The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [64]
The huge street crowds certainly weren’t hard to find; they were composed of the refugees and the destitute, packed like sardines in their bunks and cots across a huge expanse of Southern California. Having briefly been a refugee herself, Radmila knew their lives: Angeleno bread and circuses. Crackers, soup, foam mattresses, and immersive illusions.
The city grid of Los Angeles doubled as a giant game board for immersive game players: one would see these game adventurers, mostly young, angry, and unemployed, on foot, on bicycles, clambering walls, jumping fences, bent on their desperate virtual errands. And since the Montgomery-Montalbans, as media aristocrats, owned the means of game production, they could guide those crowds of gamers wherever they liked.
An engineered urban mob had its purposes: to demolish buildings, for instance. This daring act required a planned coalition of LA’s poorest and wealthiest: the poorest, who owned no real property but had the numbers and the overwhelming street presence, and the richest real-estate developers, who could supply cover with the police and who stood to profit handsomely by the eventual reconstruction.
Wrecking the damaged fabric of LA had become a massive, daylong popular festival, complete with parades, original music, gorgeous costumes, mass dancing, and the flung distribution of favors and bribes to the roiling crowds of the poor. In the world capital of the entertainment business, this was the fastest and cheapest method yet found to rezone the city.
This practice had never been legalized, but as a classic Dispensation work-around, it was pretty close to an all-around win-win-win. Many learned academic papers had been written about LA’s innovative deconstructive rezoning. The practice was spreading rapidly to other cities.
Radmila did a celebrity signing, for a crowd-drawing star turn by a local idol was strictly required. She briefly graced an assembly of forty local top game players, who were being feted and petted. These gaming champs were mostly scrawny, scampering male teens: leapers, stunters, backflippers, window climbers … They looked and dressed very much like Lionel Montalban, their beloved pop idol.
Radmila signed commemorative books, handed out prizes, allowed them a lingering touch of her star-spangled feudal robe. Stars were the linchpin of this effort. No everyday landlord would dare to sue a major star. The costs in bad publicity and lost public goodwill were much bigger costs than simply accepting the fate of dead buildings.
The Montgomery-Montalbans had always been very big on new construction: Toddy had been genially ribbon-cutting for years. The violent smashing of defunct buildings was, by contrast, one of Radmila’s personal specialties.
Toddy was no longer there to advise with show production, and her steadying, classic hand was sorely missed. Radmila’s carnival would briskly smash three damaged buildings in a mere hour and a half: a ten-story former insurance building in Central City, a twelve-story hotel on Figueroa, and an adjoining mall.
The Family had piled on the effects with a lavish hand, but not a sure one.
It was late August, and in the dog-day Greenhouse heat, Radmila’s dance costume showed a lot of her skin. “Never forget,” Toddy would have said, “that in show business, we women have to show.” Radmila did not mind showing her body to her public—that was what she built her body for—but to cut big flesh-baring holes in electronic costuming seriously damaged the integrity of the performance garment.
Radmila’s signature stagecraft involved split-second performance stunts, a superhuman proof-of-concept best held in upscale venues like Sacramento’s California State Legislature. The Family-Firm had gained enormous political capital through being publicly superhuman.
Still, the collapsing buildings were the real stars of an effort like this. Collapsing buildings overwhelmed any