Someone would put him out. Someone had to put him out. Zurri shrank away from the blast of heat and the smell. Oh God, the smell.
She was already a vegan, but the burnt pig stench would have put her off meat forever.
She knew the man in flames. Tony. He had been Tony. Security rushed onto the set, sleek, silver fire extinguishers held at the ready. White smoke filled the air, a hiss of liquid fat and a strangled moan came after, then the sound of Tony’s body, what was left of him, hitting the floor. Next to her, Hali Teng had not stopped screaming, her hands covering her eyes. On her left, Zaid WhateverWhatever vomited onto his six-hundred-dollar loafers.
More security guards in all-black jumpsuits arrived, circling the charred, twitching body. One of them held up his VIT monitor, mumbling something about paramedics.
“Zurri . . . Zurri . . .”
“H-He’s alive!” Zaid shook his head, wiping his mouth, a smear of greasepaint makeup coming off on his white sleeve.
Zurri would never forget the sound of her name coming out that way, like a thick, wet bubble bursting out of Tony’s mouth. It almost didn’t sound like her name, just a death wheeze, the last rattle of breath before the end.
“Get me out of here, I have to get out of here!” Hali Teng leapt to her feet, losing a heel, and raced off the set, shrieking.
Zurri couldn’t move. Every muscle in her body refused to cooperate. She couldn’t look away from the security guards and Tony. White motes danced around them like snow, but everything felt blistering hot under the studio lights. Winter in the desert.
Her eyes drifted upward, to the little red light blinking over the shoulder of one of the security guards. The camera. Zurri finally found her strength again, wobbling off the floor and storming past the guards and Tony.
“Cut the feed!” she screamed.
The drone cameras buzzed softly in the chaos, hovering at different levels to capture every possible angle, every reaction, every nuance. The little red light didn’t go out, so Zurri grabbed the drone with both hands, tearing it out of the air and slamming it onto the ground.
“I said cut the feed! What the hell is wrong with you people?”
The station’s first aid personnel scrambled past her, a stretcher hovering after them. Their orange-and-yellow jackets were bright even through the haze of powder from the extinguishers.
“Jesus, Tony, what were you thinking?” Zurri muttered, kicking the drone into the shadows, hoping it broke when it hit the wall.
One of the security guards spun to face her. The others parted for the stretcher. Zurri couldn’t look—Tony had to be too frail to transport anywhere. She imagined him snapping like a burnt twig, scattering to ash. Her mouth tasted like a campfire. Tony went on moaning. From the darkness surrounding the too-bright studio, Zurri’s assistant, Bev, emerged, dressed in a formfitting red suit, her white hair shellacked like a helmet to her head. Tears had carved white paths through Bev’s makeup. She couldn’t get a single word out, just shook her head and stared in horrified awe.
“You know him?” the security guard asked. The thin silver holographic badge on his chest read: davies.
“Yeah,” Zurri said, pulling Bev into a limp hug. Where was the person to hold her? Not there, she thought. Maybe not anywhere. “Yeah, I know him. He’s my stalker.”
Zurri’s knee bounced as she slipped the wafer-thin tab of Rapture under her tongue. She had to crank down her VIT AR settings even before leaving the studio with Bev—the flashing, the blinking, the explosions of advertisements in 3D neon color were too much. On the set, she had been frozen, but now she couldn’t keep still.
Below her, Tokyo Bliss Station unfurled like a sci-fi cocaine dream, seen from the top, a bottomless well of possibility, depravity, commerce, research and life. Heady, filthy life, so many people and animals packed into one orbiting meat grinder of humanity. When she was younger it was intoxicating. Now she wished desperately to escape it.
Zurri paced back and forth on the carbon-black balcony, the plaza one level down filled with nosy paparazzi and newscasters with telephoto lenses and camera drones angling for a single picture of her. The invisible holographic wrap around her balcony would make that impossible, distorting any images they managed to capture, standard-issue stuff for celebrity living. Some even went so far as to have the tech installed into their VIT monitors, leaving them a hazy ghost wherever they went. But normally, Zurri liked to be seen. Lived to be seen.
If only she could disappear.
Through the plexiglass separating her from the interior of the house, Zurri watched Bev frantically flipping through different feeds on the vid wall, cycling through the coverage of Tony’s self-immolation. Bev was probably on six different calls, juggling their response, spinning and spinning, downplaying the relationship between Zurri, Tokyo Bliss’s celebrity darling, and Tony.
Tony.
Zurri shivered, a tremor passing through her leg again. The Rapture was beginning to kick in, but not fast enough. She needed to smooth everything out, polish down all the sharp edges in her brain that threatened to slice and slice deep. Sometimes she took three or four tabs to relax before bed. Her doctor said it was risky, but Zurri couldn’t give a shit, not when insomnia was the alternative.
The holographic balcony wrap and beefed-up security measures had gone into place after the break-in. Zurri had woken up with a chill, nausea pulling her out of sleep. Some deep, unseen part of her knew she was being watched, and when she snapped her eyes open, Tony was standing there, looming over the bed. Watching her.
He was doing something else, too, but Zurri wouldn’t let herself think about that. They had been close once, as close as two working people could be. He was her first manager, the man who had gotten her her first gig, some small-time modeling for an online shopping bazaar. Things went quickly after that, her upward trajectory as sure and quick as the elevators rocketing up and down the center of the station.
“I’m good at this,” Tony had told her at an after-party a year ago. “Because the only thing I care about is you. I don’t think about myself. Fuck, at this point, I’m not sure I have a self.”
He did. And he had taken that self and used it to break into her condo and violate what little privacy she had left. She had been meaning to schedule a work-life balance talk with him, because she could sense something had changed. But she never scheduled that talk, and Tony took things into his own hands . . .
God. Zurri shook her head violently, trying to dislodge the memory like it was a physical magnet stuck to the inside of her skull. She took another tab of Rapture, and inside, Bev just became a red blur pinging back and forth like a child’s ball across the living room floor.
Zurri’s whole body went numb, and then her VIT vibrated, and she gasped, startled, nearly falling over. She caught herself on the balcony railing, her head stuffed with the drug’s velvet-soft effect. Nothing seemed bad for a second, Tony’s flaming torso as inconsequential as a red lipstick smudge on a white dress.
“No interviews,” she muttered. All her calls were supposed to be diverting to poor Bev, Bev whom she always kept at arm’s length now. She had learned the hard way not to trust her staff. Work-life balance. “What the hell . . .”
Somehow, a call had gotten through. Strange. The caller ID simply read LENG. Swaying a little, Zurri rolled her eyes—even that took immense effort while this high—and tapped the screen on her wrist, the sound of a pleasant bell chime singing up from her hand.
Then a man’s voice, nasally, British, began speaking. No video feed accompanied the call, just a disembodied voice speaking to her disembodied consciousness.
“Hello, Zurri. This is Zurri I’m speaking to, yes?”
She licked her lips, the drug dehydrating. “How did you get through?”
“Ha. I can do that. This is Paxton Dunn.”
Frowning, Zurri leaned her full weight against the balcony railing, the Rapture making the world spin slightly. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
On the other end, the man cleared his throat. “Christ. I’m sure you’ve at least heard of Merchantia Solutions.”
“Sure,” she said. They sponsored half the sporting events on the station, even had an avenue down on the tech level named after them. At one point they had probably paid for one of the fashion runways she walked down. “I’m gonna ask you again, how did you get through to my VIT?”
“The usual way. Beverly assured me you would want to hear what I have to say.”
“Fucking Bev.” Zurri glared at the fuzzy red-and-white blur that Bev had become, still taking call after call inside the condo. “Fine. You have me for twenty seconds. What do you want?”
“Nasty bit of business today on the Daily Bliss,” the man said, clucking his tongue.
“On second thought? Zero seconds. Goodbye.”
“Wait. Don’t do that, Zurri. I want to help you. I can help you.”
She turned away from the windows and watched the massive column of elevator banks to the east. The cars glowed for the different level destinations, now green, now pink, now blue . . . Watching them made her head spin a little less.
“Help me with what?” she asked, letting the rhythm of the lights going up and down soothe her. Help. She doubted it. Nobody got help in her industry. Not really. Not lasting help. It was just a revolving door of surgeries, drugs, rehabs, even more extreme cosmetic surgeries, laser face resurfacing, new drugs, new rehabs, rinse, repeat, then look in the mirror one day and find a stranger. When she next looked in the mirror, Zurri wondered if she would see her own reflection burst into flames.
That’s the drug talking.
“What you experienced was harrowing,” Paxton Dunn told her. She snorted. “Hell, it was harrowing just watching it from my office. But if I never wanted to think about it again, I could do that. Just—” She heard him snap his fingers softly. “And it would all go away. No more assistant à la flambé.”
The elevator cars bled together into one pulsing light. “What do you mean?”
“I just sent Beverly all the information,” he said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “There’s a satellite office on the station, but the real magic is happening on Ganymede. We’re looking for people like you, Zurri, people with memories they want gone, traumas they need erased.”
“Traumas!” she scoffed. “That’s giving Tony a little too much credit.”
“Oh,” Paxton murmured. He was quiet for a beat. “I see. My mistake, then.”
“Yeah, your mistake.”
She heard him shuffling something on his desk, not papers but a keyboard maybe. Why was she still listening to him? Whatever he had to say wasn’t relevant, obviously, but for some reason she just stayed on the line. Part of her worried what would happen when his voice was gone. She would be alone again with her thoughts, with the vast, dark city in space glowing all around her, hundreds of thousands of souls all suspended there among the stars with her. Even knowing Bev was there, and the paparazzi below, the whole station felt suddenly empty, and the loneliness in the darkness grew eyes, hundreds of thousands of lights all turned toward her, watching. Waiting . . .
Tony wasn’t a trauma. Tony was . . . Zurri swallowed hard. Tony was a cold sweat that never quite left. He was the vague shape that startled her awake every night, a prowling shadow in the corner of her eye, a threat that abated sometimes but never truly left. He was an almost friend turned almost killer.
“What is this?” she heard herself ask. “Like, therapy?”
The shuffling stopped. She could feel, even though he was on a moon far, far away, his attention snap back to her full force. “It’s not therapy, no. It’s technology. We can zap a scar or a tattoo off your skin, right? And now I can zap a scar off your mind, too. Your worst day, not just forgotten but gone.”
Zurri tried to imagine it: Tony’s face lingering over her bed just gone. The smell of his burning flesh just gone.
“Sounds too good to be true,” she said, rubbing her eye with the heel of her hand. She could already tell the comedown from this dose of Rapture would be brutal. A dance with oblivion never ended quietly.
“Well, it was,” Paxton Dunn said simply. “But not anymore. Stop by the office on the station sometime, I think what you see there will really change your mind. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing you on Ganymede soon, Zurri. We’ll be in touch.”
The call dropped. Zurri jerked her wrist up, staring at nothing. He had hung up on her. He had hung up on her. Smirking, she decided to let Bev keep her job for one more day, then she zigzagged to the window and tapped her knuckle on it. Bev needed to get her an appointment at this office of Dunn’s, and she needed to do it right then, wake up whatever receptionist she had to, pull whatever string was required.
They would accommodate her, they had to. After all, she was Zurri.