The man walks south on High Street, his duster jacket painted in a thousand competing shades of red by the advertisements that line the street. Half the signs are in simplified Chinese or the phonetic bastard English that’s grown more popular these last few years, the other half just scream at you; sometimes they scream through words, other times through flesh. Tonight it’s flesh, and so when the man looks from side to side he finds himself cringing away from pictures of his ex. Her name was Mandy, not short for Amanda, and by dint of a two year relationship their pictures have become forever linked. The advertisements scan the viewer's face, search the Internet for weaknesses in his economic armor—points of purchase, Mandy used to call them—and use them to worm their way into his head. Mandy’s smiling face stares out at him from twenty different screens, sipping New Coke through a neon straw, or posing in oversized men’s shirts, hair mussed like she’s just picked them off his floor.

The man’s name is Jonah, and he was on his way to a bar downtown, but there were cops outside it, two officers and a cloud of blinking police aerostats, so now he’s drifting. It’s a cold night in early autumn; if there were trees their leaves would have started to turn colors. But there aren’t trees. Just like there aren’t cats or dogs or squirrels. Like how the bugs have been replaced by aerostats, miniature mechanical drones that flit across the night sky like stardust, like some child’s misplaced dream. The animals have all been jettisoned, the South has even solved kudzu. And Jonah, drifting through it all, is thinking about the Franchise.

At twenty-three, Jonah doesn’t have it. He’s not a citizen of these New United States, or of the Middle Kingdom’s Exclaves, or any of the other small, independent phyles that have sprouted up around the this part of the world. He is chronically undernourished, underpaid, and overworked. And he is sterile.

A few weeks ago Mandy won her Franchise in a lottery. Jonah has been over it a thousand times, and a part of him is grateful. He thinks now that he didn't really like her, just like she didn’t really like him. They were placeholders in each other’s lives, a thing you did because that’s what you were supposed to do. Because over however many millions of years the human animal was programmed to search out another human animal and pick lice out of her hair or something. So he’s free and feeling it, but he’s also sad. The advertisements are proof that it still bothers him, Coca-Cola’s marketing departing knows you better than you know yourself after all, so she must still have some kind of hold over him.

Jonah ducks into the first that doesn’t advertise her face at him. He buys a PBR from a shirtless bartender who’s sold all the skin on his chest to Playboy to hock magazines. It’s just an address, obscenity laws and all that, but the address spirals around the man’s pale chest hypnotically, and before he can look away it has reformed into Mandy’s face. Smiling. Sketched out on the bartender’s bare skin. He even recognizes the photograph.

Jonah finishes his PBR, tosses the can into the recycling bin, and stumbles back into the street.

In the ten minutes that he was away the advertisements have gone somehow more red. Chinese characters dance across the corners of his vision. Mandy’s face contorts around half a dozen photoshopped expressions. Jonah tries to think about the Franchise. He needs a plan, some way to get it, to get ahead, to make his life have meaning, but all he can think about is that the planet is full up. There’s ten billion souls and Mother Earth has had enough. We’ve scoured the rainforests, the highest mountain valleys, the deepest oceans, eliminated all the biomass we can, and still. Somewhere along the way humanity hit the carrying capacity of the planet, and from Challenger Deep all the way up to the fucking clouds, everything said “No.”

Jonah mulls this over on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. It has started to rain, and pedestrians are scattering into the bars and late night tea shops. He hears music, the high keening sound of feverbeat, which has gotten popular lately. Genres spring up overnight these days, and die out just as quick. Like a passing fever, Jonah thinks, and he smiles. He turns towards home, giving up on the night, and there, beneath another one of Mandy’s pictures, he sees a real life, honest-to-god human holding an old fashioned sign. Jonah squints, thinking his eyes are playing tricks on him, but the man waves the sign. He shouts, trying Mandarin first, but when Jonah shakes his head the man switches seamlessly to English.

“You look lost, friend!” he shouts. “Are you lost?”

“No,” Jonah shouts back, confused. “I live here!”

“Not that kind of lost!” And the man puts down his sign, which says, as best as Jonah can read the crabbed handwriting, Mr. Lun’s Ersatz Tomorrow.

The man steps into a shop nearby, and swaying to the frantic tempo of the feverbeat, Jonah steps in after him.

Inside, it is chaos. The shop is small and very cramped, and when the old man, Mr. Lun presumably, turns the lights on they spark and flicker, and he has to hit the unprotected bulb with a length of PVC tubing to make it work right.

Mr. Lun is a short man, stooped, whose threadbare hair is turning gray like the color leaching out of a well-worn sweater. He wears a thin blue windbreaker and grubby jeans. His hands are small and very fine, always moving. Grease-stained fingertips brush against his bulbous nose, the cluttered counter. As the light inside Mr. Lun’s shop stabilizes, Jonah sees patches of synthetic fur mounted for display. Half constructed cats peer up at him, and a mechanical dog darts out from behind a beaded curtain to fetch a tatty length of rope. When the dog picks it up, Mr. Lun has to spring forward and take the rope from him. The dog has snagged half a dozen electrical wires in the process. There are so many wires sketched across the floor that Jonah doesn’t know where to put his feet.

“Come in, come in,” Mr. Lun says. “I could tell that you were lost the moment that I saw you. It’s like an aura, gray waves coming off your skin. My mother would have seen them, but me? No, I just have my intuition.”

“What’s your intuition telling you, specifically?” Jonah asks.

“That you’re a man without a Franchise!”

“Me and half the world,” Jonah says.

“Lucky for you,” Mr Lun says, “I have just the thing.”

“A lottery ticket?”

“Better. An android.”

“You sell mechanical pets.”

“Oh yes,” says Mr. Lun. “Entirely artificial, no penalty against the biological maximum. Would you like a parakeet? They are quite popular. Parakeets and parrots and whole flocks of pigeons. I do cheshires, sphynxes and Maine Coons. Half a dozen breeds of dog. And for a price I can make you—”

“Ever do a human?” Jonah asks suddenly.

The salesman blinks. “Excuse me?”

“A human,” Jonah says again, “you ever make one?”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Lun says carefully. “Though if you’re interested in such fare there is a bordello down the street.”

Jonah hears himself speaking now. He’s moving without any conscious thought. He’s sad. He’s tired. He wishes that he’d had more to drink. “I’m not like…that,” he says. “Not an adult. A child, have you ever made child? I want…”

“Ah,” Mr. Lun says. “Ah. That would be…expensive.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Jonah says. “Could you make--damnit.”

Mandy’s face is in front of him now. He’s turned to look out the dirty window, and the advertisements across the street are screaming her at him. Did he love her? Maybe. Jonah asks himself the question. Asks it again. Wants to scream. Right now, somewhere across the country, she’s staring into a future that he will never have. There will be houses with white picket fences, vacations to exotic destinations, a family and children. And now, he’s decided, just now, thinking about that, maybe he did love her. At least a little. As much as he’s ever loved anyone, and maybe, Jonah thinks, that’s enough.

“Yes?” Mr. Lun says.

“Could you make it look like me?” Jonah asks. “Like it was my child with a particular person?”

“Very expensive,” Mr. Lun says. There’s a smile in his eyes. The dog curls at his feet and wags its skeletal tail. Besides the unfinished tail it’s very lifelike; you could look it straight in the eyes every morning and believe that it’s alive.

“I’ll manage,” Jonah says, and across the street the advertisements begin to change.

r/TurningtoWords