by Al Ewing
PRAISE FOR THE FICTIONAL MAN
“Intriguing and entertaining, at times not far short of a modern classic.”
The SF Site
“From Episodes to The Player, Tinseltown has made a habit over the years of satirising its own superficial, self-obsessed ways. But none have exposed the cynical inner workings of the Hollywood movie-making machine quite as brilliantly as Al Ewing’s The Fictional Man.”
SFX
“This is a solid piece of sci-fi that deals with the nature of self, and is worthy of comparison with Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. It’s an effortless and rapid read, and works perfectly. Highly recommended.”
Starburst
“Once in a while I pick up a gem of a book that blows my friggin’ mind and takes me places I did not even know existed... I assure you, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that The Fictional Man is just such a book. Ewing is a goddamn genius.”
Den of Geek
First published 2013 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-538-4
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-539-1
Copyright © 2013 Al Ewing
Cover art by Pye Parr
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
For Sarah,
who helped unlock this when I needed it most.
CHAPTER ONE
RALPH CUTNER WAS fictional, but Niles didn’t hold that against him.
THERE WERE ADVANTAGES in having a fictional human – a Fictional – for a therapist.
Niles could still remember the four fruitless months, four and a half years ago, two hours a week, when he’d perched uncomfortably on the edge of a teal suede couch belonging to one Dr Mary Loewes.
She’d done most of the talking. Niles, for his part, would hesitate for long seconds, then nod silently or make small meaningless noises. On rare occasions, he might actually manage to answer one of her questions – though guardedly, with a drawn-out, one-word answer, as if he was sitting in an interrogation cell instead of a tastefully-appointed office.
Inside Niles’ head, it was a different story.
“What you don’t understand, Mary,” the author snapped, (he would narrate to himself) “is that I was attempting a last-ditch attempt to save my marriage. That’s why I slept with that woman – to wake my wife up to the problems we were going through before it was too late!”
“Mr Golan, I understand perfectly well,” Dr Loewes said, understandingly, “and I agree completely with everything you just said.”
Niles Golan had a habit of internally narrating his own life story, usually improving on it as he went. Mostly, it was the romance of a juicy internal monologue, a quirk that – like the habit of rolling golf balls around in his palm, which he’d claimed was how he came up with new ideas, at least until he’d lost one of the golf balls – he assumed made him deep. Partly, it was born of a neurotic desire to always be working, or at least pretend to be working – the kind of thing that Dr Loewes could have helped with, if he’d opened up to her for half a second.
Laughing inwardly at the obviousness of her technique, the author deflected her foolish questions with a practiced panache, Niles would think, or something like it. And later, as he signed over the four hundred dollars she required per hour, he would feel a warm glow of satisfaction, as if he’d won a game he was playing with her. Another session finished – another session with the walls of his mental fortress still unbreached.
After thirty-four sessions – coming to thirteen thousand, six hundred dollars in total – he had decided that therapy was too expensive a hobby to pursue any further.
“AND YET...” SAID Ralph Cutner, four and a half years later, as Niles Golan relaxed in the sumptuous brown leather chair he kept for his patients, “...here we are.”
“Well, this is hardly the same,” Niles muttered, leaning back into the warm recesses of the brown leather. It was the same chair that had been on the show – as far as possible, Ralph had tried to duplicate the set of Cutner’s Chair to the last degree when setting up his practice, and obviously the chair itself played a large part of that. He’d bought it from a memorabilia collector for twelve thousand dollars and a signed photo.
“Isn’t it?”
“Well, no. I mean, it’s different, isn’t it? The sessions with Doctor Loewes... they were something I promised Iyla I’d do. Before the divorce, I mean.”
“Right, right. This would have been after the thing with Justine.” Ralph smiled. Like most Fictionals created specifically for the small screen, he was a handsome man – a little craggy, perhaps, not quite as unnaturally gorgeous as some of the soap-opera Fictionals, but definitely the better looking of the two men. Not that Niles had much to worry about – obviously his chin was weaker, and he’d been going bald for some time, and his nose was perhaps a little long, but all that added character.
And he was real, of course. That made a difference.
“Whereas this, on the other hand,” he said, ignoring the mention of Justine Coverly – he really didn’t want to talk about her today, or any of the others, or his ex-wife – “these weekly sessions with you... that’s something I came to of my own accord. It was my decision to come and see you, I wasn’t pressured into it by anybody, so...” Niles shrugged, waving a hand idly. “There we are. Completely different situations.”
Ralph half-smiled, raising one eyebrow – the imperfections of which had been discussed by the studio’s design team for some days. He paused dramatically for a moment before speaking.
“That’s the only difference?”
Niles swallowed. “Well, yes. Absolutely.” He coughed. “The only difference that matters – to me, I mean.” He leaned forward, scratching the back of his head. Ralph’s arms were folded now, and Niles had a feeling he’d seen that particular fold of the arms on the ‘very special episode’ of Cutner’s Chair where Ralph Cutner had analysed a Grand Wizard of the local Klan.
“Do, um... do you think there are any other differences?” Niles tried to make his voice as innocent as possible. “Between you and her? That matter?”
Ralph raised his other eyebrow and said nothing.
Niles sighed. “It’s going to sound insulting.”
“How so?”
“It’s going to sound as if... well, as if I don’t consider you a real...” He swallowed. “You know.”
Ralph’s eyes crinkled just so, in a way that hadn’t been designed into him but was encouraged by the director all the same, particularly for close-ups. The crinkle of Ralph’s eyes was a happy accident for the translation team. “No, I don’t know. You’re going to have to tell me.” He chuckled. “A real therapist? A real jerk? A real human being? What?”
Niles shifted uncomfortably in the chair for a moment. “...A real therapist,” he finished, weakly.
Ralph leaned back against the wall, lowering and raising his eyebrows in a little ballet. His eyebrows were very expressive, when he wanted them to be. “Hesitation. That’s very interesting.”
The author stared Ralph Cutner right in the eye a
s his ridiculous eyebrows waggled like caterpillars. With one insouciant glare, he dared the man to make his accusation and be done. Instead, the Fictional crumbled, utterly defeated.
Niles didn’t look at Ralph. He looked at the floor. The silence stretched on.
“Here’s the thing, Niles.” Ralph suddenly grinned, showing teeth. “I’m not a real therapist – I mean, I made that clear when you started coming to see me. Technically, I’m a life coach. Because to call yourself a therapist, you need to get certain degrees. I don’t have those. I never went to college – I was never the age you go to college at. I’ve always been thirty-five – or able to play thirty-five, I should say. In real terms, I’m nine.” He leant forward, jerking a thumb conspiratorially at the certificates on the wall. “The moment I came out of the translation tube, those degrees were waiting for me. They’re not real, either. Just props, from the show.” Another dry little chuckle. “But you knew that.”
Niles flushed red. Of course, he knew all about the show: Cutner’s Chair, a one-hour weekly drama about a curmudgeonly psychiatrist with a heart of gold who (with the help of a clutch of beautiful interns) solved one crippling neurosis per week in time for a montage of learning moments cut to some unobjectionable indie song aimed at the dad demographic. It had run for seven seasons, leaving behind a large albeit steadily shrinking fan base, several dozen tumblr accounts, a small ocean of memorabilia – and the Fictional, Ralph Cutner.
THERE WERE STILL, occasionally, in far-flung corners of the world, people who didn’t know what Fictionals were.
Strictly speaking, a Fictional was a cloned and modified human being. If you’d worked in the fast food industry, you’d probably have an understanding of cloning – since the big genetics breakthroughs of the ’seventies and ’eighties, it was where the meat came from. The higher class of restaurant still used ‘real’ chickens, pigs and cows, but anyone who told you they could taste the difference was a liar, and a pretentious one at that.
The laws of most countries prohibited the cloning and duplication of real people. “Every American has the right to their individual identity” was the line in the US. There were also various bans in place on weaponised and otherwise enhanced humans, but every so often North Korea would crow about men who could see in the dark and lift buses, at which point any country with the technology to achieve that would realise they were far better off just working on a nuclear programme. Which they did.
So really, the only legal or useful place left for human cloning was in entertainment.
They’d already used a cloned shark in Jaws – augmenting it to be larger, more vicious-looking, but also more docile and easy to train. Thanks to some wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, it was significantly cheaper than the cost of a model would have been. In the wake of that film’s success, a brief spate of creature features with cloned animals followed – Dodectapus, Piranha, Death Bear – and, eventually, someone took a close look at the laws on the books and decided to take the next logical step.
George Burns had been in the running for the title role in Oh, God!, but the studio made the decision, somewhat blasphemously, to cast a cloned human with a personality programmed by a computer – a computer the size of several rooms, back then – to match the God from the original Avery Corman novel. According to the law, real people could not be duplicated, but fictional people – as confirmed by a fairly contentious ruling from the Supreme Court – were fair game.
(In trying to explain the Supreme Court’s working, Warren Burger made a rather confused analogy – that, just as fictions could be translated from English to Spanish, so they could be ‘translated’ into the language of the human genetic code. It was one of the least coherent statements of his career, but the term stuck.)
God, as he emerged from the translation tube, had a warm, beatific personality and a wickedly dry sense of humour, but what made his performance – as himself, or Himself, depending on how heretical you were feeling – was the essential otherworldliness he brought to the role, that strange touch of unreality. If you were to watch the film today, you probably won’t notice it – we’re used to Fictionals now – but imagine how it must have been, in 1977, to see a fictional man walking and talking for the very first time...
God made two sequels – one with George Burns starring opposite him as the Devil – and after that, the studio released him from his contract and he was left to his own devices. Over the next year – 1985 – he starred in ‘special episodes’ of Magnum, P.I. and Cheers and announced his plans to write a (necessarily short) autobiography. He never finished the book; he was found dead in bed in late December of that year. Physically, he was eight years old.
By that time, eighty-three other Fictionals – most with life expectancies benefitting from the rapid improvements in cloning technology – had been produced by the larger studios. By 1990, there would be more than four hundred, each of them modelled on a fictional character from a novel or a play, or created especially for the big or small screens. By the turn of the millennium, the number of Fictionals in Los Angeles would stabilise somewhere between forty and fifty thousand.
The Fictionals were here to stay.
“...ALL RIGHT.” NILES sighed, looking at the floor. “Maybe I was worried about implying... oh, you know what. The other thing.”
Ralph chuckled again.
In a flash, the novelist leaped from the chair. With one expertly-delivered karate chop, the giggling moron’s neck was snapped like a cheese straw, Niles thought, as he continued to sit and stare at his shoes.
“What other thing?” Ralph grinned. “Come on, say it out loud. It won’t hurt us.”
Niles sighed. “You being a... a Fictional.” He scowled. “There, happy?”
“A Fictional.” Cutner stood up and began walking around the room in a slow circle, staring intently ahead. On the Cutner’s Chair message boards, this was known as the ‘walk and talk’ moment. He stalked his office like a panther prowling a cage, Niles found himself thinking, the laser eye of his mind seeking out every last detail of the demons plaguing the inner landscape of the handsome novelist.
It was comforting, in a way – but at the same time, oddly irritating. It almost felt as if Ralph was flaunting his unreality, shoving it down Niles’ throat.
“Say it loud, say it proud. Created, not gestated. My father was a typewriter and my mother was a translation tube.” Ralph gave himself another beat, as though following the orders of an invisible director, then turned. “I’m not real in the way that you are, Mr Golan. That’s a part of it, isn’t it?”
“No.” Niles scowled. He could see what Cutner was implying. It was arrant nonsense, of course.
There were people who thought that way – realists, they were called. They’d been a serious problem for the movie industry until 1989, when a realist mob had murdered Bernie Lomax, a Fictional created for the Weekend At Bernie’s franchise, leading to a controversial and arguably gruesome rewrite of the script. Public opinion had turned solidly against realism after that, but there were still plenty of people who felt that a character who’d emerged from a translation tube with a full personality already in place was, if not an abomination per se, at least naturally inferior to someone who’d been born from a human womb, who’d acquired their genetic makeup the old-fashioned way.
Niles wasn’t one of those people. The Fictionals were different – of course they were – but certainly not inferior.
Not very inferior.
He scowled. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Cutner smiled, showing his teeth again. It was the predatory grin of a shark, Niles narrated, feeling the old desire to shut himself up like a clam rising in him.
“The way I see it,” Cutner said, “you couldn’t open up to Loewes because she was real. She was a professional therapist. She was analysing every word and gesture you made – or you thought she was, anyway, and that’s enough. Probably seeing things about you that you hadn’t worked out yourself yet, right? And th
at’s not a nice position to be in for you. You felt vulnerable.” He smiled, pouring himself an apple juice from the whiskey decanter on the sideboard; like many Fictionals, he had an aversion to alcohol, preferring the prop drinks that came on the set. He knocked the drink he’d poured back in one. “You come to me because you feel superior to me.”
“Really?” Niles tried not to roll his eyes. “Because I’m a writer? Is that it?”
“Sure, why not? A famous writer, at that. How many books is it now?”
Niles had to admit it was nice to be called a famous writer. And he certainly didn’t mind talking about his work – in fact, it was one of his favourite topics of conversation. “Eighteen. Nineteen in February. And Doubleday want a new Kurt Power novel by Christmas.”
KURT POWER WAS Niles Golan’s signature character; a no-nonsense private eye and ex-lawyer who, on the days he wasn’t solving cases involving genius serial killers, consulted for the police and anti-terrorist forces. He was divorced, with a drink problem and – the clever touch Niles was most proud of – an autistic six-year-old daughter, whose unique insights often provided the key to a difficult case. The first few novels had done relatively well, before sales settled down to something reasonable but unremarkable – enough to keep Niles in the style to which he had become accustomed, but not enough to put him up amongst the greats, which was where he felt he deserved to be.
After all, what did King or Rowling have that Golan didn’t? Why did Gaiman command a Twitter following of over a million, while Niles struggled to reach six thousand? Why had Bring Up The Bodies won a Booker while Pudding And Pie: A Kurt Power Novel had been so cruelly ignored?