SIMULACRUM: $32.99
There were only two apartments on the eighty-ninth floor. According to the schematic I’d seen, they both were huge. Carol Amanda Harving’s was apartment A. I didn’t need a map to identify it. Her side of the hall was lined with artwork and flowers and, on either side of the door, life-size pictures of her looking tall and lean, covered in diamonds and sparkly gowns. In one photograph, she stood in front of an Ebony Meiboch™ Triumph, a sleek, absurdly luxurious car with thin flame-orange highlights that cut through the matte darkness of its surface. It was like lava cracked through black stone.
I knew this exact car. Everyone knew it. It belonged to Silas Rog.
In the other photo, she stood on the red carpet, bare-armed in a slinky, luxurious, diamond-studded silk dress, her neck draped with strands and strands of pearls. She had so much, it seemed, that her prosperity had spilled out beyond her apartment walls.
Her pictures infuriated me. My clothes were damp and cold from sweat, but coal-like hatred warmed me. It should have been Saretha up here. Had their positions been reversed, Saretha would have treated Carol Amanda Harving with far more kindness. It seemed entirely unfair. Carol Amanda Harving’s eyes were cold and lifeless. Fruitlessly glaring at the hallway shrine she had made to herself, I realized Carol Amanda Harving’s advantage: she was empty, soulless and without compassion. It was easy for her to let Saretha be destroyed. I could see it in the chill of her icy blue eyes.
I shook myself. If I let my anger grow, I worried what I might do when I got inside. I forced myself to focus. I wasn’t here to hurt her. I was here to make her understand. It was pointless to meditate on how—I needed to act.
But I suddenly had a feeling she wasn’t there. Something about the hallway air seemed stale and unlived in. The carpet looked untouched. But maybe that was what I wanted to believe. I told myself she could be anywhere—filming, vacationing, living in one of a dozen homes in any dome she liked. How many, I wondered, had she seen?
If she was gone, that might be easier. It felt safer. I could look through her home for evidence that might prove her birthday was a lie, or that she used drugs, or for anything else I might use against her. And I wouldn’t need to speak—or hurt her.
I couldn’t let myself hope too much. I had to prepare to face her, right now, and whoever might be with her.
The door unlocked after an undue amount of fiddling with its magnetic innards. A heavy clunk released as a thick metal bolt retracted. The door slid open, and the room came into focus through the darkness. Something about it felt very, very wrong.
There was a couch in the center of an enormous room, and—that was all. I peered inside. Carol Amanda Harving’s apartment had one couch, facing out toward the apartment’s gargantuan window, and nothing more. How was this possible? Was she some Buddhist star who wanted to lead a perfect, uncluttered life? Did she even live here? Was this just a space for her to entertain? The whole apartment reminded me of an oversized Squelch, not a home.
I stepped inside, puzzled and somehow angrier than before. My body tensed. Who was this woman? The door slid closed behind me. The window, which in theory overlooked the dome, was black as night. I walked toward it, silent in the darkness. It was opaque. I touched it with my hand.
At once, it clicked to life with enormous, vivid, three-dimensional depictions of the natural world. It cycled through images of forests, seashores and deserts. From where I stood, everything looked oddly distorted. The view was calibrated specifically for the couch.
The apartment had no bedroom, or kitchen or bathroom. It was literally just one enormous, empty room, like a theater. I looked for hidden buttons or seams in the walls that might give some indication there was something else, yet I knew the dimensions well enough to know there was nothing more. Her walls were clean and smooth, with none of the ugly striations we had in our home from cheap printing.
The wall changed to a movie preview, flat and two-dimensional, like a classic film, but this was a new remake of a film I’d seen two years before about a clever female spy.
A man sipped at a glass of wine, a twinkle in his eye, his head hung low as he eyed the woman across from him. The lights in the distance behind him were reduced to beautiful gold circles by the camera’s blur. A soft, romantic rock guitar played beneath the scene.
“So, what is it you do?” The man smiled, head cocked charmingly to one side. I knew the actor, Martin Cross. He had been digitally de-aged to look younger.
The woman across from him flashed a smile—Saretha’s smile. It was Carol Amanda Harving. Her hair was dark now, like my sister’s, though she was blonde in some films, and often her skin was lighter. But her eyes were still the same—empty, ice-cold diamonds. She sipped some drink through a straw, coyly, and did not answer him. Instead, she reached out. In close-up, they held hands, fingers intertwined, probably hand models. Something did not match about it.
When the shot went wide, each actor’s name floated slowly above their heads as the music grew louder. Carol Amanda Harving looked a little less like Saretha, probably because Saretha had put on some weight in her exile. Meanwhile, the actress looked muscled, but achingly thin. Her arms were like pencils, and yet they looked sleek and long, without the knobbiness you would expect. I wondered if they had a surgery for that. I shuddered at the thought of shaved bone.
I stepped closer to the window, looking closely at her hands. Even they looked thin and tiny in Martin Cross’s grasp. How do you lose weight in your hands?
“Miss Dart.” A thick, dark-skinned man was standing over them suddenly. He wore an all-black suit and sunglasses, even though it was night. “It’s time.” Martin Cross’s character looked at the man with surprise. Carol Amanda Harving stood, and her small red dress flitted around her, tight across her tiny waist. Her boobs were bigger than the last time I’d seen her, but this wasn’t any great surprise. She was now in a starring role. If she hadn’t requested a little plastic surgery, the studio would have insisted on it.
“Sorry,” she said, blowing Martin a kiss. She ran to the balcony and did a flip over the edge. The stunt bothered me. It reminded me of the video footage of Bridgette Pell. It didn’t look entirely real, but that didn’t really lessen the sting. They often switched to CGI for stunts. The studio wouldn’t want to be sued for a broken leg or chipped nail.
Then again, none of it looked quite right. The music rocked harder, drums pounding like an engine as Carol Amanda Harving shot guns, launched grenades and generally unleashed chaos on a bunch of swarthy-looking villains the movie put in her path.
I had to laugh at how sweaty she wasn’t. Here I was, after a long, slow climb, drenched and chilled by my own perspiration, but characters like her, in movies, never pitted with sweat.
I looked for a way to turn off the screen, worried the sound might wake the neighbors. On the off chance the next unit was occupied, I had no idea who I might be dealing with.
I was a foot away from the screen when Carol Amanda Harving’s giant face filled it, her cold eyes the size of softballs, her irises wide and inviting. I tapped at the screen and let out a breath in relief when it shut off. It went black, with no hint of the view outside. Why have no view? Wasn’t that the point of being up so high? I felt a pang of disappointment that I wouldn’t get to see the ocean. I had always wanted to see it. They say the water touches the eastern edge of the dome.
I scanned the empty room and realized there was absolutely nothing to find. There was no Carol Amanda Harving to demand answers from. There was no evidence of any kind. She was probably in Hollywood. Maybe she just kept this apartment for fun, in case she wanted to visit or have a party. More likely still, this was just a tax thing that I didn’t understand. All I had to examine were the few garish mementos left outside, like territory she had marked.
My nerves calmed, replaced with gloom. This was a dead end. I couldn’t help Saretha. I couldn’t help myself. All the risk was for nothing.
At least I didn’t have to think about hurting the actress to convince her to help us. I returned to the door and had to pick the lock again to get out. It unsealed and slid open. Outside, like sentinels, were the two enormous framed photos, larger than life, in thick, welded metal frames built right into the wall. Her smile was so wide, I imagined it hurt to be that joyful.
Slowly my anger rose again. I wanted to destroy her. If she had been there, what would I have done? I bit my lip. I couldn’t hurt her, but I could ruin these pictures—these stupid, egotistical photographs. It was foolish, exactly the sort of thing Kel would insist I not waste time with. I could have smashed the frames and ripped them from the walls, but I wanted her to know she was hated.
I took out my knife, half-ready to carve a mustache under her nose, devil horns on her head, to scrape away her eyes. It was pointless and reckless—the glass was too thick. Plus I’d be charged twenty different ways. The best I could actually do was stab the glass, and what would be the point? Sam would have appreciated the thought, but he would never know.
I glared at her visage, contemplating my pitiful revenge, when something caught my eye. Her skin showed some small imperfections, a mottling of color like any other person. I don’t know what else I was expecting. It was a photograph, not a polished movie still. I saw moles and freckles. I saw skin with warmth, and it surprised me, because she never seemed quite real.
But it was the sight of her upper arm that stopped me cold. An inch or two above her right elbow was a faint, crescent-moon-shaped scar, exactly like the one Mrs. Nince had given Saretha.
My brain couldn’t process it at first. I stared. What did this mean?
I studied the photo carefully. The moles and freckles looked familiar. How could they look familiar? Were they the same as Saretha’s? That was impossible.
My skin began to crawl with a dawning realization.
I was never going to meet Carol Amanda Harving face-to-face. I could never confront her. She could never apologize. She could never help us, for one simple reason.
She didn’t exist.
Carol Amanda Harving was a computer-generated fiction, constructed of pixels and polygons from who-knows-how-many corporate scans of my sister. She was less substantial than the air in my lungs. It was the only explanation for that crescent-shaped scar above her elbow.
My God, this was the perfect Lawsuit, one even Arkansas Holt couldn’t lose. A frantic hope rose in me—a furious glee. If I could prove she didn’t exist, not only would Saretha be free, but we would be rich. Our parents could come home. Our family would be whole again.
My parents.
We hadn’t heard from them since our chat just after my Last Day. We hadn’t told them about Carol Amanda Harving. There was no point. What could they do? It would only cost the family more money to talk about it.
My heart pounded. Who had done this? Who had created Carol Amanda Harving from images of my sister and then sued us for what they had stolen? The gall of it was almost admirable.
Silas Rog came to mind. If it wasn’t him, then whoever had done it had Silas Rog for a Lawyer. Silas Rog, who had never been defeated.
There is a first time for everything, the voice inside my head said. The phantom sound of it soothed me. Silas Rog’s resources were near bottomless, but how could he possibly win this? He would lose his first case, and I would be the cause. Nothing would bring me more joy.