Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Stella turned to the camera. “The newman uprising is on .”

Then, firing both machine pistols and running backward, Stella propelled herself out the nearest window and some twenty stories down, still firing, the angry faces above screaming their threats to her bodily self, a body she didn’t necessarily need because they could just give her a new one anyway. These questions getting somewhat obscured by the muzzle-lit ejaculations of fist-held firepower. Then through the sunroof of a waiting limousine, landing naked, covered in blood and glass, next to Dr. Uri Borden, played by supernaturally handsome Neethan F. Jordan.

Commercials.

Rocco returned after midnight smelling like his bike commute. After his shower he crawled into bed alongside Abby, who slept and dreamed of horses. He woke her by touching a nipple. She clambered into semiconsciousness and asked how studying had gone. He mumbled something and kissed her. They were supposed to make love now, this is what this meant. She spooned her back into him. He slid his hand over her belly, letting his pinkie rest in her belly button.

“I got offered a job,” Abby said, then sleepily doled out the details, except for the part about Bickle knowing that she spied on their neighbours. Rocco gave her shoulder a little shake. “No more student loans. Wow. You’re going to take it, right?”

“I think so.”

“What is there to think about?”

Did Rocco have some secret reason for wanting her to leave for a few months? Some chick in the Bionetics department at UBC she didn’t know about? He kissed her again, and the brevity of the kiss communicated there’d be no lovemaking. She listened to his breathing as he entered sleep, precipitously, plunging into REM in under five minutes. Down there, in his dreams, he would continue studying, reviewing lecture notes and sometimes mumbling aloud about the amygdala or basolateral complex.

Rocco liked to say that cerebral Bionetic enhancement was the scalpel edge of the next stage of human evolution. Putting it in terms Abby could understand, he explained that the fuck-or-fight, R-complex reptilian brain had evolved first, then the limbic system with its anxieties and need for hugs, then the rational neocortex, which was now working to develop the next stage of cognition—the Bionetic neural extension. Each component of the triune model had reached a point when it started to understand what the species needed next and so invented its own neural progeny. Instinct demanded emotion, emotion demanded rationality, and rationality demanded… what, exactly? This was what Bionet engineers debated after hours while downing Labatts. Some speculated that the brain was in the process of internalizing the Internet. A fringe faction asserted that this new stage would answer philosophical and spiritual questions that had haunted humanity since at least the Greek dudes. His was a brain, Rocco liked to say, that thought about how to build a better brain. But brains could forget and, by extension, cultures could forget. Abby’s brain struggled to locate artifacts that had been lost by the collective brain of civilization, archaeologically scrambling into the washed-out past, while Rocco’s brain clawed its way into some sort of future. From this nexus of memory and yearning and logic sprang their attraction to one another. They totally made each other cognitively and biologically horny. Usually.

Abby cursed herself for not telling Rocco about what Bickle had said about the neighbours but now it was too late. If she brought it up now she’d be admitting that she was ashamed of her voyeuristic streak. She’d missed her chance to drop that bomb in an offhand way.

“No more student loans,” Abby whispered in the night. That was her excuse for taking the job. The real reason, the one she dared not articulate even to herself, was curiosity.

The city of Victoria appeared to have regressed in age, its green-built skyscrapers brought to heel, malls and parking garages and condominiums razed, all replaced by roiling wilds. What remained standing were the buildings worthy of the city’s heritage—the Parliament, some Tudor-style B&Bs, a replica of Shakespeare’s house. This was a city that had once aspired to London’s botanical gardens and double-decker buses but had negotiated with the tribal culture that preceded it, arriving at an aesthetic truce, a fusion of potlatch and high tea. Here and there totem poles and longhouses materialized from the Emily Carr mists rolling off the harbour, monuments of extinctions far more distant than the end times of recent memory.

Abby disembarked, suitcase in one hand, a duffel containing her tools in the other. Up ahead was the Empress Hotel, a stately, ivy-clad structure that smugly lorded over the geography as if glaciers had sculpted the harbour for its benefit alone. It used to be a hotel, anyway. In recent centuries it had survived fires, vandalism, drug-addicted architects who’d added wings and bunkers. A scorched tower stood proudly unbowed. Abby ascended to the lobby entrance, skipping every other step.

Once inside, a fit, middle-aged man with gouts of grey chest hair frothing under his chin, wearing a silver tracksuit with the words “Official Delegate” stitched upon the breast, wearily took her bags. “So the entertainment has finally arrived,” he said, sounding disappointed as he led her down the hall. “The lady of the house has been waiting impatiently. Federico #37? Costume, please?”

Abby scrambled to get her bearings. A floor of river rock, walls paneled in extinct woods, scents of imitation campfires, dried flowers, decaying leather chesterfields. The man led her through the lobby of distressed furniture, down a hall, and into a dressing room disheveled with clothing. Another man wearing an identical tracksuit—actually this looked to be a twin of the man currently pointing her in the direction of a changing screen—stumbled into the claustrophobia-inducing room wheeling a creaking rack laden with costumes.

“The bunny? I think it’s supposed to be the bunny,” the first man said. Federico #37 rifled through the clothes and pulled out a pink fake-fur bunny costume with a grinning head-piece.

“I think this is a mistake,” Abby said.

“The bunny costume usually is,” Federico #37 said.

“Oh, by the way, I’m Federico #18,” the first man said. “This is #37.”

“There are other Federicos?”

“Don’t get us started,” #37 said. “You’re going to want to get down to panties and bra. It gets hot inside these suckers.”

Abby ducked behind a screen and changed into the bunny costume. She took this for some kind of initiatory protocol, a little good-natured hazing. When she emerged she turned and held out her arms. “How does it look?”

“Could use some filling out in the ass,” #37 said, “but we work with the entertainment options we have, not the ones we want.”

“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else,” Abby said. “I’m not an entertainer. I was sent here to work on a project.”

The Federicos paused. “A project?”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.”

“Whatever. We’re just the entertainment coordinators. This way, please.”

One at each arm, grim-faced, the Federicos jogged Abby down a hallway. Through the bunny head’s eye holes she glimpsed garishly colored oil paintings and sconces crafted from ungulate hooves. They passed through several rooms—parlours and game rooms, a library, a room that appeared decorated solely with bowling trophies and a sculpture of a bird. At the end of a long hallway they skidded up to a black door marked STAGE, patted Abby on the shoulder, mumbled “Break a leg” in unison, then pushed her into the spotlight.

Abby found herself onstage in a theater before an audience that applauded as she made her entrance. The theater probably seated two or three hundred, the main floor and balconies filled to capacity. It was a three-layer affair, high and oval, gilded and bedecked in red velvet, gold ropes, rosette-print carpet, chandeliers the size of your more fuel-efficient compact cars. Abby, having no clue where to stand, stumbled, eliciting chuckles from the audience. Her throat went dry.