by Neil Clarke
Eventually, something looms ahead, massive and broken. Luke tells her to stop.
“That building? That was where my great-grandfather worked. Back in the twentieth century. Putting lawnmowers together. Then all those jobs went overseas. Then they came back, except they were being done by computer scientists. Then those jobs went overseas. And then all the jobs went away forever. So we did it.” He laughs. “We finally achieved true global equality.”
As they drive on, the names of the streets become increasingly irrelevant, until Tipper no longer even notices the towns. It’s all jumbled together, geography, history, family, a random walk of turns and dead ends.
“Over here, this was where my grandma used to work. A library. Can you believe they used to have physical libraries? And over here, this is where the college was. I had a friend whose dad worked there. Guess what he taught? Game design and pedagogical process. Whoops! Taught himself right out of a job.”
In a downtown where the all-night restaurants twinkle with animated ads, Luke urges Tipper to get out and walk.
“That’s where the old Walmart used to be. My dad worked there as a cashier. Then in the stockroom. Then as a greeter. They all thought Walmart was the epitome of evil, back then. There’s the salon where my sister used to work. They’re still open, but they’re cutting back. Get it? No, but seriously, all they employ now is a couple of touchers. Know what that is?”
Growing up as a tomboy with three ubermale brothers, Tipper hasn’t had a chance to learn much about the ways of hair salons.
“Okay,” Luke explains. “So the machines do all the work, right? There’s a whole line of robots to do the washing, the styling. But what they still need is, I guess you could call it ‘the human touch.’ So before you get your hair cut, they have a person who comes and checks you out, massages your scalp, makes a little chitchat. After you get your hair cut, there’s another person who comes over to tell you how great you look. It’s completely useless. It’s what they call ‘perk employment.’ Touchers. But over here, this is what I wanted to show you.”
He runs ahead, boyish in his eagerness, pulling at the weather-tenting on a squat lump of a building.
“Uh, Luke?” Tipper’s not sure if she’s charmed or unsettled by the way her cool seducer has become this gamboling tour guide. But quick as an autodriv-ing car will switch routes, Luke reverts to his broody persona, hoisting up the slippery film of the tenting to expose a small, glassless window. Smooth as a burglar, he slides inside. A pale hand extends to help Tipper.
She waves him way and lifts herself over. With the weatherproof shroud its owner has thrown over it, the building has taken on the dusty, almost sweet scent of a desert cave. Luke fumbles for her hand.
“It’s okay. My friend’s got a unit outside, running a baffler on the AI alarm. It thinks we’re weevils. Here.”
A small spot of light falls on the dusty floor. Luke leads Tipper among shrouded furniture. She lifts up a flap and sees thirties-era fractal construction, fake wood printed in sea-anemone patterns. Charmingly retro.
“This place—”
“It’s a club.” Luke has a beer in hand. He pushes one toward Tipper. She sees no fridge, but there’s a crystal-insulated cooler lying lopsided on a couch. Luke’s flashlight whips over dust, reed tables, a little riser of a stage. “It used to be, anyway. I’ve been hanging out here since it closed. They used to have music on weekends, comedy four nights a week. This was where my mom got started.”
“And she was—?”
Luke pulls out a portobook, thumbs in a name, tosses it over. The book’s an old model, no frills, just e-paper. Tipper flips through the document, which appears to be the career summary of a rather unremarkable actress. If this is Luke’s mother, she doesn’t seem to have gone very far. The credits paint a picture of a low-tier thespian scrounging for work.
Babe, It’s Okay (uncredited)
Monster Matriarch (voice)
The Long and Short of It (unreleased)
A shout jerks Tipper’s head up.
“Ladies and gennelmen!”
Luke is onstage, addressing a phantom crowd, swinging an old mike stand. “Tonight, we have a real fine treat. Get ready for the boundary-crossing, risk-taking, no-holds-barred comedy of Lucas Averro!”
He grins, comedian-style. Tipper shakes her head as Luke mugs his way through a spoof of standup.
“Okay, guys, seriously. Seriously, people.”
Suddenly he is serious, holding the stand at arm’s length, making it clear there’s no mike in the grip, no lights, no crowd. His performance consists of a single line.
“What the fuck happened to us?”
Luke scans the room. “Tipper? You out there? You hearing this?” He hops off the stage. “I mean, it was supposed to be the one thing we’d always fall back on, right? The one thing they could never take away from us.”
He holds out a hand. Tipper sees what he wants, gives him the porto-book. Luke shakes it like a magician. The pages flap out into a single stiff screen, magazine-size. He loads a video. Seeing the image, Tipper can’t help but laugh.
“There it is.” Luke’s watching over her shoulder. “End game.”
The video, sensing her attention, begins to play. It’s like a fragment of Tipper’s teenage experience, shaken loose and tossed up into the present, a scene from her sixteen-year-old self’s favorite cartoon show.
Darly the Penguin is more or less the sum of everything a modern girl experiences. A tad overweight, insecure about her body, dirty-minded, ambitious, loyal to her friends, fiercely smart, intermittently sassy . . . with a bizarre little mop of biologically incorrect hair . . . who in the world wouldn’t love Darly?
This clip is from one of the early shows, when Darly was trying to make her way in the modern office. Here, Darly’s talking to her polar-bear boss, Dexter, and it seems that during a strategic planning meeting, when Darly self-deprecatingly referred to herself as a “big bird,” Dexter’s response was—
Well, the plot doesn’t really matter. What’s funny is Darly’s attitude, the way this CGI penguin somehow captures everything crazy about being a human being at the start of the twenty-second century. Darly has a whole bundle of oddball tics: spelling out dirty words (or more often misspelling them), flapping her wings and squeaking like a kazoo, tapping her forehead and reminding herself, “Penguins are chill, Darly—penguins are chill.” Sometimes, when things get really crazy, Darly’ll dive to the floor and slide on her belly out of awkward situations. It’s all too funny, and Tipper’s already laughing when Luke abruptly shuts off the playback.
“Programmed.” He closes the portobook. “Every second.”
Tipper’s annoyed. Of course it’s programmed. It’s TV! But Luke’s looking at her like he thinks she doesn’t get it.
“You know how they write these shows?” He waves the portobook. “They don’t. No human does. The scenarios are randomly generated, based on trending topics. The jokes are crowdsourced: Thousands of one-liners are submitted, and the producers pick the best ones. And the characters? They’re AI. Your Darly? She’s a program. Gestures, catchphrases, even the voice. All coded, trained on test audiences. It can even improvise.”
Tipper sighs. She knows this. Everyone knows this. It’s like kayfabe: You know it; you don’t have to harp on it. But guys like Luke always seem to overexplain.
“My mom?” He turns to the stage. “This is where she did it. Up on that stage, every night, trying out her jokes, trying out her voices. And for what? To create an act. A persona. And that would be her product. That would become her shtick.
“This?” He waves the portobook. “This killed all that. Why? Because guess what? That mysterious allure? That human appeal? All those things a performer is supposed to have: charm, gravitas, charisma? Turns out, you can simulate all of it, no problem. Because that’s exactly what a shtick is. Predictability. Routine.”
Tipper wonders: What do you say when you see the point someone’s trying
to make, but don’t quite see the point of making it? She reaches for his hand. Luke doesn’t even notice. He’s too intent on striding among the tables, kicking old beer cans out of his path.
“So there it is, folks! End of the road. Muscle, skill, brains . . . the one thing left, the one thing we thought we could always rely on, was personality. Our wonderfully human, charming imperfections. Well, here you go. Darly the Penguin is more charmingly fucked up than someone like my mom could ever be. So it’s over. Gone. We’ve cleared the last hurdle. We’ve finally perfected imperfection.” He points at Tipper’s nose. “You see what you’ve been doing?”
“Me?” It’s the first time Tipper’s spoken since entering this shrouded place, and her voice sounds weird for such a haunted scene, bold, young, strong. Luke comes toward her. Without thinking, she holds out her arms.
“Your boss. Your friends at the fair. You know who you people are working for?” He dodges her embrace, counting on his fingers. “You don’t own the rides. The company owns the rides. Traveling Troupe, a subsidiary of SevenStar Entertainments. Who owns the company? The shareholders own the company. Who are the shareholders? Funds and banks. Who are the funds and banks? Who else? They’re a bunch of computer programs, who sometimes hire human beings to go to meetings. And guess what? The hair salons, the stores, the factories, the Air Force: the same programs are running it all.” He taps his nose. “Follow it back, Tipper. Follow it back.”
Tipper finally gets a hold of him, grabbing his wrists, which feel surprisingly thin and frail. Guys like this always shock her with their fragility. She holds him by the collar, putting her palms to his cheeks, calming him.
“I know, Luke, okay? I know.”
“And where does it start?” He’s still looking away. “It starts with you, Tipper. A friendly girl, leading little children up to a big monster, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s your friend. It’s okay.’”
She can’t stop thinking of her brothers. How they always used to talk this way, taking her out to the barn to show her their projects. How one day, they said, they were going to change it all, bring the whole system crashing down.
Well, something changed, all right. Tipper doesn’t remember what exactly set it off. But her father never needed an excuse to fly into a rage. He was at his worst, that day, stomping around the house, kicking anything that would break, and eventually he made his way out to the barn, throwing open the doors to expose the projects of Tipper’s brothers, the car engines, the game tables, the magnetic and chemical experiments. As he worked his way through the collection, sometimes with a hammer, sometimes with his hands, he shouted out his verdict. “Useless . . . ridiculous . . . a fucking waste.” What made Tipper tremble as she stood there in the door, what made her shake with a rage that terrified her, was the way her brothers stood back, passive, simply watching the destruction. Their constructions, their creations, their hobbies, all crushed, complexity pounded to scrap, sacrificed to their father’s aimless anger. And they accepted it. Like biblical sons, they bowed under the patriarchal judgment. Even to themselves, they were nothing, in the end. Useless, ridiculous, a fucking waste.
It’s like Tipper can see them all, right now, the angry boys and the angry girls, the mothers and fathers who’ll never work again, the Manuals and the doctors and the mathematicians, scattered all through the lonely Fringe towns.
She holds Luke by the collar, pulling his face toward hers. “It will be okay,” she whispers against his lips. “It will.”
With instinctual ease, Tipper guides him. She doesn’t push, doesn’t pull, just leads him where she needs him to be. At one point, her foot skids on something, suddenly rolling, and she sees it’s the flashlight, dropped from his hand. By its wheeling light, they find their way to the couch. Tipper pats the sheet-covered cushions. The crystal-insulated cooler falls to the floor. The crash only adds to her urgency—a brittle music of glass bottles in the dark.
She lays him down, climbing onto his hips. I trust you, Luke, I trust you. Even as she’s thinking this, Tipper knows it’s not quite right. What she trusts, what she’s bending to kiss, is the feeling inside him, the hurt and need of a boy who’s seen everything smashed, abused, stolen: Everything he’s worked for, everything he loves.
From the highway, the fair looks like a true menagerie. Monstrous heads and swinging tails cast wild shadows against the gaudy lights. The people register as no more than specks. You can almost imagine that history has run backwards, and that they’ve all come back again, the lost and majestic monsters, the prehistoric beasts.
Luke pulls deftly off the road, guiding his truck through the autodriving traffic.
HELLO, TIPOLI SMITH! flashes a sign. WELCOME TO THE TRAVELING TROUPE FAIR!
The Traveling Troupe. The Metal Demimonde. Call it what you will, the fair will always be a welcoming place for the wandering, the footloose, the cast aside.
“We forgot to change the login.” Tipper taps the screen as Luke steers through the gate. “All the monitors will think you’re me.”
Normally, it wouldn’t matter; the car would detect the driver automatically. But this automatic function, like most of the others, has been shut off.
Luke doesn’t care. He’s been driving all night with his eyes on the overheads, impassive and silent, expertly imitating a machine. Now he steers past the public lots, onto the service road beyond the gates. Tipper looks out the window.
WARNING, flashes a sign. RESTRICTED AREA. STAFF ONLY. WARNING. WARNING. Then: WELCOME, TIPOLI SMITH!
“You’re not supposed to be back here.”
“It’s okay.” He keeps his eyes on the screen. “I’ll take you to your trailer.”
An almost painfully gallant gesture, it seems to Tipper. After tonight, they’re unlikely to meet again. More lonely traveling for her, more lonely ranting for him. But he can do this for her, if nothing else: He can drop her like a gentleman at her front door.
The trailer flickers with LED light. Suzie must be waiting up. A little distance away, Snake lies curled under lamps, dormant for the night. Luke parks at the fence, lets the truck idle. The engine, built for all-night driving, hums softly in the dark.
“Well.” He reaches for the dashboard. “Guess this is it.”
It’s hard to say why, but Tipper feels almost panicked. “Are you . . . I could probably get tomorrow night off.”
“I don’t think I’ll be around.” He makes it harshly final. And like that, Tipper realizes that this is what he wants, what he’s always wanted. Not to kiss her, not even to sleep with her. Only to have given her the tour of his life.
“So that’s it?” She tries to keep her voice from shaking. “That’s all we’re doing?”
“Tip.” His hand twitches on the dashboard.
“You drive me around, you show me your life, you put on this big demonstration . . . I mean, what was all this about?”
He doesn’t answer at first. His face is answer enough.
“Well.” He sighs. “I guess I wanted you to know. To know why I’m doing what I do. So you would . . . so you would understand.”
“To under—” Then she sees where his hand his resting, hovering on that unremarkable black button, the one she almost pressed before. The one he warned her never to touch.
“Luke!”
Even before it happens, Tipper realizes he’s right. He’s done it, achieved his goal. In a way, in a hidden, angry part of her, she does understand.
The first ride to go is the Haunted House. A spook on the roof, a winged gargoyle, jerks and lurches like a drunken suicide. It quivers, stiffens, tumbles off, crashing to the hard-packed gravel and snapping a wing. The doors fly open. A lizardman staggers out, lashing a rubber tail, clawing the air. Two people follow, a pair of teenage girls, screaming in genuine terror. It’s pandemonium, the windows opening, the walls shaking, shrieks and howls from every corner. The spookbots run riot and jump from the rooftops, even punch holes in the mycocore walls. A kid staggers out with one of t
he cannibal babies clamped like a monkey to the back of his head. From the central courtyard, the Morbid Eye ascends, puttering on its failing jets, sailing away over the gables, into the night.
Nearby, the Scream-o-Saurus is lashing its tail, tipping over souvenir stalls and a BBQ stand. As the riders and operators shout and flee, the ride shudders, tips, whipping its head wildly side to side. The Abominable Go-Go-Go man is pounding dents in his chest. The LandShark chomps earth. Octowhip reels into the midway, flinging out its arms and dispensing mayhem. With a screech of straining hydraulics, the Dementor sways and falls.
The worst, though, is Snake. A salted slug, a suffocating fish, a worm under a magnifying glass: there’s no comparison for the flailing of this great fat body. The tail alone is a menace, whacking nearby trailers, catching the bars of fences and flinging them hundreds of feet. The big mouth gapes and gnashes. The googly eyes, ordinarily so jolly, are now the soul of anguish and fear. Even in eighteen years of rough-and-tumble Fringe life, Tipper has never seen such a display of agony.
She’s at the edge of the gravel. She must have gotten out of the car. Luke is here, beyond the reach of Snake’s gyrations. Suzie, Carter, all the operators: they’ve come out of their trailers, their private compartments, to witness this artificial Armageddon.
“What’s happening?” An operator from the Bear Jamboree, a woman Tipper scarcely recognizes, drifts by like a refugee. Suzie and Carter stand almost perfectly still, only moving their heads as they watch.
Tipper ducks into Luke’s truck. She pounds at the interface, entering random commands. The car beeps. She hears a clunk. With Luke’s hands clutching at her shoulders, she kicks out of the seat and marches around to the rear.
The big storage compartment has popped open, exposing the interior. Tipper remembers Luke’s description: a bed back here, internet, built-in fridge . . . the best game hookup you’ll ever see . . .