Chapter 18: The Comedian

We arrived in Sao Paulo at dusk. The air was warm and humid, thick with the smell of fruit and cooking oil and something floral, and the light through the station doors was golden and fading. We were late.

"The show starts in forty-five minutes," Edward said, walking fast. Fast for 2100, anyway, which was a brisk walk by my standards.

Marco's invitation had been among the first I'd received after word spread about the frozen woman, and Edward had built the whole day trip around it. "He started doing shows for the people on his floor," Edward had told me back in San Francisco. "Now people come from all over the world to see him."

"A comedian," I'd said. "Can't the info be funny?"

Edward's info had answered. "When AI in your time first became genuinely funny, there was a period when people couldn't get enough of it. But it became so precisely calibrated to each person's sense of humor that it was like eating too much of the richest chocolate cake. People stopped wanting it. The info can make you laugh hysterically at any moment, and knowing that is exactly what makes it unable to make you laugh at any moment. Comedy needs surprise."

"Marco surprises people," Edward had said. "He comes up with things nobody expects, including himself. You can see on his face that he didn't know he was going to say it."

The station was inside the mega-structure, just as in Lagos, the tube rising directly into the city's lower levels. We passed through quickly, and even in my rush I noticed that it was lusher than Lagos, explosions of tropical green on every surface, water everywhere, streams and small waterfalls running through channels in the floors. It was extravagant in a way that felt natural, as though the building had decided to become a rainforest and nobody had tried to stop it.

Edward's friend Rafael met us near the show. He was a dark-haired man about Edward's age, grinning as we jogged up. They greeted each other with the same gesture I'd seen in Lagos: the interlocking hand clasp, the pull-in, the back slap, the handshake. Rafael turned to me and did the same. I was getting used to it. It made sense here. Latin America.

"You're almost late," Rafael said.

"She didn't want to leave Lagos," Edward said.

"Nobody ever wants to leave Lagos."

We found the show on the third level, in a space open on one side to the warm evening air, maybe two hundred people in concentric half-circles around a low stage. We slipped in just as the lights shifted.

Marco was a small man with enormous energy and a face in constant conversation with itself, one eyebrow always doing something different from the other. He performed in Portuguese, switching to English when he spotted me.

"Juliana West," Marco said. "The frozen woman. My guest of honor." He turned to the audience. "This woman went to sleep in 2027 and woke up in our time. She has spent the last several weeks learning that everything she believed was wrong. Let's help her."

The audience laughed. I laughed.

"Juliana. What do you miss most about 2027?"

"Traffic," I said.

The audience roared. Marco mimed a person sitting in a metal box screaming, and the laughter doubled.

"She misses sitting in a machine that burns poison," Marco said, "waiting for the other machines to move, so her machine can move, so she can go to a building where she sits at a desk and makes a computer do things that a different computer could do better."

"That is a disturbingly accurate description of my career," I said.

"And you had to PAY for the machine? And the poison?"

"And the insurance. And the parking. And the registration."

Marco looked at the audience. "She paid money. To sit in traffic. To go to a job. That a computer could do. And she is the one who is supposed to be amazed by US."

I was laughing so hard my ribs ached. Edward was laughing beside me, his hand on my back, and I could feel the warmth of it through my shirt.

Marco talked to me for fifteen minutes. He asked about phones, about social media, about the concept of a "personal brand." He asked about mukbang, and when I confirmed it was real, he sat on the stage with his face in his hands and said, "My friends, we must be gentle with her. She has been through something terrible."

After the show, people approached me the way neighbors approach a new neighbor, curious and warm. A woman pressed a small woven bracelet into my hands: "For the frozen lady, so she stays warm." A teenager asked me to say "old English" words, and by the time I got to "synergy" he was crying with laughter.

And then the party started.

Someone had set up speakers on a terrace three levels up, and the music that came through them was not recorded but live, a band somewhere in the structure playing something that made your body move before your brain had time to decide about it. People were already dancing when we arrived, and more kept coming, flowing up through the elevator columns and off the floating platforms, carrying food and bottles and instruments of their own.

Edward brought me something to drink, fruity and sharp. Wine from somewhere. "Lila would be jealous," he said, meaning the wine wasn't as good as hers.

I danced. Not well, but nobody cared. Edward danced near me, close but not touching, giving me space the way he always did, and I was grateful for it and also, increasingly, not grateful for it. The music shifted from something fast and Brazilian to something slower and warmer, and people around us paired off or pulled together in groups, and I felt the particular ache of wanting to be closer to someone who was already close.

His hand found mine. Or mine found his. I'm not sure which. We were dancing and then we were holding hands and then we were dancing together, his other hand on my waist, and the music was slow and the city was dark and warm beyond the terrace edge and I thought: I am on the other side of the world at one in the morning dancing with a man who speaks eight languages and has been patient with me every single day since I woke up and I am happy. I am actually happy.

We stayed until three. Rafael had long since disappeared into the crowd with a woman he seemed to know well. People came and went, the party refreshing itself with new arrivals as others left, and the music never stopped, and the food kept appearing from somewhere, and I danced and talked to strangers and drank the wine that wasn't as good as Lila's and leaned into Edward when the music was slow.

At three I was exhausted in a way I hadn't been since my startup days, when I used to work through the night and feel the particular buzzing delirium of a body that has forgotten what sleep is for.

"One more city," Edward said.

"One more city."

We walked to the station through corridors that were quieter now but not empty, people still moving through the mega-structure at three in the morning the way people move through a city that never fully sleeps. Edward held my hand the whole way.

In the capsule, I leaned against him and closed my eyes.

"Don't let me fall asleep," I said.

"I won't."

I fell asleep. He let me. I woke forty-two minutes later to the sound of the doors opening and the air changing again, cooler now, drier, and Edward's voice saying, "Beijing."