It’s a contention Michael’s father has made before, AR as separate but equal dimensional plane. The problem, for Michael, is the body. He says, “What about death?”
“The end,” Stuart says. “No afterlife.”
“But in the game, when you die?”
“Returned to darkness.”
“And in so-called unaugmented reality?”
“The Jewish cemetery in West Stockbridge.”
“It’s a pretty cemetery,” says Michael.
“I’ve done well,” continues Stuart, indicating his SD bracelet. “This bracelet represents more money than I’ve seen in a long time. I should buy a home storage vault, but I like to wear it. Who’s gonna rob me out here in the boonies? Your sister’s got armed drones protecting our airspace. You don’t have to worry. Your inheritance is safe.”
“I wasn’t,” says Michael.
“It’s not all going to Quentin either. He gets his third, that’s only fair. But you’ve been generous with me over the years. I haven’t forgotten. It’s reflected in my will.”
“Your will in the game.”
“I know what you’re thinking: at the rate I’m going, buying TVs and living-room sets, it will all be gone by the time I retire this body at age two hundred and upload myself to the cloud.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” says Michael.
“But I’m telling you, the amount I’ve made over the last few months—maybe for a big Wall Street guy like you it wouldn’t seem like much, but I’m a simple man, Michael. I don’t have wants or needs like Dale Hunter. The yacht in my mind will do just fine. If you still want to record that rap album, though, I’d be happy to help. MC Metamucil or whatever it was? The industry’s booming in my realm. None of this free streaming bullshit. In Shamerica it’s pay to play. The licensing alone could send a kid to college.”
Michael imagines his easy rise to stardom in that meritocratic space. Shamerica is a country without history or context, a place where identity is forged neither by nature or nurture, but only by the breadth of one’s imaginative powers. It’s what the pilgrims dreamed of when they showed up in Plymouth with their buckle shoes and Protestant Bibles. And now, in this TMI culture of online permanence, where search histories remain cryogenically frozen in server-farm cloud storage, ever threatening to, one day, rise from the dead and return to ruin lives, Shamerica offers a viable antidote, the last frontier where a person might achieve a fresh start.
“You mentioned people trying to rob you,” he says, looking again at his father’s SD bracelet, which hangs loose and looks huge on his thin, hairless wrist. “That’s a real threat?”
“I keep a low profile,” says Stuart. “I’m not out on the message boards bragging it up, or at the San Jose nightclubs flashing my bling. It’s all relative anyway. I’ve done well, but there are guys who’ve made boatloads. No one knows who they are of course, but you can guess when you see one cruise the valley in his Porsche draping his braceleted wrist around a supermodel’s arm.”
“I don’t understand,” says Michael. “How are people buying Porsches with Sykodollars? And, for that matter, how are you buying living-room sets?”
“You haven’t been following what’s happened since the crash? It’s like ’49 all over again, Mike, only this time Woody Guthrie’s not here to sing his dustbowl blues, and there’s plenty of gold to go around. At least there was a few weeks ago. But people are pulling money from banks left and right, and they’re investing in SD, which are getting scarce. I can’t see how you’ve missed it. What do you do in that office all day, jerk off and play Snood?”
“I haven’t played Snood in years,” lies Michael. “But these bracelets, how much might one be worth? In American dollars, I mean. A bracelet owned by one of these big shot Shamerican moguls.”
“Could be millions,” says Stuart.
“Huh,” says Michael.
24.
The room is windowless but bright, lit by fluorescent overheads that reflect off the steel table and the suspect’s watch. Ryan had always pictured these rooms differently, filled with cigar smoke and lit by bare bulbs that dangled from long, swaying wires between cop and perp. He’d formed this image watching cop shows and cop movies from the age of eight until twenty-two when he joined the force and suddenly found his formerly beloved programs insufferably plotted, as if all cases were open and shut, and the lines between bad guys and good ones, and crooked cops and the kind that help old ladies cross the street, were clear as Crystal Pepsi; a world where the coffee machine is never broken, and everyone’s uniform is always neatly pressed, and CSI can break a case by looking at a bloodstain through a piece of futuristic technology, and even the street beat unis are constantly coming up with clever quips and having affairs with femmes fatales played by such otherworldly beauties as Katharine Hepburn and Mary-Kate Olsen.
He’d been particularly disappointed on this last point, joining up after 9/11 under the assumption that cops would be granted the same hyper-sexualized status as firemen, only to find that despite the uniform’s stately navy and the protective presence of the hip piece, and despite the newfound reverence for even the most previously debased authority figures like Mayor Giuliani, there was still such a deep, historically justified distrust of the badge that no amount of media-celebrated heroism could create the goodwill that would fill Ryan’s bed with the women he wants.
There are police groupies, sure, but they’re never the chic and affluent business types who tantalize Ryan walking the streets of SoHo, or eating salad in Bryant Park, staring into their phones as if each contains a universe far more interesting than the one at hand. Ryan is paralyzed in front of these women, who look at him with something even worse than disdain: utter disinterest.
He also thought the people he interrogated would be
