Federico #78 Beloved Friend FUS 2078 Nearby, a couple of Federicos in mud-spattered overalls began lowering the coffin into a freshly dug grave. Kylee sat graveside in her chair, honking into a lacy black handkerchief. Another Federico had taken the role of minister, reading the ashes-to-ashes stuff. In groups of twos and threes the surviving Federicos clutched each other, wiping tears, pressing their foreheads together in the solidarity of grief. Abby glanced at other headstones. Federico #301, Federico #425, Federico #16, Federico #27, Federico #153. Each of them a beloved friend. After the coffin came to rest the survivors took turns tossing in shovels full of dirt until the cavity in the earth was filled. A light mist began to coalesce. A Federico unfolded a black and Gothic umbrella over Kylee's head as they made their way from the cemetery to the path. As they proceeded a Federico sidled up to Abby and explained how the numbering system worked.

"We've all got a number, sure, but the number changes based on deaths. So if Federico #1 dies, all the other Federicos move up a number. So #2 becomes the new #1, #3 becomes the new #2, and so on. That way there are no gaps in our numbers. Now it looks like I'm going to be Federico #178."

"What about the little Federicos?" Abby asked. "How often do they arrive?"

"Every couple months or so. We'll put in an order for a new Federico now that we've lost one. When the boat shows up with a new Federico, it's quite a big deal. Maybe you'll be here to see the arrival of a new little one."

The Seaside Love Palace popped and groaned as it settled in the cold night. Abby flipped through a stack of celebrity biographies until after midnight, when she rose and slipped into the hallway. There was a whole wing of the manse she hadn't seen yet; now would be a good time to check it out. Every ten feet or so along the hall hung one of Isaac's garish phantasy paintings, each lit by a single halogen bulb. Here was Isaac in a fishbowl helmet and s.p.a.ce suit, firing a laser gun, Kylee in a gold bikini clutching his thigh, fending off what appeared to be a bad seafood experience. In another he raised a sword to deliver the coup de grace to a kind of furry, maybe-dragon sorta thing that had Kylee in its talons. Abby imagined the couple posing for these portraits, frozen in war-gaming gear while a bearded and kilted graphic designer sketched them onto canvas. After studying five or six of these paintings she got the crazy idea that they'd actually loved each other.

Abby descended a flight of stairs and heard music. Sort of a disco/house beat, a track off one of Kylee's old alb.u.ms. She maneuvered around shadows of furniture, past a dormant kitchen and a reading room where taxidermy animal heads gawked from the walls. At the end of a short side hall she came to a black door through which she could feel the pulse of the ba.s.s. She pushed it open a crack and peeked into a ballroom that smelled like a mashup between a gymnasium and a health clinic. From speakers thumped a hit single about promiscuity and shopping for luxury goods. Abby's eyes widened. From a chintzy-looking throne atop a dais Kylee barked through a megaphone, directing the Federicos in a mammoth, gay clone orgy!

From her hiding place, for over an hour, Abby observed the carnal ritual like an anthropologist, finding the grunting contortions much like the underground Bionet parties she had attended in college. News of those parties had spread by word of mouth, directions changing and conflicting, secret pa.s.swords whispered into ears. One rainy night Abby had piled into a car with three of her friends-Jadie, Megan, and Heather-and headed across the Lions Gate Bridge into a zone of murky abandoned industry. Out here the streets eventually gave up and ended in tangles of debris and broken concrete. They parked in an alley and followed the directions to a metal door marked with a crop-circle glyph. The four friends looked at one another, questioning whether they were really up for this, a quartet of graduate students in a downpour, willingly giving someone else-a stranger-complete control over their bodies. Abby opened the door.

They called these kinds of places pleasure centers. This particular pleasure center was down a musty-smelling flight of stairs that opened into a subterranean s.p.a.ce lit with purples and reds, forms gathered around pillars checking out the newcomers, the periphery fuzzed-out visually with hushed conversations and lips occasionally sipping gla.s.ses of energy drink. A dance floor, if one wanted to call it that, framed by spotlights. No music, just a low rumble of whispers and body noises. On the dance floor was a human pyramid-three men on the bottom, two in the middle, and a single man standing on his hands, which were planted on the two men beneath him. The pyramid remained stationary for several minutes. The man standing on his hands pulled in one of his arms to balance on one hand. Abby watched the man's forearm tremble. Was he going to fall? No, actually, he was extending his index finger so that it was the only part of his body touching the man beneath him. He balanced a full minute as a ripple of applause went through the spectators and a patch of blood spread on the leotard of the man beneath him. Carefully, the human pyramid disa.s.sembled itself and a couple women carrying towels rushed to the one who'd been the pyramid's apex. He looked exhausted, slumping into their arms as they wiped his face. A violent shudder racked his body like an epileptic seizure, but short, a jolt.

Over a PA system a calm and reedy voice intoned, "He's going to be just fine. His nervous system is confused and it will take about an hour before he's back to feeling like himself. And tomorrow his arms will be a little sore. Don't worry. We'll take loving care of him."

Another flutter of applause. Abby looked around trying to determine the source of the voice and found it in a shaded corner of the room, the DJ's booth. The DJ stood behind a bank of three laptops, GUIs reflected off the surfaces of his gla.s.ses.

Heather pinched Abby's arm. "No freakin' way I'm letting the DJ take over my implants. How do you know he won't make you kill somebody?"

Megan said, "Or worse, f.u.c.k somebody?"

Jadie said, "You believe that USA Today bulls.h.i.t? They're already breaking the law hacking other peoples 'plants, it's not like they're going to completely screw themselves with a murder or rape charge."

"It's based on SM," Abby said. "Every partic.i.p.ant has a safe word to break the hack."

Jadie added, "And the DJ would be ripped apart by the crowd if he tried anything stupid. Everyone's looking out for everyone else."

Onto the dance floor marched six hairless eunuchs. This ought to be good, Abby thought. For the next twenty minutes they danced, their eyes miles away, letting themselves get thrown into a ch.o.r.eography controlled remotely from the corner of the room. They leapt, pinwheeled, jerked. Contentwise it wasn't unlike a lot of archival footage of modern dance Abby had seen. Once the routine concluded the eunuchs wobbled off, regaining their gross motor skills in an almost narcotic fugue. This stuff was often compared to a kind of addiction. The hard-core Bionet abusers begged for DJs to control their every move, even eating, defecation, s.e.x. Abby'd heard about a man in Boise who'd entered into an abusive arrangement with his neighborhood Bionet hacker and given him carte blanche over his vitals. Guy by the name of Paul Garza. The hacker, who went by the handle Salo, set up scripts to run automatically and induce Garza to eat, sleep, take a shower, groom himself, speak, m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, read, watch TV. At first Garza thought this was heavenly, watching his body go about its prescribed routines as if from a distance and yet from within himself. He described it as feeling like Salo's flesh-and-blood embodiment. Garza found himself waking up at a regular time, taking care of his business in the bathroom, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work at the recycling plant, chatting with coworkers with Salo's distantly typed words in his mouth, making wittier jokes than he'd ever made, going to a bar after work, hooking up with some hottie chick who was herself under 24/7 remote control, maybe even by Salo also, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g like crazy at her place, coming home, falling asleep, and dreaming. Dreams, though. Dreams were the one thing Bionet hackers couldn't control, and Garza's started taking on a panicked element. In the dreams he watched himself as if on a security-camera monitor, painstakingly executing the most mundane rituals of his day. His subconscious was freaking out, saying, Whoa, hold on, buddy, I thought I was calling the shots around here! Alarmed at being usurped, his subconscious sent out these distress calls in the middle of deep REM. As the days dragged and Salo's routines changed little, if at all, Garza wondered if he should utter his safe word and break the hack. But it was so dreamy, living like this. He was making more friends, getting fit with a daily workout, eating well. The scripts Salo had laid out were truly working the wonders the hacker had promised when they first met in a booth at Game Zone. Somewhere across town on a laptop in a guy's rec room, Garza's entire life was being mapped out and executed perfectly. He even got a promotion. He began looking at the life he'd led before giving over his daily routine to Salo as one filled with foibles and inadequacies. This new Garza strode confidently, spoke up for himself, ate right, and bedded the ladies. But the dreams. Full-on thrashing nightmares now, with slaughtered animals and self-castration, the pollution of h.e.l.l vomited up through his brain stem. He woke trembling and saw his hand moving toward a bottle of pills prescribed to blunt the edges of these terrors. But I like not being in control, Garza told himself, and told one of his dates, who was far beyond where he was, her eyes gone milky, as mechanically they began to screw. "With the Bionet," she said, "you can experience another person's o.r.g.a.s.m. Would you like to experience mine?" Garza consented and deep in their brains the software flipped their perceptions of their sense organs so whatever was happening to the date's body was going into Garza's brain and vice versa. Garza, disoriented, felt himself being penetrated in a new concavity, understanding the swinging weight of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, opening his eyes expecting to see himself pounding away on his now-female form, but finding his date drifting into a somnambulist's version of s.e.xual intercourse, her eyes like monitors tuned to static, face twitching minutely upon his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. And the real s.h.i.tty part was that he never made her come, so Garza missed out on his own o.r.g.a.s.m. Or hers. Whatever. Then the next day a crazy thing happened. Salo, the hacker, died. Car wreck, nothing fancy. The scripts ran as per usual, leading Garza through his day on autopilot, then the next day and the next until Salo's family handed the laptops over to the cops, whose Bionet enforcement division quickly figured out Salo was operating several flesh-and-blood embodiments and put the brakes on the whole operation. One minute Garza was making himself a mango fruit smoothie, the next he sensed a great silence within. The blender kept going on PUREE. He wanted to turn it off but found the only things his hands appeared to be good for were to look at. He stood in the kitchen for an hour, during which time the blender melted down and stopped functioning and great strings of drool dripped from his catatonic face. The cops traced the signal and found Garza with his pants full of excrement, unable to speak or even close his mouth, immobile in the middle of his kitchen. They'd seen this kind of stuff before, and ferried him to the Bionet wing of the nearest hospital where, Abby supposed, he remained to this day, undergoing a battery of physical and psychological therapies to relearn how to take charge of his own nervous system.

After the eunuchs' dance the DJ spoke again. "Welcome to the uncharted waters of the Biological Internet. Your heart rate. Your electrolytes. The electricity that flows through your muscles. We control every part of you but your soul. Turn off your mind, children, relax and float downstream."

Heather was in a corner having her neck ma.s.saged by a eunuch who was asking her the model numbers of her implants. Jadie stayed glued to a pillar, looking kind of terrified. And where was Megan? Abby very suddenly didn't want to be here. She looked frantically for the exit. Some guy grabbed her bicep and spoke into her ear.

"You don't belong here. Quick, let's get out. The cops are on their way."

The guy, who would have been more threatening had he been less handsome, steered her through the crowd toward the restrooms, then through a service door and up some crumbly wood stairs. Behind them, the pleasure center erupted in panicked screaming. Abby stumbled through a door onto a street of boarded-up ex-businesses. Down the block, cop cars spun their blues and reds.

"Just walk at a normal speed," the guy said, "like we're a couple on a date. By the way, my name's Rocco."

Abby shook his hand reluctantly. "What about my friends? We should go back and help them."

"They're probably getting cuffed right now."

"Why'd you pull me out of there?"

"I could tell you were just checking it out, not into the whole scene. And I think I recognize you. We get our coffee around the same time at Lumiere's."

They pa.s.sed beneath a streetlight, giving Abby a better look. Skin the color of an Idaho potato, scruffy jet-black stubble, a pair of dark eyes squinting in the half-light. Abby said, "You're the guy who got the last Asiago bagel when I was there a couple days ago."

"Sounds like me," Rocco said.

"How'd you know the cops were coming?"

"I'm an informant. I do it sort of on the side while I'm getting my Bionetics doctorate. Plus it's good for me to see what kinds of applications are being developed at a gra.s.s-roots level. Pretty impressed by that guy who supported his whole body weight on one finger. But those DJs are amateurs. They know enough to encode the implants but have no clue-or just don't give a s.h.i.t-about dendrite deintegration or channel-flow erosion. It p.i.s.ses me off. You just don't muck around with the human brain like that. I hope that guy spends his life in the slammer."

"Why do you trust me with this information?" Abby said.

"It gives me an excuse to ask if you'd be interested in getting a drink somewhere."

They traversed patches of stink and bubbling urban lava, then found a cab back to the more or less healthy interior of Vancouver, where the city sort of shook them a while until they settled at a cafe decorated with posters from Italian movies. Which gave Abby a perfect entry point into her area of expertise. She would have normally evaded the topic of Italian neorealism in the company of a dude, had seen too many boyfriends' faces glaze over, but this guy seemed interesting enough that she'd test his endurance for twentieth-century cinema trivia. If he stared into s.p.a.ce and nodded politely she'd relegate him to that category of men who'd pa.s.sed through her life burdened by their pa.s.sions for full-immersion video games and the bracketeering of college basketball. The only guys she'd met who shared her love of Brakhage and Jodorowsky and Maddin and the Brothers Quay tended to hide in clouds of their own flatulence in the netherworld of the university library.

"Bicycle Thieves," Abby translated from a poster behind Rocco's head. "What a heartbreaking film, right?"

Rocco paused a sec, stared at the salt and pepper as if listening to a distant voice, then nodded. "Vittorio De Sica, right? 1948? Quintessential work of Italian neorealism?"

"I've never met anyone else who's actually seen it."

"I haven't seen it," Rocco said, "but I know it concerns an impoverished family man (Lamberto Maggiorani) who takes a job in postwar Rome pasting posters on buildings around the city. When his bicycle-his only mode of transportation-is stolen, he embarks on a fruitless search for it with his young son (Enzo Staiola). That's the one, right?"

Abby looked over her shoulder. "Where are you reading that?"

Rocco sipped his au lait. "It came to me."

"No, really. How'd you know the summary?"

"I'll tell you, but I can't tell you here. The only place safe enough to tell you is my apartment."

"That's a new one."

"That sounded bad. What I mean is, I know my apartment is free of surveillance. We can't be sure about this restaurant. Come back to my place and I'll fill you in on the details. I'm not asking you to sleep with me."

You're not? Abby thought. d.a.m.n.

Rocco's apartment wasn't far, and he spent the interim five blocks warning and preparing Abby for the wretched state of the living s.p.a.ce. The kitchen hadn't been cleaned in some time, he warned, and there might be a spaghetti-type situation in one of the sinks. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a tree-ringed, green-built, post-FUS building, with windows overlooking the retinal-rape neon of a takeout Szechuan hole-in-the-wall.

And good thing he'd prepped her for the disaster of his personal living s.p.a.ce. He'd actually oversold the sloppiness of the pad, so now it didn't look that bad. Rocco opened the fridge and pointed out some beverages. Abby agreed to something with pomegranate in it.

"Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger cheesiness," Rocco said. "I'll just get really busted if they find out I helped someone escape from the sting. Worse, that I've told you as much as I have. The deal with my line of study is we test a lot of our own applications on ourselves. You know how the Bionet works, right?"

"Not really. I have an emergency implant, that's about it. I know 911 will be called with a GPS signal if I have a heart attack."

"Right, so that's basically where the Bionet started. For years people chipped their dogs and cats so if they ran off the Humane Society could scan them and get an address and a phone number. That was the beginning, pretty much. Then when the baby boomers started going into retirement homes, a few of them got chipped with files including their whole medical histories. Better than wearing a bracelet with all that info engraved on it. Then the next wave of innovation went down and these implants, still incredibly crude by today's standards, got networked using the rudimentary Wi-Fi and Internet of the day. Pretty easy to monitor heart rate and transmit the data via the Web. Then, like you said, all this GPS-enabled, vitals-monitoring software went into the implants and now you can get hit by a truck and two seconds later your body calls an ambulance for you. The Bionet's saved lives. That's why I wanted to get into it in the first place. Now we can download hormones, enzymes, and antigens remotely through implants and upload our immunities for other people to share."

"What's that have to do with you knowing about Bicycle Thieves?"

"We're on to the next stage, Bionet 2.0. Neurology. The development of this stuff hasn't been all that smooth. For years we've stuck these implants in volunteers' heads that make them hear voices in other languages, pick up phone transmissions, radio stations. We've been trying to wire the frontal lobes into the Internet so everyone can eventually become their own Wikipedia or, rather, share the Wikipedia with others who are logged in. The software itself has improved by several orders of magnitude, for sure, but for the past ten years or so the industry has been driving test subjects crazy, paying out huge lawsuits. It's been a disaster.

"Three, four years ago a group of neuroscientists and Bioneticists at the University of Montreal published a paper that changed everyone's thinking about neural implants. They proposed that the problems we were seeing in clinical trials weren't all that related to the implants themselves, but to the parts of the brain we were seeking to integrate with. Rather than trying to plug those implants into the parts of the brain that produce consciousness, we needed to start plugging them into the parts of the brain that produce subconsciousness. And this makes a lot of sense for two reasons. One, the subconscious is built to process a s.h.i.tload of information, a quant.i.ty that overloads the conscious mind. It doles out information judiciously into our conscious thoughts. Second, Jung believed that the individual subconscious tapped into a level of consciousness all living beings shared, the collective unconscious. And one cool way to think of the collective unconscious is as a giant, biological Internet."

"So you plugged the real Internet into the subconscious Internet?"

"We're trying to. Instead of plugging these implants into people's heads that just scream trivia at them 24/7, we're finding that these subconscious implants work far more mysteriously than we imagined. You know that feeling when you can't remember a word? When you say you feel there's something on the tip of your tongue? That's what this implant feels like all the time. Like there's always information just behind the screen waiting to burst out but the subconscious is acting in your best interest to hold it back. So tonight, when you said Bicycle Thieves, my implant probably did a quick search of IMDb, then served up that little summary for me."

"That feeling, though, doesn't it drive you nuts?"

"I'm learning to manage it. And my implant is only turned on a few hours a day. Started out just a minute or two a day at first, and even at that level it left me exhausted. I got these h.e.l.lish nightmares. My subconscious had to learn how to use this new tool, this piece of hardware thrust like a s.p.a.ce probe into my skull. You can imagine, after millions of years of evolution, suddenly the mind has to deal with this weird little sesame-seed-sized thing that shows up in the cranium. And you're right, I'd go crazy if I walked around all day feeling like I'd just forgotten what I was going to say." Rocco paused, but not like he was listening to a distant signal. More like he was listening to something that only came from within himself. "I like you, Abby."

How romantically science fictiony this all was! Abby leaned in to kiss him.

Abby confronted Kylee as she jerked along through the great hall in an antique-looking electric wheelchair that smelled of burning lubricant.

"Either I see the archives or I'm leaving," Abby said.

Kylee b.u.mbled into one of the phantasy-art-lined pa.s.sages. "That would be a shame. You at least have to stick around to see the musical we're producing in your honor."

"If there isn't work for me to do I'll get out of your way and head home to Vancouver."

A great bell clanged somewhere on the property. Kylee quickly wheeled herself to the nearest elevator. Federicos rushed through the house, a.s.sembling on a balcony overlooking the harbour. Abby pushed her way to the front and saw a squat little freighter pull up to the pier. The captain, a bronzed man in a red-striped shirt and captain's hat, waved up to the spectators as six Federicos rushed to help unload crates of supplies. There emerged a young nurse carrying a bundle in her arms-the newest Federico. A cheer went up, hugs all around. Accompanied by Federicos beside themselves with excitement, the nurse strode the length of the pier and ascended the steep path to the house with the infant Federico in her arms. When she came to the balcony she handed the baby to Kylee, who quivered in her wheelchair, suppressing tears. The pop star pulled the blanket away from the baby's face and said, "Oh, my heavens, he's the most precious baby I have ever seen." The other Federicos elbowed one another to get a better look, oohing over Federico #631, freshly expelled from the womb of a desperate third-world woman. Once the nurse and the boat departed, and after a few seconds of tickling and cooing, Kylee handed the baby over to one of the Federicos in charge of childcare and wiped her hands on her shawl. "That one seemed a bit underbaked," she said. "A rush job. We'll see how he grows. Disperse, everyone. Off to your stupid, like, responsibilities and s.h.i.t."

Alone with Kylee, Abby watched the ship disappear on the horizon as a procession of Federicos hauled the supplies to the house. A breeze lifted some strands of hair from Abby's face and laid them across her shoulder.

"There are no archives," Abby said.

"True, but I was going to show you what's left of them. Ready?"

The domed solarium, three stories of steel and gla.s.s, was by far the most meticulously maintained wing of the Seaside Love Palace. A hundred species of b.u.t.terflies colored trees, vines, and blossoms of endangered flora. The thick, peaty air smelled ripe with the sweet scent of decay. A tiled trail led through the foliage to a room-sized peninsula encircled by a crescent-shaped koi pond. When Kylee, Abby, and a Federico arrived at the pond they found a table set for afternoon tea and an ancient man napping in a wheelchair. That he wasn't actually a corpse astonished Abby. Rare species of moths alighted on his shoulders.

The young Federico poured tea for the group while Kylee shouted at the old man, "Wake up! Wake up, you old queen!" After a minute of this the ancient man began to stir, opening an eye a crack.

"You don't have to wake him for me," Abby said.

"Oh, but I do," Kylee said. "You wanted to see the archives, didn't you?"

"This is your archivist?"

"No, young thing. This isn't the archivist. This is the archive. This is Federico #1."

Abby looked puzzled.

"Ask him something," Kylee continued. "His brain is a server. You have to put your ear close to his mouth, though. He can only whisper. And you have to shout your question."

Abby knelt beside the source of all Federicos. "What was Errol Flynn's first starring role?" she asked.

"Louder, honey," Kylee said.

"What was Errol Flynn's first starring role!"

Federico #1's mouth began to move, just a subtle tremor of the lips and a slight breeze of rank air rising from his throat to indicate words were about to be formulated. "Captain Blood, 1935," he whispered.

"I thought I was here to recover digital data," Abby said. "How am I supposed to know what's lost if it's all stored in this man's head?"

"They said you were the best," Kylee snickered.

"I retrieve digital content, not memories. How am I supposed to figure out what was lost?"

The archives went back to sleep. Kylee shrugged and scooted away, chuckling, with the younger Federico in tow, leaving Abby and #1 alone. Abby checked the level on her recorder then shouted into the archive's ear, "Recite the Luke Piper transcript!"

After a moment of silence the archive's lips began to move. Abby positioned her microphone and turned up the volume, listening through the ear buds. ". . . the tape roll a bit here before we get . . . Luke? You need anything, Luke? No, I'm fine. I thought we could first talk . . ." the archive began. Hours vanished into the story of Luke's search for Mr. Kirkpatrick. Why anyone would go through the trouble to send her here to record this tale was beyond her. She turned the recorder off when it was clear the transcript was complete, then rose to leave. The old Federico grabbed her wrist and trained his gummy eyes on her. "You aren't the person you think you are," he said, his voice rising barely above a whisper.

"Let go of me."

"You're in superposition."

A young Federico appeared and removed Abby's arm from Federico #1's grip. "Now, now, #1," he said. "Let's not traumatize our guest."

As he was wheeled away, Federico #1 shook his finger at Abby. "You're somebody else entirely."

On the stage, gradually brightening footlights brought an abstract cityscape into view. A light burned in the window of an apartment tower where a Federico in a black wig sat drinking tea, clicking on a laptop. Another Federico wearing fake stubble appeared beside the wigged Federico and rubbed his shoulder. Abby, sitting in the balcony beside Kylee, realized these actors were supposed to represent Rocco and herself.

ROCCO.

What are you doing, sweetheart?

ABBY (sighing) Looking for a job. I sure wish there was a better market for a digital-media restorer!

ROCCO.

Hey, you'll find something soon. Don't give up. Which reminds me. I got this phone call last night from some guy named Dirk Bickle. He wanted to talk to you about an opportunity.

ABBY.

Well, why didn't you say so?

The stage Abby leaped to her feet and grabbed a jacket and hat, then pranced down from the skysc.r.a.per to center stage, where a grey-haired Federico in dark sungla.s.ses rose from a cafe table.

DIRK.

Nice to meet you, Abby. My name is Dirk Bickle and have I got an opportunity for you. To Victoria! Posthaste! To recover a bunch of archives and jazz like that!

Dirk hustled Abby onto a cardboard boat that glided along behind rolling, saw-toothed stage waves. A couple of anthropomorphized clouds with Dizzy Gillespie cheeks descended from the rafters while offstage a Foley artist faked the sounds of waves, wind, and thunder with sheets of metal and hand-cranked barrels of rice.

ABBY.

Wait! What am I actually supposed to do?

The boat came to rest, stage right, in front of the art director's baroque vision of the Seaside Love Palace. Abby belted a couplet.