Watchlist (15 page)

“How do you know all that?”

“Because we care about you,” said the drone. “We are Anonymous. We are legion. Sometimes we are benevolent lol and reward those who serve the world. It was a brilliant program. Did you know that people still use it to this very day? You are almost a hero in certain circles. In other circles you are not a hero at all. There are many circles.”

“I didn't know that,” said Tre.

“Ladykiller,” said the drone. “Was that your title or your friend Peter's?”

“That was me,” he said weakly.

Tre realized now that it didn't matter who was piloting the drone. He was in an extremely precarious situation and he needed to get away.

“What do you want from me?”

“We don't want anything,” said the drone. “We are giving ourselves to you as a wedding present, like a fruit basket. You can do whatever you want to us. We are yours to keep. We thought about hacking a power user on FetLife and sending some willing slave from the bottom of a leather family to you as a gift, but this is more clean. We will both keep our secrets: you won't tell anyone what happened, and we won't tell you who we really are. It will be so fun for both of us. This whole body is artificial. Have you ever wanted to fuck the Internet? LOL.”

The drone reached into its purse and pulled out a Band-Aid-colored pill bottle. The drone shook the bottle, rattling the contents.

“What are those?” asked Tre. “Now you want to drug me?”

“They are harmless,” said the drone. “Just sugar. But they are password pills. For the suite.”

“I can't stay with you,” said Tre. “I have to get home. You are trying to hurt me somehow.”

“You don't have to stay the night,” said the drone. “You can leave whenever you like. But you should really come with us. So we can be alone together. I bet you aren't really honest with your . . . desires . . . until you are alone with someone lol.”

A shadow fell across his face.

There was somebody standing over them.

The bartender was standing at their table, grinning knowingly.

“Your car is ready,” said the bartender.

Tre followed the drone out of the restaurant, unsure of how to get away. Could he run? He found himself getting into the back seat of the car beside the drone. The car didn't have a driver. It navigated the streets carefully and persistently, tinted windows concealing this terrifying vacuity from other drivers on the road.

The drone slipped its hands down Tre's pants and encouraged him to feel the warmth of its perfect mouth, the wetness of its breath.

“You have to take one of the pills whenever you want to come up,” said the drone. “Your stomach acids will dissolve the coating and prime the transmitter. It is temporary; a bit like a glow stick. By the time it stops working, you have to be gone, or otherwise security will be called. You can take another pill if you want to come see us again. We are a present to you. For all you have done. From Anonymous. For the lulz.”

Tre dryswallowed one of the pills and put the rest in his pocket.

The lobby of the building they stopped in front of was also empty. The elevator snapped open. There were no buttons in the elevator, just smooth metal on every side.

“It is scanning the pill inside you,” said the drone.

The elevator opened on the top-floor suite.

“This is nice, isn't it,” said the drone. “Facebook tells us whose birthday it is and who is in a relationship and who is having kids. We like these things. We say: ‘Happy birthday.' Facebook measures how responsive we are to our peers, and to ads, and how much money we make based on the trips we take and the wonderful things we buy and the exciting jobs we have. And when we want to fuck somebody with a drone as a present, Facebook makes it so easy, doesn't it? Everything is so nice now lol.”

Tre waited for the drone to turn its head to walk deeper into the suite.

And then he slammed into it from behind, tackling it to the ground. The drone was not made for combat or battle. Its responses were silky and catlike as he straddled it and got his knees onto its shoulder blades. He put his boot on its neck.

“Lol,” said the drone. “You mad?”

His phone beeped at him. Alerts. Hadn't he turned his ringer off?

There was a marble side table by the foyer. With his boot still on the drone's neck, he swept a ficus and an antique clock from the tabletop and then picked up the table by the base. He swung the table around and broke the legs off. He just wanted the slab of marble.

The drone writhed beneath him, stroking his ankle seductively. He slammed the piece of marble into the drone's head, cracking it. He heaved and sweated, bringing the slab of marble down again and again. His phone kept bleeping at him. The alerts streamed from his pants pocket, a nearly constant irritating whine.

“Shut up,” he said.

Any piece of the drone that moved, he bashed it with the slab of marble. He was precise and consistent. The fingers twitched; he bashed them. An eyelid fluttered; he smashed it as hard as he could, making sparks, sending chips of marble flying.

Eventually, the drone lay completely still on the soft rug beneath him. He was sweating and kept burping up stomach acid, though he felt nothing but cold inside.

It's the equivalent of breaking a camera, he thought to himself. The fact that it feels like murder is part of the camera's new defense mechanism.

He leaned against the door of the suite and finally checked his phone. The alerts were all from Facebook. There were thousands of them and they were still coming in.

He scrolled over to his Facebook wall. It was filled with pictures of him from every angle smashing the drone. The only text accompanying the pictures was a frowny face. There were thousands of them; each moment captured in beautiful three-tone sepia. Too many to delete.

He looked for the camera taking the pictures. Was it in the ceiling tiles? Was it embedded in the doorframe?

He was up on a chair using his phone to look at Facebook with one hand and searching the ceiling tiles with the other when a security guard unlocked the door.

“I had to smash it,” said Tre. “It was hacking my computer.”

“The cops are on their way,” she said. “Just so you know.”

“Man,” he said. “Why did you call the cops? It's a fucking
robot
!
”

“It calls the cops automatically, dude,” said the security guard. “Do you know how much these things cost? You basically just crashed somebody's yacht, dude.”

“Whose apartment is this?” asked Tre.

“You mean you don't even know where you are?” asked the security guard, laughing.

His phone was ringing. It was Jessica. He put his phone on the ground and started smashing it with the slab of marble, gritting his teeth so hard that they squeaked, while the security guard just shook her head and laughed, not getting too close, quietly taking video with her phone just in case the cops had questions.

After college, Cora found it hard to get a well-paying job. Amidst stints as a waitress, a bartender, a barista, she came across a few medical testing gigs at a local research facility. Usually, these paid a few hundred dollars and required her to put a cream onto her skin that sometimes caused a rash and sometimes didn't, or to put drops into her ears that caused variable levels of itching and/or burning and then required her to rank the intensity of itching and/or burning on a numerical scale.

There were many things in life that Cora found difficult, like choosing which scent and brand of dishwashing soap to purchase. If all bottles of dish soap cost the same amount of money, were all the same size and color and merely differed in fragrance, it would still, she felt, be a very hard decision, because there were many fragrances and they weren't even in the same fragrance category: there was citrus, floral. There were atmospheric titles like Ocean Breeze that inspired their own line of thought and questioning altogether (for example, which ocean? How strong a breeze?). But other tasks, such as being at a given place at least fifteen minutes prior to the time when she actually needed to be there, had never proved to be a struggle for Cora. The researchers noted and appreciated this, and it led to her being offered The Transparency Project.

The Transparency Project was not a one-day test but a hired, permanent job that would last until her natural death. When the leader of the research team said the word “natural” in the phrase “natural death,” he emphasized it in a very unnatural way. Each year, her paid salary would be the previous year's average salary for all full-time workers in the city where she lived, in addition to a generous benefits package. All she had to do in order to receive this money every year until her
natural
death was come into the facility for monitoring and testing two days a week, eight hours per day. And have the operation. She could travel up to six weeks of the year, provided she allowed a monitor to meet her at a nearby hotel room for monitoring twice a week during each week of travel. If she were ever injured, comatose, or unable to come to the facility for any reason despite being alive, she would allow them to come to her for the monitoring. There would be legal documents outlining this permission. She would sign them.

The operation would remove all existing skin and fat from a front section of her torso, starting at the top of her ribs and ending at the top of her pelvis. Her blood and muscles would be infused with a harmless solution that would allow them to become transparent under select wavelengths of light, including daylight and fluorescent lighting, allowing researchers to easily see through to her internal organs. Her skin in this region would be replaced with a clear, waterproof polymer film; when she wasn't at the facility, she could wear a flesh-colored silicone panel that would easily snap onto a sternum-mounted fastener. When they showed her the panel plate, she rubbed her hand across its surface carefully, like it was asleep and she didn't wish to wake it up. “What's this?” she asked them. It was a small brown nub in the sternum's center that had been designed to look like a protruding mole. It was the panel's release button.

The first few months after the surgery, she never released the panel on her own, and on observation days at the facility when the panel was removed, she felt very cold despite the fact that there was no drop in her temperature readings. She began bringing a blanket that she'd put around her shoulders when the panel came off. She avoided looking down at her own organs when the panel was off, mindful to keep her posture straight and her head directed forward or looking up at the ceiling. In order to do this, she pretended she was standing on the ledge of a very tall building, because she was very afraid of heights. Dropping her eyes would not provide a welcome view.

But gradually, this changed. The panel didn't feel like her own skin so much as a bodice or a giant waistband; she always wore the panel beneath her clothes in public, but when she got home she found she liked removing it and walking around her house in an open robe. The panel wasn't capable of sweating, but it often felt that way—despite being dry and even slightly cold to the touch, it felt like a tight shirt that was collecting her body's warm moisture; when she snapped it off and set it on her nightstand, always balancing it upright on its edge against a reading lamp, she swore her organs felt a pleasant rush of air. This wasn't possible, of course; the plastic layer that coated them wasn't porous or permeable. But the psychological feeling was a pleasant one that she enjoyed. At first she only caught sight of her organs in accidental peripheral glances—the mirror, the reflective surface of the new chrome kitchen appliances she'd bought with her new salary. Then, day by day, the coils and twines of her insides became familiar geography with patterns and symmetry that didn't threaten her sense of order but instead increased it.

The only sight that continued to give her discomfort was her beating heart. Not its image but its constant movement when she was at rest. Its pulsing reminded her of the way a digital alarm clock's numbers would flash repeatedly when the power went out and made her feel like an essential part of her needed to be reset. During each session at the research facility, a therapist came into the room at some point and spoke with her and sometimes Cora would talk about the sight of her beating heart with the therapist. Usually the therapist had her speak directly to her heart, saying affirming sentences such as, “Heart, I appreciate you keeping me alive. Heart, I am grateful for your service.” Other times, the therapist asked her to report any unpleasant dreams. Early on, she had a dream that she was at the beach in a bikini, and upon seeing her internal organs a flock of gulls swarmed around her and tried to peck them out. Later she had a dream where she thought she'd woken up only to find herself standing at the foot of her bed watching herself sleeping. Her dreams were being projected on the skin panel resting on her nightstand, playing upon it like a video. It was the dream where seagulls attacked her at the beach.

Recently the therapist asked Cora to consider starting to date again. Cora replied that she'd never enjoyed dating, but that prior to the operation, it had been her habit to seek out companions for one-night sexual encounters. That she'd done this a few times a year prior to the operation, but had not done it since. “Then try finding someone and having sex,” the therapist said.

So she joined an online service and tried. The first man declined to meet after hearing about the operation she'd had. The next said it was okay but changed his mind when she took her shirt off and he ran his fingers along the edges of the panel's thin seams. “I work on computers all day,” he explained, “taking their cases off. Sometimes I get repair calls because the cases come loose and fall off by accident, all on their own.” She assured him that it wouldn't, declining to admit this was possible if he pressed the release mole firmly enough by accident, or if she pressed it firmly enough on purpose. The third was fine with the operation and the panel's seams and even asked her to take the panel off and leave the bedroom light on. He wanted to watch her organs during intercourse.