::MODULE_1.0//:INITIALIZING…

Zurich, 2063

Welcome to Turicum, opening night, list-and-augs only.

Don’t worry, I’m on the list.

Also on three different aug lists, but those are way pricier than bottle-service.

Mitzi’s talking. Because she’s always talking. My little sister, Mitzi-the-Wiki, boosted her cog capacities a month ago and might have the whole fucking internet in her head. Says “Turicum” was Zurich’s maiden name, our town’s title back when we still spoke Latin and served as a Roman tax outpost. Now it’s the name of the nightclub we find ourselves in queue for, the promoters who fled Singapore after You-Know-What having named their shiny new temple to excess in honor of Zurich’s empiric origins.

At long last, the time of togas has returned.

Now Mitzi’s sharing an opinion. Because she’s always sharing her opinion. Nods at the newest, largest, gaudiest dance scene in the world and says Turicum, as far as names go, nailed Zurich from the onset.

Still a proud and mighty tax outpost.

“Do you ever shut up?”

But before she can, we are inside.

Turicum is a time machine to ancient Rome, it’s Rome, realized—their every extravagance modernized, with infinity pool “bathhouses” to the left and a bona fide dining “floor” to the right, where Zurich’s wealthiest lie down to feast, leave discards on the ground for staff to clean up. Erase and re-write the barbarians, the end of Roman patriotism, a gap between rich and poor so wide the empire rotted on the vine and you’d find this, Roma 2063: the world’s prettiest and ritziest, tray-passed golden goblets of cloned Pinot Noir, flirty conversation amongst holographic busts of ancient emperors. Sexual and political deviance delivered hand-in-hand, hand-in-pocket, hand-on-ass. The main dance floor—what some ivy-crowned bouncer grandly introduces as the Amphitheater—appears surrounded by a forest of forged glass columns masquerading as facades of exquisitely-carved, semi-transparent granite, and squeezing between them and the pretty people are waitresses whose togas are painted on with luminescent bodylight. From our table, Mitzi waves one over and we watch, stunned, as the server’s toga changes colors in time with the lighting beneath her feet, and then shifts to the walls beside her, and then matches the color of the drinks she hands us.

Mitzi grabs two, toasts them into each other, chugs both. The drinks’ green lights go red.

She hands me my own pair. Winks.

This is how our celebration begins. Tomorrow I begin my new job at Coalescence Corporation and Mitzi my know-it-all nailed it. We’re in the right place to get very, very weird.

“Four more,” Mitzi says, “and the first bottle.” The waitress glides back to the bar for reinforcements.

“Can you really handle that?” I ask.

“Telling me to drink like a lady?”

“No. But. You know. It’s going to be a long night.”

I suddenly understand how my sister can drink like a turn-of-the-century traveling salesman.

“You jacked up your liver and kidneys didn’t you?”

Mitzi gives a grin I know from our childhood. She waves toward the teeming crowd.

“Hope you can keep up.”

It’s a tall order. All around us, synthetic marble walls in aug’d abs as hard as marble, and that’s just entry-level augmentation. Mind, body, spirit: they’re all for purchase, and it’s clear almost everyone in here has padded my new employer’s profit margins considerably. Easing restrictions on gene therapy and ever-shrinking implantables allowed Coalescence Corporation and its competitors to begin rolling out augmentation for the masses about ten years ago. In Singapore at first, and in Zurich now, the installation of an aug is a sign of having made it. Whereas the rest of the world is fighting food shortages, folks like the ones here fight boredom, stasis. Money unspent is money wasted, and money unspent on oneself is potential wasted.

Another waitress arrives with our drinks, her tray of green parting a trail through the revelers. Before she can even mix the drinks, Mitzi’s already pouring neat and heavy. The waitress turns to me instead.

“You’re the Coalescence guy, right? I bet you get the best perks, don’t you?”

Her voice cuts through the bass and treble like we’re talking in a library. She must have had vocal work done just for this job.

“I might. Start tomorrow.”

I see Mitzi roll her eyes.

Five shots go red at another table, cutting short our moment. The waitress pinches my arm on her walk away, bodylight cycling between white sheen toga, leopard skin, lingerie. A treat meant just for me.

Mitzi’s eyes confirm she’s judging. Because Mitzi’s always judging.

“Bastien. That thing you think is a girl will leech you of all your in-house discounts, then take her augs up the ladder.”

She’s right, of course. Turicum tonight is a showroom for today’s most eligible human specimens, which also makes it a showroom for credit-hoarding augstitutes. Whereas the club itself has embraced a Roman taste for extravagant titles—we with tables are dubbed Emperors, Senators dance in balcony pods above the Amphitheater, and the DJ, our deity, faces every angle of the dance floor, spinning upon his platform like the great extinct Greek God of Vinyl—its attendees have long-since embraced another of Rome’s themes: worship. For those flush with cash, the human body has become a holy endeavor, and like any self-respecting religion, that kind of devotion demands tribute.

Mitzi slinks onto the dance floor with her big brain and even bigger alcohol tolerance, blending into a throng of human-gods, their teeth enamel augmented to not turn red after that cloned pinot, or brown after a nightcap of New Nile Arabica; armpits that will never again grow hair or sweat anything odorous; fingernails perfectly shaped and permanently painted, with insta-swappable colors for when pantone-inspiration strikes; hair augmented to stay straightened or curled or never grow at all; eyes that see as well in the dark as in the day, eyes that glow red with their owner’s arousal; standard augs of Olympian musculature, hand-model fingers, cheekbones so plump they could pop.

Then there’s what I can’t see: short-and-long term memory expansions, mood enhancers and stabilizers, the eradication of social anxieties, food-and-drink allergies, even smoker’s cough.

And then there’s the shit I hope to never see: bio-hackers hawking stolen DNA, an ex-girlfriend who’s revised whatever turned me off, and anyone at the urinal dumb enough to aug their hog.

These are my people, my new peers.

And tomorrow, they become my customers.

Singapore, 2037

At three in the morning, riding the city’s new monorail feels like passing through REM cycles, a dream-like dart from one Singapore neighborhood to the next. Whole blocks blur, allowing few distinct visuals so that when I arrive at work, I won’t recall any one memory—just the sense I went somewhere. And that now I’ve arrived.

Sleepy or not, I’ll know when I do. The Isle has that effect.

Until then, I witness my city whiz by with the same velocity that transformed it over the last fifteen years. While today in Thailand, millions of refugees escape incessant flooding by foot, we zip around on a brand-new, aboveground monorail, built last year to crisscross all the way north and south from HarbourFront to the Straits of Johor. The monorail connects an upstart, shiny-new Singapore: dozens of state-of-the-art schools, factories, hospitals, even a new soccer stadium with its own hospital.

The rest of the world isn’t enjoying the same growth spurt. In search of their own stability, they feed us billions in foreign military research, dozens of allies and enemies now using us as their common denominator. The resulting influx of GDP has multiplied the number of towers that pierce our skyline tenfold, with the city’s population not far behind. On the train this evening, I see the buildings stand high above Singapore’s tech bazaars, shrunk down along with the devices they once hawked, yet still busy at this late hour. Even fashion, the one industry ripest for 3D-printer counterfeit, has remained a constant vein of green, pumping enough new money through Orchard Road’s world-famous stretch of luxury goods that it’s sprouted whole new tributaries of coffee shops, jazz clubs, VR-cafes—a veritable orchard now, where bloated consumers graze down row after bountiful row. Sure, some of Singapore’s constants remain: no gum, murder-for-murder, the strobes and soju of Geylang. But the kids there, like their parents, still party through every sunrise, rivals only to the insomniac beasts of the Night Safari Nocturnal Zoo—my last visual cue before we pull past the city’s BioDome and Garden—before I finally, fantastically arrive for work.

The Isle.

No transformation or accomplishment is more important than Singapore’s seascraper, floating off shore, as self-sufficient as she is sultry. Fifteen hundred feet of maritime miracle.

Composed of luxury residences, commercial offices, and recreational areas, the floating island of a city is Singapore’s answer to a world in unrest asking what the future can look forward to—but also what the present can do about withering urban shorelines and a crippling energy shortage.

Our island-nation’s answer? Gain independence from both.

The Isle foregoes land and oil altogether, completely self-sufficient thanks to a photovoltaic skin above water and deep sea turbines down below. The solar throughput is enough for our superficial needs—wireless charging, exterior lighting—but it’s the turbines that tackle our main life-support and operational demands, harnessing and harvesting slow, super-dense ocean currents for energy. At the turbines’ depths, water is eight-hundred times more dense than anything a windmill can capture, which means most months we have enough to spare that we could sell it back into the grid. Instead, The Isle stores it for a rainy day while powering a desalination plant in its lower core. That fresh water pumps into steam baths, saunas, and cucumber waters at the fitness center; it’s frozen into ice and carbonated, accompanying happy-hour gins and vodkas; it floats by, bubbles up, or shoots into the air at any one of two dozen fountains, waterfalls, and reflection ponds; it flows like the river in hands of hold-em played at the The Isle’s high-roller’s casino, a perfect nightcap for days spent in the salon or shopping mall or either one of our Michelin-starred restaurants. At The Isle, guests hit golf balls off one side and watch movies on the other; they jog 5Ks through clouds, then scuba through undersea depths. They enjoy the sundeck and infinity pool up top, retreat to five-star penthouse accommodations below. They toast their wives or taste their mistresses. The Isle is an offshore haven for those with the kinds of offshore accounts that don’t know how to separate business and pleasure, because their business is pleasure.

They are my people, if not my peers.

And tonight, they will be my customers.

* * *

“Gurmit!”

It’s never good when I hear the earpiece from inside my pocket. That Lim’s yelling my name through comms thatloudly. It’s that rare volume achieved when I’m confirmed as doing something very wrong, which tonight, could be just about anything. I’m not supposed to be here, let alone watching this, let alone with my earpiece commingling with an illegal gum wrapper. Telling you: just about anything.

I scramble to push the earpiece back in.

“Sir! Sir?”

The wireless bud is so quiet I wonder if my squeeze accidentally triggered a reboot.

In the silence, my eyes return to the v-pitch below. Still standing at centerfield is JJ—yes, just JJ—the pride of Singapore’s national soccer team and top-priority Isle Lofts guest, which is where The Isle’s most high-profile guests go for five-star shuteye. We’re currently across the compound from the Lofts, where we’re both supposed to be—he asleep, resting those precious feet, and me monitoring room temperatures and humidity, prepping the morning shift check-outs, queuing up our small army of in-room breakfast chefs. Alas, someone far more important than anyone I report to has granted JJ absolute exclusivity to privately train with The Isle’s facilities for next month’s championship series, so we both find ourselves here, our proprietary v-pitch. He came in through the front in sandals, cleats strung up around his neck, as I snuck through the back service entrance, watching from shadowed balcony seating far enough for him not to notice. It’s moments like these my RFID for all things Lofts-level is my best perk, besides of course the freedom of working when everyone else is sleeping.

Everyone but JJ, I’ve learned.

He stands at centerfield in total silence and completely alone, like every other 4 a.m. this week. VR-goggles and his own earpiece ensure I blend in with the rest of a raucous, roaring crowd, but he’d have disregarded me anyway. It’s him versus the projection of a goalie standing sentry. Binary-enhanced tunnel vision. Go time.

“Lim?” I ask. “You there?”

From what I understand, they can now code all of an athlete’s moves and ticks, his every hesitation and instinct. Then the magic pixie dust: they use AI to extrapolate decision-making probabilities based on previous decisions and stats. The result is a precise scout-sim output that coaches and players can VR-practice against.

JJ positions himself behind the ball for a free kick, stepping back once, twice—pivoting, then stepping back and turning. A swift approach and kick sends JJ’s ball off the grass he sees through the goggles’ transparent HUD. Depending on if he looks up now to follow his shot or traces its arc later, he’ll transition from our field’s artificial grass to the v-pitch’s lowest range—field-level advertisements, the shins of cameramen and opposing coaches—until he’s only viewing the feed of a 120 frames per second sim of his upcoming match: superimposed layers of atmospherics, stadium lighting, flashing cameras, that monster of a Greek goalie.

The one disappointment is that the Greek appears in JJ’s display only, so I can’t ever know if he scores or not. JJ, a human, is too robotic to guess at, anyway. He just sets up and shoots. Again and again.

My earbud crackles to life.

“Gurmit! Where the fuck are you?”

“On my way back to the front desk,” I lie.

“Your GPS isn’t triangulating!”

“It should be.”

“I need you at the desk now!”

“I’m already on my way.”

My boss, Lim, does this often. Sometimes I think it’s strictly to annoy me, but that would demand Lim’s brain to operate at a capacity rivaling the inflated ball rolling back toward JJ for more abuse.

I backtrack through the pitch’s viewing balcony and enter the main thoroughfare outside. Thanks to two-dozen stacked transparent walkways that connect the higher-levels of The Isle, I can see almost everything at once. Who’s coming out of the fitness center, the late-night buffet, the private screening room. Tonight, it’s silent. It gets more refracted the farther you look, one glass tunnel bouncing off the next, so what I think I see at first, I tell myself I cannot be seeing.

But then I hear it.

Not through my earbud, which has again gone quiet. In front of me. In the distance. Coming closer. Fast.

Every corner turned and new tunnel entered brings whatever is screaming and sprinting toward the far side of the Lofts closer to me.

Lim explodes into my ear. “Stop her! Stop her!”

“Who?”

“Running — toward — you — female — Caucasian — mid-fifties!”

It’s up to me. I approach the tunnel the sprinter will come out from next, wondering all the way why a fifty-year-old woman is running through one of the finest hotels in the world. I assume it’s a bad trip, a cocktail of meds gone wrong.

“Turning the corner,” I report. “Got her.”

There’s just one glass tunnel left between us and I see my prey clearer than ever. She’s thin. American-thin. Long blonde hair and a baggy sweatshirt above something tighter, maybe yoga pants. She sounds like whatever someone about to be murdered sounds like. A fierce, angry dread.

She turns the last tunnel and does not appear to slow down upon seeing me, arms outstretched, blocking the bulk of the passageway. Instead, she speeds up.

“Stop!”

Her fists piston up and down like she’s done this sprint-at-top-velocity thing before. A track star or maybe a HIIT junky. Your average American housewife professionally training for nothing.

“STOP!” I scream.

She’s twenty feet away when she looks up and screams. Whatever she sees, I don’t. But whatever she sees is real to her, and with seemingly the same clarity that JJ did on the v-pitch. She turns back around and ten feet away now, looks through me, no different than the glass tunnels I peered through in pursuit of her. To her, I don’t exist. Maybe none of this does.

The drones! is the last thing she screams.

I form tackle her, low to high, stopping her with a shoulder into her waist the way a seatbelt might. I feel the air explode out of her lungs and wait for her to start coughing, but on the ground below me, she stays oddly still. Her eyes water. She stares up through the top of The Isle at a black morning sky still defrosting, our ember of a star rising, still too far for the other clouds to catch. The woman begins to whimper like a child.

Then she starts screaming again, her panicked mantra filling the hall.

The drones. The drones. The drones. 

“Lim, you see my position?”

“On — my — way!”

I turn back to the American.

“What drones?”

She doesn’t stop repeating it, victim to some kind of panic attack, maybe a full-blown hallucination.

The drones. The drones.

“You’re okay. I promise you’re fine. No drones. None here.”

Suddenly a voice behind me—a deep baritone, deeply annoyed.

“I got it,” the man in the pinstripe suit says, stabbing the woman’s neck with a triggered syringe.

The woman convulses once, twice, and then begins snoring loud enough to make the man in the suit laugh.

“They always black out so quick,” he says, still chuckling.

“The hell?”

“Appreciate your help,” he answers. “She was having a severe panic attack. PTSD. Survived the Los Angeles drone attacks.”

I recall the throng of LA-based tourists who came two days ago. All with addresses in the Palisades and bank accounts healthy enough to allow victims of war to make the quick pivot to vacation. I don’t remember her specifically, but there were dozens. All assigned to one block of rooms.

“Are you her husband?” I ask.

“I’m treating her.”

“You the one who set up the block of rooms? For all the LA guests?”

“They’re all on the Axcentric account.”

Axcentric Systems has its headquarters here in The Isle. They’re a charter member with the kind of uninhibited access through the building that makes my RFID-tag look like a charm bracelet.

Lim finally arrives, all 115 kilos of him. It looks like he swam in the koi pond and then sat in the steam room. I wonder if this guy in the suit has another sedative to calm the look in my boss’s frantic eyes.

“You killed her?”

The man and I look at each other and he gives another of those chuckles.

“No, Lim,” I answer. “Do you not hear that snoring?”

He might not, his wheezing and all.

“I’m her doctor,” interrupts the man, checking her pulse. “She’s fine.”

“She’s okay?” Lim asks, incredulous. “She sprinted by my front desk in hysterics.”

“She’s fine now. She had an episode. I’m going to take her back to where we’re treating her, and I’d appreciate your wiping this hall’s security feeds. Guests of her stature demand…discretion.”

Lim’s eyes again—less frantic this time than offended.

“I’m going to need to see some sort of—”

“Lim,” I say sternly. “I ID’d him.”

Those eyes know I didn’t.

“No harm in double checking.”

“Lim. They’re good to go.”

The man gives me a wink Lim doesn’t catch—poor Lim, can’t catch anything—grunting as he hoists the woman up and over his shoulder. We watch them walk back down the hall, drool leaking out of her mouth, tracing between pinstripes.

I’ll tell Lim later that the guy wasn’t a doctor. That he didn’t want anything to do with this, or the paperwork that would follow it. That I saved his huge ass.

But when I turn back to Lim, he’s looking at me like I caused the whole scene.

“What is it?”

“Are you…” Lim asks, tilting his head, “are you chewing gum?”

For the briefest of moments, I’m fucked, but just the briefest because then there’s JJ, Singapore’s hero, now mine, approaching us from down the hall with a gym bag sashed across his shoulders and VR-goggles tethered tight. Lim and I hug the sides of the glass hallway. We make room for the king of kicks as he toes down the middle of the hall. At first, we think the hall’s newest mantra is meant for us—Thank you, thanks very much, I love you too—but the words are for nobody in particular, just as we are nobody in particular. Oblivious, JJ passes between us signing invisible autographs for a legion of adoring, virtual fans.

Spellbound, Lim never sees me turn away. He never sees me swallow my gum.

::MODULE_2.0//:INITIALIZING…

Zurich, 2063

At first, it feels just like Turicum. Seven doubles in, seeing double. That sense of being there and not, and then your dinner coming up and out.

But I don’t vomit. The six-year old in front of me does. I know I’m dreaming so the boy with the blood coming out of his eyes shouldn’t scare me. My breathing doesn’t need to heave like his. It’s up to me, I know he’s not real, so when he vomits again and a coagulated mess of red and purple hits the ground; when he falls down and his little hand leaves a palm print in his own insides, I tell myself to stop. Get it together. Get out.

It’s enough to turn me around, transport me back across Singapore, quiet as Chernobyl and just as deluded, just as full of death. City officials told everyone to stay inside so there are the boy’s dead parents, still holding each other in bed, windows shut, dust masks kissing. The cocktail of chemicals in the atmosphere was different here than on the block where it hit the boy. Air is more yellow than green, more Rhenium than Neodymium. The parents got theirs peaceful—coughing and suffocation, but at least some awareness. Enough time to lie down, embrace, stop breathing as one. To give a thought to who I come back to now, their boy, blinded by the blood, calling through red for help, for mommy, for nothing when it overcomes. His skin begins to singe from the inside out. Another school down the block will come down with tummy aches but the wrong breeze means this boy will receive more toxins than air. It means before he’s even passed, alone in his sandbox, his skin will begin to scab and scale, ghostly white flakes that will fall, delicate as he, with final breaths.

I wake up screaming.

Then cussing, because this nightmare is my own goddamn fault. Coverage of the three-year anniversary of the “Singapore Disaster” is playing on the bedroom display. It was probably playing all night, infecting me from the moment I stumbled home and blacked out.

I rub my eyes and sleepwalk into the shower. I take punishment from the hottest water I can bear. I get dressed. I head to work. I ignore the newscasters who debate whether Coalescence Corporation paid the right price for their role in the most lethal chemical leak in history.

If I want to know that, I can ask them when I get there.

* * *

Besides the herds of hybrid-bicycles, cheating up and down inclines on battery-powered pedals, Zurich is connected by a reliable labyrinth of trains, trams, buses and boats. Long before we begin work at our desks, shoulders hunched, we travel shoulder-to-shoulder, packing into train cars that push carefully calculated ETAs into our daily calendars so that nary a second is lost. The Swiss Way! Today I’m especially grateful for that ping and haptic vibrato, as this’ll be my first day in the Corporate Communications department at Coalescence, and I’m still one train and a transfer away; because, hungover as I am, it’d be stupid not to take every advantage Zurich has to offer — like air.

With no superstorms to worry about, Zurich’s green lungs have blossomed, no longer limited to the vast forests from Adlisberg to Zürichberg. New city bylaws have planted trees and gardens atop most buildings, painting the city in splotches of intermittent green dots like an impressionist portrait. My neighborhood in west Zurich, Industriequartier, the city’s former industrial area, has enjoyed not only the greatest transformation, but also the deepest infusion of green. With so much new development, we’ve seen “sprouting” at its most innovative. Prime Tower might have been the first superscraper, but now there are half-a-dozen, and the newest ones rotate outside panels of vegetation east-to-west with the sun. All that city-mandated sprouting was just the start. Gone are Industriequartier’s choking smokestacks, toxic runoff, worn-out timecards. Now we boast puffs of recycled air, spools of optic fiber and workers like me, always on, but paid handsomely. The Westside factories that once specialized in outputting sheets and bottles of glass have been replaced by enormous structures composed of just that—towering see-through specters of solar-absorbent compounds that remind me of the transparent columns back at Turicum, except teeming with transactions, not togas.

I take another deep breath and it’s a lungful of Zurich’s finest that does it.

For a moment I’m no longer heading for the 7:48a at Hardbrücke, or dropping Mitzi at her pad, but back with the boy, his parents. Sand and skin. The visions of Singapore from my nightmare and the newsfeed this morning arrive swiftly and I attempt to swallow them down, no different from the other nausea I woke up with.

I try to focus on the intersection—all its blinking reds. On the trolley that’s coming.

I’m grateful for the interruption suddenly buzzing in my pocket—a wave and crash of haptic updates that flows through my pocket and every other pedestrian’s in the immediate area. Sometimes these beacons warn of global disaster. A little ping portending some massive new catastrophe: the worsening water shortage in Cairo, some new crumbling economy or alliance, the insanity of our global technological arms race, even as food aid goes hand to mouth. The world outside of Zurich is in unstable shambles—yet even with all our connectedness, it still feels a world away.

This time, at least, the update’s just a train schedule. One by one, my fellow pedestrians and I learn if we’ve lost precious seconds or whole minutes.

Time is fast like that. Go back just a few years and all this was theirs—Zurich wasn’t the world’s brightest beacon, Singapore was. It’s there where Coalescence Corporation got started on consumer augmentation—it’s there where almost every technology and advancement we take for granted got started. Enterprise, consumer, military: every week some new Singapore announcement sent companies and whole countries scrambling to invest, invest, invest. They built a research bed unlike any other in history thanks to a government that made our friendly tax laws look downright dystopian.

The Incident changed everything.

One hundred thousand died on day one. In the few years since, as that number climbed toward a million, Singapore’s status as the world’s beacon burned out, its money and talent flowing to Zurich. There are rumors that Singapore’s gangsters have taken over some of the worst hit areas, slowly repopulating, cockroaches after a nuke. But the city won’t ever catch up. The gap just got too big.

It’s not so different here. I see it every day beyond this crosswalk, on the actual train. Aug and reg shoulder-to-shoulder—but aug standing a head taller. And multitasking. And multilingual. Even though non-augs could use the 22-hour workday to catch up, it’s the augs who don’t suffer sleep deprivation or pack on fat or need help learning new skills. Just like with Singapore’s survivors, if you have the credit, hormone and gene therapy can deliver enough mood and memory reconditioning to change the narrative forever. It’s just that ever since then, the people who need it most can afford it least. And the ones who can? They’re toasting in togas.

At last, the trolley we’ve been waiting for passes.

The E-Tram, a modified Schweizer Standardwagen, gingerly goes by, half-century old green paint chipping off as it huffs and puffs up our modest hill. Since the early 2000s, E-Trams have collected unwanted electronics and appliances, alleviating the need for illegal dumping by stopping in all ten neighborhoods each week. On a special day, you might see a two-door fridge, or a microwave and toaster, bricks soon mortared in, made invisible by vintage keyboards, hair straighteners, alarm clocks. On an extra special day, you’ll spot the rare and endangered corded phone, its frayed tail poking out through the pile. You’ll stare, as I do, at our wasted past, the innovations stacked like bodies in a plague wagon, the E-Tram patrolling onward for something newly poor or broken or dead, pulling dutifully for ash.

Singapore, 2037

“Gurmit!”

This time, I’m yelled at because I’m taking too long in the bathroom; and not by Lim, but my father, Adnan; and thank god, not due to any traumatized tourists, but my slightly-less traumatized mother, tired of rushing out the eggs just so they’ll congeal.

“One second!”

“Already twenty seconds! Respect your mother and I!”

I will not win this argument for many reasons, so I return to my reflection. I’ve never particularly liked this version. It’s the tired one that stumbles back into its childhood home after a hard night working a job that underpays so savagely that it must return here night after night. The bathroom where I first pooped and suffered through puberty now hosts a reflection ravaged by the boredom of what came next: adulthood. Two black circles under two red eyes; dry skin at the corners of lips that mouth-breathed processed air. Hideous, but a canvas nonetheless, which is what the Axcentric ad calls it on the projection behind me.

You are your masterpiece. 

It’s a fitting tag. If you want to look like priceless art, it’ll come at a price with lots of zeroes.  For now, even with all the new money flowing into Singapore, what they’re calling “elective human augmentation” is something only the Lofts’ wealthiest guests can afford. I’d always thought Axcentric’s off-site locations handled actual procedures, leaving The Isle’s to handle research trials, patents, credit checks—but after last night, I don’t know. They’re doing something with that block of rooms.

“Gurm.”

That time: mother.

I dry my hands, fly downstairs, take my seat.

“Sorry.”

She looks at me like I just came out of the womb. Helpless Gurmie in need of food, sleep. A burping.

“Always sorry,” my father echoes. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“When I was your age,” I say, sitting up taller, “I worked five night-shifts! Simultaneously! Sometimes, the sun wouldn’t come up for twelve days, and I worked all dozen night shifts five times simultaneously without a single cup of coffee! But y-o-u! Lazy! Tired! Failure!”

My father laughs his version of a laugh. Imagine a squeeze bottle failing to eject that last bit of ketchup. A sad, snorting splatter—frustration as exhalation.

“Besides our son here,” mother says, dropping a heaping plate of toast and the kaya spread, “the only ones working this many nightshifts are the 54. Neighbors probably think we’re housing a criminal.”

My father looks me up and down incredulously. “Him?”

“What, I couldn’t be a criminal?”

That ketchup laugh again.

“No, Gurmit. You’re a talker.”

I suppose I should be insulted. If you’re going to join a gang in Singapore, you could choose far worse than the 54. For almost 150 years, our local syndicate has lived up to its namesake, the 54 Immortals. Founded by Chinese and Indian immigrants, the 5 stands for “no,” the 4 for a similarly pronounced Chinese word for “death.” That namesake, No-Death, is just what the 54 Immortals have done since the time of Goh Qiant, surviving decades of instability on firm footholds of high-class brothels, friendly drug dens (half of Geylang), and leadership based on bloodlines. Nobody not named Goh ascends 54, but 54 itself has ascended, evolving from boosting food and clothing supplies from International Aid drops to supplying soldiers with Advanced Military Tech. And as the city’s has gotten richer, they’ve grown from escorting call girls around town to delivering them straight to SAF officers and Singapore City officials.

“You never know, father. I tackled a woman at work today.”

Punctuating the sentence is mother’s trusty egg timer. Black coffee, kaya toast, soft-boiled eggs. Nothing more Singaporean; nothing better.

The timer shrills on as my parents look at me, expecting to offer more details. The troubling part is they don’t even seem surprised. They just want the story. I think that might be what parental love is. Fear of every single thing in the world that could conceivably hurt your precious child, but never the fear that your precious child could ever hurt it back.

That, and the way mother heats butter into molten golden lava for our morning kaya.

“She was sprinting down the halls,” I continue, “totally nuts-o. Screaming about drones attacking. Apparently she’s from LA, and you know, the thing there. She was at The Isle for treatment.”

My mother brings over the white pepper and soy sauce, finally sitting down.

“Poor thing. Was she going to run over a railing? Fall?”

I know mother’s just fishing, trying to get me to backtrack over some phantom lie from when I started. She’s convinced that any floating building is bound to tip.

“I told you a million times. Every hallway is self-enclosed. If you ever came to visit, you’d know that.”

“We have nothing to wear to such a place.”

I motion, indicating to mother what I’m wearing. Our Lofts-issued “performance polos.”

“I like it. One less thing for me to iron around this house.”

“Anyway. I was talking about how I tackled a woman.”

Father pauses the destruction of his yolk.

“Your heroic tackle. Did it at least give her a concussion?”

“You want her to have been concussed?”

“It would suggest you tackle like a man.”

“Well. No. I don’t think so.”

“Like I said,” father concludes, tearing into his toast. “A talker.”

“I just stopped her. I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“This is the whole problem,” he answers, a new yellow-tipped corner now in the air, “with all of your generation. You’re talkers! Negotiators! Nobody wants to hurt one other!”

I look at my mother. Send her the why-does-my-dad-want-me-to-commit-assault look. She motions for me to eat while the spread is still warm. She knows he’s in full-on Angry-Adnan mode.

“Your tower, with all its rich people—these people who are followed and emulated—they are just too afraid to live on land. To commit! They hole up on an island next to an island. They pay by the night, just like their governments back home! No long-term thinking…only leasing! Where are the countries, the borders? Now it’s airspace, alliances! Everyone afraid to compete, interact. Nobody producing, only importing. Russia buys Poland’s debt. Germany and France leave the Euro. EU joins with Russia! A Common Defense Pact! A Mutual Defense Agreement! All these pieces of paper…these little passive truces. It’s like the world’s happy to sit and wait for disaster.”

“Dad.”

“Lunatics.”

“Okay.”

“Heads in the sand.”

“Okay.”

“Deserve what’s—“

Mother’s chopsticks slam down on her plate.

“Adnan.”

You’d think the egg timer went off again it’s so silent.

“Just look out there,” father finally says, motioning out our small apartment’s window at the newly minted laser turret. “Every damn nation has a collection of those now! How’s it make any of us safer if we all sign the same paper, install the same stupid equipment?”

He’s referring to the ground-based megawatt drone defense system. After LA’s attacks, the technological arms race hit its highest gear, with everyone who signed the Winslow Accords installing a D.E.A.D. system beside their most strategically significant sites—high-value buildings, airports, stadiums. Overnight, defense systems sprouted like dandelions, the metal towers blooming like weeds popping between slabs of sidewalk.

He’s right. Mother and I know it. But what can we do? We’re in an important city working on important initiatives for important people. We’re making important advancements and whether or not the world’s better or worse afterward isn’t for us to judge. It’s for us to forge.

Given my status as the family talker, I talk. It’s time to force a change of subject.

“So. How about these superstorms? Hear the next one’s approaching Tokyo?”

::MODULE_3.0//:INITIALIZING…

Zurich, 2063

The dry run is over.

Coalescence Corporation’s new Zurich headquarters were completed exactly sixty days ago, but today—after countless training sessions, debriefs, and VR-tours—the building will finally open for business, extra-staffed and fully operational.

I experience Turicum déjà vu. It might be the sheer amount of glass and money, the newness of the building. Or maybe it’s the sheer number of augs. Company vets who have taken advantage of in-house augmentation for years walk in rank-and-file with us, mere us, a smallish, rather average army of new recruits—a class of two hundred filtering in for the very first time, popping our cherries along with the new HQ. The architects, on-hand at the entrance, sipping champagne, look like proud parents terrified of prom night. That agro blend of awareness and acknowledgement—“Do not dream of hurting her” mixed with “There’s no avoiding some damage.”

At new-employee orientation a week ago, I don’t think any of this dawned on us then like it does now. We bought in that One Coalescence Way was a new beginning for the company, but they explained the new headquarters as a way of flexing our vertical muscle: combining networks of global satellite offices, consumer and enterprise research labs, pretty much anything that was on the books (and especially all the rest off of them) in one behemoth building—to coalesce, just as our name pledged, into a stunning glass monument to our impact on the world.

But today we realize this isn’t just a tower—it’s also a fortress.

During construction, those architects over there with the teary eyes were celebrated not just for One’s design but also its new dynamic exterior. A proprietary blend of colloidal quantum dots would allow the surface of the building to absorb solar energy on every surface, powering a circuit of conductive coating and liquid-crystal molecules. The result was supposed to be the world’s first self-sufficient building exterior, able to fluctuate between clear and opaque glass by individual pane—a kind of self-powered tapestry of refracted and reflected sunlight.

Today, however, we’ve arrived to find the building not transparent at all. It’s solid-steel gray.

Our first day at Coalescence will begin in total lockdown.

The building stands as tall and silver-plated as a giant rocket awaiting blastoff. The quantum dots have assembled into some third, unannounced setting— a reinforced exterior that appears as cosmetically strong as structurally, almost like a Kevlar dust cover on a tank. If I had to guess, One can bear ballistics, if not a full-on plane.

Down in the building’s shadow, a few dozen armed guards patrol the perimeter but like most humans in combat these days, they are more for show than anything else. It’s the swarm of drones above them that do the important recon, feeding real-time radar, infrared, and spectrum datastreams back into sub-basement command centers that beam them back up to the roof where I can see direct-energy anti-aircraft lasers rotate back and forth across the city’s skyline with an a 3D printer’s preciseness. Mini-D.E.A.D.S. The only way not to feel safe with those on the roof is to make too much eye contact with the encampments of exoskeleton’ed strike teams at the intersection closest to the building. They look terrifyingly irritated.

A new haptic alert hits my mobile. It’s from One, the building a contact like any other boss or friend or Turicum waitress (her final sales pitch: “there are more augs than meets the eye”).

Two sharp, shrill pulses announce the update as CC; a three-second tremor confirms our threat level.

Green—yellow—orange.

The building has received a threat, but it remains business as usual.

Inside, it’s just that, so normal it’s abnormal. The lines at the body scanners and biometric stations move quickly. A few couriers get processed in the visitors center. On the far east side of the lobby, I see a small batch of underdressed employees—combat boots, urban fatigues under sweats, canvas bags in place of briefcases—enter a side-elevator seemingly accessible solely to them. The rest of us head to the main bank of elevators, hungrily awaiting our orderly rows of scientists and technicians, executives and admins, underwriters and lawyers. Each batch is delivered to their floor with an individualized newsstream, never realizing sensors in the lift are scanning vitals for anyone that might be catching a virus or a cold and reporting the results to HR. To most, this is one last, calm moment to sip siphon coffees. To let ears pop.

But not for my new team.

ComAffairs will always be on their own permanent version of orange, a full-fledged triage mode we simply call “work.” Now in One, we will sit on the top floor with the CEO’s support staff, because, I suppose, we are cousins once removed. My new team may not be setting his schedule or selecting his suits, but that’s because we’re less worried about window-dressing than bricks flying through said windows—quantum dot security-drapes or not.

My role along with the rest of Coalescence’s Communications Affairs department will be to manage all things public-facing, be it the punctuation in a press release or the legality of a government inquiry. If things go well, I’ll never enter that east-side elevator, nor meet the dressed-down dudes who frequent it. We’ll be too busy establishing stances and reinforcing partnerships, executing damage control if they backfire.

ComAffairs are the shepherds of every corporate exit strategy, allowing plans to graze, grow strong—then we execute. In many ways, we are the CEO, if not his actual decisions. We control what gets compartmentalized versus what gets congratulated.

When the elevator slides open, Julien is waiting for me.

“This way. Debrief already started.”

Julien is the man who recruited me away from the pharmaceutical company I called home from university onward. He is tall, angular, and impossible to miss thanks to a mop of messy red hair some of us suspect is artificial.

“In here,” he says, pointing at the entrance ahead.

For a company that builds humanoid combat robots and revolutionized battlefields with exoskeletons, our department’s conference room has a fitting name.

The War Room. 

Inside, a breakfast spread of acai, yogurt, and a mound of undisturbed danishes sit centered on the table beside emptied carafes of tea and coffee. I see why the livestreams projecting on all four walls disposed of any appetite. We have ourselves a bright swathe of morning bullshit.

The sitrep, a situation report, includes a new report from our contact inside the burgeoning aug black-market, who reports Singapore has a chance to cut deep into optics margins. A gang there has replicated our patents on iris hue manipulation and are close to night-vision, with plans to price both at prices ten-percent ours by the end of the month. There’s also a consortium of universities claiming our helium-based rigid-bodied airships aren’t the transport miracle we claimed. New numbers on fractional distillation from natural gas—even with our helium extraction efficiencies—might mean Coalescence Corporation needs to find new, unique ways of filling vacuum transfer lines (or the bank accounts of those who can protect it). Then there’s the anti-robot demonstration heading straight for One. Five hundred people, most not even from Zurich, marching for change that will never, ever come. They’re why we’re in shade.

Nothing about the ten-year anniversary, surprisingly. My nightmare won’t extend to work.

Julien motions to the five team-members talking on various screenshares and private lines. “We’ve got these,” he says, awaking another trayed alert and flicking it into my display. “This one’s you. Been briefed yet?”

“No.”

“Your first assignment then. Bon appétit.”

I’m still digesting the brief when I realize every person in the room is looking at me.

Was I reading out loud? is the first thought.

Am I still wearing a toga? is the second.

I’m still looking ahead at Julien when I realize what might be happening, who might be causing it, and in that same precise moment, I swear I see Julien’s hair flatten down in response, tinting darker into a matte brown.

I knew it was aug’d, I think, and then snap back into focus.

“Welcome to the team, Bastien,” the voice says.

I turn with my hand already extended.

“Sir,” I hear myself say, all focus on the handshake. I’ve heard the man can squeeze syrup from firewood.

“This will be a nice first assignment for you,” the CEO of Coalescence Corporation says to me.

Me. 

“I look forward to it, Mr. Väst.”

At a sturdy, sinewy six foot six, Coalescence’s CEO stands an imposing two-heads taller than most, with at least two more heads’ worth of imposing intellectual horsepower to boot. The stark blue eyes staring down at me now, newb of his all-important ComAffairs crew, are renowned for holding an ocean’s worth of data, numbers we’ve all seen him fish out on-demand for legislative committees, internal town halls, public media interviews. But today I see first-hand that those eyes are also impenetrable, a kind of vault that shields him so fully that eye contact makes me feel like I’m looking into a fun house mirror—that I’m cartoonishly short and ghoulishly simple, a deformed human compared to the specimen I’m staring at.

If you’re a man—which Mitzi might claim I am not—Väst just makes you feel insecure. He is, in many ways, Zurich’s perfect output personified. Born here to Swiss parents—built here by his Swiss employer. The company can time its internal clocks to his daily comings and goings, its bonuses to his bi-annual marathons, its quarterly earnings reports to the charity dinners he cooks himself. The Väst Story is a rags-to-riches for the augmented age. He has worked for some form of Coalescence Corporation since starting in data entry at one of its earlier acquisitions as a teen, growing with the company until he’s very literally become its larger-than-life representative. His one brain can do it all: store a database’s worth of data, visualize and load-test with an engineer’s exactness, execute an action plan like any project manager or territory director. But it’s greatest feat might be compartmentalization: Väst builds technologies for the betterment of mankind, but is just as happy to sell it to the highest bidder, keeping Coalescence’s public offerings separate from our other revenue streams and sources, and even kept off of our own omniscient ComAffairs dashboard. Väst’s vaults all this in his head, and maybe with those shady guys in the east-elevator—nobody else.

Whereas on most, dozens of mental and physical augmentations might blur the lines of what’s human, Väst has somehow become the tasteful embodiment of augs done right, which makes him our company and industry’s pinnacle, the pedestal who also talks on one. It doesn’t hurt that he’s one charming dude.

Väst smiles and points at my display.

“We had an augmentation customer pass away late last night, a few hours after leaving one of our legacy facilities. It should have been a standard lung capacity boost—we’ve seen the demand for those spike here on the Singapore anniversary. Would you please look into it, considering the size of the potential recall?”

The word recall has almost instantly transitioned Julien’s hair even further into a near comb-over. Väst’s eyes haven’t blinked.

“Yes, sir.”

“One more thing,” Väst says to me, motioning to walk with him out the door.

The team resumes talking as soon as we exit. Sound-scrubbers installed into the War Room’s entrance immediately mask anything said to us or any other passersby.

Väst and I stand quietly in that silence. I feel acutely judged in that stillness. The quiet is invasive but invigorating, as if the day ahead is pushing out through the muted membrane of the conference room’s entrance, an osmosis I feel my heart begin to race to. This high is precisely how Julien described the job on his first call to gauge my interest. That call was as surprising as this one-on-one with Väst, as Julien’s what we call a Supermanager, someone who makes ten-times what the rest of his team makes. You’d expect an HR bot, some recruiting algorithm to blast out recruitment notes. Instead, Julien had done his homework, asked about particular situations I’d triaged back when I was in big-pharma. This conversation with Väst has a similar vibe. There’s an adrenaline spike working on a stage this big, but there’s also the Supermanager-like discrepancy between us, which only increases it, puts everything on an insanely higher order of magnitude. Julien makes ten-times what I make but Väst earns whole countries’ GDPs. It’s a thrill knowing Väst had this conversation planned, hardcoded into his day plan like any other piece of data racing through his souped-up super-brain. It makes this gig worth it.

“I didn’t want to mention this in front of the team,” he says, pointing through the muted doorway, “or on any recorded channels, but when you go, I’d love for you to pull down and wipe any secondary transponders the victim might have had installed.”

Confirming, I touch my left temple, where training said they’re usually installed.

“It’s actually behind the left ear, into the hairline.”

I nod. I don’t ask how he knows about it.

Or why I now do.

Sometimes, I think, the best thing to do in a department called Communication Affairs is probably just limit your communication.

Singapore, 2037

I know something is wrong because I hear it clear as day.

“Gurmit!”

Something is very wrong because it is clear as day.

“Wake up!”

The third clue: that it’s mother, because if it was Adnan waking me up, he would’ve done it silently, strictly physically, simply to accentuate that all I do is talk. Father would have tossed my comforter off the bed, then thrown me on top of it; ruffled my hair, then rifled me with a pillow. A splatter laugh on the way out of the room, now dark, because he just got home from work, and I still had yet to clock in.

But there stands my sweet, pacifist mother, peeking through a doorframe lit by bright sunshine.

Trouble.

“Gurmit, I’m sorry, I know you’re tired, but you have to go into the office.”

I can still smell the kaya toast from earlier.

“What?”

“You left your mobile in the kitchen after breakfast. It rang twice and then you got several DMs. I peeked. It looks important.”

“Lim?”

“New contact.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Two hours.”

She tosses me the phone, already lit up in notifications. The first is my sleep scanner. It confirms I enjoyed one full R.E.M. before a swift end to the second one. I’m alerted that I have an +80% chance of catching a cold based on diet, exercise, exposure and last night’s sleep patterns.

“Thanks, mother.”

The next batch of notifications are from an anonymous contact. Its IP address is like nothing I’ve seen before. It has three less digits and lettering in it.

// You helped my patient today @ vpitch. Come in asap. 100TH //

It takes a moment to realize my teeth are grinding along with the coffee beans downstairs.

* * *

I responded while boarding the monorail.

On way.

The daytime ride is vastly different from last night’s. Sure, we’re still zooming along, but this time it’s not just blurs of neighborhoods I see, but their borders and landmarks—the Straight due south, shiny new megawatt class D.E.A.D. System on its shore, The Isle just off of it.

Already, I see the 100th.

The top floor before the roof holds the Lofts’ most exclusive collection of suites. No credit card company big spenders or loyalty upgrades to get one of these. Like any other skybox, they are lent only to the deepest pockets, corporations and the politicians they court.

I check my mobile again.

Whoever sent me on this urgent trip hasn’t responded.

We fly south. Past old neighborhoods, new ones, old ones with new ones built atop, around and between, installed like updates to any other motherboard Singapore-herself gives birth to. We pass schools with real sandboxes and pitches with real goals until we hit the neighborhoods where recess occurs on giant grass fields—holo-playgrounds that pit kids with dodgeballs against cartoonishly friendly dragons or drops their football games into giant coliseums of sober, golf-clapping hooligans.

Block by block, the city gets cleaner, more angular and efficient, more beautiful, as if the tide that passes through The Isle can only wash so high up Singapore’s shores. Eyes locked on the 100th, I barely notice what Adnan would have gawked at—that new D.E.A.D. system’s sub-ballistic barrels, up close and personal, pointing south toward an unstable world. It looks almost fake, statuesque, less combat-ready than a monument to readiness—a giant ray gun reflecting rays of light.

We arrive shortly thereafter. Not sure who or what I’m reporting to, I leave my black Lofts polo in a bag, choosing instead to enter The Isle in civilian clothes. No wearables embedded in their stitching, so I don’t auto-sync with the building. Unlike our customers upstairs, my clothes won’t tell a room’s thermostat to warm or cool, or a waiter’s tablet whether to offer a hot or cold beverage. I walk in from off-the-grid and stay there, using my RFID to gain swift access to the 100th floor. 

Though the velocity upwards makes my ears pop, the first sound on arrival is one I still recognize.

A pinstriped man’s chuckle.

“Sorry if we woke you.”

I shrug.

“I’m Christian.”

“Gurmit.”

He nods like he knows, then turns and begins walking away. I jump out of the lift in order to not get taken back down.

Normally, this is the only elevator bank that serves the Lofts’ 100th floor. At night, that means Lim or I usually sit at the desk ahead, dutifully in wait for a guest’s demands or approach. We have lots of rules on etiquette and timeliness but the first one refers to attendance: someone must always stand sentry here. It’s the precise reason I know I can watch JJ at sunrise—I know Lim won’t leave the reception foyer until I come back.

When we arrive at the desk, nobody is behind its monitor. No backlit display indicates someone will be right back. The entire area is abandoned.

“Is this what you need?” I ask. “Did the daytime desk operator call in sick?”

“This?” Christian asks, surprised. “Not at all. This is purposeful.”

He lifts his arms in each direction and as they pass my shoulder, I shudder, suddenly remembering that syringe he keeps somewhere on his person. The one filled with knock-out juice.

“All this,” he says, motioning across the foyer, the two branching halls, even the ocean outside, ”is why we called you in today.”

“The whole floor?”

“We’ve rented the 100th. Every suite. Also most of the 99th.”

He must see me attempt the math.

“Don’t worry, Gurmit. We can afford it. Axcentric Systems has been at The Isle since the beginning. Without our commitment, I’m not sure we have those turbines down there that keep the lights on. Helps when we need to call in a favor now and again.”

I recall the woman with PTSD. The other LA tourists who just arrived.

“What do you need with that many lofts?”

“Good question,” he says, walking away again.

As I scramble to keep up for the second time, I sneak a peek back toward the desk. The monitor is off—and not just the screen, but the wireless charging station below it. Christian and his team must have switched the whole pod offline after Lim and I left.

We amble down the hall like we’re here on vacation, heading to our suite. But compared to Christian’s tailored jacket and super-shined shoes, my hastily-selected warm-up jacket and sneakers suggest we’re not friends, but that I’m some kind of au pair or maybe a masseuse, and then suddenly I feel that way—trailing behind like hired help, someone unofficial, someone about to be paid under the table in cash.

His pinstripes straighten at the entrance to suite 104.

JJ was staying in this very room before he was granted full residence two days ago. I’d thought it was another perk from management, like exclusivity on the v-pitch, but now realize it might have been this man in the suit. Christian flicked away a superstar like an ant.

A wave from his mobile should unbolt the lock, log his entry, alert the staff. It should activate an algorithm that analyzes the weather outside and time of day, distill what he’s eaten and how much he’s exercised, check his calendar to see if he can relax or has work. The lofts we offer should calibrate to their clients precisely.

What we open to is vastly different.

“Welcome,” Christian says, swinging open the door. I barely hear it.

The room isn’t the room. Enhanced soundproofing and an insulated subfloor kept the sound out of the hall but now, inside, the screaming hits me in the gut.

For a moment all I can do is stare, eyes watering, at something I don’t understand. Gone are the computer-controlled blinds and window dressing, replaced by blackout infrared-proof curtains. Same for any furniture that wasn’t installed into the floor or a wall stud. Luxury and light have been pushed to the edges and left in shadow, the room remade into a triage center of some sort. In the main suite, about a dozen gurneys have been rolled into spotlit-broken darkness, each bed paired with a lab station of medical instruments, monitors, and a workbench. A series of overhead fixtures rain sterile white light on each little partition’s nucleus, its patients, some wild-eyed and animalistic, pawing at their restraints, and others tranquil, eyes peeking over vintage paperbacks. Between them lie a range of ragers—drooling on themselves, spitting and cussing at phantoms, a group harmonizing on notes of anguish, mourning, and terror. He takes four earbuds out of his pocket. Touches two pairs together, syncing them, and hands me one.

“For the racket.”

I put the plugs in and follow him to the closest bed—a middle-aged man with a haggard beard but boyish complexion.

“̤̋̾͑H̠͉̻ͪ̓͛ͥ̎ͫ̆eͦͭͪ҉ ̏ͪ̀̈́҉̖͍͍͎͓h̢̹̲̩̦ͧͯͤͅḁ̢ͦ̂s̙̮͖̣͖̤͕ͭ̋ͪ͘n͔̙̹͍̫̈͐̓̂̂’̺̞͔̭̻̒̍ť̘͓̰͕̫̕ ͖̰̠̅͛̋͐ͫ̑ͧ̀s̠ͣ̅̽̐ͨḧ̗̤̖̼́͆͠a̘̭͚͝v͈̫ͨ͠e̛͓̠͖̺͆ͣ͒̋d̥̰͇͍̦͉̞͊ͫ͌̃͘ ̥͎̼͙͈̘̯ͮ̽ͥͣͥ͊̉s̷͈͖i̡͍̫̜̮͒̀ͧͯ̐̓̚n̹ͭ̑͛̓ͬ͑ͫ̀c̷̝̣̝̬e̽̾͒̍̇͠ ҉t̼ͣ͒̐̑ͥ̓h͞e̩͙ͪ̒ͧͦ́ ͫ҉̟̪̙̮̲̼ͅd̛̠̥̫̖̱̖̓̈̾͗̇r̰̰͓̖̰̲͉ͩǫ̙̫͖͎n̘͇̙̮̪̠͖̓ͨe̹̟̞̼̹̬͂̓̇̚ ̬̱̥̗̰ͯͮ̆a̶̫͖̠ͪ́ͪ̽̀ͥt͖͔̻̤̱̉̌̚͠ͅt͓͉̐̇ͧͨ͑̆͠ͅa̯̫͆̄̇͜c̷̟̰̞̱̣̼ͯ̾̉ͯͬ̏̋k̴̹̙̙̞̹̲͓̈́͗̎ͤͧ̂s͔̩̦̥͔̒͡ͅ.̷̙͓̯̄̈ͬ”̹̟̓̃ ͎̼̥̞̙̅ͩͨ̇ͪ̃ͦ

“Huh?”

“Push and hold,” Christian motions, using his own earbuds as an example.

I lean into the pair of plugs and suddenly I’m deaf. No screaming or moaning. Nothing but white noise.

“Better?”

Gone are the terrors.

Just him.

“These are critical,” he continues. “We’ll hear each other but none of the nonsense. I was just saying that this gentleman hasn’t shaved since the drone attacks. Used to be a Botox guy, one of our first augmenters. He kept up. But totally went numb afterwards. Stopped all personal maintenance, then eating, then drinking. Started shitting himself in bed every morning.”

The man’s fingers flutter above the bed’s blanket.

“Is he awake?”

“Sleeping off his last round of treatment. It’s an important part, getting rest. It’s when the brain reclassifies what it just saw, reconditions the memory. That’s half the battle.”

“What are you guys treating here?”

“The brain.”

“As in?”

“Here it’s PTSD. But what we’re doing on the 99th and 100th is more a proof of concept than it is any one disorder.”

I must look confused because so does he. It’s a father-like frustration, like Adnan earlier.

Christian reaches down into the bearded man’s lab station and pulls out VR-glasses, not unlike JJ’s earlier. These are taller and wider, more bulky. Less tuned for athletic movement than full immersion.

“Put his on.”

The device activates and I’m transplanted into a simulation of a huge outdoor amphitheater I recognize instantly as the Hollywood Bowl. In a city broken up by neighborhoods and freeways, caste systems of beauty and money, this place, carved deep into a hillside with a backdrop of the Hollywood sign, relished something the rest of Los Angeles never could: a shoulder-to-shoulder togetherness. Tonight, 18,301 share a movie. We share space on benches and in box seats, we share the 35mm film playing on massive screens above the band shell, we share its duet with an 80-piece orchestra. Even through the simulation’s earbuds, sound bounces off the outside walls of the Bowl and ripples backward through the audience magnificently. We share that like we share the sunset. Like we share in quiet. We talk just loud enough to hear in order to flirt with our dates, or our neighbors’, sharing opinions and fears and nervous kisses as the world’s light dims into the film’s black-and-white. Then we share cups and cutlery. We share napkins when spotted by snacks eaten in the dark, bounties we share from overflowing grocery bags at our feet. One guy at the end of my row brought a pizza just for himself but gives in, trading as neighbors do for some candy or popcorn. We share responsibilities, helping hold seats when someone runs to the restroom, or to warn when an usher looks too carefully at the way we sneak in sips of smuggled booze from our thermoses and coffee cups. We share bottle openers. We share blankets. We share two hours of joy here, in the heart of Hollywood, where there is a little more magic. And then we share the whistle.

I realize what’s coming.

A little annoying at first, then nothing after.

But as badly as I want to look up and search the sky, I never do. Her hands have found mine and now I’m searching for something else, sharing in something else. I see what the man with the beard saw before he had a beard. Not just the moment before this giant, gorgeous crater becomes another kind of one, but the moment his heart fills and overflows—the shared moment when a black-and-white movie exploded into color for them before it will explode into color for all of them.

The whistle, then.

Louder until it’s everything, then nothing.

The glasses are pulled off my head—

Blinded—

Shaking—

Eyes won’t     adjust—

“Stop.

“Gurmit, stop.

“Gurmit, stop screaming.”

It takes a moment.

To get my bearings.

He’s talking.

Like nothing happened —

“Hey.”

— pinstripes slap my cheek. The sound reverberates through my head and bounces back out through the whites of my eyes.

“Hey. Snap out of it.”

Like nothing happened—

“Thing is, you see that differently than he does. To you it was new but to him, it’s the thousandth time out of a million. He’ll always relive that, and that’s key.”

Christian drops my VR-goggles back into the workstation.

“Like I said earlier, the problem is the brain. It’s this tangled, three-pound curd of neurons, connective tissue, circuits. A lot to hack.”

I think I hear the whistle again. I look up.

“Stay with me. It’s tough, I know, but that’s just a sim. Think of what’s in his head. It’s not like we pulled that memory out, either. That’s fiction. A writer wrote it. We used a modified video game engine to render it since these goggles don’t have unlimited processing. The wife’s face—that was a bit of magic, though. Scanned in the real one, then reverse aged it using an algorithm the augmentation and enhancement divisions wrote up. The you are a masterpiece team.”

I still haven’t blinked.

“You see what I’m saying, Gurmit? What you saw was that powerful as just an approximation.”

“Why do you make him watch that?” I ask, not remembering when I stood up or balled my fists.

“Your reaction, right now. I make him watch it because he can’t do what you’re doing. And that’s just the first problem.”

Christian swings the monitor toward me and zooms in on a bisected brain scan.

“Here, in the hippocampus,” he says, magnifying, “is the dentate gyrus, a little wedge of cells that feeds CA3, where pattern separation takes place. Pattern separation is everything. It’s what keeps our memories from jumbling together. We encode events using all fives senses in ways that allow them to be distinguished later—and just like we separate memories, we separate situations, too. Dangerous ones from riskless ones.

“Our patient here is so stunted by his PTSD that neurogenesis simply hit the pause button.”

“Neurogenesis?”

“The birth of neurons and nerve cells. The PTSD stunts new growth, and with no new neurons in the dentate gyrus, CA3 begins to atrophy, which makes it impossible to separate patterns, regulate mood, help code those memories. PTSD is a vicious cycle: the memory’s there in the first place because of a trauma, but then that trauma’s limiting new neurons in the sub granular zone, which he needs to process the trauma. He’s the reason he can’t get better. There are no fresh neurons to do pattern separating. A kind of dysfunctional stasis.”

“Can’t you inject him with some new neurons? Grow some?”

“Tricky. You engage that whole area and memories will blur. We need to be discrete and super selective since one memory activates about five neurons out of a hundred, and a normal person creates about 1,400 every day.Now, you’re right, we could produce them, but we’d need his own neural stem cells of which there are precious few regularly functioning before we go pulling them out, messing with what lucidity he has left. For us it’s simple. Go for a jog and we’ll come home with some new neurons. But he’s bedridden, so exercise won’t help kick production into gear. And we can’t really pop him with P7C3, because that promotes the survival of newborn neurons—it won’t catalyze new ones.”

A lot of acronyms; a lot of science. And that’s not even what makes the least sense.

“So what is all this?” I ask. “If you guys aren’t helping activate his brain, what are you doing?”

On the monitor, he pulls up a frame from the simulation I saw in the goggles. A few swipes later and the same frame is tiled across the entire monitor, from top to bottom, but across a spectrum of minute variations. At the top, the colors and shadows are stark and foreboding but in the middle, they’re a binary black and white, more noir, like what I saw. Toward the end, they’ve warmed, a sunset haloing the entire scene in bright, warm light. It transitions from nightmare to daydream.

“Memory isn’t a file on a hard drive you can delete or rewrite. Memory is just a version of the last time you thought about something. Decades ago, brain trauma treatment toyed with neuromodulators, as if that would be enough—like a dose of memory vitamins could boost recognition. But as you can’t erase a memory to death, you can’t clarify one to death, either. The only thing you can do is amend its emotional connection, and thus amend how it’s reconsolidated. You have to recondition a memory’s meaning.”

A pinstriped sleeve cycles the monitor’s tiled frame from dark to light.

“That takeaway took forever. When we first started, this whole process was reliant on all the wrong things. We started in optogenetics, smuggling genes for light-sensitive proteins into neurons so that a pulse of light would turn the neurons on or off—it’s how we treat blindness now, but back then, we flipped the cells of a painful memory like a light switch. It took a decade of those bandaid fixes before we realized emotional valence is the key. Now we play the PTSD-causing memory over and over, reconditioning it as we go. Give a rat pranolol with a shock, and you can weaken its memory. It’ll forget the shock, but won’t recall what caused it clearly. Give it some isoproterenol with a shock, and you’ll strengthen its memory. It won’t ever forget the shock. Now, we don’t erase or turn off—we recondition. Our patients have authorized us to allow them to re-experience the most traumatic things affecting them, intervening the reconsolidation process with anti-anxiety drugs and neuromodulators to assist how they reclass it. No more light switch—now it’s a dimmer.”

Christian points toward the middle of the screen, the black-and-white version I just experienced first-hand.

“We’re half way through with this patient, and we’ll go until the memory’s meaning thaws. Then we just refreeze it as something else.”

I think for a moment, scanning this room of insanely wealthy people willingly reliving their most haunting nightmares. I look around and see what Christian sees, which is the beauty in all this brain stuff, and what Axcentric might, which is the money in it—enough money to take two floors in The Isle.

But then I see what my father might. Adnan’s voice rises in my head, another kind of whistle. It’s what he said this morning, how he called this tower full of rich people too afraid to live on land. It gives me a thought.

“Couldn’t this do the opposite?” I ask.

Christian looks up from the monitor. “What do you mean?”

“If you change things so that someone can’t separate a dangerous situation from a safe one, couldn’t you create someone fearless just as easily as someone who forgets their fear?”

Christian’s eyes narrow.

He stands up and reaches around the bearded man’s workstation, pulling out a white lab coat. He hands it to me.

“You’re brighter than I thought.”