Prologue

. we seem to see

the people of the world

exactly at the moment when

they first attained the title of

"suffering humanity"

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

I'm digging my feet into the gritty sand at the edge of the shore, my hologram toes slipping into sand, leaving behind no footprints.

When I look up, I can see lights on the horizon, floating toward the Toronto Islands on gentle waves. I recognize their lights. For so long, I thought light was all I was.

Wind blows dandelion fluff through my back and out my empty chest, making no landfall on this body that can't keep the hardness I demand of it.

I leave no impression, no matter how hard I stomp down. The water vomits up a used cardboard container to claim the shores of the island so much faster than the island as a whole has allowed itself to be claimed by disrepair, but just as quickly as the water swallowed the legacies of me.

McDonald's loves you, it says.

Once, the Toronto Islands had been full of playgrounds, full of beaches and docked ferries, harried airport travellers and hurried summer cyclists and heritage homes stuffed full. The islands were peopled, and then, just as quickly, the people left. They left as the city slowly bulldozed their heritage homes, throwing all those numerous things away. They left as the playgrounds fell into ruin and the beaches filled up with sludge and plans for a ten-storey student housing complex went into development and then dropped out of memory, leaving behind only construction kits and empty holes.

Only the airport remained. That's where I was made - part of a guerrilla marketing program, projectors that scanned passport profiles to throw us back at them, to mix and match features to create friendly faces that were familiar without being specific. Our hologram-casters would lob us into crowded terminals, populating walkways with shades and projections and hybrid images of bodies in motion. Some, like me, were just meant to stand near a vending machine or a duty-free gift shop. I would take a sip of Coca-Cola or eat from a McDonald's meal and smile and look good.

Other projections walked toward the bodies they reflected, bodies that would stop in confusion at those half-remembered faces and wonder about how nice they would look in that stranger's clothes, in their designer shoes and watches, with their expensive suitcases, which were all for sale at the airport shops. But when the projections turned the corner, out of range of the machines that cast our light, they would vanish, those siblings of mine. We were only reflections of images and code. I stood there until all known travellers passed me by. When the airport was finally shut down, only my light remained. I was a reflection of bodies long gone.

When those spaces were peopled once more, it wasn't the same. Bodies in uniforms came, jury-rigging the structure from a place of departure to a camp of locked doors and barred windows. Official coverage said that, above, the moon's terraform generators had malfunctioned and burned the air. Nobody believed that was what really happened. It was impossible to stop them from arriving because they came raining down from the sky. So the airport and its surrounding decrepit places became a migrant prison camp, and they named it Arrival.

The early prisoners and guards and construction workers caught glimpses of me sometimes. They liked to argue about whose ghost I was supposed to be:

"He was from that early arrival, the ghost of the first asylum seeker who tried to land in Toronto and got shot down by drones."

"If he is, then why does he stay here? His ship never even made it to the island."

"He's looking for his family."

"I think he's a ghost from the war."

"Those ghosts wouldn't be planet-side."

They were so convinced I had to be a ghost and not a machine. Even I believed it, a little. What was the difference between what a ghost might be and what I might be? Consciousness without body. Image without flesh. Did it matter that I had come forth from something inanimate, rather than something rotting?

By the time every block and cell were full I'd slipped out of the visible spectrum of light. I watched, and wandered through that place that had once been so full of people paying to leave, now brimming with people forced to stay. I could only understand the guards (my code was full of English), but I looked more like the prisoners. It was only as their children began to die that I was filled with thoughts of leaving.

"Momma," she said.

The ones who could understand her were already too far away. I caught the word; I could infer the meaning. I'd been haunting the prison camp just long enough to know the sounds the children made for their parents. The ones rushing her to the waiting ferry only spoke English.

"You're going to be all right, C-159," they said.

"Just hold on, C-159," they said.

I realized for the first time that nobody who worked at the prison knew the asylum seekers' names, and this seemed strange to me. To all those guards and staff and doctors, the people within the walls of Arrival were only Bodies 1 to 710. I would have tried to find something to say to her in the few terse words of her language I knew, perhaps at least ask her real name, but I was only image. I couldn't make a sound.

She was dying of anaphylactic shock. Her breathing was so hypnotic to me. Past all those bodies closing in, her eyes met mine, and even though my code was too weak to make any light that could penetrate human vision, I thought she saw me.

They kept giving oxygen and chest compressions, not noticing how empty the body in the stretcher had become, and the slow-drifting ferry carried it away into the early morning pale.

But when I looked beside me, she was looking back again. Was it in the structure of her face? The shade of her skin? Features had been added or mutated that were hard to place. Somewhere, her thoughts had slipped into the great machine I'd come from. A ghost and not a machine. What was the difference between us?

"Did I make you?" I wanted to ask, but I knew I hadn't. I could still see the body from which her consciousness had sprung.

She walked past me and through me. We didn't touch. She followed the cries of her distant parents as they were escorted away, back into the compound of Arrival.

But then she turned the corner, too far from me, and her image flickered and faded, the way I'd watched so many other holograms fade, too far from the light that cast them.

"Come back," I wanted to say.

I found that if I pushed myself, I could birth image out of my body, programming light to take a shape other than my own, and when I did, I found there was an intelligence waiting to occupy that image. Her mind was with me in the machine, but she didn't know how to hold the image, didn't know how to make herself without flesh. So I painted her, letting my code spill outward until her image flickered into being among the dead leaves that crowned the open grounds of Arrival's vacant departure runways. For a moment it was only an image. But then she seemed to expand, and she was really there, really with me. But she seemed terrified to have been brought back there, and within moments she was gone. Watching her go felt like dying. Could I die? She had died.

I carried her image across the water, far from her death-site and her number, and hid us in caverns beneath the ground where subways lay dormant, where our light could shine in isolation, far from the sun that made us transparent or the uniforms that had buried her.

There, among scattered tokens and red-ink graffiti, I cast my light until the image of her appeared again. I was her projector, making her as others had made me. But she would only watch me sadly and vanish again.

In mourning, I walked among the bodies of the city for the first time. In the city I didn't need to hide outside the visible light spectrum. To the city dwellers, I was just another disparate body, which gave me a fierce but fading joy.

Toronto was a world that had dropped the little t: Torono. Language was the code to say who did not belong. I liked to mouth the words I couldn't say, trying to get them right. All of their words made me hungry. They made me wonder how the girl might have said them. How she would say them, if I could make enough of her to speak.

Away from the island, it was like the people inside Arrival didn't exist, like the heat and light of summer had burned them out of sight.

Everywhere I went, I made no sound. But I listened. I hoped to find the city dwellers speaking about those people out on the water. I expected to see them angry, or caring, or explaining to each other - and to me - why the prisoners had to be over there, and not over here. I let the sounds of the city wash over me like so much light and data and song, never hearing what I needed:

"Spare change?"

"It's so hot."

"Don't you bitches watch where you're going?"

"God bless you!"

"Fuck, I'm hungry."

"Red light!"

"Should take the bus."

"Christ, it's so fucking hot."

"Get off the sidewalk!"

"Doesn't it bother you people to see someone on the ground?!"

Once,...