Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

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From the “wickedly talented” (
) and “darkly funny” (
) Ryan Boudinot,
is a tour de force.
It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.
Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—
will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

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“I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake,” Abby stuttered. “I’m not an entertainer. My name is Abby Fogg and I was sent here by a man named Dirk Bickle.”

The audience cheered and whistled loudly.

Abby waited for the applause to die down. “I don’t know what I’m doing here dressed as a bunny but this has been the weirdest twenty-four hours of my life.”

Assorted chuckles.

“I live in Vancouver. I recently graduated from the University of British Columbia with a master’s degree in data recovery. I’m here for a project that requires my expertise in restoring digital content. Is there someone I can talk to about this? I’m really sorry I’m not the entertainer you thought I was supposed to be. I’m not even sure if I’m in the right place. Are you in need of a digital recovery expert?”

The audience howled. As the laughter died down, some guy in the back yelled, “You’re in the right place all right!”

Abby tried to get a good look at the audience through the bunny eye holes. They were dressed formally, as for an opera, in tuxedos and satin ball gowns, with furs and top hats, monocles, clutch purses, and, here and there, a lap poodle. Every face exactly the same. Six hundred Federicos waited for her to deliver her next line. Things got blurry. Dramatically—this being a stage after all—Abby swooned and fell over, the bunny head providing a soft landing as she passed out and the audience rose to an ovation.

She woke to seagull cries, in a third-floor suite facing the harbour, her suitcases set beside the king-size bed. The open window let in a warm, salted breeze. There was a desk, a lamp, a chair, two bedside tables. In the chair sat one of the Federicos, reading a book. This Federico looked younger and had longer hair than the previous ones she’d met. When he noticed Abby stirring he set the book aside and folded his hands over his crossed knees.

“You hungry?”

“No,” Abby said. “Maybe a little.”

“Bring the girl something to eat,” Federico said to no one in particular.

“What is going on here?”

“I don’t blame you for being confused,” Federico said, “and I have to apologize. I was supposed to orient you, but numbers 37 and 18 got to you first. I expected you to arrive later.”

“What is this place?”

“We call it the Seaside Love Palace.”

“You’re all twins or—”

“Clones.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Six hundred and thirty-one.”

“I thought the quota was two.”

“It is in the United States and Canada. Vancouver Island seceded, remember?”

“Where’s Kylee Asparagus?”

“You’ll meet her straightaway.”

An older Federico arrived with a cart laden with snack foods. Abby, still wearing the body of the pink bunny, sat up in bed and scratched her chest. The head lay nearby on a bedside table, gazing out to the water.

“Until recently I was under the impression that Kylee Asparagus was dead,” she said.

The Federicos shook their heads and spoke in unison. “Not exactly. Sometimes she thinks she is.”

“How’d you guys do that?” Abby said.

The younger of the Federicos smiled. “We’re connected wirelessly. When you speak to one of us—”

The other Federico finished the thought. “—you’re really speaking to all of us.”

Abby smeared some hummus on a piece of crusty bread. “Why’d she have you cloned?”

Both Federicos said, “The original Federico was one of Ms. Asparagus’s backup dancers, her most loyal companion.”

“Can you point me in the direction of the data that’s supposed to be restored?” Abby said.

The older Federico nodded and said that would be discussed in time. Tonight she was to have dinner with Ms. Asparagus.

Without the filter of the bunny head Abby got a better look at the manse. She passed one room where an old nonfunctional plasma TV took up much of one wall. Nearby, a Federico wearing a repairman’s overalls busily reupholstered a chair. On her way to the dining room she passed several more Federicos, each absorbed in a task, each man a little different from the others but bearing the same brown eyes squinting in concentration. She even glimpsed a room where an older Federico was busy using magic tricks to entertain a group of five or six child-size Federicos.

“Who is your mother, if you don’t mind me asking?” Abby said to a Federico leaning on a broom.

“Our source mother was a woman named Esther Gonzales, of Los Gatos, California. A cleaning lady, raised six children on one income. She died many, many years ago. Our midway mothers are all in Africa or Asia.”

“Have any of you met your midway mothers?”

Federico sighed. Elsewhere in the house other Federicos sighed, too, having heard the comment. “Of course we haven’t. We’re happy to know they received the best medical care in the world for leasing out their uteruses and we greatly appreciate their generosity. Dining room’s right up those stairs, Ms. Fogg.”

She came to a restaurant with a view of the gardens. A Federico dressed as a host seated Abby at a table across from a woman so petite she could have been a child, though her wrinkled skin hung off her face in powdery folds. Her face was mostly obscured by a pair of gigantic sunglasses, her head wrapped in a scarf, neck bristling with necklaces, shoulders covered in synthetic chinchilla. She extended a spindly hand to lift her water glass to her lips. How old was this woman? A hundred and fifty maybe?

“Ms. Asparagus, I’m—” Abby started.

Kylee shushed her. “That prick Bickle sent you against my wishes. You can go back to your mainland little existence and take your bag of cheap electronic shit with you. If it were up to me I would have had the Federicos murder you as soon as you set foot on the estate. Unfortunately they’re bred to care, not to kill.”

A waiter Federico appeared. “How are you guys doing tonight? Would you like to start out with a bread basket?”

Abby nodded. Federico the waiter set down the bread and poured some olive oil and herbed balsamic into a little saucer. Kylee sulked behind her sunglasses.

“Dirk Bickle said—”

“He’s a toadie. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s yes-man. Are you blind? And they expect you of all people to recover the archives. Give me a fucking break.”

“What happened to the archives?”

“So I get to explain the whole can of worms to you. I see. The archives are in the basement. I’m not the first inhabitant of this house, you know. This used to be called the Seaside Love Palace, home of Isaac Pope, the dot-com nerd. It’s his artwork you see up all over the place. Artwork he commissioned anyway. Isaac stored all sorts of useless shit, in formats no one knows anything about anymore. DVD-ROMs and stuff. We keep it all in the basement. A couple weeks ago a pipe burst and flooded the dump. The Federicos worked overtime to get it cleaned out but we lost about half the archive. That’s why you’re here. To tell us what we lost.”

“I’ll be happy to get started on it right away. When can I see the—”

“We haven’t even ordered yet!”

“By the way, I’m a huge fan of your music.”

The waiter Federico arrived to take their orders.

“Before you take our orders, Federico, we would like to see a menu,” Kylee said. “And if you could bring me a brush and some soapy water so I can scrub this young thing’s lip prints off my ass.”

“No, I really am a fan. My friends make fun of me for being into old music but—”

“Old music!”

“What I mean is I especially love The Glamorous Life of Kylee Asparagus . It’s got some great—”

“I’d give my left tit to get back in the studio with the Satan Brothers. They weren’t so much studio sessions as artistic retreats. We rented a castle in Scotland and stayed up till five in the morning on shrooms. We swam naked together in the pool, my band and me, and wrote such beautiful music on that bitchin’ Steinway. Those were the albums when I started getting close to Federico.”

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