“Fuck you—”
“No, fuck you, Dominic. Fuck you. That shit was ten years ago. Enough. Open your fucking eyes. You can work for me, you know that. Anytime you want, I’ll set you up with a plum job, working with beautiful women all day, every day. But what do you do? Get involved with these fucking people because they promise they’ll let you live in the fucking past—”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I tell him.
“Go to the fucking cops,” he says. “It’s not more complicated—”
“I already told you why I can’t go to the cops. I told you what those cops did to Kucenic—”
“All the cops? They’re working with all the fucking cops?”
“Gav—”
He grabs me by the shirt and I hear fabric rip, setting off all the jersey’s augs—the Redskins cheer squad splays through the room like a crimson and yellow Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of legs and breasts and smiling teeth and flowing hair and shimmering golden pom-poms.
“I don’t want anything to fucking happen to you,” he screams.
“At least give me a different shirt before you kick my ass—”
“Shit,” says Gav, laughing.
He gives me a cardigan that covers up the jersey augs. He tells me he knows people who can hit the streams with my evidence if it comes to that, people in the tabloids who trade in true crime and the gruesome deaths of young women, but we both know this gambit of threatening to go public with the scant evidence we have is only short-term protection, that it escalates the situation rather than tamps it down.
“You need to find Mook,” says Gavril.
“Fuck him. Mook took Theresa from me—”
“Think rationally,” says Gavril. “Think: from everything you’ve told me, he’s not working with Timothy or Waverly. He might know how to protect you, how to hide from them—or at least he might have a few ideas to fuck them over. ‘I know hate and ice is great,’ or something like that—whatever Frost said. Right? Right?”
“That’s right,” I tell him.
“If you can track him down—what’s the word—it’s, um, rošáda, um, in chess—”
iLux catching up, the translation apps presenting options: “‘Castling,’” I tell him.
“That’s right,” he says. “Better attack options through defensive movement. Castling—”
“And if I find Mook, I can also get Theresa back—”
Gavril cracks his knuckles, collects himself with a deep breath. “Maybe that, too,” he says.
Gavril asks for details about what I’ve told him—he wants me to rehash everything for him. He wants to know about Zhou. He asks me whether Zhou is always the same when I encounter her, or if she’s different each time. Different hairstyles, different clothes? He wants to know if I’m able to add up all the hours I’ve experienced with her, specifically “unique hours,” he calls them, where she does or says things differently from the last time I’d encountered her—different gestures, different scenes.
“I can’t even guess,” I tell him. “She’s always different. She’s not just a cardboard stand-in, if that’s what you’re asking—”
“Quick scenes?” he asks.
“Hundreds of hours, but I’ve already tried tracking her. There’s nothing in the exception reports—”
“She’s a stream girl,” says Gavril. “Either a model or someone’s program. If we can find out who she is, we can track Zhou to Mook—”
“I already ran a Facecrawler on Zhou and I’m telling you there’s nothing—or, there’s really too much. Someone ghosted her, probably Mook—”
“I don’t know what that means—”
“Someone, let’s say Mook, compromised the data points that facial recognition software would use to match her face to other images of her face. Made the sign point to an incorrect referent. Mook basically made her invisible to third-party software. No exact matches so Facecrawler starts pulling results for approximate facial matches, Asian women—billions of hits. I guess I could just start sifting through the results—”
“No, no—you don’t understand what I’m telling you,” says Gavril. “This woman, Zhou, is the kind of woman I work with all the time. She’s either a fully realized simulation or she’s an actress. If she’s a sim, think of all the hours to program her—not just what she looks like but all those little unique things she does. If she’s an actress, think of the hours to film her. My guess is that she’s an actress—but either way, a professional’s involved. This bullshit you’re caught up in is someone’s full-time job, even if it’s under the table. It won’t be impossible to track her down. Show her to me—”
I show him. He downloads Three Rivers Net and the City-Archive app and we synch, Gavril’s soccer match receding to a point of light as western Pennsylvania coalesces and we plunge through the mountainside into the tunnel. He tells me that he’s dreamt about this tunnel, this entranceway into Pittsburgh from the airport, that it reminds him of winter flights and snow-covered midnights, of childhood Christmases spent far from home visiting his cousin and aunts and uncles in America. I want to ask him what he remembers about those Christmases at my grandmother’s house, the midnight masses at Prince of Peace, the Pittsburgh Slovak Folk Ensemble dancing in the church basement, girls in white knee-highs and burgundy dresses, their hair in braids, their thighs flashing. Gav and I couldn’t understand a word each other was saying back then, but we didn’t need words—all we needed to know about each other was that we both wanted to melt away in those beautiful girls but were both too shy to talk with them. I want to ask him if he remembers his first year visiting, when we each unwrapped Optimus Prime, huddled together beneath my grandma’s dinner table, but the tunnel ends and the City unfolds around us, the streets and rivers and bridges like a dazzling crosshatch of light.
I take him home.
The paisley carpet, the gauzy curtains at the far end of the apartment hallway. An Exit light flickers above the fire doors. Room 208. Gavril had met Theresa, only once—we vacationed in Prague for a week with Gavril as our guide. I expect him to seem dazed or dismayed when I unlock the apartment door and find Zhou greeting us instead of Theresa, but Gavril only looks her over and says, “Her, right?”
Odd seeing him here, in my living room. Gavril pulls Zhou aside and asks her to take a seat on the couch. She’s wearing my wife’s plaid pajama pants and Donora T-shirt and I feel protective of her, in a way, but as she takes a seat, doing what Gavril asks her to do, the environment snaps from the gauzy sentimentality of my personal memories—with Gavril here, I can see the apartment as a built environment, an illusion, nothing more.
“Serial number?” he says, but Zhou looks at me and asks, “Who is this man?”
Gavril lifts Zhou’s T-shirt above her abdomen and checks a spot on the underside of her right breast, checking her like a doctor might check for lumps. He lets her T-shirt fall and touches her near her collarbone.
“What’s your serial number?” he asks again and Zhou says, “Please—”
“A woman, not a sim,” says Gavril. “Sims are registered, trademarked. Even pirated sims have telltale signs of the engines they’ve cribbed—little codes or abraded markings beneath the breast area where the serial numbers are required to go, or on the collarbone—up here. There’s nothing like that on Zhou—”
“So she doesn’t have markings—”
“The people who create sims, the good ones, spend more of their budgets outthinking software pirates than they do in creating the sims in the first place,” he says. “It’s difficult to get rid of a bar code—”
“There are workarounds. Or custom—”
“Maybe… but do you realize how much fucking money it would take to create a sim this lifelike running on a custom engine?” he says. “Not only the work involved but the red tape, the laws. We’re talking megacorporation money, or state-sponsored money, if even then—but it’s not just a question of money. Look at Zhou—look at how she interacts with the environment, with us. She’s so perfect—so realistic. No one creates stuff this realistic, that’s why human models still have work—”