“Well, there are millions of Benjies worth of my parents’ pretentious artwork upstairs. It’s dicey everywhere, so why don’t you just man up and hit me on a five route over through the sequencers.”
I hesitated.
“You know what a five is, right? Fifteen yards down then—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know what a five is,” I said. “I just . . . I just don’t want to break anything.”
“This thing can halve your forty-meter dash time, but it can’t give you a pair of balls.”
I smirked. “Alright. Run the route, hotshot.”
Before I could even set my feet, she blasted off fifteen yards, taking a hard plant and then jabbing left in between a row of gene sequencers and centrifuges. I hadn’t thrown a pass in six months, but I took a deep breath, trusted in the motion I’d signaled to my nervous system ten thousand times before, and sent a spiral ripping in between two microarrays.
She moved toward the ball and caught it with her hands exactly like you’re taught to and sent a tight spiral ripping right back. Not expecting it, and subconsciously favoring my broken arm even though I wasn’t using it, the ball clanked against my robo hands and ricocheted off the chest plating.
“Let’s go, butterfingers. Quarterbacks have to catch, too. Or are you not much of a shotgun guy?”
“Shotgun. Under center. Place holding. I’m anything you want me to be.”
She shook her head as she jogged back over.
“Now it’s not because I’m surprised,” I prefaced, “but how long have you been playing ball?”
“Since pee-wees. You always hear the standard, ‘I’m all for women’s rights and equality and shit, blah, blah, blah, but their bodies are just different,’” she said, somehow managing to combine both a surfer and a southern accent into her imitation. “They are different. But look who’s benching five fifty and running a two-second forty-meter dash now. I’d be out on the field, but like you said yesterday, the tech team’s where the action is. Even more so next year. It’ll basically just be about the four robos.”
“That’s a little dark.”
“You can soup up biology, but it’s still biology. Sure, it’s evolved for millions of years, but how many of those adaptations are relevant to football?”
“Or quantum computing?”
“Or quantum computing,” she echoed. “No, even the top dogs are struggling to keep their heads above water these days. Here, hit me on a nine.”
Martin had basically said the same thing. Of course they weren’t thinking about un-Revised people; they were in their own race with the robos. And they were losing. I threw another spiral, but this time putting enough air under it so she could catch it over her shoulder on the fly route.
“You almost shaved off a few of those lights.”
“Just seeing how accurate the physics model is. And I gotta say, you nerds’ve ‘done well.’ Pretty seamless nerve cell interaction.
“No wonder the top dogs are struggling: you’re building their replacements.”
“Even then you’re not safe. Look at someone like my dad, who a lot of people think is kind of a big fucking deal bio-engineer. He can’t stop for a second. He used to love deep sea fishing and charity sailing races and was involved with a bunch of cool causes, but now all he thinks about is his competitors designing better genetic algorithms than him and poaching his best data scientists. The only thing he’s still involved in is a scholarship for un-Revised people, but even that’s turned into a fiasco.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s this thing with—” She stopped and put her hand up to her ear signaling she was on her bug. “Yeah, do it. I’ll be up in a sec.” And then to me in a more upbeat voice she said, “Here, hit me on a six route through the printers; I have to put out a fire upstairs.”
“Are you always this reckless with your lab equipment?”
“When I’m trying to improve in-game update functionality. Definitely. It’s just good process,” she said, right before flying down the long side of the room again.
I took a deep breath, visualized the movement in my head, and aired it out.
“I’d say your UI is pretty good,” I told her after she jogged back over with the ball.
“I can’t count on everyone being as talented as Gatley. Or you, for that matter. Now let’s go check on the kids.”
I felt so light breaking the link with Icarus, like I’d finally found the world I was meant to be in. The person I was supposed to be on it with. I was just taking it all in, trying to hold onto the moment when Ethan’s voice sounded in my ear. What’s going on in there?
My BCI converted my thought to text. Just give me a few more minutes.
Come on Cinderella, it’s going to be midnight before you know it.
I was about to think something back when Lena asked, “Is everything alright?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m great,” I said as we started walking back down the workshop’s main aisle.
“Just that your face was so sad a second ago.”
“Nah, are you kidding? I just got to be Iron Giant.” And then hoping to change the subject, I added, “Whoa. What are those things over there along the wall?”
“Those?” she asked, following my pointing arm. “Fractal robots. They don’t look like much, but you can program them to assemble into anything you want. My mom uses them for tool fabrication when she’s out in the field. It lets her pack pretty light.”
“I bet.”
When we got to the top of the stairs there was a man in a security uniform waiting for her in the hallway. I froze. And then just as quickly I wanted to run, dash out the way I came in—or better yet, slip through the door from where the caterers had been bringing the food.
But the guard didn’t have anyone else with him. And he and Lena weren’t glancing over at me the way you’d expect them to if I were the topic of discussion, just calmly talking, using normal baseline body language. Then again, they were probably smart enough to play it cool if I was. The doubt sent variables tearing through my brain, scooping up everything in my memory and weaving it into one scenario after another, but before I could finish puzzling them out, Lena was back beside me, looking just like she had a minute ago. “Shall we head back in?”
“Sure, sure. Is everything okay?” I asked, walking beside her down the hall and into the ballroom.
“Yeah. The network turned off for a moment, but it’s back now. It’s been doing that ever since my parents had new fiber laid for this guest house they’re building out back.”
“Bed and breakfast?”
She laughed. “No, they’ve just got a lot of international collaborators flying in and wanted a place to put ’em up. They say it’s not professional to have them in the house proper even though we have like fifteen guest bedrooms . . . but at that point why don’t you just send them to a hotel?”
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em, right?”
“It’s their money to waste,” said Lena as we started moving through the crowd. “It’s just that they’re always complaining about their colleagues, so it hardly makes sense bringing them closer.”
I gestured to the palatial tract in front of us. “Seems like they’re doing something right.”
She smiled for a second as if in agreement, but it vanished and just as quickly a cloud came over her face. It wasn’t quite melancholy, just a low-grade concern whirring in the background, and the only reason I knew it was there was because I’d been feeling the same thing all year. The chandelier lights brightened as if adjusted by some invisible dial and I was shrinking into myself, my thoughts churning as I tried to concentrate, my mind closing around its target like a retro arcade claw.
A belly laugh rang out from the owner of a gold toucan mask in a group in front of us, followed by a machine gun snort of a tall, lithe female.
“Magus, Magus. I thought that was you. Come here and meet my friend, Carter!” said Lena, almost too enthusiastically. As if so eager to be drawn
out of her trance that she was willing to throw herself at any available distraction.
A tall, slender, figure in violet strode casually over with two ladies on either side of him. “Lena, Lena, Lena. Sconcertante. Sei riuscite. Sei andato e fatto la fermata mando.”
“Grazie mille, parliamo English for now since my friend’s from somewhere where that hasn’t quite yet become the ‘cosa alla moda,’” said Lena. In the background the orchestra was playing something beautiful, but the clatter of plates and chatter was drowning it out, making it gurgle and trill just below the surface.
“If you say so, my dear,” said Magus, and turning to me: “But you should really make a point of learning, my friend, because language is the conduit of so much more than words. It sculpts meaning. It shapes thoughts and ideas. Italian makes you want to throw up your hands and seize the moment, and Francais makes every sensation more sensual. The manner in which you express your thoughts is just as important as what you say, and it takes a master artist to match exactly the right brush with exactly the right shade.”
Lena laughed politely. “Surely that’s taking it too far.”
“Surely, it’s not! You’re only as good as your vessel, my lady. A ship’s treasure doesn’t help it float. No, no, no! Think of all that Spanish silver at the bottom of the Atlantic and you’ll get my point all too well. However, there are no concerns for you in that canton, Lena, because this is astonishing! Astounding!” He made a wide gesture across the ballroom. “It’s set my senses aflame and managed to rip our hopelessly assiduous brethren’s heads out of the sand long enough to realize that you can’t live your life only to study someone else’s. It doesn’t matter if it’s there; it only matters if it’s breathed in.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mags.”
“It’s my pleasure, dear. My one wish is that more could see the same textures but, alas, there are too many cataracts in this age of cures, not born of matter but of motion. Can we really be shocked that things turn to a blur if we’re always racing by them?”
His blue, sapphire-like eyes scanned us, taking in the assenting nods of Lena and his two companions, as if their faces were blank canvasses for his words to splash expression.
“To illustrate, how many people here do you suppose realize that there are two original Giorgiones, a Titian, and a Tintoretto on the wall over there? Few, and their lack of recognition is itself a masterpiece. This age has overstuffed our mouths at the expense of our taste buds, deadening them to anything subtler than sugar or finer than salt. We’re lost in seas of sweetness and marooned on islands where the treasure comes pre-dug and strewn across the beaches—bewildered and numb—left to wander like paupers through the halls of our own castles.
“Recently, I was at a family affair with some rather distant cousins, and I loathe to admit that there was hardly a soul among them who could tell the difference between the 1926 Macallan my father brought and the swill they got from BevMo.”
The girl beside Magus in a spangled ruby dress piped, “Indeed, it can be quite trying to have a conversation with . . . well, anyone outside of Lawrence, really, anymore. They might mean well, per se, but they succeed only in cluttering everything up with all their amateur endeavors. Just because these droves of unemployed paint pictures doesn’t mean they’re painters, for just as a grain of sand doesn’t make a beach and no single droplet of water a pool, it takes an accumulation of talent to create a body of anything worth inhabiting, and further talent to critique that body’s temporal resilience.”
“Schopenhauer said that ‘One work of genius may well have been worth one thousand commentaries,’ but in a de trop world, curation is creation. The problem is that if you’re talking to the uninitiated, curation is almost too large of a chasm to venture bridging. In painting, for instance, there’s so much background and context that goes into explaining how every choice the artist makes influences the picture. I couldn’t make an off-the-cuff critique to someone without a tuned pallet and expect to spark even an ounce of comprehension without first giving a requisite five-hundred-hour lecture.”
She paused and looked around at the group with pursed lips, as if she were sucking something in through a straw.
“Take that original Venus of Urbino over there; notice the suggestive expression on her face, the position of her hand, and the proximity of the bouquet of roses to her breasts and how alarming that would be to people in an age unequipped with contraception and in constant fear of disease and eternal damnation. This, of course, needs to be understood before you can appreciate the significance of the painting’s role in the vanguard of the Renaissance’s sexual awakening, as well as all the methods employed to achieve it, such as the French-imported glazing technique used to make her skin look soft and sensual, or the way he employs chiaroscuro to make the room seem three-dimensional, or composition to unobtrusively draw your eye from the woman to the dog to the child and maid, or the straight lines of architecture juxtaposed with the curvier human form to create contrast . . .”
“I could go on, but you see, if there aren’t basic assumptions you’re making, then . . .”
“Then you have nothing to talk about. Indeed,” said Magus.
“It’s not worth it,” said the other girl standing to his left.
I looked at Lena and she subtly rolled her eyes.
“Perhaps Vasiliev says it best when he writes, ‘Words are only as capable as the knowledge carrying meaning across the ether, the shape of which masks internal obstructions, leaving manual verification as the sole way of measuring efficacy.’”
“Thank God for French.”
I glanced at the clock in my film. It was 10:02. Sometime soon I was going to need to pull away. Maybe I should actually feign a slight illness. Lena had said the Medpad was upstairs, and as much as I’d like to get some of the paintings down here—drunk or not—there were just too many people. Too many eyes.
“The tedious part,” the red-dressed girl went on between sips of champagne, “is when you know it’s going to be a bad line, as with gatherings less discerning than this one. It’s a chore with all the frustration in dealing with an undeveloped mind yet none of the charms of youth.”
“Though the real difference is that an actual child doesn’t want to go to a physics lecture because he knows it’s boring, yet these children want to—they think it’s boring too, of course, but somehow feel left out and slighted when denied the privilege of watching kinematic equations fly past their heads like an asteroid shower.”
“They might as well be written in Sumerian,” said Magus, chuckling.
“Thus, Pelletier states that, ‘Time spent on translation doesn’t translate back to time.’ And that, ‘Time is too precious to waste on any people known to waste their own.’” said the girl in red, who seemed to wear theories and epigrams around her like pearls. “Pretty nice, aren’t they?”
She’d noticed me staring at the statues which had begun disassembling and reassembling themselves into completely different shapes—frowns turning into smiles into laughter, postures relaxing, stances shifting. It was like the stone was being molded by some invisible, artistic God, as it melted and then hardened again, accomplishing in the blink of an eye something that would take nature millions of years. “Surely, they have fractal robots in Alaska, don’t they?”
“Oh, of course,” I said, not wanting to sound any more provincial than I already had. “It’s just the nuances of the—”
“Christopher, you made it! I was beginning to get worried!” Lena cried, interrupting me.
I didn’t even have time to think of the question before a voice I’d recognize anywhere answered it first, “Oh, I wouldn’t miss this, Lena. Thanks so much for having me.”
I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. The ballroom started spinning again.
“Christopher won the Community Spirit Award my father’s company gives each year to a senior with the most impressive local service record,” Lena gushed. “Candidates can’t be Revised, bu
t the prize is a Revision battery and full ride to Stanford.”
“That’s delightful,” Magus drawled. “Stanford, eh?”
“Yeah, that’s where Dad got his doctorate.”
I was lost. It was like a hole had gaped open within me and everything I had left was draining through it. He’d gotten that scholarship for what, playing catch with some kids a few days a week? It didn’t make any sense. It was a great deal for him, no doubt, but it was so arbitrary. What about everyone else, left no better off? Actually, they were worse off; this kind of one-off award gave the illusion that they were being taken care of.
I looked at Chris who was wearing a kind of minimalist white half-mask reminiscent of the Phantom of the Opera; then I looked at Lena. Christ, I needed to get out of here. I tried thinking of something suave to say to excuse myself but, fearful that he’d recognize my voice, decided against it.
Any hope of waiting him out was dashed, though, when Lena swished the punch around her glass and said, “Chris, I want you meet Carter; he’s another of our honored guests, here all the way from Alaska. “
I understood then what she’d meant before by flourish; she was lumping me in with him. I was less a guest, more a form of entertainment, like a chimp wearing spectacles. Yet simultaneously keeping them from being too elitist. From having to feel too guilty about diverging so dramatically from the sapien tree.
Chris had taken a step forward and extended his hand. Everyone was looking at me now and in a few more moments it would become uncomfortable. “Great to meet you, Carter,” he said.
I shook his hand, finally, nodding in reply. I looked at the door and then I looked back at Lena, knowing that I should already be walking away.
“So,” said Chris. “How have you found yourself a guest in such fine company?”
It took me a second to realize that the question was aimed at me and another second to process that it was so direct and open-ended that there would be no dodging or nodding this time. Again, I looked at the door, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to run from the place I’d fought so hard to be let into. And if I left now, wouldn’t Lena say, “We just met at the park this afternoon,” and end up comparing notes with Chris?
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