The South Florida Offshore Tourism Redevelopment Zone #4
The cheering eventually died down. “Thanks for joining us,” Bob said, as if Glenn had done him a personal favor. “So you’ve been playing this role on the live Malicarn set for almost twenty years now. That’s incredible.”
“Thank you,” Glenn said. “Nineteen years next month.” He wasn’t sure what he was thanking Pickering for.
“What are some of the things which have changed in those years? What’s different now from when you started?”
“Well,” Glenn said, “the structure is different. In the early years everything we did was really in purpose to an ongoing story. That first live-set film, The Return of the Council, was very planned out. Now the films are much more improvisational. We find them in the editing. It means that day-to-day life on set feels more chaotic, but also more lived in. Most days people are just going about their lives.”
“You say ‘people,’ but you mean the memory-scanned characters?”
“Well, yes. But most of these characters have been on set now for nearly two decades. So they are pretty well integrated. And there’s a whole generation of children and young adults who’ve grown up on the live set.”
Pickering, the good PR fluffer that he was, did not interrogate the longevity of the scanned characters, all of whose contracts technically expired years ago but were extended after Lilly’s arson through legal chicanery that Glenn decided was better for him, intellectually and ethically, not to understand.
Pickering looked out toward the audience as he asked the next question. “Now, this is an interesting concept. Because these younger characters aren’t prewritten. You have to interact with them in unexpected ways, right?”
“That’s true. The most recent film, the Bariol solo picture, was built around his relationship with a group of orphans. The orphans’ parents were all scanned, but the children aren’t.”
The whole conversation was short, less than thirty minutes, and almost immediately after it was over Glenn could no longer remember much about it. He took some audience questions, waved again at the crowd, and exited stage left. The convention producer was waiting for him.
“Because we moved up the interview, you have a few hours before the autograph booth.”
“Great,” Glenn said. “I could use a nap.”
A different intern accompanied him to the service elevator, and by the time Glenn made it back to his suite, he was so happy to be alone to rest that he didn’t notice the window was open.
It wasn’t until he was in the bedroom and one of them spoke that Glenn saw the two other people waiting for him.
“Hello, Glenn.”
Her voice was the same: dusky and serious, though wearier than it once was. When he turned, he noticed her hair was shorter, the lines under her eyes deeper, but she looked more like his memories than he could have hoped.
“Lilly?” Glenn asked. “You’re here? What’s—what’s going on?”
Next to her stood a tall, dark-haired man with a scowl on his face.
“You better sit down,” the strange man said. “We’re going to have a conversation.”
Glenn leaned back on the bed, and it was only then he noticed that the man was holding a gun.
3.
Glenn’s conversation with Bob Pickering was vapid and inconsequential. A few preprepared questions were asked by attendees in Hall B.
Glenn answered one about future storylines with some empty platitude.
He was surprisingly soft-spoken, Lilly thought, and clearly a little uncomfortable.
Perhaps he wasn’t used to being out in front of so many people, away from the false anonymity of the set, or perhaps he was just a coward. Lilly suspected the latter.
Bob Pickering announced that the session was over and that a special meet-and-greet line for Glenn would be available that afternoon, for the low fee of two thousand dollars a person.
“Let’s go,” Roger said, and they stood up and made for the back of the theater.
They were in the lobby ahead of the crush.
Roger grabbed Lilly’s hand and pulled her close, a little too comfortably.
But he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was looking for the left maintenance corridor, the one obscured from security cameras.
Lilly and Roger ducked through the mass of people, slipping past the door when the crowd was at its thickest. They walked down the hallway, a member of the catering staff rushing past them without a thought.
Lilly and Roger dipped through another door and then another—third left, second right—arriving finally in a small storage room filled with foldable tables and chairs.
The room was empty. This had been no guarantee, only an assumption that the crowds in the hall and the lunch rush would mean no new tables needed to be set up.
The window was right where Roger’s architectural plans said it would be, in the southwest corner.
It was bolted shut, and Roger opened up his watch face and removed a small foldable screwdriver.
“They sell those at the MI6 gift shop?” Lilly asked.
He ignored her and quickly unhooked the screws and smacked the edge of the window frame until it popped out. The ocean breeze blew into the room, and Lilly pulled from the lining of her backpack a pair of leather gloves with nonstick palms.
They both tucked their pant legs into their shoes, stuffed their jackets and bags behind a pile of folded tables where they couldn’t be seen, then crawled through the window.
A sloping ledge was immediately outside, about two meters long, and Lilly rested herself on the edge of it as Roger reached back through, pulled the glass up, and rested it back in the frame.
He pulled on the window just enough to jam it back in.
“Is this really the easiest way you could find?” Lilly asked.
Roger looked down at his watch. “We have about two minutes,” he said. If he could have blasted action-movie music he would have.
They climbed down the side of the building.
Because of its pyramid shape, each drop from one level of the hotel to the next was only about ten feet, followed by another two or three yards of sloping rooftop.
Lilly guided herself down with her gloves, trying not to think about slipping down the incline and into the water below.
When Roger first came to visit her, Lilly said nothing about Glenn.
Roger didn’t force her to talk but she knew she didn’t really have a choice.
She sat on her couch while he paced around, fielding his endless questions.
She told him everything. Her career, her work in the Malicarn, tech specs and protocols, what she did to destroy the technology, and how she escaped.
They talked about neuroscanners, the implementation process, even the science behind the scanning.
“So there were twelve neuroscanners on-site, correct?”
“Only eight were operational by the end. They were always glitching.”
“And you destroyed eleven of them?”
“Yes, one was missing.”
“Where was it?”
“I don’t know. One of the writers borrowed it.”
“Jules Walker?”
“Yes, I believe it was him.”
“Does he have it still?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who would know?”
The only thing she kept private was her relationship with Glenn.
When she mentioned him at all it was only in passing, another figure among the many she used to work beside.
Lilly didn’t owe Glenn anything. What was Glenn doing, what was he thinking, year after year, working for those people, putting on the same old farce? Lilly didn’t have to protect him.
“I know who to contact on the inside,” Lilly said. “Find Brian Doyle. He’s one of the actors. A Real. He plays Kreek, a swordsman and trainer. He’s been there a long time. He might know.”
“Yes, I am aware of Brian Doyle. You think he knows about the neuroscanner?” Roger puffed on his pipe as he spoke. Lilly had to open a window to let the smoke out.
“Yes, I believe so,” Lilly said, but she was not sure if she did.
“What about Glenn Mackey?”
“Oh, yes, well, I suppose he might know something too.”
Roger smirked and nodded.
Lilly did not miss Glenn, did not miss his indecisiveness and lack of strong opinions about anything.
There was not a nostalgic romantic spark she hoped to rekindle, certainly not since Glenn had clearly taken no action in the years since she left to change the Malicarn in any way.
What Lilly did do, however, was wonder. Wonder if Glenn ever thought about her, about what had happened, about how things had changed and how they might change again.
Lilly had spent a short but momentous period of her life tied to a man who had never once thought anything important, and in the years since she had become a person of little significance herself.
She was like Gregorian, bereft of magic or purpose and wandering a world where she was no longer needed.
So she wondered if perhaps, somewhere on an island in the middle of the ocean, Glenn had spent the ensuing years finding something, anything, inside himself that mattered even a little bit.
But Roger, still smirking, wasn’t going to let Lilly off so easily.
“Brian Doyle is a dead end. I looked into it. He doesn’t leave the island anymore. Not a single press event in twelve years. But Glenn Mackey travels all the time. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.”
“Talk to me? Why?”
“Because you used to fuck each other.”
Lilly couldn’t deny it. Roger produced photographs of the two of them, some from a premiere or a press event, some from Glenn’s old social accounts, which while not updated often did include several pictures of the two of them camping or hanging out with Jules in one of their apartments.