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MANON CLOCKS IN and first thing, she has to rescue Megan’s head. In the gift shop, Dani is using it to play pickup basketball. Yoonchae is looking on, and, yes, Manon has to admit that its lightly rubbery synthetic skin and hollow skull-frame are well-suited to this, watching Dani score a bounce shot off a tower of split pink-and-green votive candles. But she has personal morals, so on the rebound, she snags it out of the air.
“Lame,” Dani says, giving her the work-appropriate finger (peace sign with the palm turned in; they’ve all been using it since Mitra announced that their Regrouping Era would include Periodic Reviews of Security Footage). Manon ignores her and focuses on Velcroing Megan’s wig back on, because any minute now, a family could rock up early for the 2 p.m. show. And if they are granola types from Silver Lake with screen-free kids who have not seen their recommended ten thousand TV murders, and those little tykes mush their drippy freckled noses up against the glass, this will be traumatizing as shit for them, therefore speed is the key if she does not want to end up back on Mitra’s Shame Wall.
Meanwhile Yoonchae goes quietly to straighten the mini hoop, which for copyright reasons bears a logo that is very similar to East High’s, but Is not exactly that. Specifically the wildcat is having some dental issues. Manon pushes her tongue around in her mouth, feeling her own clear aligners—another reason she should keep this job. She’s only a month in and the full course is pricey.
They need to get those hoops out of here. For one thing, every other day a school group is wrecking the gift shop playing H-O-R-S-E with one of the South Pacific palm-printed beach balls. Also, that’s not a Broadway musical.
Whatever. She sticks two fingers into Megan’s mouth and pops her dented left cheek back out, then hands her head off to Dani and says, “Go turn her on for a little bit.” Dani rolls her eyes, but she takes Megan’s head and heads for the backstage stairs and the slanted cupboard under them where they keep Megan’s body.
Manon does her standard pre-show walkthrough of the set, checking the fake fire escape for broken rungs and picking chewed gum out of the carpet in Sophia’s Bedroom. She scrubs two dicks and one pretty anatomically correct vulva—interesting; the kids are branching out—off the Subway Station’s tile. She straightens the letters on the Theater Exterior’s fake marquee, then goes up to the Shared Dressing Room and straightens the fake bottles of lotion and acetone and honey-lemon-ginger. Then she walks all the way back to the start and spends about ten minutes unknotting a complicated snarl in Sophia’s hair.
IN THE HALLWAY behind the Subway Station, Dani is sitting on an upturned bucket, scrolling on her phone while Megan belts out the last lines of “Tomorrow.” Megan is from their Previous Regrettable Era. When Manon started working here, mid-show the audioanimatronic cast would perform a full Broadway number, which, according to the cease-and-desist letters, they did not, per se, have the rights to.
Since Mitra’s retired Megan, they haven’t bothered to write over her library. So she has the original lyrics and not Mitra’s new ones—It’ll be day the day after today!
Manon’s job isn’t to read the slips of paper that pile up in the complaint box. When it gets full, they dump it and shred the slips into fake snow for Christmas shows. But she’s observed that it has been filling up pretty quickly lately. A month ago, Mitra cut the big mid-show number altogether.
Megan is finishing and holding the final note: a-wayyyyyy! When she throws her arms out, her right shoulder makes that weird grinding noise, but there’s no point in filing a Maintenance Order.
Without looking up, Dani tells her, “Great job.” Megan gives her a big, gummy missing-tooth smile.
Manon whacks Dani with the back of her hand and says, “Just clap, asshole." She claps. Megan beams brighter with all her available hydraulic cylinders. Dani brings her hands together exactly three times, loudly, then stands up and sends the empty bucket rattling across the floor. Dani is openly only working here to steal costumes for her ballroom dance competitions, but Manon is openly only working here because she and Dani briefly lived together, and way back in the day when Manon got burnt out on the modeling-for-Instagram thing, Dani was like, I can probably hook you up. Whatever. So.
Heading back towards the gift shop, Dani almost crashes into Yoonchae, who’s rounding the corner, carrying a big plastic bin of toy opera glasses and playbills.
“Hi, Megan.” Yoonchae is also polite to the audioanimatronics. As she passes Manon, she says, like she’s confiding in her, "Dani will be first up when they rebel."
"First against the wall."
"First against the wall,” Yoonchae repeats, nodding. Manon fist-bumps her.
"Incredibly depressing song choice, babe," she tells Megan, working her fingernail into the tiny flat screw that secures her head. Megan’s battery is in fact a huge electricity sink, so they only turn her on about once a week. And one of these days Mitra is going to find out, which will mean disassembly, probably, i.e., no Tomorrow.
"Thank you!" Megan says. Like most of the old cast, she has Limited Interactivity. Basically, she is capable of parsing some speech, but ninety-five percent of the time she will respond with one of her fifty pre-programmed Fun Facts. Manon can tell when this is about to happen because her machinery starts to make a soft whirring sound, like inside her head she has a—what’s the word?
Casting agent in a movie. Shoulder pads. Old-timey wheel of index cards.
Rolodex.
This time, Megan’s random number generator spits out #12, so she tells Manon, “On Broadway, we never say, Good luck!” This one has an accompanying gesture, wagging finger indicating major no-no. “We say, Break a leg!"
"Yeah, Meg, I know." When Manon pops Megan’s head off, her eyes snap closed. She tries to be gentle, setting it down on top of a box of old genie lamps, straightening her arms out and propping her body up beside it, against some mops. "Sleep tight."
Yes, the ceiling is low, and, yes, Megan must be stored upright in fully locked position to prevent joint degradation, and, yes, Megan is not a real eleven-year-old and it is only in Manon’s head that she can say things like, I want my mommy. And: Manon, it’s scary when I’m all alone in the dark. Manon still personally does not love this part of her job.
She tells herself it’s fine for Megan to stay powered off. She’s having good onstage or electric sheep dreams. She was Mitra’s only foray into kid animatronics; it’s not like they have a whole fifth-grade class for her to play robotic charades with out here. Also, Mitra phased her out in large part due to creeps. They’re never doing Annie. This fading mall is anchored by a dead Sears and an alive GameStop—very bad combo.
As it turns out the whole world is chock full of weird robot-fuckers. Manon did not know that before she started working here. She and Dani have debated pretty extensively what might lead to this phenomenon—for example, does it maybe start when a normal guy gets a little too attached to his Roomba? Are they made or born? Right now, Manon’s vote is on made. But instead of dwelling on it, she closes the door and goes to boot up Sophia.
THE CROWD FOR the 4 p.m. files into the switchback line, and Dani says, “Ugh, code pink,” meaning: Chris is here. Manon squints and finds him, wearing one of his custom T-shirts, which all have iron-on transfers of his own blown-up blurry photos of Sophia. This one has big hearts in puffy paint around her face. He comes to see the show four times a week. He is one of their aforementioned robot-fuckers, but is maybe in a class of his own due to being, like, seriously in love with her.
Weirdly, he is otherwise totally normal-looking. When he’s not doing this, he is a regular guy who works in medical device sales. Manon and Dani have stalked him extensively online. But they also get emails every week from his new burner accounts, asking if Sophia can be rented out for a private event. And Sophia was composite-modeled after four different Miss Saigons, but is still very obviously an animatronic with silicone skin.
All the bots are geo-locked due to teenage hooligans. At the sliding glass exit doors, their limbs lock at ninety-degree angles and they start to emit loud siren noises. They told Chris about this, and he was like, That won’t be a problem, thumbs-up emoji.
Dani was like, acrylic nails clacking against the keyboard, Yeah, still no dice, sicko. Huge sincere apologies. Love, Management, which earned her a write-up and her photo smack in the middle of Mitra's Shame Wall. Which Dani said she only cared about because every time she had to walk past it, she was like, Ew, why did I keep bleaching my hair.
Working with Dani is really not all bad. Like, one time, this fourteen-year-old mushed his full wad of watermelon Hubba Bubba into Sophia's hair. Dani climbed up into the catwalk over the Theater and spent an entire performance aiming spitballs into his broccoli cut, so that when the lights came back on, it looked like some freak localized blizzard had swept through Seat 26K. Mad props to Dani.
Dani is stationed in the gift shop, but the guests exit through there from the Shared Dressing Room, which is the last stop on the tour. So she has fifty-five minutes before she actually needs to do anything, and out of the corner of her eye, Manon can see her filming a dance TikTok in the narrow hallway that leads to Mitra’s office. Fuck Dani, actually.
Manon’s main job tonight is to collect tickets, perched on an uncomfortable high stool under the big Broadway West sign. BROADWAY WEST, it reads in fake black-on-white marquee tiles, and underneath, in cursive, The Stage, the Stars, the Songs…and You! At the moment this is about twenty-five percent accurate, fifty percent if you count just any stage as The Stage, which is probably fair because they are in a two-story space in a mall in Santa Monica.
Broadway West was Mitra’s fourth or fifth name idea. At one point she wanted to call it Theater Dreamscape, and then the Great Golden Way. As in, Great White Way meets gold rush. “Stream of piss,” said Mitra’s fourteen-year-old nephew—really solid kid, actually. So: Broadway West, which is boring and also gives people the false impression that they’re going to see a Broadway show. If they ask about that at the ticket counter, Manon is supposed to say something like, We recommend that guests go in blind and prepare for a surprise!
The gift shop is walled off in glass, so once they’ve exited, they can’t get to her. Sometimes they actually start pounding on it with their fists.
Chris is last in line because he’s brought pink roses for Sophia and wants to watch Manon cram them into the employee mini-fridge. God forbid the flowers are wilted when the robot gets them. Usually at the end of the night, Manon gives his flowers to Yoonchae; she thinks Yoonchae takes them home and gives them to her mom.
BASICALLY THE SHOW is one long linear track. Sophia can walk, but it has proved more reliable to just screw her rubber feet onto clear acrylic bicycle pedals. For this reason the shag carpet in the Bedroom set is hilariously thick, and Mitra has compensated for this by going with a sort of saturated seventies orange-and-pink dreamhouse theme in what is otherwise a precise replica of a shitty mid-oughts apartment. Through special tubes in the walls, they pipe in faux ambient soundscapes of Hell’s Kitchen: taxi cabs honking and a guy down on the street yelling at pigeons.
It's really not clear what year this is supposed to be taking place in. Sophia has a princess phone but is also wearing sweatpants and sneakers. Some of the ads in the Subway Station were very retro until Mitra pulled them all down; for example, there was a big one for the P’Zone.
The show’s starting now and Manon can hear Sophia introducing herself to the audience, telling them earnestly how she moved to New York City two years ago. In the Bedroom scene, she explains her lifelong Broadway-star dream and also her whole deal. Then she takes questions. Some joker is always like, Do you know you’re a robot? It’s either someone’s dad or a twelve-year-old boy.
Sophia is programmed to smile and say, I don’t get what that has to do with Broadway! Manon wishes she could instead do a cartoon spit-take—grape juice or something, maybe aimed at the guy. She just thinks it would be funny.
Yoonchae is the Assigned Handler for this tour, but Manon has to stick around just in case they end up needing her. She’s a pretty decent singer; she has okay range. In the chart behind Mitra’s desk she is labeled “Good/Passable.” So when an audioanimatronic is on the fritz they will sometimes stick her into the back of the Vocal Rehearsal. In the Choreo Rehearsal that comes after, they sometimes use Dani.
It’s kind of fun. Manon likes watching people try to figure out if she’s real.
For two weeks last fall one of the three Subway Riders kept breaking down, hollering its line (“THE EXPANSION OF THE SUBWAY SYSTEM LED TO AN INFLUX OF NEW THEATERGOERS!”—every part of the show has to have some educational value, since so much of their business comes from field-tripping middle schoolers) over and over. So Manon spent eight days riding in that fake car. When she was not delivering that line with incredible conviction, she spent the time seeing what she could get away with: fully sleeping, yes, graffitiing DANIELA ANDREA AVANZINI LLORENTE WAS HERE onto the plastic seatback, yes, pretending to shoot up with one of the leftover set-building caulk syringes, NO, NO, NO!
Manon was like, But it was period-accurate, digging deep into her powers of free-word association to come up with verisimilitude. It was educational. It was a reference; it was, like, Jimi Hendrix. Sophia had to have been stoned when she picked out that shag carpet. She has a fucking pink lava lamp.
Mitra was like, That was the sixties, dumbass, I remember because I was forty-five back then, too. Okay, not precisely. Mitra was like, This experience is timeless and family-friendly, and the cursing was also very inappropriate; this is your last warning, et cetera, et cetera. After that, Dani had to play the Subway Rider and flashed Manon the V every evening, walking onto the set. Whatever. The simulated rattling had made Manon’s teeth ache in her jaw, anyway.
The lobby is quiet again, so Sophia has finished with the Q&A. Now she’ll be leading the group down onto the City Street. From there they go to the Subway Station, then into the Theater.
In the story of the show, Sophia is only an understudy—but this is okay, she explains, because it’s her first Broadway role EVER! Back when they used to do the mid-show number, Sophia would have a bit part; they would do a freeze-frame thing, where she got to pop out and wave and explain who was who. In the ending scene, one of the animatronics--or sometimes Yoonchae if things are not going smoothly—trots into the Shared Dressing Room and tells Sophia that Lara is sick and won’t be able to go on. “Oh my god!” Sophia says, eyes huge, hand over her mouth. Cut the lights.
This is a routine disappointment and all the reviews complain—kids were very disappointed; why didn’t we get to hear her sing? The real answer is that the good vocal package is expensive. For better or for worse, Mitra sprang for it for Lara. That choice has never made that much sense to Manon, even back when they used to use Lara outside of the Vocal Rehearsal.
They do four shows a day. Four times, Sophia finds out she’ll live her dream. Then the lights cut out, and Manon comes in to power her down and wheel her right back to the start of the track. This is great and fun and doesn’t remind her of anything.
WHEN THE CURTAIN goes down after the 6 p.m., Manon unscrews Sophia’s feet from the pedals. Sophia follows her obediently and a little creakily backstage—not the Backstage set but the real corridor that connects the wings of the Theater. It is extremely narrow. Since they stopped doing full numbers, no one comes back here.
In the dark her skin looks a lot softer and much less plasticky. “Rehearsal Mode,” Manon says, unbuttoning her jeans.
"Passphrase, please.” Sophia says this in the voice of an elderly British woman, which is always freaky, and Manon does not know why she is programmed to do that, actually.
"Stellar Tiara.” Manon did not get to pick that, okay? It was assigned to her by Mitra, on the basis that Manon looks like one of her niece’s princess dolls. Sophia spasms slightly and then snaps into her default position: spine straight, knees locked, arms at her sides. Wide, blank eyes. Friendly, non-threatening closed-mouth smile.
“Okay,” Manon says. Sophia’s object-recognition software has probably picked up by now on how Manon is taking off her clothes, and outside of Rehearsal Mode would prompt her to say something like, I think quick changes are so cool! Or, Guys, let’s make sure we’re all sticking to the posted policies! Which actually do not say anything specific about this, and are mostly designed to prevent people from spilling drinks on her. “Oklahoma!, the first scene, but just the blocking.” She has to specify so that Sophia does not also start delivering her lines, which are mostly about something called a box social.
Sophia is obviously not built to fuck, but she does have this butter-churning subroutine, which involves a repetitive motion that vibrates the solenoid at the base of her palm. Also a two-fingered scoop-and-inspect thing. It gets the job done. The whole time, Manon has to be holding her hand in place, but she’s had to do that with real human men and women she’s met on Tinder.
It’s never that great, but this time it’s really not great. Sophia’s wrist joint feels loose, and also, as Manon comes, Sophia glitches and blurts, “OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN BRINGING THEATER TO MIDTOWN!” very loudly into her ear.
Depressingly, Manon has not been having a lot of sex outside of this, not since she had her quarter-life crisis of consciousness and cut off all her influencer friends in the name of, like, authenticity. Which makes her current situation so fucking ironic that she should have been name-checked in that song. At least Sophia was composite-modeled after four different Miss Saigons, all grown women, and beyond that Manon is not trying to, like, marry her. At the end of the day, this is just a lot easier than bringing a vibrator.
“Thanks,” Manon tells her, pulling up her zipper. When the animatronics rebel she won’t be first against the wall. When Sophia achieves full sentience and free will, she’ll be like, Manon, when you were using me to get off, you were always really polite to me.
“You’re welcome!” Sophia says, smiling hugely. “Are you enjoying the tour?”
In theory she should know that Manon is a handler, but this feature has never worked correctly..
“No,” Manon says. She’s trying to inspect her reflection in Sophia’s glassy eyechips, but it’s not easy in the dark. “I’m dissatisfied as a customer.”
“Oh no!” Sophia’s expression shifts to one of incredible concern. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Manon says. She cracks her knuckles. “I’ll just go home and kill myself.” Mitra’s told her twice now to stop telling the animatronics this all the time.
Sophia is programmed not to respond affirmatively to concrete expressions of suicidal ideation—as in, that is literally printed word-for-word in her manual. So if Manon says, Sophia, I am going to stick a fork in a socket, Sophia will tell her, Electric lighting ushered in a new age on Broadway!
This time, Sophia just juts her bottom lip out sympathetically. Then for some reason she autonomously initiates Pre-Show Jitters, which is an old movement sequence in which she paces in nervous circles, stopping periodically to say things like, “Oh my god, SO many butterflies.” Manon lets that run for about forty-five seconds, and then powers her down and wheels her back to the start of the track.
MANON STILL HAS twenty minutes before she needs to be in place for the final show, so she leaves and makes it to the Auntie Anne’s on the mezzanine just before it closes and leans over the railing and picks all the salt off a soft pretzel. Sometimes she uses this time to walk around the vacant Sears and think about what she would do in a zombie apocalypse scenario. For one thing she would not have to do this stupid fucking job. The sheer relief from that could probably buoy her through all the gross lurching, hitting a zombie with a metal rod pulled from one of these empty clothing racks and potentially getting its disgusting blood and brain matter on her jeans, all of it.
Some of the overhead lights are burnt out and it’s making the air velvety. The railing she’s leaning on is casting long shadows onto the tile floor.
They turn off all the lights in the rest of the mall at eight, so the last group of ticketholders must stumble towards the parking lot in the dark, banging into sunglasses kiosks and discarded Hollister model standees. Already this month they had a kid knock out his two front teeth on one of the seaglass-studded planters. Dani went the next afternoon to see whether his teeth were still there, sticking out of the concrete. They weren’t, but there was a brown smudge of dried blood across the base
Manon doesn’t mind her breaks in the liminal twilight zone of the mall—twilight zone in the sense of a zone where it’s twilight, but since she’s about to go back to fucking robotland, maybe also like the TV show. She hasn’t watched the TV show. When she returns, it’s to a bunch of, like, Victorian orphan children huddled up to the gift-shop glass. It’s way after school hours but they have to field one more field trip, somehow.
Still, Manon is feeling slightly more relaxed, licking the last of the salt from her fingers. Until her phone vibrates in the pocket of her jeans, and when she fishes it out, the screen lets her know that it’s Mitra, who never calls her.
She lifts the phone to her ear and hears what Mitra splutters mostly as radio static. It's come to my attention—static. Reviewing the footage from home…A long interval of static. Highly, highly inappropriate purposes. Huh, Manon thinks absently. She added cameras. Now she feels completely relaxed, maybe the calmest she’s felt in years, because it’s sunk in that Mitra is firing her.
“Okay,” she says. “Got it. I’m going home.” She hangs up the phone. She tucks it back into her pocket and walks very calmly into Mitra’s office, which she should really keep locked, and opens all her desk drawers. Somewhere in here is Lara’s old vocal repertoire on a USB drive. She searches calmly until she finds it. The clamor coming from the lobby means that Yoonchae has almost finished collecting tickets. Why not go out with a bang.
Manon goes back out and, over Yoonchae’s soft continuing objections, ushers the whole crowd through the back employee entrance into the Theater. “Just sit down,” she tells them. “You can sit wherever.” The seats closest to the stage release little clouds of dust when their red velour cushions snap down. They leave those empty, usually. You can see the seams and ball joints from there.
“Yoonchae!” she calls. “I really need a spotlight!” Yoonchae is standing in helpless silhouette at the top of the aisle. “Come on, please!”” Yoonchae wavers for a second with her hand on the doorframe, chewing on her lip, then disappears in the direction of the narrow metal stairs that lead to the lighting booth. She’s really a good kid. Manon’s known that the whole time.
They can keep the curtain down if they just stick Sophia downstage center. “Hold on,” Manon tells the restless crowd, and shoves her way past miles of velvet. She has to drag Sophia through all the sets: the Bedroom, the City Street, the Subway Station. She is walking fast and almost running and at the same time trying to get her nails wedged under Sophia’s scalp panel, to pry it up and get the USB stick into one of the ports there. She can’t get the plate to close over it so she just leaves it hanging open. Sophia’s hair will hide it, kind of. She powers her on.
“Stellar Tiara.” She doesn’t wait for the British guy. It works; great. She thought Mitra might have been able to disable that remotely. Sophia’s eyes do a weird little shivering thing in their sockets. She’s processing. “Pick any song,” Manon tells her. “You’re on.”
Sophia’s head, for the first time ever, makes that same Rolodex whirring sound. Lara is powered off, slumped against the risers behind them. She can’t go on.
"It's your big break, babe,” Manon thumps Sophia on the back. She wishes Sophia weren’t in her rehearsal clothes. “You're the star.”
“That’s my dream,” Sophia tells her. Sometimes she sounds really unnervingly human. “My whole life.”
“Yeah, I know,” Manon says, and hauls back the curtain and sends her stumbling forward onto the stage, just as Yoonchae in the booth figures out how to work the light.
A confused murmur rises from the crowd. Some of them are repeat customers, i.e., they know that this is not how it’s supposed to go. Manon could not have asked them to do a better job, really. At this point in the movie, Sophia would gulp, but Sophia can’t feel doubt.
Sophia’s programming kicks in. She opens her mouth.
The sound that comes forth is so wrong due to many factors that Manon did not account for; it does not come natural, and also, she is playing two tracks at once, and not in stereo. Manon needed to wipe her or something. She’s pulling from two song banks. One Manon vaguely recognizes as being from Wicked. The other she’s never heard before.
The tracks are clashing and the hinges of Sophia’s jaw are working and the sound is echoing in the hollow parts of her head. Her frame is really not equipped to handle this range. The silicone stretched over her jaw is straining. Her mouth can’t split wide enough to belt;
And the formerly bored fourth-graders are frozen rapt in their seats and their gappy mouths are hanging open. And they are rising to their feet. And they are staring to clamor. Their teachers are barely trying to quiet them; they’re just as stunned. Yoonchae’s lost control of the spotlight or is just swinging it wildly, sweeping the stage and the audience and the painted-plaster arch of the proscenium. Manon is watching it all through the gap in the curtains. In Sophia’s chest the machinery’s grinding, pulling her aluminum ribcage in all directions.
This is what Mitra wanted. This is what they’ve been waiting for. They love her like nothing they’ve ever been shown before. Manon really wishes Chris were here. One of Sophia’s porcelain teeth shatters and the fragments spray the stage, and the crowd roars. All their lives they’ve been longing for something brand new.
IN THE GIFT shop, three little truants are whacking each other with plastic rapiers and Dani is watching a TikTok on loop of a man slipping on ice and cackling like a lunatic, leaning over the register. On the main monitor behind her, the blurry black-and-white crowd is just starting to riot. The security cam footage runs on a ninety-second delay.
Manon is staggering a little under sixty-five pounds of slack hydraulics, with Megan’s detached head in the crook of her elbow. They all turn to stare at her.
“I got fucking canned by Mitra,” she tells Dani. “So I’m out of here.” She feels even calmer, adjusting Megan’s weight in her arms so she can give the kids the very work-inappropriate finger.
Dani’s mouth opens and then closes pneumatically. “Shit,” she says, and comes around the counter to put her arms around her. By extension she’s hugging Megan, Megan’s arms and torso jackknifed over Manon’s shoulder. “Gross,” she says, recoiling. “Why is she so sticky?” Megan’s silicone skin is admittedly breaking down a little. God, Manon is really going to miss her.
The kids are still big-eyed and past the glass doors the mall is pitch dark. Manon can just barely make out the curled lines of the dried-up palm tree in its planter. She stops just past the exit, once she’s standing not on their faux-weathered floorboards but slick brown tile.
The white halogen lights are still hot against the backs of her shoulders. She tucks Megan’s head under her arm. She turns around. She spits her Invisalign out and it splats wetly against the laminate. Sayonara, fuckers. Worth it. She takes a bow.