Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“You’re welcome, cielo ,” she said. “It’s loaded with your snap and filter preferences. You just have to stand still and let it imprint now, cielo .”

Marisol stood as still as she could with excitement jangling up and down her body. The Razzibot—her Razzibot—rose to head height over the small mountain of clothes and bags and shreds of shrivelling biowrap, all the presents that her father had dutifully watched her open before he slouched back to his virtual conference in Seoul.

There was a little electronic warble as the Razzibot made a full orbit around her head, then the blue light flared even brighter.

“Marisol Midnight D’Souza,” it chirped. It drifted to the left, to get her good side, and Marisol felt her eyes brimming with tears of joy.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said.

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome,” her mother said. Her voice turned sweet and slippery. “Now, cielo , tell me, please, what your papa’s been up to while I’m away?”

Once her mother had pushed her puffy lips together for a goodbye kiss and dissolved off the wall, Marisol ran to her room to change clothes and curl her eyelashes a little. Her Razzibot followed, circling the faux-stucco ceiling, familiarizing itself, she imagined, with light sources and angles. It dipped in closer to watch as she wriggled into a new pair of carbon black tights with shifting rips.

She did her lashes, then it was back to the main room, where she arranged her other presents more artfully on the floor and draped a few favorites over the spindly mobile furniture. When it all looked perfect, she looked at her Razzibot.

“Stream to…” she said, and considered only streaming to Paloma and Aline and Xandra at first, because they were her best friends and also because maybe there would be a few glitches the first time she used it. But the whole point of a Razzibot was sharing with everyone . That was how Anathema Knolls used hers.

“Stream to all,” she said, the three little words sending little packets of electricity down her spine. Her Razzibot’s blue eye winked once in response and a little holo underneath showed she was live.

Marisol stepped lightly through the landmine of presents, giving a piece of biowrap a playful kick so it fluttered up in the air, approaching the smart mirror. Her Razzibot moved backward in perfect synch with her. She stopped in front of her reflection, put her hands on her hips but actually her waist in a way that made it look tiny. She pushed her pink lips together.

“Guess who got a Razzi?” she sang.

On cue, her Razzibot circled behind her and joined her in the mirror, drifting over her shoulder, both of them framed so perfectly. Marisol looked down at the phone wrapped around her tanned wrist. Seventeen people on her Stream. Nineteen. A jittering jump all the way to thirty-one.

“And a few other things, too,” she said. “Here, let’s look. Maybe you can help me decide what to try on first, okay?”

She realized her Razzibot’s little holo now displayed the Stream numbers, swelling and swelling. She smiled with all of her gleaming white teeth.

In her first week with a Razzibot, her Stream following quintupled. It was silly, Marisol thought, that people were still shuffling around with gocams or iClops. And the people still snapping with their phones, that was archaic.

The Razzibot knew her bone structure better than a surgeon and shopped her in realtime, making her skin a little smoother, hair a little glossier, ass a little rounder. Its crude AI was always shepherding her toward a wall with interesting graffiti, or a storefront with colors that matched her outfit. When she took it with her and Aline to Miramar beach, it found them the most beautiful outcrop of rock to pose on and then circled above them like a seagull while they splashed in the surf.

She wore an Hervé swimsuit and pulled nearly a hundred new followers that day. While the setting sun smelted the sky orange and red, shot through with plumes of purple, she sat in the sand and scrolled up and down them all. Her Razzibot streamed the sunset with a chopped-screwed summer song from last year that everyone was nostalgic for now.

At the end of the week her mother came back from Seville, and both her parents slid around the house like pieces in a digital quicklock, never occupying the same square of space.

Marisol’s mother took her shopping in the downtown, and to the Leitaria da Quinta do Paço for natas afterward. She cooed and laughed as Marisol showed off the Razzibot’s more acrobatic camera angles on the walk home. Marisol’s father took to kissing her on the top of the head how he used to when she was younger, but sometimes when he did it his eyes were pewter cold and pointed towards her mother.

Marisol kept herself busy with the Stream. She had to make the most of her Razzibot while it was still summer; they weren’t permitted in schools. Xandra’s older sister invited her to a party one weekend, because the Razzi was as good as having a professional photographer.

Marisol drank two glasses of cheap red wine mixed with Coke and danced with her hips and tried to laugh carelessly how her mother did. Someone’s cousin was visiting from London, and later on the rooftop, because her Razzibot was already zoomed and waiting, she let him kiss her. His tongue in her mouth mostly felt wet and cramped, but she saw a dozen new followers ticking onto her Stream to watch. The Razzibot always knew what people wanted to see.

She hung around with the boy for a few days, walking hand-in-hand over the Dom Luis bridge, watching autobarges cut through the blue muscle of the river, but he was always looking at her Razzi and smoothing his hair like it was all some sort of audition, and a few days later he left. At least he started following her Stream, and so did his friends in London.

Marisol had followers everywhere, now; at night she liked to scroll through their names and faces and GPS tags until it was all a beautiful blur. Mostly she liked looking at her total follow count. Over three thousand, which was still nothing compared to Holly Rexroat-Carrow, who was diving in New Orleans, or Anathema Knolls, who was having a total rederm but saving her old skin with its tattoos to tack up on her penthouse wall.

But the number made her feel happy, and when she finally blacked her phone it was nice to still have the muted blue light of her Razzibot in its armoire-side charging station. It reminded her of when she was little and her father would sit on the end of the bed to watch for bogeymen until she fell asleep.

One evening she let herself into the house and found the low glass coffee table ambling a little circle on the rug, borne down with several empty wine bottles and a vapor pipe and a half-swept spill of dull white powder. The sight put a familiar fear in her gut, but then from upstairs she heard her parents giggling to each other, shush-shushing, which was better than the alternative.

She realized her Razzibot was drifting over the table, peering down at the contents, its streaming indicator switched on. Marisol’s face turned hot and red. She hadn’t told it to start streaming. Had she? The Razzibot started to move towards the wrought-iron staircase, towards her mother’s drunken laugh.

“Stop,” Marisol hissed. Too quietly, maybe, because her Razzibot ignored it. “ Stop .”

Its holo blinked out and it sank in the air like a scolded pet. Marisol realized her heart was pounding against her ribs like percussion, so hard she could hear it. How many people had been looking down at the filthy table and listening to her parents’ muffled voices? How many people had heard her panicked stop ?