“Asleep on the job!” the chef bellowed. “What kind of dishwasher are you! And you dare evoke the name of the great Woo-jin Kan!”
“Don’t worry. The food’s actually great,” Hiroko said as they climbed over the dishes, trying not to slip on a rainbow of curries.
During appetizers, Chiho proclaimed, “We’re so rude. We haven’t even asked about Jadie.”
Carl sighed. “She’s had her troubles with the Bionet. Became some sick bastard’s embodiment. We got her in a recovery center down here.”
“Christ,” Skinner said.
“It started out with dancing,” Carl continued. “She’d go to parties where everyone tried out these illegal apps, give over her codes to a choreographer and they’d put her body through elaborate moves. Soon it turned into an everyday routine. She surrendered some of her basic functions, like what time she’d wake up, when she’d eat and use the bathroom. Her DJ was good to her at first, they usually are, got her to make new friends—other embodiments—made her feel popular, put witty comments in her mouth when she was in social situations. She got a bit part in a TV show they film up in Vancouver.”
“Forensic Mindfuck,” Hiroko said.
“The one about the detectives?” Chiho asked.
“The one where they travel back in time and use modern forensic methods to solve crimes of the past,” Carl said. “Anyway. Around that time she dropped out of school, which we weren’t too keen on, but it looked like she had a real career getting started.”
“When did you find out she was getting DJed?” Chiho said.
“We were clueless,” Carl said. “We thought she was succeeding purely on her own merits. If we’d known, we’d have flown up to Vancouver and tossed her ass in a recovery center straightaway.”
“We knew something about her had changed when we visited,” Hiroko said, “but we couldn’t identify it. I thought it was the pressure and excitement of her new life. Sometimes her hands trembled like she’d had too much coffee.”
Carl rubbed his stubble. “Her show got canceled and she was out of school and looking for work. That’s when her DJ lost interest in her and set her on autopilot. He got her a job waitressing and wiped his hands of her, setting her loose on autogenerated subroutines. She described it as being like living the same boring day over and over again. She woke up exactly at 7:02 a.m., had the same cereal for breakfast, ran 4.2 miles on the treadmill, and went to the same stores and bought the same three items every day—a nail file from the drugstore, a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita from the bookstore, and a set of shoelaces from a shoe repair shop. Then she’d go waitress at a greasy spoon that served only regulars who ordered the same things every day. After that she’d come home, watch a tape of the same stupid comedy, take a shower, and go to bed at 9:00 on the dot. And every night she had the same dream, in which she separated bottles for recycling behind the restaurant where she worked. Brown bottles, green bottles, clear bottles. The dream always seemed to last a couple hours, but got more detailed every night. She started to be able to read the labels, see the air bubbles in the glass, feel the texture of the glue on the bottles. Her dreams became so high-def that they started making her waking reality look foggy. Then she’d wake up and start all over again. Treadmill, shopping, work, home, movie, shower, bed, dream. It went on like this for months. Part of her remained aware of what was happening, a weak little section of her brain, and she started to suspect that the regulars at the café were embodiments, too, retired embodiments also on autopilot. She’d become this reliable little machine, a component that did its part to keep the companies that made the nail files and the shoelaces and the copies of Lolita in business, programmed to be a battery plugged into the economy. On her days off the routines automatically changed, and she’d send us an email and tell us how she was looking forward to enrolling in school again and finishing her degree. Very little variation to these messages. Hiroko and I kept trying to plan a trip up north and see her but stuff kept getting in the way. I broke my leg, Hiroko got a grant to write her book, all the usual we’ve-been-busy BS that keeps families from seeing each other. We were just happy to know she was planning to go back to school. So, finally, a couple months ago we got our act together and headed up to Vancouver. She kept trying to dissuade us from coming. I got suspicious. So we head on up there and found her new apartment, in some lousy part of town with people crazy and passed out, trash all over the place up and down the street. I ran up the steps to her door. We pounded on it and she told us to go away, so I knew something real foul was going down. The worst scenarios ran through my mind, you know how it is with a daughter. So I got all commando and broke down the fuckin’ door. Really messed up my shoulder for the weekend, I might add. We found her looking completely normal, standing in the middle of her apartment. With a hundred ninety-seven copies of Lolita, a hundred ninety-seven packages of shoelaces, and a hundred ninety-seven nail files all piled up on the kitchen table. And she was standing there dressed, smiling, making the same repetitive motion with her arm, a little shuffle with her feet, waiting for the clock to strike 9:00 a.m. so she could go out and do her shopping. Her smile terrified me. A smile a thousand miles from happiness. I just came out and asked her if she was an embodiment.”
“Christ,” Skinner said. “Did you ever catch the son of a bitch who did this to her?”
Carl shook his head. “The cops are still looking. They’re about five years behind the technology, if you wanna know the sad truth. It’s shocking. There’s a whole underground economy driven by embodiments. People just set up to work at mindless jobs, to consume the same shit every day, punch in and punch out, keep products in production, services rendered, walking around numb and dumb and compliant, without an original thought in their damn heads.”
“She’s doing better,” Hiroko said, “but it’s a long recovery. The ego atrophies during the embodiment state. It has to be rebuilt little by little. It takes weeks for them to be able to introduce themselves or shake someone’s hand.”
Skinner said, “I remember holding her little hands. Giving her shells and sand dollars. Your story breaks my heart.”
They moved on to discussions more germane to their surroundings. Skinner fingered the memory cards in his pocket, wondering at the horrors preserved in their wafer-like forms. Why punish himself like this again? Other retired private contractors, sitting in their deck chairs flipping channels and keeping their bowels operational with concoctions of herbs, didn’t seem burdened by the same obsessive need to recontextualize their former lives. For Skinner’s neighbors at the shrink-wrapped retirement community, the wars moldered. They were content to follow college football and steady their swing at the driving range. The FUS was to be actively avoided in conversation, not sought out. Skinner almost admired their ability to evade the terrors of their pasts. On his worst days he prayed for the strength to do the same. But his earlier life on battlefields demanded accounting. This need was so consuming that the only way for Carl to remain his friend was to humor him and take part in the trip, to follow him down that flaming hole of cunt-shit-molten-fuck. But now—this was a surprise—Skinner’d found some new psychic armor with which to fortify himself. He had a grandson.
Skinner took the cards out of his pocket and set them on the table. The other three regarded the cards with visible sadness as Skinner separated them into piles of innocuous memories and memories of war, the innocuous ones outnumbering the wartime ones three to one. Then, with the bottom of the pepper shaker, he smashed the war memories into pieces. When he was done, Skinner exhaled and fingered his fortune cookie, reluctant to find out what it revealed about his future.