Read an Excerpt From Sucker

Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Sucker by Daniel Hornsby, out from Anchor on July 11.

Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree. He’s already clipped his name, turning Charles Grossheart, Jr.—son of a billionaire labor exploiter, weapons manufacturer, and climate change denier—into ordinary good-guy Chuck, the “self-made” proprietor of an up-and-coming punk label. But when Daddy threatens to cut him off, Chuck is forced to get a “real job”—and conveniently, an old college friend has just swept back into his life with the perfect opportunity.

Famed Harvard dropout and biotech darling Olivia Watts says she is on the verge of totally reinventing the field of medicine, but when Chuck signs on, he soon discovers that things at the vast Kenosis campus are not quite how they appear. Secret labs, vanished employees, and mutated test subjects seem to be as impossible as they are sinister. Is Olivia simply a scammer, or does her technology threaten to usher humanity toward a far bloodier fate? Moreover, does Chuck—who has never accomplished anything without the aid of Daddy’s money—stand a chance of stopping her?

I took the scenic route to Kenosis headquarters, through my favorite seedy San Narciso neighborhoods. Out my windows sat the vibrator stores of Morcillo, the pawnshops and mirthless burger franchises of Fangoso Lagoons, Wormwood’s strip malls in sour decline. Before the Paranoids injected me with their useful nihilism, my image of San Narciso came from another, even more barbaric source, an incredibly popular video game set in the city’s criminal nineties. Another drug-dealer narrative like Bad Company, a game of carjacking, ramming pedestrians with the stolen vehicles, then mowing down the surviving pedestrians with exotic weapons from a library of obscure firearms. The game’s signature nectarine skies were lifted from an airbrushed T-shirt, and the interiors were a twelve-RGB homage, with pimply stoners serving slices of pizza nearly indistinguishable from their slimy faces. Moving here, I wasn’t so dumb as to expect it would match its musical or virtual depictions, but lucky for me, the city—like an aging comedian—had, at least in some sectors, fallen into a caricature of itself. You could get caught up in grieving the death of authentic San Narciso, whatever that was, but I for one was happy to live in the beautiful feedback loop. I ate a lot of pizza.

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Sucker

Kenosis lay in the tech hub near the Rancho Hueco Caverns. On the drive out I passed the corporate headquarters for VoltAire, Manticor, and GetTogether—gargantuan silver compounds that, in their shiny geometry, resembled samples of rare crystals or microscopic algae grown billions of times their natural size. These were the strapping grandsons of the first wave of tech out here, starting when the defense contractor Yoyodyne built their first microchip a couple gold rushes ago. Between them I spotted the many statues of saber-toothed tigers with their walrus tusks that had become the hub’s mascots in the boom (most start-ups splashed their tigers with their corporate colors, so much of this pride was painted the same calming blue, that default branding hue). In the dark, illuminated in flashes by my headlights, they looked like they might be alive, stalking their prey in the shadows.

Kenosis was only about half a mile from the famous caverns. I’d only ever checked out these underground caves once, and my experience was psychedelically skewed. Louise and I were high on mushrooms, and even then, in my psilocybin-induced awe, it seemed like little more than a hole in the ground, despite how deep it was rumored to go. Olivia embraced the cavern itself, rather than the tigers, as a theme for her compound’s design. A tasteful call, as the apex-predator shit was a bit too on the nose for me.

I pulled right into the lot, my first time as an employee, filled with admiration for her architectural vision. The building’s forward-facing side was an enormous slab of stone tapered at the top, forming a jagged teardrop. The rest of the structure submitted to the rock’s geological grandeur in its corporate neutrality, with the exception of an archway lifted from some church in Bavaria. This last motif betrayed her purpose: to inspire cathedral levels of wonder in all who beheld her domain. I myself was ready to throw on a codpiece and pantyhose and repeat whatever creed she fed me.

I swiped my new access card at the door, approached the clean-cut woman at the front desk, and told her what I was there for.

She punched something into her computer. Behind her hung a photo of Olivia administering a shot to a beaming African child. With both of them smiling hard, I’d say the picture was about 40 percent teeth.

“I’ll take you to Miss Watts. Follow me.”

She got up from her seat and, out of nowhere, another woman appeared to man the desk. Without a word to her replacement, the original receptionist whisked me off.

On our journey to the elevator, I saw Clif, the bulky lieutenant I’d met at the cloister party, step out of the bathroom. He wore what I’d learn was his acid-washed-jeans, unbuttoned-shirt uniform. I said hi, and he walked right by. I hadn’t even subtly dissed his outfit yet! I noted the slight and tried not to let it spoil my first time at the new workplace.

Here and there—along the hallway, above a water fountain—were painted a number of unhealthy maxims I’d come to know simply as the Precepts. Here are the highlights, compiled from my early weeks at the company:

“Insist on perfection.”

“Speed matters. Most decisions are reversible.”

“Who needs sleep?” (The largest iteration of this one took up an entire wall between ground-floor conference rooms. A smaller version was plastered above the mirrors in the bathroom and had me wondering what issue it had been put there to correct.)

“Obsess.”

“Don’t just think outside of the box. Live outside of it.”

This was a world created and ruled entirely by a single ego. I felt right at home.

The elevator gave me the feeling we were zigging and zagging up a lightning-bolt-shaped chute. Eventually the doors opened and the receptionist led me out.

We stood in a small vestibule with no door. I smelled pine needles— I thought maybe this fragrance was pumped in through the vents to create a soothing atmosphere, something I heard they did at these places. But then the receptionist pressed her pass against a blank patch of wall, which slid to the side, revealing the source of the scent.

We were outside, or at least it looked that way. There were trees all around and, to either side of the path before us, a thick carpet of pine needles dotted here and there with the odd cone. It was like stepping into a screen saver.

Then I registered the ceiling. High above I could see a squirrel backlit by the moon, seemingly levitating on the glass that protected this hunk of domesticated nature from its free-range cousins.

“The sylvarium,” the receptionist told me, noticing my awe. “Olivia likes to come here to brainstorm, especially at night.”

At the other end of the path I spotted the Titania of this lush indoor wood, along with three men standing in rapt attention.

“Charles!” she shouted over to me. “I have a couple people I want you to meet.”

I caught up with her, awkwardly crossing the driving-range-size expanse of her pet forest while they waited. My stride is shamefully short, so I had plenty of time to study her companions. One of the men was very old. His skin appeared to be made of potato salad. I thought I recognized him from a stamp. The man to his right was much younger, wearing (I noticed as I finally completed my hike) a gaudy Cartier watch my brother also owned. The third man, somewhere between them in age, looked familiar. I might have seen him at the cloister party, though the event was packed with people of his exact demographic, so I couldn’t be sure.

“Mr. Secretary, this is Charles Grossheart. He’s just joined us as creative consultant and special adviser on ethics.”

“Oh! A Grossheart? Now that is impressive.”

His potato-salad face momentarily roused itself from its limp and soggy state. He and his two younger associates appraised me as if I were an expensive horse.

“Secretary Slobodkin just joined our board, as you know,” Olivia explained. “Charles, have you met Sam Paca?”

“I don’t know him, but I know of him, of course.” I had no idea who he was. I shook his hand like it was attached to the pope.

“And Ralph Langenburger. My mentor. And friend. This particular introduction is long overdue.”

Now I knew where I recognized him from: my pre-reunion cram session weeks ago. In the pictures accompanying the profiles, Langenburger’s hair tickled his collar in groomed, almost feathered waves, the kind of cut that might result from a treaty between a rebellious son and his straitlaced mother (been there). But now his hair hung in uncompromising locks well past his shoulders. He still had his signature hippie circle frames, but looked oddly younger than the man in the photographs, something I attributed to the salubrious effects of immeasurable wealth.

“I’m no mentor,” he said. “I’ve got no wisdom to offer. We’re friends. I’m just a little older.”

Olivia: “We were just about to take Mr. Paca on a tour of the facilities. Charles, why don’t you come along?”

“I’d love to.”

“I’m sorry,” Langenburger said, “but I’ve got to go. It was great seeing the two of you again. Olivia, we’ll chat soon. And, Charles, we’ll have to jam sometime. We have a space in San Guijuela. You should come by.”

“Sure!”

Langenburger gave me a nod, waved to Olivia, and left the way I came.

“The space is truly amazing,” Paca said, looking a pine up and down like he was about to buy it a drink.

“I have to interface with nature. This keeps me from running off to the woods or the beach every time I need to think. There are zero invasive species in here. So, in a way, it’s almost more pristine than nature.” Olivia picked up a handful of pine needles and sifted them through her fingers, sprinkling them back down to the ground. “This was GetTogether’s old headquarters, before they went public. And it was the first Yoyodyne plant before that. It’s fitting, I think. It sounds silly, but I have a very old-school attitude about places. I really do think they contain power.” She scrutinized some bark. “It’s magical thinking, I know. But there are hubs that pop up through history— Athens, Rome, Paris, New York, Tenochtitlan—and San Narciso is one of them, undeniably. So we were lucky to get our hands on this special spot, in this city, at this moment. Of course, we’ve made some serious renovations, but you’ll find the same buzz of possibility that defined GetTogether’s early years, too.”

The path dead-ended into a silver patch of wall—we’d reached the end of our journey’s arboreal phase. Olivia pressed her hand against a seemingly random spot, conjuring another doorway, and herded the diplomat and capitalist through.

“Perfect timing,” she said to me in a way that, rather than commenting on the coincidence, seemed instead to compliment herself on the choreography.

As I followed her through the doorway, I heard a rustling in the woods to my back. I turned and glimpsed a dark blob roving through the trees. A deer, I thought, until I remembered that we weren’t, in fact, outside. It was probably just some employee. Maybe a janitor.

***

In one of my many soporific art-history courses during my stint at our nation’s oldest, costliest academy, I learned of a certain steward of the gardens of Versailles assigned an absurdly difficult task. Thanks to the palace’s limited water supply, this poor minion’s job was to scramble in advance of his king as he wandered among the fountains of his domain, activating whatever waterworks the monarch might happen to set his bleary royal gaze upon. If the king veered left, the poor servant had to book it over to the lithe sculptural youths so the water would cascade from their orifices in time. If the king moseyed to the right, our man had to race to the arrangement of brawny horses and get them going, pronto. I like to imagine he’d be killed if the king were to behold a dry spout, just to add some stakes, but I don’t think this was the case. Still, it was a pleasant enough slapstick to entertain myself with while my adjunct rambled on about the guillotine (a device that, given my background, invited terrifying mental images I preferred not to entertain).

I mention this because, during my first tour of Kenosis headquarters, I had a hunch that a similar steward might be at work, making sure each stop was perfect. Though instead of pumping water through the mouths of slutty nymphs and lascivious frogs, he now managed a network of shining laboratories, filling them with blood.

Olivia’s tour followed the life cycle of her high-tech brainchildren, from their formative years among a nursery of nanomedical specialists to the laboratories where they lived out their clinical adolescence among white-coated technicians. The former—the domain of the specialists—was made to look like a block in Park Slope, or maybe Clinton Hill, complete with a coffee shop and a brick wall spray-painted with faux graffiti (another of her Precepts: “In order to build big, we have to think small”).

Olivia stopped by a fake storefront, which displayed a buffet of revolutionary technological artifacts: a light bulb, an antique telephone, a dusty radio, and a classic iPod. In the front was a row of chrome cashews laid out like earrings.

“These are the early prototypes. I’ve always found that we learn more from failure than we do from success. And it’s important to remember where you come from. I look at this and I see an evolution in our thinking, a yearslong dance between materials and ideas, taking our time to perfect the beat, so to speak.”

She smiled at the little prototypes through the glass like a happy dad in an old maternity ward and began a speech she’d repeat nearly word for word on the many subsequent tours I’d accompany her on.

“This is probably a good time for me to explain just what led us here. I’ve mentioned my struggle with cancer to the two of you before, but, Sam, I’ll go into it just so you can get the bigger picture. When I was fifteen, I was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a kind of cancer that develops in skeletal muscle. I was an ambitious, embarrassingly precocious child, as I’m sure you both were, too. My best friends were books. I filed my first patent when I was sixteen. When I had to miss school because of my illness, I started cold-calling labs until I came across a then-graduate student at SNIT—she’s at MIT now, tenured, still doing amazing work, consults for us occasionally— and for some reason she let me join her team researching the cancer-fighting potential of certain nanoparticles. You can probably figure out why I was drawn to this work. I went into remission just before I got into Harvard, where I studied biomedical engineering.”

Her voice started catching, just like it had during her announcement.

“Halfway through college it came back. Cancer. Thanks to some very cutting-edge and rather risky treatment, we were able to beat it back again. It was like…” She gave herself a moment to collect herself, or to look like she was collecting herself. “My body hadn’t just betrayed me once, but two times. You can imagine how hard that would be on a twenty-year-old. It was like getting mugged by a member of your family, twice. I was recovering that second time, recovering physically but also emotionally, when I first came up with the idea for Kenosis, and soon I found I had other challenges, almost as difficult as my fight to survive. You see, my course of treatment was incredibly painful and disruptive, and I thought, if we could have detected it earlier, when it was just a microscopic clump of cells, it would never have come to that. That’s what led me to the idea for the nanotome.”

She pulled what looked like a licorice jelly bean out of her pocket.

“This is the Book of Life. Your life. Page by page, day by day, until your story is clear and legible. Swiss scientist Andreas Manz’s work has shown that microfabrication technologies used to manufacture computer chips can be repurposed to create channels that direct very tiny volumes of fluids. At Kenosis, we’ve taken a big leap from Manz’s premise. The nanotome—we call these the Gutenberg I’s—uses this principle to conduct microfluidic protein assays, but not in a lab. In the body itself. The tome is powered by your body heat, and unlike doctors or those clanking Siemens machines, it’s always on, always vigilant. Sure, the tome is small, but the impact will be huge. These will redefine the paradigm of medicine, away from one in which people have to present with a symptom in order to get access to care, toward a future in which every person, no matter how much money they have or where they live, already has access to the most sophisticated preventive treatment the very instant something goes wrong.”

A perfect keynote pause. I recognized the rhythm of her patter from her cloister party.

“We’re thinking it’ll only have to be replaced every three to five years, and with a nonsurgical procedure so clean and simple you’ll barely feel it, really not much different than the technique used to implant microchips to tag pets and wildlife. I have one. Right… here.” She poked a spot a few inches above her right hip. “I’m the first human to upgrade, though there are some rats and monkeys that beat me to the distinction of first mammal and primate. But what can you do?”

Paca: “Can they be used for treatment? At this point?”

“You’re thinking like we do. So most medicine, like antibiotics, isn’t potent. There’s a reason they hook you up to a bag or make you take so many pills. Which means we can’t really use the tomes for treatment just yet. Right now they’re only for biometrics and diagnosis, but we’re hoping that they’ll be able to do more. I’ll pick this thread back up soon.”

We strolled among the park benches and lampposts, and Olivia summoned her researchers from their holes. She clearly prided herself on their dejection and fatigue, forcing one or two MIT PhDs to prance tiredly before her guests. This was key to her brand, the round-the-clock, relentless striving, the whole reason why she’d brought us here so late in the first place.

One particularly ragged scientist in her stable, a bespectacled little schlub, she presented to us like one of my dad’s begrimed bottles of wine from his collection.

“He has two PhDs. He’s only twenty-one,” Olivia said, though the emphasis landed less on his education and more on his waning hairline and hollow eyes.

We left these nerds behind and walked through a huddle of boxes draped in black, a washing-machine funeral. The windows behind them were covered, too.

“Please forgive the secrecy. I know it’s a little extreme, but we’re still in stealth mode. Turns out, you make a lot of enemies when you disrupt an industry, and the boys over at Siemens would take out hits on us to cop our proprietary technology. They actually collaborated with Hitler back in the day. We have to keep the trade secrets secret.”

She began another speech. I drifted in and out, letting the torrents of language wash over me. Most of what she said consisted of synonyms for small and life, with the same phonemes jumbled together over and over. Biomarker, biometrics, biohacking, biomathematics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, biothreat, biotech (duh), microbiology, microfluidics, microfabrication, micro solenoids, nanotech, nanorobotics. It had a soothing, ASMR-like quality.

On our way to the labs, I noticed a familiar song coming out of the speakers, and Olivia gave me a wink. After a few more bars I realized it was an Obnoxious release. It warmed my heart that she’d torture her poor employees with my music.

Olivia stopped at a dingy wooden structure. It looked like an old upright piano, with a book lying open where the sheet music would sit.

“This is a desk from a scriptorium, originally from a monastery in Lyon. Actually, this is a great opportunity to talk a little more about the Gutenberg tech and our big vision for where we want to take all this, if you don’t mind.”

“Please.”

“Every human body literally has a fatal flaw, as we all know. You get fifty good years, and then—probably before then—your body begins the gradual, unstoppable process of breaking down. Why is that? Why, exactly, do we grow old and die? We accept this as a fact of life, but it’s not necessarily a given. Bats can be older than forty, while rats usually never make it past two. Octopuses also kick the bucket at two, but the ugly Greenland shark gets half a millennium. It’s unfair. And it will get us all. But there are ways to mitigate the effects of this process. I’ll explain.”

She flipped the page of the book on the old desk, as if reading her monologue off it.

“Really, the body is like a text in a scriptorium. And like any text, to survive the ravages of time, it must be copied. We’ll call the copiers the monks. For a while, the monks are on their game, copying and proofreading with precision and zeal. But after a while, these proofreaders get sloppy. The noonday demon gets to them and they slack off. In reality, this is because the selection pressure against late-action mutations is very slight, for obvious reasons, and because some genetic mutations that have benefits early on in life might also have costs later. I’m condensing pretty much all of the work of Medawar and Williams, but that’s the gist. Suffice it to say, errors are made, and not only that, they go unchecked, uncorrected. What’s worse, once an error gets past the proofreader, it gets copied again, and the flaws get passed down, repeated. The text goes from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. It makes no sense. The line for skin gets miscopied and you get wrinkles. The line for hair gets miscopied and you go gray. The same goes for any of the suite of errors associated with old age, cancer cells included.”

“My monks have been sleeping on the job,” the Secretary joked.

“Somebody better call the abbot.”

“Exactly. That’s where we come in. And, Sam, this speaks to your earlier question. Our plan is to move beyond the simple diagnostic function of the nanotomes. Soon they will be home to a volume of nanobots, the Gutenberg II’s, and we’ll convert the original Gutenberg I’s to communication hubs and coordination points for the colonies we’re developing. These will be able to seek out the typos, correct them.”

She rubbed her finger against the wood of the desk, removing a scuff only she could see.

“Now that’s the big vision, and it’ll take years to make those advances. Until then, we’re focused on detecting treatable illnesses— not that we don’t think aging is treatable—with microfluidic assays and real-time results. It won’t be long before we’re working with a true secondary immune system—something like providing beat cops with tactical armor, drones, and tanks. Or, even better, something like the FBI, looking for long-term threats to the harmony and longevity of the human body. And because the nanobots are modular, they’ll be able to function together, cooperating to synthesize compounds from food and drink, supplementing organ function. Insulin synthesis. Hematopoiesis. Hormone production. This opens up a whole new dimension of remote treatment. Imagine an epidemic breaks out, and doctors are able to remotely trigger production of antibodies in patients across a continent, the same way our neighbors in the park might require a software update to combat malware.

“While I’m always vigilant against exaggerated claims, there’s no denying that this is the future of medicine. The pilot program with R and W is big. But we’re in talks with people over at a certain five-sided building in Virginia, and while I can’t say too much about it, I can tell you that there’s a lot of interest in the Gutenbergs for use on the battlefield. But I always come back to the flood of letters and emails I get from everyday people, begging for this new technology. For them, for their partners in remission, for their children. This is for everyone. They are who this company is for. I think it goes without saying that this could very well signify a revolution, and not just in medicine. In life, in what it means to be alive.”

Olivia’s speech abruptly picked up speed. “Anyway, this is partly why I gave the Gutenberg its name, because, like the printing press, it will be the revolutionary technology that will replace this flawed, old way of doing things. But that’s only partly why.” She smiled at me, then turned back to the medieval desk. “I’ll explain the rest later. But let’s go take a look at the labs.”

As the others moved on, the desk’s feet caught my eye, and I hung back to admire them. One was carved into a hoof, one had talons, the third was a human foot in a sandal, and the last had a lion’s paw, with claws sticking out. One for each of the evangelists.

I squatted like an ape to take a picture of the lion paw, which had a severe, gothy aesthetic I admired. While I was down there, I noticed something on the opposite leg. A lazy, supine 8—an infinity symbol— had been scratched into the wood. It had thorns poking out of it, hooked like shark fins, and it looked like something had been buffed out behind it. I knew it from somewhere but couldn’t quite place it right then.

I didn’t have too long to study it. I caught the ding of the elevator in the next room and hurried to catch up with Olivia and the others.

***

She took us up a floor, where, on the other side of glass panels, men in white coveralls were blasted with air. They looked like beekeepers from the future.

“These are the air showers. They have to suit up like that because of the size of what we’re working with. Around here, we think in nanometers. To give you some idea, this morning, when you shaved”—she dragged an invisible razor from one ear to the other, as if hacking through a neck beard—“by the time you got to the other cheek, the hair where you started had grown two nanometers.”

While Paca and the Secretary rubbed their cheeks with new wonder, as if they might feel the faint growth in real time, I put my hand over my throat.

“I can’t take you in right now. We can’t risk any dust or lint in there.

Fortunately, the clinical lab is a little more accessible.”

Whereas the designers’ “borough” (that’s what she called it, though at first I thought she said “burrow”) cultivated a cozy, lived-in feel, this lab was a crisp realm of right angles and clean lines, like a maze made out of knives. The machines hummed in low assonance, as if their function was not to test and measure blood but instead to facilitate a gratifying bowel movement.

The same black jelly beans she’d shown off earlier floated in the vials of blood like ugly crustaceans in formaldehyde. Until Kenosis received approval for human testing, she explained, the lab had to make do with plunging the tomes in blood samples, “where they still outperformed anything by Siemens or LabCorp.”

“Okay, so this is where we’ll test you,” she said to Paca. A technician appeared with a needle, and the venture capitalist rolled up his sleeve. When enough blood was drawn, Olivia herself injected it into a vial containing a tiny black Gutenberg.

“It’ll take some time for the microfluidic channels to absorb the blood and process the data. I’ll just have your results sent up to my office for us to look at when we’re done touring the facility. It’s one of the benefits—you can transmit the data to any device, so it’s as easy as checking your email or taking a peek at the stock market.”

The techs, male and female alike, were uniformly overhandsome, like actors from police procedurals. My own employees, though mulleted, were much more naturally attractive, I told myself smugly as I watched a scientist resembling an asymmetrical Hadid sister drizzle fluid into a pan flute of tubes. Nevertheless, their off-brand hotness made them more attainable somehow and turned me on.

I’d become too distracted by the technicians. I heard Olivia say my name and returned my focus to the tour.

“I really do owe a lot to Charles. After I first dreamed up the idea for what would become our proprietary technology, I worked on the project for months, consulting my research team leader, corresponding with biomedical researchers across the country and, in one case, even the UK. But when I took my idea to my adviser, she laughed right in my face, claiming it was science fiction. I was completely devastated. For weeks I practically lived at Widener Library. I reread Moby-Dick, reread the Iliad. It was a dark time for me.”

She looked at me for a while. Her eyes were wet. If this were someone in my family, I’d suspect they’d been studying Stanislavski. But this was real. I couldn’t keep up the intimate eye contact and turned away to study the floor tiles.

“I felt I was onto something, but only I could see it. Was it a vision of what the future could and should become? Or merely a hallucination, a pipe dream? I didn’t know. Then one afternoon, during a rare study break, Charles and I wandered into the room where they keep their Gutenberg Bible.”

As she spoke, three or four other Olivias stared back at us from door-size screens. Each of these Olivias held a Gutenberg between her fingers with a variation on the same deadpan expression, aimed either at her signature device or turned directly toward the camera. Occasionally the three-dimensional Olivia would pass in front of one of her 2D sisters, giving her the momentary likeness of a multiarmed Vedic god or bodhisattva.

“These were the kinds of things I was talking about, there in Widener, when Charles—after patiently listening to my litany of troubles—paused to stare into the pages of one of the first printed Bibles. Charles, do you remember what it was you told me?”

“Of course,” I lied. “But you’re a much better storyteller.”

“ ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘This is a technology that changed the world. It wasn’t easy for Johannes either. You’re in good company.’ I needed that, at that exact moment. The next semester I dropped out, and that’s when all this really started. It took a while to get things off the ground, but that was when Kenosis was truly born. Thank you, Charles.”

The Secretary and Sam looked as if they were contemplating a token of wisdom personally delivered by Ram Dass himself. I’ll admit, Olivia’s effect on people befuddled me. In public, she had none of the wit I associate with the truly charming—everything she said came after a measured delay, during which her brain calculated its optimal response, and the resulting paragraph was tooled to convey an endearingly geeky vibe while hitting the necessary talking points. She’d slide into a version of what I’ve come to call smart voice, that vaguely Canadian pseudo-accent pitched down a step or two, an affect popular among provincial nerds, anime fans, insecure graduate students, and roughly a third of all podcasters. While Olivia had occasionally entered this mode during our college years, she had more unfiltered esprit back then. Now this fake Olivia had supplanted the witty one, letting her out only for a rare aside when we were alone. At her persona’s core was a politician’s tact, but this was wrapped in the tone of a precocious kid’s science-fair spiel, brimming with awkward enthusiasm and loaded with facts. I think it might be that her lack of charm was charming—she was a sincere nerd with nothing to conceal her ambition and mission, and this had a disarming effect. But having known her before public life, I could see how this authenticity had been market tested and fine-tuned.

She continued, “That’s the other reason why I named our technology after Gutenberg. To remind myself that what we’re doing here isn’t easy, will never be easy, but we’re in good company.”

I thought I saw the Secretary wipe a tear from his sunken eye. Impossibly, the hum of the machines seemed to swell under the culmination of her speech, lifting her words to ecstatic heights before setting them gently at our feet. By her closing lines, the devices had gone nearly silent, as if they, too, were taking in the gravity of her utterances. That’s how persuasive Olivia could be. I may not have understood it, but I couldn’t deny it. She could inspire a machine.

***

One of the technicians approached us as we made our way out of the lab. He didn’t look anywhere as handsome as his peers. He was much older, with a hoary muzzle that made him resemble a geriatric Labrador, and teeth like a pug’s. He obviously belonged with the specialists, not among the nubile ranks of the lab techs.

“Olivia, may I have a minute?” He spoke with an Australian accent.

“Mr. Secretary, Mr. Paca, Charles, this is Tim Murnane, our rare Cambridge PhD in a sea of MIT, Stanford, and SNIT boys. He runs the clinical lab.”

Tim gave us a perfunctory nod.

“Olivia—it’ll just be a minute.”

“Tim, I can’t talk right now. I’ll find you once I’m done with these gentlemen.”

Suddenly Clif showed up and ushered Tim off.

“Forgive Tim. I find that, in dealing with the many geniuses we have working here, it’s best to treat them like the temperamental artists they are.”

Her guests nodded. I thought I detected something behind her calm exterior—a hint of rage or embarrassment in the parts per million, but it came and went unnoticed by her dignitary buddy and potential investor, who didn’t know her nearly as well as I did. In any case, I could relate. Though Obnoxious was packed with more poetry and ceramics MFAs than biology PhDs, I knew what it was like to herd talent.

While the two men admired a gigantic model of the Gutenberg II outside the lab (picture a chrome tiki torch mounted on a tripod), I pulled Olivia aside.

“Hey, sorry to bring this up right now, but that guy I introduced you to the other night is still missing. The good-looking guy from my label. Thane. Did he say anything to you about leaving town? Did you notice anything strange? He might be ghosting me as a power play. We think he might have taken off to Falda Linda. His girlfriend is headed up that way tomorrow. But who the fuck knows.”

“He might’ve mentioned something like that. Falda Linda. I didn’t spend too much time with him after we left you. I passed him off on someone.”

This was exactly what she’d texted me the day before. She was acting cagey, but it had been the same way in college whenever I brought up anyone she was sleeping with.

“I didn’t realize he was, you know, important. How important he was to you. I thought you wanted him out of your hair. He seemed kind of fucked-up.”

“Yeah, he has some problems. We think he might have relapsed.”

“I think we found him an Uber home. But I’m really sorry to hear this. Let me know what I can do to help.”

The diplomat and the capitalist joined back up with us.

“Charles, I’m going to take Mr. Paca and Secretary Slobodkin up to my office to see their results and chat a little more. Want me to get one of my girls to let you out?”

“No worries. I’m sure I can find my way.”

“Sick. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

My first shift as the incarnation of my dad’s dark, gorgeous money was over. The three of them stepped into one elevator and I took another. Inside the bright booth I slapped my pass against a panel and pressed the button for the lobby. But as I went to stick my card back in my pocket (the only fashion offense greater than the incel Irish newsboy hat is, in my humble opinion, the unnecessary wearing of a pass), I accidentally bumped my elbow into the button for another floor.

After a short trip down, the doors opened. Beyond the cheery glow of the elevator was a pure black rectangle. I smelled stale beer. And it was cold. I could see my breath.

The door began to close, but I stopped it. I was curious.

With one hand still holding the door, I stuck my head out and shined my phone around.

There, on rows of racks about my height, were piles and piles of bags of blood. They flopped over one another like piglets on the teat. Some had fallen on the floor, where they’d ruptured, leaving scabs as big as doormats. As far as I could tell, in the limited aura of my pretty hate machine, the rows of racks stretched about as far as the sylvarium.

I thought I heard something stir far down the aisle. Fear made time skip for a second, like a scratched CD. I released my hold on the door and let the elevator carry me back into the spa-like serenity of the lobby.