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“Yes. Exactly. The portrait in the attic absorbed Dorian Gray’s defects. It sucked them away. The Miranda app, it changes the light on the flash when you take a selfie with the front camera. The light, it’s called blood light, it’s existed on the earth for thousands of years, ever since human beings first started to experience grief and pain, it permeates your neurons, it infiltrates them, then expels your defects, every single thing that you don’t like about yourself, and hurls them across the universe into a receptacle.”
“A receptacle?”
“Yes. A…repository.”
“What kind of repository?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” He licks his lips, and she sees that bony Adam’s apple bobbing up and down again.
“The thing, Arthur? What the hell do you mean by ‘the thing’?”
“I mean, that’s the bad thing. Because we tried making this work with inanimate objects. But it didn’t. And we tried making it work with animals. And it didn’t. And then we tried making it work on a human being. And it did. It worked!”
He looks animated for a moment, excited almost. But then his demeanor changes and he sighs. “But not for very long because the human being we used was old. She couldn’t absorb that many defects. Her body gave up. And then we realized we needed young bodies. I mean, young people. That they were more…absorbent?”
“Oh my God,” Jessica growls. “You’re talking about people here, not freaking paper towels. And this”—she points at the screen, the two pairs of staring eyes—“these are the young bodies?”
Arthur gulps dryly and nods.
“So that’s…?” Jessica shakes up her thoughts, tries to get them to sit in a straight line. And then it hits her, hard, like a donkey kick to her gut, and she pulls out her phone and she calls the female police officer in England, her heart racing as she waits for her to pick up the call. “Pick up, pick up. Shit. Pick up!” But the call rings out to voicemail and she ends the call with a guttural yell. “Shit!” she says, looking at the two pairs of eyes staring into the darkness on the monitor.
She calls Sebastian. The call rings out. It’s late in the UK. It’s so late. Nobody’s answering their calls. She scrolls through her contacts and then hits the number for Elliot. It rings twice before he answers.
“Oh thank God, Elliot. It’s me, Jessica. I need you to do something for me, I need you to call 911, or whatever you have over there, and get them out to Barton Manor. And I need you to go over there right now and wake up Sebastian and tell him that he needs to get into the cellar and find a way to dig up his water pump. Whatever it takes. Right now.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No, Elliot, it is not a joke. Seriously. Please do it now. There are lives at stake.”
“Okay, well, I currently have my pajamas on, so I’m going to have to get dressed.”
Jessica groans. “Just go in your pajamas. Just run, Elliot. Run! And call the cops while you’re on your way.”
She ends the call and looks at Arthur. “How can we stop this?”
“We can’t. Polly has the controls now. The only person who can stop it is her.”
Jessica looks at the time on her phone. It’s twelve minutes to seven. The park is at least an hour from here on foot. Twenty minutes in a cab, probably longer at this time of night. She closes her eyes slowly and sighs. There is a way for her to get there in under five minutes, but she hasn’t done it for a long time, and she doesn’t even know if she can, or equally if she should. But then she thinks of Amina and Audrey, buried under cement in Sebastian’s cellar, kept alive by God knows what dark, godforsaken magic, and she sees her daughter’s face in her dreams, that serious tilt of her head, that firm set of her chin, her arms folded across her chest saying, You need to get out of here. You have a job to do, lady, and she zips up her jacket, tucks her phone deep inside her pocket, ties back her hair, and heads out into the night.
Now
SummerStage, Central Park, NYC
Polly stands in the shadows in her mask and dark glasses, watching as the children arrive. It’s a perfect October evening: mild and dry, the sky just turned dark, the streetlights on gold-dipped trees making a fairy tale of the city. She is completely anonymous here, a small woman in black, tucked out of sight. Nobody would give her a second glance. Nobody would know that she is about to become the most powerful and influential woman in the world. After years hiding away in caravans and secret rooms, behind filters and pseudonyms, she is finally going to show herself to the world. She will step on that stage and rip off this mask, take off these glasses, and be Polly Devereux. At last.
She tries to do a rough head count, but every time she thinks she knows how many people are here, another hundred or more arrive, and at ten to seven she gives up trying. Arthur had sounded weird on the phone just now, she wants to call him back, but it’s getting close now, she needs to pay attention and her blood is full of adrenaline, her heart is thumping with excitement, she needs to focus, fully.
This is it, she thinks to herself, this is what her whole life has been leading up to, since she was a young girl. She is about to become the greatest beauty influencer of all time, the greatest businesswoman in history. And not only that, but she is about to change the world forever. It won’t take long until every single kid in the Western world signs up for Miranda. It won’t be long until everyone in the world is perfect.
And being perfect is so much more than looking good. Being perfect gives people the chance to focus on other things, not just their imperfections. So now the kid struggling to master the A chord on the guitar his dad bought him for Christmas—he gets it, he moves on to the next chord, he gets that. He’ll be playing like Jimi Hendrix within a month. The girl who currently sets her alarm at five a.m. to give herself time to contour and blend and stick on false eyelashes, she’ll be free to sleep an extra hour or use the time to do something meaningful instead. All the time that is wasted every minute of every day in the pursuit of perfection, of self-improvement, of trying to live up to other people’s natural-born genetic advantages, all that time could be used for good. It’s the dawning of the age of wonder. Imagine that: everyone free of the shackles of inadequacy, a whole generation free to be philosophers or storytellers or cooks or nurturers….
So who’ll clean the toilets?
That’s what people always ask when utopia is on the table as a theoretical option.
Who’ll clean the toilets?
Who’ll take away the rubbish?
