For a minute or so, nothing much happened. Then the gangster feinted at the zombie’s head, drawing up its guard. He drove through that opening with a slam to the zombie’s nuts that made me wince.
No reaction.
The dead fighter responded with a flurry of punches, and got in a glancing blow to its opponent’s cheek. They separated, engaged, circled around.
Then the big guy exploded in a combination of killer blows, connecting so solidly it seemed they would splinter every rib in the dead fighter’s body. It brought the crowd to their feet, roaring their approval.
The zombie didn’t even stagger.
A strange look came into the gangster’s eyes, then, as the zombie counterattacked, driving him back into the ropes. I could only imagine what it must be like for a man who had always lived by his strength and his ability to absorb punishment to realize that he was facing an opponent to whom pain meant nothing. Fights were lost and won by flinches and hesitations. You won by keeping your head. You lost by getting rattled.
Despite his best blows, the zombie stayed methodical, serene, calm, relentless. That was its nature.
It must have been devastating.
The fight went on and on. It was a strange and alienating experience for me. After a while I couldn’t stay focused on it. My thoughts kept slipping into a zone where I found myself studying the line of Courtney’s jaw, thinking about later tonight. She liked her sex just a little bit sick. There was always a feeling, fucking her, that there was something truly repulsive that she really wanted to do but lacked the courage to bring up on her own.
So there was always this urge to get her to do something she didn’t like. She was resistant; I never dared try more than one new thing per date. But I could always talk her into that one thing. Because when she was aroused, she got pliant. She could be talked into anything. She could be made to beg for it.
Courtney would’ve been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her—quite the opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.
Suddenly Courtney was on her feet, yelling. The hologram showed Koestler on his feet as well. The big guy was on the ropes, being pummeled. Blood and spittle flew from his face with each blow. Then he was down; he’d never even had a chance. He must’ve known early on that it was hopeless, that he wasn’t going to win, but he’d refused to take a fall. He had to be pounded into the ground. He went down raging, proud and uncomplaining. I had to admire that.
But he lost anyway.
That, I realized, was the message I was meant to take away from this. Not just that the product was robust. But that only those who backed it were going to win. I could see, even if the audience couldn’t, that it was the end of an era. A man’s body wasn’t worth a damn anymore. There wasn’t anything it could do that technology couldn’t handle better. The number of losers in the world had just doubled, tripled, reached maximum. What the fools below were cheering for was the death of their futures.
I got up and cheered too.
In the stretch afterwards, Koestler said, “You’ve seen the light. You’re a believer now.”
“I haven’t necessarily decided yet.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Koestler said. “I’ve done my homework, Mr. Nichols. Your current position is not exactly secure. Morton-Western is going down the tubes. The entire service sector is going down the tubes. Face it, the old economic order is as good as fucking gone. Of course you’re going to take my offer. You don’t have any other choice.”
The fax outed sets of contracts. “A Certain Product,” it said here and there. Corpses were never mentioned.
But when I opened my jacket to get a pen, Koestler said, “Wait. I’ve got a factory. Three thousand positions under me. I’ve got a motivated workforce. They’d walk through fire to keep their jobs. Pilferage is at zero. Sick time practically the same. Give me one advantage your product has over my current workforce. Sell me on it. I’ll give you thirty seconds.”
I wasn’t in sales and the job had been explicitly promised me already. But by reaching for the pen, I had admitted I wanted the position. And we all knew whose hand carried the whip.
“They can be catheterized,” I said—“no toilet breaks.”
For a long instant Koestler just stared at me blankly. Then he exploded with laughter. “By God, that’s a new one! You have a great future ahead of you, Donald. Welcome aboard.”
He winked out.
We drove on in silence for a while, aimless, directionless. At last Courtney leaned forward and touched the chauffeur’s shoulder.
“Take me home,” she said.
Riding through Manhattan I suffered from a waking hallucination that we were driving through a city of corpses. Gray faces, listless motions. Everyone looked dead in the headlights and sodium vapor streetlamps. Passing by the Children’s Museum I saw a mother with a stroller through the glass doors. Two small children by her side. They all three stood motionless, gazing forward at nothing. We passed by a stop-and-go where zombies stood out on the sidewalk drinking forties in paper bags. Through upper-story windows I could see the sad rainbow trace of virtuals playing to empty eyes. There were zombies in the park, zombies smoking blunts, zombies driving taxies, zombies sitting on stoops and hanging out on street corners, all of them waiting for the years to pass and the flesh to fall from their bones.
I felt like the last man alive.
Courtney was still wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought so wildly during the act itself.
And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I’d known her, we’d never once had breakfast together.
I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a wine press and squeeze her dry.
At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and stood facing me from the inside. “Well,” she said. “All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald.”
“Good night? Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could’ve told she was in heat from across the street. A chimpanzee could’ve talked his way into her pants. “What kind of idiot game are you playing now?”
“You know what no means, Donald. You’re not stupid.”
“No I’m not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit.”
“Enjoy your present,” she said, and closed the door.
I found Courtney’s present back in my suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into the room, letting the door slam behind me. So that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.
’Jackers! I thought, and all in a panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don’t know what. Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I’d feared.