pigtails secured with heart-print ribbons.
“You’re going to be all right. You’ve been injected with a Bionet hack,” the bat said. His voice sounded like it had been recorded at double speed for a cartoon. Chipmunky. “We’re your friends. We’re here to liberate you.”
Abby’s spine stiffened, as if one by one her vertebrae had begun to fuse together. Talking seemed out of the question. As if anticipating this problem, the lamb placed something cold and sticky on Abby’s forehead.
“This is a bindi transmitter,” the lamb said. “It will allow you to bypass speech and communicate with us telepathically.”
Abby heard a sort of chime in her left ear, followed by a woman’s voice. “Hi! Do you accept this connection?”
Abby thought “Yes” three times in a row. Another chime. The aural space in her head felt echoey, as if her sense of hearing had itself entered an empty concrete room. “Who did this to me?” she asked the space. “Where is Rocco? How come I can’t control myself? Who are you people?”
“We’re software developers,” the bat said in the space, his voice trailing into two or three distinct echoes. “My name is Bat and this is Lamb.”
“You’re monks.”
“We were for a time,” Lamb said.
Bat said, “We’ll help you find Rocco.”
“Who did this to me?” Abby asked again.
“Rocco did this to you,” Lamb said. “He’s a DJ. We can’t liberate all the embodiments of Vancouver but we know you can reach him and put an end to his DJing.”
“Rocco wouldn’t do this.”
Lamb said, “Rocco met you at an underground Bionet party. He knew about the police activity and spared you from getting arrested because he thought you looked cute. He took you as a trophy. Then he accidentally fell in love with you, and loves you still. You can take us to him. He is doing to thousands of people what he did to your friend Jadie and what he has done to you.”
“He would never have done this to me.”
“That is correct,” Lamb said, “but he’s been away from his dashboard. You’re running on autopilot. He didn’t want this to happen to you. He had programmed the most exquisite experiences for you. He manually encoded your sexual climaxes. Every happy moment from the time you met happened under his control. Every teardrop, every laugh, all predetermined by the most elegant software.”
Bat said, “He sent you away on a tangential trip to the archives of Kylee Asparagus to get you out of the way. He knew the heat was coming down on him. He wanted to protect you.”
“Dirk Bickle said I was sent to infiltrate another reality,” Abby said.
“Do you want to keep showing up dead?” Bat asked.
“I can’t tell I’m even alive,” Abby said. Her fingers started tingling.
“We can reverse the hack,” Bat said. “We can return you to your state of subservience to your autopilot DJ.” The two former monks glanced around the room as if considering what would happen should Abby select this option. The whole apartment was a fetid, domestic catastrophe.
Abby swallowed and thought, I’ll go along. Wasn’t that what she was good at? Going along? Letting others plot her trajectories? Her throat felt as if she was suffering the worst cold of her life while she simultaneously huffed chemical fumes and swallowed peach pits. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and resisted falling down the sides of her face. Bat patted her chest.
“The hack is almost complete,” Bat said. “After this, you will fall asleep. A sleep deeper than any sleep you’ve had in a long time. We’ll leave instructions for you for when you wake up.”
Abby’s voice came back, barely. “Wait. If it’s true. If Rocco really did this to me—what are you going to do to him?”
“We’ll recycle him,” Lamb said. Upon which curtains fell, blotting out all light, all thought.
Abby’s eyelids made an audible noise as they flapped open. From zero to fully conscious within half a second. Her joints squealed and popped as she struggled out of bed. First thing she noticed was how immaculate the apartment looked. Wood floors actually reflective again, the clothes hamper empty, not a trace of dust on the surface of anything. In the kitchen she found a bowl of fresh fruit and the refrigerator stocked with vegetables, new cartons of juice, tubs of yogurt, entrees neatly sealed in containers. Her arms wildly extracted the contents of the fridge, tossing ingredients onto the counter. Fresh pumpernickel bagels with a selection of schmeers. Bananas that preferred the climate of the very very tropical equator. Abby pulled out the blender and began dropping in strawberries and protein powder. She felt like doing yoga! She wanted wheat grass! She stretched, hopped in place, put some music on. Not a cockroach in sight. The shitty takeout containers and the trick-or-treating monks seemed but a hallucination. This right here—this vibrantly colored orange—this was the real world, clean and alert, confident and rejoicing. She slipped a seedless grape into her mouth and closed her eyes as her teeth punctured the skin with a snap. She poured a glass of orange-guava juice and downed it in five gulps. Satiated, she pranced into the bathroom, where she faced her wall of soaps, exfoliants, conditioners, and moisturizers, the balms, muds, glosses, and creams. She cranked the shower up to steamy, stripped out of her pajamas, and proceeded to enjoy a forty- five-minute session under the nozzle. Out of the shower, she dressed in her newly washed favorite jeans and blouse but left her feet bare. Something about bare feet on hardwood with clean clothes and Brazilian music playing while coffee brewed meant
She noticed a manila envelope on the coffee table. Opening it she found one plane ticket, in her name, to New Newark Airport on the Kitsap Peninsula. The flight left in two hours. When she went to the closet for her suitcase, she discovered it had already been packed. Looking once more around the apartment she’d shared with Rocco, Abby pulled on her best flats and wheeled the suitcase to the door. This life, with the sunlight filtered through the shades and every tchotchke in its perfect place, was a way station. Her real life was about to begin. She was going to New York Alki.
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 6
As blood dripped out of me into the sand, Nick set a one-liter bottle of water a few inches from my face. He said, “I was just supposed to shoot you. They didn’t say to kill you. If you’re lucky, I didn’t hit anything important.” Then, without another word, he stood up and walked away. I watched him grow smaller in the waves of desert heat until he was lost in the ripples. I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. I knew enough to put pressure on the wound but that was about the extent of my knowledge of self-administered first aid. I faded in and out and thought I was dying. I laughed, sending pain through my gut. I considered starting a fire with the books. I grabbed one of them, a dirty paperback titled
I became absolutely certain I was going to. Then I heard a vehicle. Something coming from far away,
