by Rich Larson

It always starts with a drink in Todo Bien, a beachside bar that burns perpetually to the ground. Holographic flames lick and crackle on all sides. Deionized smoke billows across the floor. The servers wear rippled skinsuits, artificial grotesqueries that turn your empty stomach before the mezcal torches it entirely.

You raise your drink.

“Here’s to the second-most famous Frida,” you say, because Frida is the reason you are here and she is as ominously beautiful as ever, eyes cocooned with vantablack, flowering cartilage of her biosculpted left ear in full bloom.

She leans back, moving the burgundy dress across the sharp angles of her body. Her face is regally blank. “Hueles a alcohol,” she says, and taps one iridescent fingernail against the side of her nose.

You refuse to sniff yourself. “It’s the only way to make time go faster,” you say, even though a small part of you is always begging for it to slow down.

“Okay,” she says, and it’s up to you to paint in reproach or resignation, to decide whether she means fuck you or fuck me or fuck it – or okay.

She raises her tonic water, then stops. Scowls. There is a small winged insect thrashing between the ice cubes.

• • •

You masturbated to Frida before you ever met her.

You were deep in your implant, working overtime on an empathy storyboard, when you felt the restless incessant urge. For the good of your work you paused, and because you had spent the past week in sim, you did not have the stomach to generate another custom scenario. Instead, you went flitting through strangers’ social feeds.

Recall the specific loop: She takes two strides down a hotel hallway on skyhook heels, splays one hand against the stucco, turns to stare over her shoulder. Her left ankle wobbles. Her lips twitch. The immaculate geometry of her hips, her spine, her ass – she was overwhelming. Your ears popped when you came.

A year later, on a lonely rooftop in CDMX, you folded yourself into the one slice of shade and drank two beers and swiped voraciously. Your finger left tracks of dust and skin on the sunbaked screen of your tablet. The algorithmic gods unveiled a familiar face two kilometers away; you hoped it was fate but suspected a bot.

Do you ever feel like the cameras are eating you? you asked, banking on mid-twenties ennui.

The room’s beautiful stained-glass windows turned it into a kiln at night. When you spread a towel out on the rooftop turf, a colony of rust-red ants found your feet and annexed your ankles. You went two days without sleeping, always hot, dazed, sickly. You drank alone and suspended yourself over the emptiness.

On the third day, she replied.

• • •

Frida fishes the bichito out of her drink. She lays it on the table in its own glassy puddle, inspecting its waterlogged wings, playing entomologist. You imagine yourself small and dead, icy mezcal leaking from your drowned spiracles.

“Necesitamos sal,” she says. “Para resucitarlo.”

You know this trick. She learned it from her father, who died when she was young and never had a chance at saline resurrection. You snatch a shaker from the next table and pass it over. She unscrews the cap using the clench of her palm.

You watch her pour the salt, shape it with her luminous fingernails into a burial mound. When the insect is fully entombed, a pharaoh beneath a crusted white pyramid, she folds her arms and stares at you.

“So,” she says. “What did you call me here for?”

• • •

The hungry cameras line has never worked since – another reason you suspect it was fate that collated you to Frida. You agreed to meet in La Condesa, at some bar with red brick walls and a mural of a saint in a gas mask. Frida arrived in a strappy white dress, wearing her ribcage outside herself, and walked past you without a granule of recognition.

Seeing her in person crashed your nervous system. Heat in your face, fluttering moths in your stomach, a tightening from chest to groin. You caught up to her at the bar, where she was ordering tonic water. She recognized you then, and told you she was very tired because she’d just come from a show in Sonora, and so would not be staying out late.

You asked if she was drinking pure vodka – one of those recyclable jokes that you make like an automaton, because you’ve done this too many times. She told you it was water, because hydration is essential for the skin, and because her father drank himself to death when she was still a child.

“Somos esclavos de la genética,” she said, and put a finger to her skull. “I have a fish in here that always wants to drink.”

“Tengo un montón de peces asi,” you said, and ordered a gin-tonic.

You moved together to a wobbly wooden table, and the proximity of her leg to yours, your hand to hers, became a gut-churning game of chance, first summer hormones all over again. She’d seen your job description, asked if you were going to generate a machine play about Mexico, and you said maybe.

She suggested you make it about Día de Muertos. When you told her that was a cliché, she towed your drink across the splintery wood and deposited a precise glob of spit inside.

Your heart beat so hard. Outside, it finally started to rain.

• • •

“How was your birthday?” you ask, as if you didn’t watch it on your way to Acapulco, all those curated moments unfolding in sequence across her feed.

Breakfast by a sparkling fountain, syrup drizzling over high-def pan francés.

Gifts emerging from a cloudscape of pale pink wrapping paper.

Radioactive-bright cocktails clinking together.

Her, in the dress she is wearing now, but much happier.

“My grandmother asked where you are.” She looks around at the flickering flames crawling the walls. “I was surprised she remembered. These days she is very forgetful. All she talks about is the village.”

You know some of those stories. Frida’s grandmother told them to you with her elbows on the table, smoothing thick silver hair back from her brown forehead:

How she played schoolteacher, assigning marks to every flower in the garden. How she went to the cine and decided Ultraman, who pummeled monstrous reptiles in grainy black-and-white, was her boyfriend. How the volcano coated everything in ash one day, and her family sent her away to the city.

“Lo siento,” you say again. “Y la madre?”

“Te ha olvidado,” Frida says, repositioning a stray grain of salt. “I nearly did, too. Why are we here?”

You still feel the black hole in your chest, a collapsed star pulling your ribs inward.

“I love you,” you say, and as always, she grimaces.

• • •

After you drank her spit, she ordered two shots of mezcal and told you a ghost story. Her great-grandfather, back in Chiapas, rented his upstairs room to a beautiful schoolteacher who wore high heels and used a manual typewriter. Her scoundrel great-uncle loved and left this schoolteacher, who went to the beach and drowned herself out of grief.

But the sounds of her typing and her pacing persisted, for years, until the town witch was hired to arreglar todo. The schoolteacher’s bereaved spirit was so strong that during the exorcism the witch nearly strangled herself with a laundry line.

“The teacher was probably pregnant,” Frida added, moving her empty shot glass in a tiny orbit around yours. “Sin acceso al aborto legal.” She stacked the shot glasses, click-clack. “Now you tell me one.”

So you told her one about a man whose shadow starts acting strangely, falling behind him, mocking him, always making the same gesture. You tapped at your wrist to demonstrate, regretted it when she glanced reflexively at the slender screen of her watch. But her eyes came back to you, twin rivets made from obsidian.

“He started avoiding his shadow whenever he could,” you said. “He closed every curtain. He lit no lamps. But he grew paler and sicker in the dark, and the shadow grew stronger. More solid.” You squeezed her hand, then, and found it thrumming warm. “Until one morning the man woke up pinned to the wall above his bed. He couldn’t move or speak or scream. And when he looked down, he saw his own sleeping body.”

That first slight smile on Frida’s face, that little hook tugging at the corner of her painted mouth, lit you up like phosphorous.

“His body opened both eyes, and looked up, and grinned,” you said. “And he realized who it was. Your turn, his shadow said. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Fair is fair,” Frida echoed. “Justo es justo.” Her smile widened, briefly symmetrical, then vanished. “My story is still better, because it’s true, and no algorithm helped make it. Now let’s go to a different bar.”

You walked out into the rain-cooled dusk, following the scythe of her tanned legs, the hibiscus smell of her hair, the electric storm inside her head. You put an arm around her waist, and in the cab she played absently with the bone of your kneecap. Her favorite speakeasy was closed, which she must have already known, so the cab went to your rented piso instead.

• • •

Frida leaves to Todo Bien’s washroom, and probably does not intend to come back. The tabletop agrees. It starts playing ads for the strip club down the street, all that anonymous flesh packed and pixelated. You stare at the little hill of salt and not a grain stirs.

“Algo más?” a horrific server asks.

You shake your head. You pretend that the only thing that matters is the insect in its salt tomb, whether or not it will emerge. You are a slow learner.

• • •

That first morning sprawled in bed – slick with sweat, but still unwilling to untangle from each other’s fevered flesh – felt baptismal. You wanted to memorize every pore of her skin and every word from her mouth.

So you did. All it took was a toggled gate in your hippocampus, the same one you use for work, and suddenly every quantum of sensory information, from optic to haptic, was rerouted to your implant, where it layered itself in tight folds.

She lay across you sideways, bisecting you with her bony body, using one hand to play with the hairs on your forearm and the other to scroll through her missed messages. You encoded every aspect of her face in profile, every tug and sting from her sharp fingers, every sleep-thick mutter about the Sonora show’s unreliable organizers.

She tossed her favorite loops onto the ceiling, and you watched her rove, pose, rove again, with no wobble in her left ankle. You encoded her encoding herself. She showed you older loops, older stills, and pointed out her sawblade shoulders and the dull gleam in her eyes three years ago.

“La mirada de los angeles,” she said – or maybe Los Angeles, but you wanted it to be los angeles, because it had more poetry that way. “Desnutrición. Another little fish, telling me not to eat. It was a problem, but I am better now.”

She played loop after loop, and you told yourself that what you did now with your implant was nothing she had not done herself. There were already so many Fridas.

• • •

Frida re-emerges before the insect does, slamming out of the washroom and back to the table in three furious strides. She’s holding the little black canister she showed you that first morning, the one she always takes with her on the metro. She aims it at your face.

“What the fuck is going on?” she demands.

You don’t know the specifics, which are mutable. But you know the gist.

“Algo raro en el baño?” you ask, slowly raising both hands, palms out, harmless.

“Algo raro.” She gives a choked laugh, stares around at the servers, who have not noticed the nightspray or the raised voices. “You tell me.”

She jerks her head toward the washroom, follows you there at a distance.

• • •

It felt like all the nerves in your body had been restrung, a web of retrofitted cables with Frida now at the center. When you were together, every glance, every touch, was gravity. When you were apart, every loop, every voice message, was sunshine. You loved her so badly, and she loved you too, though a small voice always reminded you that te quiero bears a slightly different semantic extension.

You took her to Mero Toro next, which she told you was cliché, and then to a grimy pulquería called La Pirata to make up for it, where the stools screeched and the tables flaked paint. It was full of elderly men who’d established their own elaborate economy of drinks owed, drinks wagered, drinks bartered for homemade tortas or salsa.

Their favorite topic of discussion was pulque, and the making thereof, and they were all too happy to explain it to a sun-scalded gringo and a beautiful woman. You spent the day getting drunk with them on foamy sour blanco, guava-pink curado. Frida slowly cared less and less about the filthy floors.

She laughed and argued and shot you looks, sometimes trailing her fingers along your neck or arm, sometimes resting her hand casually on your kneecap, like it belonged to her. You encoded it all, especially the moment when she told you the most important thing about harvesting agave, for pulque or anything else, as told to her by her uncles in Acapulco:

“Que muere la planta,” she said. “To harvest is to kill, so you can harvest only once.”

For a silent moment in the dusty bar, biological fact became holy scripture. The old men, nodding solemnly, almost worshiped her then. So did you.

You knew it was chemicals, on some level. The serotonin and oxytocin and adrenaline and alcohol and amphetamines. But everything is chemicals, and when she curled around you that night and told you the hospital memory, how she helped the nurse shave her father’s doughy bristly face just days before his liver failed completely, it felt like more.

When she gave you a book of poems by Jaime Sabines, the pages starched and rumpled with seawater from the beach at Acapulco, it felt like you had known each other for years.

When you sat hip-to-hip on your rented rooftop, watching sheet lightning in an ochre sky, it felt like your heart might whirl up into the thunderstorm and never come down.

When her mother and grandmother visited CDMX, she insisted, drunkenly, on introducing you to them. So you spent an hour listening to her grandmother’s stories about the village, while Frida argued with her mother in the next room, a rapid-fire conversation you could only half parse. You encoded anyway.

• • •

You step inside Todo Bien’s slate-tiled washroom, Frida trailing, and see what gave the game away. The room is imperfectly generated, for one. Walls warp and mirrors blend into sinks and the row of stalls is far longer than the dimensions allow. But that’s not what scrawled all the shock and horror across her face.

In the gap beneath each stall door, you see the same pair of feet wearing the same pair of shoes, because each stall contains a Frida.

“Simulacrum,” the first Frida says. “Why am I in a simulacrum?”

“You’re not,” you say. “Only I am.”

• • •

In the end, it only lasted two months.

You’ll never know precisely why. Maybe it was biological; her genes sniffed out yours and found them wanting. Maybe you were amorphous in a moment she needed something to batter herself against, inflexible in a moment she needed you to softly fill the cracks. There are many ways for want to become not-want.

She frowned at you across a rickety patio table, tapping her unlit cigarette against the inside of her wrist. She sent shorter messages. She snapped when your fingers brushed the lattice of collagen holding her freshly sculpted ear in place. She told you she was busy tomorrow and the next day.

She went to a show in Tabasco, and only had time for a rushed coffee before she left again for Acapulco. The goodbye kiss felt dutiful, like hospice. She ignored one sober call and one drunk call, and when she came back to CDMX she didn’t tell you, and suddenly it was over.

Maybe it was because you were harvesting, from the very beginning.

• • •

Frida walks along the row of stalls, pushing them open one by one. Her own regally blank face stares back at her.

“So I’m not real,” she surmises.

“No,” you say, because she can only appear to surmise. “You’re not even sentient. An algorithm is using every interaction we ever had to play your role as best it can.”

Even knowing that, the look she gives you feels like it could tear flesh. “Your little implant,” she says. “You made a copy of me. ¿Para qué? ¿Para coger una muñeca con mi cara?”

“Para hablarte,” you say. “Para verte. I just – I miss you.”

“So you do this,” she says. “You turn me into a digital doll.” Her scorn coats you in ashes. “You know I would shudder. I would shudder to know you are using an algorithm to put words into my mouth.”

“Everyone has the right to peruse their own memories,” you say. “That’s all I’m doing. The implant only enhances the natural encoding process.”

Frida looks up and down the row of stalls. “Or you are troubleshooting,” she says. “For when you ask to see the real me again. You think if you say the right things, at the right times …” She flutters her hand like a magician. “Because to you a person is a mechanism. Something you can simulate.”

“We’re all sims,” you say. “The me in my head was never the me in your head. The you in your head was never the you in my head. We’re all using proxies, no matter how hard we try to close the gap.”

“Does it ever end well?” she demands. “Without you tweaking the parameters, I mean. Do we ever leave together, hand in hand, dancing down the street?”

“I’m not troubleshooting,” you say. “It was years ago. I know it’s over. I know all my life is aftermath.”

She narrows her eyes. “We didn’t talk like this in real life,” she says. “Nobody does.” She appears to reach a new conclusion. “This is one of your fucking machine plays.”

“Caught me,” I say.

• • •

A sunburned man who is no longer a young man unplugs himself from the bar and staggers out into the night. The simulation plays on inside his aching skull: The characters debate if it is acceptable to harvest yourself-with-her so long as names and key details are suitably mutated, if the act of remembrance is by necessity an act of destruction.

If two months of anything is long enough to matter, and if the maths change when nobody has ever been able to stand you longer than six. If she remembers watching cliché Lago Chapultepec boiling in the rain, its algae-green water turned to shifting data points, pointillist pixel art.

If this is interesting enough to entertain for even a moment, to creep chameleonic into an unsimulated brain, a hostage-scribbled note that reads it was always a big joke, that reads we all do exactly what we can get away with.

If all of creation is jabbering to itself in a locked room.

The man stumbles along the dark beach with stars slewing overhead. Nocturnal machines work to clear away ropey hills of seaweed; their halogen eyeballs pierce the night for his benefit only. He follows their hieroglyphic tracks until he loses balance and crashes down into the foamy surf.

The sea is still warm from the day’s heat. He scoops up handfuls of the semi-liquid sand, lets the tide carve a hollow around his body.

An insect passes him in the dark, near enough that its hum caresses his ear. He licks his lips and tastes salt.