Holberton adjusted his position in his seat. “They went willingly,” he repeated.
Vultures circled overhead. Of course they’d gone willingly. The failsafe made them incapable of doing anything else. “Yeah,” Javier said.
“But we couldn’t just split up the families. We didn’t want to do that. Nobody wanted to do that.”
“So you moved them here.”
“FEMA moved them here. I’m just a design consultant.”
Javier turned to him. He said nothing, just stretched his arm out the window to get the sun.
“What’s it like? When you’re in the sun?”
Javier searched for the right word. “Fizzy.”
“But you were intended for work in the woods, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’re here, in the desert. Where there’s nothing.” Holberton clicked his tongue. “I guess that’s what Vegas is for. Reinvention.”
They changed lanes, and Holberton pointed. It was there, up ahead. In the dun-coloured desert it was a field of sudden green and silver, its edges as sharp and exact as pixels. It looked like a motherboard forgotten on a stretch of burlap. There were skyscrapers and strip malls, steeples and domes and golden arches. Javier thought of the city Amy kept hidden underwater. He liked that one better.
They drove along a ring road that circled the entire complex. Eventually they came to a simple checkpoint with a red and white bar that lowered as they drove close. The man inside was organic. He was very old, and Latino, with a pockmarked face and hair that reeked of gardenia-infused petroleum jelly. Until this moment, Javier was unaware that anyone still made Tres Flores, much less used it.
“Good afternoon, Mr Holberton.”
“Good afternoon. I’m bringing my friend with me, today. He’ll need a guest pass.”
“Does he have a radiation detector?”
Holberton winced. “Ooh… No. Yeah, he needs one of those.”
The guard handed them both lapel pins with red squares of film inside. “If that turns black, you run,” he said. “Now there’s more paperwork…”
“Oh, come on. I cut short my time in Vegas just to show all this to my friend.”
The words my friend seemed to trigger something in the guard’s mind. Instantly, his face went from anxious to sheepish. He handed Holberton a pass marked GUEST without so much as looking at him, and lifted the gate.
“Goodness,” Holberton said. “I don’t know why that had to be so awkward.”
“He thought you were trying to impress me,” Javier said.
Holberton turned to him with raised brows. “Am I not?”
Javier smiled.
Pastures formed the outermost edges of the city. Drones hovered above them, moving in time with the herds of alpaca that appeared to be making their homes there. The ring road picked up the interstate, and they followed it out of the farmland and over the rest of the complex. On the right, Javier watched a series of long, rectangular buildings disappear under the concrete. “MACONDO MALL” the sign read. Only a few cars were parked in the lot.
They turned off the interstate, taking an offramp marked only “MACONDO.” It curved down away from the highway and led into a suburb of one-story houses. Javier’s experience with suburbs was minimal. But he doubted most of them looked like this.
“I decided to go for a retrofuturist theme.”
Holberton gestured at the houses. They looked like snowflakes: all white, all edges, all angles. Faux stone and slab roofs that tilted strangely, doorways that opened to the diagonal corners of front yards rather than the street. White archways and colonnades and windows, endless windows.
“The thing about these people, the people who choose vN, is that they don’t want something real. If they wanted reality, they would have chosen reality.”
Even the storefronts looked a little wrong. Rather, they looked like they were from the past – but a past Javier didn’t understand. A place where everything was white and gleaming and the signage was huge and neon and the fonts were all that stylized drunken slant that was neither print nor cursive.
“Most emergency housing tries to replicate everything about your old housing, in miniature,” Holberton said. “But that’s a mistake. That’s a setup for an Uncanny Valley reaction at the architectural level. It’s like your house, but it’s not your house. It’s literally unheimlich. The familiar, defamiliarized. So you have to make something completely different. Something so far off the mark that people get into it as an alternative, rather than a straight replacement.”
Javier opened his window and looked out. Even the trees had been pruned to meet a certain standard size and shape. The lawn furniture, what he could see of it on porches and concrete patios, was comprised of chairs like eggs and tulips. The tables all looked like they’d been cast of a single piece.