Here I am, sitting in front of a half-eaten cobb salad on a fifty thousand dollar plate, vacuum sealed in five yards of cobalt satin because my stylist heard Blue Origin and confused the topic for a theme that required literal interpretation.

I feel like Versace Violet in a Willy Wonka ‘Where Are They Now?’ documentary.

(Post-juice, heh)

Shut up.

What began as a tax haven fever dream has descended into an Orwellian space nightmare pitched as economic prosperity. The room is a Forbes’ Who’s Who of billionaires likely to toss a crate of kittens into a river if it increases their net worth by a percentage point. Attendees are arranged around a dozen round tables beneath darkened chandeliers, all attention directed to the brightly lit stage where Jeff Bezos is thirty minutes into his moon manifesto.

“The environmentalists scream that we are killing the planet,” he says as a cinematic PowerPoint projects behind him on a massive digital display. The Earth is shown in striking detail. You know the drill. pollution, famine, plague, all rendered in Unreal Engine. Here come the warheads, crisscrossing through the haze. Cue the fireballs that consume the planet.

“—they are not wrong.”

His posture is abrupt, like an animatronic puppet locked to a pole whose skin is surgically frozen into an expression I can only describe as blank. He has the appearance of a Bond villain without the sex appeal, powered by the mind of a man who achieved world-shaping power by selling convenience.

Like everyone in this room, I have invested heavily into Blue Origin. My company sank fifty million freedom bucks last year into this Mickey Mouse operation for two reasons. One, I like money and making more of it, and this is the future. Two, it may or may not secure me a room aboard his space yacht when the shit hits the fan. If it does, it’ll be worth every penny.

Bezos continues.

“What environmentalists lack is imagination. They think the solution is to stop, to consume less, to apologize for our hunger. That is the logic of a prey animal. That is the logic of something waiting to starve.”

He has a voice fit for monologuing a master plan to cure the human condition by eradicating the humans.

Behind him, the PowerPoint zips away from the planet, turning to the cratered face of the moon. The ground erupts, buildings rising from the dust like a city simulator to create an industrial megacity.

“The solution is not to stop the machine,” he says as rockets with Amazon logos begin chartering to and from launch pads. “The solution is to move the machine to the moon.”

Everyone at my table is smiling in silence, except for the man to my right. He leans towards me and whispers, “When he says to the moon… does he mean… literally the moon? Like, little moon factories run by little moon people?”

I look down. William Shatner is staring back at me, brows round peaks above his sharp eyes, though the left is drifting off course. Ocular irregularities aside, he looks great for a man pushing a century.

My hand falls on his shoulder. “Welcome to the Starship Dystopia, Captain.”

I push my chair back and stand. Shocked faces turn toward me, what little light there is reflecting across their corneas narrowing in judgment. How dare I get up during The Master’s grand speech?

I flash a smile.

“Excuse me,” I say in a hushed voice, “I have to tinkle.”

Shatner looks around the table with a shrug and says, “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

I navigate the dark maze as Bezos’s voice echoes with bold proclamations of human workers living in moon ghettos under the supervision of AI automatons. Paraphrasing. That totally won’t backfire. The last person I see before ducking into the hallway is Sam Altman who has a 5.2 inch tent in his pants just thinking about ChatGPT-powered murder robots.

The toilet flushes as I leave the stall, cursing in Romanian at the wrinkles of satin bunched around my hips too stubborn to flatten out themselves. I don’t pinch the dress to tug down. That will only make matters worse. I use the heel of my hands to tame the rumples until the fabric remembers my shape.

I keep smoothing all the way to the vanity. “There,” I say, finally satisfied, and reach into the sink. The water kicks on but before my hands dive under I look up at the mirror. I spent three hours in the jet parked on the tarmac getting ready for this event and never once did I stop to appreciate Joelle’s hard work.

The water shuts off as I stand straight. I turn left, then right. Shift my weight. I plant a hand on my hip, thrusting it out, and thread my other hand behind my head. This was exactly the aesthetic Joelle pitched. She’d scoured decades-old issues of Photoplay and Silver Screen just to nail it. She wanted that classic mid-century bombshell energy: Marcel waves framing wide, doe eyes.

For a moment I feel… beautiful. Like Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. That old movie. One of Dad’s favorites. We watched it a week before I lost him. Towards the end, most days he didn’t even recognize me but on that day, he did. He even smiled once or twice as I lay next to him, watching Cora convince Frank to off her worthless husband. He laughed at the end, when Frank is rotting on death row.

A sweet memory of our final moments, but like all memories from that time, it sours. The thing about hyperthymesia is I remember everything. Good. Bad. In between. But it isn’t simply remembering how cold his thin skin felt, or the wheeze every time he struggled for a breath. The 4D head cinema fires up and I am there again.

Memories become real.

The nasal burning stench of disinfectant and human waste.

Beep.

Pressurized oxygen rushing through miles of tubing.

Beep.

Not the… not the monitor.

Beep.

…a real time display of your entire world falling apart… burned into my eyes. Even when I close them I still see the numbers falling.

Beep.

By the end, I stopped hearing the beeps and focused only on the expanding gulf of silence between them.

Beep… beep… … beep… … … beep…

“What do we got here,” my voice echoes, “A pity party?”

Well, not my voice. Not physically.

“And you didn’t invite your plus one.”

I drop my eyes to the mirror’s base. Reflected under the stall door behind me are two feet in Manolo Blahnik pumps. Mine exactly—if mine had mud-caked patent leather and blood-crusted crystal buckles.

The Other Me. My Dark Self. My Hunger.

The monster behind the mask.

She snorts. “Hey, did you see Lauren’s dress? Orange and turquoise—what was that bitch thinkin’?”

I laugh. If my waves weren’t locked in pins and hairspray they’d be tossing about. “She looks like the logo,” I say after another chuckle. “It’s like, hello! We all know you’re the First Lady of Amazon. You don’t need to be the mascot, too!”

I spin around to look back at the stall, expecting a laugh but the cruddy Manolo Blahnik pumps are gone. The Appetite has returned to the dark pit of my mind, far behind the walled garden that protects the world from the real me—and me from it. My true self.

The door opens. Footsteps follow, but not the customary sharp strikes of stilettos. The stride is weightened and lacking in feminine grace.

I turn back to the sink, as a woman rounds the corner. She’s tall, almost as tall as me without heels. The demanding thumps of her steps are owed to the low profile tactical boots, a strange choice of footwear for the event, and they definitely clash with her tuxedo.

We share a look. Hers is at a disadvantage. The left socket is concealed beneath a matte black polymer shield, fused directly to her orbital bone. That’s quite the fashion statement. Clashes a bit with the penguin suit. Then again, I get the feeling she prefers the battlefield over a boardroom. See: the five dollar crew cut. See: the hook-shaped scar dominating her right face. Everything about her screams private military contractor.

Her reflection passes behind mine then grows larger as she approaches the counter three sinks from me. No words. Only a one-eyed stare of gritty indifference.

(Ask her if she got the scar eatin’ p—)

“I have never been in this room before,” a voice says from behind, one that should be alien to this environment. A rich baritone that resonates like it’s being broadcast directly into my inner ear.

Immediately my eyes search for the source. It doesn’t take long. His reflection is haunting the far end of the mirror. “There’s a reason for that,” I say, then turn to face him directly.

Jeff Bezos occupies the exact dead center between two hand dryers like he’s been waiting there for a decade—and could wait another. He stands so unnervingly still I might have missed him entirely had he not spoken. His eyes are fixed on mine with an uncanny level of focus.

“The acoustics in here are surprisingly functional.”

The statement must rank near the top of fucked up things someone has said in a ladies’ room.

Eyebrows raise. I make a big fake-fake smile. “I’ll alert the concierge but first—I need to wash my hands.”

“Of course,” he says, then adds like an observer from another dimension. “The future requires a certain level of hygiene.”

I look at myself in the mirror as the water sprays over my hands.

(Is this guy for real?)

Unfortunately.

Soap splatters in my palm. The more money men get, the more they mutate into absolute fucking weirdos. I lather up, but primal instinct drags my gaze to the glass. He’s right behind me, barely three paces away. I flinch—less terrified, more completely thrown off that he moved so silently.

Under the water, my hands grind together, making sloppy, wet sounds.

“Maybe you should get to the point,” I say now, my voice roughened with impatience. The first crack in the Walled Garden appears. The Hunger beats once against the gate.

“I require dialogue,” he says between two slow blinks. “And this happens to be one of the few rooms in this building where eavesdroppers aren’t on payroll.”

“What a relief,” I say flatly while reaching for the folded towels on the toiletry tray. I take a handful off the top then turn to face him. I begin drying my hands. “If you want to talk, let’s talk.”

“I apologize,” “he says, though his voice lacks any trace of actual regret. “The necessary variables haven’t all entered the equation just yet.”

“What ‘variables’ are we waiting for, hm?”

The woman reveals her purpose. She charges me, throwing a shoulder into my midsection with two hands curled around my legs. I move one foot back to brace and immediately the heel snaps like a dry branch. Off-balance, I’m driven backward by a waist-high tackle. I claw at the counter but my grip skates off the edge and I’m slammed into the floor. Impact paralyzes my lungs. An elbow slashes my face. My ears ring with deafening static and heat spills down my cheek. Then a fist connects with my jaw, snapping back with knuckles painted bright red.

She cracks me again—forehead. Again—left cheek.

Every contact is a bomb detonated in my skull.

The lights are dimming.

In the far reaches of my mind, the walled garden crumbles. The gate crashes down. And the Monster, the real me, escapes the pit.

The lights are bright and candy coated red… and I smile.

The next strike misses, deflected by my forearm. Her knuckles crash into the floor, a whisper from my ear. I hear the bones shatter.

She reels back holding her hand. Bye bye, gritty indifference.

Hello, tuxedo collar.

My fingers dive inside her shirt. It’s the last time she breathes easy.

I yank her face straight into my forehead. Bone crunches. She recoils, mouth flooding red, cartilage pancakes into pounded meat. Still gripping the collar, I drag her to the floor, rolling into full mount. Her legs lock my hips in a vice. Our hands battle for control. I start laughing. A hacking, wheezing howl as I get past her piddly fucking guard and seize both sides of her head.

“If you wanted to get close to me,” I say as my blood rains down onto her face, “all ya had to do… WAS ASK.”

I haul her skull off the floor and piston it back down. Crimson ejects from her lips. A classic sitcom jingle suddenly hijacks my brain.

“LOVE AND MARRIAGE!” I scream before slamming her again. “LOVE AND MARRIAGE!’

SMASH. CRUNCH.

Her eyes are blown and glassy but she’s still breathing.

“GO TO-GETH-AH LIKE A… HORSE… AND… CARRIAGE!”

I lift her head up from a puddle of red goo to deliver the coup de grâce—until I hear… applause.

My eyes roll upward, to stare under my brows at Bezos. He stands perfectly still above us, the sharp lines of his suit entirely unmarred by the violence. His hands come together in a rhythmic slow clap—three hollow strikes of palm against palm.

“Do try not to break her completely,” he remarks, his tone infuriatingly level. “She is a crude instrument, but a useful one.”

My lips peel back from teeth slick with spit and blood. “Is this who you were waiting for?” I ask as I let her fall to the floor.

He looks down at her crumbled body. His only reaction is to take a step back as the blood nears his polished shoes.

“Ms. Visser is not the guest of honor,” he says smoothly. “She was merely the catalyst required to facilitate the arrival.”

“Whose arrival?”

“Yours,” he says, a cold satisfaction finally gleaming in his dark eyes. “Or rather… the unvarnished you whose services I require. The apex predator beneath the satin.”

Services. Huh. Ain’t this a situation.

I grab the counter with both hands and pull myself up, standing uneven because of the broken heel. I kick both off and lean forward into the mirror. A busted seam of raw meat replaces my left brow. Blood washes around my eye, sliding over a swollen lump ballooning beneath my cheek. Most of my hair is just a matted, crimson shell.

I am beautiful.

Poking my tongue around for missing teeth, I picture Joelle seeing the wreckage of her five-thousand-dollar Versace. Drenched, covered in red blotches like I fought a jar of spaghetti sauce and won. The material clings to my breasts and dense core like the world’s goriest wet t-shirt contest.

The thought of her French smug fucking attitude breaking under the sight of the horror show makes me laugh madly, shredding my vocal cords. Then I cough—a loud hack that dredges sludge up. I spit. Bloody phlegm violently splatters the porcelain. In the mirror, his gaze falls to the messy business, then calmly snaps back to my eyes.

He speaks louder now. “Let us dispense with the fiction that your… quaint little financial stake in my aerospace division secured your invitation tonight. I invited you because I have a sudden and very specific need for an independent contractor… within the XWF.”

Hearing that word does something to me. And that something is punching the mirror, shattering it into a spiderweb of violence. A hundred versions of me stare back, all of them sliced open at the mouth with a very Spiral-like grin.

“And why would I do that?” I say, shoulders heaving with every ragged breath.

He steps forward, completely unconcerned with the broken woman on the floor, as if she ceased to matter in this moment. All those Me’s are joined by a hundred Him’s, his stoic face floating above my shoulder, staring at me with his black eyes.

“When my associates and I acquired the company,” he begins, his voice a calm, modulated hum, “I created a psychometric profile of every talent that has ever stepped inside the ring. I was searching, you see… searching for an individual who could help me prune a very overgrown garden. A blade of deliberate, spectacular violence.”

His reflections loom larger. I can feel him breathing on my shoulder. “I want you to be that blade,” he says, eyelids widened to their limits. “My blade—to cut away the obsolete. To separate the assets from the liabilities. Shall we finalize terms?”

The thought tumbles through my head like a dead body in a dryer. The sheer, unadulterated hubris of this bald little man. He wants to put the apocalypse on payroll then sit back and enjoy the festivities.

I ain’t for sale.

But… he is presenting me with an opportunity.

He thinks I’m the Orkin Man, come to clean out the rats but what I really am is a rabid wolverine he wants to toss into a bouncy castle full of toddlers.

“What do you say, Ms. Gorgo?” he asks.

What do I say?

A hundred Yelena’s stare back at me, jackal grins relaxed, lips sliding down the faces of my thousands of teeth, forming together a perfect, pursed pucker.

And I whistle the Mickey Mouse Club march.