Chapter 41 – Both Sides Now

G-Day, 5 AM.

She couldn’t sleep, and she had [Causality] for stamina, so Eppie got up, got dressed in her clothes that were warm enough to wear and easy enough to disrobe, then left for the Playhouse.

It was dark, but she was joined by hundreds of others. There were trucks everywhere. Not the food trucks, those would come later, but flatbeds with barriers stacked in rows and sections and white vans with city permits taped to the windshields. All over the entry, men with high-vis vests rolled chairs into place at the open-air amphitheatre, or expanded the overhead cover in anticipation of the December rain.

The dorms would be blocked off. Small paths leading to the rest of the CSULA campus would be warded and redirected back toward LAPA and the overflow parking. Someone had already drained the fountain LAPA shared with the university, because two years ago, some fool had fallen into it while it was forty degrees out and tried to sue.

On the way, Eppie saw Susan Carr running about the place, somehow immune to the cold, relying on her Scandinavian genes to maintain a permanent wardrobe of overpriced ladies’ workout clothes. She travelled with a suitcase: within it were the school’s permits, sign-offs, invoices, and contracts for the four dozen contractors working on site, which had to be produced at a moment’s notice.

By the time she arrived at the Playhouse, there was a mighty channel of plastic blocks funnelling arrivals from the main gate to the performing building’s entrances. At the fountain, it split into three: the Amphitheatre, where the music students would have their open airs, the Whitman Complex, with the gallery and the theatre, and finally the Playhouse, sadly out of sight and a little out of the way.

When Eppie pushed on the double doors, she paused.
The school had put up an enormous poster of Eppie in her Sony leotards. It was a very good photo, post-processed by Dov to achieve a chiaroscuro effect, with her elegant figure looking toward a stage light, her baby-blue eyes sharpened to a glistening pinpoint, with a minimum of twenty per cent more saturation.

“YOU WERE MY UMBRELLA,” said a clearly misleading title underneath.

Eppie fought the cringe, making her legs knock-kneed, sending goosebumps as far as her belly.

Inside the building, the technicians were already crawling over the wireworks like ants, double-checking connections and fastenings the students had checked prior. For a public event, shitty plays were entirely permissible, but injury to the public? That was a catastrophe.

Eppie walked past the lighting boards, cable runs and the gaffer tape lines on the stage floor. One of her theatre tech classmates was eating a breakfast burrito in a folding chair while a PA fed cable through a conduit through his legs. The stage itself was already set. The Syrian War Antigone pieces were in position, spike marks were confirmed, the press-conference table was centred, and the flash rig was ready. She recalled Min-jun noting in the Bible that he would arrive at seven to test it again.

She leapt like a cat onto the stage, making the meter-high elevation in a single bound. She walked to the centre and looked out onto the empty seats. The Playhouse was not large, but in this moment, it felt like a stadium. Eppie stood on the X and looked out at the dark, feeling strangely nostalgic.

In a previous life, she had stood on a stage like this in front of thousands. On the live stream, there were hundreds of thousands. In the weeks that followed, there would be millions, maybe even millions of millions, of views, likely a billion by the year’s end.

“With [iNGENU], there will be no more barriers to creation, no gate-keeping of the human imagination,” she had told a captive audience. “My name is Lana Zacanissian, and this is my TED Talk. THIS—is the liberation of creative potential.”

There was applause. Roaring applause. Applause from floor to ceiling, A section to Z. The video broke records for the most dislikes.

As a CEO, she knew how to work a room, how to hype, how to sell a technology that took clean drinking water from America’s neediest towns so bloggers in Mumbai could create slop videos of pregnant strawberries abused by their banana spouses. She had never felt culpable for what historians had called the great race to AGI, because she wasn’t an engineer, or even an entrepreneur. She had merely gathered IP monopolies in a single room and drew them a pie the size of the sky and told them that old adage—Greed was Good.

But this wasn’t the corporate stage.
It was a black box theatre.

As she said to Costello, the theatre was asking a person to be true via fiction. Her Antigone was genuinely fifteen and afraid to die, yet so unyielding in her resolve that she became a force to topple a regime.

It’s about how much you can bear. Dr Cooper had said.

And she had grown a little tired of Eppie’s body bearing so much.
The locker room.
Mio’s shattered psyche.
Simone’s betrayal.
Lim’s hurt.
The recording.

She shifted a little from neutral. There was a tiny white cross below her feet, which was a little loose. She pressed it with her toes, grinding it against the wood until it lay flat.

Her [Persona] was going to perform a play in a few hours in which a girl-child defies an unjust king and an unjust system and pays willingly with her life. In the evening, she was going to sing a song, wearing the same costume, unironically, and drive a fellow [Usurper]’s mind to roaring for the next five months.

“To be,” she mumbled to the darkness. “Or not to be.”

To think that she finally understood the veritas of her AP English, three decades after the fact.

Someone looked up from below, smiled at her, then went about their business. She stood there a little longer until the scent of espresso permeated the building.

The food trucks had arrived, and she dearly desired a tamale.

When she returned with coffee and no tamale, it was ten to six, and Cameron had arrived. His prompt book was already out, and the future stage manager was visualising the play.

Min-jun and Sage arrived at 7 AM. They hugged Eppie, who greeted them at the door, then left for their stations. Maya, who played Tiresias the seer, aka the Political Analyst, had minimal lines with Eppie, but Eppie still gave her a reaffirming hug. Everyone else then arrived in ones and twos, including the other classes, the Juniors who had their showcases, and the Seniors who came to help.

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Chloe arrived at 8:15 in her warm-up clothes.

“Hey there, Emmi,” Eppie greeted her with a smile.

“Hey Anni,” the girl greeted her back in character.

They laughed. They were not friends, and they were not foes. There were two people who knew their lines, and for the duration of the play, they were real sisters. It was a theatre connection, the kind where, after pouring their emotions into one another for weeks, their bodies had developed a working relationship. It was similar to what she and Cooper shared, a kind of intimacy that existed outside of the conventional.

At ten, Dr Costello arrived.

“Circle,” he said quietly, and the crew moved into place like trained hounds. Everyone joined, because the circle wasn’t just for the cast. Theatre was not conducted alone.

They warmed up with LABAN, moving through weight, space, time, and flow. Their bodies remembered. That was the whole point of fourteen weeks of endless repetition. Their shoulders loosened, as did their jaw. The tension leaked away.