The Artificial Mirage (4 page)

“It doesn’t have to end this way. I know that’s what you’re thinking, ’cause you’ve lost a lot of money and everything seems to be going down the drain…But you can fight. You can make that choice.”

“Fight. Yeah. I’ve been doing that my whole life…I loved to take risks. And I loved the market—its unforgiveness.”

“There are other options.”

“Like what?”

“Now we’re talking about something outside of the law.”

“Like how outside of the law?”

“I have contacts. It’s possible to get you a new identity.”

“I told you I’m broke.”

“This wouldn’t be a legal service, per se. It would get you out of the country. After that, you’re on your own.”

“I don’t think that’s an option I want to consider.”

“Then leave.”

“What?”

“Leave. Leave now, and they can’t come after you.”

“How so?”

“Because you’re not convicted…yet. If you leave now, getting you extradited back here is a long diplomatic process. The worst they can do to you is ban you from banking and brokerage for life. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think they care if you’re in prison here or convicted in absentia as long as they can say it’s a foreigner who did it.”

“But I don’t have my passport. How do I get out of here?”

“Easy. I get you a local passport, like I said before—”

“And I said I’m not interested.”

“Hold on. You use it to get out. Once you’re out, you declare your passport lost and get a new one.”

“Wait. Did you say a local passport?”

“Yes.”

“How exactly is that going to work?”

“Easy. Use your imagination.”

“It doesn’t sound easy.”

“I know. You’ve got some hard choices to make.”

“Yeah, I know.” Charlie looked up through a sea of AR profiles at a muscular female sumo wrestler wrestling a tiger. “OK, let’s do it.”

“You sure?”

“Never been more certain. The facts are fresh in my mind.”

“That’s the best time to make a decision.”

“I know.”

“OK. I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry.”

“Hey, do you have a contact for Keith?”

“Are you sure, Charlie?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“I don’t know where he is in Jakarta. He might not even be there… but here’s a card with an address in Vung Tau.” Tonya flicked him the AR card and watched the elegantly scripted white parchment float to him like a feather in the wind.

“Thanks.”

5

G
oing through customs at Manama International Airport was a tedious bore for Harold, but it was faster than going through Dammam. He resented their searches. The officers had insisted on looking through everything, but they lacked the Saudis’ penchant for scanning AR glasses and making arrests for alcohol possession. Although alcohol was legal in Bahrain, bringing in duty-free alcohol wasn’t allowed for Muslims. When he finally got through, a cluster of Bahraini taxi drivers were waiting; red AR beacons shot straight up to the ceiling of the airport. “Come,” one of them said as he turned on the heels of his black patent leather shoes. His thobe had the characteristic sheen of silk, and the black tassels dangling from his gutra swayed as he walked.

It wasn’t winter, so readjusting to the climate was easier than at other times of the year. He eased himself out of his gray-and-black herringbone jacket as soon as he felt he was beginning to sweat. One night in Paris had felt like a year, an altogether separate life. As always, he had given himself a night to adjust before reentering Saudi Arabia. The taxi driver stopped his banter about visiting the Tree of Life just as soon as Harold held up his SSOC identification card with a smirk and twirled it around his fingers like he was doing a card trick.

As the taxi approached the main entrance of the Sheraton, the Indian porter came rushing and opened the door with a smile that could easily have been mistaken for a sign of sincerity. Harold watched the AR gold coins flying in two directions as he paid the taxi driver and tipped the porter. The porter nodded appreciatively and complimented him on his blue onyx ring stylus. He looked through him and proceeded to the reflective black glass door, which swished open. As he was approaching reception, the sensory data on his AR glasses went blank and was replaced by a translucent 3-D rendition of the Kiblah hovering in space in front of him as the elevated moan from the mosques in the area penetrated the lobby. He watched the black cube rotate for
a moment before bringing up his credit card. The last tribal council meeting had concluded they still wouldn’t require the shops and restaurants to close during prayer times, though certain conservative elements within the government felt they should. He removed his glasses and took out his SSOC card and Chinese passport from his blue blazer’s breast pocket as he sat down at the check-in desk. The receptionist, an Egyptian man with wire spectacles, returned to explain that his bags were in his room already, and he had sent up a bottle of bai jiu from Harbin. Harold listened absently as he looked down at the geometric patterns of black-and-orange marble, noticing the glances of a blonde woman with a face slathered in white makeup. She had lifted her black abaya on one side to reveal shiny black plastic boots up to her thighs. She looked at him and tapped her black-gloved right hand on the empty burgundy velvet armchair next to hers. He invited her to his room with an AR snowman with his room number written on it in blue neon gel nearly obscured by the AR snowstorm app. After the Kiblah faded and contracted, he saw she had sent him a menu with photos and videos of herself. It was a bold move. The Bahraini police weren’t usually together enough to filter individual messages or offshore web accounts, but it was a bold move nonetheless.

There was a light tap on his door no more than a minute after he had entered his room. She was swift and efficient and safe; he didn’t even realize there was a condom on until he looked down. For the first time, he experienced the feeling of being toxic. The condom was for her protection. He removed the condom and increased his payment to her with his ring stylus. “Darling, I’m not Russian,” she said. “In England we play by the rules…of course, I’ve never been there,” she said before slipping another one on with her mouth.

“No, you must do natural way.”

“Oh, must I?”

“Yes. You must.”

“Then I suppose you must pay me more money.”

“No problem.”

Her technique was methodical, and the conclusion was as efficient and businesslike as checking in to the hotel. She smiled cheerfully through the receipt of his credit deposit and into his dilated pupils before kissing him on the cheek in passing as she made for the door. “Darling, why don’t you stop by Seppuku tonight. You can meet my girlfriends. I’m Stephanie, by the way.”
The door clicked behind her, and the room felt quiet. He downed a few glasses of the bai jiu and peeled an orange from the fruit bowl while looking down from his floor-to-ceiling view of the traffic below. London taxis rushed below a lonesome wind turbine jutting from the side of a tall black glass building, reflecting the streetlights amidst the sea of three- and four-story white buildings around it. The streets were empty of pedestrians with the exception of two men in thobes with Hawks hovering just beneath the height of the streetlights, projecting screens beneath them. He became aware of his vision beginning to blur from the bai jiu.

As he lay on the bed, he let his mind fade into AR renditions of childhood remembrances of eating candied Hawthorn fruit while walking through one of several ice renditions of the Taj Mahal and cathedrals and ancient Chinese temples with a myriad of multicolored LED lights embedded in the ice walls and ceilings and stairs. He focused on a green neon light embedded in one of the walls until it consumed everything, and he slipped into unconsciousness.

He awoke with the full weight of a regretful mind running alternative scenarios of things he might have done differently. Darkness and the refracted city lights appeared through the black glass like the streetlights reflected off the black, coal-soaked snow and ice of his childhood in Harbin. A pop-up message and links from the woman in the boots were glaring back at him beyond his new prayer-time app that featured multiple moons the size of soccer balls featuring listings of the coming week’s prayer schedule as it related to the lunar orbit. He brought up his bank’s site and winced at the quick flash of the iris-scanning app before getting his balance. It was sufficiently embarrassing. He knew men who after just two years in a similar position were able to go home and buy a woman an apartment and get married and relax for a while. But things hadn’t worked out that way for him. A chat session window with a message from Cameron popped up:

Waverunner party tomorrow?

“No,” he tapped back with a keyboard floating beneath the dialogue bubble made to look like a cartoon. In his haste to get tested in Paris, he had forgotten all about the hash in the submarines. At their slow rate of speed, it would take a week to get them to pass around the US Navy base and its anti-terrorist sonar and robotic retaliation vessels. He was slipping. This was a definite sign. He needed to focus on the moment. One moment at a time. Breathe. Exhale. Breathe again.

Between putting down a year’s savings on oil futures that had evaporated in value in a few days as a result of a new oil find in the Empty Quarter and frequent time off out of Saudi Arabia, he was in no position to leave. He just needed to put together enough to get back in the market. There was always talk of the possibility of another attack on a pipeline or processing plant, and that was all he needed. With a few thousand dinars, he could be back in the Manama Exchange with a leveraged account. That was the only way to make real money. That was his only option. But at least it wasn’t summer yet. In the summer it became hard to remember that there was a world outside as the searing temperatures made it difficult to breathe and killed everything and anything down to the molecular level within a few hours. After the months of coastal fog that pressed inland all the way to Abqaiq, there were only the dust storms that pushed through the edges of windowpanes and could cover everything in a room in a fine layer in just an afternoon. But not in Bahrain, a small island ensconced in gentle Gulf breezes, and certainly not at his hotel.

He lay on the bed and flicked through the spa menu with his stylus before settling on a Reiki treatment. After a parliamentary debate, it had become the only spa treatment that a woman could perform on a man in Bahrain, because there was no actual touching involved. He clicked the receptionist icon and got an appointment that gave him just enough time to shower first. After showering, he changed his mind and deleted the appointment with a slash of his forefinger. He put on a short-sleeved navy blue Zegna shirt and black tropical wool pants that had faded from the hot desert sun and the high salinity of the tap water but had retained a worn-out elegance.

He got into the elevator and stood next to a woman with platinum hair and luminescent porcelain skin. She was speaking dramatically in Arabic with her head cocked to the side just so and her eyes looking up toward the corner of the elevator. But beneath the dyed hair and the bleached skin was an Egyptian or Moroccan, judging by her features. Leaning back against the black velvet elevator wall next to her was another woman with downcast eyes, brownish-black hair, and delicate facial features of untraceable origin. They were an interesting combination, clearly expensive.

He walked out of the elevator and through the entrance without even looking at the doorman gesturing to a taxi. He strolled past the fountains and onto the eternally new sidewalk that was never used before taking a shortcut
through freshly cut bioengineered grass that looked like plastic. A disclaimer featuring safety reports of bacterial infections from the fertilizer popped up in AR, the last thing he needed now. He noticed that he was walking faster than the cars in the two single lanes of traffic. The weather was warmer than Paris but cooler than the usual immobilizing womb of summer in the Gulf. It felt like spring. He needed to be around people. He kept walking.

6

C
harlie’s credit accounts, the only accounts the Saigon police couldn’t seize, were rapidly dwindling. As he walked through District 7, the conversations and laughter from the sidewalk cafés were muted by his thoughts. This was where programmers who understood the finite nuances of gesture and personality and eye movement came to unravel. Young models congregated around them and hoped that some aspect of themselves would become the hot new thing for renditions. The green AR leprechaun he was following stopped and pointed up at the building to his right. Looking upward, he saw the sharp purple laser projection of the Recreate™ logo on the white concrete edifice.

He made his way to the back of Café Tulip and closed the rattling metal gate of the elevator that was barely big enough to contain him. Slowly, he was buoyed up to the fourth floor. He stepped out onto a large tatami mat on black-and-white tiles. Before him was an equally large and intricately carved mahogany desk with a French secretary named Valerie behind it. Behind her, he could see consoles and projections on the walls of renditions of people and flowers. An AR deer stood to her right, mouthing some words he couldn’t make out. He inhaled deeply to feel the crisp smell of new electronics in his nostrils. Valerie told him to have a seat in one of the two Adirondack chairs facing perpendicularly to her desk. There was only a waist-high cobalt blue glass barrier for a back wall, and the sounds of the street below wafted around the office. Despite the waves of warm air that tumbled over the blue glass, the room felt predominantly chilled. Valerie flicked him an AR questionnaire regarding his identity and visa status. He completed the form and flicked it back to her.

One of the four programmers in the back came forward to welcome him. “How can I help you today?” His voice exuded a professional, anonymous charm.

“I’d like a rendition of her,” Charlie said, flicking a folder with all his pictures and videos of Lauren to the programmer, but it was halted from transmitting.