Art by GHOULKISS
Richard
Binker was adorable in a sad kind of way, a perfect last client, Eveline had
decided. Big eyes a bit far apart, pale
brown hair that fell limp above his eyebrows… chubby for a twenty year old… and
bless his soul, he’d even worn a suit to the date. The fraying grey sleeves rode up his wrists,
and it had so many wrinkles it was like staring into a grey, swelling ocean of
admirable effort… but it worked. It was
unassuming—if he’d worn a nice black suit, one that fit, if he’d tried to do
something, anything with his hair… it’d be off.
Like putting a bow on a dumpster.
No sense in trying to dress up what wasn’t there, Eveline thought.
“Do you think… is it too much?” he
fidgeted with the sleeves, trying to pull them down over hairy wrists.
“No.”
“I just… this is such a nice place…”
he looked around, and Eveline caught sight of a band of sweat on the back of
his neck.
“Rich.”
“What?” he said. Eve patted the back of her neck. He felt his own, the starch-stiff shoulders
of his suit shrugging up.
“Oh God,” he grabbed a yellowed
handkerchief from his breast pocket and frantically patted it down. “I’m a mess… this place is too nice, Eve,
maybe we should just call it off—”
She put a hand on his… well, not on, more above, her projection wouldn’t
allow her to actually touch clients, one of the downsides of being a hologram…
but, as she’d learned, for men like Rich, nervous, mousy men whose night would
be made by a real woman just giving them a hug by the end of the date… it was
the thought that counted.
“Look around,” she said, tracing the
restaurant with her eyes. It was a nice
Italian joint she’d found—high ceilings painted in red velvet, supported by a
rib cage of arcing cream columns… trim waiters with crisp eyes and handsome
smiles floated through the archipelago of tables, distributing lush red wines
and steaming bowls of pasta dribbled in thick, white sauces… there was even
live music, some swarthy Mediterranean dude plunking tinkling jazz out of a
glistening black Steinway. Every so
often, Eve had caught him flashing a smile and wandering his eyes all over her
black dress… So authentic.
“She, hey, look at me—” it was like
he had ankle weights hanging from his eyelids, but he managed to meet her
gaze. She smiled. “She is gonna love this place, I know
it.”
There was split-second panic that
bounded through his pupils… but his cheeks warmed, if just for a moment, by a
little smile. “Alright. Okay.”
“Alright,” Eve leaned back in her
chair, leaning a hand on her cheek. “You
wanna practice at all with me? I can go
into the bathroom and change.”
“I… yeah, that’d be nice.”
Eve excused herself and wound her
way between the tables and into the ladies room. Sprawling faux-Renaissance prints of chunky
cherubs and chiseled saints spread themselves across the walls. Some other woman, mid-20s, blonde, was
checking her lipstick in the mirror. She
tapped the touch-screen interface, zooming in on her lips. Eve checked the blue time read-out on her own
mirror—7:06. About five minutes before
she’d have to meet Lillian.
She focused—Lillian, Lillian, Lillian. And in a flash, the slight, waifish Eve,
brown bob, hazel eyes, small nose and all was replaced by a taller, stockier
ginger girl smattered by a snowfall of freckles. Eve’s black dress had been replaced with a
loose floral blouse and high-waist bootcut black slacks.
She fluffed the mound of flaming
spirals that was now her hair, and scrubbed her teeth in the mirror with an
index finger.
“Alright,” she turned around,
pulling the pants a bit tighter around her rear.
“Last day?”
Eve looked over. The blonde woman glanced at her before going
back to her lip gloss. “I was one for a
year or so. I know the look.”
Eve didn’t have time for this. She’d been briefed by the Director not to
engage with any former Matchmakers, especially not while on assignment. That kind of stuff lead to immediate
termination, no benefits, no recommendation, no deferment for school loans…
she, quite literally, could not afford to slip up when she was so close to
closing out her contract.
Wordlessly, Eve walked away from the
bathroom counter.
“Fall for anyone yet?”
She stopped.
A laugh. “But who…”
“Listen,” Eve turned, against her
better judgement, against a little pawing voice in her head that told her to
leave, that told her there was nothing ahead in this conversation for her but
an angry, empty dead end. “Schedule a
session. Pay us if you’re going to waste
time—”
“It must be someone really special,
for you to have stuck around for… what, two years? Isn’t that the average contract period?” the
blonde smacked her lips and leaned on the counter, twisting her slender body
towards Eve. She had cynical, almond
eyes and a mouth with sharp corners. “So
it can’t be a client.... you would’ve left by now, crushed…” she pouted. “So it must be…” her eyes glinted, and a
smile made the corners of her mouth into razors. “Oh my God.
No. Not him. Honey, please, tell me it’s not—”
Eve took a swipe at the woman. Her hand connected with a carefully-roughed
cheek… and phased right through it in a cloud of pixels that reformed on the
other side of the woman’s face.
The blonde laughed, a high scratch
that warped as her face began to fracture and freeze. Eve took a step back, blood fuzzy in her
ears, hands and feet numb.
“What’s the m-m-m-MA-M-matter, Eve?”
the blonde said. Jagged segments of her
cheeks peeled off, revealing nothing but a wavering, blaring multi-colored
static underneath the surface. Her one
good eye flared with dangerous reds and blues. “Last…t.t.t.t.t day blues? Last day first day last day first day—DO YOU
REMEMBER—”
Eve screamed—
-
“You’re alright! You’re alright!”
And then she wasn’t in the
restaurant bathroom anymore, she wasn’t in a floral blouse, she wasn’t
Lillian—she was Eveline, and she was sobbing buckets into a plush grey
sweater.
“You had a bad dream,” a voice said,
and nice, firm hands held her tight, brushing back her hair. “Just a bad dream, Eve.”
She looked up—the Director looked
back down at her and smiled.
Eve took a second to breathe and
look around—she was back at the facility, back in her own body. She lifted up her left arm and rolled one of
the dozen black cables anchored around her body between her fingers. Definitely back in her body.
“Hey,” the Director nudged her chin
with his thumb. “Last day.”
His lips parted in a smile, and she
laughed in spite of herself, the kind that rolled her shoulders and tipped her
head forward, back onto his chest. He
laughed too. “Alright, there we go,
there we go.” He patted her back,
drawing little circles with his fingers.
-
She was finally asleep, after a good
thirty minutes of calming her down. The
Director yawned and flicked the lights off, leaving the young woman curled on
her bed of cables with a soft, ratty blanket over her.
“Control,” he keyed the uplink in
his ear. Static. “Davies.
C’mon, pick up—”
“Whu—yeah, what, what do you need?”
a thin voice snapped up, still in the milky haze of what the Director assumed
had been a clandestine nap.
“When you run the memory rollback
program tonight, be sure to check the box that says, ‘Delete all cookies,’
okay? She had another episode.”
“Oh goddammit,” the tech
sighed. “I don’t, okay, alright,
anything else? I swear to God I did
that, but anything else?”
“Remember—only a twenty-four hour
rollback. She’s gotta think it’s her
last day, that’s what keeps her motivated.”
“Roger, boss.”
The Director cut the line and
whistled as he walked out through the main lobby. Time to go have dinner with the wife and
kids.
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