Irina tells the cab to drive at random through the city. As it’s a drone, there’s no one to ask why.
The streets slip by, and the sullied marble facades and the spotlit couture and the sidewalk crowds, whose faces will be with her forever, like a haphazard catalog of the dead-to-be, all the same as every other city, forms repeated without end.
She lies down on the backseat and, as though by magic, the city vanishes, replaced by a narrow view of blank walls and fragments of signs and sun glare on the glass of third-story windows. She thinks of childhood car trips, wishes she could remember them better.
She’d meant to stay another night but decides she’ll leave that hour. There are outstanding bids for her time in Tokyo and Stockholm, Maya’s said. Tokyo, then—she likes flying west, how it draws out the day. She’ll go straight to the airport, have the hotel send her bags.
Her phone chimes. She’s expecting Maya but the text is from Philip, her friend, whom she hasn’t seen in years. A little bird told me you’re in town today. Thanks for keeping me informed! Dinner? Tonight? Unless you were blowing me off for reasons of real personal significance.
It’s three years since they’ve spoken but with the one text those three years seem to vanish. Yes, she texts back. Good. Sorry. Distracted? Fundamentally a bad friend? Name a time—I’m available then. She feels the future shift—no vanishing act, then, at least not yet, and no long suspension in the evening.
Her phone rings and she picks up, thinking it’s Philip, but Maya says, “They loved you!”
“Oh?” says Irina, staring at the cab’s ceiling. “How can you tell?”
“Because they made an offer for an option on your time! For the next week you get your hourly for doing nothing, and double that if they need you to come in. Okay?”
“I’m a little surprised,” she says, remembering how it feels to speed-walk through the Prosperity Airways concourse, the sense of freedom, almost of release. “And it’s not like I accomplished much.” She remembers the hidden AI’s immensity, its strangeness, but feels helpless to convey it.
“Well, they loved you anyway, and to prove it I just got a request-to-push-funds to your account. Do you want me to accept?”
The cab lurches to a halt. She pokes her head up, sees a trio of girls in front of the cab, high-school-aged, entirely absorbed in each other, seeming not to see her. “Accept,” she hears herself say.
A little pause, and she says, “I’m sorry if I worried you this morning. I’m afraid I must be your most difficult client.”
“Most difficult? Ha,” says Maya, in full ballsy big-time-player mode. “Do you want to know how I spent my morning? I have a new client, you might have heard of her, the Korean kid, Sun Yong Min, the one who can sight-read DNA? I had to chaperone her through a meet-and-greet with the board at Biotechnica. Serious money on the table. Sunny is twenty, looks fourteen, and is emotionally about ten. Sweet kid, always smiling, but her parents are fresh-off-the-boat and don’t speak English—Sunny’s making beaucoup bucks but her dad is too proud to quit his job as a security guard. So I’m standing there on the steps of their black glass office-tower-of-doom for twenty minutes in the rain and texting her once a minute until finally she shows up in a pedicab, which she took instead of a real cab, she tells me, to save money. Moreover, she’s wearing sweatpants and a sort of furry hat with cat ears and it’s immediately clear to me that she has absolutely no idea that any of this could possibly be a problem.
“So we walk into the conference room and the CEO is this handsome son of a bitch, he looks like an executive in a commercial, and when he sees us he freezes, because he’s an important man and there’s a way to do business and blah blah blah, but this girl is amazing, and if they don’t exercise her non-compete option then they’re pretty much bent over, because I packaged her with my other brightest biotech stars, because I am very clever and use y’all’s brilliance like a god-damned bludgeon—and I can see him just dying inside as he absorbs this new reality.
“Bless his little MBA heart, he rose to the occasion, and listened for ten minutes while she rambled on about cartoons. He said he liked her hat, and asked if it was Gamba-chan, which is some kawaii fuckin’ Japanese licensed character that’s big with the tweens, and then he told her about getting his daughter the Gamba-chan video game for Christmas.”
“I’m glad you could let that out,” says Irina.
“Ha!” says Maya. “I know, right? Look at me, crying on your shoulder. Where’s your ten percent? But the kicker is, after Mr. CEO sent away the elegant little gilt porcelain espresso pots and the lox, very expensive, not from vats, and had his big-titted mistress-slash-assistant bring Sunny-chan hot chocolate and a Danish, he takes out a tablet and shows her the genome of a bacterium that Biotechnica’s so-called alpha nerds designed to eat industrial waste in polluted waterways. Lots of government contracts there, so many it moved the stock price, but she scrolls through it for five minutes and says they made a mistake, that it’s going to die in acidic environments. You know me, I’m a jill-of-all-trades, but Sunny talked for two minutes in her squeaky little-girl voice about the implied chemistry of the thing and I was totally lost.
“So. Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely, and in every sense. But you will notice, my dear, that you are highly functional even among the high-functioning. You have more fashion sense than even I do, and to my certain knowledge you have had romantic relationships with actual human beings. So in answer to your question, no, you are not, in fact, my most difficult client, girlie, not by a damn sight. Okay?”
She remembers Philip, who has worked with Maya, saying she gets clients by hanging around MIT in low-cut blouses. “I suppose the females are more difficult to manage,” Irina says, and is immediately ashamed of her tacit malice.
“Hell yeah!” Maya says. “I love my boys to death but they usually think I’m their mom or their girlfriend and they’re often starkly in need of both. I used to have a little preciosity about getting them hookers but my god it makes them easier to work with.”
“So for me, you’re, what, my pretend best friend and confidante?”
“You are in a mood!” Maya says blithely, and then, in a fake bedroom voice, “Baby, I’m whatever you need me to be.”
“You are aware that technically we have a professional relationship?”
“Too late! But, babe, you know I’d get you a hooker if you wanted one. When’s your birthday?”
Irina turns a laugh into a snort. “Thanks.”
Sober now, Maya says, “Seriously, what I am for you is your friendly little helper who’s always there on the other end of the line. I play the clown when you need it, and cheer you up when I can. I’m also the one who helps you monetize your intelligence, which is prodigious, and, as you well know, a bit more than human, but hard for the uninitiated to appreciate, much less value properly. No one else is as good at talking to AIs, which means no one else really gets how good you are at talking to AIs, unless I buttonhole them and spend fifteen minutes praising you to the skies, which I assure you, my dear, is my god-damn stock in trade.”
“Thanks again.”
“Come on, what else are you going to do? Live in a garret and write a novel about your hurty little feelings?”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Proust’s madeleines have got nothing on me. It’s madeleines all the way down.” She had tried to write, once. It had been almost eerie, every sentence she wrote eliciting thousands of parallels from everything she’d ever read, as though they were just a continuation of conversations between old books for which her presence was barely welcome, or even necessary.
“I get that! The rush-of-memory thing. Cute. Anyway, stick with me and you’ll be in a much better class of garret. And speaking of, well, money, it’s that Mayo Clinic time of year again. After the Water and Power gig, you should have enough saved up for this year’s longevity treatment. You want me to book you?”
“Do you ever suppose we should just grow old gracefully?”
“Totally. We should also get fat, have some brats and watch a lot of TV. Maybe wear sweatpants when we leave the house to go shopping. Add a cat-ear hat and you’ve really got a look.”
“Please book me.”
Typing sounds. “Done.”
“Always a pleasure, Maya.”
“Hang in there, I. Let me know about that hooker. Or hookers. Don’t be shy, now.”
“Goodbye, Maya,” she says, and ends the call.
While she was talking, Philip sent another text—they have a reservation at Fantôme, in SOMA, but not for hours, which makes the afternoon a long stretch of dead time. She could probably go hang around his offices but it would be pitiful to be seen to have nothing to do. Tempting to nap there in the back of the cab, like it’s a tiny hotel room, endlessly in motion; she’d run up a bill, but the cost would be minute compared to what she’s getting from Water and Power, and compared to the cost of the Mayo would scarcely count as loose change.
She remembers her last visit to the Mayo, now ten months past, the long road to the clinic weaving through the green shadows of the wooded plain. Expensively unobtrusive, the clinic, like a boutique hotel in the prairie style. The staff’s fathomless politeness and oddly uniform beauty was chilling, somehow, and she never set eyes on another patron, as they call them, supposes they’re paying for discretion as much as longer life (and how they pay, and exponentially more as they get older). But however flocculent the towels, however luminous the marble of the tubs, the fulcrum of the trip is the succession of injections that preface the narcotized haze and the febrile days in bed hallucinating mandalas on the whitewashed walls as the tailored retroviruses knit up her frayed DNA, overwriting all the past year’s errors and erosion. When she’d packed her bags with shaky hands a girl of the most vivid youth and vitality took her arm and guided her, still nodding, out into the daylight and down the manicured gravel path to the waiting town car and as she helped Irina maneuver her inert limbs into the air-conditioned dark the girl said, “Go in good health, and we hope to see you next year!” the same thing they said every year, and even in her fog Irina sifted her tone for irony, as the only choices are to come back or to decay, and to miss even a single year is to pass the point of no return.
She remembers the TV blaring in the first class Alitalia lounge in London Heathrow—willowy blond Keri Kendrick, last year’s cinema darling, faced an unseen interviewer, pale blue eyes widening with passionate sincerity as she said, “It was a deeply spiritual decision. For me, life is a succession of seasons, and right now it’s the season of motherhood. I finally realized that I don’t need the Mayo to be happy, and I don’t care if my decision is quote-unquote ‘terrible and irrevocable.’” Put another way, she could no longer open a movie and her alcoholic husband-slash-manager had squandered most of her wealth. That’s me, Irina thinks, the first time I have a bad year, and the cab and its pointless motion start to feel like a prison and a metaphor for the vanity of her life. She thinks of all the flights leaving SFO, and how she’s now constrained to linger.
Rain starts pattering on the roof of the cab. She’s lost track of where they are but knows the favelas are nearby, as though she can feel their penumbra.
A girl hurries by wearing a man’s long dark coat with the sleeves rolled up; it looks like it’s expensive, or once was—she probably got it from the ebays or a thrift store. She has a frayed ammo bag for a purse, and there are dark rings under her eyes, though she can’t be more than twenty, like she’s hungover but too young to mind it, and somehow Irina knows that though the girl lives in the favelas she is not of them, a daughter of the upper middle class out having an adventure, and she thinks of her own youth—still there, perfectly preserved—and of her months in Singapore, her own brief withdrawal from living cities and the world.
The girl disappears into the crowd, and now it’s raining harder. “You wouldn’t believe it, sweetie,” she says, “but I used to be punk,” then worries the cab will interpret this as new instructions. She checks the time on her phone, though she knows she has hours, and then, indulgently, lets her months in Singapore rise up in her memory.
At the time, the experience had seemed to be one of singular importance; now she preserves the memory, in all its vastness, out of a careful respect for her past selves. Straining a little, she can hold all that summer in her mind at once, as a sort of porous, four-dimensional solid, she and her friends streaks of color twining among the ponderous hypervolumes of the buildings, the sinuous masses of the changing tides. But this isn’t how a person should see the world, she reminds herself, and lets the days of that summer play over her in sequence.
She was twenty and Singapore was drowning. Most of the people had left—garbage ran in the tide race between buildings, and Malay looters plied the waters downtown—and the government did little more than post edicts online demanding Confucian fortitude and virtue. Young people from all over had converged there to roost among the sinking towers, that last summer of the city’s viability, and, having no need to work, and no ties to bind her, she’d joined them.
Construction drones were just getting cheap and spavined older models were all over the rooftops. She built herself a room on top of an old glass-and-steel skyscraper, its base flooded, her room and the other itinerants’ clustered like swallows’ nests. The trip was nominally educational—she was enrolled at the national university—but she rarely went to class and someone told her that most of the teachers had left the city.
Such stores as weren’t sunk were empty, but a boy on her rooftop had a boat and would take her to the market ships down from Malaysia; the ships’ holds, creaking, rusty and as long as a landing strip, were full of multicolored piles of gemlike fruit, crates of tinned beef, oranges, milk, the dizzying stench of durian. She and her new friends often made grand plans—snorkeling expeditions, trips to the wreck of the Raffles Hotel—but these ambitions rarely materialized; most days they woke in the afternoon and spent the nights at parties on the lowest unflooded levels—dance music and strobe lights, the sweat of strangers, long-haired boys burning marijuana by the bale, the music’s pauses filled with the reverberation of the waves.
It was a beautifully disposable youth. When it was time to go, people would just leave, rarely saying goodbye, their rooms left to the next squatter. One girl sealed over the door to her room, forever preserving the wilted Kerouac paperbacks and empty vodka bottles. Irina left the day she noticed that her tower was listing. A few of the kids spoke of staying forever, of founding families among the waves, of building mansions out of concrete and raising them ever higher as the seas rose—a mistake, she thought, as their interlude, like the city, had a term.
She wonders whether her room is above water, still, or has sunk, become the abode of rays and fishes, and lets the tremendous mass of old data sink once again into the dark.
She’s kept equally detailed recollections of old lovers. Someday, if she has children, she will edit these, and leave her descendants this eidetic record of her life, and will they be abashed to know her so completely?
Her afternoon with Water and Power is in the periphery of her awareness, there toward the surface of her memory, and she’s about to let it dissolve—she’ll retain her memories of their AIs, which is technically a breach of contract, but one she commits all the time, and no one has ever been the wiser—but she finds herself disliking Cromwell and Magda more than seems reasonable, given how often she’s worked for worse.
She calls up her ten minutes in Cromwell’s office, holding all of it in her mind, sees how when she’d walked into his office, he’d looked up from his laptop and for a tenth of a second he had a strange expression comprised of wonder and fear and superiority, like a man who knew a secret.
It could be anything, is probably nothing, but now she is intent, and sees how quickly he’d closed his laptop, the Cycladic figures on his desk, the grey at the great man’s temples, the almost tangible light, and there it is: his laptop had faced away from her but there in the antique affectation of his eyeglasses there’s a reflection of its screen, and zooming in she sees a browser window, and though most of the text is too small to read there are many sequences of legible numbers, probably GPS coordinates, and above them all is a single word, MNEMOSYNE.