How is Bonny Brood? She’s happy as a kitten lapping milk. She’s dreaming her recurring dream, the pleasant one where she runs alone on a beach, moonlit sea beside her, surf regular and course flat as if the sand’s been groomed. But then there’s a tickle, on her side, and she wakes. Silk sheets, wool blankets, and the persistent tickle on her right side, which she realizes after a sleep-dulled moment is a private skin zone that someone is clicking. Her ex Simon, or one of the Clique, or—she sits up, her skin offline-dark as the sheets fall, snaps the fingers of her right hand—Terrance.
His face stares at her from her right palm.
“Too late to call?”
Her left thumbnail shines a green 3:15 AM. “Of course not.” Her middle-finger microcam is on, glowing red indicator like a pinpricked drop of blood, and she realizes: he can see her body. She pulls the blanket up. There’s only pale skin from her clavicles to just above her navel: a blank slate. Nonkewl and ultrablank! Unlike Terrance. “My feet are keeping me awake,” she says. “I’ve installed windows into my soles.”
It’s such a lame joke he doesn’t even pretend to laugh. “Good for you!” Or maybe his soles are windowed just liked the rest of him. He’s got a third eye, blue, in his forehead, a Vandyke beard that cycles between green and purple on his chin, and on his right cheek a little naked man talking into an ancient black phone handset. When his head is shaved he plays windows in his scalp but his ginger-colored hair is half an inch long and his head is dark. His real eyes are a piercing brown that makes her shiver. “I encourage your progression!”
The funny way Terrance can phrase things makes her think he’s EU, based in Bucharest or something. “Could you recommend downloads I can walk on?”
“Later! I have bigger agenda items for you tonight!”
“Hip me.”
“First, you know Orinda?”
She curls her fingers toward her palm, making Terrance’s third eye seem to squint. “Little town across the Bay?”
“Yes! A woman has just moved there from SoCal. She is branded—but her Corporation has been dissolved! Her product line has been shut down! She has made an appointment with Steward International for rebranding!”
“If she’s Stewardizing, what good are we for?” Bonny asks.
“What good? We are the nexus of good!” Bonny feels a tickle on her left forearm. She wraps her blankets around her like a halter top so she can see what Terrance is streaming to her arm without exposing herself. She sees a black-haired woman sitting at a desk eating crackers. The woman is tanned and double-chinned, large enough that even Bonny with her Bay Area tastes tags her big. She can only imagine what Angelenos would call her. “Her name’s Katelyn Sayed. She was genetically branded for a pharmaceutical called Sovelte. It regulated a gustatory process that kept her at the slender end of normal until a year ago!” The picture changes to show a skinny woman playing tennis on a summer’s day, Bonny’s arm going itchy the way her skin can do when streaming something bright. “Then the company belly-upped! Kaputed!”
“Nobody picked up the product?” she asks.
“Of course not, for so many reasons! It was too boutique to be profitable! The FDA banned it as emotionally coercive!” His beard vanishes. “But the reason of primacy—our society is one of consumption! Not one of anti‑consumption!”
“That’s true chew,” she says. “So Katelyn’s going to Stewardize, right?”
“She has an appointment at the San Francisco store tomorrow afternoon at 1 PM.”
“I’ll meet her outside.”
“No coercion! Gentle persuasion!”
A year ago Bonny Brood had tackled a potential client; she’d been arrested but that woman had declined to press charges. The handcuffs had cracked a wire in Bonny’s left wrist, leaving her palm the blue of a video screen in boot-up mode. It had been a bad time all around. Bonny had to pay to fix her wrist herself, and, since the woman became Stewardized instead of kewltured, Terrance credited Bonny’s bank account just 10 percent of her usual wage. Not that money is important. “I’m all about gentleness,” Bonny says.
“Much goodness! I’m dumping to you the pertinent details!” Thumbnail shots of Katelyn Sayed at various ages crowd her left arm. Biographical text links cuff her wrist—gently. “Now the second agenda item. Barstow, CA!”
“Not an easy boat ride from San Fran,” Bonny said.
Terrance’s beard reappears, unrealistic: a glossy brown seeming to drip, like hot fudge, from his lower lip past his chin and to his Adam’s apple. “Peek at your left palm!” he says.
She sees a shiny multifaceted thing like a diamond. It’s more complicated, though, and asymmetrical, and seems to contain dark wiggling impurities. “This is Barstow?”
“This is my house in Barstow. Click it!”
She taps a wiggling thing in her palm.
It expands to show her and Terrance dancing, free-form and sweaty, at the center of a group of dancers. Clearly meant to flatter: everyone is watching them together.
“Come to Barstow for my party! All the Clique will be there!”
What is the Clique? A hundred faces, a hundred names, a hundred locations around the globe. And: a hundred bodies, occupying Bonny Brood’s right arm. Most gray, meaning offline or asleep. But two of them are bright, multicolored, motile, and talkative at this 4 AM.
“I’ve never met Terrance!” says Penny.
“None of us have,” says Bonny. “I thought he was from Bucharest.”
“I surmised one of those -stan countries, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,” says Mona.
“I bet it’s not his house!” Penny says. “It’s huge! He can’t have that much money!”
“Information wants to be free,” points out Mona. “And what is money but information?”
“But why live in a mansion?” Penny asks. “It’s so crass!”
“He’s got to live somewhere,” Bonny says. She feels sick. She felt so privileged a few minutes ago, but Terrance has invited her friends the same way. The same clip, but Terrance dancing with them, not her. She tries to change the subject. “I have an assignment—”
“He doesn’t necessarily have to live anywhere,” Mona says. She starts lecturing them about some mathematician who had no home but went from college town to college town, staying with professor friends. Bonny tunes out. Mona is green lipstick, green eyes, green hair in glossy locks like surgical tubes. All this greenness in cappuccino-colored skin. It looks great. Image is everything, sure, but Bonny suddenly has the spiteful hope that Mona is bucktoothed and fish-eyed, eczemaed and jug-eared, when you peel back her digital veneer. “Where does it matter where you live, if you can have a virtual presence anywhere?”
“Virtual is real,” Penny says. She’s got a window in her front bicuspid, screening some black and white movie. “And real virtual.”
The darkened tooth gives her the look of a dainty boxer, a pixie hockey player.
“A-men to that,” Bonny says, then she clicks both women away with a fingertap.
What does Bonny Brood look like?
She’s riding the Market Street Ferry toward the Steward Store. She’s been fingering Katelyn Sayed’s thumbnail shots, clicking up the woman’s history, but the guy sitting next to her, a middle-aged goof with a baseball cap and a Tin Ear that thumps knock-Bach dance music, has been too interested in the show her arm has been putting on. So she’s turned toward the window, shielding her arm from his view. She sees the partly-submerged buildings and the midday boat traffic. And closer by her own face reflected.
Big eyes, oval face, full lips, nose 5 percent larger than optimal. She’s been told she’s pretty but it’s hard to believe today. With her blond hair swept back in a bun she looks like a schoolmarm or Stewardite. The window implanted beneath her right ear is skin-tone blank. The two lemon-wedge-shaped windows beneath her eyes have a skin tone animation, a progression of tiny wrinkles and pores designed to lead the viewer’s eyes towards her mouth, on the theory that seeing her lips as she speaks reinforces her message. But who’s going to watch her lips when her eyes are sad and her brow furrowed?
She wishes she hadn’t hung up on her friends. She wishes she hadn’t ballooned up egotistical about Terrance’s invitation so they could puncture that balloon.
She wishes she had slept better. How’s she going to change Katelyn’s life while she’s yawning?
She gets off at the Montgomery Street stop and walks two blocks on the pontoon sidewalk to the Steward Store.
Given that the Bay waters rose when the ice caps melted, given that it’s San Francisco, you’d have thought Stewardship Incorporated would have put some thought into this store. But it’s the same as their stores worldwide: a four story building in the Modernist style, square, concrete, with polished faux-marble pillars and a wide cement staircase. Stewardites in business attire are finishing their lunches. She doesn’t look out of place as she sits, unrolls a black Business Brief, pretends to read Accountant’s World.
At 12:53 a watertaxi drops Katelyn Sayed off.
Katelyn’s large enough the pontoon sidewalk sags beneath her. She’s got a disheveled corporate look. The gray micropore suit that she’d had tailored to fit her enlarging frame but which is already tight at the thighs, leaving the slitted skirt always open. The glitterhose, last year’s hint of sexy danger beneath the corporate façade, rainbow iridescence veined blue where the hose is stretched too far. Black hair in a bun like Bonny’s but there are loose hairs she’s brushing out of her face even as she climbs the staircase.
“Katelyn Sayed?” Bonny says, rising. “I’m Bonny. I understand you’re beginning your Stewardization—”
“How do you know my name?”
Not friendly, but at least she’s stopped. “Stewardship doesn’t worry much about client confidentiality. Anybody can get your data. Luckily, I work for an organization that cares—”
“Are you IRS? Some collection agency?”
Maybe it’s good Bonny’s tired so she doesn’t meet Katelyn’s hostility with hostility. “Nothing like that. I want to help you. I want to help you in a better way than Stewardship could.”
“How can you help me? You don’t even know me!”
“No, I don’t. But if Stewardship doesn’t work out, I wanted you to know there’s a cheaper, kewler alternative.” Bonny holds out a business card.
“ ‘Kewler’?” Katelyn says contemptuously. But she takes the card and marches up the stairs.
Bonny grabs lunch at a sandwich shop across the street from the Steward Store. She’s waiting for Katelyn to finish her Steward session. She watches the boat traffic, the sidewalk pedestrians, the occasional gilled swimmer, moving just below the surface. They’re sleek and beautiful, these swimmers, bronzed skin covering powerful muscles. Some follow kewl, but most are corporate, financing their biogeneering through corporate sponsorship, their windowized backs streaming ads. One breast-stroking past her displays a spinning orange planet. Only as she sees it reflected off the glossy blue hull of a passing boat does she realize what it really is: the S of Stewardship International.
Seeing the great gray façade of the Store she feels a wave of self-pity. No way can she compete if the Bay’s now thick with Steward swimmers. That Katelyn even accepted her card was just a fluke. No point in engaging the woman with some follow-through.
Life looks blech, like a grainy video viewed in a smoky room.
Bonny buys a coffee to combat her mood. It’s half finished when she sees Katelyn exiting the Steward Store.
She sees Katelyn’s changed. Hair combed, head up high, invigorated with the false confidence that an hour of scented pheromones and generic advice from a Stewarding Pro can give you. She’s carrying the Steward goodie bag, animated logo on its side. No way she’s going to taxi the two blocks to Montgomery Station. She’ll have self-improvement on her mind.
Bonny slams down her coffee, hurries outside.
She has called it right. Katelyn’s walking fast toward Market Street and Montgomery Station. Bonny, jittery from the coffee, bumps people, shakes footbridges, worries that she’s flat-out going to have to run to catch the other woman.
But then Katelyn hesitates.
There’s a corporate swimmer moving alongside her.
Skin the color and texture of naugahyde, back streaming the Steward logo as he sidestrokes beside Katelyn.
Katelyn, her fascination and distress obvious, almost walks into a woman coming the other way.
Bonny sees a chance.
“He just wants to show you how you’ll be,” Bonny says.
Katelyn studies the swimmer. His webbed fingers clutch the sidewalk, his back shows Katelyn, as though reflected by a perfect mirror, her ankles puffy, calves bulbous, slit in her skirt like a pointer to her bulky thighs.
“No lungs. Swimmers can’t talk.” Bonnie restrains herself from mentioning how out of water they will slowly suffocate. “But they can stream pixels fine. Ads. To encourage.”
“Encourage! Encourage what?”
“Take a few steps and keep watching his back.”
Katelyn flashes Bonny a look, but walks anyway.
As she moves, the swimmer paces her, the image on his back changing with each stroke. The streamed Katelyn drops poundage, reduces from obese to plump to thin, ankles sharpening, calves shaping, a figure with an hourglass figure emerging, though the hourglass is hard to see because she’s wearing the same huge clothes. The sexy slit closes.
Katelyn stares trembling at what she could be.
“The Stewards make like it’s about encouragement, but what it is about is consumption.”
Katelyn looks at Bonny. “You think I need reminding I eat too much?”
Bonny steps back. “That’s not what I mean. I mean—take that goody bag—it’s got Gorge You Gorgeous freeze-dried steaks, right? And Min-Cal Masala, low-fat Indian foods, yeah?”
“Samples,” Katelyn says. “So what?”
“Those are all Steward subsidiaries.”
“So?”
“They want to give you a taste for Steward foods. But it’s just not foods. See how the clothes are too big in the animation?”
“I know I’m fat.”
“They want you to buy Steward clothes too when you slim down. Streamlined Sass and Look-Pricey Petites! They want to lock you into a lifetime of consumer dependency. Trapped like a wounded animal in the corporate machine!”
Though she’s being too aggressive she’s still surprised as Katelyn Sayed swings the goodie bag at her, striking her solid in the face.
Bonny Brood, at home in her tenement on San Bruno mountain, awkwardly holds an ice gel to her right cheek with her left hand as she talks to Terrance with her right. “I got ink all over my business suit. My cheek is swollen. And the ink’s supposed to be hypoallergenic, but it makes my eye itch.”
“Why didn’t you run after her?”
“She knocked me down. She was gone when I got up. I thought the ink was blood.”
The shadowy patterns playing beneath Terrance’s lips make him look like he’s moueing sympathetically. Maybe he is. Bonny says: “Can I get an advance for the window? To buy a replacement?”
“No, I will not pay for your mistakes! Your hard-sell!”
Not a moue.
“But I had a connection. I mean she wasn’t running. She wasn’t yelling at me.”
“She’s SoCal! Not City-hardened yet!”
“She took my card.” Bonny’s sounding whiny. She breathes in deep, says cool as she can, “What should I have said?”
“Sweetness, persuasion. I have seen you do that before.”
“But how?”
“Words are not my talent. I do not feed you your lines. They must come from within.” Terrance closes his eyes: his lids stream video faint as capillaries. “You have a unique Bonnyness about you which you can demonstrate to sweet and profound effect.”
She’s not sure what that means but it makes her feel a little better. “But my broken cheek—”
“I will pay to replace if you have success with Katelyn.”
“Why are you being weird?” Penny asks. “Why are you only showing one side of your face?”
“I have a new download,” Bonny says. “It’s the kewl jewels. It’s radastic.”
“Why not show it to us?” Penny asks.
“You’ll see it at the party,” Bonny says.
“Are you okay?” asks Mona.
“I have to go now,” Bonny says, clicking them away.
How is Bonny Brood? Disconsolate and miserable. In her dream, she’s jogging along the moonlit beach, but there’s a sense of imminent catastrophe: she’ll sprain her ankle, she’ll step on a nail. But then she remembers this beach should be underwater, ice-cap flooded, and a correction is made: a wall of water knocks her from her feet. As she fights to break the surface so she can breathe, something scratches at her side.
She wakes up fast. “What?” she says, even before she opens her right hand.
“Bonny Brood?”
“It’s two in the morning,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I’ll call later.”
“Wait!” It’s Katelyn Sayed. Puffy-faced and wearing orange eyeliner. Bonny Brood says: “How can I help you?”
“I’m—” Katelyn says. “Oh, my god. Your face.”
Bonny moves her hand so only her left profile is visible to her fingercam.
“Did I do that?”
“No big deal,” Bonny says.
“I did do that. I’m so sorry.” The woman sniffs. An orange tear slides down her face: chromographic Steward makeup, reacting to the salt. “How can I make it up to you?”
Bonny moves her hand so Katelyn can see her full-on. “Meet me tomorrow and listen to what I have to say about Stewardship.”
It’s an aggressive move, no sweetness at all, but Katelyn wipes her cheek and says, “Where do we meet?”
They meet at ScopeEasy, a dryland café in North Beach where each table has black velour curtains for privacy. Bonny Brood keeps the curtains open a foot so daylight shines upon her face. Her eye’s not swollen anymore, but she’s got a marble-sized lump on her cheek where the remaining window ink has collected.
It’s colored red and green and cyan in horizontal levels like some layered cocktail.
It’s the only color Bonny’s showing today. Otherwise she’s all in black. Black sweater, black beret hiding pinned-up blond hair. Even black gloves. “This is what I have for you,” she says to Katelyn, showing the clear amber vial, with its five pills, resting in her black-suede-covered open hand.
Katelyn asks, “Diet drugs?”
“Not exactly,” Bonny says. “Diet drugs are about consumption. They treat symptoms. They maintain dependence. That’s Stewardship. That’s not us. These—” she rolls the vial atop the table so the pills click inside— “these fix things.”
Katelyn glances at Bonny’s cheek. “What do they fix?”
“They branded you to Sovelte when you were a girl.”
“My mom had it done. Pharmtasia paid my high school tuition in return.”
“The pills fix it.”
“Do they now? Do they fix families? Do they make daughters and mothers talk again?”
Katelyn’s clenched her coffee mug so hard her knuckles have gone white.
“Will the Stewards do that for you?” Bonny asks, sweetly as she can.
“They say they will.”
“Well, that’s not something we claim we can do. All our pills do is fix the branding.”
“How?”
“It turns the melanocortin-4 gene back on. The one that codes the receptor that tells you when you’re full. The gene Pharmtasia inactivated in you for Sovelte to work.”
“I know what they did to me,” Katelyn says. She relaxes her grip. “A pill seems too easy. Why wouldn’t I have heard about it?”
“There’s no profit in producing it. Especially if you’re Stewardship and you own the patent.”
Katelyn sips at her coffee. “Do you make it in your kitchen?”
“I have a supplier. He’s in Barstow. I can let you have one of the pills if you want some pharmchem to analyze it. The drug was tested on mice. Safe, effective, all that. I can link you to the studies if you want.”
“I do want.” Katelyn looks at Bonny’s cheek. “But what do you want? What’s your charge?”
“The pills are free.”
“Then what? Your cheek? You want me to pay to fix it?”
“No. It’s not about my cheek. Well, not directly.” She pulls off her right glove. “We want you to consider a palmphone.”
“My god,” Katelyn says. Bonny’s playing a blue sky in her hand, soft white clouds drifting away from her thumb. “You’re selling phones to me?”
“No selling involved,” Bonny says. “We’re about aesthetics, not consumerism. Kewlture. We’ll get you a palmphone implanted free. Think of it as a symbol of the new Katelyn. A bow to kewl!”
“But a palmphone? Do you think I’m fourteen?”
“ ’Course not.” Bonny closes her hand. “It’s a suggestion. We’d like you to windowize at our expense. Anywhere on your body. Palm’s nice ’cause it’s useful. Everybody phones, right? And once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to mode it back to skinshade.” Bonny subvocalizes skin, and opens her hand. In their dim black-curtained space her palm’s got the slightest glow. But the color’s perfect.
“I don’t understand,” Katelyn says. “Is there a contract? Some subscription I sign up for?”
“It’s all free for you.”
“Then what’s your motive? Where’s your profit?”
“Katelyn,” Bonny says. “Profit’s the old paradigm. Profit’s a Steward thing. Our motive is aesthetic improvement.”
Katelyn pours an entire demiglass of sugar water into her coffee. “You can’t live off aesthetic improvement.”
Bonny shrugs. “I make enough to get by.”
“You can’t even fix your cheek.”
“Let me put it this way. If you windowize your palm, Terrance will bank my cheek repair.”
“My God,” Katelyn says, then she puts her hand on Bonny’s. Her hand is soft and heavy. “Send me some links on the palm procedure too.”
Bonny resists the urge to yank her hand away. “Kewl.”
In the tenement as Bonny’s approaching her door, the door beyond opens and the cute guy neighboring her steps out into the corridor. “Hey,” he says, and “Hey,” she says, turning away from him so he can’t see her right cheek. Then he walks her way, and to her horror, she keeps turning to her right, so that she’s facing the wall as he passes her.
The ink in her cheek feels icy as her face heats up.
Ultrablank!
She hasn’t felt so unkewl since high school. The time she’d worn hornrims, brown knockoffs instead of black Jean Chauvins, and the girls had called her “cool” while winking at their friends.
She’s hardly recovered from her current embarrassment before Terrance clicks her side. “You’re not supposed to mention me,” he says.
He’s screening something in his scalp. She can’t discern what but it gives his bristle-cut hair a white nimbus glow. “I’m working with what I got.”
“Pity? She’s the pathetic one, not you.”
Bonny’s shocked that Terrance would talk about a client that way. But she remembers almost pulling her hand away from Katelyn’s. The revulsion at the woman’s heavy touch. “We’re improving her.”
“Pity is not the route to improvement.”
“It got her interested.”
“For this one time, one palmphone—maybe! But pity does not bring repeat customers! Passion and self-confidence are what shift paradigms!”
“But—pity is cute.”
“Wrong kind of cuteness! Puppies are cute, but they do not reconceptualize worldviews! You must be the cute that moves men’s hearts! You must be the cute that draws forth the latent Bonny that lies within Katelyn’s ampleness!”
It is when she doesn’t understand Terrance that she finds him kewlest. And it helps how his scalp’s gone red so his hair looks fiery. “Maybe—sexy cute?”
“What do I know of sexy?” Terrance asks. “I know only paradigms.”
She brings her fingercam close to her broken cheek. “This isn’t sexy.”
“I promise to fix that. When you bring her closer.”…
