“Of course it’s gang related,” a competing voice offered. Hazel began walking forward. The crowd didn’t part for her. They all stood fixed in place and she had to maneuver around them like traffic cones.
HER FATHER’S TRAILER PARK WASN’T NEAR THE NEIGHBORHOOD where Hazel had grown up. She passed a Laundromat and a convenience store and a shop that seemed to sell wigs and custom podiatric items with equal fervor. And then—she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before when being driven back to The Hub, probably because she’d had her head buried between her legs in the same antihyperventilation posture she’d assumed post-engagement (this posture had become her standard resting position, really)—there was a Gogol outlet peddling used electronics.
The window display held a toothbrush device, a Tooth-Flash 3.0, that was like an automatic car wash of fluorinating antiseptic gel. Hazel had tried it once and gagged the whole time. The brush produced a defensive amount of foam. Hazel felt like she was a large predator who was trying to eat the device because it seemed the brush was filling Hazel’s mouth with a lathery toxin as a form of defense. Byron loved these personal products because they made Gogol seem harmless: how could a company whose home-health line loosely trafficked in dental hygiene have anything to hide?
Hazel didn’t know if there even was a bar within walking distance of her father’s trailer. She recalled the times when she was young and he’d tell her he’d hidden ten quarters in the backyard and she needed to go look for them. He’d actually hide only six, and she would look until the sun went down and then go inside and get a flashlight and look some more, and when he finally called her back inside or she got tired and eventually complained to him that she’d only found six, he’d say, Then you didn’t look hard enough. He insisted this even when she finally got wise and made him admit there only ever were six coins. If you really wanted ten, he’d argued, you would’ve found four more somehow.
Of course, Hazel could go into the Gogol outlet and search-app for a bar in a matter of seconds, but that was exactly what the enemy wanted. No longer would she ever rely on any of that. Hazel wanted to begin forming her own mental maps, fallible and distractible as they might be—her very own lay of the land. She was going to deprogram herself, she’d decided. Not that Byron had brainwashed her, exactly; she clearly wouldn’t have left him if he had.
But it was all very cultish at Gogol, the way reliance upon technology was perceived as a personal strength and the degree of one’s reliance measured that person’s value. Hazel had once posed a question to Byron: “Say one of your workers walked into your office tomorrow and was a full-on Transformer. This individual, a real go-getter, has managed to sever her brain from her human body and put it inside a robotic frame. Would this please you?”
He hadn’t blinked. “I’d make her do the same thing to me right then and there. Same day. If for some reason the results weren’t replicable and she couldn’t, I’d give her the company. Co-CEO until my retirement, then it would be her show for eternity. I can think of few greater competitive advantages for a technology corporation than an immortal CEO.”
“So you’d want to be immortal?” Hazel had clarified, repeating the question with disbelief. “You’d want to be immortal?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Technology is only getting better. Thanks, in large part, to me.” Then he’d winked at her, and that wink had made Hazel feel like her organs were a house of cards that Byron had just blown down. At the time, the thought of welcoming death was her only fantasy escape from the marriage, and Byron was apparently going to try to stave death off for them both for as long as possible.
But Hazel had felt that she’d made her bad decision and needed to accept the punishments it brought: This was her life, and she couldn’t get out of it. She truly probably couldn’t, even though she’d now made the overture of leaving. He was going to come for her one way or another. It had taken her a few years to decide to do it no matter the outcome. Knowing something was much different from knowing what to do about something, she supposed.
For example: at present she was ambling along an unfamiliar street and had no cell phone or Internet device or navigation system and she was looking for a bar and her husband whose corporation included multiple armament and surveillance technology subsets probably wanted her dead. She knew these things, but what to do about them still eluded her.
It was then she saw a sign for THE SPOTTED ROSE. The name seemed like a bad euphemism, perhaps an inelegant venereal-disease reference. If Byron found her there, it seemed as good a place as any to die.
6
THE BAR COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER: IT HAD REGULAR TVS, NOT the Gogol TeleGlass Hazel was used to at home, and people were smoking real cigarettes. Loads of them.
Gratitude flooding through her body was a deeply foreign sensation to Hazel. At first she mistook the feeling to be a diarrheal precursor.
Smoking wasn’t allowed at The Hub or any of Gogol’s campuses, except, oddly, for the doctor at Gogol’s medical subsidiary who was in charge of most of Hazel’s checkups. When she’d asked Byron about it, he’d said, Well, I’d prefer she didn’t, but she’s special. I’m very happy with her research.
The low-hanging clouds of smoke felt like a chemical bath, in a good way—the bar was a decontamination chamber. Everywhere patrons were anointing one another with exhalations. Here was an opportunity to get as much of Byron’s technology off her skin as possible before death. She had learned this much from her husband: the future hated germs. She’d hardly ever gotten physically sick when she lived with him. Nothing in the house was cloth except their bedding, towels, and napkins, which still really weren’t—they were all made from some slick, antimicrobial fabric that seemed to blend silk and low-density aluminum foil. When she rolled over in bed, it made a crinkling noise that reminded her of opening up a burrito wrapper.
Was this a way she could get back at Byron a little—contaminate herself as much as possible before her slaughter? She could stop washing her hands, make out with strangers bearing cold sores. Maybe germs would be like camouflage against Byron and his employed agents, like covering oneself in mud to elude being sniffed out by a bear. If she got sick or infected enough, their sensors might stop registering her humanity: they were probably calibrated to find someone who’d been living the past several years in great economic privilege.
Sitting down at the bar, Hazel picked up a near-empty glass that had been left behind by a previous patron. “I’d like to drink a beer out of this used glass, please,” she announced, a little too proudly. The woman immediately filled it up without dumping out the cloudy half inch at the bottom.