wired Gameboy in her hand to send out a string of goofy cartoon sounds over the theater speakers in a call-and-response with the techno-trance in ways that seemed to dance around it, undercut the seriousness of that music as skillfully as a whoopee cushion at a State dinner. The crowd was loving it in an angry sort of way, the way laughter at a comic’s send-up of Trump had always been tinged with hate.
Looking at the people, it was easy to tell that being part of the scene was the real attraction; people went to concerts of classical music to be classical and people came here to?.... Let loose between pandemics? A lot of the NGers in black Kabuki masks locked arms, jumping up and down to create a wave of bobbing, wooden faces. Others mimed throwing bottles as they had during the G7 summit. Packed tight around the lip of the tiny stage, those at the very front reached out so far that it was hard for BubblyFish to not step on their hands.
Lots of arms bore tattoos of Red Marble Earth. A few had tat-sleeves of AGCT TGCA TTGC TAAG GTAG TATC—from the genome of the ape some NGers were trying to free from the Lincoln Park Zoo. The lawyers for the ape were arguing that it was a person, and so its confinement amounted to slavery—in a zoo named after Lincoln, no less. They weren’t interested in dancing. They beat their fists on the plywood stage in unison to her riffs, turning its plywood floor into a large tribal drum. Hopping up and down in the dancing throng were Geo-Skinheads, and another group whose name she couldn’t remember but that left the ErthLiberation Movement because it was too pacifist. The FBI classified them as terrorists—another reason that anything that could be tracked was banned at these concerts.
A jet of burning gas shot from the nostrils of the CEO robot, and they all let out a cheer. Something big was going to blow, Gabe could tell, a pilot light continuing to burn in the CEO’s head. Was that the preheater for a rocket engine? The techs worrying the cylinders of compressed gas at the base of the stage were wearing orange jumpsuits from Guantanamo. Where did they get this stuff?
While waiting for the escargot, Brian explained to Jackie and Mr. Colfax why most of their projects had modest expectations. Some only wanted to be bought, which other companies often did in order to acquire techniques pioneered by the startup: OmegaOrion bought Phiron simply to acquire their method for networking existing MRI machines, which OmegaOrion then used to create 3D images of brain synapses firing.
They thought Olympia’s work might fall somewhere between the two extremes. In a worst-case scenario, Sid said, by which Olympia took to mean that no one would lose money, they would have a patentable library of protein sequences. “But if everything works out as we hope,” Brian continued, now speaking to Ms. Smyth-Jakarta, “it could be one of those projects where everyone says, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Simple, elegant solutions.”
“Well, not so simple,” Olympia couldn’t help but add, the phrase sounding like the tagline for a company. They all laughed as though she’d been making a joke, especially Sid. A forced stage laugh. But Olympia knew about resveratrol in red wine. The studies that grabbed headlines were always the ones people wanted to believe: the experiment that turned couch-potato mice into Olympic-athlete mice by putting them on the resveratrol. People ignored the details, like the fact that resveratrol only worked by activating sirtuin, an interaction that took place in mice but not people. The woods were always full of dead ends. Stairways to nothing.
Brian asked her—Dr. Olympia; they kept referring to Olympia as Dr. Olympia—Brian asked her to describe for Mr. Colfax and Ms. Smyth-Jakarta, in layman’s terms, where she was in her research.
As she did, they listened politely, though Olympia got the impression that they already knew what she told them: that her lab was now in the process of sequencing the most common blood-sucking lice to test the theory that it’s the saliva in the lice that gave the local population immunity. Brian kept suggesting that she fill in the details later and skip to the other goal—the project they could shift to once the proteins in the saliva of lice were sequenced: a genetically altered strain of bird lice that could give fowl in the wild immunity against diseases harmful to people. “If you kill the messenger, the bad news never arrives.” Thousands of people could be saved: people who’d never see a vaccine developed for wealthy nations.
It was weird having this ringtone lawyer there, a yellow string tie bright against his crimson shirt. He could have stepped out of a boyband. But whenever he opened his mouth, she could tell how smart he was. She wasn’t sure why she should be surprised. Lots of smart people were devoting their lives to coming up with high-tech deedle balls. As he took notes, Mr. Colfax and Ms. Smyth-Jakarta asked her many things: about lice populations; about the military funding she’d gotten; if she’d ever discussed her idea with any Bottom Billion government; if she’d been approached by any of the pharmaceutical companies yet. “Can I be honest?” Olympia asked. She explained how no one would be interested in the diseases of the Bottom Billion, or lice, if the U.S. hadn’t occupied so many conflict-mineral zones. “If these wars ever end, so will our funding. As a scientist, that is very frustrating.”
This was where Mr. Colfax, Ms. Smyth-Jakarta, and others were willing to bet she was wrong, Brian said, becoming animated now, as though having gotten through her school lesson, they’d finally be able to discuss the real subject: ‘potential.’ Sid spoke up, sounding like a politician running for office with all his platitudes about doing good for others, the ideas he laid out as smooth as a rock polished by a river of words: There’d been so many ‘spot’ epidemics of Plasmodium vivax malaria in Florida over the last few years that the CDC would have classified the Southern U.S. as a malaria endemic area if Disneyland hadn’t thrown its political clout into squashing the discussion. “Charities might only be able to raise a pittance for all of sub-Saharan Africa, but a Niagara of cash would be poured onto the problem of keeping Mickey and his Magic Kingdom malaria free.”
“That’s so true!” Ms. Smyth–Jakarta said, indignation making her eyes shine. Sid knew which buttons to push, Olympia thought, listening to him go over the way the UN couldn’t agree enough to move in and stop the genocides that made conflict zones so unstable; instead, they’d assembled worldwide response teams to keep spot pandemics from spreading to the West: an army of men in bio-suits was at the ready to fly in and quarantine any area in the world. Within twenty-four hours, they’d throw a vaccination blanket over the locals and slaughter the poultry. In this way they’d slow the mutation of the virus. Slow but not stop. Especially after terrorists had begun infecting themselves as a way to spread diseases. Scared Americans watched the news more; between bouts of shouting-mouths bellowing about more walls, they saw more ads for Sleep Aide, Viagra+, Prozac, Dieta, and 0.1 micron face masks (also good for TB, SARS, Smallpox, Anthrax). Like companies that sold nations phone systems, Pfizer had built a $14 million multimedia theater in Riyadh just to show a promotional video to Saudi princes in the hopes that they’d buy their vaccination program. Fear wasn’t good for business. It was great.
“And you really believe,” Ms. Smyth-Jakarta asked Olympia sincerely, “using lice to vaccinate wild birds gives poor nations a better chance than developing a cheap, human vaccine?” She looked directly at Olympia—her eyes asking Olympia to answer woman to woman, as if the men weren’t present.
Olympia was silent. She could see Sid holding his breath, waiting to see how she’d answer. She wasn’t going to lie. But still…. Finally, she said, “If every family was provided a $1.25 mosquito net, they say, malaria would be eradicated in a generation. But ‘they’ have been saying this for 5 generations now.”
Sid exhaled. “Let the rich nations tweak human vaccines,” Brian added, “But if Dr. Olympia’s BioShield”—they kept calling it ‘her shield’—“caused every mutation to fizzle out at the level of the birds, who would benefit most?”
Investors, Olympia thought but didn’t say.
“The poorest of the nations,” Brian answered.
The music turned darker—Game-Over—BubblyFish driving the bleeps faster, making them more threatening, sinister. On the wall behind her, a pixelated stick figure dodged rows of bug-like aliens washing down the screen the way they did in the original game. DEATH RESTART DEATH RESTART. Gabe could feel her pulse quicken with that ancient biology of the hunt and the hunted—even though the graphic cards were so antique that to depict the aliens, the programmers had to make a series of stair-stepped arcs. Still, the aliens’ pincers, biting in time to the music, set her on edge, the aliens as relentless as goose-stepping automatons, multiplying faster than BubblyFish could kill them. The trill of electronic bleeps crashed into a register so low Gabe could feel the sound as dull thumps in her chest. Almost subliminally, some of the aliens morphed into corporate logos: We Cover the Earth—an icon of paint pouring from a giant can onto the globe….
When BubblyFish pulled out a JesusFone, the crowd surged—like a bunch of people wanting to fight but having no one to punch. BubblyFish stepped back as though stunned that they didn’t break into laughter at the sight of the hacked JesusFone the way other audiences would. Not this bunch. She kept her distance from the fists beating the stage. More hands reached out to the thick braids of colored wires that cascaded from the hacked phone to her synthesizers and mixing boards. Someone in the crowd slipped, falling against someone else who turned and pushed back. Hard.
This is how riots start, Gabe thought. The beam projecting aliens and logos now filled the screen with invasive beetles and plants that had moved ever northward as the climate changed. Then the projection beam swung from the stage to a backdoor of the warehouse that LIVE.NATION was using, the white beam painting it with their guilt for having fucked over the Earth. NGers had spray-painted a goth bull’s-eye on the door. Take back the day & the night. erthlib now! was scrawled across it.
Something was going to happen. Gabe could feel it; she could feel herself becoming itchy for something to blow, her body tensing for a fight the way adrenaline always pushed bodies to run or bring it on.
“Truth! Truth! Truth!” the mob began chanting.
Something was happening outside the W.2 warehouse that Meadow’s avatar was in—rather it was outside the real warehouse where the concert was being simulcast from. Inside the W.2 warehouse, most of the avatars continued to dance but from the streaming video in the background. Meadow could tell something was beginning to worry the people at the actual concert: first one, then everyone stopped dancing, and turned to the same direction—a shattering of glass—they were watching breaking windows or a fight or something going on out of camera-shot—a range of emotion on their faces from surprise to fear to irritation to anger—for having their party crashed? The muffled sound of a mob swelled then faded in Meadow’s headset like a cheer coming from outside a room whose door had opened then shut. ‘Truth,’ she thought they were chanting. But it could have been ‘Roof.’ Whatever was said, other avatars heard it too. They looked up to the live feed of the real people watching whatever they were watching. Jet engines whined in the background. Were they near an airport?
The TJ alone continued to groove to the music, the video feed continuing to show him on stage, snapping his head to make his long, green locs whip the air, the green lines that were the braids of his avatar moving more jerkily—like the difference between a live actor and his image in an old, jerky videogame. When the competing noise began to overpower his music, even he turned toward the door. There was a loud boom, a muffled explosion—outside? Someone in the video screamed. People began to back away.
Meadow kept her avatar on the dance floor to see what would happen, everyone fixed on the back door as though expecting Godzilla to bust through.
Heat and shock from enormous gas plumes on either side of the stage blew out the back windows of the warehouse.
The vidie projections were coming rapid-fire now, low-res centipedes from antique Ataris snaking back and forth across blocks of text: DEATH OR TRUTH.
More images of ice caps breaking apart. HEAT. STARVATION. One of the pixelated aliens became a black mosquito enlarged in the projection to the size of a small airplane: a black silhouette.
Gabe froze at the sight.
Plasmodium falciparum. She recognized it immediately. It was large and black as a horsefly. Suddenly she remembered: it looked just like the insect she’d swatted in her Insectarium some weeks ago. Just before her hand turned it into a smear, she’d seen enough of it to tell that it wasn’t one of her insects—she’d studied the smear wondering if it was a local that had gotten into the building. It happened from time to time, given the size of doors and insects. No big deal, she’d thought then. But now….
A flash of incredulity, then rage, went through her as she remembered how someone had ordered genetically altered mice—doing shit off the books—and it wasn’t long after that she’d started feeling tired all the time; just like that the pieces fell together: some fucker in the lab must have smuggled in malaria-
bearing mosquitoes….
The giant CEO robot to the right of the stage erupted with volcanic force, a jet flame roaring from its mouth. BubblyFish jumped off the stage. Hands shot to ears; the jet-powered squeal coming from the robot sent everyone scrambling to get in their earplugs. Even when Gabe pressed on hers, the sound was so loud it hurt. The crush of people pushing to get away from the stage stepped on those behind them. Hydraulics made the two robots lurch, then come together like the jaws of a vice. The plywood floor of the stage between them began to buckle in their grip, snapping, splintering down its middle, then heaving upward like pavement in an earthquake.
Techs in the same earmuffs as airport ground crews operated control boxes hacked from industrial cranes. A pipe—no, it was a pipe fashioned to be a dick—rose from the Trump-bot as though the sight of the giant CEO had aroused him. Compared to the robot’s Goliath size, Trump’s dick was tiny.
The techs navigated the robots until Trump’s tiny dick jerkily docked into the mouth of the CEO. A mufferless motorcycle engine roared, powering the dick to thrust—faster and faster, fast as the needle of a sewing machine, creating so much heat that smoke began to pour out of the CEO’s ears.
The operators pushed the throttle higher than the limits of the pivot points, cams and pulleys of their machines, the entire contraption beginning to rattle, then squeal the unnatural squeal of metal grinding metal. Still, they pushed up the speed, the piston-dick a blur of motion, the motorcycle engines roaring at a deafening level. The Trump-bot’s bobblehead shook violently. People backed away, squashing against those behind them who were pushed forward by those in the back trying to see. Jets of burning gas began to shoot from the Trump-bot’s mouth—as they had during the teaser blasts; then a gigantic flame from his mouth blackened the CEO. The crowd screamed in fear or glee, it was hard to tell, running from the contraption as it began to fall. It hit the ground with the force of an auto accident right where people had been standing a moment ago.
There was a pause in the crowd as though everyone had sucked in their breath at the same time, then, just as they realized that no one had been hurt, they burst into laughter; at the same instant, two tub-shaped robot-warriors raced out from under the stage. They attacked the fallen automatons with sledgehammers and buzz saws, sparks flying as they tore into the hollow metal heads….
On Olympia’s drive home, the white corporate headquarters she passed seemed to glide by as smoothly as cruise ships. Like the emblems of foreign nations, each bore a sleek corporate logo, each logo a different version of the euro or dollar sign. Compared to these buildings, her little academic lab was a rowboat. What was going on behind those walls, she wondered. What bacterium did they have in their incubators? What reactants had their centrifuges teased out today? How many of them were racing to patent the same string
of letters?
Lots of them, she knew, from the frequency that the logos on the buildings changed, a futuristic LP SYSTEMATICS being replaced by PL LOGOSYSTEMS, fashions in drug companies changing more often than fashions in clothes, fortunes riding on which way an amino acid fell….
Some of those companies were way beyond domesticating molecules, she knew, that is, beyond changing a few letters to flip a gene on or off. Some tricked stem cells into embryonic scaffolding, the brain of a SHEEF growing in one dish networked with the rudimentary nervous system growing in another. Others were assembling synthetic cells to make synthetic bugs that could absorb carbon and emit oxygen; eat garbage and urinate gasoline…. If they got their way, a whole zoo of synthetic creatures will be let out into the oceans, the atmosphere, homes….
Everyone who plants an olive tree does so for a future generation, the ancients used to say, olive trees back then taking 70 years to bear fruit. This is why it was a war crime for city states to cut down another’s olive grove, the cutting of an olive tree serving no purpose other than as a spite to future generations. Now, acorns were reprogrammed to generate floor planks direct; the time it took to get an olive out of a tree had been cut to 3 weeks. Warlords in the conflict-mineral zones might not think twice about razing an olive grove but it was the staggering speed with which Sci-Fi dreams could fix men’s wickedness that gave her hope—and made her row faster to not be left behind.
As she passed one of those suburban cemeteries, she could see a coyote sleeping openly on a grave, lots of wildlife growing bold as rolling pandemics made people retreat.
The police arrived. Lots of them, judging from the blue strobes that began reflecting off buildings around the yard. She could hear a drone, too, up above in the dark. Then she saw it: motorcycle-sized, prickly with lenses and big enough to be loaded with the skunk, armadillo, or shit spray they used on crowds. Some of the men in black clown masks started the engines of leaf blowers, and aimed them skyward, ready to disperse it.
People who weren't already wearing pandemic masks covered their faces with kerchiefs or homemade gas masks. DIY directions for making them had been all over Pinterest. Pushing, scuffling…. On the ground, being stepped on by dozens of feet, was a keffiyeh. She bent to pick it up, and was nearly knocked over. On a knee, she tied it around her mouth and nose, then stood, looking across the crowd for a way out, imagining police in riot gear looking for a way in. The freight shaft she’d climbed down to enter had been sealed off, no doubt. Ladders were being lowered from the roofs of adjoining buildings to give spectators an escape route, but like the fights that broke out over lifeboats, pushing and bickering over their bottom rungs were making it hard for anyone to go up. More NGers put on black Kabuki masks, or pulled the blue scarf they’d been wearing around their necks up over their face. One near her took off the chain he’d been wearing as a belt and wrapped it around his knuckles.
The performance itself only seemed to ramp up, adding to the chaos: after smashing the gigantic puppets to pieces, the mini-bots had turned their saws and hammers on each other, the music blaring, people screaming, looking for a way out, others storming the door of the warehouse. Gabe could feel herself carried by their anger, images of the Biohazard Containment room that was under construction flashing through her mind, mixing with the black silhouette of P. falciparum and the other images projected on the wall that the mob crushed against. Bits of conversation came to her: Olympia and another PI complaining that the containment room was behind schedule—had the fuckers brought in the mosquitoes anyway? Olympia yelling at the lab group for ordering transgenic animals without approval—and the thought that she could have picked up malaria because of someone else’s greed or laziness or whatever really pissed her off.
When people around her began running, she ran too. Some scattered the way they always did when cops arrived, but she found herself being carried along by the part of the crowd that was storming the building, the building and those in it making all the abstract political arguments vapid in comparison to this real thing that was in front of her—NOW!
Charging in through the back door, eco-terrorists and their ERTH LIBERATION MOVEMENT seemed like the only sensible ones left, and the first of the police pushed by her, forcing their way out of the LIVE.NATION concert she found herself suddenly inside: Uppies all around, lava lamps and a real stage with high-end sound equipment and a professional light show. One of the things she would remember later was how new and sleek the people looked. She came face to face with a girl dressed like her, only not like her—it was some Urban Outfitter version of the DIY stuff that she and others at NO.IT.AN.EVIL were into. The screens that surrounded the dance pit here were live with a high-def version of interactive vidie that played in the LIVE.NATION email she’d received: April is the Kruelest Month… XactlySO, the TJ, continued playing his Z-Box controller, pointing it like a gun at those who had stormed in, hologram words coming at them like snowballs, then bricks, then dragonflies, then the silhouette of those jets that had been hijacked…. One of the screens showed a W.2 avatar of him, mirroring his movements. His green dreadlocks flipped out as she came closer, his wild, wide eyes fixed on her, the hair that was supposed to be an Eco-style of long green locs, looking more like Medusa’s snakes as she came closer and closer, getting up on the stage as he kept shooting her with his game controller, the words coming at her changing to axes: virtual axes.
Suddenly she found herself picking up a mic stand—she’d show him what the real thing could do!— She chopped into one of his amps and it exploded in sparks.
Riot police continued to take the names of people in the streaming video of the live concert while avatars stood around looking up at them in the W.2 simulcast, knowing that their IPs were being downloaded into police files as they watched. Then the live-video screens went blank, leaving the avatars with each other. All around Meadow, they began spreading rumors. “I heard that the bust was staged,” an avatar in the shape of a dragon said.
“No way,” a steampunk girl said, leather biplane pilot’s helmet, big goggles. “My friend was there and she Snapped a photo.”
Dragon man wasn’t deterred. “Come on. I’ll bet XactlySo’s label filmed the bust in a studio in L.A. then made it look real to big-up his street cred.” As others began to argue whether the bust was real, the concert staged, or one or the other faked by hackers who tapped into the live video feed, more avatars, bored by the same old arguments, began to vanish as their owners logged off. Others logged off when the police avatars showed up, trolling for who knows what.
Through the chatter about whether the concert had been faked—by the same people who faked elections—Meadow heard the faint sound of someone struggling to play a flute—a hollow whiffing sound exactly like Nico used to make, trying to play. She turned her head, trying to tell what direction the flute was coming from—The crowd parted for an instant, revealing a redheaded avatar sitting on the floor, playing the flute: the guy who’d asked her to dance. As she neared, she could see that his flute was exactly like the one they’d bought for Nico.
Meadow went up to him. Without looking up he said, “I can’t seem to get the hang of this thing.”
Despite herself, Meadow could feel herself tremble as she began to type, YOU…. Then she remembered that she could speak. “You have to tighten your lips,” she said. “Like blowing out candles on a birthday cake.”
The avatar before her did so, and her headset was suddenly filled with the sound of the first clear note Nico had played, the single note sounding with an intensity that vibrated the test tubes. Meadow could feel a rush of fear and joy. But then she remembered. It wasn’t real. And yet, her ears continued to ring after the note died away…. It was all so confusing. Something was happening, but what? Other avatars continued to mill about. “What?... What’s going on?” she asked the avatar.
He hesitated. Not the way a person hesitates when thinking, but more the way an online video freezes for a moment, waiting on a bit of info to arrive via its network before it can play. “Maybe you should check out the pyramids. Lots of people who aren’t here to shop or dance end up at the pyramids,” he said.
He knew her, she noted: he had a memory of her that was deeper than the few words they’d exchanged.
But before she could ask, Who are you?, he stood up and handed her the flute. Then he began to morph into the bald manikin shape all male avatars took as they went offline. “Wait! What pyramids?”
Too late. He pixelated, then was gone.
As Olympia pulled off onto the exit ramp that would take her home, her car’s GPS went dead. Christ! Had she stumbled into another social swarm? She tried to check the FlashMob Alert on her phone but her phone didn’t have a signal either. What good was that stupid app if the police jammed the signal before it could warn you?
Her car was back in its electric mode, silent as a glider, and as she neared, the staticky chatter of police radios grew louder. There were police vans and crowds of people. Had there been a shooting? A person could never tell if they’d stumbled upon a mob of queens blowing bubbles or a mob of RedHatters beating up a refugee. This crowd seemed to be a commercial for iWhatNots. Did a fire break out at one of those underground clubs? A cop waved to keep the traffic moving, and Olympia inched her car through the thicket of trendy people. A model-thin woman in a glittering miniskirt sat on the curb, one shoe missing, while another model nursed her with a compress. Others stood around staring into dead phones as though lost without them. There were a dozen bicycles chained to a lamppost. Back in the day, the only place you’d see bikes piled up like that was outside the park pool. Now all the bars had bike racks. As if the kids from those pools had never grown up, just gotten bigger, moved on to fucking and fighting in more adult venues.