“So, uh, do any of you have siblings?” Kenner said. “Like twins?”
“What a random thing to ask,” Annie said, laughing.
“I have a brother,” Ash said. “He died a few years ago, but my parents paid to bot him. I talk to him every day. It still sounds weird saying that.”
“Do you think you’re closer to him since he died?” Luci asked.
“Definitely. I think you tend to open up more to people after they die. The pressure’s off, you know?”
“That’s like when they scrape all your social media data and create a VR avatar bot, right?” Kenner said, serving himself salad, his hands shaking. “I heard it’s super expensive.”
“Sometimes VR, sometimes not. Depends on if you’ve got a body scan that’s high res enough. It was part of my brother’s life insurance. Like a package thing. I don’t think my parents paid too much. But yeah, it’s expensive. You get what you pay for, though.”
“Do you really feel like you’re talking to your brother, though?” Kenner said.
“Aren’t I? You would never know it wasn’t my brother. I’ve never encountered a single glitch. My mom claims she has, but I doubt it. It’s really indistinguishable. For all intents and purposes, my broth-er is still alive, just nonphysical.”
“Don’t even bother with Kenner. He had his social torched years ago. He’s one of those,” Annie teased as she joined them at the table.
“That doesn’t matter,” Ash said. “They can scrape a bot from your adjacents. It just costs more and can be a little less accurate. Like 96 percent as opposed to 99.99 percent.”
“Speaking of adjacents, you think I could borrow someone’s phone to talk to my girlfriend?” Abram said, forcing a laugh and looking into the faces of the two dead people who had stolen their phones the day before.
“Oh yeah, of course. You can use mine,” Annie said, unlocking and handing her phone to Abram. “You can have some privacy in here.” She led Abram back through the moon room and down a dark cor-ridor. “In here.” She smiled and opened the door. “Take your time.”
The room was round, egg-shaped, lit evenly with a soft, warm light. The light emanated from within the walls as if through a membrane. Abram sat on the rounded, glowing floor and then lay flat, arms and legs splayed. He found a small scrap of paper, torn from a notebook. He read a passage.
After a female octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she quits eating and wastes away; by the time the eggs hatch, she dies. In the later stages, some females in captivity even seem to intentionally speed along the death spiral, banging into the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin or eating the tips of their own tentacles.
13
Edie wanted to forget everything. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, and she felt nauseous. Things weren’t right. She needed to get away. Find Abram. Her world had been thrown out of balance in a way she couldn’t at the present moment comprehend. The sky was yellow, and she could see vague smoke wisping in the street. How could there still be any grass or forests left to burn in California? She sat on the edge of the bed, wearing her ventilator mask, while the air purifier breathed in the room. The indi-cator light shone red, then a few minutes later purple, and finally blue. She read recently that particu-lates from dirty air reached the brain via the bloodstream and caused increased brain inflammation, damage to nerve cells, and changes in stress hormone production—which had been linked to depres-sion, dementia, lower IQ, and even suicide. She took off her mask.
I need to get stoned. Maybe I’ll text Bryce again. She texted Bryce and Akeem, both drag queens. All of her friends still hanging on in San Francisco were drag queens who performed con-stantly to support their lavish lifestyles. Expensive drugs. Expensive and increasingly intricate cos-tumes. A costume arms race, a survival of the fittest on the Galapagos Island of San Francisco. Most maintained multiple social media personas and twenty-four-hour VR avatars. It was an expensive pro-fession. Edie was quaint and scrappy by comparison. They loved her and were continually fascinated by her lack of pretense and creative intensity.
Edie thought about trying the VR again as an escape while waiting for a reply from someone, any-one. She couldn’t bring herself to turn it on. A surprising wave of emotion washed over her. She remem-bered the artificial rabbit sitting on the moon. Where had she put that rabbit? Had she turned it off? The rabbit, as if summoned by her memory, hopped lazily into the room and sat at Edie’s feet. Edie’s initial reaction was terror, but then she laughed at herself. What’s wrong with me?
She reached down to pick up the rabbit, which struggled for a second and then relaxed in Edie’s arms while she stroked its soft forehead and held it like a baby. Its fur was cold. Edie had forgotten for a moment that the rabbit was a robot. That was the point, of course. If you forgot that the rabbit wasn’t real, then for all intents and purposes, the rabbit was real. Even better than real since you didn’t have to feed it or clean up after it, and it charged itself on its charging pad eve-ry couple of days.
How fast did they wear out? Faster than a real rabbit wears out? Edie thought these things as she sat in the brass-colored light from the window. The silver balloons on the ceiling shifted and scattered in the gust from the air purifier. One balloon dropped and bobbed in front of Edie’s face. She slapped it away. The rabbit watched it drift and rise again to the ceiling to join its comrades.
Edie felt a headache gathering. She blamed the smoke and the glare and shut the blackout cur-tains. How did Octavia know about the Blue Lady? About what I saw? Maybe that’s what everyone sees the first time they play the game. I’m sure someone just told her about it. I’m being paranoid. The kid’s just hustling me. I just need to relax. Relaxrelaxrelaxrelax.
She put on an Alice Coltrane record, Ptah, the El Daoud. She opened the door and poked her head out into the hallway, half hoping to see a neighbor coming or going. Human connection of any kind.
I should name the rabbit. If I died in the apartment, would the rabbit just keep hopping around the apartment like nothing happened? Hop over my cold, stiff body on the floor? Maybe it’s pro-grammed to alert the authorities. That’s ridiculous. That’s illegal. The rabbits aren’t online. The rabbits would get banned in the U.S. so fast if they were online. But imagine if someone is watching me right now through the rabbit’s eyes. Why am I trying to spook myself? Goddamn this headache. Did I already take ibuprofen? I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll eat some toast.
After eating toast and taking more ibuprofen, Edie returned to the edge of the bed and sat with a pounding headache. You can train a flatworm to navigate a maze, cut it in half, and both halves will regenerate into full flatworms and both will remember how to navigate the maze. The memories disperse through the body via RNA. An untrained flatworm can gain the required memories to navigate a maze by eating one of its maze-trained siblings.
The rabbit sprawled regally on its charging pad, eyes half closed. The air purifier continued its low roar. Edie, made nearly delirious from the headache, crawled onto the floor to pet the rabbit. The bal-loons shifted and danced on the ceiling above, and as soon as Edie reached the rabbit, her headache ceased as if someone had thrown a switch. She looked around the room and touched her head. She walked into the kitchen and her headache returned with a magnitude that almost brought her to her knees.
She desperately returned to the bedroom and found her phone so she could search the symptoms of a brain aneurysm. The draft created from her entrance pulled three balloons toward her, and as they settled above, the headache subsided as quickly as it had come. She sat her phone down in disbelief and stood on the bed, taking one of the balloons in her hands. She removed it from its space above her head and the pain returned, replaced it and the pain vanished.
14
“Edie? Can you hear me?”
“Oh my god, Abram. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Where do I even start?” And with those words, Abram’s reality clicked back into place. He was himself again, constructing a narr
ative, could finally breathe.
“Why haven’t you even texted me?” Edie said. “I’ve been so fucking worried. It’s been like three days.”
“Well . . . Our phones were stolen.”
“Fucking Kenner . . . Of course your phones were stolen.”
Abram grasped that he was deep underground. He surmised that phones might only work inside this egg-shaped room. Some kind of signal repeater, possibly. The room looked like a James Turrell in-stallation. Maybe it was.
“Kenner and I are in an old, decommissioned nuclear missile base in Arizona. Also, we got robbed at gunpoint. We’re fine, though. Don’t freak out.”
“Enough, Abram! Please come home. Enough of this shit. You’re letting Kenner drag you down in-to his ridiculous chaos again. He’s mentally ill. He’s going to get you killed.”
“He’s not dragging me into anything. Or maybe he did, but I’m done now. I just got caught up in my own head. Or his head. I don’t know. I just wanted to take some pictures out here. Simple. It was my idea in the first place. I’m just really tired.”
“You sound weird. Are you high?”
“No, I’m exhausted. I want to tell you everything that’s happened, but I can’t tell you over the phone.”
“Why? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No, no, not at all. We’re just stopping off for a second at one of Kenner’s ex-girlfriend’s.”
“She lives inside a nuclear missile base?” Edie asked.
“She works here and lives here, too, I guess. It’s not a missile base anymore. It’s wild. I wish you could see it.”
“Take pictures, then.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re on your way home, though?”
“Yeah, I’ll be home tomorrow,” Abram said. “I’ll try to call you again real quick from this phone when we leave here and get back on the road. Anyway, what have you been up to? I don’t want to talk about my traumatic Kenner adventure anymore. I just wish I was home already.”
“Well, let’s see. I’ve started having terrible headaches. Like, the worst I’ve ever had.”
“I’m sure it’s the smoke.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been running the air purifier constantly, and I wear an N95 mask when I’m outside for even a second. Plus, the air quality has been a little better the past couple days. AQI was 175 today.”
“What do you think it is, then? A food allergy?”
“I don’t know,” Edie said. “Maybe I’m smoking too much weed. Or not enough.”
“My vote is too much.”
“Oh, also, I might have smoked a little bit of Kenner’s DMT-A that you left in the fridge.”
“What? That stuff is no joke, Edie. Why would you do that?”
“Okay, okay, okay, I was bored! And don’t start getting on my ass while you’re running around partying with your bro out in the desert, getting robbed, and not calling me for three days. You’re lucky I’m being cool about it. I’ve thought about calling the police.”
“I’m sorry,” Abram said. “I love you. I’ll be home soon.”
“I love you, too. I’ve been having the craziest dreams since you left.”
“Dreams with a gray alien named Lam?”
“No? What?” She laughed hard and coughed. “Ow, shit, my fucking head.”
“If you’re still having those headaches tomorrow, we’re taking you to a doctor.”
“No way. I’ll be fine. I’m about to tell you the weirdest, most ridiculous thing, though.”
“What?”
“I noticed last night that the headaches stopped completely whenever one of those leftover silver balloons from your art installation floated over my head on the ceiling. Like, my headache would stop instantly. I’m not even kidding. I may tape them up there so they don’t move around while I sleep to-night.”
“Yeah, you’ve lost your mind.”
“Abram, I’m totally serious. And now you’re really going to think I’m crazy. One of the balloons deflated a little bit, so it doesn’t stay up on the ceiling anymore, and I swear to God, that balloon bobs around the apartment and follows me like it’s alive. Like a puppy. It’s super fucking creepy. It’ll just float into the kitchen while I’m sitting at the table and just hover at face level across from me. I’ll take a video next time it happens.”
“You’ve been in the apartment too long by yourself,” Abram said. They both laughed. “I really don’t want to get off the phone.”
“Then don’t. Do you have to go?”
“I shouldn’t leave Kenner in there alone after the shit we went through today.”
“What shit? Why can’t you tell me anything?” Edie asked.
“I’ll tell you everything when I see you tomorrow. I promise. I read once that stress at a young age leads to a longer lifespan.”
“Young? You’re forty.”
“But I have a boyish enthusiasm.”
Edie didn’t respond.
“Hello?” Abram said after a pause. The phone was dead. Abram didn’t want to go back and join the others. He just wanted to be at home, in bed with Edie. He sat there in the deafening subterranean silence, staring at the dead phone in his hand. Okay, let’s just do this. Eat and take a shower. Clean out the truck and drive out of here. You’ll be home soon. Everything will be okay. Humans have a psycho-logical need for order, but perfect order in art is boring. Too much order and we start to lose interest and fall asleep. Too much disorder and there isn’t anything to be interested in. The universe is constantly mov-ing from order to disorder and back again. Look at all of this as a work of performance art. For who? Who’s watching?
Abram pushed open the heavy door and stepped into the corridor, a single strand of blue neon snaking along the ceiling. He could hear a muffled, far-off conversation and walked toward it through the artificial moonscape. On the floor of a crater toward the back of the large room, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something move. He stopped and turned toward it, squinting. A pyramid shape, reflective. Abram thought he must have seen his own dark reflection moving over it.
Trudging through the lunar regolith, he found a neatly stacked mound of gleaming gold bars, around five feet tall. They probably wouldn’t even notice if I took one from the back. Maybe it’s a test. Why the fuck would it be a test? Whatever. I better not. There could be a camera watching some-where. Eye of God. In the Book of Exodus, the Golden Calf is a symbol of idolatry and rebellion against God. He paused, then turned around and walked quickly toward the doorway leading into the kitchen.
“There you are. I made sure Kenner didn’t eat everything,” Annie said, smiling.
“Here’s your phone,” Abram said. “Battery died.”
“Oh no, let me plug it in for a minute and you can call her back.”
“Sure, thank you.”
Kenner sat in the same chair and smiled at Abram absently. Abram laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Annie said, laughing along with Abram.
“Kenner and I are just exhausted. We both look like shit.”
“Let me show you two the guest rooms and showers.”
“Where did Ash and Luci go?”
“They went back to work. We don’t keep regular hours.” Annie laughed. “It is a little tricky keep-ing track of time down here without any daylight.” She giggled and sat on Kenner’s lap.
“Kenner? Hey? You’re being unusually quiet,” Abram said. “Did you and Annie smoke while I was gone?”
“Oh, no, no, no, I don’t do that anymore. It’s really unnecessary,” Annie said.
“For sure, for sure,” Kenner said, his eyes closed.
“Kenner ate some fish. Kenner ate some fish,” Annie sang.
“Wow, really? You have a lot more influence over him than I do. I can’t even get him to drink a glass of water without a million questions.”
“Kenner and I were talking about something while you were on the phone,” Annie said, “and I’d love to see what you think
.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, it’s weird. Say hypothetically your brain was split in half and transplanted into two new bodies. One body got the left side of your brain. One got the right. You know people can function really well with only half a brain or even less than that. So say the two bodies wake up with their half brains working perfectly. Now the question is, are both of them you? Or are they two new people?”
“Well . . . I guess it all depends on memory. Would the half brains have your memories?”
“Of course. One half would have some of your memories. The other half would have some of your memories.”
“Maybe the half that held more important ties to key people in my life. The one that had more memories of my girlfriend. The body that had the brain half with the more current memories.”
“So if the other body had all of your old memories, that wouldn’t be you also?” Annie asked.
“I guess it would be me, but a less relevant version.”
“So you admit that you think you can be two people at once?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe the two half-brain Abrams would have a longing for one another, a need to reunite and become whole again. That’s romantic, isn’t it?” She laughed.
“Molecules can be two places at once,” Kenner said, slurring, eyes still closed. “Every group of par-ticles in the universe is also a wave—bacteria, human beings, even planets and stars. The moon. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. Any chunk of matter can be two places at once. It’s no big deal.”
15
Kenner opened his eyes and found himself in the moonscape room, under the fluorescent lights and office ceiling. He could feel milk from the ceiling pouring over his shoulders and head. A rum-bling began in his ears and spread to his hands. Numb, opiate-drugged. At his feet, a pyramid of gold bars surrounded by scattered, cheap plastic children’s toys. A green bucket for building sandcastles. A shiny red cartoon octopus, half buried in moondust. Kenner lifted himself with enormous effort and leaned against the heavy gold bars. He wondered where Abram had gone and couldn’t remember how he had arrived in the moon room. Annie crouched next to him with a worried look. Kenner flinched.
The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 10