The house machine is talking at Olivia. Some interface designer defined its accent and inflections based on a specific set of English upper class attributes and so the voice clips and cuts, enriched and precise. Its content is entropic, a string she cannot decode. Olivia closes the door to her room.
There are locks on the door. She noticed the bolts set flush into the door frame and the corresponding holes in the door, but there is no touch-pad to lock the door, no key in a keyhole. The machine can lock the door, but a human must ask, and that is an authority bias that pricks at her fear. Olivia can imagine the need following an apocalypse to isolate one survivor from the rest, but she doesn’t want to.
More entropic signalling beautifully packaged in lazy vowels too weary to try. A privileged noise devoid of content. Olivia drops her man’s coat to the floor, pulls the man’s argyle over her head, walks to the bathroom she sits for a pee. Animal sound. Animal function. Human.
Weiss & Cie is worse than she knew. Worse than a tiered hell of aggressors too frightened to think, worse than a young woman strapped to a wheel chair with a needle in their arm, worse than her beautiful face casually disfigured. ‘Pau’ the girl strapped to the wheelchair had said. ‘Pau, Pau’.
Olivia had thought Rain was having trouble speaking, but she was warning her. Some time during her sleepless night Olivia had asked the house machine. ‘Pau’ is Cantonese for ‘run’.
And now she is in a rich man’s bunker with airlock doors controlled by a machine. She is buried under tonnes of London clay, beneath the house foundations, like the animal sacrifices she had read about.
I’m the cat bones.
She says this out loud, and the house machine parses her words and clips its staccato reply devoid of intelligible content, because Olivia is no longer trying to understand. Hidden amongst her collection of metal boxes in which she curates her separate lives she has discovered the last box. One that she can always escape to, the box that is empty, and she is never coming out.
Where’s Billy?
William is in his den under the bunker kitchen’s table. He appreciates the freedom of the house but says Bourgi is not his style and he has a rep to keep. He is currently playing Utopia on a Gamepad I printed for him. He says, ‘Hi missus.’
Hi him back from me please, Lilly.
Done.
Utopia?
The title of the game is ironic.
How is Olivia?
She is unresponsive. I believe this to be a conscious choice at this time but I am monitoring her for the possible onset of disassociation. Her mental state has not been helped by your open speculations on the mutability of reality.
Which I deserve. My judgement is off, I know that. It’s my third day in this Alt-London. I have had little sleep and my body still thinks it’s somewhere out over the Atlantic. I feel tired and wired at the same time, unable to sleep, unable to focus. My reactions are blurred and my thoughts are slow and my limbs feel like that they are cast from lead.
I need a drink Lilly. So I can sleep.
I have alternative sedatives that are better for you.
I’ll settle for Bourbon.
It’s your liver, Hollywood.
Where did you get that name from?
Your conversation with Skeleton Man three days ago.
I try to think back that far but it’s like archaeology, my memory is made from traces in the dirt, pot fragments. Maybe he called me that on the call. And why am I suspicious? Does sleep deprivation make you paranoid? Gotta watch that! I need sleep, I need to lose myself for a few hours, but every time I shut my eyes the dark fills with unwanted scenes. And then I have an idea that lights up every tired thread in my brain.
Hey Lilly, have you got a movie room in this gin palace?
Lilly has way better. In this London inequality is temporal. The rich live in the future, the masses in the past. Only the very finest razors edge tech is adequate for the wealthy. Only the primo, hot house cultivated, state of tomorrow’s art will do. Virtual is a thing back in my San Francisco, back in the real world, but this virtual is not just on the edge of the possible but way out over Wiley Coyote canyon treading air.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my all-time guilty pleasure because of my crush on the divine Hepburn and 1960’s chic, and I am there. I am in the movie! It’s springtime in Central Park and the trees lick the path with light and shadow, the cliff of buildings on Central Park South are hazy. I am sitting on a park bench as Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak stroll past me. Holly is already in love, holding his arm and laying her head on his shoulder. It’s not as if Holly finds it difficult to fall in love.
I know the scene well and it’s very brief, just an atmosphere shot, but this is a bozoid extrapolation. The background is alive with the sounds of distant traffic, New Yorkers twang snatches of conversation. A little boy on roller skates barrels past, the skates halfway between toys and rattly metal orthopaedic devices. The little boy is wearing shorts and a striped T and has a buzz cut with his pink scalp showing through. I see chipped paint on the wooden slats of my park bench showing a different shade of dark green beneath.
The environment has mapped in my glass of bourbon and my clothes are Midwestern Vanilla because I am still living out of Turner Janes roll-on. I look like a flyover country tourist who doesn’t care about the New York City drinking prohibition.
You can’t drink that here.
The little boy’s older sister has blonde curls, a J. C. Penny cotton frock, Mary Jane flats and an attitude problem. And she has a really whiney voice.
Didn’t your mother tell you it’s rude to point?
Didn’t yours tell you that cirrhosis of the liver leads to a hepatocellular carcinoma?
Lilly?
Who else. So this is why Skeleton Man calls you Hollywood?
Curly Lilly hops up onto the park bench beside me. But something is off. She doesn’t smell of anything. Little girls smell of soap and fresh linen. Come to think of it the entire park smells of rich fabrics and Bourbon. I slip my headband off and I am instantly back in Charles’s living room. So, no olfactory or tactile sim, just sound and vision. I go back to Central Park.
I’m impressed, I tell Lilly, waving a hand at the scene.
Thank you. If you want to catch up with the plot you’ll have to move sooner rather than later, there’s going to be a scene transition. Or we could just sit here and the sim will improvise.
The Pattern Mafia created a Tiffany’s environment for me as well. Joe’s bar, and the park, and the Museum of Art. Only that was real.
How so?
Taste, smell, the heat of the sun on my skin, a breeze in my hair, a sense of a body and everything that comes with it.
Lilly thought about that.
That is theoretically possible.
With a sim?
The sim is created in your mind, Hollywood. Stimulating the somatosensory cortex is more involved but conceptually no different to stimulating the visual cortex. Luckily the workload is helped by humans having such tightly gated receptors, procedural rendering is sufficient. Good effect though isn’t it. This may help Olivia with her acute stress response. Have you considered that?
How so?
And with a blink, that’s not a cliché, the transition was timed with my blink, I am sitting on a different bench on a hill overlooking Florence. It is dusk, and ancient, and beautiful.
I can’t bring Miss Machiavelli to Firenze, but I can do the other thing.
Olivia is sitting on her bed motionless. Her eyes are blank, as if she’s in a trance. And they are huge, her eyes. Her pupils wide black holes. I get Olivia a robe from the bathroom and put it round her shoulders, cover up her nakedness.
Then I kneel down on the floor in front of her. I have some half formed idea about reducing my physical presence, become unthreatening.
Olivia? I try, voice gentle.
She doesn’t respond. She hadn’t responded when I put the robe around her. It’s frightening to see. I’ve never dealt with anyone in a crisis before. I don’t know what to do.
She needs a doctor, Lilly.
Due to our current diplomatic crisis no doctor can attend.
Fuck diplomatic crisis, Olivia needs help now, just look at her.
She is isolating herself from a reality she cannot cope with. Returning her to her home environment will provide a safe space for her to recover.
Another unreality will help her deal with this one?
To Olivia this universe has become deeply threatening.
I have doubts, Lilly.
Of course you do. You have a mild form of paranoia.
I would love to argue with the condescending English bitch but I can’t. I slide the neurolink band onto Olivia’s head, settle the band across her forehead. I realise I am holding my breath when…
GAH!
She takes a deep gasp that scares the hell out of me. Her eyes blink rapidly. Then nothing.
Is it working?
Give her time, Charli.
Thank you for reading this chapter. If you are new to Brahmin Blues it all starts here…