Contents| Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9
“What do you mean by you people?” Shay asked the grinning holo. The interview was over, but the conversation wasn’t.
Reid Ralston maintained his cruel rictus, “Oh, I think you know,” he said, pausing, “and you can record this all you want. Who believes any of these stupid fucking exclusives or gotchas anyway? Nobody these days, my dear. What is reality, even if you have it recorded? Besides, you’re washed up, my dear, out to pasture, and from what I’ve heard, the machines are doing the listeners a favour by taking over from you. Nobody needs your brand of bleeding heart sympathy, especially not from some traitor, one of, well, you people.”
One of what people?
Who could say? Scottish? For this is how she had come to think of herself. Or, well, what? Black? An artist? Another “bleeding heart” paid to take the former news anchor’s abuse? He sat staring back through the holo display, triumphant but no longer with the red, white and blue fluttering of a flag behind him. The digital mirage faded into banality. It was just an office: drawers, a desk and a lone aspidistra stranded on an empty bookshelf. The Orwellian reference was not lost on Shay. The interview, though, was. It had completely passed Shay by. It had been a series of jibes and accusations on air, and now they were off the air; the nastiness did not abate.
“I don’t understand,” said Shay, her voice reedy, spirit drained.
“That’s for you to decide what I meant, but I think we all know,” he said, rubbing his forearm below a rolled-up shirt sleeve with the customary two fingers—the brotherhood salute.
“Some of us, my dear, are as God intended us, unadulterated, unaugmented, whereas you… Are you even a true human, a true person? Hell, you’re not even proud to call yourself American anymore.”
“Fuck you,” Shay had time to say before Ralston terminated the connection. She flung a vicious chop through the disconnected holo and screamed.
Motherfucker.
It had not been the most gratifying hour of her life. Mascara stained her cheeks, proving the former news anchor’s reputation remained intact. The smooth pebble of her phone winked and beeped, but she left it on the bed, wagging a warning finger at Poppy, the assistant, as she drifted out, genie-like and smiling, her holographic arms full of messages. The demented machine had taken to reading her calendar, messages and other things as scrolls to be folded out. Shay had little time for that, especially today.
“Don’t annoy me today, Poppy, ok?”
“Ok,” said the phone. She looked down at the bed, the phone sitting there, discarded and now inert, save for a blinking blue light, indicating that she had mail and more.
Fuck ‘em.
She crossed the dark room, her warm feet sticking to the cold tiled floor, and opened the window blinds, letting the sun gush in. Shouts and laughter came with it and Shay lingered, watching the commotion two storeys below. Children splashed and screamed as dozens of disparate games buzzed around parents anchored to loungers, basking in the Spanish summer. The adult’s faces were buried in airport novels, tablets, holo-sheafs or cocktails. Lonny was down there with his wife and their two, much acclimatised to civilian life now, unlike Shay. She was his guest here, a last-minute addition to the family holiday.
A Spanish poolside in July.
Sun cream and salsa dancing after the all-you-can-eat buffet, the all-inclusive bar, with its facsimiles of big-name spirits and beers. It had been Lonny’s idea to go and “tell your side of the story” to the highest bidder.
“Who wouldn’t want to hear your side of things? We were playing stadiums a handful of years ago, you last year, and now look at us, kicked to the curb by the label. Hell, you even got replaced by an avatar, a fucking machine! The public will want to know what these bastards are doing,” said Lonny.
And Shay had acquiesced. It sounded reasonable on the surface. Plus, Shay was skint.
Brassic.
The legal fees alone from her “breach of contract” had swallowed up whatever she had left. It had been Amibola Aje, the label chief, no less, who had sat her down in a spartan LA office and told her how it would go.
“You signed the contract in good faith. We can use your image rights, Shay. Hell, we can use your name, face, voice, even your tits and ass should we decide you’re posing nude for the next album. You forfeited the lot when you decided to take a bite out of our earnings,” she said. Shay’s lawyers had agreed, deeming the contract clauses “watertight”.
And what had Shay done sitting in that LA office? She had lost it, thrown pens and some kind of African ornament at that label head. Aje just smiled at Shay—a predator’s smile, charmless and cold—functional, nothing more.
That fucking bitch.
She had goaded Shay into being a diva, and Shay had obliged. Several weeks later, it still stung. Penniless, Shay returned to Glasgow, the ignominy of economy, recognised by a plane load of phone-toting news consumers, with their questions and attentions. She was headline news, intercepted by pap-drones at the airport, the attention following her back to the flat she grew up in, Ben’s place in the West End of Glasgow. Ben was on Venus with her, and Craig was unsympathetic in New York. Shay was alone, isolated from her former peers, and her society shunned by those with interests that the legal proceedings could damage. She was toxic to her old circles and alien to her domestic ones, which had long since dispersed. She hadn’t lived in Glasgow for a long time. Now she was here, welcomed by the tenements’ sandstone stability and the summer’s reassuring greenery. The serenity was short-lived. No sooner had she emptied a hurriedly packed bag, and neighbours were knocking on the door, complaining about the photographers and pap-drones camped outside the close.
Like I have any fucking control over that.
The journos pestered the neighbours for quotes, rooted through the bins, and when both activities yielded nothing, they just wrote what they wanted anyway, as was tradition. It took two days for Lonny to penetrate her tears and the duvet cocoon she hid behind. The former drummer had seen her on TV and knew instantly that she needed to “escape these bloody jackals”.
So she got added last minute to his imminent holiday with the family to Benidorm. One idea from two worked out, with the holiday being a relief and talking to Reid Ralston being the opposite. One hundred thousand dollars for her side of the story? A tenth of a million to be character assassinated before a live, rabid audience. The automated paparazzi showed more mercy than the former news anchor had.
“Hey, Shay, should I keep diverting calls from your neighbours? They are getting insistent about the cameras outside of the flat,” said Poppy.
This time she didn’t dare waft from the phone like smoke, instead keeping her holo form dormant. Passing the Turing Test was one thing, but the machine fell badly short on a friendship test. It was ever alacrious and seldom helpful, far from what the adverts had promised for this game-changing true intelligence.
“Fuck off, Poppy,” said Shay, moving to the door and slamming it on her phone. She made for the bar, hoping to find a quiet corner and a ready supply of cocktails.
“So what did he say?” asked Lonny. He had found Shay, phoneless and vacant, behind a secluded trellis far from the pool’s whoops and hollers. She bunched her knees to her chest, back against the banquette. The table before her was an audience of empty cocktail glasses.
What was there to say?
She had been paid to give her views to a reactionary media outlet and was accused of being “low value” by the host, among other things—things the host could only say to a live audience sotto voce.
Just “asking questions,” my arse.
Sunlight streaked her forlorn frame as she huddled within the embrace of the thick hedge. The frivolity of the pool was in another country, on another planet, though only on the other side of the resort’s cabana bar. A gentle breeze filtered through the trellis, pushing aromatic hints of SPF50, coconut oil, chlorinated water and cigarettes: the heady scent of a working-class British holiday. The sun worshippers did not favour this area of the bar and gardens. Instead, they took their beverages by the pool or in the UV-saturated seating between it and the bar. Above them, the thick foliage coiled and twisted around the wooden frame, taking the sting out of the high afternoon sun.
“It was Reid Ralston, that smug American prick. I think he was trying to make me cry, or I don’t know. He was just upsetting me. I told him to fuck off,” said Shay, sobbing and rocking.
“Live on air?” asked Lonny. Shay sniffed and shook her head.
“No, after the interview. The bastard got plenty of good shots of me crying, though, especially after accusing me of breaching my contract with the label. Well, he’s only fucking best chums with Henrik De Jong, isn’t he? The stupid phone, that fucking Poppy AI thing, and the contextual feed it puts up beside calls, it displayed that. Like that bitch was taunting me like I need more shit from a fucking AI!”
Lonny put his arm around her, shooshing her sobs and rubbing her back. His wife, Karen, was at the pool with their children and was nudged by her phone about the car crash interview. She, in turn, nudged Lonny into conciliatory mode, urging him to seek out and mollify.
“Can you believe he said you people to her?” Karen said.
He could believe it.
The man had built a reputation upon saying such things, first in the news and latterly to people his media corporation decided needed to be brought down a peg or two. As a news anchor, Ralston seldom hid his contempt for anyone who wasn’t him, and stirring resentment on American news was simply tradition at this point. It was always a quick win with an inbuilt audience trained for a century to do tricks for dog whistles. She had not anticipated being roped into some trans-humanist argument, however. Thanks to Reid Ralston, she had become a totem for the moral panic du jour.
“Hey, come on, at least you got paid for that; take the sting out of that idiot’s words,” said Lonny.
Shay wanted to tell Lonny to fuck off too, but couldn’t summon the energy. Besides, he was only trying to help, albeit clumsily. He caught the attention of a servitor trundling past on its small, caterpillar tracks and gave the machine his order.
“Two more of whatever she is having,” he said, pointing to Shay’s depleted glasses. The machine acknowledged his request and hummed as it prepared the drinks. A small spherical eye cam on top of it scanned the table and almost seemed to shake its eye stalk at the dozen or so drained cocktails.
“You’re drinking the cocktails from this thing?” said Lonny. Shay sniffed back tears and felt the urge to laugh. She had gone from six-star opulence to a bargain family resort in a part of Spain with holo-images of the food on the menus outside the restaurants. This was better, though; less lonely, more honest.
“Beats going to the bar and having to talk to people or waiting, plus it’s part of the all-inclusive deal,” she said, shaking her hotel wristband.
Two tall cocktail glasses emerged from the servitor, and an arm swung out to deposit crushed ice into each glass. The machine beeped, cleared the table and moved on, leaving them to drink cocktails in the shade and reminisce about the early days.
Has it really been over a decade?
It had. Their journey went from a PhD in biomechanical engineering to a student band and busking to albums, A&R, studios and stadium gigs, to normality in no time. Their twenties evaporated faster than ice in an oven.
“Where does the time go?” Lonny asked, not expecting an answer because who could really say?
He worked as a plumber now, a job not yet fit for full automation and paying better than doctor or lawyer did. He, it transpired, left the band at a more optimal time than Shay. He got a golden handshake, paid off his mortgage and settled down. Shay had held onto the frantically bucking beast of fame and been thrown off to penury and injury. Lonny had spat his cocktail out when Shay told him how much she was being sued for, the damages the label had applied for when they had used machine intelligence to steal her name, face and voice.
“In the fine print of the deal, in some buried clause, the bastards hid some weasel words about losing them money, that I was in breach of contract if I was to ‘materially impact the label’s earnings’—something like that. A total tripwire. They got rid of you and the others and then knew I wouldn’t keep the output up on my own,” said Shay, shaking her head ruefully.
Lonny hung his head, eyes only for the bottom of his cocktail glass.
Shay laughed bitterly, “Even if the last album on the deal was a chart-topper, they knew they didn’t have to renew me and could still retain the rights to Shay Laren. So, either way, they won, and I got my soul stolen by a machine.”
She was unsure if the interview or character assassination with Reid Ralston would be the final insult.
Probably not even close.
To have the highest-paid talking head in the world insulting her on air, referring to her as “you people” and calling her “greedy”, telling her she was a “complainer” and that “property rights are sovereign and you signed yours away, so get over it”. Could it get worse?
“What about other labels?” said Lonny.
Shay shook her head. “They won’t touch me. Shit scared that I’ll be too similar to my digital doppelganger.”
“Fucking hell,” said Lonny, opting to order more cocktails. Drunkenness was moving beyond a concept for both of them now.
“Worst of it is that for being subjected to that fucking supremacist fuck pig bastard live on TV, for being upset before a global audience, the dollars won’t even touch the sides of the debt. A hundred thousand dollars, and I’ll barely have enough left out of that to buy a fucking pizza,” said Shay.
Lonny refused to take any money from her for the holiday, seeing it as his duty to her as they reforged a friendship wrecked by the very label that was now destroying Shay’s life. Shay Laren, the most famous avatar in the world, is the intellectual and physical property of the label, with legal rights so tight that Shay McLaren wasn’t even allowed to have the same haircut as her digital clone.
“I think bald suits you, though,” said Lonny unconvincingly.
“I was a fucking idiot, Lonny; during that last recording run, I should have known. All the notes Henrik gave me, all the shit he said, the way he acted, making me go to that awards show in London…I should have known. You remember that Ainsworth Grimes, the soap star?”
Lonny nodded as Shay sank the remainder of her umpteenth cocktail.
“Well,” she continued, “He kind of warned me. He said, ‘We have to make the most of our time before we all get replaced.’ My head was wedged up my arse so far. So, so far. Why didn’t I listen to him?”
“What could you do?”
“I could have fucking…ach, I don’t know, but I could have been sharper. Maybe I could have played ball. Maybe I could have leaned into it more, been the thing that Shay Laren is now.”
Lonny put his glass down and came forward, taking Shay’s hand.
“Well, you wouldn’t be you if you had done that, so why fret? You didn’t become successful by doing what they wanted, and sure, if they knew best, then why did they need you?”
Shay snorted, “To train the new AI model?”
They both laughed. It was mirthless, though, empty, but enough of a balm. They ordered more drinks, watching the sun creep behind the high hotel roof.
“Ironic, you know,” said Lonny.
“What is?”
“Well, that a large part of our success was down to an algorithm picking us out on one of those mood filters, you know, the thing phones do now, with those bio sensor thingys, then another set of algorithms replacing us. Ironic.”
“I don’t think you know what irony is, mate,” said Shay, throwing a cocktail-soaked ice cube at Lonny.
“Do you think I’m trans-human?”
The question surprised Lonny. He thought for a moment.
“Do you? I mean, it’s not like you’re trying to grow gills or claiming you have surpassed us lowly homo sapiens, is it?”
Shay sighed.
“They brought up the implant I have, and mentioned the procedure like it was something I chose. I would have died without it. Christ, I would have died without it! So I guess by that motherfucker’s standard, kids with artificial hearts are now trans-humanists, out to defile the species!”
She shook her head, and Lonny looked at her, selfishly wishing no more tears would come. He had as much as he could handle of seeing his friend this way, however warranted.
“He brought up the asexuality thing, too,” said Shay.
“Well, being into anything other than kids is no longer a crime. You’re the outcast now if you don’t say or don’t do anything. Ever think of a fake girlfriend or boyfriend?”
Shay shook her head, “it just never occurred to me. Wasn’t interested, and besides, who outside of a fairytale wants a thirty-something virgin?”
“So,” said Lonny, pretending to hold a microphone under Shay’s mouth, “the rumours are true, eh? What do you have to say, Ms McLaren, now that everyone knows you’re a pervert?”
Shay leaned forward, speaking into the imaginary mic, “Eh, go fuck yourself, and you can quote me on that.”
Later, once suitably lubricated, the two former musicians joined up with Karen and the kids for dinner. Karen embraced Shay, “I couldn’t believe that arsehole, babes; how do they get away with saying that on TV?” said Karen.
Shay shrugged, “American TV. They’re used to it, I think.”
She hiccuped, holding her hand over her mouth, giggling as she rocked towards the dinner table.
“I do like your hairdo, though,” said Lonny, thumping down at his seat by the dinner table. “Kids, what do you think of Auntie Shay’s new look?”
Both kids looked at one another, giggled, and then returned to the business of demolishing their food.
“Bald suits you,“ Karen said slightly more convincingly than Lonny, who was getting a telling stare from his wife. Lonny slurred an apology while Shay decided that there would be more drinks once she had her fill of the buffet.
Shay set off from Benidorm to the surrounding countryside the next day with just her sunrise hangover for company. She was wary of ruining Lonny’s holiday and had been attracting unwanted attention at the hotel bar that evening. People had twigged who she was. Ralston’s reach encompassed the English-speaking globe and a little beyond, too. Pool-side pundits weighed in noisily, parroting the lines the label’s defence lawyers had. Corporate bullying was always nastier when done by an unpaid, unasked public. Pap-drones had descended on the hotel too, and Reid Ralston was making much capital from “spoiled singer gets her comeuppance. Another whining, bleeding-heart victim whose political views are poisoning Western culture.”
All big news to Shay, who had never once voted or expressed so much as one political view in her music. She was this week’s bête noire in big media’s never-ending battle against its viewers. She packed breakfast from the sparsely-cropped buffet, threw it in her backpack and left the hotel via a side door. Outside, a greasy-haired local photographer erected pap-drone pylons and charging cradles for a flock of robotic spies. By lunchtime, the reception would be inundated with people keen to see her and chart the decline of one of the planet’s most famous singers. Her phone was off and in her bag, and she knew that come power up, it would burst with calls.
It’s just for emergencies.
She walked across the waking city, avoiding any routes with drunken holidaymakers staggering back to their hotels, edging to the east of town and the hills containing the Mirador de Taiwan, La Creu and the southern-facing views of the Mediterranean. Blue seas and skies met at the horizon, contrasted against the backdrop of concrete consumerism she walked from. She pushed on, keen to be in the shade by lunchtime. Following the coast, she reached Punta del Mascaret, an appendix-shaped outcrop jutting into the sea. She sat on the sun-bleached white rocks beneath the welcome shade of some trees and tore into her serrano ham sandwich. Benidorm and hassle were back to her left, westwards along the coast, shimmering in the heat.
After eating, she scrambled down to the beach and its sharp stones and gently lapping waves, paddling in the cool sea and looking out at the sailboats and surf. It was almost enough to breathe the free air and think of nothing. Almost, but not quite. In three days, they would return to Glasgow to more attention, to accusations, to the flat she grew up in, her childhood bedroom and to debt. A mountain of debt.
“And just why do you think that you, a highly paid artist, are above the laws we all must abide by? Don’t you think it is a slap in the face to all those who helped make you what you are? To your fans? Now they don’t get to see you but have a facsimile instead, and all because you think performing is beneath you? I honestly don’t understand where people like you, your sort, get off. I really don’t!”
Even on a secluded beach, there were phones. Even in this remote alcove, there were consumers. From beneath her hat, she stared at a fat, balding man, oblivious, on his lounger as he watched the news, shaking his head. Shay moved on as his wife joined in, “These people want to try living in the real world! Fucking trans-humanists.”
These people.
She was these people now, her welcome worn out, her cash reserves evaporated. Like anyone else, she never wanted to be a charity case or in need. The feeling was alien to her as the weather on Venus. Lonny pitied her, as did Karen, and they meant well, though their pity didn’t heal her wounds.
She watched the setting sun through tears, wishing it would set to on her miseries and woes, crying all the more, knowing that a new fresh cycle would resume, fading only when enough news and gossip had been extracted from the here and now. The only solution for the here and now was to live through it and continue existing. The pain would make something new, and that form would be stronger, but the process had to be endured, and the scars would be visible.
Shay summoned the strength to stand, defiant against the evening wind, wearily eyeing the trials to be endured. She skirted civilisation like a rat might a kitchen, out of the light, away from the noise and attention. Circuitously, she reached the hotel at dark, and the media scrum outside had grown. Their attempts to penetrate the hotel had yielded little success, so a dozen photographers and journalists sat about bored, staring into screens and holos, just waiting.
Am I really worth any of this?
She pushed through them, and the avalanche of questions crashed into her. The waiting manager and a security guard pulled her from the crush, the glass panel doors halting the melee. The manager wrung his hands nervously, doubtlessly content with his establishment getting featured on the news. He assured Shay that no journalists would enter the hotel and that they took measures to prevent drones from flying over public areas of the hotel. He asked for an autograph, and Shay obliged, carefully adding the Mc to her name. He didn’t seem to notice or care. She retired to the room, careful not to wake the kids, content Karen and Lonny were out on the balcony. She had enough pity and attention to last her the rest of her days.
The remaining days of the holiday passed peacefully, without incident. Although the stares of other guests were annoying, Shay shrugged them off, taking pleasure in talking to Karen and playing with the children by the pool. Back home, the pap-drones had dispersed, and beyond some attention at Glasgow Airport, little else was said. The news had rumbled on, as was its want. There were new victims to leech from. Eventually, curled foetal in her teenage bed, Shay let out the tears that couldn’t come around Lonny. The deep, miserable tears that had only been previewed in Spain. She felt like she could cry enough to flood the tenement and drown the city in grief. It took time for her to fall asleep, but before she did, she had settled on one clear thought: something has to change.
The question was, what?