by Alex Shakar
“Eat your shit, Fred. Live to eat your shit another day.”
The scrap truck sped into the left lane. In the Escalade ahead of it, a cartoon Batman leapt into action on a flatscreen TV. A pudgy kid watching it in the backseat huffed on an inhaler.
“Anyway,” Fred said, “they’re moving the office down to Orlando before long.”
Vartan smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “Later this month.”
“This month?”
“When’s the last time you went in to work? Go talk to Sam.”
“Why would I do that? Even if I could get my job back, I’m not about to leave George alone in that hospital bed.”
Vartan thought. “Could you find a job here?”
Fred thought. “Given time.”
Vartan glanced over. “Would you?”
They listened to George Bush talking up the liquid bomb plot, the news of which had just broken last Friday. Followed by a story about the singer Boy George reporting for his court-ordered community service, sweeping Manhattan streets for the Department of Sanitation. Fred fought down the urge to bring up going to the hospital again.
“If I did go to Florida,” he said, “you couldn’t go on doing these magic shows.”
A kind of laugh escaped Vartan, a short exhalation through his nose. “Sam says there’s plenty of acting work down in Florida for your company.”
“My company.”
“For their military simulations. Playing Afghan warlords. Iraqi sectarian leaders. Suicide bombers.” He sucked his teeth. But a moment later: “Don’t suppose they pay union wages.”
“Not on your life.”
Vartan nodded. He hadn’t been remotely serious, anyway. After George’s illness had begun last year, Vartan had dropped out of The Tempest and the production had fallen apart; and soon after George fell into the coma, their father was back in his undershirt, making cards float out of a deck. Then he was sitting around the Edison Hotel diner, idly disappearing coins and creamers, when an actor friend asked him to do a nephew’s birthday party. Then Vartan was asking Fred how this or that sequence went. Next, they were rehearsing in the living room, both in their undershirts, making milkshakes in each other’s top hats, shredding each other’s newspapers and reconstituting their own. When Vartan had finally made it clear that he really was planning to revive the act, it was with an assurance that Fred didn’t need to join him, that he could just do a version of it on his own, but Fred had been dubious. Even hauling the equipment in and out of the van was probably too much for his father to handle alone.
A story about Governor George Pataki came on. Something about consolation or compensation, but it was too many Georges and Fred had already turned it off.
“Sam says—”
“Tell me, Dad, what else does Sam say?”
The eyebrow hoist. The thumb shrug. “He says we should all move down there. Before New York blows up.”
“Right.”
Vartan’s mustache spread. “All cities are doomed, he says.”
“Right.”
As they neared the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, the Manhattan skyline came into view. Palled by haze, it seemed to take on a shaky transparency, like a slide-show image from some never-to-be-repeated holiday vacation, the projector a relic, the vacationers themselves dead and gone.
Picture it, George instructs, in a noisy East Village bar, over pints at a dark booth with a sticky table. Their own world. On the Internet.
Fred and Sam try. It’s the summer of 1997.
“You mean, like, with graphics?” Sam says.
Not just a world, a utopia, any number of them, George is saying. He makes a magician’s hand-sweep over the beers, a faded friendship bracelet sliding on his forearm. He’s just in from California, radiates sun and sea spray, his skin burnished, his hair a shade lighter than Fred’s, even a bit wavy. Players could strike out on their own or form larger groups, he’s saying, and everything in one’s borders would be customizable—flora and fauna, tech levels, forms of government, the very laws of physics. Sam rubs his smudged pint glass with a Handi Wipe. Fred turns his cigarette on the ashtray rim, sharpening the ember.
A purer existence, George goes on. The avatars wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty, wouldn’t freeze or get heatstroke, couldn’t be injured or killed. Postmaterial life, he proclaims with a smile. George himself could exemplify “Postmaterial life” right now, Fred thinks, with his yoga, macrobiotic food, loose linen shirt, crazy-bright future. George sits back in the wooden booth, hands behind his head, lounging as if on some beach chair, oblivious to the smoke, the college mob, the Jersey girls at the bar eyeing him—not Fred, not even glancing back and forth between them, Fred observes, torn in the usual way between envy and amazed pride. Weird how Fred’s always been the slacker, at least from the world’s point of view, but somehow George has always been the freer one. Chasing his goals with the grace and absolute devotion of a dog leaping at Frisbees. Whereas Fred, wanting to get real but never quite figuring out what real is, has been so leery of every rainbow he can barely follow them a step. From high school, he floundered from part-time programming gigs to community college stints, interspersed with desperate, footloose jaunts across the country. For the last three years, thanks more to the rising tide of dot-commism than his résumé, he’s been treading water in a low-level position overseeing tweaks to an algorithm designed to predict profitable tech stocks—a dull job, and he suspects the product is working so far only because the NASDAQ is only going up. Sam is in roughly the same occupational hamster wheel as Fred is, slogging away as a system administrator for a stripling city government website; he may be a harder worker than Fred is, but he’s intense and exudes stress and hasn’t risen far.
As for George, after rocketing out of college near the top of his class, he’s done well for himself out West, if maybe not quite so well as the family expected. He was highly paid for his programming and design work at three different game companies, but didn’t stay at any of them long enough to get vested, never finding a project he felt was worthwhile. Anyway, the era is throwing off twentysomething billionaires like sparks from a forge; it’s too much for George to sit at a desk working on someone else’s dream. Because here, finally, is his own. And just think how evolutionary it could be, he’s saying, how the avatars’ immaterial nature could rub off on players over time, temper their baser desires, coax their mindsets up the pyramid steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs all the way up to beauty, truth, self-actualization.
As if pulled by the same string, Sam lifts his glass to his lips as Fred lifts his cigarette. To be sure, George’s vision is starry-eyed. Yet in the nineties, at least for those residing in the valleys and alleys of silicon under the expanding bubble of the boom, it isn’t all that hard to imagine that even the real world is headed this way, that science and peace and the increase of wealth and trade are all ineluctably leading humanity to a not-too-distant future in which every basic human need will be met. In techie circles, bodily immortality itself isn’t thought to be out of the question, even in their own lifetimes. There’s talk of minds uploaded to storage banks, spare bodies hanging like so many suits in a closet. No shortage of resources, no enslavement to the dictates of the body, violence itself a vestigial act without meaning or consequence. Along what new lines will such a culture organize itself? This question, George is saying, is what will make their virtual world at once a recreational activity and something else, an edutainment, a training ground for the next inevitable phase of human evolution, for the postmaterial lives they’ll soon be living for real.
“Urth.” George spells out the word, raises his glass. “Say it with me.”
Fred and Sam exchange a glance, the enormity of what George is offering them—rescue from their stalled little lives—beginning to break through their furtive reserve. In a minute, Fred will be saying it with him, and Sam will too. Before much longer, they’ll be saying it again in a boardroom fu
ll of suits and a staggering view of, among the thousands of other buildings sprawled below, the little brown box that will soon house their sunny, lofty office. And, poof, George and Fred will be co-CEOs, Sam a CTO. And Fred will find himself giving in to life, blossoming in a way he’d given up hoping was possible. The dreaded pursuit of success, he’ll find, is only a problem for those still clamoring at the gates. For those who’ve made it in, who are exactly where they want to be, there’s no war, no work—just magic.
But that future is still a few seconds off. For now, he lets George squirm—pint glass hovering in the air, smile getting nervous at the edges—and savors the obvious: George needs him, too.
When Fred finally relents and raises his glass, George cuts him off:
“You’re not going to smoke in the office, are you?”
As it will happen, he’ll kick cigarettes within weeks. Though his response for now: what will seem in memory a never-ending smoke plume, blown in his twin brother’s face.
Sam was right where Fred had last seen him a week ago: crosslegged in his Aeron chair, back hunched, head jutted, headset in place, black T-shirt rolled at the cuffs and tucked neatly into his black jeans. Closecropped hair, patchy shadow of a beard. The unvarying nature of Sam’s appearance wasn’t a matter of personal inattention, but of decisiveness—the whole fashion question, in his view, had been settled—and, as well, probably, a deep need for constancy. He ordered identical backups of those black jeans and black T-shirts online and sent them out to be laundered on a rotating basis. He electrically trimmed his hair down to three-eighths of an inch every few weeks, and his beard to one-eighth every morning. Several times a day, of late, to renew his energy, he’d drop to the floor and do twenty pushups, with the result that sinewy muscle squadrons had begun taking up positions on the ridgelines of his otherwise skinny arms and chest. For someone who sat in a chair twelve or more hours a day, he probably wasn’t in the worst possible shape. Though Fred wouldn’t have called it health, exactly. Sam’s eyes were too deeply ringed.
He was leaned into his dual-screen display as Fred approached, the left one crammed with microscopic lines of code, the right a window into the Urth environment—what appeared to be the hostage-extraction scenario. Sam’s avatar, dressed in desert fatigues and holding an M-16A2 rifle with a grenade-launcher attachment, stood against a wall to one side of a gateway leading out of a barren, moonlit courtyard. Another soldier, identifiable from his girth and sparse blond beard as their lead programmer Jesse’s avatar, stood to the other side, firing out into the street with a mammoth M-60E3, the jackhammer report of which rattled from Sam’s headset. Out of ingrained habit, Sam joggled the mouse more or less continually, swiveling the view back and forth and up and down through the courtyard, a fuzzy, green circle of night-vision visibility sliding over the broken windows, kicked-in doors, and a narrow alley between two low buildings where a third soldier stood facing the other way. Watching the lifelike kick of the guns, the near-photorealistic chinks and eruptions from the bullet-riddled walls, Fred felt what he did every time he came in here: a dizzy mixture of liberation and oppression, adventure and drear constriction.
“Holomelancholia,” he remembered George pronouncing late in the office one night. “The inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds.” Pleased at his invention, he’d allowed himself a rueful smile. “Mark my words. It’ll be in the DSM by 2021.”
“Fred,” Sam stated, by way of greeting. It spooked the newer employees, this ability of his to tell who was behind him without having to turn and check. The trick lay in the reflectivity of the aluminum head of his desk lamp, which he used as a kind of rearview mirror. “I’m trying to cover you,” he growled almost subvocally into his headset mic.
Fred heard Jesse curse from across the room as Little Jesse fell backward in the courtyard. Where the bridge of his nose had been was now a flattened well, out of which green-lit blood seeped over his face and onto the ground.
“What the hell …” A wave of unreality lifted Fred in his shoes. He couldn’t double-check what he thought he’d seen because Sam kept shifting the view around.
“Where’s it coming from?” Sam hissed into the mic, hunching closer to the screen.
“Was Jesse’s nose blown off?” Fred asked.
Sam joggled and clicked, too busy to answer. Interspersed with the popping gunfire, a pleading voice which might have been their lead animator Conrad’s emanated from Sam’s earpiece. Little Sam turned into the gateway and fired off a grenade into a second-story window across the street. Then came a flash, a thunderclap, a hail of stone and smoke. As Little Sam backed into the courtyard, the canned sounds of a woman screaming and a child crying.
“That wasn’t the one you said?” Sam called out. Bullets began chipping away the wall around him. He swiveled. The soldier by the alley was down. Something moved back into the darkness. Another explosion, this one making the whole screen flash, and then convert to black and white, the indicator-of-death feature they’d cribbed from Dungeons & Dragons Online. Little Sam was down, blackened, missing an arm. Definitely. Missing an arm. Blood oozing from the stump. For a while, neither Fred nor Sam could take their eyes off Little Sam, whose soot-caked face bore Sam’s own sunken cheeks, prominent nose, vacantly staring eyes.
“Yeah,” Sam said, eyeing Fred in the lamp hood. “Whole new level of avatar deformability. It’s like a real game now.”
Fred nodded, that underwater feeling coming on.
“Still a ways to go,” Sam went on, with minimal affect. “They want full, persistent human physiology now. Cumulative trauma, wounds that can slow you down, cripple and kill you over days. Hunger and thirst shriveling you up like a prune. Smallpox hives, neurotoxin tremors. Radiation. That’s the big one. Sores on the skin. Hair and teeth falling out …” On some level, Fred thought, Sam must have known the effect this singsong list was having on him. The increasingly deformable avatars had been getting steadily harder for Fred to stomach, a development he blamed less on the improving technology than on witnessing George’s increasingly deformable body over the last year—rashes and burns, sutures and scars, IV punctures, bloody gobs coughed into wads of tissues or pumped out of him through silicone tubes. At Sam’s mention of hair falling out, what flashed to mind was that first shock of going to George’s apartment and finding his head shaved smooth. George had begun losing his hair and so had decided to get it over with. Fred had stood with him before the bathroom mirror, marveling over the transformation. The proportions seemed off, less cranium up there than either of them had expected. Fred was spooked by the alienness of it, one more step in an ongoing metamorphosis of which the physiological changes were only a part. Yet the physical exposure seemed to bring George back to Fred a little, too. Since the trouble with the company had begun, Fred had felt George gradually walling him out of his life; but in that moment, his brother surprised him, taking his arm and guiding his hand up to feel the dome. Fred was surprised how silken and warm a bald head turned out to be. “Gives me a whole new insight into skinheads,” George remarked, the two of them still facing the mirror. “They try to look so hard and tough with those bald heads.” He grinned. “But they must be feeling so bare-ass naked.”
Still staring down at Little Sam’s corpse, Sam rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Looks decent so far, huh?”
Decent, said Inner George, with dark emphasis.
“Decent,” Fred repeated, unable to help himself.
“Real. I mean real.” Sam’s mouse hand darted and clicked the window shut. An angry gesture, though its main effect was to reveal his incongruously placid desktop wallpaper: palm trees on a beach, with ocean and sky beyond.
“Sounds like … work,” Fred said, a half-hearted attempt to repair the damage. But he’d worded it too ambiguously, and Sam decided to hear another slight.
“Work, yes. That’s what we tend to do here.” Sam brought his nonmouse hand down protectively over his stomach. He had irritable bowel syndrome,
and made no effort to hide the fact from those whose presence exacerbated it.
“Right. I guess I wouldn’t know too much about that. I just loaf around in the hospital these days. Oh,” Fred held up a finger, “almost forgot. George says hi, by the way.”
Sam’s reflected, melted-together eyes in the lamp hood had looked up to meet Fred’s as he’d raised his finger, and Fred now had to watch them liquefy, and slink back off to gaze at the palm trees. He couldn’t quite bring himself to apologize.
“I hear I got canned,” he said instead.
Sam brought up another window on his monitor, this one containing a tactical overhead view of the Empire State Building surrounded by a flat, gray street map. He moved the terrain north, east, south, west, causing the building to churn in a slow circle.
“Word came this morning, Fred. You didn’t give them much choice.” It figured, Fred thought, Sam would take their side in this. “What choice did I have? It’s been one emergency after another.”
“Right. Dad told me about your crime spree.”
Now it was Fred’s turn to smart.
“And your magic shows. You still smell like flash powder, by the way.” Vartan had won out, dropping Fred off here directly, Fred changing out of the tux in the back of the van. He now regretted not stopping in the hall bathroom to wash up.
Sam opened another Urth window—a side view of the skyscraper. The level of realism didn’t yet approach that of the Iraq sims, but the building was recognizable. The structure was right, the windows all correctly placed.
“So now it’s off to the mother ship, eh?” Fred said, after a moment.
Sam took his time to scan the statement for explosive compounds.
“Off to the mother ship,” he allowed. “It’s going to be a busy three weeks. We’ve got a deadline to meet and can’t even stop working while we pack.”
“So they won’t even let you stay here, huh?”