eyes slightly.
She spoke carefully. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally this stupid, but I’m on drugs.”
Eugene burst into laughter. “You’re a lot of fun.”
“So you’re a sculptor? An artist?”
“Artifice isn’t art.”
“Are you an engineer, then?”
“Artifice isn’t engineering. Let me show you something else. You’re a couture model, right? You ought to find this intriguing.”
Eugene led her over to a life-sized plastic nude sprawling on the floor. The nude woman was lying on her back with her hands laced behind her head and a vague expression of animal bliss.
“Who’s your model?”
“She’s nobody. And everybody. See, Muncheners are very big on nude sunbathing. We just went down to the Flauchersteg one Sunday last summer, and we scanned a bunch of people with our spex. Then we did a physical composite of all the models, a collation in our virtuality. Then we output the collation in plastic, and we got her: The Average Nude Munchener Sunbathing Woman.” Eugene looked at the statue with pride, then jerked his thumb over his lab-coated shoulder. “We got her husband, Mr. Nude Munchener, stashed over there in the corner; he’s a little hard to see right now because his finish wore off and his substance is semi translucent.”
“Right.”
“You can see that as a model she’s not particularly compelling; I mean, entirely average people are unremarkable by definition, wouldn’t you say? But creating this image was just the first step. My next concept was to get about a hundred men to look at her—while wearing spex, of course, so we could track the movement of their attention.”
“How’d you get a hundred people to stare at a nude plastic statue?”
“Well, we just bicycled her down to the Marienplatz and made it a performance event. The tourists were real cooperative.”
“Oh.”
“Then we collated our attention statistics in an algorithm and plotted it in virtuality and fused it out. Come have a look.”
He strolled over to a corner and whipped away a thin black sheet.
“Wait a minute,” Maya said, “I … I
“The
“That’s it. That’s
“My original conjecture was that we were going to output the most beautiful woman in the world,” Eugene said, “a feminine form that would absolutely compel male attention! But what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.”
“What’s the man look like?”
“The man as seen by men, or the man as seen by women?”
“The man as seen by women.”
Eugene shrugged. “Somehow I knew you’d ask that.… Well, have a look.” He crossed the floor of the studio and removed another sheet.
“What went wrong?” Maya said.
“Well, we’re not quite sure. We think maybe it was our sampling procedure. I mean, you get these two rather odd artificer guys, me and Franz, asking total female strangers in the Marienplatz to put on spex and stare at a naked plastic guy.… We got a few volunteers, but it was kind of a small self-selected crowd of women, and this is what we ended up with.”
The statue was a big angry-looking horned mask connected to a swollen bunch of bulging bubbles.
“It looks like they tried to boil him to death.”
“You see those three, um, leglike appendages here? They’re supposed to float detached in midair, but we couldn’t cast it that way. We still don’t get what happened to his nose; it looks like they just sort of stared right through him.”
Maya gazed meditatively at the statue. The initial impression of ugliness seemed to fade after a while. It was getting harder and harder to stop watching the thing. She felt a growing sense of excitement. It was as if they’d dragged the statue whole and true from some sticky crevice deep in her own brain. “Eugene, this artwork is doing something to me. This feels very … unreal.”
“Thanks a lot.” Eugene shrugged. “We lost interest in this one, we figured we had a flaw in our procedurals. I’m thinking now that maybe self-portraits are the next conceptual step. We scan you, we show you yourself, then we plot out your attention algorithm as you’re looking at your own replicated body. That way we can cast your internal self-image in permanent plastic.”
“I think this boiling-bubble guy would be a lot less scary if he were really small,” Maya offered thoughtfully. “Like something I could wear on a charm bracelet, maybe.”
“You’d have to take that up with Franz. Franz does our merchandising.
Therese came up. “Franz says he’ll cut me a discount if we do six of you,” she told Maya.
“I thought we were just going to do just one nice replica dummy of me for the store window.”
“Sure, but if we do six dummies then I can retail you. Assuming the product would move, that is.”
“Certainly this girl will sell,” said Franz with confidence.
“The problem with couture mannequins is they’re not very tactile,” Eugene opined. “We’ve been doing some great work in surfaces. We got some new finishing techniques that feel just like wet sealskin.”
Therese made a quick moue of distaste. “We don’t want people feeling up the mannequins, Eugene. It wrinkles the clothes.”
Eugene was crestfallen. He considered a further argument, then looked at his watch. “Well, I can’t stay chatting, I gotta see a dog about a man.… ” He looked at Maya. “Y’know, I enjoyed meeting you. You’re a really fascinating conversationalist. If you’re not too busy, why don’t you drop by the Tete du Noye in Praha next Tuesday? You know where that is?”
“No.”
“It’s in the Praha Old Town, the Staromestska. The Tete is a tincture joint for the artifice crowd. We got a crowd of very vivid people from the net, they meet there in Praha once a month. Someone like you—I think maybe you’d fit right in.”
Franz and Eugene delivered six Mayas next Monday. Eugene had jointed their shoulders, knees, elbows, and hips on plastic swivels. He had trimmed their skulls inside the design virtuality, so the finished mannequins had no hair.
The shop was now in possession of six tall plastic nudes with slightly startled expressions. The mannequins weighed about five kilos each, so lightweight and breezy that it was a good idea to weight their feet lest they topple over.
Maya and Klaudia spent the day dressing the plastic mannequins, doing their wigs and makeup, and assembling them in action tableaus outside the shop.
Klaudia was surprisingly good at this. Klaudia was no genius at making change but she was great at deploying mannequins—mannequins clambering over cafe tables, mannequins brandishing tennis rackets, mannequins chewing enthusiastically on each other’s feet. The outdoor orgy of well-dressed plastic Mayas was a powerful crowd draw. Maya would take her own place among the plastic stiffs and then suddenly move, on Klaudia’s cue. The effect was profound.
Maya found it lovely to be publicly admired. So publicly, and with such intense repetition. The romantic ingenue Maya; the big floral pink powderpuff Maya; the Maya in gallopades with gleaming wads of costume jewelry and big kicky wings of eyeliner; the Maya in the white neon battery suit; the high-kicking hey-sailor Maya in red and white culottes; the sporty mountain-hiking Maya; the cool and classic draperied Maya with a fluted frappe glass. The Maya multiplicity was grand fun, a pocket spectacle. Still, when the day was over, Maya felt peculiarly thin and stretched. Strangely and terribly weary.
It was Therese’s biggest commercial day in months. They sold so much stock (including every last one of the Maya dolls) that Therese decided to leave town for an acquisition tour.
