Big Egos Page 3

  While it’s not exactly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a delicate morphing of features occurs. A thickening of the brow. A thinning of the lips. A shifting of the hairline. Changes in your physical appearance to help make your experience more transformative. So it’s helpful to select an Ego that’s within reasonable spitting distance of your own physical makeup. In other words, if you look like Alfred Hitchcock, then you might not want to purchase The Jim Morrison.

  To complete the transformation, most customers purchase an accessory package that includes items such as wigs, facial hair, colored contacts, clothing, and, where applicable, beauty marks. Although most people won’t look exactly like their celebrity doppelgänger, it’s close enough to make you look twice. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference, which is why Big Egos of living celebrities are banned.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone plays by the rules.

  The developer and manufacturer of Big Egos is the Los Angeles-based Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, or EGOS for short—a bioengineering company that’s been around for the past two decades refining nanorobotics, molecular cloning, and cell replication technology. While some of their nanotechnology has been used by government agencies and other bioengineering firms, their largest successes have come in the creation of consumer products, with Big Egos proving to be the pinnacle of their accomplishments.

  While no one else has the legal right to manufacture a competing product, knockoffs are available on the black market at a fraction of the price. But they come with a serious risk. Amateurs who don’t know how to properly re-create nucleic acids encode their fraudulent Egos not with DNA but with RNA, which produces proteins that act as retroviruses, forcing the host brain to manufacture more viruses instead of the proteins required for proper cell function. Ultimately, the RNA takes over the brain, leading to psychosis and other irreversible damage.

  Not exactly something that’s covered by your health insurance.

  Some people believe that Big Egos is just a fad that will be something everyone looks back on and laughs about, like fanny packs or Myspace or Crocs. But the desire to be someone else isn’t anything new. From tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons to live-action costumed role-playing games to massive multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, people have been pretending they were someone else for the past fifty years. And with the proliferation of Sims games and online avatars during the first two decades of this century, this was just the inevitable next step.

  Big Egos is the ultimate role-playing game.

  On ESPN is a story about a New York Yankee who is petitioning the league to play as Babe Ruth so that he can reclaim the career home-run record.

  Naturally not everyone is a fan. Even before the first Big Egos store opened here in Los Angeles, there have been naysayers and doubters lining up to protest, arguing that replicating DNA is against the laws of nature or reality or God, while others believe Big Egos poses a risk to society by providing people with the opportunity to live in a constant fantasy world.

  And then there’s the Food and Drug Administration, which is attempting to regulate Big Egos as a drug rather than as a consumer product, claiming that regular use can lead to extreme side effects—from paranoid schizophrenia to floating delusions of alternate egos. They even point to one case of permanent physical deformation.

  I don’t know where they’re getting their info, but I’ve injected hundreds of Big Egos for more than three years and other than an occasional headache, I haven’t experienced any adverse side effects. And while initial product testing revealed a risk of depression for a small percentage of users, that was resolved by adding serotonin to the Ego cocktail as a depression inhibitor for when you stop being famous and return to being yourself.

  You ask me, this is just another example of Big Brother trying to regulate consumers rather than letting the market determine what the people want. If the government isn’t careful, they’re going to end up creating a culture of crime the same way they did with Prohibition during the 1920s.

  So far, government intervention into the production and marketing of Big Egos has been minimal and any proposed legislation has stalled, so it doesn’t look like the opposition will get the regulations or bans they want anytime soon. This might have something to do with the fact that more than half of the members of Congress own multiple Big Egos.

  On Fox News, there’s a report about the rising influence of Egos being used by lobbyists and special interest groups.

  You ask me, the FDA should be focusing their efforts on black market Egos, which are inherently dangerous and easily accessible, especially the ones that come from Mexico. Still, in spite of the risk, illegally manufactured Egos continue to be popular among young people and the affluent-challenged.

  While the main attraction is the lower price, there’s also the fringe element. Egos of living celebrities can be easily obtained on the black market, in addition to Egos of infamous historical figures and fictional villains. It’s bad enough to think that someone can walk into an alley and purchase The Charlie Sheen or The Paris Hilton, but it’s only a matter of time before some twisted soul creates The Adolf Hitler or The Hannibal Lecter.

  Fortunately, that time has not yet come.

  On CNN is a story about the death of a Beverly Hills man who suffered a brain aneurysm at a party as the result of a black market Ego.

  For a moment there’s something about the story that seems important, a revelation that dances at the edge of my memory, the flicker of a shadow in my mind. Then the moment passes and I change the channel.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Why don’t you come over tonight and let me suck you dry?”

  I’m standing outside of Emily’s workstation, but she’s not the one inviting me over to her place for a little fellatio. Emily’s never offered me a ride home, let alone a blow job. This voice is coming from the workstation two down from Emily’s.

  “Then you can bend me over your dining room table and tie me up and spank me while you tell me I’m a bad little girl.”

  I look at Emily and wonder if she’s ever been bent over a dining room table and spanked. With her conservative slacks and buttoned-up shirt and unadorned face, she’s always struck me more as the type to spend her evenings alone with a good book and a glass of pinot noir rather than wrist cuffs and a paddle. But for all I know, Emily could moonlight as a dominatrix. After all, you never really know what someone does when you’re not around and they put on a different mask.

  Like Billy Joel said, we all give in to our desire when the stranger comes along.

  “Morning, Emily,” I say, imagining Emily in a catsuit and thigh-high stiletto boots with a riding crop.

  “Morning,” she says without looking up from her touchscreen monitor. A Cinnabon sits on her desk in its container, partially eaten. Every day Emily brings a Cinnabon with her to work and nibbles at it and picks at it until it’s nothing but a corpse of a cinnamon roll, a pastry victim, gutted and left for dead on her desk like breakfast roadkill. And then she throws it away.

  I’ve been working with Emily for five years and I have yet to see her finish one of her Cinnabons.

  “You have those reports on The Buddy Holly and The Marlon Brando?” I ask.

  “Just finishing them up.” She pulls off a piece of her cinnamon roll and eats it. “I’ll have them on your desk before the hour.”

  “Great,” I say, watching her as the leather catsuit disappears and it’s just conservative Emily again with her constant doughy confection companion.

  I leave Emily and walk down to Kurt’s workstation, where I find him sitting at his desk, pressing the NEXT button on his voice mail. While listening to his private voice mails on speaker could be considered inappropriate for the workplace, none of the women on my team have a problem with it and actually told me they find it helps to liven up the place.

  “Hey lover boy, I’m still having orgasms from last night. Listen.”

&nb
sp; Kurt is out of shape, balding, and is in dire need of a nose hair trimmer. I’ve never understood how he gets so much action. I’m guessing he puts his Egos to good use. Either that or he’s got a certain je ne sais quoi that only women understand because I sure as hell don’t know what anyone sees in him.

  “Morning, Kurt.”

  Kurt stops listening to the moans coming from his voice mail and turns to me, a smile stretching from ear to ear like someone sliced open his face and inserted a cartoon smile. “Hey boss. You ready for another week?”

  That’s what Kurt says every Monday morning when I see him, as if it’s his only line in a scene for a movie and he does the same take with the exact same tone and the exact same inflection. Even his facial expression never varies.

  “Ready,” I say, to which Kurt gives a single, approving nod.

  I’ve tried mixing things up, saying something different, like You betcha or If it’s ready for me, but whenever I do, Kurt gets this confused look about him, as if he’s forgotten his own birthday and is frightened by the thought that he might be losing his mind. So I stick with what he expects.

  “What’s the latest feedback on The Peter Pan?” I ask.

  The Peter Pan is the latest addition to our newly launched line of Animated Egos.

  “I’m on top of it,” says Kurt.

  “Good. We don’t want another Cinderella fiasco on our hands.”

  The first women who tested out The Cinderella reported feeling like an indentured servant rather than a glamorous debutante, with no fairy godmother in sight.

  “It’s under control,” says Kurt with his Cheshire Cat of a smile.

  I half expect him to disappear, his disembodied smile floating in front of me for a few moments before vanishing along with the rest of him—which reminds me that I need to follow up on the special order for The Mad Hatter.

  “Great,” I say. “Then as you were.”

  As I turn to leave, Kurt resumes listening to his voice mail.

  “Hi big boy, where have you been? I miss your other big boy. Call me.”

  On the way to my office, I say good morning to Chloe—a half Korean, half French twenty-three-year-old beauty who is our youngest and brightest investigator. Chloe graduated from UC San Diego in May, with a double major in literature and physics. She skydives, fosters cats, and always seems to look as if she’s laughing at a joke that no one else gets because they’ve never read James Joyce or bothered to understand the intricacies of quantum mechanics.

  “How was your weekend?” I ask.

  Chloe shrugs and takes a sip of her grande whatever from Starbucks. “I spent most of it reading Dante on my new iPad Platinum. You ever read The Divine Comedy?”

  I spent my first two years at UCLA majoring in English before I discovered Freud and Jung and ended up switching to psychology. So while I consider myself fairly well-read in American and Western literature, I was never a big fan of epic poems.

  “Can’t say that I have,” I say.

  “It’s not very funny,” says Chloe, then she gives me a smile that makes me wish I didn’t have a girlfriend.

  And like I did with Emily, I imagine Chloe moonlighting as a dominatrix. Only this time, the leather catsuit and thigh-high stilettos fit like a monoglove.

  We talk for a few minutes about religion and existentialism and allegorical literature, topics Delilah and I never discuss, and I find myself wishing for the second time that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Still, I walk away feeling intellectually inadequate.

  After leaving Chloe I check in on Neil, who waves a dismissive hand at me as he arranges everything in his workstation. Much like Kurt’s greeting, the arranging of his workstation is a morning ritual with Neil. Everything has to be in its place. But unlike Kurt, who is something of an exhibitionist, Neil is obsessive-compulsive, right down to his manicured fingernails and his perfectly arranged desk and his monochromatic outfits. Today he’s dressed all in dark brown, with matching pants, shoes, a tweed jacket, and a coordinating sweater vest. He almost looks like he belongs in a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel.

  Which reminds me: the reboot of The Sherlock Holmes is coming out this week.

  In addition to Kurt, Emily, Chloe, and Neil, the rest of my crew includes Angela, a short, bubbly blonde who loves live music and always seems to have a new dating horror story, and Vincent, who claims to be a descendant of ragtime composer Scott Joplin and who has an affinity for twentieth-century pop culture.

  We’re all a part of the Investigations Department at EGOS, where we track the purchase and refills of Big Egos, conduct user interviews, and follow up on any complaints or unusual reactions—in part to determine which Egos are the most popular and in part to verify that our customers are not only using the product properly but are happy with their experiences.

  Call it a kind of glorified customer service.

  However, one of the perks of being in Investigations is that we have access to every Big Ego available for purchase, including every custom Ego ever ordered. No one else in the company has that kind of access. That’s because in order to do our jobs thoroughly and with an accurate level of discretion, we need to know how each Ego should perform, so we’re encouraged to test out as many as we’d like.

  That’s not to say that we’re allowed to take advantage of the company’s generosity. And Ego-ing on company time is grounds for immediate dismissal, which doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. More than two dozen employees were let go in the first week after product launch, but everyone in my department has been on their best behavior.

  There are more than three thousand Big Egos currently on the market, with another two hundred and fifty currently in production. Whenever someone famous dies or when a blockbuster movie comes out with a memorable character, the demand for an Ego of that celebrity or character floods Central Processing. Once the demand hits a certain level and the rights are cleared, an order is placed to develop a new Big Ego.

  If you have enough disposable income and like to be first in line or the front-runner of the latest fashion, you can custom-order an Ego of a celebrity who isn’t dead yet so that when they do eventually kick off, you’ll receive your Big Ego well ahead of the product release.

  Some of the guys in accounting run an Egos Dead Pool for aging celebrities, with whoever guessing the celebrity death closest to the actual date getting the pot. The last one paid out over $2,500.

  Of course, we can’t green-light an Ego for production until we have all the legalities taken care of, which means getting permission from the appropriate estates and copyright holders. While some of them are content with a onetime, up-front payout, most of them opt to receive annual royalties from sales, which is actually a better deal for them in the long run. Kind of like taking your lottery winnings in twenty annual installments rather than a lump-sum payment.

  Although some of the celebrity estate and creative rights holders aren’t willing to license the images of their family members or fictional creations to us, more and more are jumping on board. Fortunately, not every Big Ego requires paying for licensing rights. Historical figures like Cleopatra and Abraham Lincoln, as well as fictional creations such as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, are in the public domain. We even managed to avoid having to pay for the rights to one of our most popular Egos: The Elvis Presley. Since there are so many Elvis impersonators just in Vegas alone using The King’s image for profit, any lawsuits brought against EGOS for financial restitution ended up getting thrown out due to legal precedent.

  When the technology was first created, it took up to six months to roll out a new Big Ego, so my first two years here were primarily spent helping to create policies and protocol and doing market research. But the process has been improved and refined to the point where it now takes less than a month for an Ego to go from the execution of the estate rights contracts to the store shelves. Skeptics are concerned that this is a result of cost-cutting procedures to meet market demand, but it’s not like we’re doing factory farming
here.

  No one’s selectively breeding.

  No one’s injecting hormones.

  No one’s pumping anyone full of antibiotics.

  All of the proteins and enzymes and other ingredients used in the production of Big Egos are created naturally, with no artificial ingredients or preservatives. No steroids. No antibiotics. No human growth hormones.

  Just all natural identities. Renewable celebrities. Organic personalities.

  We’re the next generation of green.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Eat your green beans, dear.”

  I’m six years old, eating dinner at the kitchen table with my parents. Meat loaf with green beans and mashed potatoes. Only they’re not really mashed potatoes. My mother didn’t peel them and chop them up and boil them. They came out of a box of Potato Buds. Everything my mother cooks comes out of a can or a jar or a box.

  Mashed potatoes. SpaghettiOs. SPAM.

  Hamburger Helper. Rice-A-Roni. Campbell’s soup.

  Frozen burritos and chicken pot pies and TV dinners.

  Even the green beans are frozen. All of the vegetables my mother cooks come out of the freezer or the pantry. They’re either defrosted or served with a can opener. The only thing that’s real is the ground beef in the meat loaf, but my mother used onion soup mix and ketchup for seasoning. Otherwise, nothing else is fresh. Nothing is real. Everything is fake.

  My mother sits on my right, eating her dinner and drinking her wine. My father sits across from me wearing a tie with his sleeves rolled up while he tells me how to properly chew my food.

  “Ten times for every bite,” he says. “No more, no less.”

  He’s told me this at almost every meal since I was old enough to understand. It’s supposed to help with digestion. Not long ago, I noticed my father doesn’t follow his own rules. When I ask him why he doesn’t chew ten times for every bite, he tells me that the rules are different for adults than they are for children. Which kind of sounds like a double standard to me, but what do I know? I’m just a little kid who longs for his father’s approval.