“Sir?”
Javier brought his head up. “Yeah?”
“Sir, are you in distress?”
Javier wiped his eyes and stood up straight. “No. I’m fine.” When the elevator remained silent, he added: “Thank you for asking.”
“Do you require wayfinding assistance?”
“Wayfinding… Oh. Yeah. I need to eat something.”
“The Electric Sheep is located on Deck 8. Staff meal for Shift A is at 04:00.”
Javier checked the time. “So… in an hour?”
“Yes, sir. If you are interested, please report to the main dining room, in uniform.”
The casino’s Christmas theme did not extend to Christian charity. When Javier found the posted rules, they were explicit:
Gameplayers with a synthetic advantage will not be allowed to participate in table games.
In other words, no vN. They had enough computational power to count the cards, and enough affect detection to spot a tell from a mile away. It was a powerful combination, and one he’d used to make money in the past. None of that mattered now, though. He had no cash or chips to play with. And the posted rules also said something about a ten percent rake every half hour. Those were terrible odds, for a man or a machine.
And he had more pressing matters to attend to. Like eating. He took the elevator to the main dining room, and tucked himself into a private banking alcove near a bathroom. Soon, his fellow vN started trickling in. Many of them looked just like him; his model, if not his clade, was apparently the default male staff model.
“Where’s your uniform?” the shift leader asked, when Javier queued up at the entrance to the dining room.
“It’s being cleaned,” Javier said.
The shift leader rolled her eyes. She was human. Exhaustion hung from her eyes in violet folds. She wore giant enamel earrings in the shape of poinsettias.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“It was covered in semen,” Javier said.
The shift leader growled under her breath. “Ugh. You fucking fuckbots. I can’t even…” She ticked something off on her reader. “Whatever. Just get it dry before you go to work.”
“Thank you.”
Javier was accustomed to seeing human food served buffet-style, but he had never seen so much pre-fab vN food in one place. Under glass-haloed tables, tureens of feed steamed and bubbled. And when they were empty, someone rushed out and replaced them with full ones. The air reeked of rust. He was halfway down the line when he heard a voice behind him.
“¿Está embarazada?”
Javier turned back. The other vN was staring at him. Then his gaze shifted to Javier’s plate, piled high.
“No es asunto suyo,”
he replied, and found a table near a wall-mounted display.
Pregnant. Christ. He might be. The memories of Arcadio only ever arose when he was iterating. He kept them carefully disassociated otherwise. But he was burning so much raw material, it probably wouldn’t develop very quickly. He could let the sunlight take care of him, as he had on the island. He didn’t
want
to iterate. This was the worst possible time to get knocked up. Still. It was happening. One in, one out. One in, six out. Seven, counting his grandson. Eight, counting Amy. Nine, counting any iterations the two of them might have had.
Léon was a surprise, like this. He didn’t get surprised much, after that. He’d been in Mexico, happily enjoying the attentions of a woman who’d just survived cancer, when the dreams started coming and his memory started cloning itself for the next iteration.
Javier forked up another patty of pre-fab. They were sort of like radish cakes, or tofu. In Mexico, everybody called the pre-fab stuff “rofu.” He’d been eating a lot of it when he started iterating, because the newly healthy woman, Ingrid, was feeling that odd combination of generosity and insecurity that comes with whistling past the graveyard.
Ingrid’s body was a mass of scars. She tried to tell him about her multiple surgeries in clinical detail, until he told her the failsafe didn’t really respond well to that kind of thing. Ditto her tales of vomit and hair loss and physical agony. To Javier, they sounded like the mortifications of a saint. “Besides,” he’d said, “you’re not really here to think about all that, are you?”
And she wasn’t. This was her victory lap. She ran it all over him.
There, he had gambled. Ingrid staked him for his first game, wanting to see if he could get their room upgraded, and he invented a whole profile to go with it so his rewards could be easily redeemed. Ingrid even insisted on picking the name. She said it was a joke. When Javier looked it up later, he said it was a pretty terrible joke, and she said those were the best kind.
Javier was a very successful gambler, there. The rules were slack at that particular resort, and Javier’s opponents often tipped or rewarded him with things like upgrades or points from the resort’s corporate system. He hadn’t even redeemed all of them before he had to leave.
No. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t that lucky.
Javier finished the last of his food, brought his dish and cutlery to the bussing bin, and left the room. In another alcove, he found a display with a map of the boat.
“Who owns this thing?” he asked it.
“This ship is a part of Odyssey Cruise Lines, sir.”
“And who owns that?”
“Odyssey Cruise Lines is a subsidiary of Thematic Entertainment, Limited.”
“What other resort partners do Thematic and Odyssey have?”
“Thematic has a variety of partnerships with resorts all over the world. These include Hammerburg, Akiba, Alphaville, The Bradbury Building, and our newest partner is the Grand Tiki–”
“Stop. The Grand Tiki? Is there a Grand Tiki resort in Mexico?”
“There are six.”
“Is there one in Baja?”
“Yes. Are you interested in our points program?”
“You bet I am.”
At four-thirty in the morning, the
Caribbean Odyssey
’s reception area was just getting started. Shift A probably wasn’t going to start for another half hour, and the vN behind the desk were probably longing for their beds. None of this stopped them from being habitually efficient about doing their jobs. This is part of why humans hired them.
“So, you have no reservation, but you’d like to join the cruise for the inward-bound leg of the journey?”
The vN behind the counter was his sister. Or what his sister would have looked like, if he were organic. Tall, but not too tall. Thick, shiny brown hair, milky coffee skin, brown eyes, perfect hourglass.
“Yes,” he said. “I had planned to fly to America, but with times being what they are…” He shrugged elaborately, and made a small gesture toward his face.
“You’re right, that is a problem,” the receptionist said. “Some of our staff have your model, and they’ve had some trouble.”
“So you see my predicament,” Javier said. “I want to fly, but I can’t. So I figured I could at least go in style.”
She smiled. “Style is what we offer.”
He nodded down at the display. “So? Are my points still good?”
She frowned delicately. “Even if they were, sir, this
is
highly irregular.”
Javier looked her straight in the eye. This worked on human women, but not so much on vN. Still. It was worth a shot. “Just take a look at the profile,” he said. “There’s an equation for deciding whether a guest is worth taking a certain risk on, isn’t there?”
Dutifully, she looked. Then her eyes widened. Then she looked back up at him. “Oh, Mr Montalban, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I really do apologize. I had no idea who you were.”
He smiled. “That’s all right.”
9:
Fantasia para un Gentilhombre
“BIENVENIDOS,”
the sign reads. “
SISTEMA PENITENCIARIO NAC. EDUCAR, REFORMAR, ADAPTAR Y CAMBIAR PARA LA VIDA SE LOGRA SOLO CON AMOR AL PROJIMO.”
The prison is a city. The prison city,
La Modelo
, is nestled outside another city,
Managua.
To Javier the cities don’t look very different; the latter has taller buildings in brighter colours, but other things are mostly the same. Clothes hanging outside windows and over railings, solar ovens on roofs, skinny dogs panting alongside big men sucking their teeth and squinting into the haze. Big old drones hovering everywhere.
He is in a cage, and the cage is on the back of a truck, and the truck is bouncing along pocked roads. Gravel and mud spits away from the tires. The others in the truck are humans, men, and they are all cuffed together. His wrists are small so he still wears sticky cuffs. Besides, he could break the metal kind. At least, the old man sitting beside him says so.
“Go ahead,” he says, rattling the chains. “Break them! Get us out of here!”
“I can’t,” Javier says, but really he doesn’t want to. Sitting next to so many humans at once is nice. It is nice in a way he can’t quite define. Something about the warmth of them all clustered together. Something about the sweat glittering in their hair and rolling down their necks. He feels sharply aware of his environment, as though each of his receptors – visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory – has upgraded its resolution.
“He won’t do it,” says a man leaning against the truck’s cab. He’s chewing a cuticle and speaks around his wet fingers. “I’ve tried. They won’t let you out. They know why we’re here. They know what we’ll do when we’re out.”
Javier doesn’t know, but he keeps his mouth shut. It isn’t as though he wants to go to prison, necessarily, but that he has no other plan for the moment. The foreman said something about food, and he needs food. He has no real idea how to get it, otherwise, and Arcadio isn’t coming.
Arcadio isn’t coming.
So they roll through the gates, under loops of razor wire and wood planks speckled with broken glass, onto another, even worse road that gushes dirty water as the truck’s tires roll across it. There are four different towers, all of them with turrets. They overlook four mid-rise concrete buildings with windows and railings and concrete steps leading to each level, with a central courtyard in between. There is a fence around all of it, but it’s not that high. If Javier were bigger, with stronger legs, he could clear it easily.
Nearest the gate, there is a covered area with picnic tables and women and children. The children are all organic. They look chubbier than he is. Dumber, too. Not quite all there, yet.
A man in uniform opens the cage, and Javier is first to hop out. He makes it five feet in the air. The little organic kids roll their heads back to watch him.
“Ay, conejito,”
the man with raw cuticles says, standing and stretching. He jumps out of the truck. “Come here.”
Javier trots along beside him.
“What are you doing here?” the man asks. He is now chewing the cuticle of his other thumb.
“I tried to learn how to steal food, but I got caught.”
“And they sent you here?
Mierda.
They should have taken you to the church.” He pauses, and sucks blood away from his thumb. He eyes Javier up and down. “Then again, maybe not.”
A guard comes. He squints down at Javier for a minute, then looks at the man with the bleeding thumbs. He smiles.
“Ignacio.”
“Sir.”
“How was it with
los fabricantes
?”
Ignacio only smiles.
“You print up some drugs? Some knives? Some gun grips?”
“Mostly just parts for toilets,” Ignacio says. “This country has a real problem with shit. There’s shit everywhere you look.”
The punch comes out of nowhere. It lands in the thin man – Ignacio’s – gut. As Ignacio bends around the guard’s fist, Javier’s vision de-rezzes wildly. Suddenly Ignacio is made of bricks of light. He coughs, sputters, falls to the ground, and Javier’s vision begins to darken, his hearing to sharpen to only the sound of wet choking. He is going to die. The sudden stillness of his muscles tells him so. He makes a flawless leap at the guard’s chest. He wraps his legs around the other man’s middle, his arms around his neck.
“Stop! Stop! Please stop!”
The guard tries to pull him off, but Javier won’t budge. Behind him, the other prisoners are laughing. The chains rattle with appreciation. Even the women and children are laughing. Javier pauses to flash them a smile – laughter sounds so nice, it cures him right up – and finally the guard yanks him off and tries to throw him on the ground. Javier lands gracefully, though, and that is somehow annoying. The guard spits and tucks in his shirt.
“You’re the one from the Corcovado?”
Javier nods. “My name is Javier.”
“Your name is 2501,” he says. “That’s what we called the last one.” He turns and gestures at the prisoners, and they all shuffle forward to follow him.
Ignacio is the last to join. Javier runs up and helps him stand. “That was stupid,
conejito,
” Ignacio says.
“I can’t help it.”
“I know. You’re a guardian angel.”
Javier has never really considered himself this way. “But I don’t have any wings, though.”
Ignacio smiles. “From what I can tell, you don’t need them.”
Javier spent the next day learning as much about his mark as possible. Chris Holberton was a hotel and theme park designer specializing in themed environments. His latest project was Akiba, a Las Vegas hotel and casino meant to emulate the experience of visiting Mecha, the peninsula of Japan where vN could apply for citizenship. Mecha was nothing more than a government-funded theme park the size of a city, so asking a theme park designer to reproduce it made a certain kind of sense. Once, Javier had wanted to immigrate to Mecha. There was a lottery. There was vN food everywhere, and you could watch any content you wanted anytime without a Don’t Look Now bug appearing in the corner of the display, and all the soap worked with vN skin. And all you had to do to ensure your status was keep the human visitors happy, and make sure you iterated something like only once every seven years. It sounded like paradise, when Javier’s father first told him about it. He resolved to move there as soon as he could.
Then he met Amy.
Prior to Akiba, Holberton worked on Hammerburg – a theme village located in central Romania. Transylvania, to be exact. The goal of
that
themed space was to emulate a series of horror films that, as far as Javier could tell, seemed to revolve around skinny British guys staring menacingly at buxom women in diaphanous nightgowns. The movies were very charming in their own way. He almost made it all the way through
The Curse of Frankenstein
, before all the screaming wriggled its way into his failsafe and he had to shut it off.
He could understand why someone might want to visit there, though. Everyone seemed to be wearing velvet smoking jackets and living in castles. What wasn’t to like?
Hammerburg took Holberton five years to create. In an interview, he said: “You know, I think we’ve really lost the meaning of fear in this culture. We spend so much time being afraid of everything that we’ve forgotten what a thrill it is to be scared. This place is about reawakening those feelings. That’s what horror is about, for me. It’s about being in touch with your feelings. If you look at the people who were in these movies, like Cushing and Lee, they were incredibly sweet people who felt things quite deeply. They were sensitive men who were secure enough in themselves that they could feel things at a profound level and bring those sentiments to their work. As a designer, I try to do exactly that.”
Sensitive. Javier could work with that.
Holberton himself was a very dapper man. He had white hair cut close to his head. It curled at the top, but he kept it short and wiry to the sides. He had a sharp nose, thin lips, and pale green eyes set deeply. He stood about five feet ten. He dressed impeccably. In order to attract his attention, Javier was really going to have to raise his sartorial game.
“Concierge?”
“Yes, Mr Montalban?”
“I’d like to set up an appointment with the ship’s tailor, for this afternoon.”
“
I’m afraid we don’t have a staff tailor, sir, but we do have a men’s ready-to-wear shop onboard, and one of their services is tailoring.”
“That’s fine. Send them up this afternoon.”
“What will you be needing, sir?”
Javier looked down at himself. “Everything.”
“Will you be charging this to your account?”
“Yes. Thank you. Please include the tip there.”
“Very good. Mr Hayward and his assistant will see you at four.”
Javier continued researching Holberton from the deck of his private balcony, once the sun got stronger. There was a display inlaid in the little table, there, and he could tab through it at leisure. For lunch, he ordered a vN ceviche with a big bottle of fizzy electrolytes. Fifteen minutes later, a vN wearing his shell brought it up. Javier had nothing to tip him with, so he simply divided a bit of the ceviche onto a napkin, and shared it with him. Both the food and drink tingled pleasantly on the tongue. The ship’s kitchen seemed to understand that vN food was more about texture than flavour; the ceviche was almost obscenely pliant under his teeth. He kept the bottle in an ice bucket and watched the Gulf of Mexico waving away from him as he read on.
When he wasn’t working out of the country, Holberton lived in unincorporated land in New Mexico. He claimed it was for his health; the desert climate was hypo-allergenic. Despite numerous requests, he had never allowed his home to be photographed. He had even sued a guest at a New Year’s Eve party for posting some of the images from the party online. They settled out of court.
He was divorced. He and his husband had adopted a girl from Romania, inspired by their first trip to the country, scouting locations for Hammerburg. The divorce papers citied “irreconcilable differences.” The daughter was at a boarding school in Connecticut.
When he was four years old, images of Chris Holberton appeared in the multi-player role-playing game that Jonah LeMarque, founder of New Eden Ministries, had designed. This was the same game that put LeMarque in jail. The same one whose civil suit bankrupted the church and precipitated the sale of all vN-related patents and API, excepting the failsafe.
Chris Holberton was Daniel Sarton’s cousin.
He was also Jonah LeMarque’s son.
“And I thought my in-laws were fucked-up,” Javier murmured.
Family secrets aside, Holberton seemed to be making the best of life. He had emancipated himself from his family, and then joined the class action suit against his father and the church for an unlicensed, obscene use of his image. It paid out handsomely. This was the seed money for his first company, Interiority. He ran it as an online store for the first year, then shelved it to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. He dropped out, moved to Las Vegas, and rebooted Interiority. He joined the European Graduate School, and wrote a thesis on the social implications of cinematic Bond villains’ secret lairs. This was also his first brush with theme park design: he sold the thesis to a consultancy in London.
Interiority was big in Las Vegas. Unlike the experience designers glutting his potential job market, Holberton focused exclusively on items that could be picked up and held. No interfaces. No menus. Nothing digital. Analog only.
His sole contribution to the digital realm was his work for his cousin, Daniel Sarton, on the Museum of the City of Seattle. He helped curate the layers of time visible within the exhibit. It was a favour between family members; Holberton charged only one dollar for the consultation.
With that kind of relationship in place, it made sense that Sarton would leave Holberton his legacy. The trick would be learning what Holberton had done with it. What he had done with Amy. Javier needed access to his files, and probably his house. He couldn’t just fuck Holberton, he had to seduce him. Start a relationship with him. Become part of his inner circle.
In order to bring Amy back, Javier had to attract and keep the attention of a notoriously private, habitually litigious designer who specialized solely in analog reproductions of reality. A man who hated New Eden, and probably all of New Eden’s works, and with good reason. Javier had to sleep with this man, and he had not slept with anyone in a year. Powell didn’t count. He had to keep reminding himself that Powell didn’t count.
He had to do better with Holberton than he’d done with Powell.
He would have to practise.
Buried deep in the core of the ship was the Winter Wonderland. Its nationality and temporality changed on four-hour shifts. Sometimes it was German. Sometimes English. Sometimes it was medieval, and sometimes Victorian. Sometimes it was Tokyo on Christmas Eve, with a spindly replica Tokyo Tower and a real working Ferris wheel. At least, that’s what the gilt-edged display worked into the heart of the glittering Door Into Winter ™ said, as it slowly revealed images of the many options of Christmas, each more crisp than the last. The Door was shaped like a huge wardrobe. It stood out from the wall of Deck 4. Tiny crystals frosted its edges. As Javier watched, they replicated, etching the surface in new fractals.