First contact in her search for terrestrial life was a local police officer. He, like everyone wearing the uniform of these latter days, was focused, alert, and ready To Protect and Serve, while still emanating something of the vague attentiveness of the collective. She would recognize it in the unsteady glare, the measured response, the expansive long-suffering aspect; all dressed up in the language and bearing of a 21st century peace officer. He had a hint of a smirk, but it was meaningless: handsome, and slightly out-of-place, as if a pop star was playing a cop in his acting debut. It was a quirk of the code that the function of safe, earnest, and encouraging public-service was often communicated by the projection of youth, which she found simply unbelievable. ‘Evening, Ma’am.’ ‘Hello there,’ she said, turning the words in her mouth playfully. She fixed him with a look that outdid the gently voyeuristic gestalt that haunted the gaze of every creep she’d ever interacted with. Tonight, she was the one probing, scanning him with all her resources, mining his presence, his words, his bearing, for signs. ‘Is there ... anything I can do for you? Are you lost?’ She already felt the balance of power shifting. He was almost perfectly delivering that collective projection of concern, but she wondered in this moment if the cop was feeling concern for itself. ‘What if I was?’ her head cocking, her eyes locked on, focused on the truth just behind his eyes. Patiently: ‘We’d like to know you could find your way home safely. It’s getting dark – .’ If only dark meant danger, she thought. ‘Should I be scared of the dark? ... Are you?’ She took a step toward the cop, with no intention other than preventing the conversation from ending in equilibrium. He shifted his weight in a very un-cop-like way. In fact he moved in a distinctly inhuman way to avoid her provocation. But then he spoke again, and reset the conversation to something like a baseline of acceptable banality: ‘Of course there’s nothing for you to be concerned about, especially on a beautiful night like this. Enjoy your evening, and you be sure to let us know if we can be of service.’ He stepped around her to continue on his way. ‘All the nights are beautiful,’ she said to his back as he walked away. ‘But none of them are real.’ She felt a measure of accomplishment as she checked one off the list, and a new awareness of the scale of the problem that she had created for herself. She turned and resumed her journey. She loitered outside a fire station, taking stock of the bracing examples of strength, vigor, and heroism within, and wondered, why on Earth did firefighters need to manifest these particular traits in a place where nothing ever caught fire? She’d never even seen a cat in need of rescue – briefly she considered climbing a tree herself, getting stuck, and striking up a conversation with the first one to the top of the ladder. But no, she could see that there would be no surprises here: she needed more. She peered into one unfamiliar bar, didn’t need to go in; the bartenders had already been one short step away from being replaced by robots at that moment in history when the argument for keeping humans behind the bar became pointless, because soon there would be no humans, or bars, left. That is, the arguments survived and became frozen in code: these bartenders could perfectly mix a disappointing drink, tell a decent joke, and lend a listening ear. But they could never really hear her, and they were incapable of telling a joke that might rob them of a tip. What she needed right now, no bartender in this world could provide. She chatted with a husband and wife over a low white fence. She let this conversation unfold at a leisurely pace, and the happy couple thanked the Nice Woman for her compliments regarding their garden while answering her enthusiastic questions about how they had managed to produce such magnificent fruit. In fact, all the woman wanted was to figure out how their relationship worked, but she was struggling to come up with a reasonable line of inquiry. Finally, any chance at learning something useful was confounded by a surprising flood of adulterous thoughts. The idea of it gave her a lawbreaker’s thrill, but she ruled it out almost immediately, which also surprised her, and set her to thinking. What if she could get this man to break his virtual vows? Wouldn’t that indicate the presence of some real humanity – risky, dangerous – beneath the projection of perfect domestic security? It might be worth the trouble if it payed off, and it wouldn’t be like she was really causing an infidelity, when there was no faith to be broken between these images. But she also knew, deep down, that any man who cheated on his wife in this place would be ... the perfect adulterer. A perfectly average, cowardly, adulterous nobody. Perfect in his ambiguities and heartbreak, perfect in his shifting allegiances, perfectly weak. And not a man she wanted anything to do with. Under a broad oak tree, outside a church, she lingered, listening to the evening march taking place inside, and felt yet the strongest sense of despair at the futility of her mission. She hadn’t had the will to enter a church in a very, very long time. Even as she stood feeling the pull to look inside, to cast her eye about the wilderness of the mostly empty chamber for her Abram, arguments filled her mind, rebuking her for hoping. In this world of moving statues, the very thing that had made the average creep so offensive – the modal personality, the warm-porridge conversations, the lack of opinion – would be, in these religious men and women, a blasphemy. Something particularly egregious had happened when a population already at risk of becoming too soft and too agreeable was rendered perfectly safe, which is to say uninspired and perfectly uninspiring. With a shudder and a pang, she turned slowly and carefully moved away. Young people on the edge of the city college: a conversation about friends in romantic crisis, and then a spat about politics – the untempered sword-play of young-adulthood, opinions constantly beat on by the academics, but never fired. She was briefly tempted, but even with the momentary flaring of revolutionary ideas, there was no assurance of revolution. Keep going! A walk through a bookstore; ‘No! Too quiet!’ ... She searched the coffee places, restaurants, and bodegas; a hardware shop and a video-arcade (always a strange experience in this place, but seemed worth a look tonight); she even considered a return to City Hall – it was on the heels of this last thought that all the doubts and despair returned like a flood. Was she being a fool? At every turn, she encountered a cast of characters visibly distinct, but essentially the same. After blocks of undifferentiated repetition of suburban townscape, the night was almost over, and her enthusiasm was on the wane. Hope returned briefly with a sudden change in scenery – a larger tract, a different kind of building, smoke rising from a great chimney – but left just as quickly as she realized she was passing by a kind of garbage plant. It was different, to be sure, but she was too tired to investigate, and expected little from a computer-generated Refuse Management Technician. That is, she expected the same thing she’d been getting all night – someone fulfilling their duty, both to utility and to the collective, while also maybe smelling bad? She stumbled forward, vaguely wishing she’d fall off the edge of something. She had been walking for hours, and with most of the ghosts ‘settled in’ for the night, she wondered if she’d be able to stay awake. She knew she couldn’t go to sleep. But what was she supposed to do with no one to talk to? Hope dwindled even while her resolve grew. She had to find among these images just one that could still represent something singular and complicated, something indivisible and multi-faceted, something human. And when she found it? Well, then, she suspected that her resolve would truly be tested. Finally, at the end of a mostly dark street, something really different. A courtyard lit by a string of lights, surrounded by a number of structures and cluttered with heavy tools and what looked, at first, like more trash, but, in this case, trash that children had been allowed to play with, so that there were bizarre assemblages and lighthearted towers of piled metal and wood and stone. Equally surprising was that beyond the towers of trash at the end of this street, there appeared to be nothing. No more town, no more buildings, no streetlights, no signs. It was, what, desert? Maybe some mountains? It was hard to make out, and she had not seen past buildings in so very long that she stood before the scene confused and uneasy. A grinding noise startled her. Turning abruptly, she was surprised by a towering figure, looming in the dim light. She froze. Nor did it move. In the span of a long moment she recognized that it was a statue of some kind. It was weird, uncanny, but not in the way of the creeps: It was not the kind of unsettling you get when you try to make something look human and miss it, it was unsettling in the way it projected some aspect of humanity in the rough – A perfect flash of truth in a mess of loose assemblage. It was unlike most statues she’d seen, save for the rare work of ancient Greek masters that the sea occasionally gave up. This figure held no staff, no instrument, was not perched on top of any conquered thing; it seemed only to exist in relation to the viewer, its chest gently lifted, its face inclined toward her. It made her uncomfortable; her cheeks flushed. Carefully she stepped around the figure and picked her way forward through the chaos, instinctively cringing when she upset a small pile of metal junk. But the grinding noise continued, and she continued her approac
