‘So that’s where the loot went, huh? I heard you were broke.’
‘Flat busted. The yachts, the drugs, the hospital bills. It adds up.’
Laz nodded: but he seemed unable to take his eyes off Sage’s hands. ‘Hey!’ He touched the braided ring. ‘Whoa, You married?’
‘Betrothed.’ Fiorinda and Ax would say plain no to that question, Sage liked betrothed. Nothing to do, no no no, with a secret persistent fantasy of Ax all in formals beside him, and Fiorinda in a cloud of white tulle—
‘Well who’s the laydee? Uh, I guess that’s not Mary?’
Mary Williams was the mother of Sage’s son. They’d broken up before Marlon was born, but he had carried the festering corpse of that relationship around with him for years. The worst things he’d done in his life he’d done to Mary.
‘No,’ he said, jolted by the question. ‘Not Mary.’ This visit was turning out to be a series of pokes in the eye for the former Aoxomoxoa. Is that suspicious?
Or merely inevitable.
‘I heard you were in a threesome with the revolutionary king of England.’
‘Something like that.’ Sage braced himself for further pratfalls.
Lazarus had unusually dark skin, that glowed, like his whole presence, with Hollywood perfection. His eyes were light hazel shading to green: an arresting effect. For a long moment, he considered Sage in silence.
‘Who the fuck knows the truth about anyone?’ he said at last, without a smile. ‘Like you said, we all go through changes.’
They finished their coffee and toured the house, checking out the wired rooms, where Lazi and Kaya conducted the obligatory reality show. Lazarus recommended the life of a post-modern megastar highly. ‘All I have to do is be me,’ he said, with unaffected charm. ‘No script, no acting talent, no turning up on set required! I refresh my avatar when they tell me: and maybe twice a year I put out a single, which goes platinum to the nth.’
‘You don’t tour?’
‘Shit, no. Those days are gone, man. The security got unbelievable.’
‘Well, it sounds thrilling. What d’you think about our movie, anyway?’
‘Harry Lopez isn’t it? He’s the golden boy: it’ll be a big fat success.’
The shirt reappeared, freshly washed and crisply ironed. Sage’s humble limo was summoned to the carriage sweep. Lazarus came out to see him off.
‘I hope you stay, it’d be cool to have you around. You know, we might have more in common than you think.’
‘Oh really?’
Lazarus nodded, with a big perfect white smile, and sober eyes. ‘Yeah, really. Hey, promotion takes it out of you. If you guys feel like unwinding I have a cabin you could borrow. It’s pretty, peaceful and commuting distance: we go up there when we can’t get away like away, you know. Great little coffee shop in the village too, I recommend you should check out their live music.’
‘We may take you up on that,’ said Sage. ‘Thanks.’
Back at Sunset Cape he sat by the dry fountain pool in the courtyard, thinking about the several hells he had escaped. Ah, but those Peter Pan features! Nice cage you got, Laz… Dilip came by. They sat together, on the rim of amber stone, and DK broke the news he’d been hiding. He would be sorry to leave the party early, but it was about time. He had been HIV positive for eighteen years, nearly a third of his life, and he’d been very well for most of that, but never better.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘When we get back to England, I want you to talk to Olwen Devi-’
‘Okay,’ said Sage, with a good idea of what was coming. ‘What am I to say?’
‘That I want to die trying. I want to be under the scanner, full of snapshot, when I go. I want you all to watch what happens.’
Snapshot was the nickname of the formidable drug cocktail the Zen Selfers used, to facilitate their path to fusion consciousness.
‘Olwen won’t like it. She’s going to call that assisted suicide.’
‘I have AIDS, Sage. Unconfirmed as yet, but I know. How can it be suicide, if I make an attempt on the unclaimed prize, all the way and never come back? Will you fix it for me, my lord?’
‘I’ll talk to her. You’re sure we’re going to get back to England?’
The mixmaster shrugged, already indifferent. ‘If the doomsday scenario gets us first, you are absolved.’ He lay back, and gazed into the pearlised evening sky. The day had been hot and calm, nothing to shift the smog. ‘I’m glad to be in California again. I’ve had good times on this crazy, corrupt and golden shore.’
‘Have you told the others?’
‘Not yet. Everyone knows I’m in a low energy phase, and that’s enough for a while. It will be hard to tell Allie. I’m an old man, but she doesn’t see it.’
‘This could still be a low energy phase. You could be wrong, and if you’re right, there must be better and easier drugs, fuck, this is California.’
‘Tree-hugging conservative. You never want anything to change, oh master of change. But the sword outwears the sheath. Whoo, it has been fun, terrifying but fun, dancing with you guys through the death of Babylon. I’ll go indoors now.’
They hugged. Dilip was like dry leaves.
Sage stayed where he was, trying to think about Dilip Krishnachandran’s beautiful life: artist of friendship, lover of the world, a true adept of the dao of fun. All he could feel was numb. The gatehouse floodlights came on, because the evening was growing dim, and suddenly he was plunged into utter blackness. A shift of orientation: he wasn’t facing the same way, he was indoors, not outdoors. Fiorinda’s voice said, softly, ‘Hello?’
He felt his own surprise, and inexplicable dread. ‘Hi, baby, what are you doing here?’ Then she was in his arms like thistledown, and he knew she’d come to say goodbye, but all he could see was blackness—
Gone. He was back in the pastel courtyard in California; and that was a snapshot flashback. He’d taken so much of the fucking stuff, in the last phase of the Zen Self, he’d be getting flashes all his life. Was that a glimpse of the future, something from the past, something that will never happen?
He realised that there was someone behind him.
He didn’t look round. He saw, with the hyperreal clarity of internal vision, the man who was standing there: a rawboned, middleaged bruiser, in battered jeans and a fringed Celtic mantle, a broadsword at his back and an assault rifle in his arms. It was Fergal Kearney, the Irish musician whose dead body Rufus O’Niall had used as a disguise; haggard as a corpse, and his breath was carrion.
‘Is that you, Fergal?’ But no, that’s not Fergal.
‘Rufus? Is that you?’
The crunch of a heavy footfall, shifting on gravel. ‘Fergal Kearney has no more use fer this stinking carcase. Since I took it from him, I must wear it now.’
‘Would you mind telling me what the fuck you are doing here?’
He had the impression that the ghost took proud offence. ‘I’m here to guard and protect my daughter, Aoxomoxoa. And I’ll thank you not to get in my way.’
‘I’m not to get in your way? Rufus, I think we’ve had that conversation.’
But the vision was gone.
Very strange.
What do they mean, these phantoms of the mind?
Fiorinda had not mentioned Fergal’s ghost since the Baja. If he’d understood her, she’d seen the apparition as benign, but he wouldn’t tell her about this. She’d come back from the shock of Billy’s death, he wasn’t going to risk sending her into fugue again. So what was that? A warning from his unconscious? He was starting to feel he would really like to get out of California. That he would like to run for his life: if only they could persuade Fiorinda to leave.
Is that suspicious?
He dropped to the ground, and went into the house.
The avatar tests came around, delays and difficulties vanishing now that Lou Branco was back on board. Harry had impressed on them that this day was as a very big deal in the virtual movies, schematic equiv
alent of weeks or months of action in front of the cameras. Custom scanned characters signalled an important project, and this was the live performance. It was technically almost irrelevant, but a moviebreaker: you knew where you were by looking at who turned up. They’d be performing today for the stars and money-mavens and the hot mediafolk, as much as for the lasers: and they know their stuff, said Harry. They’re very sharp, even the ones you’d least suspect—
Then he was afraid he’d scared them, and backpedalled madly.
It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. Just be yourselves.
Limos picked them up viciously early hour, and they were on the Golden State Freeway soon after dawn. At the entrance to the studio village they had to wait for someone to open up, and had time to appreciate the Abe Stevens quote, worked in metal in the arch over the gates: Digital Artists’ mission statement.
A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree,
Shoot it in Griffith Park.
Griffith Park itself, the green oasis somewhat smaller than it had been before Silicon Hollywood arrived, made a peaceful backdrop to the plains of parking, the dorms with their leisure facilities and mall, the inventory hangars, the units where code-monkeys slaved. The theatre allotted to them was reached through Inventory C, the biggest building in the village: where ‘custom objects’ were being scanned into code.
Harry was nowhere to be seen. His assistant, a charming, ditzy young woman named Julia, apologised for him profusely: another girl handed out name tags. The Few nibbled pastries from the breakfast trolley and wandered; they hadn’t been back here since the obligatory studio tour. Inventory C had everything, from full size trees to torn and bleeding human body parts. Rob and the Powerbabes stopped to examine a shabby armchair, that stood in state on a flatbed, ready for the lasers. There was something familiar about it.
‘Hey,’ said Dora, ‘Mister? Is this chair for our movie?’
‘Yes, Ms… Devine,’ said the techie, checking her tag. ‘Custom scanned, from-real. Every virtual movie needs a few new properties. This is the armchair for the basement in the Snake Eyes house on the Lambeth Road in London, England, where Ax laid his plans for the Reich.’
‘Is that what he was doing?’ said Rob. ‘I thought he was putting his moves on a certain red-headed babe. But, er, this is not the real, actual chair?’
He had visions of that lunatic Harry Lopez scouring South London for Few memorabilia, and shipping the stuff over by the containerload.
‘We threw out a chair like that,’ mused Cherry. ‘I think. Years ago.’
‘Well, no. This one we bought from a Thrift store, and worked on it to make it like the original. I have to say, we really bless you guys for all the news footage, and those natural-environment videos in your homes.’
‘We did it just for you,’ said Felice.
‘Frequently we reverse-engineer, from the code patch to the story content, because it’s impossible to get the object to scan, but if you do too much of that the quality goes. We use a piece of code that was a livid oozing sore from a horror-medical, the firing values say it’s a sunset effect, but something’s off—’
‘Gross.’
‘No, ma’am. Just a little off: cartoony. It’s kinda mysterious, nobody really understands it except the qualia coders, they’re the ones who kick up hell when that happens. The dcd code, direct cortical delivery, will give this the qualia of a real object, and then the emotional track will make it deliver what the scene requires. You see, what it says on the gates, that’s not really true: a rock is never just a rock. A chair is not a chair, it’s an experience. It might be the chair that nobody noticed, or the chair that was filled with horror, or the chair where I sat when I first said ‘I love you’ to my baby…. But direct cortical, what you guys call immix in Europe, we don’t do that here. Those people are mostly freelance, hotshots like Janelle Firdous, too good to be tied to the studio.’
He made adjustments to the rows of toggles on his long desk.
‘Janelle is pretty much God, in our business. I’ve met her. She’s a nice lady.’
They watched the chair, as it waited humbly to be zapped, with fellow feeling. ‘Hey,’ said Cherry, ‘If its avatar gets good notices, will it be a virtual sofa next time? With a hot love scene happening on it?’
This technician wasn’t strong on humour. Maybe the tone of voice didn’t translate. ‘Probably this exact scan is a one-off. Pieces of it might turn up again.’
‘Like pus in the sky,’ murmured Dora. ‘But you don’t do that to our avatars?’
‘Not my department, but you guys have a contract, don’t you?’
‘No substantial reuse.’ said Felice.
‘Right. I’m warming up now. You can stay, but please use your eyeshields.’
They moved on, exchanging glances. Scratch the virtual movie career, we don’t want to get mulched down for scrap. We’ll stick with the music biz.
The scanning theatre was uncannily like a Star Trek transporter room; except for the raked seats that surrounded the flatbed. It filled up while the techies were doing their final checks: Digital Artists suits and Hollywood liberal luminaries elbowing for the best seats. Harry seemed to be doing well. Puusi Meera and Janelle Firdous chose their spot with care, face-on to the laser engineers in their box up above. Kathryn Adams arrived with media friends (in working life she was a journalist). Her uncle had returned to Washington after Memorial Day weekend: she was staying in Los Angeles. She’d convinced her news syndicate they needed the Ax Preston comes to Hollywood story in depth.
‘The whole operation is so fucking perverse,’ muttered Chip, suffering badly from audition nerves.
‘We are to be punished for our art,’ Verlaine told him, in hollow tones, ‘The lasers rip us up and suck us into the machines, but only simulacra come back, that’s what they don’t tell you. This is it. Farewell, Merry my lad.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Okay!’ cried Harry, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t have to tell you this but I will anyway, use your eyeshields. If you’re seated by an exit, and not fit for those duties, speak to one of the cabin staff. Strap yourselves in. We have lift off.’
No make-up, no script, no music. You read from an autocue (something personal, that you had provided). You move around as you like, and the feed in your ear tells you if you should do something else. You get a ‘rehearsal’, then you do it over again for the lasers. On the flatbed you don’t need an eyeshield, the danger is from stray beams that might escape into the audience. There’s an element of performance, but it’s the technicians who decide if your soul is stealable. If it is, you come back another day to get sunk in a tank of electrolytic goo. If you can’t be mugged, that’s the end of your virtual movie career.
Harry had spent the morning dealing with terrible crises, such as Puusi’s favourite brand of spring water failing to turn up. He was a wreck. He sat with Ax and Sage and Fiorinda, in the character test holding area, and trembled.
‘We can afford a couple of failures. It happens, about one in ten. There are huge stars who can’t cross the divide. We can paste the faces and gaits from file, onto crash-dummies.’ Crash-dummies were the virtual studio’s schematic equivalent of Central Casting. ‘You know we had to audition live human actors for the dummies? Did you hear that story? Screen Actors Guild insisted, but we’re still using the same thirty scans, half male, half female. You never need something you can’t find the code for. Thirty people is all we’ll ever need, for all human variety: isn’t that amazing?’
‘Amazing.’
The process sounded simple but was interminable, worse than the weariest recording session. However all went well until Harry’s running order (which had a rationale known only to Harry) hit Allie Marlowe. Allie couldn’t do it. Five takes, worse results. In their raked seats the demi-gods and emperors murmured, holding up their eyeshields like opera glasses, turning down their thumbs. Allie was mortified, on the brink of tears. ‘Fuck this,’ muttered Ax to Sage. ‘C’mon. Let�
�s talk to her, tell her she doesn’t have to do it.’
They took Allie out of the theatre. Fiorinda had a better idea. She got next to Harry, who was sitting looking tragic on the steps up to the flatbed.
‘Bully her.’
‘Oh, no Fiorinda,’ said Harry woefully. ‘It’s not like that. The test is objective. The scan reads the actor’s unique individual physical and empathic presence, that we can genuinely translate into code, or… Or we just can’t. It won’t make any difference how she’s feeling, any emotional state is the same.’
‘I believe you, but get a grip, Allie never got to the lasers yet. She wants to do this, but she has stage fright, and she doesn’t understand that you ignore that feeling. Just tell her she’s on. Make your wishes clear. That’s all she needs, for it not to be her decision. Pretend you’re in charge, why don’t you?’
Harry bit Allie’s head off. Allie tried again, and she was good.
Rob did well. Sage caused consternation, until they got him to take the mask button out of his eyesocket: they had to work around his phone implant. Virtual movie stars can’t have permanent personal digital devices. Ax caused a stir of a different order, because the live audience regarded him as the star of the show. Fortunately, the lasers also liked him. Then it was Fiorinda’s turn. She seemed good. To her friends she seemed really herself, no trace of the after-effects of Billy the Whizz getting eviscerated: very skinny but not skeletal, moving with energy, giving them the old calm little Fiorinda grin. But the demi-gods were silent; and they were right. She tried again, the engineers still said no. Harry went and had a confab with Marshall Morgan, the Digital Artists’ CEO.
‘No problem,’ he announced, ‘We’ll test Fiorinda another time.’
Smelly Hugh, Anne-Marie and DK took another couple of hours. They passed.
Afterwards there was the traditional party, on the beach at Harry’s place in Malibu. Stars and execs, techies, media folk and support staff, cheered Harry’s thank you speech. There was a buffet and a bar, waitrons in incongruous black-and-white; there was a Mariachi band and people trying to dance on the sand.
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