The Year’s Best Science Fiction

Maintaining an expressionless “poker face” can be a considerable advantage in high-stakes games, in personal relationships, in corporate intrigue, and even in espionage, but as the vigorous and violent tale that follows demonstrates, keeping one can be a lot easier if you have a little high-tech help.…

Ned Beauman was born in 1985 in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, Glow, was published in 2014. He has been chosen by the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the twelve best new British novelists and by Granta as one of the twenty best British novelists under forty. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

Tonight’s interrogation was a sitcom. The subject of the sitcom was me, although I never appeared on screen. I recognised the actors, and the oversized Manhattan apartment set in which they sat around bantering, because I’d seen several episodes of the sitcom before. But today their voices and movements were contrived by an algorithm. They were talking about how I’d recently made a disastrous blunder at work and I was struggling to cover it up; how I was sabotaging Simagre’s operations on behalf of a rival oil company; how I was embezzling money; how I was selling confidential information to a journalist or a hedge fund or a cartel; how I was compromised by a debt or an addiction or an affair. These were serious subjects, but they were being slotted into time-tested, all-purpose joke structures that could accommodate almost any concept and still be funny if the delivery was right. On both sides of the screen were cameras pointed at my face. It was a fine simulation of what watching TV must be like for a paranoid schizophrenic.

The software would see if my mouth was laughing but my eyes weren’t. It would see if I began to laugh but then the laugh died away when I realised how disturbingly accurate the joke was. It would see if I blanched at the joke and then forced a laugh slightly too late. It would see if I laughed at everything, even the lines that weren’t funny, to cover my panic. It would see if my face was tense with the effort to look natural. It would see if I made involuntary cringes of anxiety between my other expressions, even for only a thirtieth of a second. “Leakage” was the technical name for self-betrayals of this kind. And if the emotion detection software did notice anything out of the ordinary, it would modify the script of the following scene to hone in on whatever had caused that reaction. The sitcom, as they used to say, was filmed before a live studio audience.

I’d heard rumours about this method, but I’d never experienced it firsthand. Usually I just got the basic interview: a few dozen questions, many of them quite innocuous, from a face on a screen. The face was digitally composited, like the sitcom actors, although we’d been told that about once in every five sessions the face would be a mask for a trained subcontractor in Kenya or the Phillipines. We’d also been told, repeatedly, that the software was almost infallible. Cantabrian were keen for us to believe that, because their software would work better if the sinless felt they had nothing to fear and the sinners felt they had everything to fear.

I was a sinner, but I wasn’t afraid. And the curtained privacy booth was comfortable, like the back of a very small limousine. So I sat there and watched the show as if I was at home on the couch. Yes, it was written and acted by an algorithm, but it was funny, in a dated sort of way, and I laughed at a lot of the jokes. Including the joke about how I was selling pipeline data to a cartel. Even though that joke was in pretty bad taste. Even though that joke hit pretty close to home.

The episode concluded with the logo of the company who had produced the original sitcom back in the 1990s, the logo of the company who now owned the rights to both the sitcom and the actors’ likenesses, the logo of the company who developed the emotion detection software, and of course the logo of Cantabrian, who handled security for Simagre Petroleum across Mexico and Guatemala. “Thank you very much for your patience,” said a voice. “We hope you have a pleasant evening.”

There was very little chance of that. I’d already agreed to go out for drinks at a mirrory lounge on Calle Schiller with my boss and a few of my coworkers. By now they would be waiting for me beyond the security gates in the lobby. The next four or five hours would be a greater drudgery than the afternoon I’d just spent at my desk, and it wasn’t as if I’d get overtime.

My boss, Gabriel Obregón, a Mexican American with an MBA from Sloan, was an efficient and fair-minded manager but also the most insecure conversationalist I had ever met. When he was telling you a story, you had to stage a continual pantomime of emotional involvement, otherwise he’d worry you weren’t following. And if the story had a punch line, you had to laugh as loud and as long as Obregón himself did, which was very loud and very long. But he wasn’t the sort of narcissist who would cheerfully lap up the most blatant sycophancy. He was convinced that he could distinguish fake smiles from real ones better than any software, even though in practice he was about as reliable as a coin toss; “I don’t want you to laugh at my jokes just because I’m the boss,” he would say to us, even though our working lives would have become unfeasibly awkward if we’d ever stopped.

Before I moved from Houston to Mexico City, Obregón would have been my undoing. Tweaking my face into socially acceptable configurations had always been a challenge for me. I’d long since given up smiling for cameras, because even when I tried my best it looked as if I was making a sarcastic parody of a smile. This was a hereditary incompetence: when we were especially bored, my father and I both suffered from what was affectionately known in my family as “death face,” our attentive expressions decaying minute by minute into grimaces so extreme that onlookers would often assume we’d been taken ill. We never realised we were doing it until it was pointed out, and all my life it had been a liability, in seminars and meetings and first dates and family reunions. There was nothing physically wrong with me. I had all the right muscles to be insincere. But I just couldn’t seem to array them very well or fix them for very long.

I’m not trying to imply that somehow it taxed me so much because I’m fundamentally more honest than other people. As my personal history demonstrates, that is not at all the case. All I mean to say is, when those cartel surgeons hid 43 electroactive polymer units inside my new face, it was as if, at very long last, I had graduated from finishing school.

Earlier in the year, a small-batch añejo from Fushimi had won Best Tequila at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, causing uproar in the Mexican media and at least one speech before the Chamber of Deputies. By eight o’clock, Obregón had already had four rounds of a tequila made with gin botanicals in the same distillery, even though each measure cost as much as a good dinner. I was sipping Negra Modelo, because the maximum amount of fun I could possibly have with my coworkers still wasn’t worth a hangover in the morning.

“You can’t even imagine how much crap I insulate you guys from,” Obregón was saying. We all looked curious. “I mean, coming down from above. It isn’t easy sometimes.” We all looked sympathetic. “Look, I’m not whining. It’s my job to look out for you. I just, you know, hope you realise.” We all looked grateful.

“They aren’t happy upstairs?” said Soto, who worked at the desk next to me. Everyone here could speak Spanish, but Simagre was a multinational company and it functioned in English.

“Hey, they’re never happy, right? But this last quarter they’ve been extra grouchy because of the Cantabrian thing, and who do they take it out on? Guys at my level.”

“What Cantabrian thing?”

Obregón hesitated. “This isn’t exactly water cooler material at this point…” But he’d had four tequilas. “You deserve to know, though. You all jump through their hoops every day.” He gestured at me. “You just sat through that stupid emotion detection show for twenty minutes. You deserve to know.” He exhaled heavily. “They’re thinking about dropping Cantabrian.”

That was genuinely monumental corporate gossip. None of us had to fake our surprise. “Don’t we have another three years on the contract?” I said. I knew we were paying them a lot. The denationalisation of the Mexican oil market had been the biggest boom for the private security industry since the Bush wars.

“Yeah, so either we pay the penalty, or we go to court to get out of it, but either way we’d be looking at … I don’t even know. Then the transition costs … So a lot of them are against it, upstairs. But Cantabrian have had their shot. They’ve had all this time to find the data breaches, and from what I hear, they’re just flailing. The taps are still killing our bottom line because the cartels always know every fucking thing we’re doing. Cantabrian can manage the low-level stuff fine—if you try to hijack one of our trucks, you’re going to get shot—but if that was all we needed, we could just hire the biggest gatillero in every cantina. Anyway, drop them, don’t drop them, either way everybody’s arguing, everybody’s in a crappy mood. And you know what I think?” He lowered his voice. “I think the leaks are coming from Cantabrian.”

“Cantabrian don’t have access to any pipeline data,” I said.

“But they built our security architecture. They have back doors.”

“The programmers are in Singapore,” said Soto.

“Doesn’t matter. The cartels have reach. Hey, that reminds me,” Obregón said, tapping his phone for another round. “So there’s this cartel boss’s son, right? Eight years old. And his nanny tells him that if he wants a lot of presents for Christmas this year, he should write a letter to Baby Jesus. Because if it wasn’t for Baby Jesus, we wouldn’t even have Christmas. So the boy sits down to write the letter, and first he puts, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, I’ve been a good boy the whole year, so I want a new speedboat.’ He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away. He gets out a new piece of paper, and this time he writes, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, I’ve been a good boy most of the year, so I want a new speedboat.’ He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away again. But then he gets an idea. He goes into his abuela’s room, takes a statue of the Virgin Mary, wraps it up in duct tape, puts it in the closet, and locks the door. Then he gets another piece of paper and he writes, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again…’”

Everyone guffawed. And even though I’d heard the joke told better before, my guffaw was more convincing than anyone else’s, at least visually. Because I had help.

The electroactive polymer prosthesis had been developed at the UC Davis Medical Center as a treatment for facial paralysis. It still hadn’t been approved for use by regulators anywhere in the world. But the Nuevos Zetas’ hackers had stolen the designs and forwarded them to a fabricator in Guangzhou that specialised in biomedical prototypes. Presumably both Cantabrian and the company that made the emotion detection software were aware that the technology existed, but thought they had a few years’ grace before they had to worry about it.

There wasn’t enough metal in my face to show up on a body scanner, and even under a close examination the lacework under my skin could easily be mistaken for the titanium alloy mesh sometimes used in facial reconstruction surgery. It worked on roughly the same principle as a shipbuilder’s powered exoskeleton, but in miniature: when you initiated a movement, the prosthesis detected that movement and threw its own weight behind it. A smile that would normally be thin and mirthless would instead dawn across your whole face. Then it would linger and fade, like a real smile, instead of clicking off like a fake one. Conversely, when you tried to keep your face neutral, the prosthesis would steady anything that might squinch or quiver or droop. No more nervousness, no more death face.

Because the emotion detection software that Cantabrian used could also detect spikes in facial temperature and perspiration, I had a unit in each of my cheekbones to dispense a fizzle of magnetite nanoparticles into my facial veins, which in an emergency would partially neutralise both tells. So far, though, that had never been necessary, because the support of the electroactive polymers meant I was always relaxed about telling lies (or listening to jokes). If I started babbling or gnawing my fingernails or squirming in my seat, an interviewer would certainly notice, and there was nothing the prosthesis could do about that. But it was easy to train yourself not to show any of those signs. Whereas it was impossible, as far as anybody knew, to train the microexpressions out of your face.

The prosthesis could be switched on and off wirelessly. On my phone I had a settings app disguised as a puzzle game. I took off my girdle for sleep and exercise and sex, otherwise I got a sore jaw. But the rest of the time, I kept it on. Once you get used to having full control over your face, it begins to seem very strange that you ever tolerated its delinquency. If a social network decided to broadcast your deepest feelings to the world without permission, spurting emojis left and right, you would delete your account. And yet your body does precisely that. Crying, blushing, sweating, goosebumps, involuntary facial expressions—not to mention erections, when visible, and stress-related incontinence, in extreme cases—are all serious data breaches. Strangers on the Metro have no more right to know how you’re feeling than strangers on the Internet.

When we look at other people’s faces, we don’t see a muscular configuration that we interpret as an emotion: we see the emotion itself. That makes us feel as if the face is the raw membrane of the soul. We conflate ourselves with our faces. But in fact the face is no more than a signalling machine strapped to the brain. There’s no meaningful difference between a face and a mask. And people who happen to be bad at painting their masks don’t deserve to have more complicated lives than people who happen to be good at it.

I once asked one of the Nuevos Zetas doctors about the maximum extension of the artificial muscles. He told me that in principle they could rip my face apart, but the prosthesis’ firmware would never allow that. I was reminded of a photograph from the 1860s that Lauren, my girlfriend back in Houston, had once showed me on her tablet: an old man getting his face electrocuted with metal probes to produce an expression of wild fright, part of a series of experiments that the neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne referred to as “the gymnastics of the soul.”

“That’s how you look when you come,” Lauren said to me. She adopted a fond and jokey tone, but she must have known it would sting. More than once we’d argued about her refusal to let me fuck her from behind in front of a mirror. She’d told me she found me handsome the rest of the time but when she saw me like that, framed in the mirror, it put her off so much she just wanted to stop. She’d even reappropriated the term “death face” to emphasise her point. By that time, I was already planning to break up with her, but in fact my situation in Houston went up in flames so suddenly I never even got the chance.

In Mexico City, I had a new “girlfriend.” On Sunday night, I went for my weekly appointment with Rafaella, who lived on the seventh floor of a brand-new condominium overlooking the Viaducto Miguel Alemán in Escandón. If anyone from Cantabrian had ever decided to follow me—and they presumably already had, at least once, as a matter of routine—they would have observed that I arrived at the apartment around eight o’clock with two bottles of wine and a shopping bag containing jewellery or perfume or lingerie or heels or some other gossamer commodity, delivered to me that morning by a concierge service. About an hour later, a boy would arrive on a moped to hand over to the doorman the dinner we’d ordered. And at two or three in the morning, I would come back downstairs and take a car service home to my own apartment. Since my salary at Simagre wasn’t all that high, it might have occurred to the surveillance team from Cantabrian that I was stretching myself a little bit with all the expensive gifts. What would have reassured them was that it wasn’t quite the sort of overhead that made a guy take risks. It was only the sort of overhead that made a guy stay home playing video games the rest of the week to save money. All in all it must have seemed intoxicatingly romantic.

But that was nothing compared to the passion we unleashed in private. As usual, Rafaella greeted me with a dry kiss on the cheek. Once I’d shut the door behind me she took the shopping bag and disappeared into her bedroom without a word. Arturo raised his glass of mezcal in greeting. Omar sat on the couch, typing on his laptop. “Everything cool this week?” he said.

“Yeah.” I would have liked a mezcal myself but I wasn’t allowed to drink until I’d taken the test. The muffled sound of cumbiaton started up from behind Rafaella’s bedroom door.

“Anything new?” said Arturo.

“They did a new emotion detection thing.”

“La telecomedia?” said Omar.

I wondered how he knew. “Yeah. It wasn’t a problem. Oh, and my boss told me Simagre is thinking about dropping Cantabrian. They’re not making any progress on the leak.”

Omar smirked. He was a twenty-year-old Syrian Mexican who’d got his start as a programmer for a cartel-owned darknet start-up in Guadalajara. One of his superiors must have judged him trustworthy enough to recommend him for a position in the cartel itself, which was baffling to me, because Omar was so blatant about his eagerness to sell his talents to the highest bidder that he practically handed out auction paddles. I found it surreal that he, of all people, was now responsible for the evaluation of loyalty. Even Arturo had to take Omar’s test every week before I arrived, which was topsy-turvy. You could argue that loyalty was not exactly personified in Arturo, whose job, after all, involved stealing from his old employer on behalf of his new one; he had worked in pipeline security for Pemex before he brought his expertise to the Nuevos Zetas. But where Omar treated the cartel like it was just another tech internship he could drop at any time, Arturo treated the cartel as if it was just another state-run company with a pension plan. They were both, in their own ways, deluding themselves. They were both, in their own ways, pragmatists. The difference was that Arturo, the oldest of the three of us, still clung to his belief in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, even if that honest day’s pay came from men who liked to roast their enemies alive on cinder-block barbecues. In my presence he always talked as if he was getting charged by the word, although Omar had told me that he had once overheard Arturo teasing one of his four daughters over the phone and he had sounded like an entirely different person.

“You ready?” I said.

“I just installed an upgrade,” said Omar. “Still a little jinky. Should be OK, though.” The cartel used the same software as Cantabrian, although it was a pirated, adapted version. Omar got up off the couch so I could sit down in his place. I compliantly adjusted the camera on the coffee table to make sure it would have my whole face in shot. “Hey, you notice anything different about the jaina today?” Omar said, nodding towards the bedroom door.

I shrugged. Rafaella was in her final year of studying law at UNAM. The “gifts” in the shopping bags came with receipts so that she could return them for cash. And the cartel also paid the rent on the apartment. Apart from that, I didn’t know the contractual details. I only knew that when Omar and Arturo left, and I had to stay in the apartment for another few hours to keep up appearances, she let me go to bed with her, without enthusiasm on her part but also without open resentment. This had been going on for three months, and presumably it was worth her while. “The way it works is, the pussy’s part of your fee,” Omar had once told me. “So if you don’t hit that shit every week, it’s like you’re leaving money on the table.” With that remark, he had succeeded in making every sexual encounter I had with Rafaella feel even more poisonous.

Omar slapped the knuckles of his left hand with the palm of his right. “Somebody put a ring on it. She’s engaged. She told us.”

“I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend,” I said. But it didn’t surprise me. She was gorgeous. And although her bedroom was decorated with throw pillows and Christmas lights and those artificial flowers that changed colour through the day, she’d left the rest of the apartment almost untouched—it still looked like a generic bachelor pad you’d see pictured on a real estate website—which I took to mean she regarded her concubinage as strictly provisional. Whenever I went into her room she’d turn off all the photographs on her shelves, so we fucked beneath dozens of pale Huawei logos like sponsors’ billboards.

“You didn’t notice there’s always Tecate Light in the refrigerator now?” Omar said. “Who the fuck drinks Tecate Light?”

“Aren’t Cantabrian going to wonder why I’m still over here every week if she’s engaged?”

“Are you kidding me? These chilango putas? If she’s only spreading for two guys, that counts as she’s a virgin. Anyway, none of this shit is gonna change. She isn’t moving out any time soon. It’s gonna be one of those old-school long engagements or whatever.”

“Can we get on with the test?” I said. I waited while Omar disabled my prosthesis and initialised the emotion detection software. Then I looked into the camera as he read questions from a list. The more general ones would also have been posed to Arturo before I arrived.

“Are the numbers you’ve given us this week comprehensive and accurate?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any reason to think Simagre is suspicious? Or Cantabrian?”

“No.”

“Are you being careful? Are you taking every precaution?”

“Yes.”

“Does anybody outside this apartment know about what’s happening here?”

“No.”

“Are you planning to fuck with us in any way?”

“No.”

Omar tapped a few more keys. Then he frowned. “OK, hold up.”

I knew I couldn’t have failed the test, because I was telling the truth. “What?”

A grin spread across Omar’s face. “So we got two emotions showing up on your face here. Lust and sadness.”

I wasn’t feeling either of those. Except in the sense that I was awake. “Are you sure the upgrade worked out?”

Omar turned to Arturo. “You know what that means? Lust and sadness? That’s jealousy! Like, sexual jealousy. He’s bummed because the jaina’s getting married! He thinks he’s her boyfriend for real! He’s on some true love shit!” He could not have been more gleeful.

“No, Omar, I’m not.”

He turned back to me. “Sorry, guero, the software doesn’t lie. Unless you’re crushing on Arturo. Or me!”

“So he wasn’t lying on the questions?” said Arturo in Spanish.

“No…”

“Then just give him the fucking computer.”

Omar put the laptop down on the coffee table, still giggling. I leaned forward and started typing in the pipeline data I’d memorised earlier in the week, about the timing and pressure of flows from the oil fields along the Gulf Coast. With the intelligence Arturo collated from his various sources, the cartel’s engineers could place their taps so efficiently that by the time Cantabrian’s armed response teams arrived they would already have made off with thousands of barrels of crude. Back in the days of the Pemex monopoly and the original Zetas, the cartel would simply have bribed or extorted local oil workers, but Simagre made sure that no one outside their DF headquarters had access to the operational data in advance.

It might have been easier for me to send the figures in code from an anonymous email account or a prepaid phone, without leaving the comfort of my apartment. But Omar seemed to feel that his laptop was the only electronic device in the whole of Mexico that couldn’t be compromised by Cantabrian or the Federales or the Sinaloans. In the circumstances his paranoia was probably well-founded. Anyway, I had to be physically present to take the loyalty test every week, so in practice it was no further burden.

Like Rafaella, I hoped my concubinage would end one day. But no matter how protracted her engagement, it would be nothing compared to my indenture. She would celebrate many, many anniversaries before I was cut loose. After all, the Neuvas Zetas had saved my life. The etiquette may vary, but perhaps I would owe them until I died.

Back in Houston, I had been the vice president of a small petroleum distributor called Magnolia Fuels that was owned through a shell by the Sinaloa Cartel. We moved about fifty thousand barrels of stolen Mexican petroleum condensate a month. The president was a Vietnamese guy named Luong. Neither of us had any stake in the business, and as long as our revenue was stable the cartel didn’t pay close attention, either to us or to the American oil market, so there was no incentive to get Magnolia the best possible deal. With that in mind, we set up a shell company of our own in Oklahoma City and began to sell that company a percentage of Magnolia’s condensate every month. On my lunch break I would sit in my car with my laptop, reselling that same brothy oil at a better price, so that Luong and I could split the difference between us. Neither of us was compromised by a debt or an addiction or an affair. We just wanted the money. We knew perfectly well what happened to Mexicans who ripped off the cartels. But we were Americans, and in an office suite in downtown Houston, across the hall from a company that distributed aromatherapy pet hammocks, the Sinaloa Cartel felt very far away.

Of course, they weren’t. I still don’t know exactly how they discovered our scam. Luong’s body has never been recovered, but his abduction was caught on security camera. I only survived because he managed to dictate a text message to me before they tossed his phone from the van. After I read it in the locker room at my gym, I told a gym attendant that a divorce server was waiting in the lobby to serve me divorce papers. He let me leave by the back exit. As I got into a cab, I knew that I would probably never see my family again. On the bright side, I also knew that I would definitely never see Lauren again.

I didn’t want to rely on the authorities to protect me. I’d read too many news stories about prosecutions that had collapsed because some witness under federal protection had been hunted down, his body fished from the backyard swimming pool of a rented suburban house after a drone blew his skull open. As Obregón would later assure me, the cartels had reach. Instead, I went straight to the Nuevos Zetas. My value wasn’t what I knew about the Sinaloans, which was very little. My value was that the multinational companies at the centre of the new Mexican oil boom were notorious for their reluctance to employ anybody at a management level with any local roots. I was an American who spoke oil. And I’d do anything, for anyone, to stay alive.

Three weeks later, I was in a clinic on the outskirts of Monterrey. I assumed I was just there to get a new face to match my new name and new biography. There was something strangely compelling to me about the period halfway through the facial reconstruction process when there would truly be no answer to the question of what I looked like. Nobody warned me that I was there to be made animatronic like a puppet in an old theme park.

After Omar and Arturo left, I ate one of the merguez tlayudas we’d ordered, and then knocked on Rafaella’s door. Despite myself, I felt uneasy. I wasn’t in love with Rafaella, and I didn’t care that she was engaged. And yet living with my prosthesis had made me aware that my body was an exhibitionist, a whistle-blower, practically turning itself inside out in its eagerness to open me to the world. I didn’t necessarily know everything that was going on in my own head. Was it possible that the emotion detection software had tapped me like an oil pipeline? Was it possible that, in the course of sleeping with Rafaella every Sunday night for three months, I’d developed real feelings for her, and I couldn’t admit it to myself? I didn’t think so, but when Rafaella turned off her music and opened the door, I still felt oddly as if I was turning up for a first date.

While she was undressing, I noticed she wasn’t wearing any engagement ring, but all the same I said in Spanish, “Omar told me you’re getting married. Congratulations. That’s terrific.” Even if my prosthesis had been turned on, I wouldn’t have looked sincere when I said it, because I felt so self-conscious about the topic that I completely forgot to smile.

“Do you actually care?” she snapped. “If you don’t actually care, don’t say anything.”

She’d never been so testy with me before. Clearly she didn’t want me even to brush up against her personal life. And yet her reply was a little unreasonable. Empty pleasantries were a prosthesis installed in every single human being, even cartel psychopaths. “If you don’t actually care, don’t say anything” was not a plausible rule of conduct. In fact, I literally couldn’t remember the last time I’d voiced an honest sentiment to anybody, so in effect she was asking me to be mute. Except that what flopped out of my mouth next really was a self-disclosure, authentic and involuntary. “Rafaella, you don’t think I’m just a big fake, do you?” She gave me a look so cold it probably would have crashed Omar’s software. I waved the question away, embarrassed. “Don’t answer that.”

After that we pretended to be lovers.

As usual, I finished by fucking her from behind in front of a mirror, fantasising that Lauren was spying on us jealously through the keyhole. These days, I tried to keep my face a little under control at the climax, so that I didn’t go completely Duchenne de Boulogne. But I didn’t bind it too tightly. Apart from my occasional weight training sessions, an orgasm was the only chance my face got to limber up without the prosthesis; and I had the irrational feeling that if I didn’t let the expression out, it might rot inside me. If Rafaella saw it and thought it looked like a death face, I didn’t care, because I was pretty sure she already held me in contempt, my unrequited, unconscious, unconfirmed sweetheart.

But this time, when I ejaculated, although I was only making the gentlest effort to control my expression, my face was as blank as the headshot on my Simagre ID.

The next morning, I sat at my desk, wondering what I’d done to myself. I knew that all prosthetics rewired the brain, even a peg leg, even a swimfin. Perhaps I’d been wearing my subcutaneous mempo for so long that the natural connection between my inner states and my outer surface had become vaguer, more diffuse, more circuitous, like some decaying telegraph network. That was the only explanation I could think of. One moment I might be clenching with ecstasy and somehow the signal wouldn’t reach my face. The next moment I might have an emotion so dim and inchoate that perhaps it wasn’t truly an emotion so much as a speculation or a potentiality and it would nevertheless cause a sputter of microexpressions.

I loved my prosthesis, but I loved it only because I was still an obligate social mammal. In the back of my mind, I had always assumed that at some point in my life there would come a time when I wouldn’t have to perform for anybody ever again. I had an indistinct fantasy of settling into early retirement with a wife and two dogs in some fishing village down on the Nayarit coast. When I turned off the prosthesis for good, I didn’t want to find that it had hobbled me irreparably.

Today, for the first time since taking the job at Simagre, I hadn’t, as ladies used to say, put my face on in the morning. My prosthesis was still disabled. On my way to lunch, I stopped by Obregón’s office. As always, his door was open, so I stood in the doorway. “How was your weekend?”

I knew he’d have a story about his spouse or his kids or his soccer team. I didn’t pay attention to the content, only to the intonation, so that I would be able to tell when the punch line was coming up. “… but afterwards, I called the store, just to check, and you know what? They don’t even sell apple pie filling at Bodega Aurrera!”

I laughed as hard as I could, and Obregón laughed too. But then his laughter trailed off. Granted, Obregón was no grand inquisitor, but in this instance the new expression on his face was so full of dismay that I knew the expression on my own must have been grievously miscalibrated. I hadn’t been sure which way this experiment was going to go, but it had proved that, without the prosthesis, I was less capable than ever of realistic mirth.

“Sir?”

I turned. A Cantabrian security officer stood just outside the doorway. I recognised her but I didn’t know her name. “Yes?”

“If you’d be kind enough to accompany me to one of the privacy booths downstairs, we’d like you to sit for a security interview.”

“But it’s Monday. It’s the middle of the day.”

“We’re operating on a randomised schedule now.”

I looked at Obregón, who nodded. “I had to do one first thing this morning. Pain in the butt.”

I told myself that the test was no threat. All I had to do was discreetly turn my prosthesis back on before the interview started. I patted my pockets.

I’d left my phone behind at my desk to charge.

Without the phone I had no way to turn the prosthesis back on. “OK,” I said, “but I just need to swing by my desk to send one email. Then I’ll be with you.”

“The new protocol is that you have to come directly to the privacy booth. It will only take ten minutes.”

Hoping that he might intervene in some way, I shot Obregón another glance that conveyed “Surely we don’t have to put up with this shit?”—or at least I meant it to convey that, but I felt like such an amateur at this point that for all I knew it conveyed tenderness or patriotism or schadenfreude or some other mood entirely. Obregón just shrugged. “I think it’s so that you don’t sneak a zofrosil or anything like that,” he said.

I knew I couldn’t protest any more without raising suspicion. In West Africa they sometimes used to hold trials where the accused were challenged to dip their hands in boiling oil. At that moment a vat of Campeche crude was almost more appealing than a camera. At least it was a test I could conceivably pass. “Fine,” I said to the security officer, hoping she couldn’t already see my fear. “Lead the way.” Somewhere inside a Cantabrian server the judges were waiting to score my gymnastics of the soul.

“I need to tell you guys something about what happened at work this week,” I said.

“No, guero, you need to tell us something about what happened right here,” said Omar.

What I had been about to explain was that I had failed the pop quiz. Sitting there in the privacy booth, trying to remember what normal people looked like when they gave truthful answers to simple questions, it was as if I had no instincts or defaults any more, just a control panel inside me the size of a recording studio’s mixing desk. My face felt more cybernetic than it ever had with the prosthesis turned on. The more I thought about it, the worse it got. By the end my best attempt at a relaxed expression probably looked like someone having a stroke in a wind tunnel. I imagined the video going viral on the Cantabrian intranet, “the worst liar we’ve ever tested!” Afterwards, I still went out to get a torta, but I was too shaken to eat, and I almost didn’t go back to the office. I was ready to book it out of Mexico City just like I’d booked it out of Houston. When I asked the Nuevos Zetas for help, I wouldn’t have to admit to them that it was my own fault I’d failed the test because I’d left my prosthesis off.

I did go back to the office, though, because I knew Cantabrian wouldn’t act on their suspicions until they’d carried out an investigation. When they called me in for a second interview, I decided, that was when I would vanish. Until then, I wouldn’t do anything irrevocable. So for the rest of the week I walked around feeling like a fugitive in the middle of a police station.

Then Friday came, and still nothing had happened. I couldn’t understand it, and I was hoping Omar might have some kind of answer.

But then Arturo pointed a gun at me, a silver semi-automatic so big it looked as if you could shout down the barrel and it would echo back at you.

I hadn’t even realised he carried one. “Hey, what the fuck is this?” I said.

“The couch,” Arturo ordered. I sat down.

“That test last week,” Omar said, “when the software was saying lust and sadness, and we thought it was because you was getting mushy about la jaina— I took a closer look. Wanted to see how the upgrade was working out. You know what? A lot of the microexpressions in the log, they only lasted for a hundredth of a second or less. You got your basic vanilla face with your basic vanilla muscles, it can’t do that. Can’t contract that fast. A thirtieth of a second is the fastest. Maybe a fiftieth.”

“So?”

“That means you had the prosthesis turned on during the test. The polymers. That’s the only way you could be flashing microexpressions so quick.”

“You always turn it off before I start,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. But you must have modified it so it looks like it’s off but it stays on. And why the fuck would you do that unless you’re trying to play us on the test?”

“Omar, I haven’t modified anything. I wouldn’t even know how.”

“Maybe not. But the Sinaloans, they got a few guys.”

By now Arturo had circled around so that he was between me and the front door of the apartment, although it wasn’t as if I was going to try anything when he still had the gun on me. “Why would I set my prosthesis to show lust and sadness? Just give me the test again now. Ask me about all this stuff on the camera once you’ve satisfied yourself one hundred percent that my prosthesis is off.”

“I can’t do that if you’ve modified it.”

“We could just cut it out of him,” said Arturo in Spanish.

At that moment I thought I could feel the prosthesis inside my face, every polymer unit like a twist of barbed wire. “It must be a problem with the software,” I stammered. “The upgrade.”

“The upgrade is fine,” said Omar.

“Maybe you’ve been hacked.”

Omar sneered. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He nodded at his laptop. “Nobody hacks that. I’m not a retard. That shit is tighter than Korean pussy. No inputs means no vulnerabilities. Every fucking byte of data on that machine, I pop the trunk like Border Control. Every fucking byte except…” He blinked, and was silent for a little while. “No way,” he murmured. “No way you could fit a code injection into…” Then he sat down at his laptop and started typing. “Hijos de puta,” he kept saying, shaking his head. “Hijos de puta.”

“What is it?

“I think they used your face.”

“My face?”

“Ever heard of a code injection? You hide executable code inside raw data. The system runs the code because it doesn’t know any better. That’s what those microexpressions were. They got control of your prosthesis. Then they used it to transmit a code injection. They hacked into my system with your face.”

My hand went up to my cheek. “Who? The Sinaloans?”

“Or Cantabrian.”

So I wasn’t in control of my own signalling device. But then I never really had been. “You think they’ve been doing this every week?”

“Every time I upgrade the software, had to guess.”

“But why would they need to hack your loyalty tests?”

He was still typing. “Help somebody pass them who shouldn’t be passing them.”

“But I pass those tests because I’m telling the truth. I don’t need any help.”

“Not you. More likely to be—” Then Omar’s eyes widened. “Detenerlo!” he yelped.

But Arturo was already gone.

Omar bounded to the door, almost knocking me down as he pushed past. I looked out into the corridor. Arturo had disappeared around a corner, towards the elevators. Omar pulled a gun of his own from his waistband, but it was only a tiddly printed model as opposed to Arturo’s fat semi-auto, and for a moment he bounced from foot to foot as if he couldn’t decide whether to risk giving chase. Then he snarled in frustration and came back inside. “OK, pendejo,” he said, waving the gun at me. “On the couch again.”

As I sat back down, I recalled what Obregón had confided to us in the bar about Cantabrian’s troubles. He probably had no idea that it was calculated misinformation. If Cantabrian were using me as a Trojan horse to help Arturo infiltrate the Nuevos Zetas, that would explain why there hadn’t been consequences for my humiliation in the privacy booth: when the software recommended that I should be investigated further, it would have been overruled. And if my prosthesis hadn’t actually switched off when Omar thought he was switching it off last Sunday, that would also explain why I hadn’t shown my death face to Rafaella afterwards. Omar dialled somebody on his phone and had a short conversation so dense with cartel slang I could barely follow, except that he asked for a drone to be sent up over Escandón to look for Arturo. Then he pounded on Rafaella’s bedroom door. “Whore, come out here and help me tie up your client!” he shouted, still in Spanish. “It’s bondage time!”

“Hey! Why? Come on,” I said, “Arturo’s the one working for Cantabrian!”

“For all I know it’s the both of you. I’m taking you to El Taquero. He can decide. Maybe we really will cut that thing out of your face. It’s cartel property, pendejo, you should remember that.” Rafaella came out of her room. “I need cable or tape or something,” Omar said to her.

“Can you talk some sense into this guy?” I said. “Please.”

“Sorry,” she mouthed.

“But Rafaella … I love you.” I said it because I knew it wasn’t true, and because at this point it didn’t seem to matter much what I said.

She looked down at me with eyes as imperturbable, as incontrovertible, as Cantabrian’s cameras. Then she threw her head back and laughed harder than I had ever seen her laugh, a hilarity so luxuriant no prosthesis could have faked it.

Within a few minutes, Omar and I were on the way down in the elevator. My wrists were taped behind my back. “Omar, I’m not working for anybody except you and Arturo. I didn’t sell you out. I didn’t fuck up. I did everything you said. This shouldn’t be happening.” He didn’t respond. “Who’s El Taquero?” I asked.

“He’s not a guy who takes chances,” Omar said. “And while we’re on the fucking subject. You try and run? Those drones are looking for Arturo but they have your face too. Remember that. I optimised them myself. They got personalities now. They’re like those dogs they train to catch rats.”

As we crossed the lobby I looked around for the doorman, but I couldn’t see him, and anyway I knew he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get involved. We emerged into the warm evening and I immediately got a couple of lungfuls of truck exhaust. The Viaducto Miguel Alemán had four lanes that connected to the surface roads; between them, another six lanes of faster traffic that dipped beneath the overpasses; and between those, from what I remembered, a grassy median, although I couldn’t see that over the concrete barrier. Around 8:30 on Sunday night, the roads weren’t busy. Half a mile to the south, the World Trade Center rose into the smog, an enormous blue jerrycan with a turret for a cap. Omar had ordered a car, which would meet us around the corner. The gun was still pointed at me but most of his attention was on his phone. I thought about the Virgin Mary wrapped up like my wrists. I thought about a taquero at a market carving meat off a spit. I ran into the road.

By the time Omar took his first shot, I had already crossed two lanes and hurled myself over the barrier.

My hope was that Cantabrian might have eyes on the apartment building, especially if Arturo had made some sort of distress call. My hope was that they might prefer me to survive just in case I could tell them anything about the cartel that they didn’t already know. If I could get away from Omar, there was a possibility of rescue. A remote possibility, but it was still better than shuffling to my doom with Omar’s boss.

The drop to the freeway was farther than I’d estimated, and something crunched in my shoulder when I hit the ground. I heard a horn, very close. Blindly, I rolled sideways, and the car missed me by an inch or so. To get to my feet with my wrists still bound, I first had to jerk myself into a kneeling position, and I was only just upright when another car swerved out of its lane to avoid the vagrant in the road. I heard two more shots, and I started running towards the oncoming traffic, because at least that way I could see what was about to kill me.

I’d miscalculated my escape. There was indeed a median, a covered sewer, but its sheer sides were too tall for me to climb without the use of my hands. And there was no safe margin between the freeway and the barriers on either side. I was trapped in the concrete pipeline, and I had to keep moving in case Omar caught up.

I heard a distant buzzing in the sky.

If the drone recognised my face, it would end me. I wanted to crouch down and hide myself against the barrier. But if I did, it wouldn’t be long before I was clipped by a fender, spun into the middle of the lane, flattened like a stray dog. I decided that, of all the deaths available, of all the missiles the night was throwing at me, the drone would probably be the most painless. So I kept running.

Then my face exploded.

Normally, when I was using the prosthesis, the contractions and expansions of the polymer units were too tiny to be perceptible. This time, it was as if 43 steel traps had sprung inside my face, yanking skin and wrenching cartilage. The pain exceeded any human scale, and I almost keeled over on the spot. My eyes and nose and mouth were full of blood, and I was gagging so hard I couldn’t scream.

Somehow, though, in whatever part of my brain was most distant from my facial nerve, I must still have been capable of thought. Because I understood why Cantabrian had done it. But I didn’t believe it would work. Facial recognition algorithms looked at the bone structure underneath. You couldn’t obscure or deform that. No matter what you did with your features, you were still you.

The buzzing got louder. Now I could make out the drone, a black quadcopter small enough to fit in a briefcase, making those insectile shrugs and dodges that seem random and purposeful at the same time, the mark of a software pilot. I didn’t know whether it was the breed that would shoot me in the heart with a hollow-point or the breed that would simply land on my shoulder and explode. The drone kept closing the distance, and so did I, until I could feel its gaze on me, its immaculate appraisal, like the cameras in the privacy booth, or the beauty up on the seventh floor.

The drone swooped past.

It had made its judgement. I wasn’t me.

I didn’t know what the prosthesis had done to my face, but it must have been avant-garde. There wasn’t time for relief, because an SUV was coming at me around the bend. I tripped sideways, saving myself so narrowly that its right-hand wing mirror swatted my elbow. As it passed, I caught a glimpse of the driver, a woman aghast, and I thought of how I must have looked to her, this ghoul with a veil of blood, its features jumbled into a word without meaning, not true, not false, just flesh; and for the first time I realised what a terrible burden it had been to have a face, and how truly free I was without one.