Zoey is too Drunk for this Dystopia E-Book

Jason Pargin

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 693

Beschreibung

Tabula Ra$a is hosting its massive annual music festival in the desert, which every year precedes the massive annual drunken riot in the desert. This is all organized by Zoey's people, including the riot - as Will explains, the citizens need a little chaos now and then, their job is just to keep a lid on it. That will be a problem this year, with history's most ridiculous mayoral election playing out in the background. The city has divided into roughly two camps, supporting each of the major candidates: One is a stern, calculating activist out to restore traditional morality to the city at all costs, the other is Megaboss Alonzo, whose platform is that he will pay you ten dollars if you vote for him. When a horrific crime is broadcast live on the all-seeing social network Blink, the former seems poised to reap the benefits in the polls. The Suits suspect the nature and timing of the crime are a little too convenient and may be a carefully-staged hoax. But in a city in which lies are always served in layers, even that explanation will prove to be far too simple. As tensions ratchet tighter, Zoey comes to realize that this is really a battle of narratives: Every culture needs a collective story to believe in, so it's just a matter of coming up with one and then carefully sculpting reality to make it fit. How hard can that be? They have the whole weekend.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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About the Author

“Jason Pargin’s Zoey Ashe series is the dystopias of Margaret Atwood meets Parks and Recreation, a fast-paced, witty and much-needed shot in the arm to the genre. Funny without being flippant, cynical without being insincere, this is one of the best ongoing series out there today.”

Lindsay Ellis, New York Times bestselling author of Axiom’s End

PRAISE FOR THE ZOEY ASHE BOOKS

“Wong sneaks a nuanced examination of the surrealist nature of the digital age into the nonstop action, whipping technological, philosophical, and ethical questions into a wild romp that satirizes everything from the men’s rights movement to gaming culture to the cult of celebrity. This is a brilliant modern parable disguised as pop fiction.”

Publishers Weekly

“With verve and velocity, the story moves... one cinematic set piece after another, strung together with twisty fun and wit.”

The New York Times Book Review

“Like Jonathan Swift for the internet age, Wong’s novel offers an engrossing journey and razor-sharp wit inside of an uncanny prediction of an American future. His newest is only more proof that he will be remembered as one of today s great satirists.”

Nerdist

“All right, grab some popcorn and strap in. We’re in for another profane and funny roller-coaster ride from Wong.”

Kirkus Reviews

Also by Jason Parginand available from Titan Books

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

The John, David and Amy series

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe

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Zoey is Too Drunk for this Dystopia

Print edition ISBN: 9781803367842

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803367859

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Jason Pargin 2023. All Rights Reserved

Jason Pargin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For my mother, who gave everything to everyone

HEIRESS, ASSOCIATES AMONG VICTIMS OF EAST VILLAGE BLAST: REPORT

Zoey Ashe, 23, is reportedly among the victims of this morning’s explosion in the trendy East Village neighborhood of Tabula Ra$a, along with an unknown number of her associates.

Ashe achieved notoriety as the surprise heir to the fortune of flamboyant real estate mogul Arthur Livingston. There have been multiple high-profile attempts on Ashe’s life in the fifteen months since, her father having accumulated numerous enemies over the decades due to his alleged involvement in organized crime. It is unknown why Ashe and her associates were present at the time of the incident and no official announcement has been made regarding their . . .

BLAST MAY HAVE BEEN DUE TO IMPLANTED DEVICE, SAY EXPERTS

The explosion that collapsed an East Village business and reportedly claimed multiple high-profile victims may have been the result of an implanted device, say experts.

The blast occurred sometime after midnight and authorities have so far declined to declare it to be an intentional attack. Law enforcement sources speaking on condition of anonymity say charred human remains recovered from around the blast site are consistent with an internal device, the legs and skull reportedly having landed over two hundred feet apart. Black-market implants, including notoriously unstable augmentations, have recently become the subject of . . .

BELOVED RACCOON BELIEVED KILLED IN EAST VILLAGE BLAST

Bandito, a wild raccoon with over 15 million followers on the social livestreaming platform Blink, is believed to have been killed in the overnight explosion in an upscale neighborhood on the East side of Tabula Ra$a.

Bandito rose to fame last year after an unknown user captured the raccoon and attached a dime-sized Blink-enabled camera on a harness, set to continuously stream its day-to-day activities. Millions of users have since followed the animal’s adventures as he has attempted to secure food from trash bins and dumpsters around local businesses while evading predators and Animal Control. Fans are planning a vigil this afternoon outside the . .

1Exactly forty-four hours before a building would collapse on top of her, Zoey Ashe was shuffling drunkenly around her mansion in a bathrobe, munching Doritos.

She’d actually gotten lost in her own home, dully convinced that someone had switched around all the rooms as a prank. She’d gotten up in search of her favorite drunken-night food (the Doritos in the heated bag that makes them taste like they’d been pulled fresh from a deep fryer) but when she arrived back at the guest bedroom, she’d opened the door to find a chemical-stinking storage room packed with housekeeping equipment, including the pair of floor-cleaner robots plugged into their chargers like a couple of sleeping tortoises. Zoey had gotten distracted for a while, giggling and trying to feed them Doritos, until she’d lost interest in that and stumbled back into the hall. That’s when she heard the alarm.

It sounded like it was coming from outside, a robotic woman’s voice sternly warning an intruder that terrible consequences were coming their way unless they turned back. Zoey shuffled back toward the main stairwell leading down to the front entrance, only to instead find herself in the foyer at ground level—ah, that’s why she’d gotten lost, she was on the wrong floor. She pulled open one of the obscenely heavy, twelve-foot-tall etched-bronze doors, paused to wipe Doritos dust off the knob with her robe, then stepped out into the night, only remembering she was barefoot when she felt the cold cobblestones under her toes.

“You are on a course to violate restricted airspace over private property,” stated the alarm voice with chilling robotic indifference. “You have five seconds to turn back or automated countermeasures will be used, up to and including lethal force.” Zoey thought it was funny that this kind of computerized warning voice was always coded as female. She had brought it up with the person who’d installed the alarm system and was told that for the type of guy you’re trying to deter, a stern woman was the last voice they’d ever obeyed: a schoolteacher, a mother, or whatever female family member had gotten stuck with raising them.

Zoey surveyed the area and saw nothing out of the ordinary, unless she counted the pair of white trucks belonging to the company that was about to install a pool out back, which she had apparently ordered at some point. But they’d been there for days and surely the estate’s ingenious threat detection knew that. Then, her sluggish brain finally processed what the robotic schoolmarm was saying about “violating restricted airspace” and she squinted up into the night sky, scanning it for hovering lights.

The last few times she’d heard this alarm it had turned out to be paparazzi—usually drones, once a helicopter—hoping to catch some kind of crime or other depravity occurring at the estate, as if Zoey’s people would do that kind of thing out on the lawn. Then she looked down at herself and remembered why the March night felt so much colder than she’d expected: she was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe, but that was it. Her underwear had been discarded in the hallway, the dress she’d worn to the evening’s awards ceremony had been left in the car (she actually wasn’t certain it was an awards ceremony, it could have been a charity banquet or possibly a wedding reception—she just remembered a lot of tuxedos and mandatory clapping).

The intruder apparently hadn’t turned back. The AI dominatrix voiced a new message, stating that they were now officially flying over private property and that countermeasures were being readied. Though, if they were here for photos, they probably had everything they wanted from Zoey’s appearance alone. The tabloid media outlets loved to simultaneously describe Zoey as fat and disgusting while also publishing as much of her bare skin as they could steal. One drone had caught her sunbathing on a private beach in an extremely conservative two-piece, then ran the photos under a headline saying she was “flaunting” her chunky horror of a body. The next day, a progressive women’s publication pushed back by describing Zoey’s choice of public attire as “brave,” which hardly made the situation better. The point being, if this was just a flying camera, the operator now had pics/video of Zoey in her rumpled bathrobe, standing on her driveway among the marble statues while holding a Doritos bag, her hair looking like it had spent the last couple of hours being pawed and pulled by a sweaty line cook. She briefly considered pulling open her robe and flashing them but figured tabloid readers probably wouldn’t be impressed by that a third time.

The robotic schoolmarm gave a final warning that projectiles were on their way and that if they hadn’t yet turned around their aircraft, it was probably too late, so why bother. Zoey still couldn’t see the airborne intruder but thought she could hear it, that weird pulsing rush of little drone engines. Then a couple of spotlights kicked on from the yard and there it was: not a drone or a helicopter, but something in between, a personal flying device carrying some idiot over the wrought-iron main gate, then soaring above the hedges and statues along the winding driveway.

A moment later, two of the statues inside the gate—men in armor, on horseback—pivoted and from their eyes flew angry swarms of projectiles that streaked up into the darkness like sparks from a poked campfire. The arms and legs of the flyer were ripped off, whirling to the ground before the torso and flying device tumbled down after them.

Zoey gasped and dropped her Doritos. Had she just watched someone die?

She pulled the lapel of her robe closed, as if worried she was now dressed inappropriately for such a somber occasion. She looked down at the Doritos bag, the animated flaming-triangle logo dancing above a heap of dusted chips, as if looking to it for advice. Receiving none, she started running. She moved as quickly as her current physical state would allow, bare feet slapping the cobblestones. It seemed improbable that someone could survive both a dismemberment and a subsequent fall but, hey, modern medicine could do almost anything. Hadn’t she just seen a story about robotic surgeons reattaching a severed head? Or had she seen that in a movie? Either way, there was no one else around to help, so she ran toward the fallen intruder with no idea what she’d actually do once she reached them.

The estate and its defenses had been built by Zoey’s biological father, Arthur Livingston, whom the press described as a “flamboyant real estate developer” or “ruthless organized-crime kingpin,” depending on the publication (specifically, on whether or not it was a publication that Arthur Livingston had owned). The system was not designed only to deter burglars, but to thwart a full-on armed assault from some cartel’s hit squad. Anyone attempting a breach like this had either done zero research or was just delegating their suicide.

And still, Zoey ran.

A new alarm was sounding now, this one from back in the house, alerting staff to go out and investigate whatever had landed on the front lawn. Somewhere back there was a naked dude in a guest bedroom who was probably squinting drunkenly into the darkness, wondering where he was and if the alarm meant the place was on fire.

Zoey arrived at the approximate landing spot of the flying intruder’s various parts. She felt around her robe pockets for her phone—nope, not there. Her bodyguard had gone home; she’d dismissed him after leaving the banquet (birthday party? Funeral?) with the tattooed member of the kitchen staff she’d picked up, the guy having made some slurred comment about how he could protect her if assassins appeared. The only human on-site right now was Carlton the Butler, whom she’d inherited along with the property. And Carlton was, by Zoey’s estimate, between seventy and two hundred years old. The wailing alarm was giving her a headache, so she shouted, “WOULD YOU PLEASE SHUT UP?!?” and was amused to find that actually worked. Then she remembered that everything in the house had been set to respond to her voice commands. That’s why a misheard phrase shouted in an argument had once resulted in the HVAC system shutting up several ducts.

She first found a severed arm in a bright yellow sleeve, smoldering where it had been detached from its body. She felt an urge to get sick and stifled it. There was no blood, which seemed strange. Then Zoey noted that, where the wrist was revealed between glove and cuff, there was a plastic joint instead of skin. Either the flyer had a prosthetic arm, or his entire body was prosthetic (Zoey’s drunken mind needed a few seconds to remember there was a word for that: “mannequin”). She did, in fact, then find a plastic head and torso still strapped to the flying rig a little farther up, next to a fountain made to look like a woman pointing her pelvis into the air, spraying forth liquid (Zoey had replaced much of her father’s old decor, but hadn’t gotten to the front lawn’s water features yet). The flying rig was an oversized backpack, sprouting fins and wraparound arms that ended in control sticks. The whole apparatus was a garish yellow, so eye-wateringly bright that Zoey thought it looked like an angel had pissed on it. The mannequin pilot had been wearing an equally yellow jumpsuit and helmet. She felt relief that was quickly swamped by confusion.

“May I be of assistance?” asked a raspy but dignified voice from behind her. She had never seen Carlton move at a speed quicker than “very old man doing his best,” yet she frequently saw him appear in spots that would have required a brisk jog at the very least, if not a dead run. She speculated that Carlton could actually move very quickly when he needed to, but perhaps thought it was unbecoming to be seen sprinting from place to place in formal butler garb.

Zoey said, “It’s a dummy.”

“I would still advise caution. The system has not detected any dangerous devices, but some dangers are difficult to detect. Previous experience has taught us a hard lesson on that subject.”

Some part of Zoey’s brain knew this was correct, but what was the point of drinking if you were just going to cling to your inhibitions? The limbless torso was lying chest-down in the grass, so she rolled it over. The front of the yellow jumpsuit was emblazoned with a logo backlit by animated fireworks. Tall block letters spelled out,

THE AMAZING AVIV

Zoey pointed at it. “Do we know what that means?”

“No, but if one were to divine the meaning via context, one would guess that Mr. Aviv is a stunt performer, and perhaps something of a prankster.”

“He had us shoot down a mannequin as a prank? It’s not very funny, he should have filled it with poop or something.”

“Perhaps this was not the prank. Perhaps this was a dry run, to see what happens to intruders who attempt to gain access to the grounds via the air.”

“Ah. Well, now he knows.”

“Should I call Wu?”

“He’s almost certainly already on his way, any alarm from the house goes directly to his phone. If anything, we should message him to not bother. In fact, please do that. I’m going back to bed.”

“Very good. And should I notify Mr. Blackwater?”

“I guarantee you he also already knows, and that’s assuming he didn’t know about it before it happened. I have to try to get some sleep, I have to be up in . . .” she tried to do the math, “four hours?”

She wasn’t sleepy; she and the guy whose name she hadn’t retained had spent the evening downing what he’d called Dragon Shots: smoldering liquid that, if she blew across the glass, would unleash a puff of flame. It was obvious now that one of the ingredients was some kind of stimulant designed to keep the party going until sunrise.

“Oh, and, uh, in the third guest bedroom, there’s a guy up there. Got a lot of tattoos. Wake him up and tell him you’ve called a car to pick him up. And, you know, actually do that before you tell him.” She turned to head back to the house. “What do I have tomorrow? Or later today, I mean? I know I have to get up but can’t remember what for.”

“First, I believe, is a tour of the new factory with Mr. Blackwater, a journalist, and a number of schoolchildren. It begins . . .” he consulted his watch, “five and a half hours from now.”

“Oh, god. Can I get out of it?”

“I, of course, cannot answer that question. I suppose one must weigh the consequences of leaving said children, as well as the public image of the company, in the hands of Will Blackwater.”

“Ugh. I have to get my life together. Start going to bed at a reasonable hour, the whole thing. All right. I just have to get through that factory tour, then I can come back here and collapse on a sofa for the rest of the day.”

“I believe there are a series of meetings and obligations after, including tonight’s debate.”

“Oh, right. And then the next night is the thing.”

You know how sometimes your life gets into a holding pattern because you’re just killing time until a dreaded scheduled event? For Zoey, that event was coming Sunday evening and for weeks she’d been filling her life with distractions, trying to fast-forward through the timeline until the blessed day when it would all be over and done with.

“As for today, it sounds like the biggest challenge will be staying awake for it all,” said Zoey in what would turn out to be the most inaccurate prediction of her lifetime.

2The events described herein take place in the future, in an 85,000-square-mile expanse of a gorgeously hostile territory that people in Zoey’s time will call Utah, which you’ll note is the same as what it’s called now. The difference is that in your present, the southwestern part of the state is home to a number of friendly small towns and some of the best hiking grounds in America. In Zoey’s future, a cabal of wealthy real estate developers have bulldozed all of that nonsense and laid the foundations for a gleaming new metropolis called Tabula Ra$a.

Spearheading that effort was Arthur Livingston, an innovator responsible for numerous breakthroughs in the field of committing crimes in ways that cannot easily be prosecuted. Tabula Ra$a was to be a Utopia built according to Arthur’s undying belief that if enough capital accumulated in one spot, everything else would just work itself out. His spectacularly violent death at the hands of his rivals would thus be declared “ironic” by some in the press who clearly did not understand the meaning of the word. When a professional shark wrestler gets bitten in half by a Great White, that’s not irony, that’s somebody getting precisely what they signed up for.

Those are but the broad strokes of the events; the details are all but impossible to know. This is by design. Arthur had famously surrounded himself with a team of four advisors who, according to outlandish rumors that happened to be true, had mostly cut their teeth as “dirty tricks” operatives for intelligence agencies that, it should be noted, considered just shooting their enemies in the back of the head to be an example of a clean trick. Their names were Will Blackwater, Andre Knox, Budd Billingsley, and Michelle “Echo” Ling. Or maybe they weren’t; their birth certificates would almost certainly display different names, if anyone were actually able to find such documents. “They are always impeccably dressed,” wrote one journalist, “but they do all of their most important work in the dark.”

Arthur’s team, whom most people in town simply called the Suits, were the subject of endless conspiracy theories (one claimed that they owned an invisible military helicopter to move about the city) and just as many conspiracy facts (they had, in fact, used such a helicopter at some point, but it was a rental). “In a world full of cameras,” said one obituary, “Arthur Livingston and his underlings mastered the art of staging a reality that suited their needs.” Fringe publications often attributed some kind of occult powers to Arthur and his people, but the truth was they simply didn’t need them. Arthur had learned early in life that reality only existed as the collective perceptions of the beings living in it, so if one could manipulate those perceptions, they could effectively control reality. Arthur used this unfathomable power to advance goals that were similar to the goals of most powerful men throughout history: mainly to acquire stupid amounts of wealth and sex.

Upon his death, it was discovered that Arthur had bequeathed his entire empire to a previously unknown daughter who, at the time, was residing with her mother in a Colorado trailer park. This was the equivalent of our hypothetical shark grappler requiring his estranged child to resume wrestling the very fish that had just chewed through his torso. The name of that daughter was Zoey Ashe and, along with that empire, she also inherited the Suits. As for whether this bizarre arrangement was the result of a carefully orchestrated plan or a drunken impulse, it is believed that Arthur took the answer to that question to his grave.

Zoey has since become the subject of many salacious rumors herself, many revolving around the accusation that she has resorted to some deeply unhealthy habits in order to cope with the stresses of her new position. Zoey would be the first to tell you that this is absolutely untrue: her unhealthy habits were doing nothing to help her cope.

3Zoey was leaning on a huge pillar of quivering beef when she heard the crash.

The noise had erupted from somewhere outside the vast production floor and sounded like a buffalo rampaging through a bicycle shop. She was on the verge of asking if that noise was unusual for this facility when an alarm began wailing, answering the question for her. This was a day for alarms, apparently. Alarms and headaches. There was a handful of white-jumpsuited staff working the factory floor and she attempted to judge the scale of the emergency from their reactions. They were all exchanging looks with each other, apparently trying to do the same.

“What was that?” Zoey asked the man in the black three-piece suit next to her, who was currently directing a withering gaze toward the commotion.

“She cut her way in through the roof,” replied Will Blackwater, as if he’d somehow discerned the who, what, and where from a clanging chorus of tumbling metal. It wouldn’t surprise Zoey if he had. Will was a man in his late thirties whom the press referred to as Zoey’s “advisor” or “puppeteer,” depending on the publication. He was wearing the clothes of a man headed for a funeral and the expression of a man who was about to cause one.

The pillar of beef next to them continued quivering.

They were in a cavernous space dominated by stainless-steel pipes and rhythmic squishy noises. It was a “cultured meat” factory owned by a company that had almost sarcastically named itself Montana Skies Beef. Here, tissue extracted from some especially delicious cow was fed with nutrients until the cells multiplied, growing into massive wads of living pink “beef.” The wobbly masses were then transferred to these clear vats, each ten feet tall and five feet wide, where they were stretched and then massaged with pulses of electricity, causing the pink pillar of flesh to flex and convulse as if being tortured. Cultured beef was mushy when freshly grown, so this shock treatment would work the muscle tissue to better simulate the natural texture of meat that had spent a few years moving a cow around a pasture. The sprawling facility was packed with these pink pillars, each marbled with carefully calculated amounts of white fat, each shivering in turn, as if a cold wind was blowing across flesh that had not even skin for protection.

Zoey knew all of this, not because she now owned this factory—though she definitely did—but because it had all just been explained moments ago by a holographic cartoon cow that was leading the tour. She, Will, and her bodyguard were taking the tour along with a blond reporter, whose name Zoey kept forgetting, and the reporter’s camera operator, who at the moment was using a touchscreen to operate three hovering cameras that were capturing the scene from various angles. One of those cameras was continuously focused on Zoey’s face to record her reactions, which unfortunately meant it had captured her involuntary yelp of “ohmygod” when she’d entered the room a few minutes ago and gotten a look at the ranks of twitching, alien meat columns. Will had warned her about them in advance but had completely failed to tell her that they moved. When Zoey heard the mysterious crash, her first thought had been that one of the meat slugs had escaped its enclosure and gone on a rampage.

Will asked, “Is she alone?”

Zoey had no idea why he was asking her, or what the question even meant. Before she could ask him to clarify, an answer came from behind her.

Wu, whom the press referred to as Zoey’s “bodyguard” or “henchman,” depending on the publication, said, “Yes, everyone else is joining remotely. She came in through the roof over the loading bay. Cut right through the steel trusses.”

He was fed information like this via a display in his sunglasses, though in that moment, Zoey wished its software was better at noticing threats while they were still a little farther away. No one had discussed even the possibility of them getting ambushed while doing a boring publicity appearance for an acquisition Zoey didn’t necessarily remember acquiring. If they had, she’d have gotten less drunk the night before and gone to bed way earlier. She’d also have probably picked a different outfit; she was in a fairly short, off-the-shelf minidress with a pattern of loud splotches of red and white that she’d picked out because she’d thought it kind of looked like meat.

Will nodded and said, “Well, no need to ask if she’s armed,” which Zoey understood to mean that whatever tools or abilities had allowed this intruder to slice through structural steel would make it equally easy for them to cut Zoey into pieces, if indeed that was their goal. Her temples were throbbing, as if her brain were trying to peck its way out of her skull like a baby bird.

“Are we safe here?” asked Zoey.

“Montana Skies No-Kill Beef is absolutely safe!” exclaimed the holographic cow, the AI apparently thinking it’d detected a relevant question from the tour group. “In fact, there hasn’t been a single recall of cultured beef the whole time it’s been on the market! The one instance of large-scale contamination was found to be the fault of the wholesaler!”

Will said, “Shut that thing up or I’m going to break it.”

The cow went into a silent looping animation, as if that also was a phrase it had heard before and had learned to respond to out of self-preservation. The alarm continued wailing from the other room, until it was abruptly cut off by another metallic crash. That was, presumably, the alarm mechanism being destroyed by whomever had just triggered it and was, Zoey noted, the one noise an alarm could make that was more alarming than the alarm.

The blond reporter, who was not a real reporter but a paid shill hired to put together a puff piece about the grand opening of the beef factory, seemed to slowly realize that she might actually be in position to document history, or at least a spectacular murder, which was almost as good. This was the kind of story that could elevate her to real-reporter status.

“Viewers,” she began breathlessly into the nearest hovering camera, “we have just heard a commotion from another part of the facility; it sounded to me like some kind of structural collapse or even an explosion. We do not yet know the cause but I’m hearing there may be some kind of intruder. Zoey Ashe, of course, has been the frequent target of violence since she assumed her current position and, of course, tensions are running high on the cusp of the upcoming elections. Zoey, how are you feeling right now?”

The camera that had been focused on Zoey’s face buzzed in a little closer. “Actually,” said Zoey, “can we turn these off for now? We’ll do this later.”

“I do want to remind you that we are live . . .”

Zoey wanted to ask what kind of sick freak was watching a beef-factory grand opening live, but one thing she’d learned is that you can’t overestimate how bored people get.

She turned to Will and Wu. “Can you guys loop me in here?”

Will held up a hand to ask for silence, listening intently. Everyone was staring in the direction of the noise, toward a wall in the distance featuring a truck-sized doorway closed with a heavy black rubber flap, like a giant doggie door, presumably to let automated carts full of product roll in and out. From beyond that doorway, Zoey thought she could hear a female voice.

Wu the Bodyguard said, “She’s coming this way.”

“Who is? What is happening?”

“We’re still assessing.”

Zoey did not consider that an answer. Wu moved to put himself in between Zoey and the threat. On his right wrist was a black band that contained a number of exotic projectiles. In his left hand was what would appear to a casual observer to be a red Ping-Pong ball, or possibly a stolen clown’s nose. Wu also had a katana on his back, but that was mostly just for show, both as a warning and as branding.

Zoey turned to the reporter and her camera operator. “Seriously, you guys might want to leave. I have, uh, weird enemies.”

The reporter and camera guy actually seemed to be considering this. Just how badly did they want to become real journalists? The job didn’t pay much. But Zoey was rooting for them to go mainly because she intended to follow them to the door.

They didn’t move, but Wu said, “We need to get Zoey out of the building. The front exit is clear.”

All three of the hovering cameras now swung around to focus on Zoey. She knew she would be forever judged by whatever she said and did next. Would she flee from whatever was heading her way, leaving her rank-and-file factory workers behind? If so, that clip would be replayed and used against her until her dying day. Or would she stay and face down the threat like a brave male would? If so, the incident would be forgotten by lunchtime.

She counted seven or eight of the white-jumpsuit-wearing workers, all in the process of checking settings on various screens, some seeming to do pretend work, hitting the same loop of buttons over and over. “You guys, go,” she told them. “Out the front. Whatever this person wants, they almost certainly want it from me, not you. You’ll be paid for whatever time you miss, I promise.”

The staff looked apprehensive, each waiting to see if someone else made the first move. The hovering cameras pivoted to catch their reactions. They, too, were now live in front of an audience. Did they want to be seen leaving this young woman to the wolves? Collectively, they made a silent compromise and retreated until they were closer to the main exit, but without going outside. Technically, they hadn’t abandoned their posts, but they still had a clear path to safety should whatever came through that doggie door be the kind of exotic threat the city was famous for.

“As you can see, Ms. Ashe has chosen to stay behind to face whatever is coming,” said Blond Reporter. “There has, of course, been a significant investment in this facility and she will not so easily be deterred from her mission to become the Beef Queen of Tabula Rasa.”

Zoey was about to say that was absolutely not her mission, when Will interjected, “She’s not staying for the factory. She’s staying for the kids.” He tossed a thumb to his right and Zoey’s stomach dropped.

Oh, god, she thought. The kids. Between her pounding headache and looming panic, she’d forgotten all about them.

“We have to get them away from here!”

The meat pillar shivered in response. The children were on the other side of an exterior glass wall to their right, on a grassy fenced-in lawn along with several miniature cows.

The substance in the vats, which the press referred to as “cultured meat” or “Frankenmeat,” depending on the publication, had taken something of a beating in public opinion over the last few years. Not that Zoey had known how fierce the resistance was when she’d bought this facility; she’d thought she was doing a good deed, since this beef used a tiny fraction of the land and water as the real stuff, produced an equally tiny fraction of the CO2 emissions, and involved none of the animal suffering. That last one was a big part of the marketing for Montana Skies and, as such, the grounds outside the factory included a petting zoo with several adorable, waist-high Highland cows lazily grazing under a “Friends, Not Food” banner. Zoey’s tour group had thus included a dozen children from a school or an orphanage or something (she hadn’t paid close attention to that part of the meeting), and they were currently outside, petting those friendly miniature cows and posing with them for photos. The kids had been diverted out there prior to this part of the tour, as the shivering beef-pillar section of the facility would presumably have been far too traumatizing for them. The glass wall was, of course, only transparent from the inside.

No one responded to Zoey’s request to evacuate the children because it was already too late. Everyone had turned their attention to the doggie door, where a woman was stepping through. In any other era and in any other city, Zoey would have assumed she was hallucinating what she saw next: the woman, thin and pale with brown hair and wearing a flowing kaftan, seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of glowing butterflies. This kind of thing alarmed Zoey more than if the lady had walked in toting a shotgun and a meat hook.

“Again, who is this?” asked Zoey under her breath.

“She calls herself Harmonia,” replied Will.

“Do we have any idea what she wants?”

“From the look in her eyes, I suspect a rational mind would be unable to comprehend what she wants.”

“Don’t say that, you can’t diagnose mental illness from a facial expression.”

“Maybe not, but it’s a pretty reliable way to detect zealotry. Look for the whites above the irises.”

“So what do we do?”

Will shot a meaningful glance toward the children outside the glass wall and, raising his voice, said, “The same as always: protect the innocent, above all else.”

Zoey almost barked a laugh at that, as she assumed Will was being sarcastic. Then she realized he’d said it for the benefit of the cameras. Whatever meager audience of Zoey fans/beef fetishists had originally joined the broadcast, that audience would have grown exponentially the moment word got out that violent tragedy might be on the way. This time of year, that would matter to Will, as at least some of those people were eligible voters.

Harmonia drew closer and Zoey could make out the uncanny smile and glassy eyes that she did have to admit triggered a primal fear response somewhere deep in her brain. The woman’s long hair was in braids and she wore a handmade crown of flowers. She moved with soft, elegant strides on bare feet, flowing between the meat pillars, which seemed to vibrate in response. There were maybe ten of the butterflies flitting around her and, from this range, Zoey could now identify them as mechanical drones, each the size of a child’s hand, their wings outlined with threads of piercing blue light.

Harmonia stopped, stared at the nearest twitching meat pillar, then covered her mouth and fell to the floor.

“My god!” she wailed. “My god. My god!”

Zoey got the sense that the woman, Harmonia, was playing up her reaction and just then remembered what Wu had said a moment ago, that the rest of her team (or army? Disciples?) were following remotely. Each of those butterfly drones presumably contained a tiny camera, and each feed was being viewed by who knows how many people who were loyal to the cause or maybe just curious to see if this would end in disaster. Zoey also noticed that Harmonia wore what looked like white elbow-length opera gloves. Whatever power she possessed that had allowed her to slice or punch her way through the roof was probably contained in her hands, so the gloves were likely there for protection, made of some kind of high-tech material that would keep those hands from getting destroyed in the process. Unless she’d chewed her way through with her teeth—Zoey had absolutely seen implants that would allow you to do that, too.

“Welcome to Montana Skies!” said the holographic cow, having detected that someone new had joined the tour. “Would you like me to start the presentation from the beginning or continue from where we left off?”

Zoey stepped around Wu to face the woman, as she assumed it wouldn’t look great on camera if she just cowered behind her bodyguard the whole time.

“Uh, hi,” Zoey began, noticing that Harmonia wasn’t quite making eye contact. “I, uh, know this all looks super weird but there’s an explanation for all of it. Do you want the cow to explain?”

“It’s worse than I thought,” said Harmonia. “I had heard rumors, but seeing the pillars of flesh, are you guys getting this? The way they quiver? I feel like I’ve descended into Hell. I’m being addressed by the ghouls now, you can see them just over there. It’s Zoey Ashe, her right-hand man, Will Blackwater, her bodyguard, and two people who I think are journalists. If you look back by the door, you’ll see a pack of ghouls in white, either staff or maybe security, ready to tear me to pieces.”

Zoey realized the woman was talking to the streaming audience and ignoring her completely, which was going to make negotiations significantly more difficult, if negotiating was even what she had in mind.

“I am approaching the ghouls now,” announced the woman to her flock of butterflies. “Whatever they do to me, you shall serve as witnesses.”

“Hello,” said Zoey, “and that’s ‘hello’ to you and to everyone joining by, uh, butterfly. Welcome to my beef factory! What can I do for you?”

“As you know, Zoey Ashe owns half of the businesses in this city, her wealth inherited from one of the most notorious crime lords in American history.”

“Oh, so you’re still talking to them . . .”

“In her mansion, her pet cat has its own lavish suite, while the impoverished children of Tabula Rasa sleep in alleys. Under Zoey’s watch, her father’s operation has become far more depraved. As you can see.”

The butterfly woman gestured to the quivering meat pillars.

Zoey said, “So I guess we’re both addressing the streaming audience now. What you said about my dad is true. But he’s been dead for over a year and the operation is now as legit as you’ll find in this city.” Zoey always had to throw in that last qualifier; in Tabula Ra$a, this kind of thing had to be graded on a curve. “I realize this is going to lead to a discussion about whether or not all of his wealth is fruit of a poison tree and if legitimacy can be purchased when the money to purchase it wouldn’t have existed if the operation had been legit from the start. I’ve asked that question myself—manytimes—and the answer I keep getting is that pretty much every fortune has bloody roots so all we can do is try to make it right. Your name is Harmonia?”

“It is,” replied the woman, addressing Zoey directly for the first time. Still, she felt like Harmonia’s gaze was passing right through her. “Are the rest of your henchmen here? Or are they out orchestrating some new horror for the city?”

The rest of the Suits were not, in fact, present, as there’d have been no reason to drag the whole team along to tour the cloned hamburger distillery. Hell, Zoey was pretty sure Will had only come as an excuse to avoid some other, worse meeting, probably one involving local politics.

“It’s just the ones you see here,” said Zoey, “and we don’t really plan horrors anymore, the horrors that occur now are pretty much spontaneous and against our will. I actually bought this factory as part of that, the going-legit process. One day, I found out I owned a horse-racing track and that felt like a sleazy business to me so I immediately sold it and bought this instead. It’s beef without hurting the cows! I know the manufacturing process is weird to look at, but have you ever seen a slaughterhouse?”

“Mute Zoey Ashe.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You are muted on my feed. For anyone tuning in, your voice will be silenced and a box will appear over your mouth to prevent the reading of lips. I will not allow you to brainwash my followers with your lies.” She gestured to her glowing butterfly drones. “My flock, take out her cameras.”

The butterflies zipped around the woman, leaving streaks of blue in Zoey’s vision. They swarmed the reporter’s three camera drones and, one by one, all three banged to the floor, smoldering and stinking of molten plastic. They then fluttered back to Harmonia and now Zoey wondered if Wu had anything on him that would defeat a pack of electrified insect drones.

She looked to Will. Zoey couldn’t read his expression, not now or at any other time. In general, if you ever thought you could read Will’s expression, it was only because he wanted you to, which meant you still weren’t doing it.

The cameraman dropped his control pad and sighed. “Those were twenty thousand dollars each.”

Zoey said, “We’ll pay for them,” then turned to Harmonia. “It looks like you’re not here to talk, so what exactly do you intend to do here today? And do you mind if we all just take off and leave you to it?”

Without answering, Harmonia made a gesture toward the nearest quivering meat pillar and the butterflies flew over to it. Half swarmed to the top of the glass pillar, where pipes and conduits ran up to the ceiling in bundles. The rest of the drones clustered at the bottom, where metal brackets attached the apparatus to the floor. Next came sparks and the sizzle of concentrated energy slicing through metal, the drones working it from both ends.

“Wait,” muttered Zoey to Will, “is she mad at the meat?”

Will only looked annoyed.

The butterflies kept working until the meat-filled glass column shifted and then tilted on its perch. The whole thing fell over, shattering on the floor, exposing the raw cylinder of wobbling pink flesh. Harmonia strode over on her bare feet until she was standing over the pillar, carrying herself with the solemn grace of a mourner over a casket. Her bare feet had come to rest atop several shards of glass and tiny circles of blood were oozing out. Harmonia seemed not to feel it.

“There it is,” she said softly to her unseen audience. “This is what they’re putting into your hamburgers, your hot dogs, your tacos. Some of you have eaten this already. Of course, they say this . . . mass . . . is the result of extracting cells from a healthy cow, then growing them in a lab. But we know the truth, don’t we?”

Zoey rubbed her eyes. “Oh, god. I think I know where this is going.”

“You!” shouted Harmonia to one of the white jumpsuits around the front door. “What cow did this ‘meat’ come from?”

The man glanced nervously at his coworkers. “I . . . don’t know,” he said, barely loud enough to be heard from back by the doors. “You mean, like, its name? That’s not information we would—”

“In what region of the country was it raised?”

“I don’t know, ma’am, somewhere out in—”

“What type of cow, then? You’d surely know that, just from working here. Hereford? Texas Longhorn? Wagyu?”

“That first one, I think. That wasn’t really my area of—”

“Come here.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Come here.”

The man, a square-jawed guy who almost seemed to Zoey to be too pretty for this job, tentatively came forward. He stopped some distance from Harmonia, warily eyeing her flock of flapping robotic butterflies.

Harmonia gestured to the fallen meat pillar. “Eat it.”

“What?”

“Take a bite of the meat. It’s just beef, right?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Well, it’s raw. And it’s, uh, unfinished . . .”

“He will not consume the meat,” announced Harmonia to her audience, “because this meat was not grown from the cells of a cow, but of a human.”

Zoey said, “Jesus Christ. Why is it always cannibalism with you weirdos? When I was little, the conspiracies were always about child sex-trafficking, did you guys get bored with that? I mean, at least that’s an actual problem in the world. I know you’re not going to listen to what I say, and I know that your fans can’t listen because you’ve blocked my mouth, so I’m going to ask out of pure, morbid curiosity: What possible motivation could we have for feeding human meat to people? What would we have to gain?”

“You get the lower classes addicted to human flesh and they will begin to hunt and eat one other. You will then sit back in your palaces and laugh as their blood runs in the streets.”

Zoey took a moment to compose herself before speaking.

“You know my story, right?” She began. “Not too long ago, I was on minimum wage plus tips and government PDR payments. Now, I know you think all of the rich people in this city are monsters, but I’ve been dealing with them personally ever since I got here and I can assure you they are actually much worse. This whole city was built with casino money—did you know that the games don’t run on chance? Those slot machines use software, it’s an algorithm that picks payouts based on human psychology. It detects right when the player is about to give up and then throws them a minor win to keep them hooked, or makes the spinning numbers look like they just missed a jackpot. Big payouts are timed for when the most tourists will see the flashing lights and get tricked into thinking they could be next. And you know who cleans and maintains all of those towers downtown? It’s not robots, it’s migrant workers who wiped out their life savings for their papers, then got here and were told they had to work for half the promised pay or get deported. Do you see the theme? This whole city was built on false hope dangled to desperate people like a fishing lure!”

Zoey was getting so worked up that she had to stop and restrain herself before the vein on her forehead started throbbing. Wu was now looking at her with some concern.

Harmonia said, “I am well aware of what people like you do to the downtrodden—”

“I don’t think you are!” interrupted Zoey, the words painfully ricocheting around her skull. “Just, do you realize how weird it is that the person who owns the land basically controls everything? Or that a person can own land at all? Then when other people build stuff on and around that land, when other humans do work that makes it livable, the owner of the land gets infinitely rich off it even though they didn’t do anything! Owning property is an infinite-money cheat code and nobody sees it as a problem! I have no idea what I’m doing and I just keep getting richer! And no, the enemy isn’t a few corrupt billionaires. Below us, all of the CEOs and corporate landlords collude with each other all the time, they fix prices, they keep wages low, you name it. Below them, the executives and middle managers run a system designed entirely to protect their salaries. That’s why they won’t blow the whistle on the monsters, because they’ll lose their stock options and their kids won’t get to attend one of the expensive private schools that exist only to choke off the pipeline for anybody outside their class of elites. It’s all rigged to keep the money flowing upward, but the second the workers try to organize and gain bargaining power on their end, these rich vipers send thugs to break up picket lines with microwave beams that cook people alive. Do you understand what I’m saying? Harmonia, you don’t need to make stuff up. Hell, I’ll join you, give me some butterflies.”

At this point, Zoey figured even the huddle of white jumpsuits by the doors should be ready to rise up and seize the means of production. Harmonia, however, still seemed unmoved. Distracted, even.

There was a crash and the tinkle of glass to her right. Zoey turned toward the glass exterior wall and, beyond it, the lawn with the children. One of the panes had been shattered by the butterfly drones. The tour-group kids outside had reacted to the noise, as had several of the tiny cows.

“Come, children!” shouted Harmonia, stepping toward them. “Come and see what the ruling classes are doing with your flesh.”

One of the kids, to Zoey’s horror, ran toward the opening in the glass wall, a curly-haired boy who seemed thrilled at the promise of chaos. Then, the rest of the children followed him, their little eyes lighting up at the one thing few human brains can resist: the thrilling promise of novelty.

“No!” yelled Zoey.

“Stay out there!” shouted Wu in his most authoritative voice. “It’s dangerous! No! Stay back!”

The curly-haired kid arrived and gawked at the quivering meat pillars. “They’re alive!” Then he saw the toppled one among the jagged shards of glass and said, “Look! That one got out! Whoa!”

There was no turning them back now. Twelve children and three small cows came wandering in to witness the awesome wonders of the beef factory. One little girl was stepping tentatively among the columns, eyes wide, her little arms wrapped tightly around herself. The curly-haired boy grabbed her, hustled her toward the toppled pillar, and yelled, “I dare you to put your tongue on it!”

The little girl shrieked. Another boy laughed. Another kid said, “I’ll put my tongue on it for a hundred dollars.”

Harmonia opened her arms. “Gather around, children. Come and see.”

Zoey turned to Wu. “Do something!”

It was clear from Wu’s expression that he didn’t know exactly what Zoey wanted him to do. He had various methods of incapacitating threats, up to and including incapacitating them right off this mortal coil in smoldering briquettes. But the presence of the children complicated everything.

Will set his eyes on Harmonia and, in a voice that somehow seemed bored, said, “I assume you know that if you hurt these children, your movement is dead forever.”

“If I hurt these children?” replied Harmonia in a quivering tone that implied her outrage was about to cause her brain to boil out of her ears. “These children, who will see their own flesh multiplied and consumed for generations by a civilization turned into cannibals at the hands of a cabal of ghouls?”

“Hold on,” said Zoey. “So we’re not just manufacturing man-meat here, but we’re taking the starter tissue from kids? Why would we do that? Why?”

“Their meat is the most tender.”

“How do you know that?”

The children were getting upset, presumably less because they understood the danger and more because they just hated hearing grown-ups fight. One of the fluffy little cows came over and started sniffing the handsome staffer Harmonia had brought forward earlier, the one who hadn’t known his beef trivia.

Harmonia approached one of the children, a tall boy with jet-black hair. “You, young man. You seem to have the proper muscle-to-fat ratio for livestock. Did these people here do anything to you? Did they use a needle, or a thin blade, to withdraw a piece of your flesh?”

The boy looked to Zoey like he was hoping she’d provide him with an answer to what had to have been the most confusing question he’d been asked in his young life.

“They did it to me!” shouted the curly-haired boy, who was now sitting on the floor and playing with bits of broken glass. “They took it from me!”

Harmonia’s eyes went wide. “Tell me where.”

“From my butt!” shouted the boy, laughing.

“No, I mean—never mind.” Harmonia faced Zoey. “You’re going to take me to the room where you collect the samples of child flesh. And then you’re going to show me where you store them. I’m not allowing you to destroy the evidence the moment I leave.”

“Well, there is no such room,” said Zoey, “so it looks like we’re at an impasse.”

Harmonia directed her swarm so that the glowing blue butterflies surrounded the handsome staff member. The cow next to him gave a confused little moo.

Harmonia asked him, “Do you want to show me where the children’s cells are taken?”

“I don’t know anything about that!” he replied. “I don’t know anything about this place at all! I, I, uh, don’t even work here!”

Harmonia faced Zoey. “Take me to the extraction room, or this man dies.”

Zoey looked to Will. She prided herself on not having to rely on him in situations like this or, really, any other. But he still had far, far more experience than she did in this kind of thing. There was a long pause while Will looked back and forth from Harmonia to the man she was holding hostage with her butterflies and then to Wu, who seemed poised to cut the woman down if some kind of resolution could not be reached in the next five seconds or so.

The fluffy little cow grunted and licked its snout.

For the second time that morning, Will uttered a phrase that was utter nonsense to Zoey: “Millie wants you to come home.”

Harmonia reacted like Will had just pulled a gun.

Through a clenched jaw, she said, “Are you threatening my child?”

Zoey felt the familiar sensation of being simultaneously comforted and terrified that Will was, somehow, several steps ahead.

“You take up the cause of ‘children’ but you have a child in the city who is your own flesh and blood, whom you have not spoken to in six months. She’s thirteen, these are her formative years. She needs a mother, to teach her how to be a woman. You, not her father’s carousel of young girlfriends. You’ve invented this cause to cover for your own failure, for your own cowardice.”

“If you speak of her again, I will kill you. You may not think I am capable, but I am.”

“I know you are. You received implants from the same supplier that made your moth swarm. That’s some expensive hardware. Who paid for it?”

Harmonia was purposefully working her fingers, as if activating the tiny machinery threaded through the muscle and bone. Zoey noted gleaming, diamond-shaped panels on the palms of her gloves.

Zoey said, “Whoa, everybody calm down. This actually seems like the world’s easiest problem to solve. Harmonia, take a sample from any of these beef towers. Or all of them. Take it to an independent lab and let them test it. If it doesn’t come up human, boom, problem solved. Right? No need for violence. There’s no difference of philosophy or morality here, this is just a misunderstanding.”

“All your offer tells me is that every lab in the city is on your payroll. Otherwise you wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“Then take it out of the city, send it to a lab in Europe, wherever. Don’t you want proof?”

“If it came up negative for human cells, it’d just mean you swapped the samples during shipping.”

“I don’t understand, what would serve as proof for you, then?”

“Show me the tissue extraction chamber, like I asked.”

“It doesn’t exist.” Zoey was trying to keep the frustration out of her voice and failing spectacularly. Her headache had reached a point that she was frankly surprised wasn’t fatal. “Do you want to tour every room of this facility, to prove to yourself that it doesn’t exist? We can do that.”

“That would only mean the entrance is hidden. I’m done listening to your lies.”

The woman grabbed the little boy who’d claimed he’d had his butt sampled and yanked him to his feet. “You. Show me where they took you, to extract the tissue.”

“No!” yelled the curly-haired boy. “You smell weird.”

Will said, “I know you didn’t pay for this gear yourself. You got fired from your job at the real estate office three months ago, after ranting to customers about human meat in their burgers. The divorce came a week later, right? How much has this cost you, this obsession of yours? What would it mean if it turned out you were wrong this whole time? About this? About everything? What if it turned out that you’re being used, that some power-hungry schemer is playing you like a, well, not a violin, that’s too sophisticated an instrument. Like a squeaking dog toy.”

Harmonia set her jaw. “No. I don’t need to see the facility! I have him. I have a witness. Come on.”

She started to drag the child away, as if intending to leave with him.

In a panic, Zoey stepped forward and yelled, “Hey! You’re not taking him out of here!”

Harmonia kept walking, yanking the child along. And then, chaos ensued.

First, Zoey felt a hand wrap around her bicep. That was Will, restraining her. Enraged, she ripped her arm free and lunged forward, grabbing the hostage kid by his free hand, trying to separate him from Harmonia. In the following few seconds, two distinct images were imprinted on Zoey’s brain:

The first was Harmonia, who’d pivoted and raised her hand toward Zoey, a hand that held no weapon because, Zoey knew, it was itself a weapon. Lines of bright blue pulsed across the diamonds in her palm. The second image, spotted just at the outer boundary of Zoey’s vision, was Will Blackwater’s face. Just moments ago, she’d had the thought that she could never read his expressions. Well, the alarm he showed now was genuine; what was happening was absolutely not what he had been expecting.