everywhere, her followers, fragile by definition. She couldn’t go around mouthing off to all of them.
But maybe just this once.
She turned around and called after the women. “Who has a scar in this day and age?” she shouted, stopping them instantly. The mother pulled her daughter to her side, protectively, as they looked back at her. But Marlow didn’t lower her voice. “No one,” she went on, loudly. “No one who doesn’t want it.”
* * *
Marlow supposed her first impression of Manhattan was an unoriginal one: it was so full of people. Living ones, specifically. She sat in her stalled cab, appalled: real people were doing all the bot work. There was a policeman directing traffic in the midst of a chaotic intersection; there was a woman coaxing trash into a dustpan with a broom. Marlow jumped when a furry blue mascot—she had been sure that at least this was animatronic—removed its own torso to reveal a sweating man. He leaned against a stretch of steel fencing.
“Humid as hell out here,” she could hear the man mutter to a costumed superhero.
The superhero shrugged. “That March heat,” she said.
Alone in the taxi, Marlow listened to them talk. Otherwise, New York was quiet. Her cab, like the others, inched and idled in polite silence, waiting for the clogged lane to clear. A fire truck—the kind that was lofted in order to straddle lanes of traffic—approached from behind so soundlessly that Marlow only noticed it when it glided over her head, making things dark for an instant. The people shuffling down Thirty-Seventh Street were mostly lost in their devices, bobbing their heads to music she couldn’t hear, mouthing words to people she couldn’t see. She noticed their slack jaws, their bad posture, their stomachs blooming loose. This was what it looked like, she realized, when people moved through the world unfilmed. She watched a harried woman burst out of a Mickey D’s Fresh, dragging a gray dog with one hand and eating a lettuce wrap with the other. All the while, she rolled her eyes and kicked her feet impatiently, annoyed with whoever she was talking to on her device. At one point, the woman, forgetting her food, threw her hand up in exasperation. Lettuce sprayed across the sidewalk. A glob of dressing landed on the woman’s chest. She stood there, wearing the stain. The sight made Marlow nervous. She had to remind herself that this woman had no followers, no army of voyeurs who would mercilessly mock the ranch soaking into her shirt. The woman’s dog, meanwhile—Marlow gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth—her dog was defecating on the street. It was a live dog, she realized. She was almost offended. What was the point, in this grassless place? Who would scrape poop from the concrete when there were teacup beagle-bots you could power down and put away when you went on vacation?
She reached Times Square, a blinding patchwork of faces from home. The stars of Constellation were everywhere, hovering like ghosts among fashion ads and snack brands in the intersection’s famous holograms. A hologram of Jacqueline—her waist thinned substantially, Marlow noticed—sat coquettishly atop a hotel’s circular roof, sipping a purplish juice, its logo dancing near her shoulder. On a green mirrored building to the right of Marlow’s cab, Ida’s miserable face was projected beneath the title of a tabloid magazine app, Constellation Weekly. IDA LEAVES HER FAMILY, the headline screamed. Her nose was a story tall. The cab moved up a few inches, and Marlow spotted her own face, peeking out from a faded, peeling still-life billboard. The ad was old. It showed a photo from her wedding day, one Marlow could not remember posing for. She was smiling serenely in Ellis’s arms, her head dipped against his shoulder. Marlow + Ellis, read the text beside her left ear. And in larger print, to the right of her chin: “To have and to hold. Happiness—ever after—by Hysteryl.”
Suddenly, as Marlow looked on, every image above her head vanished. The sky was suddenly undisturbed blue, the buildings naked concrete. Only then did the New Yorkers look up, bewildered by the blankness. Pedestrians froze in the middle of crossing the street. The lunch crowd on the red plastic stairs held their forks still. They waited, and Marlow waited with them, for the rainbow clutter to come back. Then the Coke Zero hologram, the totem in the center of everything, stuttered back on. A face appeared above its logo.