by Toby Weston
“Nothing to worry about, Joaquín, old boy,” replied Ben. “Charles, would you talk Mr Varela through your divestment and growth plans?”
“Sure, Ben.” Charles turned to Joaquín and went into his prepared patter. “We have a very robust transition plan. Most of the ANZDS management team will be staying on as part of the merger…”
“Most?” Joaquín asked maliciously.
While the attention moved away, Ben took the opportunity to pick up his silverware and gather a delicate fork of risotto and parsley. The first taste is with the eyes and, by that measure, it tasted fantastic. However, the second taste is with the tongue and the third with the nose. Ben wasn’t sure what he had put into his mouth, but it wasn’t risotto. By the second mouthful, he was pretty sure it was supposed to be potato salad—there were peas in it. The mayonnaise was oily and unpleasantly fishy. He was debating with himself whether there might be a couple of spoons of taramasalata mixed in, but more likely it was just cheap mayo made from whipped krill oil. The gourmet steak sandwich, when it arrived, was no better. It was a cruel trick to lift something so patently delicious—oozing cheese, garnished with crispy onions and dripping steak juices—to one’s mouth, only to have it transmute, in a sort of anti-Eucharist, into shoe leather on the tongue. At least his water was drinkable.
Outside lights reflected off the harbour and boats bobbed comfortably. Ben had never been to Tasmania, but it looked peaceful; a bit of a backwater, but that made it appealing in a world too full of action. Perhaps he would come here; make up some pretext for a business visit and charter a boat, maybe do some climbing.
He was feeling a little better, as the food—however unpleasant—was working its magic. The others seemed to be getting along. He caught the waiter’s eye and asked for directions to the bathroom. Ben reassured himself that Joaquín was in good hands and excused himself. He made his way between tables, smiling at a mother and daughter enjoying a special meal. A birthday? Mother’s Day, perhaps?
Mother’s Day. When was that, even? Ben thought. Have I missed it already?
On the way, he caught another waiter’s eye and ordered a bottle of white wine to be sent back to their table.
“Not that way, love! The loos are back by the pool tables,” a disembodied cockney accent informed him, contradicting earlier directions imparted with francophonic enunciation.
A woman in a glamorous golden cocktail dress, coming the other way, pushed the restroom’s swinging doors towards him. Ben sidestepped to let her glide past and fell through the floor.
***
For the second time in a few hours, Ben woke with no idea where he was. This time, there was at least some continuity; he was pretty sure he recognised the rotund, tattooed woman dabbing at his forehead with a wad of bloody napkins.
He moved to get up and discovered that he was laid out on a pool table, a crumpled-up beer towel under his head. Bits hurt. He flopped back down again in painful confusion.
His short-term memory was returning slowly. He recalled getting up to go to the toilet. He had walked to the swinging double doors; someone, a woman, had passed him coming back from the ladies’. She had pushed the doors and they had swung out towards him; he had stepped to the side, giving her priority. Then that was it, end of the memory file—
The next recollection had been a few moments ago, staring up the nostrils of a woman in the process of having the flesh flayed from her face by some sort of alien death octopus—
His head hurt, as did his legs and back. In fact, he was in a lot of pain. He got the feeling this was more than just another hangover.
“What happened?” he managed to ask.
“You fell down the stairs, love. I told you the pisser was out the back.”
“The stairs?”
“Yes. It’s happened before. Don’t tell the boss I told you, but it’s a bit of a death trap if you ask me.”
“Oh, yeah, the stairs. I remember.” He didn’t, but he could hazard a pretty good guess. Le Bol didn’t have stairs because it was Shared Casual compliant. Whereas this bohemian pool hall was Shared Casual in spirit, but decided to spice things up a little by leaving stair wells lying around like bear traps hidden under consensus camouflage.
He fumbled on his face for his Spex, but they were not there. Things were as they really were.
“Sorry love, they’re knackered,” the waitress said, holding his very expensive Spex by one bent arm. “Your Companion looks a bit fucked, too.”
Ben looked from the crumpled, shattered remains of his Spex to his Companion—bent, and crazed with a spider web of cracks.
“Bloody hell. What a fucking morning!”
The waitress shrugged ambiguously.
“Thanks for your help. I’ve got to get going,” Ben said, straining against the pain. He ducked under the light, and swung his legs over the side of the pool table.
“Careful, hon.”
“Yeah, I know. Feels like I’ve taken a kicking!”
“Don’t forget, before you go, you owe for…” The waitress looked at her own Companion and read from its screen. “A risotto, steak sandwich and a bottle of house white.”
“The fuckers didn’t cover my bill? What bastards!”
“They paid for your water. Said you’d cover the rest when you got back from the lav. Sounded a bit narked, if you ask me.”
“Probably pissing themselves.”
“They won’t have seen nothing of your fall, you’re alright there. In that posh place, your avatar is still standing by the lav door.”
“Oh, Christ. I’ll look like a pervert.”
“Nooo!” she said with syrupy sarcasm. “Anyway, cough up then!”
“I can’t. Everything’s fucked, isn’t it!”
“You’ve got cash, haven’t you?”
“Not enough.” Ben turned out his pockets. He had two Mc in paper and some écus of shrapnel. “Look, take that for your help. You’re going to have to hit me up for the rest. And tell your boss he’ll be lucky if I don’t have our Sages sue him out of existence for those fucking stairs!”
“Fair enough. I’ll tell him. Feel free to pop by and settle up in person…” the waitress said with a wink.
Ben only properly recognised the severity of his injuries and the general dilapidation of his body, when, after waving goodbye to the waitress and hobbling away, he realised he had just, very uncharacteristically, ignored an obvious come-on.
His knee would only partially take his weight, so he limped down the stairs, relying heavily on the banister. He wanted to hail an auto, but without Spex, Companion or cash, he was a ghost.
He usually kept the Mixed Reality crap on his Spex to a minimum, anyway, so Soho looked much the same, but people were generally drabber, shoes not so shiny, hair not so buoyant. Rustic, retro-charm was the fashion at the moment and the street here had plenty of retro-sleaze. He huffed past a store selling genital augmentation, a pet shop, several bars, a drug store specialising in the magic leaf.
As he walked past the open door of an art gallery, a woman squeaked in surprise, doing a comedy double take as he limped past her window. Jumping up from her bentwood chair, she dashed to the door and stuck her head out.
“Ben!”
Ben leant against the wall to see what the lady wanted. As her head darted out of the gap, her dark curly hair hanging down like a curtain, he suddenly recognised her.
“Deb! Jesus!”
“Ben! It must be a decade since I last saw you. What the hell has happened to you?” Deb said, taking in Ben’s ruin.
“It’s a long story.”
“You look like shit, Ben.”
“Yeah, well, so do y… Actually, you look pretty good, Deb.”
“Oh, thanks! It’s a long time since anybody told me I looked mediocre.”
“Hey, a lot of girls would be happy to be called pretty,” Ben said, trying a playful grin, while grimacing against the packets of pain various parts of his body kept dispatching towards his head.
“Good save, Mr Smooth,” she replied sceptically. “You’ve been in a fight, haven’t you?”
“No, I fell down some stairs.”
Deb’s expression became suddenly concerned. “The Razzia?”
“What? No! I literally fell down the stairs—dodgy bar with shoddy health and safety. Anyway, what are you doing here? You’re working in a gallery now? Nice. You always liked art, right?”
“I did. I do… it’s my gallery. Well, I rent it, but they’re my paintings.”
“That’s cool!”
“You want to come in? I live upstairs. You look like you could do with a cup of tea.”
“Deb. I would love a cup of tea!” Ben said entirely honestly.
While they headed upstairs, Deb left a bell on the counter and her oid double behind the desk. She explained that this was a significant concession; mechs, Sages, mAIds—all oids—were apparently tools of oppression.
Deb’s apartment clearly doubled as her studio. Paintings, or soon to be paintings, leant against everything. Her art was edgy; splashes of lime green, dripping viscous blacks, tortured portraits obscured by lines of yellow and black.
She explained that her art was about the struggle for honesty, how she tried to capture day-to-day unreality, highlighting the twisted perceptions and beguiling persuasion the puppet masters inserted into every innocent glance. She refused to spend effort maintaining intellectual purity through constant vigilance and refused to wear Spex anymore. As Deb spoke—telling him that the world, through Spex, was an adversarial jungle—Ben slowly realised that she might have misunderstood the basis of his momentary lack of technological augmentation.
Sitting cross-legged on her couch, legs curled up under her, nursing her oversized mug of tea, Deb continued to summarise the last decade of her life.
“…unless, of course, a customer wants to dial in from somewhere else,” she laughed, crossing herself as if for protection from the devil.
Ben said nothing, uneasy with the conversation, but reluctant to confess his position as senior management in the world’s biggest supplier of outsourced computational propaganda…
As Deb made a second cup of tea, he reached for a Companion and flipped through some of her streams on the wall screen.
“Stop! What was that?” she asked from the kitchen area.
Ben flipped back.
A body under a sheet, several people sitting on the floor, their arms tied behind their backs. One bleeding from a bash on the side of his head. Razzia, in their yellow and black riot armour…
“Fucking pigs!” Deb shouted at the screen.
“Terrible,” Ben said.
“They want to keep us living on scraps. That’s what this is. Eating their shit!”
“I guess so. Those people were probably breaking the law though, right?”
“Fuck off! You sound like one of them!”
“Hah! Yeah right!” Ben laughed, loudly.
He flipped.
A pretty, sombre-faced young woman in a black skirt and leather jacket walking at the front of a procession of similarly black-clad, beautiful people.
“Oh, shit! That’s S Sagong. This must be the funeral!” Ben exclaimed.
“Are you serious right now?” Deb asked, looking at Ben incredulously.
“It’s not like my favourite stream or anything, but maybe we could watch a few minutes?” said Ben. “This is the girl our buddy Keith rescued. He’d probably want us to watch, don’t you think?”
“Ben! You are really a total bastard, aren’t you?” Then, partly to herself, “Not that I should be surprised by now, but you bring up the memory of a dead friend so you can perv over some TeenLife Starlet!”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” said Ben. They were slipping back into their old, good-natured antagonistic familiarity. “Keith wouldn’t mind! All the big names will be there. Hey, let’s watch together. Call it research, if you want. Base a piece of art around it?”
“Hmm, I could. Perhaps a reflection on our society, showing how it is that an alliance of shallow losers and hyper masculine elites enables the exploitation of females and the trivialisation of culture?”
Ben was not sure if Deb was being sarcastic. “Yeah… if you like. Sounds like something that would sell. Make sure to put lots of tits in it, though. Porn sells best. Add a bit of social justice to take the curse off. I bet the punters around here would go for that.” He was already transfixed by the array of celebrities flicking across Deb’s screen.
“You’re good at this. You should be in the art scene!” Deb said, scooting up next to Ben on the sofa and passing him his tea. “I might call the painting, ‘Having your tit and eating it’.”
Chapter 8 – The Mourning After
Stella had woken early in the dark and lain quietly, curled up under expensive cotton sheets.
She waited while her mind picked out a suitable state for itself. The dull glow of dawn had been building slowly, but now flared, banishing introspection with rays sliding out from behind a silhouetted tower, sending horizontal beams lancing through chinks in the brown velvet curtains.
A message was waiting on her Companion.
A terse formal note from TeenLife™. The night of sex and violence had been too much for the nanny bots who moderated her content. The message explained that lewd and wanton displays did not fit within the spectrum of behaviours TeenLife™ and its fans found acceptable.
The acts, listed alphabetically, were also a breach of contract and, until further notice, she was no longer entitled to call herself a Starlet. She was no longer entitled to invoke TeenLife™ or its stable of personalities in her public communication.
She would continue to receive her retainer until a final decision was made, but royalties would be locked and immediate restitution would be made to cover outstanding fines. Oh, and she noted that they would sue the guts out of her if she even considered signing with another Life stable for the next several decades.
Still horizontal, lying on her side, facing away from the light, she read and re-read the message, running through in her mind all the ways it was going to change her life. The fines alone would leave her virtually penniless; her retainer payments would be enough to pay for a roof, but certainly not enough to keep her at her suite in the Pasha.
After dressing, moving carefully to minimise rustling, she stole out of the building and hailed an auto to take her back to the hotel. Messages began arriving in avalanches. The word must be out. She had no appetite for munching through piles of spam or trying to separate synthetic sympathy from genuine concern, so she commanded her Companion to move to a strategy of proactive vetting, telling it to silently file anything that smelt even faintly of TeenLife™ directly into junk.
It was still early, just after 6 am. The light was still furry and full of colour. She stared mindlessly out the window at the waking city. Cats slunk around bins; dogs trotted along sidewalks, glancing over their shoulders, fearful of interference; a brush-wielding street sweeper in orange and yellow herded remnants of the night’s debris into a flattened metal tin nailed to the bottom of a broom handle; a mAId stepped primly out of the boxy, windowless vehicle which had transported her and a dozen other porcelain-skinned Oids to customers on its morning rounds…
Physical labour; biological or mechanical; suffering or oblivious.
She entered the Pasha and crossed its glitzy 1930s lobby. She was still in last night’s clothes, and fully expected to be detained at the desk, presented with her suitcases—poorly packed and prolapsing clothes—and booted out the front door as a harlot. But the human concierge just smiled cryptically. It seemed that, although TeenLife™ had fined her to within a hair of bankruptcy, they were not going to get petty. Stella shouldn’t have been surprised; she was sure there was plenty of mileage in streaming the shame of a down-and-out former Starlet.
The doors closed. She caught the furtive eye of a human bellboy watching her in the vanishing gap.
When she got to her roo
m, she found police tape stretched across its door frame. Confused, she looked around. A Camera Bee was hovering up by the ceiling, but the corridor was otherwise empty.
She looked around again, then sighed and brought up her junk folder and ventured in to see if there were any clues lurking amongst, what she was sure would be, a sea of shit. She asked her Spex to sort her messages, guessing at priority. First up were a succession of increasingly irate messages from Marcel. Apparently, she had missed a game of ‘capture the flag’ that she had promised to play and the team had lost badly. Then, there was plenty of mail tagged by her Companion as ‘Lurid’—breathless gossip focusing on the steamy events of the previous evening. She ignored these.