“No, they have a great deal more money,” she murmurs.
“Exactly! Anyway, this is nothing—we’re also building him a house to last one million years. We hired seismologists to find a stable site, someplace that won’t be subducted the next time Pangaea rolls around. We’re building on the top of the Rocky Mountains, which is almost not isolated. It’s an absurd project, but it has a certain grandeur—we hired evolutionary biologists, for heaven’s sake, to get ahead of the adaptations the bacteria will make to the cooling system. I can only imagine he’s obsessed with his legacy.” His eyes go to the tablet in his hands. “Materials crisis. You must excuse me. Good luck!” He smiles at her, is off into the hangar’s distances.
She stands there, emptied of all volition, watching the workmen grind the floor down as the seconds pass. A chime from her phone as a text arrives, joining the confusion of the echoes in the space, but she ignores it, and the next one, and the next. When she looks, finally, she sees it was Maya, her agent. You’re on-site? she’s written, and Hello?, and finally, They’re waiting for you upstairs, dear. Go Now. Do Well. Call Me Later and Tell Me How It Went. XXOXOX, and then she is walking toward an elevator bank, grateful that Maya is there, unseen and far away, to push her through the world.
As the elevator rises she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the presence of the Net, its vastness and sterility. There was a time when she did the background for a job before she was in the elevator, watching the ground floor recede. (But you can get away with it, she thinks. You can get away with almost anything.)
She sighs, then reaches out, lets the company’s data come flooding in, filling the shallows of her other memory with websites and SEC filings and all the articles in the trade press and the blog posts and the records of old offices and learned articles on dead platforms and generations of annual reports and every mention in every public document. Fragments of text flicker through her awareness—“… closing its Manhattan offices in favor of Northern California…” and “… predicting energy consumption in major metropolitan markets…” and “Water and Power Capital Management LLC, an innovator in AI-driven resource arbitrage and medical engineering…” and “… James Cromwell, serial entrepreneur, founder and majority shareholder”—and in all of this there’s a sadness for there can be no doubt that Water and Power, the focus of the lives of its thousands of employees, is essentially the same as all the other trading houses owned by all the other stridently aggressive suits, and in fact she could just walk out, and be damned to no money and the marred reputation and the dwindling options and presently the doctor’s face a mask of seriousness as, with practiced gentleness, he tells her that it’s time to make her preparations and before he can finish she’ll turn away and stagger out of his office, full of the terror of the nearness of the end. She thinks of the chill outside, the blue of morning. The lift stops. The doors slide open.
“Irina?” says a slight, almost plain woman, smiling, somehow birdlike, head cocked to one side. “I’m Magda. I’m so glad you could come.” Her ensemble is, Irina thinks, an Asano, and, as such, gorgeous, her blouse like fires flaring on a black patch of night, but she seems uncertain in her finery, and Irina wonders if she’s some sort of partner, perhaps newly minted, to be able to afford a designer she associates with maturing starlets, less formal cabinet ministers and, regrettably, minor royals, and she is expecting offers of coffee and the usual chatter to which she need not attend but Magda says, “Come with me—he wants to meet you.”
She duly follows, smiling woodenly, though she hates it when they want to meet her, as the questions are always the same, and, unless they’re very well bred, they’ll peer at her, fascinated by her difference. She thinks of her minute fraction of celebrity, centered on a handful of university departments, mostly brain science and AI, places she makes a point of avoiding.
Corridor upon corridor, none finished but all the same, loops of cable hanging from the ceiling like jungle vines, and she wonders what it would be like to be able to be lost. They come to a wide interior courtyard of bare concrete, stark in the muted light glowing through the tinted glass ceiling. Like winter, in that grey light. On each of the four walls is a sheet of canvas, ten feet across, restive in the air-conditioning; the canvas before her ripples, seethes, reveals a few inches of something spray-painted, complex, maybe some kind of writing? She wants to run her hands over the smoothness of the polished concrete, then take the rough canvas in her hands and yank it hard so it comes down in a billowing cloud to reveal … what? “It feels like a gallery,” she says, her voice reflecting off the walls.
“It will be,” says Magda. “When we’re done. It marks the transition to the inner offices.”
“What’s behind the canvas?” Irina asks.
“Nothing we’re ready to show yet,” says Magda with stagy regret and a false smile and Irina is surprised to find herself feeling like an unwelcome guest in another woman’s home. “He’s waiting,” Magda says, turning to lead her away.
They come to a massive steel door whose overengineered solidity speaks of bank vaults and a kind of vanity, but no, Irina reflects, that’s the mentality of a past time. She thinks of the LAPD (now reborn as the Provisional Authority), frantic and militarized, how you need the right ID, now, to get up onto Mulholland, how the drones scour the wastes through the night, like lethal constellations floating over the hills, visible from the flatlands, both reminder and warning. Metal groans at middle C as the door’s lock releases.