“Does it come in any other colors?” Maeve asks, eyeing herself in the smart glass.
“No,” the salesperson admits. “You look quite elegant in eggshell, though.”
She’s undecided. The holiday suit is a cooperative swarm of microorganisms, a pale paramecium shroud that coats her entire body, wetly glistening.
“Full-spectrum UV protection, internal temperature regulation, virus filtration, water desalination, emergency starch synthesis.” The salesperson has a comforting sort of murmur. “Ideal for any sort of live tourism. Where will you be off to?”
“Faro,” Maeve says, and saying the name conjures immaculate white buildings and deep blue waters onto the smart glass behind her, displaying the paradise she’s dreamed of for entire weeks now.
“Faro,” the salesperson echoes. “Oh, I’m so jealous.”
She buys two: one for her and one for Charlie, who is predictably unimpressed by the sleek black designer biocanisters and their not insignificant price tag.
“The whole point of live tourism is authenticity, Maeve,” he says, with that little bruised catch in his voice. “We want to see Faro the way the Faroese do.”
“We will,” she says, unsealing his canister for him. “Just with less sweat in our eyes, and less worry about contamination and whatnot.”
The glistening putty slumps out onto the granite countertop, feeling its way toward Charlie’s fingers. He was tapping them in a tetchy circuit, but now stops. He watches its approach with a bereaved expression, likely thinking how Hemingway or some other dead person would have never deigned to wear a holiday suit traveling through southern Portugal.
“It likes you,” Maeve coos. “Go on, Charlie. Let it taste your gut flora.”
She wears her holiday suit to the airport, just to be safe. In fact, she has worn it about the house for the past few days as well—partly because the salesperson recommended letting the swarm familiarize itself with her biorhythms, and partly because she has grown to enjoy its soft scurrying.
The holiday suit is compatible with the airport’s membranous scanners, so she wafts through security in her own private breeze while Charlie gets stuck behind, giving a pharyngeal swab and blood sample. He catches up to her at the gate, which is dutifully flashing ads for carbon sequestration as the travelers embark.
“The trick is to imagine yourself as a cow in an abattoir,” he says, rubbing his irritated, capillary-red nose. “Then the whole process feels quite fitting, rather than degrading.”
“But that’s less authentic, isn’t it?” Maeve asks, busy experimenting with the holiday suit’s sound filtration. She can slice out the background chatter of the other passengers if she likes, or the whirring of the armed security drones.
Charlie’s voice comes in clear. “Hand me my canister,” he says, with resignation in his beautiful blue eyes. “The air’s horrible on airplanes. Desiccating.”
She beams.
No chilly gust at her ankles, no bone-dry air scraping at her face. Maeve marvels at the cleverness of the semipermeable membrane, which allows her water bottle through with no issue but rejects the foil-packaged nuts as an allergen hazard.
During landing the holiday suit even slips a little filament down her ear canal, to mediate the pressure change. All said and done, it’s the most relaxing flight she’s ever taken undrugged, and she steps off the plane with an implacable happiness rising in her chest.
They stride, hand-in-hand, through a charmingly small airport populated mostly by maintenance bots.
“So beautiful,” she says, when they pass beneath a swathe of glass roofing and see the wide blue sky above them, the roiling bright sun.
“Really quite fucking beautiful,” Charlie says, when they step out onto the sun-soaked paving to meet their autocab. “The Faroese are a lucky bunch.”
They clamber inside, where their holiday suits are quick to erase the pungent scent of a gecko that became trapped in the autocab’s undercarriage and rotted there. They breathe deep contented breaths.
Faro is a daydream. She and Charlie wander down canted cobblestone toward the sea, relishing the sunshine and the salt breeze. Most of the shops and restaurants they pass are boarded up, or have iron grills pulled across their doors, which is either because it’s Sunday or because the last pandemic was particularly unkind here.
It’s nice to have the place to themselves. The crumbling castle wall is utterly deserted; they walk along its overgrown base and run their hands over the ancient stone. Their holiday suits transmit the tactile sensation without any actual molecules colliding.
They follow a rusted train track, which ends up swallowed by the encroaching sea. They circumambulate the marina, where they watch a lithe and sun-browned woman repair her battered boat engine. They find an elegant copper statue, a nude figure with a conch shell instead of a head, and wonder what that might mean.
Their holiday suits help them sniff out a taberna that serves fish with acceptable mercury levels. The server is unbothered by their facelessness. When Maeve looks across the patio, she sees, with some annoyance, that there is another tourist at the far table.
They are slumped in their rickety metal chair; empty beer bottles crenellate their table and their ghostly hand encircles a full one.
“Just here to get drunk,” Charlie says, contemptuous. “Gives an awful impression. Do that at home, mate.”
Maeve agrees, and the next time she glances over she can’t quite see their fellow diner. The membrane of her holiday suit seems to have developed a very specific glitch.
After lunch they finally head to their rental, following their maps through a labyrinth of whitewashed houses with carnival-colored doors. The streets are quite empty, but they do pass a haggard young man with a wiry beard and unstable eyes. He shouts at them in Portuguese and trails after them for a few moments.
Maeve’s pulse thumps all the rest of the way; Charlie makes a joke of it, but glances periodically over his shoulder. The encounter seethes like a singularity between them, until they cannot help but murmur about the dearth of proper mental health support and rue the financialization of housing.
The tiny apartment has a retrofitted genelock; it springs open at a touch and they cram inside. Charlie is quick to shed his holiday suit, which wriggles obediently back to its canister.
“Much better,” he declares.
But he has sweat beading his back only minutes later, and admits that the bed sheets are scratchy. Maeve is perfectly comfortable.
They have supper at sunset with an anarchist chef named Pedro, who they had to book ten days in advance. He takes them out onto the gold-flecked waves, in a boat equipped with a solar stove and full kitchen equipment, and drops anchor just off Ilha da Barretta.
“I will be back,” he says, pouring them each a glass of vino verde.
Maeve and Charlie cannot restrain their delight when Pedro shucks off his clothes, revealing the wetsuit underneath, and tips backward off the edge of the boat to go catch their supper. When he emerges only ten minutes later with a small writhing octopus, they gasp and applaud.
The seared tentacles are delicious, and upon their insistence Pedro agrees to drink with them afterward, clinking his glass to theirs and explaining that the Portuguese have been pessimists ever since the great earthquake of 1755, and people don’t realize that it wasn’t just Lisboa that suffered, it was Faro, too, and suffering is now just the way of things once more.
Charlie injects a few historical facts he learned mid-flight, gleaned from the travel wiki, and this assures Pedro that they are the good sort of tourist. Maeve is feeling quite drunk and happy, and is even considering inviting Pedro to visit them at their summer home, when something odd happens.
The chef had reached across her, to refill Charlie, and on the way back his arm brushes her shoulder—innocuous, unintentional; Maeve would not have noticed at all except that Pedro suddenly jerks backward with a shout.
“Fuck!” he yelps. “It bit me.”
For a moment she thinks he’s joking, teasing them for their alienish holiday suits, but then she sees a shiny red blotch on his forearm, skin scraped away. She gapes at it. The chef curses again, she apologizes, and they lapse into embarrassed silence during which Charlie glares at her, as if it’s her fault.
He pays Pedro extra when they get back to the dock.
They buy another bottle of wine, and by the time they go to bed they have forgiven each other. Charlie speculates that Pedro’s trailing arm might have been a sly attempt to grope her, in which case the holiday suit did well for itself. Maeve confides that she saw a cooler near the back of the boat, and that it was the perfect size to hold an octopus.
They agree, with their arms looped around each other, that you cannot call yourself an anarchist chef if you accept six different forms of digital currency.
“Should we try it with the suits on?” Charlie asks, with a mischievous smile. “What do you think it feels like?”
“Like condom all over, I expect,” Maeve says, reaching between his legs.
But when they entwine on the bed it’s much better than anticipated. The suits amp up every bit of tactile sensation, turn every touch into an electric storm. They fuck better than they have in ages.
The week passes in a joyous blur. They establish a miniature life for themselves—a Faroese life, Charlie declares it. Mornings are spent in their favorite cafe, sipping from steaming mugs of thick dark chocolate made all the sweeter by cacao’s impending extinction.
Afternoons are for the beach, where they spend hours on the flour-soft sand with no need for towel or parasol. Maeve imprints the tide on all her senses, relishing the spray and roar, the crash and scurry. Charlie leafs through a translated collection of poetry, and expounds on the difficulty of separating Neruda’s brilliance from his misogyny.
They sit in the surf and let the waves bathe their legs, let the flowing wet sand hollow out around them. Their holiday suits allow the cool water in but keep the sediment out. Once a bloated shark carcass washes up quite near to them, and Maeve is briefly reminded of Pedro’s minor injury.
When they are replete with filtered air and sunshine, they go back to town to explore its half-stocked shops, its small empty plazas, its historical nooks and crannies. Faro seems to grow more beautiful by the day. She no longer sees scrawny stray cats or panhandlers about, nor shuttered windows, nor decaying tenements.
She does see an occasional flicker in her peripheral, which reminds her of the tourist who vanished so neatly for them in the taverna that first day. But a few glitches are nothing to worry about.
They spend their final evening drinking cheap wine at their favorite restaurant, where a tired woman sometimes plays fado on her metal-stringed guitar, but not tonight. Then they walk their usual route through the Vila Adentro, so as to end up at the soaring stone cathedral. At night, in the jaundiced glow of solar lamps, it feels both beautiful and menacing.
“Which makes it very authentic,” Charlie slurs. “Very much in line with the mood—and character—of the Faroese.”
“Farenses,” Maeve says, before she can stop herself.
Charlie frowns. “What?”
“Faroese refers to the Faroe Islands,” Maeve says. “Not Faro, Portugal. People from here, they’d be Farenses, I believe.”
“I’ve been saying Faroese this whole week.” Charlie’s ears have gone lobster red. “You’ve been letting me say Faroese this whole week.”
Maeve blinks. “It doesn’t really matter that much.”
“Then why point it out now?”
“Just for future reference, I suppose.”
“You could have given me that future reference a week in the past.” Charlie’s cerulean eyes are narrowed. “But you thought it was funny. Seeing me make a fool of myself.”
Maeve folds her arms. “You’re only making a fool of yourself right now. You’re being fucking ridiculous.”
“I need to cool down,” Charlie announces. “I’ll be at the apartment.”
He turns and stalks away. Maeve is not fully surprised. Things have been souring since this morning, when they both agreed that having a child in the midst of the climate crisis, and its many co-crises, was unthinkable, but afterwards Charlie stared glumly at a cherubic toddler stumbling around the cafe.
Maeve walks around the corner of the cathedral, then heads toward the remnant of the Moorish castle. She would rather spend her final waking hours in Faro out here, in the dark electricity of evening, than inside the apartment with Charlie—who will apologize, but will also want to analyze his emotions, restate his position, et cetera.
She follows the crumbling stone wall to the marina, for a last look at the night-skinned sea.
Maeve finds a bench on the quay; the streaks of white bird shit give her pause for only a moment before she sits down, remembering that she is invincible. She stares out at the slow waves. The air is chilly at this hour, dipping toward ten degrees vis-a-vis the weather feed, but her holiday suit maintains a perfect equilibrium.
The moon is up, bright and swollen. She is trying to make out the craters when she hears a muffled noise from behind her. She knows Faro is safe, very safe, but she whirls around with her heart in her throat. The noise comes again, a strange soft warbling.
At first she sees nothing. Then she sees a sort of blur, like grease on a lens, which grows larger and larger. She realizes the noise is a faint voice, distorted, like someone singing underwater. She puts a hand to the membrane covering her face. The holiday suit must be glitching.
“Hello?” she calls.
The blur gets closer, and she catches a whiff of stale sweat, just the smallest tendril of scent threading inside her suit. Struck by sudden panic, by the urgent need to see, to hear, she tries to claw the membrane away from her face.
It obliges, slithering down her neck to free her head. For the first time, Maeve breathes Faro’s unfiltered air. The stench of fish and rot makes her eyes water, but even through her tears she can see much more clearly. The blur has become a young man with tattered clothes, dark eyes, his gaunt cheeks half-swallowed by overgrown beard.
“Ajude-me,” he says, reaching for her. “Acho que sou invisível.”
Maeve’s pulse is roaring too loudly for her to hear her earpods’ whispered translation. It’s the man who followed them that first day. The man who shouted. She realizes he has been following them all week, a feral cat waiting for the right moment to pounce.
“Acho que sou o Homem Invisível,” the man mumbles. “O do filme antigo. Ajude-me.”
He lunges forward and seizes her hand in both of his. Before Maeve can wrench it away, before she can scream at him to leave her alone, she feels a shudder go through the holiday suit. The man shrieks. Staggers.
Maeve stares at the dark spatter on the trash-strewn marina, at the spaces where the man’s fingers should have been. She moans. She pulls at the holiday suit, urging it up, up, to block out the hot coppery smell of—
“Sorry for going off in a huff,” Charlie says, when she steps inside the apartment. “I think I’m just a bit morose, because I didn’t want this trip to ever end.”
“It’s been really lovely,” Maeve agrees, thinking of stumps and screams.
“You were right about the holiday suits, too,” Charlie says. “Terrific investment.” He pauses. Smiles. “You finally found the color options. I figured there had to be.”
Maeve was picturing her schedule for the upcoming week, trying to think where she might be able to slot in a therapy session, but now she looks into the mirror hung beside the bed. Her holiday suit is a soft cloudy pink.
Rich Larson
Rich Larson was born in Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and is currently based in Canada. He is the author of the novels Annexand Ymir, as well as over two hundred and fifty short stories—some of the best of which can be found in his collections Tomorrow Factory, The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches, and his latest book, Changelog. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, among them Polish, French, Romanian and Japanese, and his Clarkesworld story “Ice” was adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.