9: Fantasia para un Gentilhombre 

 

“BIENVENIDOS,” the sign reads. “SISTEMA PENITENCIARIO NAC. EDUCAR, REFORMAR, ADAPTAR Y CAMBIAR PARA LA VIDA SE LOGRA SOLO CON AMOR AL PROJIMO.”

The prison is a city. The prison city, La Modelo, is nestled outside another city, Managua. To Javier the cities don’t look very different; the latter has taller buildings in brighter colours, but other things are mostly the same. Clothes hanging outside windows and over railings, solar ovens on roofs, skinny dogs panting alongside big men sucking their teeth and squinting into the haze. Big old drones hovering everywhere. 

He is in a cage, and the cage is on the back of a truck, and the truck is bouncing along pocked roads. Gravel and mud spits away from the tires. The others in the truck are humans, men, and they are all cuffed together. His wrists are small so he still wears sticky cuffs. Besides, he could break the metal kind. At least, the old man sitting beside him says so. 

“Go ahead,” he says, rattling the chains. “Break them! Get us out of here!” 

“I can’t,” Javier says, but really he doesn’t want to. Sitting next to so many humans at once is nice. It is nice in a way he can’t quite define. Something about the warmth of them all clustered together. Something about the sweat glittering in their hair and rolling down their necks. He feels sharply aware of his environment, as though each of his receptors – visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory – has upgraded its resolution. 

“He won’t do it,” says a man leaning against the truck’s cab. He’s chewing a cuticle and speaks around his wet fingers. “I’ve tried. They won’t let you out. They know why we’re here. They know what we’ll do when we’re out.” 

Javier doesn’t know, but he keeps his mouth shut. It isn’t as though he wants to go to prison, necessarily, but that he has no other plan for the moment. The foreman said something about food, and he needs food. He has no real idea how to get it, otherwise, and Arcadio isn’t coming. 

Arcadio isn’t coming. 

So they roll through the gates, under loops of razor wire and wood planks speckled with broken glass, onto another, even worse road that gushes dirty water as the truck’s tires roll across it. There are four different towers, all of them with turrets. They overlook four mid-rise concrete buildings with windows and railings and concrete steps leading to each level, with a central courtyard in between. There is a fence around all of it, but it’s not that high. If Javier were bigger, with stronger legs, he could clear it easily. 

Nearest the gate, there is a covered area with picnic tables and women and children. The children are all organic. They look chubbier than he is. Dumber, too. Not quite all there, yet. 

A man in uniform opens the cage, and Javier is first to hop out. He makes it five feet in the air. The little organic kids roll their heads back to watch him. 

“Ay, conejito,” the man with raw cuticles says, standing and stretching. He jumps out of the truck. “Come here.” 

Javier trots along beside him. 

“What are you doing here?” the man asks. He is now chewing the cuticle of his other thumb. 

“I tried to learn how to steal food, but I got caught.” 

“And they sent you here? Mierda. They should have taken you to the church.” He pauses, and sucks blood away from his thumb. He eyes Javier up and down. “Then again, maybe not.” 

A guard comes. He squints down at Javier for a minute, then looks at the man with the bleeding thumbs. He smiles. 

“Ignacio.” 

“Sir.” 

“How was it with los fabricantes?” 

Ignacio only smiles. 

“You print up some drugs? Some knives? Some gun grips?” 

“Mostly just parts for toilets,” Ignacio says. “This country has a real problem with shit. There’s shit everywhere you look.” 

The punch comes out of nowhere. It lands in the thin man – Ignacio’s – gut. As Ignacio bends around the guard’s fist, Javier’s vision de-rezzes wildly. Suddenly Ignacio is made of bricks of light. He coughs, sputters, falls to the ground, and Javier’s vision begins to darken, his hearing to sharpen to only the sound of wet choking. He is going to die. The sudden stillness of his muscles tells him so. He makes a flawless leap at the guard’s chest. He wraps his legs around the other man’s middle, his arms around his neck. 

“Stop! Stop! Please stop!” 

The guard tries to pull him off, but Javier won’t budge. Behind him, the other prisoners are laughing. The chains rattle with appreciation. Even the women and children are laughing. Javier pauses to flash them a smile – laughter sounds so nice, it cures him right up – and finally the guard yanks him off and tries to throw him on the ground. Javier lands gracefully, though, and that is somehow annoying. The guard spits and tucks in his shirt. 

“You’re the one from the Corcovado?” 

Javier nods. “My name is Javier.” 

“Your name is 2501,” he says. “That’s what we called the last one.” He turns and gestures at the prisoners, and they all shuffle forward to follow him. 

Ignacio is the last to join. Javier runs up and helps him stand. “That was stupid, conejito,” Ignacio says. 

“I can’t help it.” 

“I know. You’re a guardian angel.” 

Javier has never really considered himself this way. “But I don’t have any wings, though.” 

Ignacio smiles. “From what I can tell, you don’t need them.”

 

Javier spent the next day learning as much about his mark as possible. Chris Holberton was a hotel and theme park designer specializing in themed environments. His latest project was Akiba, a Las Vegas hotel and casino meant to emulate the experience of visiting Mecha, the peninsula of Japan where vN could apply for citizenship. Mecha was nothing more than a government-funded theme park the size of a city, so asking a theme park designer to reproduce it made a certain kind of sense. Once, Javier had wanted to immigrate to Mecha. There was a lottery. There was vN food everywhere, and you could watch any content you wanted anytime without a Don’t Look Now bug appearing in the corner of the display, and all the soap worked with vN skin. And all you had to do to ensure your status was keep the human visitors happy, and make sure you iterated something like only once every seven years. It sounded like paradise, when Javier’s father first told him about it. He resolved to move there as soon as he could.

Then he met Amy.

Prior to Akiba, Holberton worked on Hammerburg – a theme village located in central Romania. Transylvania, to be exact. The goal of that themed space was to emulate a series of horror films that, as far as Javier could tell, seemed to revolve around skinny British guys staring menacingly at buxom women in diaphanous nightgowns. The movies were very charming in their own way. He almost made it all the way through The Curse of Frankenstein, before all the screaming wriggled its way into his failsafe and he had to shut it off.

He could understand why someone might want to visit there, though. Everyone seemed to be wearing velvet smoking jackets and living in castles. What wasn’t to like?

Hammerburg took Holberton five years to create. In an interview, he said: “You know, I think we’ve really lost the meaning of fear in this culture. We spend so much time being afraid of everything that we’ve forgotten what a thrill it is to be scared. This place is about reawakening those feelings. That’s what horror is about, for me. It’s about being in touch with your feelings. If you look at the people who were in these movies, like Cushing and Lee, they were incredibly sweet people who felt things quite deeply. They were sensitive men who were secure enough in themselves that they could feel things at a profound level and bring those sentiments to their work. As a designer, I try to do exactly that.”

Sensitive. Javier could work with that.

Holberton himself was a very dapper man. He had white hair cut close to his head. It curled at the top, but he kept it short and wiry to the sides. He had a sharp nose, thin lips, and pale green eyes set deeply. He stood about five feet ten. He dressed impeccably. In order to attract his attention, Javier was really going to have to raise his sartorial game.

“Concierge?”

“Yes, Mr Montalban?” 

“I’d like to set up an appointment with the ship’s tailor, for this afternoon.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have a staff tailor, sir, but we do have a men’s ready-to-wear shop onboard, and one of their services is tailoring.” 

“That’s fine. Send them up this afternoon.”

“What will you be needing, sir?” 

Javier looked down at himself. “Everything.”

“Will you be charging this to your account?” 

“Yes. Thank you. Please include the tip there.”

“Very good. Mr Hayward and his assistant will see you at four.” 

Javier continued researching Holberton from the deck of his private balcony, once the sun got stronger. There was a display inlaid in the little table, there, and he could tab through it at leisure. For lunch, he ordered a vN ceviche with a big bottle of fizzy electrolytes. Fifteen minutes later, a vN wearing his shell brought it up. Javier had nothing to tip him with, so he simply divided a bit of the ceviche onto a napkin, and shared it with him. Both the food and drink tingled pleasantly on the tongue. The ship’s kitchen seemed to understand that vN food was more about texture than flavour; the ceviche was almost obscenely pliant under his teeth. He kept the bottle in an ice bucket and watched the Gulf of Mexico waving away from him as he read on.

When he wasn’t working out of the country, Holberton lived in unincorporated land in New Mexico. He claimed it was for his health; the desert climate was hypo-allergenic. Despite numerous requests, he had never allowed his home to be photographed. He had even sued a guest at a New Year’s Eve party for posting some of the images from the party online. They settled out of court.

He was divorced. He and his husband had adopted a girl from Romania, inspired by their first trip to the country, scouting locations for Hammerburg. The divorce papers citied “irreconcilable differences.” The daughter was at a boarding school in Connecticut.

When he was four years old, images of Chris Holberton appeared in the multi-player role-playing game that Jonah LeMarque, founder of New Eden Ministries, had designed. This was the same game that put LeMarque in jail. The same one whose civil suit bankrupted the church and precipitated the sale of all vN-related patents and API, excepting the failsafe.

Chris Holberton was Daniel Sarton’s cousin.

He was also Jonah LeMarque’s son.

“And I thought my in-laws were fucked-up,” Javier murmured.

Family secrets aside, Holberton seemed to be making the best of life. He had emancipated himself from his family, and then joined the class action suit against his father and the church for an unlicensed, obscene use of his image. It paid out handsomely. This was the seed money for his first company, Interiority. He ran it as an online store for the first year, then shelved it to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. He dropped out, moved to Las Vegas, and rebooted Interiority. He joined the European Graduate School, and wrote a thesis on the social implications of cinematic Bond villains’ secret lairs. This was also his first brush with theme park design: he sold the thesis to a consultancy in London.

Interiority was big in Las Vegas. Unlike the experience designers glutting his potential job market, Holberton focused exclusively on items that could be picked up and held. No interfaces. No menus. Nothing digital. Analog only.

His sole contribution to the digital realm was his work for his cousin, Daniel Sarton, on the Museum of the City of Seattle. He helped curate the layers of time visible within the exhibit. It was a favour between family members; Holberton charged only one dollar for the consultation.

With that kind of relationship in place, it made sense that Sarton would leave Holberton his legacy. The trick would be learning what Holberton had done with it. What he had done with Amy. Javier needed access to his files, and probably his house. He couldn’t just fuck Holberton, he had to seduce him. Start a relationship with him. Become part of his inner circle.

In order to bring Amy back, Javier had to attract and keep the attention of a notoriously private, habitually litigious designer who specialized solely in analog reproductions of reality. A man who hated New Eden, and probably all of New Eden’s works, and with good reason. Javier had to sleep with this man, and he had not slept with anyone in a year. Powell didn’t count. He had to keep reminding himself that Powell didn’t count.

He had to do better with Holberton than he’d done with Powell.

He would have to practise.

 

Buried deep in the core of the ship was the Winter Wonderland. Its nationality and temporality changed on four-hour shifts. Sometimes it was German. Sometimes English. Sometimes it was medieval, and sometimes Victorian. Sometimes it was Tokyo on Christmas Eve, with a spindly replica Tokyo Tower and a real working Ferris wheel. At least, that’s what the gilt-edged display worked into the heart of the glittering Door Into Winter ™ said, as it slowly revealed images of the many options of Christmas, each more crisp than the last. The Door was shaped like a huge wardrobe. It stood out from the wall of Deck 4. Tiny crystals frosted its edges. As Javier watched, they replicated, etching the surface in new fractals.

“The rest of the world may have forgotten what a real winter feels like, but not us,” the Door said. “Step into our Winter Wonderland, and relive the glories of wintertimes long, long ago.” 

Javier chose to visit the Wonderland during a shift in which the vN were leading a posada. He followed the couple, dressed as Joseph and Mary, as they walked through pine forests asking shopkeepers and homeowners for a place to stay. It reminded him briefly of his and Amy’s journey through the forests of Washington State. Then he made the memory go away, and focused on his target instead.

The target was ahead of him. He shuffled along through the snow, alone. He was a tad overweight, but not in any way that would hinder him sexually as far as mechanics were concerned. He was also Latino. Javier was already rusty; he wasn’t going to handicap himself trying to do this in English his first time out.

Javier’s first test of the target was how the target reacted to him personally. He made sure to cross the target’s sightline on two separate occasions while the crowd waited for the posada to start. Both times, the target made eye contact. Just one furtive look, then a look away. Maybe he was confused. Javier looked like the staff members, but he dressed like the loft suite: a charcoal wool suit with a crisp white shirt and an ice blue tie. It was looser than he would have chosen for looks, but if he needed to jump anywhere, he would need flexibility. For this reason, his shoes were slip-ons without socks.

“Aren’t you cold?” the target asked.

Javier had been waiting to start this conversation for the past half hour. He had his responses already selected, branched, planned for. “Only a little. I didn’t think it would really be this cold.” He made a show of staring at the other guy’s mouth. His target was in the process of growing a vacation beard. It was going pretty well. “Wow. I can even see your breath, it’s so cold.”

The other guy squinted. “I can’t see yours.”

Javier smiled. “I don’t breathe. It just looks like I do.” He used it as an excuse to come closer. “See? Watch my chest. I’m talking to you normally, but…” He pointed. “My chest still rises and falls on meter.”

The other guy stared at Javier’s chest. His gaze moved up to Javier’s throat, then his mouth. When it hit his eyes, Javier knew he had him. The other guy didn’t know it yet, but Javier did.

“Ricardo Montalban,” Javier said, holding his hand out.

The other guy laughed and shook it. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Of course it is,” Javier said. He held his target’s hand for just a second longer than necessary.

“So, you’re traveling under an assumed name? This is your alias?”

Javier held a single finger up to his lips. “Ssh. Not so loud.”

The other guy smiled. “Manuel,” he said.

“Do you go cruising often, Manuel?”

The double meaning still existed, in Spanish. Even in the snowy twilight of the wonderland, Manuel’s blush was visible. He was young, Javier realized. Or at least, inexperienced.

“It’s my first time,” he said.

Of course it was.

“Mine too,” Javier lied. “It’s so… big. I feel like I’ll never see all of it.”

Manuel nodded. “It almost feels too big.”

“No such thing.”

They both laughed at the same time. This was going extremely well. Javier wondered what he had worried about.

“It just feels like a bit too much. I had to get off the boat, today,” Manuel continued. “I went to the rainforest.”

Javier replayed his conversation with Aaron. “Chirripó?”

Manuel nodded. He was about to start saying something more, when Javier began drifting away from the crowd, down the path they’d just walked. It was lit by furolitos in waxed paper bags. A false moon hid behind scudding clouds above them. Javier was beginning to understand the romance of winter. He had never experienced the season this way – his coldest Christmases were rainy, and nothing more. But the dry snap to the air, the length and colour of the shadows, they made you want to climb into bed with someone.

“It was really something,” Manuel said. “Hot as hell. And wet. Really, really wet. I think I may have ruined my socks.”

Javier nodded. He understood immediately why Manuel was not getting laid. At least, not by the kind of guys he was attracted to. One did not talk to people who were out of your league about wet socks.

“Did you see any wildlife?”

Manuel shook his head. “Some birds, but nothing big. Even the sloths were hiding. They say there are more jaguars, now, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

“I saw a jaguar, once.”

“In a zoo?”

Javier shook his head. He leaned against the tree. It smelled pleasantly of balsam. It reminded him of Amy. Hiding in trees in the rain, with her and Xavier – back when Xavier was still Junior. Back when he was small enough to carry in the crook of one arm.

“Where, then?”

Javier blinked. “In the wild,” he said. “Not far from here, actually. Years ago.”

Manuel’s eyebrows rose. “Wow.”

“She was just lying right out there on the branch of this huge tree, sunning herself.”

He and she had both been sunning themselves, actually. He was maybe a month old. He’d wandered out on a limb because his father was gone, probably killing drones, and he was hungry and he needed the sun. So he took off all his clothes and lay down on the branch. It wasn’t until he was completely comfortable that he noticed the jaguar above him. She was on another branch, staring at him intently. He still remembered the pink of her tongue against the white of her muzzle. How the inside of her spots was just a little bit darker than the fur outside, as though, as in the legend, she’d been burnt by the very last of God’s fire.

“Were you scared?”

“Only a little.”

Actually, it was a lot. He’d been very scared. Big cats tended not to attack people, of course, but he was in her territory and she probably wanted him gone. He had no idea what her teeth could do to hollow-core titanium, but he’d seen the carcasses other jaguars left behind. They dislocated the necks of their prey with their paws. They bit through the shells of ancient turtles. Javier was tough, but he wasn’t that tough. He tried to sit up, but then she started moving, too, so he lay back down. They spent the next hour that way, eyeing each other.

It wasn’t so different from this conversation, really.

“I wish I’d seen something like that,” Manuel said. “It’s hard. I went into the forest expecting to have something happen to me. They’ve worked so hard to preserve it. I thought it would be… more…”

“Magical,” Javier said.

“Yes. That’s right. Magical.” Manuel shrugged. “Stupid, huh?”

Javier shook his head. “It’s not stupid at all.” He ducked his head a little to catch Manuel’s eye. “Really. It isn’t. You fell for the hype. That’s not your fault.”

Manuel rolled his eyes. “It’s no different from coming to this place, then, is it?”

Javier looked around. The Holy Family had reached their destination. The crowd was singing “Noche de Paz.” A star twinkled above the trees. After watching it for a moment, Javier realized it was a botfly set to overload.

“Sure it’s different,” he said. “You met me.”

Manuel smiled. “I was told to meet you.”

An instant tension in Javier’s legs readied him for escape. Who had sent this man? He didn’t read like a cop, or even like New Eden. Who were they? And why had they waited this long to make their move?

“Wow,” Manuel said. “It’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“What they say, about your poker face. You guys are amazing. There’s just…” Manuel waved a hand in front of Javier’s face. “Nothing.”

“Still waters run deep,” Javier said.

Manuel smiled and reached into his pocket. He held out a small key fob. “You’re invited.”

Javier raised his eyebrows. “To what?”

“To a private tournament. The vN are not allowed on the casino floor, and my companion would like to stake you to a game.”

“I’ll beat him,” Javier said.

“My companion is a lady. And she would like to test her skill.”

Javier tilted his head. “Aren’t you enough of a test of her skills?”

“Most of the time.” Manuel offered his arm. “But my lady is nothing if not an overachiever.”

 

The lady’s accommodations were a loft suite identical to Javier’s on the opposite side of the ship. Hers had a piano, though. It was a real piano; the guts were visible, literally and figuratively. Someone had left a highball glass of water out on a table near it. Adjacent to the piano were a wet bar and a dinner table inlaid with matching mosaic tile, and when Javier entered the room, she stood up from the head of the table.

She was in her late forties or early fifties, judging by her hands and the stiffness in her posture. She was very petite and thin, and had deep purple hair, cut at a sharp angle. She wore multiple loops of black pearls around her neck and down her flat chest. The pearls were perfectly round, with the iridescent pinks and greens of a parking lot oil slick. He had a sudden desire to see what they would look like on Amy.

“I bought them after my first tournament, in Shanghai,” she said, touching the pearls carefully. “The producers wanted a little local colour, as it were. I wasn’t expected to win. They called me Poker Alice. It stuck. People still call me Alice, and so can you. Unless you feel like telling me your real name.”

He took her proffered hand and held it in both his own. Hers was dry, and very cool. Warfarin, maybe. Though she could likely afford drugs tailored to her genes.

“Your pearls are very beautiful,” Javier said. “They suit you.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. An old habit of a professional gambler, he guessed. “I suspected you might be charming, Mr Montalban.”

“It’s just the suit.”

Now she smiled genuinely, and he felt better. She looked at Manuel. “May we have some drinks, please?”

“Of course,” Manuel said, and went behind the bar. He brought out a few bottles of vN-friendly liquids. Unstoppered, they smelled like perfume. “I know the Electric Sheep has this cocktail called a Tears in the Rain, but they don’t make a vN version.”

Manuel used tongs to measure out a grouping of glittering crystals into a martini shaker. “These are druzy-style moissanites that I’ve kept at sub-zero,” he said. “They share the same molecular pattern as a diamond, but they’re made from silicon and not carbon. The interior of this shaker is diamond carbide, so as I shake it,” he started shaking, “the moissanites start chipping off in microscopic fragments.” He shook for another minute, then poured the liquid into a squat, square glass.

Then he opened up a drawer below the bar. Icy mist wafted out. From the drawer, he withdrew a tiny pillbox full of small blue beads shaped like teardrops. Each was about the size of a sesame seed. “These are gelatinized cobalt,” he said. “I make them with calcium alginate and three different water baths.” With an antique silver salt spoon, he drifted the spheres into the glass one by one. Tapping the last few out, he gave the glass a final, gentle nudge to swirl its contents, then handed the glass to Javier.

“Thank you,” Javier said, and raised the glass. The teardrops drifted slowly down through the sparkling suspension. “Do you carry this whole set-up with you on every cruise?”

“It comes with the suite,” Alice said. “Doesn’t yours have one?”

“I never thought to look.”

Manuel used a standard shaker to produce a dry martini for Alice. He shaved a curl of yuzu peel into it, and she and Javier raised their glasses to each other. The drink had no discernible flavour but it was delightfully cold, and quite pretty, and he liked the weight of the glass in his hand. It felt reassuringly solid and real.

“Do you play baccarat, Mr Montalban?”

He blinked. “Punto banco, or chemin de fer?”

She sniffed. “The latter, naturally. Punto banco is a game of chance. Chemin de fer is a game of choice.” She arched a pencilled eyebrow. “I thought you would appreciate a game in which there is at least a small measure of free will.”

“I do.” Javier rested a hand on the nearest chair. Opposite the piano stood floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the balcony there was nothing, only black. Somewhere, beneath those waves, there might be some trace of Amy and the island. Somewhere dark and cold and awful, where he’d put her because his own personal deck was stacked against him from the beginning. “But there are games, and then there games.”

Alice took a seat. Javier followed. “I made my career on poker and blackjack,” she said. “But it’s all different, now. The security measures are beyond anything I imagined, when I started out. Do you know that it was a computer vision algorithm that picked up my first stroke? It was a transient ischemic attack, one of the little ones. You scarcely even know it’s happening. One minute I was splitting on an eight, and the next there was the casino doctor.”

So he’d been right about the warfarin. She was probably still on a blood thinner of some type. “Casinos have doctors?”

She cast him a pitying glance. “The good ones do.” Her lips thinned. “Or they did. Once. Now it’s all vN.”

Javier sipped. “I thought we weren’t allowed on casino floors.”

“Not here. But these places…” she waved her hand to encompass the ship, “are no good. They’re for punters. The rake is terrible, the commission is too high, the bankroll top-up is automatic. It’s disgusting, the way they take advantage of people. Old people, especially. Do you know how many of the elderly are living on points, on these old boats? There’s free meals and free medical care. It’s cheaper than a home, these days.”

“But that’s not why you’re here.”

“Of course not. I’m here to host a tournament. They have me working in player development. Me. At my age.” She sniffed again. “This is my one night off. Two nights a week, I’m paid to hold private games here, in the suite. I take a commission. The rest of my evenings I’m supposed to be working the floor. With no advantage whatsoever. No loss rebate, no soft seventeens, nothing. It’s disgraceful.”

Javier liked this woman very much, he decided. His last woman, before Amy, was a divorcee from La Jolla named Brigid who took his twelfth iteration to a supermarket parking lot and gave him away, like he was an unwanted kitten. The boy hadn’t even chosen his own name, yet. Both Amy and Alice were significant improvements on that record.

Javier slid his hand across the table. “Given the value of your time, then, perhaps you should tell me what I can do for you.”

She smiled. “You’re right off the bat, aren’t you? All right, then.” She sipped, and then pushed her drink away, half-finished. “After this I’m going to Atlantic City. There’s a baccarat tournament, there. Three nights, three styles of game: punto banco, chemin de fer, and banque. Tie-bet only; nine-to-one odds. And the banker is a vN from Mecha. His name is Taft. He has corporate sponsorship. The bankroll is likely infinite.”

Javier watched her eyes. She wore bright green contacts, possibly to obscure the dilation of her pupils. It would be a good affectation to cultivate, in her profession. Even now, he could not read her feelings. She looked completely calm, a consummate professional brokering a deal.

He reached for her hand anyway. “Please don’t do that.”

She withdrew her hand. “I have to. And you’re going to help me. I need to log as many hours as I can playing against a vN.”

“You’ll still lose, no matter how much I help you.”

“Perhaps.”

He decided to take another strategy. “If I win the majority of hands, will you at least consider leaving the tournament?”

She gave him a tiny smile and patted his hand, as though humouring a child. “Of course. But you have to prove to me that a vN can play perfect cards with every hand.”

And so he did.

It didn’t take long. A professional player of Alice’s calibre understood immediately that he had a perfect count of the cards at all times, even when she switched from a six-deck shuffle to a nine. Simulating more players didn’t do anything, either – it merely increased the speed at which he accumulated the data set. Moreover, he lacked the potent combination of dopamine and adrenaline necessary to create true addictive behaviour and loss of inhibition and discipline; he could make the same small, boring bets for hours at a time, and he could do it with a massive shoe on multiple hands, with a nearly infinite number of splits.

Between the fifth and sixth round, he asked to use the bathroom to wash his face and rearrange his hair. After that, he took a peek inside Alice’s medicine cabinet, and her cosmetics bag. She kept all of her pills, patches, and gels in custom biometric containers, but the whole collection in an attractive wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl. Javier didn’t need to spend much time with the box to understand what her game really was, and how she intended to cheat. So he returned downstairs, and continued the game.

At dawn, Alice was finally ready to quit. “You’re a…”

“Machine,” Javier said.

She laughed. The laugh turned into a cough. Javier poured her a glass of water, and she drank it eagerly. “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” she said. “But you should see their offer. It’s incredible. With the rebates, it’s like playing 50/50 odds.”

Javier nibbled on a dish of Flexo Fries they’d ordered up from the Electric Sheep. He considered. He was up a significant amount of money, and he could probably leverage those winnings into points. But he couldn’t really leave the issue alone, either. “The rebates are invalid if you cheat, right?”

“Of course.”

“And there’s no getting out of it?”

“It’s a ten million dollar buy-in. It’s feeding the bankroll, so it’s non-refundable. No one is walking away from that money.”

Javier shook his head. “It’s a sunk cost. Think of it that way. Get out now, while you still can.”

“I haven’t lost that kind of money in years, and I don’t intend to start now.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”

Javier stood up. He moved toward the window. The sun was beginning to rise. He felt it in his skin. “I think your fellow players are going to cheat,” he said. “And there’s only one way to cheat successfully when playing with a vN. You have to trigger the failsafe.”

Alice joined him at the window. Reflected in the plate glass, she seemed more tired, older. She wasn’t looking at the ocean, or the sunrise. She was watching him. “And how would you do that?”

“You would h-have to c-cause harm to another human being,” Javier said.

“So you would need a team. One to play the game, and another to slip on a banana peel in the background.”

He turned to her. “Or one to give a player the wrong dose of her medicine, so she could take all her winnings early in the event of a forfeit.”

She paled. “Are you accusing me of cheating?”

“We’re just talking. But it would certainly be a good reason to keep a human lover, and not a vN. Because then the mistake would be more plausible.” Javier put his drink down. He took hers and put it down, too. He looked up at the loft. Manuel had long since gone to sleep. “Life is for the living,” he said. “A high-roller like you should know that.”

She sighed. “It’s not like that at the end. There’s a certain law of diminishing returns at work.”

He reached around and unclasped the pearls from around her neck. She stiffened, and her hands came up, but the cold fingertips only skimmed him. Carefully, he set the pearls beside the glass of water near the piano. He coiled them up in a nautilus pattern so they wouldn’t roll away. When he turned back to her, he put his hands where the pearls used to be. Beneath his fingers, her pulse was high but steady.

“It can still be good, you know.”

Her voice came out high and tight and small. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He bent and kissed her. She tasted of vermouth and yuzu and salicylic acid. She kissed back very gently, as though her mouth were just waking up.

“Don’t go all demure Chinese stereotype on me now, Alice. You sent your boy to find me. And trust me, he knows what I can do just as well as you do.”

She gripped the front of his shirt. “Take me upstairs. Please.”

“That’s more like it.”

For her part, Alice didn’t participate until later. She sat in a chaise and directed the action. Manuel came awake for him slowly, inch by inch, and he finished almost before becoming truly aware of what was happening.

“Thank you,” he said, ever polite. “I’ve always wanted someone to do that for me.”

Javier had the grace to pretend as though he had never heard this before. He also neglected to mention that this was just the thing to get the taste of Powell from his mouth. That made it a fair trade, as far as he was concerned.

Alice joined them soon after that. Manuel had a better understanding of her than Javier did, but his technique needed a little refinement and Javier was happy to demonstrate. It wasn’t the other man’s fault; he couldn’t imagine calibrating things like pressure and speed with something so vague as “instincts.” (And to be fair, the same thing was true of finding Manuel’s prostate. Alice had very little hands, and very little patience to match.)

Manuel fell asleep first. The bed was big enough for the three of them, and as she drifted off in Javier’s arms, Alice said: “Come with me. To Atlantic City.”

At any other time, he would have said yes. She was a rich woman with excellent taste and the talents to support herself, who still very much enjoyed getting fucked and wasn’t afraid to experiment. It was the kind of brass ring he’d always been looking to grab, until he found Amy. It was the kind of arrangement every other vN wanted.

“I can’t,” he said.

She frowned. “Is it because I’m old?”

“No. There’s just something I have to do.”

She waited a moment. “Cherchez la femme?” 

He smiled, and kissed her hair. “Sort of.”

“Your lady is very lucky.”

Javier rolled away. “She’s dead.”

Sighing, Alice rolled over to rest her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” She patted his hand. “I’m a widow too, you know. It gets better. With time.”

“I miss her,” Javier said, before he could simulate how the conversation might end.

“Of course you do.”

“I keep thinking about everything she ever said to me. Things I…” Oh, God, but he did miss her. Fiercely. Wanted to be holding her, right now. Wanted to be asleep, holding her, smelling her hair, not someone else’s. So what if her hands were always busy, gesturing something to the island. Why hadn’t he reached over, and taken her hand? Why hadn’t he stopped the conversation by starting one of his own? “Things I didn’t really understand at the time. When I should have.”

“Hmm.”

Alice cuddled in closer. Her breath was already thick. He heard a tiny wheeze in there. What a blessing age was. What a fantastic, wondrous gift, to know that you might someday forget everything you’d ever done, that you might drift away from it like a slowly melting chunk of ice. Someday, Alice would get to die. She would die with an imperfect memory of all the hurt she’d caused. It wouldn’t always be sharp for her. It wouldn’t always be there in perfect high-res detail, like the smell of Amy’s hair was for Javier.

“That’s always the way,” Alice said. “But it’s OK. They’re always with us.”

“I know,” Javier said. “I know.”

 

Back in his own suite, he showered off and then went directly to bed. On his display, he checked his account with the cruise line. They shared points with the Akiba, so he was good there, but the credit would dry up, soon. Even with his commission from Alice, he didn’t have enough liquid cash to get him between Galveston and Las Vegas incognito. He’d gotten by in Costa Rica because there were models like him everywhere, but he had a feeling America would be a lot more uptight. He had no desire to pass through any kind of security between now and his meeting Holberton. If the government didn’t pick him up, Portia would.

It was hard to tell which scenario he feared more.

“Concierge?”

“Yes, sir?” 

“When we land in Galveston, I’ll be sending a package to Nevada. I’d like to pay the freight now with points, and have you pick it up after I’ve disembarked.”

“That’s quite all right, sir. However, we will need to weigh the package, before we can send it.” 

Javier threw back the covers and grabbed his clothes and shoes. “I’ll do it on the bathroom scale.” He stood on the scale, holding all his things, and told them the number.

“What size of box would you like?” 

“What’s the largest size you have?”

“Eighteen inches by thirteen by three feet.” 

Javier winced. “Great. Send it up.”