by David Wong
“You know what the scariest part is about people like him? Everything he’s doing makes perfect sense in his own mind.”
“Ha! Though I guess that’s true of all of us.”
No one else had noticed the Doll Head guy doing his cigarette trick. Yet just in the time Zoey was looking in that direction, two other passengers had craned their heads around to look at her. She knew she wasn’t just being paranoid now—one at a time they would glance around their seat or raise up a bit to see over, peer back, then quickly turn around again when they saw she was meeting their gaze. The bathroom door bumped Zoey’s seat. The black girl shuffled past and she made a point to look down at Zoey again. She felt to see if there was something in her hair, but then remembered she was still wearing the knit cap she had pulled down over her ears during the bus ride to Denver. Were they making fun of the hat? Or maybe they were looking at Jacob? Was he a celebrity?
“Anyway,” Jacob said, “it’s amazing how fast they can build them now. You leave for vacation, and when you come back a week later there’s one less gap in the skyline, you have to stare at it for a minute to figure out what they added. They’re amazing to watch, the way they work. They never stop.”
“‘They’? What, like robots?”
“No, Mexicans. All of the crews are immigrants on work visas. Great workers, though.”
“Oh … that’s kind of racist, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I mean, I guess some of them are probably bad workers. Anyway, it’s kind of mesmerizing to watch them go, they have these huge fabricators right there on the job site, like big 3D printers that just ride up the side of the building and stamp out whole sections of wall, ready to assemble.”
Zoey tried to figure out if Jacob was hitting on her or if he was just bored from the train ride. She imagined the scary doll guy coming back and pulling a weapon or something, and Jacob punching him out like one of those old-timey boxers.
Jacob continued, “One Friday on the way home from work, I made an offhand comment to my friend about how I wished we had a Falafel Fusion joint in our neighborhood. Then, when I was on my way home from work Monday evening, there it was! They had built it over the weekend, almost like they had heard me say that. It went from vacant lot to open business in less than seventy-two hours. That’s Tabula Rasa in a nutshell—you blink and the landscape changes around you. It’s like an American Dubai, back when Dubai was Dubai.”
Zoey mumbled, “Yeah, that’s weird,” and she knew Jacob picked up on the fact that she wasn’t really paying attention. He fell silent.
Thinking desperately of something to fill the lull in the conversation, Zoey said, “Do you like your glasses? My ex-boyfriend couldn’t live without his, but they always give me a headache when he let me put them on.”
Occasionally Jacob’s eyes would dart up and to the right and she knew he was refreshing an inbox that was only visible to him, otherwise she had no idea what he was actually seeing out of the glasses. They made games where you could bounce a little rubber ball off the faces of the people in the room (the ball was only visible to you, of course) or that would obscure everything with a fantasy world and leave you blind to your surroundings, which if you did it on the bus, was a good way to get your purse stolen. But either way, any time you talked to a person who was wearing the glasses, you never knew if they were actually seeing you.
Jacob said, “You get used to them. They leave kind of an afterimage when you take them off, and you find yourself constantly looking around for your notifications.”
“My boyfriend downloaded an app that would superimpose a cartoon mustache on anyone he was talking to. He’d laugh and laugh. The glasses got broken when he got hit in the face with a football and I was kind of glad.” She realized she was now talking about her ex-boyfriend a little too much, and in fact had forgotten to add the “ex” just then. She quickly added, “He was stupid. We broke up two months ago.” That was pretty subtle, right?
Jacob said, “If you’re free over the weekend I’ll show you around the city. There’s tons to do.”
Huh. So he was probably another serial killer. Still, this was Thursday night, she wondered if she could lose twenty-five pounds or gain four inches in height by Saturday. Then she realized that, while she was thinking about it, she had neglected to actually answer his offer and had created an awkward moment by leaving him hanging.
Jacob, trying to cover for it, said, “So what brings you into the big city, Zoey?”
“My father—my biological father—died.” Wait—when had she told Jacob her name?
“Oh, I’m sorry. When’s the funeral?”
“I’m, uh, not sure. They said they needed me for some other stuff, legal paperwork or something. It’s pretty weird.”
“What happened? He couldn’t have been very old, you’re only—”
“Twenty-two. It was an accident. I don’t know anything yet. They said something blew up.”
“Oh, was it that warehouse explosion?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Unless there was more than one. You heard about it?”
“Everybody did, it was big news. So you’re Arthur Livingston’s daughter? I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Was he famous?”
“Around the city, yeah. Probably could have run for mayor, if the city had a mayor.”
“Well, good for him.”
Jacob picked up on her cold tone and went quiet, creating the second awkward silence in Zoey’s five-minute relationship with him. She pictured bringing him home to her trailer in Fort Drayton, this kid in his three-piece tweed suit with the silk tie and dainty gold pocket-watch chain dangling across his vest. She imagined him pulling up in a restored classic car that rolled in silently on battery power, then getting out with a walking stick and striding to the door. Then Zoey would invite him to sit on a sofa that was covered in cigarette burns and frayed wounds inflicted by cat claws. At that point she pictured him either running for his life, or staying and offering to rescue her from the squalor. She didn’t know which would be worse.
Zoey noticed a tiny pinprick of blue light at the corner of his glasses near the hinge, and said, “Oh, is that on? Were we live this whole time?”
The wired glasses all came with forward-facing video cameras that could be left on around the clock, broadcasting everything you did. If you didn’t want to wear the glasses but still wanted to livestream your life to the world, you were in luck—you could get those tiny cameras in any accessory you could imagine—pocket watches, necklaces, earrings, tie clips, hats, little copper dragonflies that teenage girls clipped to their hair, whatever. You didn’t need a viewfinder, the camera captured a panoramic view of everything in front of you, with software that automatically zoomed and focused on faces and other points of interest—you just turned it on and it recorded your life. The kids these days never left the house without a live feed running (and ever since she got out of high school, Zoey had thought of everyone under twenty as a “kid”).
So who was watching their broadcasts? Nobody, or everybody—if they left the feed public, anyone could jump in and watch. The cumulative cloud of all of these millions of connected camera feeds was referred to as the Blink network, or just “Blink.” As in, “Did you see the fight between Ayden and Madison at Isaac’s party?” “No, but I saw the Blink.” Occasionally you’d hear someone use it in past tense, saying they “Blunked” their whole vacation and that you should totally watch it. If you obstructed their feed they’d say you “Blanked” them, and they’d refer to their Blink followers as their “Blinkers,” at which point Zoey usually felt the urge to stab them. The point being that the little blue light on Jacob’s glasses meant a thousand people could have been listening in on their conversation this whole time. She tried to remember if she had said anything embarrassing.
Jacob put a hand to his glasses and said, “Oh, yeah, I’m so sorry. Jesus, I should have told you it was on. I don’t even think about it. Don’t worry, I don’t have any followers, a
nd lately it’s just my mom and a couple of guys from Pakistan who want to see what America is like. The only people watching right now are an old couple who jumped in when I boarded, they’re planning a trip and wanted to see how clean the train was.”
“Oh. Did you tell them it smells like pee?”
“I did not, but I assume they heard you say it just now.”
He tapped his glasses and the little blue light blinked off. The light was mandated by law, so pervs couldn’t sneak them into locker rooms without everybody knowing they were part of a live broadcast. But Zoey didn’t think the light was near prominent enough, considering she hadn’t noticed it until just now. Her eyes drifted toward the window again. The scrub brush and occasional mountains had been replaced by a dirt field growing rows of wood frames that would eventually bloom into a housing development. Black ribbons of newly paved roads undulated between the rows in gentle curves, sometimes ending abruptly where they met an empty space that would probably be another development a year from now. Zoey noticed that as they got closer to the city, the houses became more finished and had less motion blur—the train was slowing down. She looked around for the Doll Head guy. He had moved a few rows closer; he had finished his cigarette and was now smashing the butt under a bare foot, grinding it into the carpet.
Eager to restart the conversation with Jacob, Zoey said, “So, what’s it’s like living in Tabula Rasa?”
He thought for a moment and said, “Overload.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see. The population sign comes with an epilepsy warning. Oh, and you can fight a bear, if you want.”
“You can what a what?”
“You can pay twenty bucks and a guy will let you fight a bear. In the park, there’s a roped off area and you get five minutes to fight a grizzly bear.”
“How is that legal?”
He shrugged. “Everything’s legal when there’s nobody to enforce the law. Three months ago half the cops went to jail in this big bribery scandal. Most of the rest walked off the job. Paychecks were bouncing. It’s a huge mess. They’ve got such a backlog that nothing gets prosecuted.”
“Wait, really? Who do you call if a psychopath breaks into your—”
“Look.”
He was nodding toward her window. Zoey looked and thought, overload.
On the horizon was a cylindrical skyscraper with a gigantic serpent curling around it. The snake writhed and twisted and turned menacing red eyes toward the train. It opened its mouth and hissed. Below it appeared the words “COMING DECEMBER 23.” The building, Zoey realized, was wrapped in crystal-clear video screens from roof to foundation, every single window flashing one continuous animation—an ad for a movie. The huge, computer-animated snake snapped around and writhed off onto the building next to it, twisting its massive emerald body around letters five stories high that said “JADEN SMITH IN…” The serpent slithered along the skyline, and Zoey realized that every structure in downtown Tabula Ra$a was synced to carry a continuous video along every inch of its surface, the snake sliding smoothly from one building to the next, the ad playing to the people on the arriving train. The serpent then crawled onto the front of the domed roof of the train station they were about to pull into, wrapping its body around red block letters that spelled “JADEN SMITH FIGHTS A GIANT SNAKE.”
Jacob said, “I like how literal they are with the titles now, you know exactly what you’re getting.”
The animated snake then burst out of the ceiling of the station, climbing into the night sky—Zoey gasped, startled for a moment before she realized it was just a hologram set up on the roof of the building, positioned to give the illusion the snake had broken free of the ad. A couple of people on the train gasped and laughed and took pictures. Zoey noticed Jacob had a big stupid grin on his face. He had seen her jump. She elbowed him and told him to shut up, but she knew she was smiling too, and had to remind herself to keep her lips closed so as not to show off her substandard teeth. And then the train slipped between skyscrapers and suddenly downtown Tabula Ra$a was puking gaudy colors all over her window.
Looming over them was a crystal canyon of towers in various stages of construction—they passed a hotel that blasted a Sony ad into the heavens, then a building that was just a darkened framework of girders topped with cranes that stuck out like a spiky haircut. Zoey looked down and saw that below the rail was a gleaming, blinking river of cars. Swimming in the slow current of cabs and fleet vehicles were the flamboyant, tricked-out rides of the kind of people who were (a) rich enough to drive and park in the city and (b) hadn’t been rich long enough to develop any taste. There was a bright red motorcycle whose body had been molded in the shape of a dragon, the rider an Asian guy in a green suit with a six-inch-tall pompadour wig. Hulking in the next lane was a monster truck on tires as tall as a man, a jet of blue flames pouring out of completely unnecessary chrome pipes. Behind it was a Ferrari from the 2020s with an LED paint job flashing undulating colors that rippled across its body in beautiful psychedelic patterns. Behind it, a massive retrofitted 1960s Cadillac convertible, sporting a white leather interior and a huge black man in a white cowboy hat.
Just off the pavement on one side of the street was a deep trench where work crews in orange vests were laying some kind of underground cable. Their project was slicing right through a construction site where someone else was trying to dig out a foundation for yet another building, pallets of brick and bags of cement scattered like islands in the dirt, a flow of tire tracks swirling around where forklifts and Bobcats had scurried to and fro.
And swarming over all of this: the people. With no finished sidewalks to speak of, pedestrians leaked out into the gridlocked traffic, shuffling between bumpers. There were drunk girls in tiny dresses and fake hair giggling and leaning on each other, packs of burly guys off to construction jobs, Japanese kids in sunglasses and glue-on sideburns, Indian families with double-digit packs of kids. Every fifth person wore one of those irritating blinking shirts, fabric that flashed brand logos, obscene sayings, or cartoon characters performing the same looping animation over and over. Flickering, pulsing torsos floating around taillights, everyone screaming for attention in a cloud of light and noise. Zoey had to remind herself that this is what the city was like at eleven PM, on a Thursday.
Zoey asked Jacob, “Do you like it here?”
He laughed. “That’s a complicated question. All I know is that now I can’t tolerate living anywhere else.”
The train was gently penetrating the station now, brakes whining against the rail. They passed a parking garage bearing glowing signs promoting all of the standard car rental franchises. Standing on each side of the entrance were men in black trench coats and ties, which Zoey thought brought a nice touch of class to a parking garage, until she noticed they were carrying machine guns.
Zoey said, “Tell me those guys are cops.”
Jacob leaned over to see out her window, casually pressing his body against hers, and said, “Private security. Those guys are probably Co-Op, you can tell by the trench coats. A bunch of the bigger companies pooled their money to fund their own security when it became clear the city’s police were worthless. It’s a good thing, you call the cops here, you get voice mail telling you to leave a message.”
“Oh, wow. So you get in trouble, you call those guys instead?”
“You probably can’t afford those particular guys, Co-Op is more for corporate customers. But yes, private security is who you call. There’s a big board online where you can post jobs and they bid on them. It gets kind of crazy, half of the guys are freelancers who either got their private security licenses by taking a five-day gun-safety class, or by paying forty bucks for a fake one. It’s a little bit Wild West out here. That’s what I was saying, somebody like you shouldn’t walk around alone.”
Jacob was still leaning against her and she smelled aftershave and hair gel. He let out a breath that Zoey felt on her neck and then settled back into his seat. H
e reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a sterling silver flask, and took a sip.
He held it out to Zoey and said, “It’s going to be cold out there, this’ll warm you up.”
As far as she knew, she had never in her life taken a drink from an unmarked container from a stranger. She didn’t like germs and she didn’t like getting slipped date rape drugs, but how often do you meet a rich, handsome stranger on a train? She took a drink and felt lava ooze down her throat. Whiskey. She coughed and they both laughed, and she felt like she was in some dumb movie. They were in the station now, a half-finished geodesic dome that Zoey thought, when completed, would be absolutely stunning, or the ugliest building in America—it was too early to tell. The finished parts were all glass arches with art deco flourishes, alternately futuristic and old-fashioned. The rest was a tangled mess of exposed steel skeleton and bundles of wiring that dangled like innards, as if the building had been in a knife fight.
Just off the platform, behind the hundreds of waiting travelers, was a row of fast-food and drink franchises Zoey had never seen before. She was a little ashamed of how excited they made her, but Fort Drayton only had five places to eat, and one of them was a gas station. Tabula Ra$a’s train station alone had twice that many. Just from her seat she spotted an AwesomeChanga franchise, where according to the ads you could get just about anything as long as it could be wrapped in a thick tortilla and deep fried to a crisp. Next to it was a Waffle Burger, which is just what it sounds like, and then a Go-Juice bar serving a long line of exhausted passengers waiting to pay nine dollars for a mixed fountain drink containing four hundred milligrams of caffeine and twelve percent alcohol. Next to it was a From-the-Oven cookie stand with a clear glass oven under the counter where you could watch them bake chocolate chip cookies right in front of you. Then they’d pull them out and shove them into your hand, still warm, the chips melting all over the wax paper. Zoey decided after she got off the train she would stand over there and just smell that place for half an hour. At the end there was a beverage joint called Spiked Ice, selling sugary fruit smoothies that, according to their sign, were laced with “fuel shots” that sounded illegal as hell—Codeine, Lithium, Hash Oil, DXM, Modafinil. She half wondered how such a place could just operate in the open, cops or no cops, but mostly she just wondered how much the drinks cost and which one she would get. The line in front of it was the longest of all.