At midday Lydia sits in Madison Square Park watching people play chess. The old pros who pitch up here play the tourists and students and hipsters for money, and you can’t use an ayaie to advise your moves, they’re strict about that and have an enforcer to kick the crap out of anyone caught cheating. The crowds love it when that happens, it’s all part of the fun. Lydia sometimes comes down here when she has an afternoon off, and one time she saw some little smartarse getting caught cold. The enforcer threw him in a dumpster. It was quite satisfying to watch.
Ondine said she’d meet Lydia here, and together they’d meet this guy who knows something about where Jene is—but there’s no sign of her yet. Lydia pings her to check. The reply from Ondine comes moments later:
Yeah sorry, I really did mean to turn up, honestly, but ultimately I realized I really don’t like this guy and don’t want to see him again
How reassuring. Lydia pings back: Who is he???
Just some sketchy loser who was always hanging around my friends, Ondine replies. He’s bad news but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen Jene
Lydia bites her lip and sends: WHAT IS HIS NAME AND HOW DO I RECOGNISE HIM
A minute later Ondine gets back to her with: Oh yeah he’s called Marius here’s a pic
This last message is written on an image of a scruffy man with a blotchy complexion, a little older than she is, maybe thirty? His hair is shoulder-length and dirty orange. Lydia sweeps the words aside to get a clearer look at him, then she looks up.…
There he is, in the crowd watching the chess, drinking a coffee. He sees her and makes eye contact, then heads in her direction. “Sketchy loser” is fair. He’s twitchy, wears thick boots and a long brown coat that’s really unnecessary in this weather, and she can’t help wondering if he’s hiding a gun under it. Lydia assesses her surroundings: there’re lots of witnesses, he won’t be able to try anything. She is certainly not going anywhere with him.
Marius stops about three meters away, looks Lydia up and down and asks if her name is Lydia.
“Who wants to know?” she replies.
“Ondine said you’d be here.” His voice is hoarse and a little shaky. “She said you’re looking for Jene?”
Lydia nods and Marius sits by her.
“So how do you know her?” he asks.
“NYNU,” replies Lydia.
“And you haven’t heard from her since Saturday either?”
“No.”
He nods. “I’m pretty sure she’s dead.” He says this with little emotion, as if it’s just one of those things, and sips his coffee.
“Why?”
“Because she’s crazy. I mean like scary crazy. She’s up and then she’s down, she’s scared and then she’s, like, euphoric. I’ve known a lot of people who killed themselves,” he adds as if expecting Lydia to contradict this. “I know the signs.”
Lydia’s unsure what he expects her to say. “Sorry about your friends.”
He shrugs. “I stopped feeling sorry for them awhile ago. I carry them around with me, that’s enough. Someone else can feel sorry for them. That probably sounds kind of harsh to you.”
He’s posturing, and Lydia finds it tiresome. “It’s important I find out what happened to Jene.”
“She’s dead, trust me. People come to me when they’re ready to die, I don’t know why.”
Or you seek them out, you creep. “So she came to you … when?”
“Last week, Wednesday, she turned up at my apartment after Ondine kicked her out. She seemed upset, shaken—broken, really. We got high and fucked. That’s another sign someone’s on the way out, when they start fucking like each time could be the last.”
Christ this guy’s really dull and unpleasant. Lydia can see why Ondine didn’t want to come. “And then what?”
“She just hung out at mine, we talked. Sometimes I’d read books and she’d just stare into space. Didn’t use her scroll or glasses, like she was offgrid—in fact one night I woke up and found her messing with my apartment’s data box, trying to wipe any trace of her being there.”
“Did she manage it?”
He nods. “Cloud and all. I asked her where she learned to do that, she said you can teach yourself anything if you have enough time on your hands.”
“And when did she leave?”
“On Saturday she seemed more chill, much happier. That evening she went out to get some Cokes, or at least that’s what she said, and I didn’t see her again.”
“But if she’s dead, surely someone will have found her and the police will know?”
He shrugs again. “Depends how she did it. But maybe. I don’t get involved with cops.”
Lydia pings Ondine: Sorry but someone needs to check with cops if she’s been found dead. Can you?
“So,” she says to Marius, “would you prefer if I kept your name out of it?”
He shrugs. That’s getting really annoying now.
Ondine pings back: Sure, I’ll do it
“What it is,” Lydia tells Marius, “is she might have been in some kind of trouble before she came to you.”
“Probably, but she didn’t talk to me about it.”
“No hints? No kind of sense she was carrying around any secrets, or I don’t know, anything?”
Marius stares at her for a few moments, unblinking, unspeaking. Then he reaches into his inside coat pocket and brings out a scroll. He unfurls it—the back is skinned to look like an old Chinese take-out menu—then draws a pattern on it with his finger. Four small images of women rise to stand on its surface, all of them younger than Marius. They vary in appearance—two look like teenagers but one is heavily modded and wildly dressed, the other looks very clean and preppy. A third is a bright, cheerful art-teacher type with hair piled up on her head. The fourth is Jene.
“I told you I carry them around with me,” says Marius.
Lydia stares at them. “These are all your friends who killed themselves?” She’s seen these kind of representations at funerals and so on, ones you can talk to and they’ll parrot the kind of stuff that person used to say. But it was always seen as a comforting thing: They wouldn’t say anything that surprised you because it was all stuff you’d heard them say before. They weren’t going to spill the family secrets or anything like that.
“I pull together everything they left about themselves online,” says Marius, “everything they did and liked and didn’t like—”
“But people aren’t honest about themselves online. They say things they don’t do and do things they don’t say—”
“So it’s how they wanted to be instead of who they were. I’m cool with that.”
“OK, you’ve got a pocketful of sad, dead women—how does this help me?”
“I let them add anything they like, anything they were maybe afraid to talk about, anything they wanted to get off their chest.”
“You do this before they’re dead?”
Marius nods. “Jene talked to hers after I went to sleep one night. I dunno what she said—but if you want to ask her anything, go for it.”
Lydia looks down at the figure on the scroll. This looks more like the first picture she saw, the one on her student record: withdrawn, eyes cast slightly down and into the middle distance. If she asks this mini-Jene, this Jene genie, how will she know she can trust the answer? How will she know the real Jene was being truthful when she said it? How will she know Marius hasn’t fed this information in himself?
Well, all she can do is ask.
She looks around the park and sees towering buildings on all sides, the sun directly overhead, casting no shadows to speak of. She wonders if she should do this somewhere more secluded, in case someone’s watching or listening in. But she doesn’t want to go somewhere more secluded with Marius. So she’ll have to take the risk.
She addresses the figure and says hello.
“Hi,” says Jene, snapping into life. The other three women fade back into the scroll.
“I’m sorry you died.” This is a ridiculous thing to say and when Lydia looks up she expects to see Marius smirking at her, but he’s still looking at Jene and listening.
“Thanks,” says Jene without much feeling. This could be a shortcoming of the ayaie that drives her, but Lydia suspects it’s authentic to the real Jene.
“Jene,” Marius says suddenly, “did you know Lydia when you were alive?”
“I don’t think so,” says Jene.
Lydia’s eyes travel up to Marius, who looks back at her coolly.
“I thought I’d seen you somewhere before,” he says. “I ran a facerec. You were the translator for that Logi who got murdered. You can’t have gone to NYNU, you’d have been at language school.”
Fuck. She knows her picture has been in the news but not with her hair this color, and people are so bombarded with images every day, she hadn’t expected anyone to actually recognize her. He’s a better detective than she is. “Yes,” she says.
He smiles. “I didn’t need you to confirm it.”
“So…”
He points at the chess players. “I’m gonna walk back over there and watch those guys for a bit. Just come give me my scroll back after you ask what you need to ask.” He stands and is about to walk away before he says: “You should be careful. If I can figure you out, other people can.” And then he walks back to the crowd, which has grown, with a hubbub of excitement coming from it: maybe someone’s been caught cheating.
The most annoying thing, of course, is that Marius is right. She needs to get a shift on if she’s got any chance of getting to the bottom of all this.
Lydia addresses Jene again. “Were you in some kind of trouble before you died?”
“I knew about the voice in the game,” Jene replies. “I tried to tell people. No one believed me.”
“What voice?” says Lydia.
“The voice in the game.”
Obviously Jene didn’t supply this avatar with more information than that. Lydia asks what she was going to do about it.
“It wouldn’t make any difference to tell anyone,” says Jene. “So I’m going to kill the voice.”