Page 116 of Breaking the Dark

Who’ll look after the ill?

And that’s the thing, if everyone is good at something, if they look in the mirror and love what they see, if they lift the lid of a piano and play beautiful music, if they look into the sky and see nothing but beauty and wonder and joy, then that will feed into the jobs that they do. There will be no resentment in the world of Miranda.

Obviously, every brave new world has to find its feet, there’ll be teething pains, cracks in the walls. It’s not quite perfect yet, Polly knows that. But this is it now, Miranda is here, and by the end of the night it will be as ubiquitous a word as Apple, as Google, as Netflix. It will be, if it is not already, the most important development the world has ever seen.

Polly thinks of the girls in the cellars as heroines, not victims. What a chance they have been given, what a role they are playing, their parents should be proud, their parents will be proud.

She goes to the app on her phone, and she presses Launch Miranda. The Miranda logo appears huge on the screen, the crowd goes silent.

It’s happening.

FORTY-FOUR

MANHATTAN LOOKS LIKE abstract art at this speed, random streaks of red, gold, white, amber, people’s faces stretched and contorted into snapshots of shock and awe, snatched fragments of voices—“Hey, lady,” “What the…?” “Holy shit”—as she passes, her legs white hot, her chest burning, her nostrils stinging with the ferocity of the air being inhaled and exhaled, her throat tight and hard as she yells out to people in her path, “Move it,” “Move!” “Out of my way!” Her eyes stream and her nose runs. Her blood feels viscous, her breath feels acidic. All of her hurts, all of her stings—

And then there is the park in front of her, and a snatched glimpse of a clock on a building tells her it is 6:53, she has a mile and a half to go, she picks up her speed, makes her body work harder, harder than it’s ever worked, she’s never run this far before, and she’s never run with another human being buried inside her soft, gentle spaces and she talks to her daughter as she goes. I’m doing this for you, she says, I’m doing this for you.

She sees the swell of a small crowd ahead of her, sees it growing bigger, ribbons of people heading in from all sides of the park and she knows that she is only just in time and as she nears the summer stage, as she finally slows and feels her engorged heart throbbing under her ribs, her pitiful lungs heaving as they slow, she looks and sees a screen and on that screen she sees a woman’s face and it is the most beautiful face she has ever seen. She is captivated for a second, until the woman on the screen opens her mouth and says the words:

“Hands up—who wants to be perfect?!”

A thousand hands with cell phones in them go up, and then from the left side of the stage a small figure appears, and the crowd goes berserk. She’s wearing a mask and a hat. She has long blond hair and is wearing fitted leather boots to her knees, tight trousers, and a voluminous pink puffer coat.

“Good evening, Manhattan!” says the tiny woman. “My name is Polly, and for the last ten years, I have been working to create something that would change this world for the better. Something that would give back to the world, something extraordinary. There has been blood, sweat, and tears over the last ten years. There have been sacrifices along the way…a lot of sacrifices…. But isn’t that always the way with anything that changes the world?…And this is up there with penicillin, with the internet, with air travel, with anesthesia…. In fact, it’s not just up there, it’s more than all of them put together…. An app that turns a human being into an ideal version of themselves…and you want to know the best thing about it, everyone? You already have it in your phones! Yes, the app you downloaded when you scanned the QR code for this event has automatically upgraded your devices and given you access to a world of beauty and wonder. Belle and Miranda. So, enough talk. Tell me again—who wants to be perfect?!”

The crowd yells, a sea of open faces beaming into the light of the oversized screen, where the huge face of a woman named Miranda smiles beatifically.

Jessica is stultified for a moment, some still-damaged neuron in her brain somewhere remembering the sound of those words in her ears a week ago, and now she remembers that it was not Debra’s voice she heard that night as she tried to take Belle away, but it was this voice. It was Polly’s voice. It was her touch against her skin, Polly who turned a phone to face them both and said (the unearthed memory hits her like a freight train) “Let’s take a selfie,” and it was she who pressed the button to create that flash, that bloodred burn in her eyes, that whoosh of darkness and dread before all fell quiet, before she became a perfect, pointless simulacrum of a human being, a mannequin, a blob.

It wasn’t Debra, it was Polly. The second woman that Cassandra Webb said she saw in her memories. The young woman. And Polly is Miranda. And Polly has a thousand young souls in her thrall here tonight and Jessica cannot allow herself to be one of them, she cannot. She forces her way through this crowd, using too much strength, hurting people as she goes, but she can’t let this happen. She storms the stage where Polly stands in the beam of a single light and she rips away Polly’s mask, snatches away her dark glasses.

She sees the shocked flicker of recognition in Polly’s eyes and then a flash of excitement.

“Ha,” says Polly. “It’s you!” She turns to face her audience, theatrically. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says. “Look who it is. It’s Jessica Jones, your local super hero, who has come here tonight to…?”

“If you use this app,” Jessica says to the crowds, “people are going to die.”

Polly laughs uproariously. “Yeah,” she says. “Right.”

“Do not use this app. Reset your phones. Get this app off your phones. Do not use this app. Please. Just don’t listen to this woman. She’s a psychopath. She’s—”

But as she says this, Polly lifts her own phone to her face, turns it to the front camera, takes a selfie, and then moves the phone away.

Jessica looks at her and gasps. Polly’s face has changed. She is taller, leaner; she looks exactly like the woman on the screen behind her.

She has turned herself into Miranda.

The crowd gasps too.

“Do you see that? Do you see that?” Polly yells. “Look,” she says, turning her face this way and that. “Look what this app can do. This isn’t a trick. This isn’t a scam. This is real. You’ve seen it now, with your own eyes. And it’s on your phones. You have it. All you have to do is take a selfie. It’s that simple. Take a selfie and you will look like you always wanted to look. But wait!” She pauses, eyes the crowd playfully. “Beauty comes at a cost. If you like the results, and you want more, you will need to download the newest version of Miranda. For $24.99, you get…”

The crowd is already starting to use their phones. Jessica screams “STOP” but the crowd ignores her. While Jessica yells, a thousand other people are holding up their phones and smiling into them, a resounding shutter click reverberates through the park, a thousand faces on a thousand screens, pouts, puckers, thumbs-up, horn signs, protruding tongues, winks, awkward grimaces, and gangster poses.

Click.

Flash.

It is done.

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