Followers

by Megan Angelo

  Cellulite, like cockroaches, could not truly be defeated. Orla knew this. Floss had been talked into thousands of dollars’ worth of freezing chambers and seaweed wraps, and nothing made the dimples go away. So Orla chose to focus on something she could change—the crease in her forehead—instead.

  When Orla returned from her appointment at dusk, face tingling, she could hear Danny and Floss, but she couldn’t see them. She realized, listening in the apartment’s doorway, that they were both on the other side of the wall. Her wall.

  She went to her bedroom and threw open the door. It yielded like a piece of cardboard. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

  Floss was sitting on the bed in one of her nighties—leopard print—her legs splayed wide in front of her. Danny knelt on the floor before her, his bulky frame squashed between the mattress and the giant air conditioner. Even finding them like this, hiding from her, Orla had to bite herself back from warning him not to scrape himself on the unit’s sharp corner.

  On the bed between Floss’s legs was Danny’s laptop. His too-thick black laptop, with the pretzel crumbs fossilizing in the cracks of the alphabet. An embarrassment among the fleet of sleek and silver everything owned by Floss and Aston and Orla, so much of it that they couldn’t always remember what was whose, or how much they’d gotten for free.

  Floss cocked her head. “We’re having a presentation,” she said to Orla. “Unbreakable water bottles. Did you ever dare to dream, Orla, that my name could be on a water bottle?”

  Danny drew the laptop backward, turned it so the screen was facing him. He glared at Orla, like she had ruined things somehow. He looked back and forth, between both girls, as he said, “If you would just let me finish.”

  Orla let her keys fall from her hand onto the desk. She took a long look at him. He had gone back to putting the shitty gel he brought from home in his hair. Orla could see the screen of the laptop, blinking Danny’s final slide—AND MUCH MORE IN THE FUTURE!

  “It looks like we did let you finish,” she said. “It looks like you’re actually done.”

  * * *

  It would have been better if someone could storm out. But Orla couldn’t do it. She lived there. And Danny couldn’t do it. He had to ask Orla how to connect his laptop to her printer so that he could purchase and print out a bus ticket. By the time they had successfully linked the machines, the tension had slipped from the room.

  “Okay, then,” Danny said wearily, over the bleats of the inkjets. “Take care.”

  “Yeah,” Orla said. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you?” Floss squawked, giggling, thirty minutes later, as they rode the elevator toward the roof. Orla forced herself to join in.

  The lock on the Ukrainian man’s gate had been removed. Floss had guessed that it would be. “He’ll know who we are by now,” she had said. “He’ll think we have better places to go.”

  Orla noticed that the toddler car was gone. In the center of the dining table was a pair of small terra-cotta pots with finger painting on them. One said DAD. The other, in wobbly printing, KATYA.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Floss said, passing Orla a bottle of whiskey—something small-batch, limited-edition, much better than whatever they had drunk up here the last time. “I won’t have a boyfriend much longer, either.” Her eyes followed a cruise ship gliding over the slice of the river they could see, headed south and away from the island. “Aston’s a fucking child.”

  “Well, he kind of is,” Orla said. “He’s twenty-two.” She thought of herself at twenty-two, a year under her belt in New York. She was already waiting for Danny then, and now she felt a pang. She pictured him in line at Port Authority, the smoggy spot she stood when she went home. When she used to go home. She shook Gayle’s face out of her head. “The years I wasted,” she murmured, trusting Floss to keep up with the subject.

  Floss nodded. “I don’t know how you could want something all that time,” she said, “and not have a plan for getting it.”

  Orla thought of how carefully Danny had packed all the clothes she bought him. He took his time folding everything, as righteous as if he’d come in with it. There was meanness in that, she thought—the way he didn’t mind her seeing what mattered to him just then. Then again, she thought, with a sudden rumble of guilt in her stomach, the clothes might have been the least she could do. Hadn’t she, all those years ago, handed him a brainy book to read? Hadn’t she believed he was better than he realized, and made him feel that way? Then he had come here and called her bluff, tried to grow into his potential right in front of her. And Orla had shown him the limits of what she really thought of him: he was special and smart, of course—he was better than Mifflin. But not as special and smart and better as she was. I will finish my book this fucking month, Orla thought. And I will go on a date with that guy from Craig’s office, the one with the parrot. I will open my mind to this parrot. She breathed deeply and waited for Floss to wrestle the conversation her way.

  “When it’s over with Aston, it’s all over,” Floss said quietly a moment later. “People know me as his girlfriend. I’m half a combo name. Flosston.”

  For the first time, Orla considered the other option. She grinned. “Better than Ass.”

  Then, suddenly, turning lazily to the distance, Orla spotted her: the girl Floss had aimed her head at all those months ago. The one in her room, in her sports bra, working late on her own dream. Here she was again: again in the bra, again at the computer. Again staring at the screen, brows stern, fingers curled at her lips. Then the girl’s face changed. She smiled. Orla watched as she lifted her hand and waved at the screen. She was talking to someone, Orla realized. Not pounding away at a goal. Her eyes moved downward to the girl’s stomach. Tiny rolls jumped with each giggle. She looked effortless—the literal opposite of girdles and mink lashes, of photo filters and Be relatable!!!!! Post-its. The opposite of everything that kept Orla and Floss busy all day and night. Orla couldn’t stop staring; she was beautiful. She was real. A thought began to form in her head.

  “What the fuck are you gazing at?” Floss said.

  Orla looked at her friend. She was far from perfect, but she was the only one up here with her. It counted for something. It always would, even later, when what happened to them should have eclipsed it.

  “I know something you could do,” Orla said, “to be famous on your own.”

  Floss clapped her hands together. “Spill,” she said. “I’ll do anything.”

  * * *

  It was Melissa who woke Orla twelve hours later. She must have thought that she had roused Orla before she did, because she was already talking when Orla came to, in the middle of her frantic explanation. “A tragedy,” Melissa was saying, in a low, stern voice. “And that’s the thing with tragedies. Everyone wants someone to blame, fast.” She paused and, satisfied that Orla was awake and listening, stopped shaking her and took a step back. “The fact remains,” she said, “that she’s dead. The fact remains that it’s a big fucking deal, and it’s only getting bigger. So you need to get up now.”

  “Who’s dead?” Orla said. She propped herself up on one elbow. “What are you talking about?”

  It was like Melissa couldn’t hear her, like she was going to finish her prepared way of saying this no matter what Orla said or did. “I’m not trying to scare you,” she said. “And I’m not saying it’s your fault.” As Orla watched, she held up her hands like scales, raising one palm, then the other. “At the same time,” Melissa concluded, “it’s not not your fault.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Marlow

  New York, New York

  2051

  Marlow was in the Archive lobby, looking for a human or bot who could tell her what that code meant—404, not found—when a photo in the slideshow lighting up one wall stopped her cold.

  It was a picture of Honey. Honey, grown, her blond coils loosened into a m
atrix of salon-sanctioned waves, standing in the center of a crowd of clapping people. She held a pair of oversize lacquered scissors over a ribbon, ready to snap. The ribbon stretched across the entrance to the room where Marlow had just sat, searching for her father.

  A caption unfurled itself across the bottom of the image: “Marquee donor Honey Mitchell unveiling the Mitchell Wing, a $65 million space devoted entirely to general searches of the Internet Archive.”

  Marlow looked back at Honey. The women at the airport had been right: on the side of her face was a painful-looking starburst of shining, raised skin. Purple at the center, fading pinkish white at the ends. Marlow took a step backward. She felt, suddenly, as doomed as she would if Honey was there in person. Honey, who had always been so lethally resourceful. Honey, whose lair she had naively drifted into.

  Forget the error, forget Orla Cadden, forget her real father—it was time to go. Marlow turned and saw the bot from earlier—Mateo—right there, waiting. Standing close enough that she’d have to step around it to run.

  “Marlow Clipp,” it said, and she felt her whole being rise in fear. It knew who she was. “Marlow Clipp, on behalf of Ms. Mitchell, I’m asking you to follow me.”

  She looked into its eyes. Mateo blinked pleasantly. She heard the tiny whir of it preparing to repeat itself.

  She stepped around the bot and started to run. “Marlow,” the bot called after her, without an ounce of urgency.

  There was a crowd between her and the doors, a mass of people she mistook for a shuffling tour until she realized that they were moving toward her.

  “There!” cried the girl at the front of the group, and Marlow saw that she was the teenage girl who had identified her earlier. The group behind her wasn’t made of tourists. It was made of hunters, coming her way.

  Marlow turned and sprinted away from them, skirting Mateo, who made no move to reach out for her, but turned and followed her with placid speed. She heard the girl shouting, rerouting the mob, heard their footsteps squeaking and pounding. When Marlow reached the hallway where the bots stood like knights along the wall, she saw the girl and her band of followers flooding into one end of it. She stopped in the middle and looked over her shoulder. Mateo was advancing from the other side, sure and sweatless.

  “Marlow Clipp,” it said. “Please reduce your speed to avoid injury or confusion.”

  “C’mon!” the teenage girl barked from the other end of the hall. “Enough with the running. I have a side sticker! I won this hunt fair and square!”

  Marlow stumbled toward the wall in front of her, put her left palm flat against it. As she steadied herself, something flicked in her peripheral vision—two words, halfway down the wall, projected in soft blue light: Employees Only.

  “The Archive’s security force is here for your protection,” Mateo called out.

  Marlow pushed, and a door gave way, revealing a small room with a table and coffee dispenser. She stood there dumbly for a second, startled to find herself in such a humdrum space in the middle of being pursued. She hurried through it, through the next darkened room with the grid of security footage, toward the door beneath the red EXIT sign.

  Then she was out on a block she hadn’t seen before, looking left and right and shaking, searching the faces that pushed by her for signs of recognition. No one took a second look at her. No one stepped closer to try to see past her disguise. As she turned around and around, trying to stir up her sense of direction, a man brought his sneaker sole down on the back of her ankle. “Hell outta the way,” he mumbled, heaving himself around her.

  There was a cab. She stumbled to it, tore open the door, and fell in.

  “Please speak slowly while telling me your destination,” the cab’s soothing automation said.

  “Just go,” Marlow said sharply. “Just go anywhere.”

  The voice was silent for a moment. “This vehicle will remain in park until you provide an address.”

  She looked out the window and saw the hunters pushing their way out the main entrance, pawing their way through people trying to come in, regrouping, shouting, whipping their heads around. The teenage girl was red-faced, petulant—her mother was patting her shoulder, trying to reason with her.

  And with them, now, was Mateo. While all the humans around it tried to figure out where Marlow had gone, Mateo was looking straight at her cab, blinking, standing perfectly still.

  “Please repeat the address of your destination slowly,” the cab prompted.

  Her destination. She didn’t have one. She just needed to move. Marlow pressed on her temples. An address, any address, she could just make one up, why could she not come up with one address? What was the name of this street she was on? Which number would take her to a very distant part of it? She dug in her pocket frantically, finding the slip of wallpaper that she had written the address from the search results on. “Three-oh-three,” she shouted. “West Twenty-First Street.” The cab lurched away from the curb, through the intersection, away from her followers.

  The cab’s welcome message started up, the one she had heard already, Mayor Charlotte C. Mezvinsky welcoming her to the city. All the way down to Twenty-First Street, Marlow worked on breathing in and out, persuading her pulse to slow down. She listened to the cab’s breezy ads play on loop—including the one that reminded her, every five minutes, of the bounty on her head.

  * * *

  Three-oh-three West Twenty-First Street was a block of grimy blond stone with brick designs inlaid, red lines that reminded Marlow of the dried blood on her wrist, where her device had clung to her skin. The apartment building was on the west side of the city (she had figured out that the hazy blue tower was the island’s southern point). She could see, a few long blocks down, the shimmering surface of the West Side Canal. The commuters who kayaked up and down it streamed eastward, toward where Marlow stood in front of a nail salon, unzipping their wetsuits to the chest, shaking water out of their hair.

  Marlow went inside and found the mailboxes. She picked the lock and went upstairs, collapsed on the sun-bleached couch in the strange, haunted 6D. She lay there, safe from the hunt for the moment, but not from her own thoughts. Not from Honey.

  Marlow had gone over the night that changed her life thousands of times, and that wasn’t counting the dreams. Before Hysteryl—and after it, now—she dreamed of it constantly, always waking with a bad taste in her mouth.

  She had met Honey Mitchell when they were both fourteen. Honey came through the exchange. Every year, at the start of the school term, Constellation received an eighth grader from somewhere else—usually a struggling, smog-filled town. The literature on the exchange program lauded Constellation’s pristine air and unparalleled nutrition—it promised a chance for underprivileged children to breathe and grow and thrive.

  But fresh air had nothing to do with it. The exchange was just more marketing for Constellation’s ongoing mission: to get more people sharing again. When Honey came to town, it had been almost ten years since the government took over the internet, ten years since Constellation was launched alongside it, to make the new web look good. Yet the federal internet remained, overall, a flop. People had been coaxed, over the decade, to use it for essentials, like messaging and searching and keeping track of each other’s locations. But they layered suspicious caution into every interaction they allowed themselves. In emails, they used code words they had agreed on in person. They buried their real search-engine question in nineteen fake ones, obscuring what they really wondered about so the government wouldn’t know. Marlow’s father explained to her why everyone his age tried to hide their online footprints: they had grown up using an internet that had nothing to do with the government, one that at least pretended not to be watching people. But that was before the Spill, and now the Department of Information was blunt about the reality: yes, on the new internet, data was constantly gathered. It was kept forever, used and shared at
the government’s discretion. What choice did they have, if they wanted to keep people safe? Her father did a funny impression of the president from back then, declaring that America’s new internet would function just like China’s.

  Fine, people reasoned reluctantly. They got over it the way they’d long ago gotten over taking off their shoes in airports. But they weren’t going to share more than they had to. They certainly weren’t going back to sharing socially. They scoffed at the Department of Info’s dorky replacements for their old social-media platforms. The Department filtered silent ads through people’s still-new devices and into their minds: Flick your device-dominant wrist at something fly to snap a photo of it, then post it on Amerigram! Yet Amerigram, with its red-white-and-blue-striped background, sat sadly, sparsely used. “Lame,” Marlow’s mother said tartly when she saw the star-spangled graphics.

  The social sharing drought was a problem for the government, Aston explained to Marlow. The Department of Info needed companies to buy ads on the internet, to supplement the relatively thin slice of federal budget it had been granted. But companies didn’t want to buy ads, because they couldn’t tell, as they had in the old days, what people wanted.

  “How did they know back then?” Marlow asked her father. His response was a torrent of foreign terms: people “liked” things, people “pinned” things, people discussed things out loud as their smartphones sat there, still and dark, but somehow eavesdropping.