customize our museum experience to your interests and needs.”
Another retina scanner. Marlow hesitated. With the hunt on, she couldn’t risk being tagged here. Then again, if there was as much of the old internet—of her parents’ old lives—inside this building as advertised, she might be able to find out who her real father was.
She shuffled toward the red beam. People were crossing it casually here, not pausing their conversations to look straight into it. Children slipped beneath it easily. The secondhand bots all had their backs to it. The scanner seemed like more of a suggestion here than it had at the airport—and so, as she approached it, Marlow pretended to drop something, then ducked beneath the line.
When she straightened up on the other side, nothing happened. No one came to push her back to be counted. No one seemed to notice her at all. Marlow felt a rush of pride; was she good at this, being a renegade? Security behind her, she slipped her sunglasses off for just a moment and wiped the sweat from her face.
By the time she put them back on, the teenage daughter from the line was staring at her.
“Mom,” the girl was whispering. “Mom—” She cupped her hand to her mouth and leaned into her mother’s cloud of hair. After a moment, the woman’s eyes slid toward Marlow.
The girl poked her mother, hard. “Stop that,” Marlow heard her mother say. “Our tour leaves in five minutes. Hustle.”
“But—” the girl said. She reluctantly followed her mother.
Marlow went the other way. She shook herself free from the slow-moving mass and hurried to the right, following a sign that pointed her to “General Searches.” Flanking the long hallway on both sides were lines of security bots, all male, all run-down and funnel-shaped, with tight waists and broad shoulders, rendered in a thoughtful variety of skin tones. They wore identical eggplant blazers. Marlow moved through them like a debutante, avoiding their stares as they tracked her, en masse, every pair of eyes rolling left to right until each chin had to follow.
At the end of the hall was a bot with a beard so precise, it could only be software-designed. Its name tag read Mateo. A moment after Marlow passed it, it peeled off from the ranks and trod after her, keeping six feet or so back.
Marlow felt a jittery seed of fear in her stomach. It could be nothing, she told herself. It could be a random security measure. There was no reason for any bot to want her. Bots didn’t care about scavenger hunts.
The wide maw of a giant dark room rose up in front of her, and she walked through it, toward one of the lilac squares that beckoned with a graphic: W W W. Marlow settled onto the stool in front of it. Mateo found a spot to rest its back against the wall.
“Welcome,” came a crisp voice. “Which year’s internet would you like to browse today?”
Marlow hesitated.
“Or would you like to search for a person or place?” the voice continued.
“Floss Natuzzi,” Marlow said. “And Aston Clipp.”
Instantly: “There are 46 million results for Floss Natuzzi and 51 million results for Aston Clipp,” the voice said. “Here are some tags you can use to narrow your search.”
In front of Marlow, illuminating the dust in the air, bright boxes with phrases inside them appeared—so many phrases that they crowded the space, forcing each other to shrink. Aston Clipp New Album. Aston Clipp Lyrics. Aston Clipp Instagram. Aston Clipp Twitter. Aston Clipp Rwanda Comment. Floss Natuzzi Instagram. Floss Natuzzi Brow Tutorial. Floss Natuzzi Paulina Kratz. Floss Natuzzi Dating. Floss Natuzzi Aston Clipp. Floss Natuzzi Flosston Public. Floss Natuzzi Haircut. Floss Natuzzi Anna Salgado. Aston Clipp Fire. Floss Natuzzi Wedding. Floss Natuzzi Pregnant.
Marlow held her breath, waiting for her own name. But the tags stopped there. Of course. This version of the internet ended at the Spill.
She plunged her fingers into the tags. She called up stories and pictures, trying to keep the dates straight. She was looking for men around her mother, for hints that their genes might be swimming inside her. The more she looked, the less reasonable the task seemed. There were hundreds of men, dozens appearing regularly, and virtually all of them—even the ones she suspected were gay—touched her mother, in pictures, like they’d slept with her. Then again, Aston seemed to always be nearby, not bothered, and not bothering to overplay his claim on the girl they all wanted, because she wanted him.