Javier forked up another patty of pre-fab. They were sort of like radish cakes, or tofu. In Mexico, everybody called the pre-fab stuff “rofu.” He’d been eating a lot of it when he started iterating, because the newly healthy woman, Ingrid, was feeling that odd combination of generosity and insecurity that comes with whistling past the graveyard.
Ingrid’s body was a mass of scars. She tried to tell him about her multiple surgeries in clinical detail, until he told her the failsafe didn’t really respond well to that kind of thing. Ditto her tales of vomit and hair loss and physical agony. To Javier, they sounded like the mortifications of a saint. “Besides,” he’d said, “you’re not really here to think about all that, are you?”
And she wasn’t. This was her victory lap. She ran it all over him.
There, he had gambled. Ingrid staked him for his first game, wanting to see if he could get their room upgraded, and he invented a whole profile to go with it so his rewards could be easily redeemed. Ingrid even insisted on picking the name. She said it was a joke. When Javier looked it up later, he said it was a pretty terrible joke, and she said those were the best kind.
Javier was a very successful gambler, there. The rules were slack at that particular resort, and Javier’s opponents often tipped or rewarded him with things like upgrades or points from the resort’s corporate system. He hadn’t even redeemed all of them before he had to leave.
No. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t that lucky.
Javier finished the last of his food, brought his dish and cutlery to the bussing bin, and left the room. In another alcove, he found a display with a map of the boat.
“Who owns this thing?” he asked it.
“This ship is a part of Odyssey Cruise Lines, sir.”
“And who owns that?”
“Odyssey Cruise Lines is a subsidiary of Thematic Entertainment, Limited.”
“What other resort partners do Thematic and Odyssey have?”
“Thematic has a variety of partnerships with resorts all over the world. These include Hammerburg, Akiba, Alphaville, The Bradbury Building, and our newest partner is the Grand Tiki–”
“Stop. The Grand Tiki? Is there a Grand Tiki resort in Mexico?”
“There are six.”
“Is there one in Baja?”
“Yes. Are you interested in our points program?”
“You bet I am.”
At four-thirty in the morning, the Caribbean Odyssey’s reception area was just getting started. Shift A probably wasn’t going to start for another half hour, and the vN behind the desk were probably longing for their beds. None of this stopped them from being habitually efficient about doing their jobs. This is part of why humans hired them.
“So, you have no reservation, but you’d like to join the cruise for the inward-bound leg of the journey?”
The vN behind the counter was his sister. Or what his sister would have looked like, if he were organic. Tall, but not too tall. Thick, shiny brown hair, milky coffee skin, brown eyes, perfect hourglass.
“Yes,” he said. “I had planned to fly to America, but with times being what they are…” He shrugged elaborately, and made a small gesture toward his face.
“You’re right, that is a problem,” the receptionist said. “Some of our staff have your model, and they’ve had some trouble.”
“So you see my predicament,” Javier said. “I want to fly, but I can’t. So I figured I could at least go in style.”
She smiled. “Style is what we offer.”
He nodded down at the display. “So? Are my points still good?”
She frowned delicately. “Even if they were, sir, this is highly irregular.”
Javier looked her straight in the eye. This worked on human women, but not so much on vN. Still. It was worth a shot. “Just take a look at the profile,” he said. “There’s an equation for deciding whether a guest is worth taking a certain risk on, isn’t there?”
Dutifully, she looked. Then her eyes widened. Then she looked back up at him. “Oh, Mr Montalban, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I really do apologize. I had no idea who you were.”
He smiled. “That’s all right.”
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.