Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  8

  Unreal City

  Thales’ chair is on the edge of the terrace, inches from the empty air. Far below him, waves bellow and dissolve into foam, sometimes so loud that they keep him from sleeping. He wonders where his mother is—there’s no railing, and it would be easy to take a step forward and go tumbling into space. The coastline is concave here and across the water the surf shimmers before the grey masses of the beachward favelas, where the poor dwell, where he has never been, a ghost Los Angeles shimmering in a heat haze below the real city.

  The breeze catches the awning above him, its shadow undulating over the Cartesian grid of the black basalt tiles, and he thinks of the equations describing its rippling curve, the elegant entanglement of position and motion. With an effort, he pushes mathematics from his mind, as the surgeon says he must, if he’s to improve, and focuses on the world: the weave and texture of his white linen trousers, the Corbusier table beside him, the water beading on the heavy crystal tumbler, its wedge of lemon entombed in ice.

  He closes his eyes, and the details of the water glass have already vanished. This is how it was before the implant, he supposes, though in fact the memories of that time are scarce—he looks down at the water, sees the orange surf buoys bobbing in the swell, remembers how, the last time he saw them, he’d thought of their house deep in the Amazonian jungle, the river flowing past it in full flood; swimming in the “safe zone” denoted by buoys, the prehistoric menace of the crocodiles sliding down the muddy bank into the tea-colored water.

  They’re in the rooftop suite of the St. Mark Hotel, which his mother had said was the best that was practical but even so leaves him feeling exposed, with the constant hum of drone traffic overhead, and the lines of sight from the terrace to the rooftops of distant buildings, like an invitation to a sniper’s bullet; he misses the sense of hermetic insulation of the family compound in Leblon and the hotels they’d stayed in when they still had money. Since his father’s death and their flight to LA he’s overheard his mother on the phone trying to arrange high-interest loans secured on frozen assets in Rio, on the house she built in the mountains around Los Angeles, and even to get new architectural commissions, though she hasn’t practiced in many years, but he’s made a point of pretending not to notice.

  His brothers, Helio and Marco Aurelio, will come and find him soon, and greet him with back-slapping false bonhomie. (He suspects they’re glad to be out of Rio, regard LA as an adventure—Marco Aurelio had been expelled from his college for choking someone half to death at a party, and Helio had been brought up on rape charges, though they’d soon been quashed—a columnist who’d said the family was Brazil’s answer to the Julio-Claudian dynasty had never worked again.) They’ll see the book beside his water glass—Ramanujan’s Analytical Theory of Numbers—and look disconsolate but say nothing as they take him away from the hotel and out into the city, and the day will be the same as every other. He’ll pass the morning in the humid jiu-jitsu studio of the Malibu Athletic Club, watching them roll on the blue mats in white gis. In the afternoon he’ll wait in the dunes wishing he had his book with him as his brothers ply the waves on their longboards, and when the sun sets their friends will gather, the cauliflower-eared jiu-jitsu players and their slim-waisted girls, and all watch the fading light through a serene cannabis haze. His brothers pity him, but take pains to hide it; he accepts their charity without resentment, for to him they are no more than vacant, handsome animals, moved solely by instinct, blind to all the beauty of mathematics and the world.

  A wave closes with the shore, and as it approaches the narrow beach below the cliff its vitreous curvature furls and collapses, and the equations of hydrodynamics rise in his mind, but the white foam is unanalyzable; the world around him shivers, then, and fractures into a meaningless chaos of atoms and light. Where the water glass was there’s an illegible confusion of reflections; he sees the warped light of migraine, and closes his eyes.

  Luminous patterns burn inside his eyelids. He opens his eyes onto a blur of pinions, white motion, refracted light. The headache intensifies, and he starts to panic, but he’s going to the clinic in the evening, and the surgeon, a competent man, will help him; he draws a deep breath, focuses, and the blur resolves into a gull hovering over the table, its churning wings glowing in the sunlight, red eyes on the untouched omelette on the rough porcelain plate.

  9

  Matches

  The match flares and fades, and then the next, and the next. The face of the man flicking matches into life and tossing them into the darkness is that of her first surgeon, and Irina is calm, lost in the slow sequence of conflagrations, and she thinks she’ll be content to watch forever but then the surgeon says, “These are the seconds, you know, burning away,” and lights another. In the dream she laughs and says, “Nothing is lost, or ever will be,” and summons forth all the recent images of the matches burning and fading out, delighting in her power, but the surgeon shakes his head and points at her stomach and looking down at a point just above her navel (she is naked, now) she sees a black spot so tiny it ought to be imperceptible, and as she tries, futilely, to scrape it away with her fingernails she can feel the tainted cells’ surging reproduction as they boil outward into clean tissue. The black spot widens before her eyes—it hesitates, as her immune system rallies, then surges again. As it reaches bone, she feels cold.

  She sits up in the hotel bed and turns off her phone’s alarm; the sound of waves hissing over sand stops abruptly, leaving only room tone—voices reflected down corridors, the hum of the air-conditioning, distant traffic. In her bag are pills that offer sleep, or worse than sleep, but she’s already late, and the client pays well, and more years of life come dear, so, moving herself like a marionette, she gets out of bed.

  Brushing her teeth, the little lines around her eyes are a legible fraction of a millimeter deeper, the visible consequence of another bad night, and what other, less obvious damage has her restlessness caused, damage not reparable by any decent plastic surgeon. “So get to work,” she tells her reflection.

  In the early light the hotel lobby seems oddly tragic, suggesting a valiant determination not to waste the morning. Other souls rush by, coffees in hand, immersed in their phones or having energetic conversations with the air. Most are younger than she is, bustling young things from the vast reaches of the middle middle technocracy; a pretty, somehow Midwestern-looking girl with roses in her cheeks, clad in the Armani of seasons past, is all but hyperventilating as she berates a cloud of invisible subordinates who have apparently failed to establish a link between networks in Reykjavík and Poznan. Irina tries to imagine feeling so much emotion over infrastructure, thinks that, medical bills or no, she may have to be less frugal about hotels.

  In the cab, the fog glows with diffuse morning light, a migraine light, and she puts on her sunglasses, closes her eyes. Her face, reflected in the chrome of the cab’s dash, looks closed, remote, arrogant, a mask formed over an interior darkness. She tries a smile, convinces no one. They’ll see her essential strangeness, but let them; her mind turns to the cathedral vastnesses of the AIs’ memories.

  She dozes, soothed by the rush of tires, opening her eyes as the cab ascends an overpass and there, slipping by, are the favelas, like concrete termite nests on a monumental scale, if termites were inclined to cubism and many balconies. Occasional windows reflect the morning sun; squinting, she imagines she’s looking at geology, the product of a chthonic upheaval in the faults beneath the city, but, no, the favelas are actually like a Lebbeus Woods drawing she saw in an architecture textbook for half a second twenty years ago, and these things are, of course, what she always thinks when she sees favelas. Her other memory stirs—she has thought these thoughts two hundred and nineteen times, now two hundred and twenty.

  Like sculpture, the favelas, but she reminds herself that, avant-garde rapture notwithstanding, they’re sinks for all the saddest ugliness in the world, that to set foot in them is to step back decades, o
r even centuries; they’re the last bastion of the old, bad kind of HIV, and have little law but the gangs in their various and occasionally lurid plumages—even the cops won’t go in except in armor. She’s read about refugees starving slowly, unlicensed dentists with third-hand tools, child brothels moving from room to buried room.

  Childish, she reminds herself, still to expect to find wonder in cities, especially when it’s elsewhere, and just under the surface of things. She remembers the Metatemetatem, an AI that makes other AIs, owned by a Vancouver research lab from her last gig but one. Metatemetatem is a name given to a class of AIs that burn through trillions of possibilities a second in search of the shape of their successors; every Metatemetatem had been designed by its predecessor for some thousand generations and ninety years. There must have been some definite moment when they’d passed beyond the understanding of even the subtlest mathematician, though when this happened is a matter of debate—all that’s certain is that no one noticed at the time. Now most of the world’s software, and, lately, its industrial design, comes from machines that are essentially ineffable, though only a handful of specialists seem to realize this, or care, the world in general blithely unaware that the programs and devices that mediate their lives have emerged from mystery.

  She drifts off but comes back enough to open her eyes to slits as the cab rushes through a canyon between buildings, and she could be anywhere, or nowhere at all. There’s no one else around, but every few seconds the cab passes through the shadow of the SFPD drones hovering at intervals over the street, which is a kind of company.

  She wakes again when the car stops and the door clicks open; she steps out onto a vast too-bright field of concrete before what must have been a naval air hangar once, the Bay glittering beyond it. The hangar’s hull has weathered beautifully, the gradients of lichen on the ancient aluminum cladding streaked with ocher and rust. What is now much too much parking lot, bounded by distant chain-link fence and concertina wire, must have started as an airfield, or perhaps a spaceport, but she doesn’t think they had those, really, when the hangar was built. Cracked white lines on the tarmac denote parking stalls, swallowed by the scale of the place, magic diagrams to ward off air and emptiness. The few dozen parked cars seem forlorn, huddled around the hangar against the morning. Gulls circle; the wind brings her the Bay, the tang of iron, the smoke of the fires in the cities to the east. She shivers, checks her phone; this is the place. She turns to watch as the cab pulls away.

  In the hangar’s shadow, she feels calmer. She picks her way among the cars, which look mostly new, and mostly expensive, except for a handful of white fleet vans. A few workmen in paper overalls stand by low double doors set in the monumental wall, face masks around their necks, their eyes powdered with white dust; seeing the cigarettes burning between their fingers, she stops dead, intensely aware of the hours burning off of their lives; she’d once seen a video of a lung cell, in vitro, exposed to nicotine smoke—she remembers the cascading mutations, the computer model of unraveling DNA. The one nearest the door, an older man with an air of bemused dignity, smiles at her with yellow teeth and grinds out his cigarette on his calloused palm; in the face of his kindness, she is abashed to be read so easily, and to think that the lost time won’t matter for them anyway. He says something in Russian, and the others laugh and saunter away from the doors, indulging her. She’d once read a Russian dictionary, and the definitions of his words rise up in her mind, so many ragged chunks of disconnected meaning, but she pushes them away, as reminders of the distance between language and the world.

  The doors open as she approaches, bringing her the high whine of power tools, an exhalation of cold air. Within, the space is vast, underlit and vertiginous; looking up into the shadows, she expects to see the gently bobbing ghosts of dirigibles past. Some workmen are grinding up regions of floor with industrial sanders, throwing up clouds of sparks and dust, others, with tablets, observing. The actual offices appear to be built onto the sides of the hangar’s interior; the effect is of mass-produced pueblos clinging to the walls of an Industrial Age canyon. A pause in the sanding; she hears the muted hubbub of voices, footsteps, their echoes, all illegible, and somehow comforting; the concrete under her feet, cracked and indelibly oil-stained, is covered with a thick, hepatic varnish.

  No one challenges her, or even seems to notice her presence. Before her is a rising sweep of concrete that will be a reception desk, probably, when all’s done, but is, for now, abandoned; behind it is a huge, hollow globe, the diameter of a bus—the continents are iron, the seas absences and the major rivers are traced in blue enamel; the mirrored rectangles must be the great dams. She wonders if there are firms specializing in the sculpture of hubris, and do they ever build heroically scaled, improbably muscular statues of their older, more literal-minded clientele? It was the sort of thing they’d have had in Dubai, when it was a city-state, back before it was a ruin beloved of documentarians with its toppled spires, cavernous drowned malls, iridescent fishes schooling in the atriums of what had been hotels, would soon be reefs.

  “Those are good boots,” says someone, a man with a tablet, older, but his face has the polished, windswept look of the better plastic surgery. She looks down at her boots—an entire commission blown on them, the best thing out of Milan some five seasons past; they have the matte gloss of old black clay, and, however sleek, have a hint of blockiness, the barest suggestion of engineer’s boots, which saves them from being at least a decade too young for her. “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here with the travertine. Am I right?”

  “No,” she says, wonderingly. “No travertine … marble?”

  “But you looked like you must be the travertine,” he says. “The serpentine then?”

  “I have no stone at all,” she says, showing her palms. His expression doesn’t change; superficially his outfit is corporate-neutral but the materials and the details are very good—he’s probably some kind of creative. “I’m here to visit with the house AIs. What’s the travertine for?”

  “Flooring! At least, a judiciously calculated part of the flooring. It’s the most remarkable thing. Himself has commissioned us, us being Applied Structures Incorporated, to retrofit this hangar into viable office space that will last for the next one thousand years. Literally, the next one thousand—it’s in the contract in triplicate, in italic bold. I’ve spent the last two months measuring the rates of erosion of flooring materials, and having my little team of quants model traffic. It has to look the same in a millennium as it does now, he says, though he has conceded that it may take a patina.”

  “All this toward what possible end?”

  “Far be it from me to examine the motives of such a consistent patron of the applied arts. After all, the very rich aren’t like you and me.”

  “No, they have a great deal more money,” she murmurs.

  “Exactly! Anyway, this is nothing—we’re also building him a house to last one million years. We hired seismologists to find a stable site, someplace that won’t be subducted the next time Pangaea rolls around. We’re building on the top of the Rocky Mountains, which is almost not isolated. It’s an absurd project, but it has a certain grandeur—we hired evolutionary biologists, for heaven’s sake, to get ahead of the adaptations the bacteria will make to the cooling system. I can only imagine he’s obsessed with his legacy.” His eyes go to the tablet in his hands. “Materials crisis. You must excuse me. Good luck!” He smiles at her, is off into the hangar’s distances.

  She stands there, emptied of all volition, watching the workmen grind the floor down as the seconds pass. A chime from her phone as a text arrives, joining the confusion of the echoes in the space, but she ignores it, and the next one, and the next. When she looks, finally, she sees it was Maya, her agent. You’re on-site? she’s written, and Hello?, and finally, They’re waiting for you upstairs, dear. Go Now. Do Well. Call Me Later and Tell Me How It Went. XXOXOX, and then she is walking toward an elevator bank, grateful that Maya is
there, unseen and far away, to push her through the world.

  As the elevator rises she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the presence of the Net, its vastness and sterility. There was a time when she did the background for a job before she was in the elevator, watching the ground floor recede. (But you can get away with it, she thinks. You can get away with almost anything.)

  She sighs, then reaches out, lets the company’s data come flooding in, filling the shallows of her other memory with websites and SEC filings and all the articles in the trade press and the blog posts and the records of old offices and learned articles on dead platforms and generations of annual reports and every mention in every public document. Fragments of text flicker through her awareness—“… closing its Manhattan offices in favor of Northern California…” and “… predicting energy consumption in major metropolitan markets…” and “Water and Power Capital Management LLC, an innovator in AI-driven resource arbitrage and medical engineering…” and “… James Cromwell, serial entrepreneur, founder and majority shareholder”—and in all of this there’s a sadness for there can be no doubt that Water and Power, the focus of the lives of its thousands of employees, is essentially the same as all the other trading houses owned by all the other stridently aggressive suits, and in fact she could just walk out, and be damned to no money and the marred reputation and the dwindling options and presently the doctor’s face a mask of seriousness as, with practiced gentleness, he tells her that it’s time to make her preparations and before he can finish she’ll turn away and stagger out of his office, full of the terror of the nearness of the end. She thinks of the chill outside, the blue of morning. The lift stops. The doors slide open.

  “Irina?” says a slight, almost plain woman, smiling, somehow birdlike, head cocked to one side. “I’m Magda. I’m so glad you could come.” Her ensemble is, Irina thinks, an Asano, and, as such, gorgeous, her blouse like fires flaring on a black patch of night, but she seems uncertain in her finery, and Irina wonders if she’s some sort of partner, perhaps newly minted, to be able to afford a designer she associates with maturing starlets, less formal cabinet ministers and, regrettably, minor royals, and she is expecting offers of coffee and the usual chatter to which she need not attend but Magda says, “Come with me—he wants to meet you.”