1
Picture Marlowe at night in a different world, thirty-three years old, married but chronically lonely, on her way home from a faculty party.
In the passenger seat, as always, because her husband insisted on driving.
By this point she hadn’t driven a car in several years.
She’d gone to some effort with her appearance: hair down around her shoulders, which she knew was how her husband preferred it; careful makeup; a matching set of onyx earrings and necklace that her in-laws had given her on her wedding day.
Her dress was the wrong size, but she wouldn’t realize that for another year.
There were few other cars on the road at this hour, mostly just long electric trolleys carrying passengers across the city of Los Angeles.
Having a car in LA was an extravagance—so few people used them anymore, and the State imposed a significant annual fee for car ownership—but Marlowe’s husband, Hugo, liked driving.
Their car moved silently through the quiet streets of Culver City, between the massive towers where thousands of people lived, glass walkways strung across the expressway like corridors of light.
In this part of the city, the camera arrays were supplemented by surveillance drones, and at night the drones looked like fireflies, drifting golden through the air.
Marlowe liked how fragile the towers looked at night, steel fading into darkness so the buildings looked like constructions of light and glass, stacked lives with luminescent kitchens.
As they travelled east, the massive solar fans that cooled the city stopped spinning for the night, a gradual cessation of movement in the sky overhead.
Usually Marlowe didn’t go to faculty parties, because there was no way to not bring her husband, and when Hugo and Marlowe saw people together, she somehow always said the wrong thing.
But she’d been so lonely, and on her way home that night she felt, at first, that going to the party had been worth the risk.
While the car slipped past the first array of State cameras, she was reviewing her every move.
She’d thought the evening was beautiful.
There were good conversations. The room was gorgeous.
Hugo had seemed happy. He’d smiled when people praised the transport lecture she’d been developing, he’d raised his glass for her, he’d charmed her colleagues and made them laugh.
They were passing under a second camera array.
A light flashed yellow and her husband slowed the car.
Marlowe and Hugo leaned forward, looking up into the yellow light—looking at a lens—until a moment later the light turned white and Hugo drove them onward.
“I heard the array’s getting upgraded,” she said. “Soon the cameras will be embedded in the buildings, so we won’t even see them anymore.”
Hugo said nothing. She glanced at his profile, and felt a familiar falling sensation. His jaw was set.
“Is something wrong?” Marlowe asked.
“What were you thinking?” he asked quietly.
“What do you mean?” She touched one hand to her chest, absently, because her heart was beginning to speed up. It was important to breathe very slowly and carefully. She was replaying the evening in her head. Where was the mistake? It wasn’t always obvious.
“The way you introduced me,” he said. “I just can’t imagine what you were thinking.”
How had she introduced him? She remembered having said, “This is my husband, Hugo,” on several occasions throughout the night, but Marlowe was exquisitely sensitive to her own shortcomings, and in memory there was no unease attached to those moments.
“What do you mean? How did I introduce you?”
“The way I was just so clearly an afterthought,” he said. “It’s just, do you not even see me? Do you understand that we’re in a marriage? When you say, ‘This is my husband . . . ’”—he exaggerated the pause, longer and longer—“‘This is my husband . . . Hugo,’ like you could barely remember my name.”
“I don’t think I did that,” she said. “I don’t think I paused like that.”
“Oh, you did, and people noticed,” he said. “I saw them react. It was humiliating.” He glanced at her, and a warning light pulsed softly on the windshield. The car had registered that he’d looked away from the road. He looked forward again.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He ignored this, because no apology would ever be enough.
There was an agonizing period of silence.
The car glided onward between shining towers.
Marlowe let her mind go blank while she waited for the next round.
In her peripheral vision, Hugo ran his hand through his hair.
He only did that when he was particularly agitated.
He would still be angry tomorrow, and the day after that.
“I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it,” he said. “That’s how much difficulty you have, socially. It’s hard for you to read social cues and connect with people.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You really can’t hear yourself in those moments, can you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, on autopilot now.
“It’s like you just don’t get it,” he said, in tones of wonderment.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Marlowe was very far away. She was floating. She was looking out at the lights of the city and she was somewhere out there in the brightness. A fugitive thought: What if I wasn’t in this car anymore?
“Ten years of marriage, and you just don’t quite get it. You don’t really get that this is a partnership, do you?”
“I’m sorry.” What if there were no more car rides like this one, ever?
“The thing is, it’s just . . . we’re together, Marlowe. When you do something like this, when you humiliate me publicly, it’s just very difficult for me to understand where you’re coming from.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“I don’t think you understand how people see you,” he said.
“I guess not,” she said, very quietly.
“There’s something very wrong with you,” he said, “I think that much is clear.”
“Please,” Marlowe said, “I’m really, really sorry.” What if I were to open the door of the car, and jump out?
This was the thought that shocked her back to herself.
The latch was so close to her hand. She would only have to shift her hand a little to open the door and fly out into the night—they were on a high overpass over a low-lying residential neighbourhood—and then she would never be in a car with him again.
But that wasn’t right. She didn’t want to fly out into the night and break on the pavement, because what she wanted, she realized in a distant way, was to be alive.
What she wanted desperately just then was to talk to her father.
He’d always said to call when she was in trouble, and she was in trouble, she realized, she was in so much trouble.
How had she not seen it before? She looked at Hugo. He was wounded, incredulous.
“Marlowe,” he said, “do you understand how much I do for you?”
In the normal course of events she would apologize again, and again, and again—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’ll do better, I’ll do better—because there was always something she’d said or done wrong.
On a hundred other nights she’d fallen over herself apologizing on the car ride home, then wept and begged forgiveness for days.
But tonight, the thought of death had jolted her.
Ten years of apologies, she found herself thinking, and what, actually, was she apologizing for?
“Marlowe, I asked you a question, and I’m going to ask you to extend me the basic courtesy of a response. I asked if you understand how much I do for you.”
She looked at him, and instead of apologizing again she spoke the words that began the last fight, the fight that ended with her filing for divorce five days later: “Actually,” she said, “you don’t do anything for me at all.”
2
A year and a half later, elsewhere in the city, a detective stood by her office window, waiting for Marlowe’s lecture to begin.
Detective Ibari Waker was seventy-nine now, and at some point in the previous decade had slipped into the habit of dressing entirely in black.
She held a high rank in the Internal Security Service, which had no central office.
There were bureaus scattered everywhere in Los Angeles, as in all of the other cities of the United State.
Other countries had crumbled in the past few decades.
The State would not, because the difference between mayhem and order is control.
The State was a fortress and Service was the wall.
It was difficult to get in or out. Immigration had been largely frozen for some time, with narrow exceptions for investors.
Leaving required an exit visa, and exit visas were reserved for citizens with no history of pro-democracy activities or other subversion.
Ibari had devoted her life to Service. She had some regrets.
From her office she could see the beach, just barely, a sliver of pale sand between the glass towers of the Harbor City neighbourhood.
She was watching the movement of a kite between towers, a speck of red against a brilliant blue sky.
This view had been hers for a long time now, decades, but she was close to retirement.
She glanced at her watch, then sat at her desk, entered a code into a console, and put on her VR headset.
The code was her key into a virtual auditorium.
Holospace rooms felt like real rooms now, for the most part.
Only a faint shimmer in her peripheral vision gave it away.
Ibari’s virtual seat was halfway back in the auditorium, her favourite vantage point for lectures.
She’d missed the introduction. On the stage, a holographic projection of Marlowe Li stood behind a podium.
3