Followers

by Megan Angelo

  “Of course,” the attendant said. She dropped her eyes quickly. “He’s a valued Freebird Platinum Access customer. I’m sure the itinerary’s on its way. Let’s get you all set with a one-way ticket.” She scooped up the bills dramatically, using her whole forearm, then handed a smaller pile, Marlow’s change, back to her. “I’ll see that someone processes this payment.” She tapped her tablet once more and nodded. “Flight 1361 to JFK. Seat 18A. I’ve added your name to the manifest. Have a safe flight.”

  Marlow walked to the place near the gate, where everyone else seemed to know how to stand. They shuffled toward a retina scanner. As each person was successfully identified, a bot nodded and waved them through.

  So they would know she had gone to New York—her name was there on the list, her eyes would be checked and accounted for. But after that, she reassured herself, she would move about unmarked. She noticed, just as she got into the line, a bot approaching the human attendant. It was holding its own tablet and trying to show what it said to the woman. “Urgent security bulletin from the Constellation Network,” Marlow heard it say. But then the woman, who was double-checking her count of Marlow’s cash, held up a hand and said: “Mute. I’m trying to focus—Oh, for crying out loud. Now I’ve got to start over.”

  She was still counting when Marlow thudded down the corridor to the waiting jet.

  Then she was alone in the eighteenth row of a sparsely attended flight. Marlow’s stomach felt vaguely jumpy; she had never been on a plane. She found both ends of her seat belt and clicked them firmly into place. Then she closed her eyes, forgetting her naked wrist, and intuited: How do I fly?

  There was no voice to answer. It was only then, hours after she had torn herself away from every person she knew, that Marlow felt alone.

  * * *

  Someone touched her shoulder as she waited on the curb for a taxi. Marlow turned to find two women staring at her. The younger of the two, a teenager in a low-cut dress all wrong for her age and the time of day, was fidgeting in her heels as she looked at Marlow, uncertainty and exhilaration competing for control of her expression. The older one, fiftysomething, had on a dour look and an I NY shirt that reached her knees. As the younger one’s hand drifted toward Marlow’s arm, the older one glared at what must have been her daughter. “You can’t touch them,” she whispered. “There are rules.”

  Marlow stood there, feeling naked, clutching her duffel over her torso. These were people—real people—who had never met her, but knew who she was. Followers in the flesh. She supposed that on some level, she had never believed it, that behind those millions of screen names were humans with heartbeats and luggage, like her.

  The girl withdrew her hand. “I’m a huge fan,” she said. “I used to give myself eraser burns a zillion times a day, but you know.” She gestured at Marlow. “I’m good now.”

  Marlow felt a little streak of triumph shoot through her; this, she was prepared for. There were dozens of phrases she used to respond to followers who sent her messages of their own mental health plights; they had been scripted by the network’s advertorial team, massaged by Ellis on behalf of Antidote, and signed off on by standards at the network.

  “Isn’t it amazing what we can conquer,” Marlow said to the girl, “with willpower plus a little help from Hysteryl?”

  The mother snorted. The girl looked confused. “Huh?” she said.

  “And—I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Marlow rushed to add, her face growing hot. “I mean, eraser burns—those really hurt.” It wasn’t part of the approved verbiage, she thought, but she was far away now from anyone who would care. At the thought, something lifted in front of her. The sky seemed to lighten. This was it—this was the world where people didn’t live on camera. She was in it. Her audience, right now, was two. She let her duffel drift back to her side.

  The girl stepped closer to Marlow and planted one high-heeled foot into the concrete. She jutted her hip out petulantly. “But what happened at the rest of your sowing?” she said. “Your feed is down. It’s killing me!”

  Her mother shot her a look. “That’s enough, Donna,” she said. She looked for something with which to tug her daughter back, but the girl’s dress was so skimpy, her mother’s fingers kept finding skin.

  The girl pressed on, batting her mother’s hand away. “Really,” she said, squinting. “What are you doing here? Where’s Ellis?”

  Marlow felt like her heart was at the base of her throat, trying to climb to the light. The girl said Ellis’s name just like she did—as if she had known him forever.

  “Mom, she’s not answering,” the girl complained after a moment. “Will the baby be a boy or a girl?” she said to Marlow. “You could at least tell us that.”

  Marlow could not think of one thing to say. She stood there, frozen, as the girl’s face turned disappointed, then annoyed, before her mother forced her away, dragging both of their bags herself. Marlow turned toward the line of cabs, pretending not to hear the rest of their conversation.

  “Just not my cup of tea,” the mother was saying. “You know, the other girl still has the most terrible scar.”

  Marlow felt a stab of cold rip straight through her chest. She saw crimped black at the edge of her vision. Anger closed in on the other things she was trying to hold on to: reminders of her age and privilege and the benefits of the high road. There would be more of these people. They were everywhere, her followers, fragile by definition. She couldn’t go around mouthing off to all of them.

  But maybe just this once.

  She turned around and called after the women. “Who has a scar in this day and age?” she shouted, stopping them instantly. The mother pulled her daughter to her side, protectively, as they looked back at her. But Marlow didn’t lower her voice. “No one,” she went on, loudly. “No one who doesn’t want it.”

  * * *

  Marlow supposed her first impression of Manhattan was an unoriginal one: it was so full of people. Living ones, specifically. She sat in her stalled cab, appalled: real people were doing all the bot work. There was a policeman directing traffic in the midst of a chaotic intersection; there was a woman coaxing trash into a dustpan with a broom. Marlow jumped when a furry blue mascot—she had been sure that at least this was animatronic—removed its own torso to reveal a sweating man. He leaned against a stretch of steel fencing.

  “Humid as hell out here,” she could hear the man mutter to a costumed superhero.

  The superhero shrugged. “That March heat,” she said.

  Alone in the taxi, Marlow listened to them talk. Otherwise, New York was quiet. Her cab, like the others, inched and idled in polite silence, waiting for the clogged lane to clear. A fire truck—the kind that was lofted in order to straddle lanes of traffic—approached from behind so soundlessly that Marlow only noticed it when it glided over her head, making things dark for an instant. The people shuffling down Thirty-Seventh Street were mostly lost in their devices, bobbing their heads to music she couldn’t hear, mouthing words to people she couldn’t see. She noticed their slack jaws, their bad posture, their stomachs blooming loose. This was what it looked like, she realized, when people moved through the world unfilmed. She watched a harried woman burst out of a Mickey D’s Fresh, dragging a gray dog with one hand and eating a lettuce wrap with the other. All the while, she rolled her eyes and kicked her feet impatiently, annoyed with whoever she was talking to on her device. At one point, the woman, forgetting her food, threw her hand up in exasperation. Lettuce sprayed across the sidewalk. A glob of dressing landed on the woman’s chest. She stood there, wearing the stain. The sight made Marlow nervous. She had to remind herself that this woman had no followers, no army of voyeurs who would mercilessly mock the ranch soaking into her shirt. The woman’s dog, meanwhile—Marlow gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth—her dog was defecating on the street. It was a live dog, she realized. She was almost offended. What was the poi
nt, in this grassless place? Who would scrape poop from the concrete when there were teacup beagle-bots you could power down and put away when you went on vacation?

  She reached Times Square, a blinding patchwork of faces from home. The stars of Constellation were everywhere, hovering like ghosts among fashion ads and snack brands in the intersection’s famous holograms. A hologram of Jacqueline—her waist thinned substantially, Marlow noticed—sat coquettishly atop a hotel’s circular roof, sipping a purplish juice, its logo dancing near her shoulder. On a green mirrored building to the right of Marlow’s cab, Ida’s miserable face was projected beneath the title of a tabloid magazine app, Constellation Weekly. IDA LEAVES HER FAMILY, the headline screamed. Her nose was a story tall. The cab moved up a few inches, and Marlow spotted her own face, peeking out from a faded, peeling still-life billboard. The ad was old. It showed a photo from her wedding day, one Marlow could not remember posing for. She was smiling serenely in Ellis’s arms, her head dipped against his shoulder. Marlow + Ellis, read the text beside her left ear. And in larger print, to the right of her chin: “To have and to hold. Happiness—ever after—by Hysteryl.”

  Suddenly, as Marlow looked on, every image above her head vanished. The sky was suddenly undisturbed blue, the buildings naked concrete. Only then did the New Yorkers look up, bewildered by the blankness. Pedestrians froze in the middle of crossing the street. The lunch crowd on the red plastic stairs held their forks still. They waited, and Marlow waited with them, for the rainbow clutter to come back. Then the Coke Zero hologram, the totem in the center of everything, stuttered back on. A face appeared above its logo.

  Her face.

  Marlow shrank back into her seat. She clapped her hands over her mouth, peering over the tips of her trembling fingers as the particles of light arranged themselves: her unruly burst of hair, her serious dark blue eyes. She stared at the same image of her face—unsmiling and head-on, like a mug shot—multiplying across the block. She was where Jacqueline had been and where Ida had been. She replaced the clothes and the snacks. There were dozens of her. She was everywhere.

  The people stared, too, looking away from the holograms only to exchange bemused glances with each other. A few moved on, shaking off the spectacle with practiced indifference, but most of them simply stood there, waiting to see what would happen next.

  The light changed from red to green, but the traffic jam stayed the same.

  Then came the banners, rippling across Marlow’s software-smoothed forehead in every image. WANTED: MARLOW CLIPP.

  A voice from somewhere boomed above the gentle hum of the cab engines.

  “Constellation fans!” it cried, female and ecstatic. “This is a special day. It’s time for a scavenger hunt! Our own Marlow Clipp is out there somewhere in Manhattan, waiting for you to find her. Spot her, and you’ll win serious prizes. Go, stargazers, go!”

  Marlow pressed her back into the seat. She slid downward.

  Jacqueline was right. The hunts were real.

  She hadn’t ever believed it, and she hadn’t ever had any reason to. No one important enough to truly interrupt programming had ever left Constellation, at least not since Marlow was a child. About two years after the enclave opened, dozens of the original cast tried to defect. Some of them—the Idas, the people no one cared about anyway—were let go, their feeds canceled, their followers suavely redirected to stars with similar looks and lifestyles. Others—the ones with big audiences—were convinced to come back in different ways. The network gave them raises, or held their savings hostage—they all banked with First Constellation, after all. There were a few cases where none of that worked, and Marlow could remember trading myths with other girls during grade-school sleepovers, all of them spooking each other off-camera as they huddled in their parents’ Jacuzzi tubs. If you left, the story went, and you mattered, the network would make it look like they just let you go. They wouldn’t stop you by force. Then they would blast your photo everywhere, would tell your followers to help them find you. They’d make it look like a game, a stunt for the fans. There would be prizes for tips on your whereabouts, prizes for pictures of you on the run. And a grand prize for whoever actually caught you—for whoever closed in on you, believing you were in on the joke, and grabbed you, and made you go home.

  “Total bullshrimp,” Floss had said, sitting on Marlow’s bed, when Marlow had brought her this story, as a child, and asked her if it was real. “It’s true that the network has hunts sometimes, but it really is just a game. Nobody gets hurt. The network is here to protect us.”

  “But why did all those people want to leave our town, anyway?” Marlow had said.

  Floss had paused, thinking. “They lived the other way for too long,” she said finally. “They couldn’t get used to their followers wanting to be with them all the time.”

  “But you and Daddy,” Marlow said. “You’d never leave, right?”

  “Oh, sweetie, of course not,” Floss said, tucking the covers around Marlow’s shoulders. “Daddy and I love it here.”

  Marlow could remember the way she had wished her mother had said, instead, Of course not—we’d never leave you. She could remember feeling like she couldn’t catch her mother’s eye as they spoke. She could remember, the next morning, packing her schoolbag across the room and realizing where Floss was looking when she told Marlow not to be scared. Not at Marlow, but into the yellow eye of a daisy sewn onto her headboard—a spot better known, to Marlow, as Bedroom Camera Three.

  * * *

  Marlow was so shaken by the sight of herself in Times Square that she forgot where she was going: to 1000 Tenth Avenue, the hospital address Grace had given her. When the cab stopped, it scarfed down Marlow’s twenty-dollar bill through a grimy slit in the back seat. She put her hand on the door handle and waited for the rush of people coming down the block to thin out. When the street was as close to empty as she imagined it would ever be, she darted out and toward a dozing vendor on the sidewalk. He was ancient, and possibly blind. His mirrored lenses reminded her of the glasses she had taken from Amadou’s house, to remember him after he died. The vendor barely moved as she placed some money on his table, next to an army of tiny souvenir snow globes with bronze helixes twisted inside. Marlow seized an electric blue hijab and a wide pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. She tugged them on and turned to face the place where she was born.

  But it was gone. There was no hospital at 1000 Tenth Avenue. She definitely had the address right, for there it was spelled out in iron, above the gate in the fence that stood between her and something stunning: the enormous, life-size version of the helix inside the snow globes. The structure spiraled into the clouds, an endless chain of bronzed, disembodied, interlocking arms. Each set, Marlow saw as she walked through the gate and moved closer, began at the fingertip, crossed angelically at the elbows, and ended abruptly at the shoulders. When Marlow got up close, she saw that each pair was unique. Some of the arms were burly, with a finish raked to look like hair. Others were delicate and feminine, with brutal, long nails or rings climbing the fingers. And some, Marlow saw with a shiver, were small and smooth. Not quite full-grown.

  Marlow put her own hands against the pair of arms in front of her—a woman’s hands, clearly, with a tattoo that said AIDEN above the left fourth knuckle. She pulled herself forward to peer over the fingers, to look at the inner edge of the sculpture. There was information stamped inside every right wrist: name, age, hometown. The hand she was holding belonged to Ariel Long, twenty-two, of Fort Pierce, Florida. In the semicircles of grass that flanked the memorial on all sides, people stood still and somber with headsets covering their eyes and ears. Above Marlow’s head, tiny drones wove around the chain, hovering above information plates.

  A plaque where the chain began read simply: Each set of hands belongs to an American lost in the wake of the Spill. Next to the plaque was a pile of handmade tributes—unlit pillar candles, roses gone dry and
brown-tinged, and printed, laminated photos piled up on top of each other. A small flag staked into the grass: black, with a graphic of white quilted cubes. NEVER AGAIN, the flag said, beneath the squares.

  Something must have sensed Marlow pausing there. A hologram appeared in front of her: an arrow pointing her toward the slender silver mesh building the chain of arms wound around. “Want to learn more about the world before the Spill?” an automated voice asked in a pious hush. “Housed inside our Internet Archive is the former World Wide Web. Programmers have been working for decades on recovering the information lost or damaged in the Spill, and today, we’re proud to say, we have on display 97.6 percent of the old internet as it existed from its invention in 1989 until its destruction in 2016.”

  Marlow stepped into line behind a family of four. All of them were wearing orange ponchos that pictured, on their backs, two gray skyscrapers and an American flag beneath the words THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. The teenage daughter was having, Marlow could tell, a silent conversation with someone she was attracted to. She kept touching her hair self-consciously, as if the other person could see her. Every ten seconds or so, she giggled at top pitch.

  “Time to hang up with your boyfriend and show a little respect, Barbara,” the mother snapped. “You’re on hallowed ground.”

  The daughter rolled her eyes. “I’ve been on hallowed ground all day,” she muttered. “You promised we would go IRL-shopping.”

  Marlow walked in behind them. A bot in an eggplant polo—female, at least a generation old, dingy around the eyes, with a whisper of scrubbed-off graffiti at her jaw—nodded at her pleasantly. So here were New York’s bots, which made sense. The government was always buying up the old models discarded by industry, installing them in museums and public school classrooms.