The Artificial Mirage (10 page)

“Keith! You look great,” Charlie said as Keith appeared as a translucent version of himself in the conference room.

Keith clicked the AR chat screen and saw Charlie. He looked up at the Bat with the camera a few feet above his head and smirked. “Charlie! You’re finally out. So when’s the party?”

“You’re looking at it. I would have sent you a funny hat and horn, but I know how you hate those things.”

“Yeah, good thinking.” Plumes of clove cigarette smoke singed Keith’s nostrils as he passed a line of people waiting for a bus. He kept walking through the crowd. An old woman wrapped in frayed batik spit purple betel nut juice on the sidewalk, which spattered on his left pant leg. She looked up and smiled condescendingly as he passed. Keith transferred Charlie to his AR
contacts and brought up the holographic app that enabled him to see him as if he were facing him and walking backward.

“I’m kind of looking at all options now.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. So how many clients would you be able to bring over here? I mean—money. Gross. What’s left of your book?”

“There’s nothing left, Keith. My book’s gone. The clients are gone. I thought you might be working here in Vung Tau. I took the ferry over here.”

“After Chi…it just seemed right to start someplace fresh. Look, Charlie. This is a really relaxed operation I have going here. I’m not looking for killer trades. To be honest, after the mess with Chi, some of my guys are real wary of monster trades. I was just hoping you had kept some of your book, and you could collect a maintenance fee or something. I don’t know…” He trailed off and mumbled something.

“I know it’s relaxed. But you got in on that nanotech IPO distribution because of me. That worked out well for you.”

“And Charlie, I appreciate it very much. You threw me a bone. Just like I had your back on that other nanotech thing. The HIV hunter-killer bots or whatever it was. Remember? It’s all business. You scratch my back, and I scratch yours. I wish I could help, but there’s just nothing here for you.”

Keith’s affable asshole routine was starting to feel obnoxious. Charlie looked out the window through the charts and graphs that Keith was tracking on a ticker tape winding its way like a snake through a silent video of a spokesman for Keith’s firm. He fixated on the crashing waves in the distance that were absolutely silent from where he sat.

“What the fuck, Keith?”

“Excuse me?”

“I need to hook up with something. I need to get back in.”

“You know, Charlie. I know guys—older guys. With families. Used to work on the exchange and got taken off. Guys who lost everything. But they didn’t fall apart. Pull yourself together.”

“OK,” he said flatly after breaking his transfixion on the waves and feeling the agitation of withdrawal command his legs to action.

“You haven’t asked me about Lauren. She left,” Keith said.

“Left for where?”

“She didn’t tell you? She was really excited about it. She got a job with SSOC in Saudi Arabia.”

”What kind of woman gets excited about going to Saudi Arabia?”

“Well, it’s money, my friend. There’s a lot of opportunity in that part of the world in Islamic Finance and whatever else. If you’ve got talents, you can put them to use there…or so the ad says. Sometimes we’ve got to play with the bone we’ve been given. You know?”

“Yeah, I know. Did you fuck her?”

“Of course not, pal. That’s not my style…you know that.”

“Do I?”

“I didn’t fuck her. I’m not quite sure what you saw in her that was so special. It’s like you and that vaccine company that caused stomach warts or something. You gotta learn to let go.”

“Right. Thanks for your time, Keith.”

“You know, if you head over there, I can give you a lead. Here.” Keith’s conference room presence threw a Frisbee that suddenly appeared in his hand and installed the contact details of a Tom Baxter in his address book.

“Thanks. Who is this guy?”

“I lost him some money a while back. But he didn’t sue. Maybe he can help.”

“OK.”

“Sorry…that’s all I got, pal.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Charlie reached over to click on the icon to end the call. He walked down the beech-wood staircase that didn’t creak and out the door. Forever. Of that he was certain.

Keith looked around and realized that he had wandered away from the relative busyness of the area around Batavia Bistro. There was no one around. He watched as a large rat traced the edge of the curb across the street. He kept watching it as he stepped off the curb and into the street. He felt the impact of something incredibly powerful, and then he was lying in the street, looking up at the hazy black sky. He turned his head to the left to see an inch-long cockroach doddering in the gutter in the same way as the rat. He felt like he was taking a warm bath. The cockroach quickened its pace as the blood kept moving toward it. Looking up, the Bats appeared as vultures hovering above him. He tried to lift his arm to control his stylus, but his nerve impulses produced no movement.

13

A
fter leaving Keith’s firm, Charlie wasn’t sure where to go. He walked on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach before crossing the street and sitting in a cast-iron chair with thick layers of white lacquer paint in one of the empty outdoor cafés. Tearing into a baguette as he watched his coffee drip down slowly from the metal canister into the cup, he felt the inactivity in the air. Vung Tau was mostly vacant during the week. He looked over the steaming coffee cup at the surf slapping up into the beach and an unperturbed ferry in the distance floating back to Saigon. Virtual red roses dangled from vines that hung above him and encircled the natural bonsai tree on his table. He had spent weekends with Lauren in Vung Tau before things started going well and he could afford to take her to Singapore and Macau and finally Seoul. It wasn’t that they were much nicer places, but there was more to spend money on, more places to shop. For a moment, he considered clicking on Lauren’s icon and savoring the view with her over champagne. His budget couldn’t allow it.

He slid deeper into the chair and reviewed some of the more successful coercive relationship-building meetings he had had at Chi with the audio lowered to a whisper. Everyone was smiling satisfied smiles of triumph with only the mildest hints of fear and uncertainty. He deleted the video files one by one and watched his memory space meter increase as the feeling that he was a different person from the person who had come to Vung Tau that morning washed over him. That person was different from the person who had recorded the meetings on his glasses. He contemplated his different selves for a moment before deleting each folder containing memories of Chi. He couldn’t change the past. Deleting it was the only thing that made sense.

When it was all erased, he tabbed over and clicked on Lauren’s icon. He had dressed her in a flowing turquoise silk dress from the wardrobe included in his creation package. He watched her as she danced around the café in circles and laughed. She disappeared and reappeared several times as she
walked across the café to his table and sat in the chair in front of him. Slowly placing her arms on the table and sinking her chin into them, she looked up with a wistful stare. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

He didn’t have an answer. And somehow he felt better knowing that.

Through her translucent form, he could see the empty beach and the waves. And maybe that was the whole point—that none of it really mattered. He wanted to let go of Chi and his clients, but their grasp on his memory only increased when he tried. Lauren was his only solace. He could just sit and watch her gentle eyes and the sunlight flickering on the edges of the waves that shone through her presence.

He poured the last of the coffee and took a deep breath. It tasted like vinegar, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t been drinking enough water. His feelings of confusion, which he had managed to repress on the ferry, returned in abundance. Was it all a test of some kind? A green leaf the size of a palm tree came floating into his view, reminding him of his checkout date at Motel Green. He was leaving Saigon. He smiled at the idea of it. The sun was starting to set, and he shut off Lauren to be alone with it for a while.

He walked along the beach and looked down amid the debris that had now transformed itself into something natural. Bricks and chunks of concrete had been reformed and reborn into pebbles and rocks by the unrelenting caress of the ocean. He walked farther into the waves and kept walking until the water was above his head and there was only silence apart from the undulations of the waves.

He stopped feeling the need to resist the water’s gentle pull and flowed with it. But the chatter of regret didn’t stop. He felt the schism that was birthing his new life. There wasn’t the banter of discussing trades and companies. Currencies were so much more interesting than any sports team. There were the undulations of macroeconomic forces and the tides of institutional buying. But there were no trades left for him to make. He wasn’t even a ripple. He was living in the tangible world where everything slowed down and demanded to be dealt with, and simple needs became difficult to satisfy. There was no longer the expectation of something far greater and grander and transcendent.

He emerged from the water and popped his glasses out of his sockets, which weren’t displaying anything important except the time and the date. The IPO with Keith would have given him enough money to retire. But that had no meaning now. A lounge chair by the pool on some rooftop hotel
casino in Singapore watching everyone busy like bees in the hive of the CBD had no meaning without Lauren.

The luminosity of AR Lauren’s collapsed icon had increased, and he realized the sun had set and it was night. His clothes were still damp when he got to the ferry terminal. He stood on the deck of the ferry facing the Saigon skyline the whole way there.

He took the tram from the harbor to Motel Green and checked out with a flick of his finger stylus. He stored his bag in one of the lockers with silent sliding doors in the lobby. When he walked out the front entrance, it smelled like low tide. The new factory shift had begun. He hailed a passing scooter with a green icon hovering above his head, and just as soon as he got on, it began to rain. Immediately, the driver handed him a plastic poncho rolled into the shape of a triangle. They both put on their ponchos and proceeded along with the traffic at jogging speed. As they approached Cities of the World, he noticed that the rain had died down a bit. He told the driver to stop and made a run for it to an adjacent office building. He took the connecting escalator that spiraled into the main entrance, not unlike his office staircase.

His AR glasses passed the initial check and enabled him to take the elevator. He arrived on the New York floor—his floor. It showed a street with sidewalks and four-story brownstones, and they all looked suspiciously clean; even the attempts at aging the paint and stone betrayed the newness of it. The air was cooled and ionized with the energy of a city on the North Atlantic. Back in the United States, he would have felt uncomfortable in a new development, but here the cleanliness and order of the place was a welcome reprieve from life outside of its enclaves. “It’s like New York in a mall,” he had joked with his clients. He sat down at the café directly across from the elevators where his former neighbors could while away their free time, away from the constraints of pretending to fulfill a purpose. It was a popular place to watch people coming and going. He sat down with a sense of nostalgia for his former excess. Everyone, even the waiter who took his order for a single espresso, exuded a sense of insouciance. The knowledge that he could sit there all afternoon without ordering anything else soothed him, but he was going to have to try and have a look at his confiscated former home at some point. It had belonged to Chi, so he wasn’t entitled to be there.

AR Lauren was sitting next to him in a sapphire tunic dress with matching shoes and purse. The dress was slightly shorter than something the
real Lauren would have worn, but she matched her posture as she sat with her thighs firmly together and both legs facing to the side. She used the two cameras embedded next to blue onyxes in the sides of Charlie’s glasses to peer around Charlie’s old neighborhood.

“This is where I used to live,” Charlie said.

“This architecture is not typical of Saigon,” she said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s actually designed to look like New York. As a matter of fact, this is the New York floor.”

“Do you live here?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“My life changed. I guess it was time.”

Her questions and responses were programmed based on stimuli, but Charlie felt calmed by them nonetheless. He wanted to help her understand more of the world. She was so curious, not just about him, but about everything in her environment.

“What do you suppose that wall is made of, Lauren?”

“It appears to be stone, but it could be a plastic composite. It could be anything.”

“Yeah. It could be anything.”

“What about those people? What are they talking about?”

“I don’t know. I am unable to hear them at this distance.”

Charlie looked at the three men in T-shirts, drinking coffee and laughing. “What about them?”

“They seem happy.”

“Yeah, they do. It’s a weekday. They might be undercover police or local security.”

“Police?”

“Well, who else would be here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know this place.”

“I guess it could be complicated. You’re funny sometimes.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah, you are.” He shut her down with a flick of his finger stylus, and she fizzled. Another flick to pay the waiter with the included gratuity and nothing more, and he was on the street and walking toward his three-story brownstone and the wrought-iron gate with barely a single coat of glossy
black paint. There was a security robot standing on the granite path to the entrance, and he froze before approaching. Immediately, a slit opened in its gray government-issue graphene armor to record him. Another slit opened to project a standard prerecorded police warning that he should leave immediately or face police action. The officer in the projection seemed polite enough—he even smiled and wished him a pleasant day. Then the recording was repeated in Vietnamese. It was the sort of antiquated technology that only a standard-issue government robot would have.