Audrey’s search for her mother and sister probably didn’t have to be kept secret, but it was probably wiser for it to be private. That ruled out contacting her great aunt Ruth electronically, so with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation, Audrey had the autokitchen make a chocolate pudding cake and then left to see her in person.
She took an electric train to Spokane, then a bus to the Marzouk Elder Home, a sprawling brick structure on a dry bluff northwest of town.
In front of the building, beside the walkway, a flower garden the size of a high school stage featured purple and yellow flowers going limp in the wavering heat of the afternoon. Audrey held tight to cake and went inside. As she passed through the sliding doors, a notice projected on the wall informed her that she’d been entered into the Home’s visitor log.
It was so much cooler in the building, Audrey imagined she could hear the pudding cake sigh with relief. A thin, bald man with huge glasses came out to meet her from behind a desk in a glassed-in office.
“Hello!” the man said. “What can we do for you? Visiting?”
Audrey nodded. “My great aunt, Ruth Frankel.”
“That’s wonderful. I’m Bernie,” he said. He eyed the plastic container she was holding. “Food?” he said, pointing. For one disoriented moment, Audrey thought he was asking for some.
“It’s chocolate pudding cake.”
Bernie raised his prodigious gray eyebrows. “Wonderful. OK if I check to make sure it won’t kill her?”
“You make it hard to object,” Audrey said. “Is an ingredient list all right?”
“Best thing,” Bernie said.
Audrey gestured up her dashboard in her lenses, brought forward the home interface, selected kitchen history, tapped the cake at the top, and opened the ingredient list. She pushed the information to Bernie, who made a catching gesture followed by a few others that must have been for bringing up Great-Aunt Ruth’s dietary information.
“Wonderful,” he said after a minute. “It won’t kill her—and even if it did, what a nice way to go!”
Audrey wondered if death jokes were the norm here, or if this was Bernie’s personality.
“Your great aunt is at a concert right now,” Bernie said, “but I think they’re finishing up, so why don’t you go meet her in the Plover room?” He pushed something from his display toward her. An arrow appeared on her lenses, pointing down a hallway to her right.
“It’s nice to meet you, Bernie,” Audrey said.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Bernie said, heading back to his desk. “Wonderful,” he added a moment later.
The arrow guided Audrey around a corner and down another hallway, into a long room with yellow walls that was crowded with seniors getting up from chairs or waiting for room to move their wheelchairs. A small crowd of middle schoolers in the front of the room milled around a man who must have been their teacher. From the lack of instruments, Audrey assumed they were a choir.
The arrow was still flashing in her display, and she looked where it was pointing to see a round, blinking woman with hair like wisps of cotton and a squarish face crowded with wrinkles: Great-Aunt Ruth. She was standing up, with no cane or walker to help, and then she waited patiently for the crowd to thin before moving forward. When she did, she looked around the room until her eyes came to a stop on Audrey. Great-Aunt Ruth turned and walked up to her, one careful step at a time.
“Why Lauren,” Ruth said. “Where have you been all this time?”
A chill went down the back of Audrey’s neck. Lauren was her mother.
“It’s Audrey, Lauren’s daughter,” Audrey said.
Ruth stopped, staring. “Is it?” she said. “Well, you look just like her. A little thicker around the middle, but that happens. Where’s your mother? I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”
Audrey was taken aback by how unsurprised Ruth was. But then, if you were 96 and likely to confuse your grandniece with your niece, it was probably good policy to take things in stride.
“I’m looking for her, actually,” Audrey said. “And I brought you a—”
“Shh!” Ruth had caught sight of the plastic container and was looking around warily. An elderly man with a magnificently large head watched them with sudden interest. “Not here!” Ruth whispered. “Come with me.” She hobbled forward at a surprisingly quick pace, and Audrey followed.
Glancing behind her, Audrey saw the man with the head following, but he used a walker and was falling behind. Great-Aunt Ruth didn’t slow down. She led Audrey down a corridor to a small bedroom with family pictures and songbirds on one pale blue wall. Once Audrey followed her in, Ruth shut the door behind her and locked it.
“All right,” she said.
The container was one of the new ones that opened like a flower. Audrey undid the catch on the top to reveal the bowl of pudding cake, dark and glistening. Ruth drew in a sharp breath.
“I knew you’d turn out all right,” she said eagerly, taking the cake from Audrey and setting it on a little table by the window. She settled into a glider rocker, sighing, her eyes still on the cake. Then she looked back at Audrey. “Where’ve you been, girl?”
“America, most of the time,” Audrey said. “I just moved to California.”
“It took you long enough,” Ruth said. “Are you living with your mother?”
“I don’t know where she is, or where Carrie is,” said Audrey. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Carrie? Wasn’t there a girl named Carrie?” Ruth said.
“My sister,” Audrey said.
Great-Aunt Ruth shook her head. “You don’t have a sister,” she said. Audrey felt a second chill.
“Is my sister dead?” That would easily explain why she’d had trouble finding the two, but Audrey wished powerfully for the answer to be something else.
Ruth looked at her disapprovingly. “I just said you don’t have a sister, so obviously she isn’t dead.”
“What about my mother?”
“Well, I don’t know! But she was alive at Pesach.”
“You saw her? She was here at Passover?”
“First time in a few years, but yes, she was here. With her nice young man, Adam.”
“She’s with a young man?” Audrey said. Did Ruth mean some kind of boyfriend? Lauren would be in her seventies now, so it was hard to imagine she’d be dating anyone who could be called a “young man.” On the other hand, Great-Aunt Ruth was 96. Maybe seventy-somethings were spring chickens from that vantage.
“He’s very sweet,” Ruth said.
“Do you know where my mother is living now?” Audrey said. “Is she still Lauren Adams?”
“Adams!” said Great-Aunt Ruth. “That thug. No, it’s not Adams. I don’t know where she lives ... I can’t travel anymore, you see, and she just comes here when she comes.”
“What’s her new name?” Audrey said. “Did she remarry?”
“Oh, she did, but didn’t change it for that. It was when she moved. It was ...” Ruth stared up at the ceiling, humming under her breath, concentrating. “... I don’t know. I suppose that’s not much help.”
It wasn’t, but Ruth had already given Audrey the clue she needed to find out not only her mother’s new name, but her full contact information, as long as she was careful.
“It’s fine, Great-Aunt Ruth. I’m just happy to see you. Should we get a spoon so you can try some of that cake?” Audrey said.
Ruth nodded. “But Lauren!” she said in an exaggerated whisper. “Don’t let anyone see!”
By the time she got home that night, Audrey had worked out what she needed to do next. She’d known better than to ask Bernie or anyone else at the senior home for access to visitor records: privacy laws barred sharing that information. She, however, had other potential ways to get to it.
The AI hidden in her scarf was not specifically intended for the kind of search she had in mind, but it was excellent at a wide variety of searching, security bypassing, and information processing tasks, including its main role of setting up the fraudulent CitDiv payments. However, she assumed the scarf was reporting her activities to her American superiors, so she had to make it look like part of her mission.
Audrey would have the scarf search visitor logs for a mostly random selection of senior housing facilities, hospitals, and addiction recovery centers. She’d have it seek out individuals who were likely to be in a difficult financial situation and who, based on information from a variety of public and private sources, seemed to have the right personality type to accept a little help, no questions asked. The rationale she was using, as she was ready to explain if anyone asked, was that people with a vulnerable relative or romantic partner were more likely to be overextending themselves. This was less true in Cascadia, where universal health care and the CitDiv prevented the kinds of desperate economic situations illness, age, and drug addiction tended to visit on Americans, but it was still a reasonable approach to finding prospects for the CitDiv fraud.
Of course, the Marzouk Elder Home would be one of the senior housing facilities Audrey was “arbitrarily” including, and the raw information the scarf AI would collect to make its calculations would be available for Audrey to review in detail.
Audrey spent forty minutes providing the scarf AI with parameters for its search. The most difficult part was ensuring that Marzouk Elder Home was included without naming it specifically, but she was able to preview the hits as she tweaked the parameters, and soon Marzouk appeared on the list.
She left the scarf to do its work. In order to be as inconspicuous as possible, it would space its queries to the institutions out irregularly over the course of several hours.
While that ran, she ate seitan dumplings made ahead by the autokitchen. After, she found herself wishing she’d had the kitchen make an extra chocolate pudding cake. She could still do that, but her realistic assessment was that having a whole chocolate pudding cake would be a very bad idea.
Instead, she ate an oatmeal raisin cookie, which was completely unsatisfying. Audrey often wished she cared about food as little as some other people seemed to, but while she was carefully controlled in most ways, she’d never been able to make her peace with food. Her father had tasked her with all of the grocery shopping and cooking from when she was about eleven, and while he kept tight control over most of her behavior, he didn’t care what she bought at the grocery store. Having food felt free and empowered.
With hours of scarf research still to go, she tried to get some sleep, but she just lay restlessly on the bed, her mind jumping from one possibility to another while the minutes and hours ticked by.
Finally, at 1:37 in the morning, a nondescript notice appeared in her lenses. She heaved herself out of bed and went to the kitchen to see what the scarf had turned up.
Audrey hadn’t been entirely sure whether Great-Aunt Ruth had meant that Lauren had visited at Pesach that same year or the year before: in further conversation, Ruth had said “this past Pesach.” Accordingly, Audrey had made sure the date range included both Passover 2068 and Passover 2067.
Pesach, or Passover, actually lasted eight days. In 2067, it had started at the end of March; in 2068, it started in mid-April. Audrey filtered the records for anyone named Lauren who had visited during those times.
There was nothing for either year.
She changed the filter to include to variations of the name “Lauren”, just as she had for earlier searches, and she expanded the dates ten days out to each side of Passover proper. A match finally appeared for April 30, 2068, well after the end of Passover: Lauren Hsu, visiting her father, Nicholas Hsu, age 71. Lauren Hsu was 48—definitely not Audrey’s mother.
It was past three by the time she gave up. There was no other trace of a person named Lauren—or any variation—nor of anyone named Carrie, including any variation of that. There wasn’t even a record of anyone named Adam visiting, though Audrey still had no idea who “Adam” was supposed to be. Had Ruth imagined the visit? Or maybe she was confusing Lauren with someone else? Either way, Audrey was at a dead end again. The only way forward she could see was paying Ruth another visit. As exhausted as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to even think about that.
She ran her dental cleaner, changed into her pajamas, and climbed back into bed. Before she took out her lenses, she started some very quiet Spanish guitar music on the bedroom audio system. It had helped her fall asleep before. Even so, she lay staring into the darkness for two hours, unable to stop thinking about the useless data she had collected. Sleep, when it came, brought restless dreams.
Six a.m. came without regard for Audrey’s late bedtime, but she dragged herself out of bed. The lack of sleep made her feel years older.
“Make me a large mug of coffee with flax milk, please,” she said to the house. The house mics were turned off for safety, but the speakers were on, and her earpiece beside the bed could pick up her voice. “No sugar, a piece of chicken breast, and ... I guess some snap peas.” Her body, rebelliously, was crying out for waffles with strawberry compote, whipped cream, and dark chocolate shavings—but then, when did her body not want waffles?
A protein-and-vegetable breakfast would give her a tiny edge in staying awake and alert, and since she was planning to get some international espionage done, she figured it was best not to nod off.
“We don’t have snap peas,” the room said. “But we do have some snow peas left and some broccoli. Do you want one of those, or should I order snap peas? It would take about 25 minutes.”
“The snow peas are fine, thank you,” Audrey said. She had never managed to lose the habit of saying please and thank you to AIs, even though she knew perfectly well they didn’t care. Younger people seemed to be fine just demanding things, but some stubborn part of her clung to the idea that courtesy was a habit, that if it weren’t exercised regularly, it would get used less with real people.
“Would you make the bed, please?” she said as she pulled on her blue robe. Matilda, who had been curled up on the end of the comforter, complained as a magnetic system pulled the covers into shape. The cat stretched, then jumped down to rub Audrey’s leg.
Audrey ruefully watched the bed make itself. She could get old-style sheets and make it up herself every day, but what was the point of that? If she felt like she wasn’t doing enough herself, what was her alternative—making everything unnecessarily difficult? Though she had to admit, the idea of having tedious chores was weirdly appealing. It would be nice sometimes to be preoccupied with changing the linens on the bed or scraping out an especially messy pot if it meant not fretting about all the bigger issues for a while.
Audrey shuffled barefoot to the kitchen to collect her coffee. She served Matilda some minced fish cat food, then shuffled off toward the shower, mug in hand.
The scarf was wonderful, Audrey decided after breakfast—as long as she didn’t have to wear it. She was connected to it through her lenses and had begun setting up the job for it to falsify businesses for the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau (RIB) overpayments.
The plan for the extra payments was not complicated. First, a large number of businesses would be set up in the Sponsored Businesses system, which was administered by the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau, the organization where Audrey worked and that was also responsible for the Citizen Dividend. Technically, business founder payments through the Sponsored Business program were separate from CitDiv payments, but in practice, the money arrived at the same time, and most people thought of founder payments as bonus CitDiv money rather than as something separate.
The companies the scarf AI would be using, according to Audrey’s parameters, would be a combination of closed businesses, temporarily dormant businesses, and new businesses. They would all be tagged as “suspend review”—that is, they wouldn’t be expected to break even for the time being, as though they were in a cyclical slump or a ramp-up period. “Suspend review” status was needed because none of these businesses would actually be earning anything.
The Cascadian citizens Audrey and Bennet had been identifying would be credited as founders of these businesses, sometimes original founders and sometimes “re-founders”—that is, people who had taken over failing or released businesses from the people who had previously gotten them running. As founders, they would be due founder payments in addition to their weekly CitDiv credit. Audrey and Bennet’s system had already sent out notifications about this to the first round of participants from the list Bennet had curated, much of which came from the names sent over by the U.S.
Each of these arrangements would also have a “minority co-founder,” normally a person or organization that had helped start the business or been instrumental in making it viable. In this case, the minority co-founder would be credited with anywhere between .75% and 2.5% of the founder payments, would always be an organization, and would lead back through a complicated chain of ownership to an account in the name of the scapegoat. When the scheme was discovered, as it inevitably would be, the electronic trail would lead to that person.
Audrey would have liked to have had a bigger part in choosing who the scapegoat was, but Bennet had presented an option who checked all the boxes: Dr. Gene Ajou, head of the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Relief, where Bennet worked. Audrey had pointed out that using someone in that organization would make it more likely that Bennet himself would come under scrutiny, but Bennet had argued that nothing he was doing would suggest any kind of complicity in the scheme that Ajou, supposedly, was masterminding. More importantly, he’d also argued that this would put him in an excellent position to give testimony that would support the damning evidence against Ajou.
In discussions with Bennet, Audrey had come away with the sense that he didn’t much like Ajou but didn’t specifically have it in for the man. If the selection had been more personal, Audrey would have vetoed it. As it was, she found it cold-blooded of Bennet to frame a man he knew well. At the same time, she had to admit that in his place, she wouldn’t have relied on electronic profiles, either: she would have looked for someone she knew. Bennet had attested, credibly, that Ajou would not suspect, that he was mildly technology-averse and therefore especially unlikely to discover what was going on before it was too late, and that his arrest would cause the kind of chaos and division they were aiming for.
Audrey would have preferred if Bennet could have told her that their scapegoat was not an especially good person, but Ajou didn’t seem to fit that mold: he was a widower and a father, and he seemed to be widely liked, even admired. On the other hand, it wasn’t any more ethical to victimize someone when you didn’t like their personality, and the faith others high in the government had in Ajou—President Muñoz included—would undermine their positions when his “crime” came to light. Bennet was right on this: a better human being made a better scapegoat.
There had been those that had argued during project planning that as soon as the fraud was found out and the scapegoat taken into custody, they should be killed. If it were made to look like a suicide, it would play in the press as proof of the scapegoat’s guilt, and it would make the Cascadian government look weak or corrupt for letting the suicide occur. Another benefit: a dead scapegoat wouldn’t have the opportunity to argue their innocence or to dig up any exonerating evidence.
As far as Audrey was concerned, however, killing people just because they’d be more useful dead was not the way to build a better America. She had argued forcefully against it, and that particular discussion had ended. As long as she was in charge of this operation, nobody was getting murdered.
All of these arrangements—the businesses, the founder statuses, the co-founder percentages, the shell organizations, the account in Ajou’s name, and more—were far too complex for Audrey or Bennet to handle, especially on the scale needed. This was where the scarf came in. Audrey was responsible for setting up the parameters for it to do its work and for running test cases against a self-contained, local database that mimicked some of what the AI would find in the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau system. She needed to perfect the test case output right off, because the next day she would be back in the office for her rescheduled meeting with Gordon, and it would be then that she’d connect the scarf to the CitDiv system to launch the more complicated stages of the plan.
On the commuter train into Sacramento, Audrey found herself thinking about her accidental lunch date and the man she’d met, Noah. She found herself thinking a lot about his eyes, which were coffee-brown and quick. Talking to him felt like stepping out of invisibility. It had been refreshing and, if she was being honest with herself, unnerving. She was rarely unnerved.
Let’s skip ahead to the conclusion, she told herself. Eyes aside, the answer to the question she hadn’t allowed to form in her mind, the question of whether to let this connection with Noah turn into something more substantial, was simple. The friend she’d made where she lived was bad enough, but making a friend of any kind where she worked would be idiotic. The idea of flirting with a local while perpetrating a massive fraud as a foreign intelligence asset was ridiculous.
For that matter, the idea of her flirting under any circumstances was laughable. She was a hard-nosed person, not suited to flirting ... nor had she ever turned heads, nor was she of an age to still turn heads even if she once had, nor was she interested in turning heads.
She reflected that she was working pretty hard to convince herself, which indicated that she was still resisting. Skip ahead further, she thought: what steps will you take to shut this down?
First, she had to refrain from contacting him. Second, if he contacted her, she’d reply by text only to say it was nice to meet him, but she didn’t expect to have time to connect in the near future. Third, if she saw him, she would pretend not to recognize him. Fourth, if he saw her and started to talk to her, she would be curt and unpleasant. She would say she had somewhere important to be, as rudely as possible, and leave.
She hoped it didn’t get to “fourth.” Playing that part would turn her stomach. While she was capable of pretending to be what she wasn’t, she had found it much more successful, most of the time, to be as honest as possible without compromising her priorities. Admittedly, it might be harder with someone who actually saw her, but it had worked well enough with Elena, and Elena was another person who actually seemed to see Audrey.
The train eased to a stop at the R Street Federal Complex, and Audrey rode the outflow of passengers onto the platform, letting go of any thought of Noah ... and his eyes.
Audrey’s meeting with Gordon was scheduled for 2:00, but she was arriving at 11:00 to have time to use the scarf. She’d connect it to the office network, and then it would need 15 to 20 minutes for the initial probing and data collection. After that, she’d disconnect it, and the scarf would need one to three hours to determine next steps. Finally, she’d connect it again for a short session of sending out the instructions and data it had prepared.
She had the scarf folded up in her purse. She couldn’t bring herself to wear it: it was just too out of character. She appreciated appropriate decoration, but she rarely felt the need to decorate herself.
On the way through the department, she smiled at any number of people she hadn’t met and a few she had on her way to the flex offices in back. With her lenses, she brought up a view of the flex cube reservations and chose an undersized, out-of-the-way workspace. When she reached it, she closed the door and sat at the workstation, reaching out onto the padded typing surface with one hand and gesturing up her work dashboard with the other. As an introductory process, they had her reviewing and commenting on a long list of local and municipal reemployment proposals. She worked single-mindedly at that for about thirty minutes, so as not to allow the scarf’s local login time to coincide with her own, then brought up the scarf interface on her lenses and gestured for it to begin.
There was no physical connection: the AI was designed to negotiate with the local network and log in as though it were a human worker. It was even set up to convince the network that it was connecting from a different flex office.
Audrey kept a small status window of the scarf AI up as it got started, and she went back to reviewing reemployment plans. There was one having to do with enhancements to Capay Open Space Park, and she moved that one to the top of the queue out of interest.
Names scrolled through the scarf status window as the AI retrieved records for participants, and Audrey glimpsed one that distracted her: Marley Jun. Why was that name familiar? Something was bothering her about seeing that name on that list, but before she had a chance to remind herself where she’d seen it, there was a knock on the door. Reflexively, she flicked the status window away, even though she knew no one could see what she was seeing. She crooked her head around toward the door.
“Come on in!” she called.
It was Noah. He swung the door wide, but he didn’t walk through. Instead, he looked at her. She felt her evaporating invisibility as warmth on the surface of her skin.
“Hello, Audrey,” he said.
“Noah,” Audrey said. She had forgotten steps three and four. Actually, she’d forgotten all of the steps.
“I just wondered if you were free for lunch.”
No, she wasn’t, she thought, but what she said was “I didn’t have any plans.” Then, ineffectually, she added, “I have a meeting at 2:00.”
“We can be back by two. Would you like to go out? There’s a good Thai restaurant, if you like Thai.”
“And if I don’t, there isn’t?” Damn it, that was repartée. She wasn’t supposed to be coming up with witty responses; she was supposed to be stopping things: putting on the brakes, turning away.
Noah smiled. Before he could banter back, she said “But I can’t ...”
He waited. She couldn’t what? She couldn’t have lunch with a coworker? Somewhere inside her, a voice was trying to tell her she was doing something stupid, but she disregarded it. “I should finish this plan I’m reviewing first,” she said. Then: “Thai is fine.”
“OK,” Noah said, smiling. “Send me a hello when you finish up. I’m flexible for time.” Then, before Audrey could respond, he closed the door and was gone.
That had been stupid. Now she was going to have to go back to step two and let him know that she had made a mistake and wouldn’t be able to have lunch—but because she had allowed herself those few moments of unguarded response, she was also going to have to be a bitch about it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t stick.
She brought the scarf’s status window back up. It was currently scanning through Sponsored Business data, and statistics on businesses reviewed were flickering by. There had been something questionable that had come up before Noah knocked; she remembered that, but she didn’t recall what it was. She hoped that it hadn’t been anything important.
In the end, Audrey failed to be a bitch. She wrote, re-wrote, and re-re-wrote the message she was supposed to send to Noah. It was crisp and unkind and abrupt and damning. It would cut things off clearly and unambiguously. She was still staring at the message, stopping short of making the send gesture, when her status window blinked green and vanished: the scarf was done, for now.
Instead of sending it, she deleted all the text and substituted Is now good? I can meet you in the lobby downstairs.
Kin Khao was a tiny restaurant just a few blocks from the RIB offices, across the street from Franklin D. Roosevelt Park. Noah and Audrey walked there together in surprisingly comfortable silence, bathed in sunlight from every direction by the reflective sidewalks, which sent some of the heat of the sun back out into space. They passed bus stops where people waited for the next bus or stopped at one of the benches to rest or socialize. These areas were sheltered from the force of the sun under shade structures or under trees grown from the spate of plantings in the 2020s and 2030s. The water fountains they saw at these locations were exotic to Audrey, who was used to having to pay for drinking water in cities.
At the restaurant, the cooks and servers were all human beings rather than robots, and nearly every table was full with patrons who ate, used their lenses, or exchanged rapid-fire conversation. Each booth gained privacy from wooden screens carved in intricate tableaux featuring serene figures with tall, pointed, almost architectural headdresses amid beautiful, symmetrical patterns of leaves and vines. Each screen was different, Audrey noticed. It seemed very likely they’d been computer-carved, but they gave the impression of being based on someone’s painstaking art, whether that was someone who lived a thousand years ago or a contemporary artist creating the patterns on their lenses.
Most of the diners seemed to be younger people who’d had too much caffeine. The entrees weren’t cheap, most costing around 50 thuns, but Þ50 wasn’t bad for midtown Sacramento, from what Audrey knew. Audrey had trouble hearing the server list the specials over the background noise, but Noah’s voice, when he asked a question, rumbled in its own space beneath the clamor, reaching her intact.
They had to lean in to talk, which they did while they drank tea from handmade ceramic cups shaped to look like squat, colorful birds. Audrey kept trying to be standoffish, or at least to find something about Noah to dislike, but they slipped into conversation that was by turns earnest and clever, and after a time she gave up, leaving the undoing of this mess to her future self.
Noah said something about having been married, and Audrey opened her mouth to ask about that when he looked suddenly surprised and pointed past her, out the window. She turned to see two rainbow-colored llamas running by on their hind legs. Noah stood, took her by the hand, and led her out onto the street. Unable to make sense of what was happening, Audrey let herself be led. As they passed through the door, her lenses flashed a note confirming she had automatically paid for her lunch.
The llamas were person-sized puppets operated by people dressed all in black. They danced and leaped across 10th Street, where other people in bright costumes had stopped traffic with orange flags. She saw now that each llama had a spear and that there were dozens of them converging on FDR park from all directions. On the far side of the park, three or four meters off the ground, huge, sky-blue whales floated. These too were puppets, swimming in graceful, wave-like motions through an imaginary sea. Smaller puppets flitted around them, red and gold and white fish, each about a meter long.
One of the whales opened its mouth wide, and there was a low, bone-shaking sound that made it seem like the whale was roaring. From the whale’s throat unfurled red, yellow, and orange fabric flames, a gout of fire that rushed out in front of the whale and then collapsed back in on itself, disappearing when the whale closed its mouth.
“What is this?” said Audrey.
“Some kind of flash mob ... puppet ... war?” Noah said. “It’s beautiful.”
“It is beautiful,” Audrey said. It wouldn’t have been too remarkable in virtual reality, but she had never seen anything like it in the physical world. The fact that people had taken the time and the care to build these puppets, these beautiful, articulated sculptures made out of fabric and papier-mâché ... that took Audrey’s breath away. She’d seen flash mobs in the U.S. from time to time, but even if you disregarded the huge scale of this show, with a dozen whales and maybe a hundred llamas, all with puppeteers, not to mention the fish and the traffic people and some other people who were rushing in with objects whose purpose Audrey couldn’t guess—even if you disregarded the scale, the delight and generosity of the performers were unlike anything she was used to. There was a basic difference between Cascadia and the United States, she reflected, something more than just the CitDiv: in Cascadia, there had come to be a kind of joy in day-to-day life that still eluded most Americans. Audrey knew it was possible, that Americans and Cascadians, despite their recent divergence, were really the same people at heart. It was just that the two countries had gone different ways.
Crowds were gathering around the park, and Audrey realized that she and Noah had had the blue-sky dumb luck to have ended up an excellent view of the spectacle.
When the llamas and the whales reached each other in the center of the park, it became clear what this pageant was: a whimsical, beautiful, deadly war. A group of llamas was reaching back in unison, preparing to throw their spears, when a whale surged forward and blasted them with fabric fire. A sound of brass instruments served as llamas cries, and their group was shattered, each llama flying back through the air in a different trajectory to collapse into a lifeless rainbow mass. A second group of llamas cast spears into the whale that had come forward, and it bellowed again with that bone-shaking noise, rolled onto its side, and collapsed into a pool of fabric. Infuriated, more whales moved in to fill the breach, while llamas danced forward to meet them. The blaring cries of the llamas and the bass roars of the whales combined into a cyclical, harmonious musical chaos.
The war lasted only ten minutes. There were llamas with cannons that exploded with confetti and sudden flanking attacks of schools of fish. In the end, twelve or thirteen llamas and only two whales were left, and all the puppets on both sides turned and gave up the fight. The fallen puppets were swept up and rolled into packages that were spirited away, the traffic directors disappeared, and with unexpected suddenness, the spectacle was over. The crowd cheered, clapped, and howled. When Audrey attempted to clap with them, she realized she had never let go of Noah’s hand.