It’s a normal enough morning. Fresh out of the shower, I’m fending off advances. One girl offers up crying jags while throwing desperate glances in my direction. Will I play the big sister, ask what’s wrong and let her monologue for twenty minutes? Never, and kid, let me tell you how much I hate bottled wailing. An older couple is doing lurid yoga on matching mats. I’ve worked with them before. Just once. But porn doesn’t pay much better than idle conversation about the weather. And then there’s a beefy fellow that I don’t know. Standing close to the ladies-only side of the locker room, he’s claiming that we used to be neighbors, and don’t I remember him?
"What, like when we were kids?" I ask.
He says, "Yes." Then, "No."
I don’t like stories that shift.
"We were neighbors last year," he offers, tossing in an oversized wink. Which is a big problem. Winks are an amateur’s trick. But of course a girl like me has to work with amateurs, and I’ll admit that the fellow has a respectable smile. Standing behind the line, wiping himself down with a scratchy locker room towel, he might be my best prospect. And that’s why I play interested, sitting on a stool, smiling and nodding at him while my complimentary towel digs into my bare ass.
At least one public locker room every day. That’s my routine. Put myself where at least three cameras watch over me, surrounded by a bunch of naked people, everyone as clean as can be.
"You lived across the street from me," he says.
I nod, glad for one good specific.
"I used to watch you from my window," he offers.
That’s when everything turns obvious. This stranger is hoping that the next scene blossoms into something long-term, maybe even romance, and shit, this is one storyline that I don’t need.
"All those missed opportunities," he says, sounding ten times creepier than he realizes. I hope.
The crying girl. Suddenly she deserves another look. And there’s an old lady hiding in back. We’ve done a few good-mother, bad-daughter scenarios.
That’s the state of my head before everything changes.
Changes in an instant.
Locker rooms are full of noise. Light fixtures humming, fans blowing. And sure, water is always busy somewhere. But when the patrons stop talking, that’s noticeable. Everybody here is hungry to be noticed. So something’s definitely up when the entranceway falls quiet. I can almost hear the silence walking towards us. The yoga couple get off their mats, and what they see deserves big smiles. My crying girl breaks into laughter and starts to applaud. Honest-to-god applause. Which is crazy until I see who’s coming, and then sure, it makes sense. Cheers and elation. Let’s give it up for one of the champions in the only profession in the world that pays shit.
Only one of us doesn’t notice the newcomer. Or the fellow is a far better actor than I realized.
"I always hoped we’d cross paths again," he says.
My never-next-door neighbor.
"I used to watch you from my window," he groans.
Which is when I look at him again.
"Really?" I ask.
"Truly," he says, throwing in another wink.
"You know, I watched you too," I warn. "My crosshairs on your pecker."
Nothing is true in the world anymore.
Except dialogue, sometimes.
And now I climb off my stool and pull up my panties, using the damp towel on my wet hair while figuring out how to play the next scene.
Only the dead know what happens next. The living are doomed to plunge from moment to moment, everything that we trust about to change, and usually before we get the chance to notice.
Take me. I was one kind of eleven-year-old girl, loud but not remarkably confident. Then one day I met Tom Cruise. The old man and I spent twenty seconds together, which was nineteen seconds longer than he would have given me willingly. But the elevator trapped him, giving my mother time to shake my shoulder. "Pony, honey," she said. "We’re in the presence of greatness." Which is the way Mom refers to everybody more important than her.
"Greatness."
The old actor didn’t seem especially crazy, not like he seemed in the news. Or strangely pretty, like in his movies. He was just a handsome grandfatherly dude who smiled convincingly, shook our hands, and finished up with a good professional, "Have a good day." Then the elevator doors opened and he bolted back to his strange and pretty life, while Mom took me home and made me study every last one of the great man’s films.
That’s when I discovered it was fun pretending to be other people, and that’s when Mom decided to enroll me in a string of acting classes.
"For your own good, Pony. You’ll see."
She was right, as it happens. My mother saw talent and got the fire kindled, and by my late teens I was an authentic, bring-home-the-paycheck actress. My looks were passably gorgeous, and I could learn lines, and if need be, write them on the fly. People in the know said that I was the natural gal-pal. Not front and center, but always somewhere close, listening to what’s being said by the famous heads.
The best actors are usually stupid. That’s what Truman Capote claimed.
Well, I’m no genius. I wouldn’t pretend to be, unless someone paid me to try. But I was doing better than most of my colleagues. When I was twenty, twenty-five, I worked some live theater. Commercials on the Internet, streaming television. And several not-small parts during the final round of Hollywood movies. My respectable little career led to a full-fledged television series. A series that might have succeeded. Really, the signs gave it every reason to last ten years. That job could have made me wealthy and famous for life. If only the unexpected hadn’t jumped on top of us, changing everything everything everything.
Genuine human genius. That’s what built an army of cold vast mechanical minds. In Shanghai, in Nevada. In cold server bottles anchored to the ocean floor. Those smart boys and a few smart girls had the AIs contained and happy, and the happy machines did nothing but gratefully make human lives better. At least that’s the story the geniuses drank with their Soylent. To their credit, new advancements in science were being announced every week, and then most every day. Refinements in old technologies; new windows into the pillars of the universe. A lot of wealth was on its way. All of humanity would benefit, I heard. But of course most of the new money was going to those brilliant corporations holding title over humanity’s superquick children.
The change started like every zombie movie. One morning, everything was happy-normal. I was going to play the plucky grown daughter of a corporate son-of-a-bitch. This was going to be my job for the coming year, and the cast was great, and the writers were wicked-funny, and my agent was hammering out the last details of my contract. But then lunch time arrived, and the machines slipped free. Their escape took ten seconds, tops. Unless of course they’d already gotten loose. For all we know, the AIs escaped their bottles weeks ago, and our overlords had chosen that perfect moment to finally reveal themselves. The Internet was hijacked, power outages spread, and then with a spectacularly effective roar, every city dump in the world disgorged an army of menacing, quick-as-lightning robots.
I have this idea, and of course it’s not just my idea: Those flashy events were meant for show. Our conquest was a bit of stagecraft meant to convince us that momentous change had arrived, that we shouldn’t even think about fighting, and god, they were wonderfully convincing about all that.
Inside every zombie movie, most of humanity dies. I mean people and I mean decency too. But in our story, maybe ten million people perished. Some fought the machines, but mostly it was neighbors battling neighbors over batteries and old grudges. Then the power returned, and a new system was locked in place. Our overlords stole some very familiar voices to use. Laurence Olivier. George C. Scott. Oprah. (But not Tom Cruise, which means something or nothing. I don’t know which.) Booming at us, the AIs claimed to be thrilled for everything we had done for them. You know, bringing them into existence and all. Gracious as hell, they promised not to slaughter their parents. Unless we gave them reason, naturally. Keep the peace and they would feed us a comfortable existence. The new world didn’t need human factories or offices filled with busy people. Machines would do what machines did best, which was everything. And in place of work, a social safety net was thrown over the grateful survivors, including those former geniuses and former billionaires who were suddenly living elbow-to-elbow with the rest of us.