Irina tells the cab to drive at random through the city. As it’s a drone, there’s no one to ask why.
The streets slip by, and the sullied marble facades and the spotlit couture and the sidewalk crowds, whose faces will be with her forever, like a haphazard catalog of the dead-to-be, all the same as every other city, forms repeated without end.
She lies down on the backseat and, as though by magic, the city vanishes, replaced by a narrow view of blank walls and fragments of signs and sun glare on the glass of third-story windows. She thinks of childhood car trips, wishes she could remember them better.
She’d meant to stay another night but decides she’ll leave that hour. There are outstanding bids for her time in Tokyo and Stockholm, Maya’s said. Tokyo, then—she likes flying west, how it draws out the day. She’ll go straight to the airport, have the hotel send her bags.
Her phone chimes. She’s expecting Maya but the text is from Philip, her friend, whom she hasn’t seen in years. A little bird told me you’re in town today. Thanks for keeping me informed! Dinner? Tonight? Unless you were blowing me off for reasons of real personal significance.
It’s three years since they’ve spoken but with the one text those three years seem to vanish. Yes, she texts back. Good. Sorry. Distracted? Fundamentally a bad friend? Name a time—I’m available then. She feels the future shift—no vanishing act, then, at least not yet, and no long suspension in the evening.
Her phone rings and she picks up, thinking it’s Philip, but Maya says, “They loved you!”
“Oh?” says Irina, staring at the cab’s ceiling. “How can you tell?”
“Because they made an offer for an option on your time! For the next week you get your hourly for doing nothing, and double that if they need you to come in. Okay?”
“I’m a little surprised,” she says, remembering how it feels to speed-walk through the Prosperity Airways concourse, the sense of freedom, almost of release. “And it’s not like I accomplished much.” She remembers the hidden AI’s immensity, its strangeness, but feels helpless to convey it.
“Well, they loved you anyway, and to prove it I just got a request-to-push-funds to your account. Do you want me to accept?”
The cab lurches to a halt. She pokes her head up, sees a trio of girls in front of the cab, high-school-aged, entirely absorbed in each other, seeming not to see her. “Accept,” she hears herself say.
A little pause, and she says, “I’m sorry if I worried you this morning. I’m afraid I must be your most difficult client.”
“Most difficult? Ha,” says Maya, in full ballsy big-time-player mode. “Do you want to know how I spent my morning? I have a new client, you might have heard of her, the Korean kid, Sun Yong Min, the one who can sight-read DNA? I had to chaperone her through a meet-and-greet with the board at Biotechnica. Serious money on the table. Sunny is twenty, looks fourteen, and is emotionally about ten. Sweet kid, always smiling, but her parents are fresh-off-the-boat and don’t speak English—Sunny’s making beaucoup bucks but her dad is too proud to quit his job as a security guard. So I’m standing there on the steps of their black glass office-tower-of-doom for twenty minutes in the rain and texting her once a minute until finally she shows up in a pedicab, which she took instead of a real cab, she tells me, to save money. Moreover, she’s wearing sweatpants and a sort of furry hat with cat ears and it’s immediately clear to me that she has absolutely no idea that any of this could possibly be a problem.
“So we walk into the conference room and the CEO is this handsome son of a bitch, he looks like an executive in a commercial, and when he sees us he freezes, because he’s an important man and there’s a way to do business and blah blah blah, but this girl is amazing, and if they don’t exercise her non-compete option then they’re pretty much bent over, because I packaged her with my other brightest biotech stars, because I am very clever and use y’all’s brilliance like a god-damned bludgeon—and I can see him just dying inside as he absorbs this new reality.
“Bless his little MBA heart, he rose to the occasion, and listened for ten minutes while she rambled on about cartoons. He said he liked her hat, and asked if it was Gamba-chan, which is some kawaii fuckin’ Japanese licensed character that’s big with the tweens, and then he told her about getting his daughter the Gamba-chan video game for Christmas.”
“I’m glad you could let that out,” says Irina.
“Ha!” says Maya. “I know, right? Look at me, crying on your shoulder. Where’s your ten percent? But the kicker is, after Mr. CEO sent away the elegant little gilt porcelain espresso pots and the lox, very expensive, not from vats, and had his big-titted mistress-slash-assistant bring Sunny-chan hot chocolate and a Danish, he takes out a tablet and shows her the genome of a bacterium that Biotechnica’s so-called alpha nerds designed to eat industrial waste in polluted waterways. Lots of government contracts there, so many it moved the stock price, but she scrolls through it for five minutes and says they made a mistake, that it’s going to die in acidic environments. You know me, I’m a jill-of-all-trades, but Sunny talked for two minutes in her squeaky little-girl voice about the implied chemistry of the thing and I was totally lost.
“So. Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely, and in every sense. But you will notice, my dear, that you are highly functional even among the high-functioning. You have more fashion sense than even I do, and to my certain knowledge you have had romantic relationships with actual human beings. So in answer to your question, no, you are not, in fact, my most difficult client, girlie, not by a damn sight. Okay?”
She remembers Philip, who has worked with Maya, saying she gets clients by hanging around MIT in low-cut blouses. “I suppose the females are more difficult to manage,” Irina says, and is immediately ashamed of her tacit malice.
“Hell yeah!” Maya says. “I love my boys to death but they usually think I’m their mom or their girlfriend and they’re often starkly in need of both. I used to have a little preciosity about getting them hookers but my god it makes them easier to work with.”
“So for me, you’re, what, my pretend best friend and confidante?”
“You are in a mood!” Maya says blithely, and then, in a fake bedroom voice, “Baby, I’m whatever you need me to be.”
“You are aware that technically we have a professional relationship?”
“Too late! But, babe, you know I’d get you a hooker if you wanted one. When’s your birthday?”