The Caryatids

Radmila did a celebrity signing, for a crowd-drawing star turn by a local idol was strictly required. She briefly graced an assembly of forty local top game players, who were being feted and petted. These gaming champs were mostly scrawny, scampering male teens: leapers, stunters, backflippers, window climbers...They looked and dressed very much like Lionel Montalban, their beloved pop idol.

Radmila signed commemorative books, handed out prizes, allowed them a lingering touch of her star-spangled feudal robe. Stars were the linchpin of this effort. No everyday landlord would dare to sue a major star. The costs in bad publicity and lost public goodwill were much bigger costs than simply accepting the fate of dead buildings.

The Montgomery-Montalbans had always been very big on new construction: Toddy had been genially ribbon-cutting for years. The violent smashing of defunct buildings was, by contrast, one of Radmila's personal specialties.

Toddy was no longer there to advise with show production, and her steadying, classic hand was sorely missed. Radmila's carnival would briskly smash three damaged buildings in a mere hour and a half: a ten-story former insurance building in Central City, a twelve-story hotel on Figueroa, and an adjoining mall.

The Family had piled on the effects with a lavish hand, but not a sure one.

It was late August, and in the dog-day Greenhouse heat, Radmila's dance costume showed a lot of her skin. "Never forget," Toddy would have said, "that in show business, we women have to show." Radmila did not mind showing her body to her public-that was what she built her body for-but to cut big flesh-baring holes in electronic costuming seriously damaged the integrity of the performance garment.

Radmila's signature stagecraft involved split-second performance stunts, a superhuman proof-of-concept best held in upscale venues like Sacramento's California State Legislature. The Family-Firm had gained enormous political capital through being publicly superhuman.

Still, the collapsing buildings were the real stars of an effort like this. Collapsing buildings overwhelmed any stunt any mere actress could do. The overblown demolition machinery that smashed the buildings supplied the coup de grace of urban spectacle. Of course they were not mere dynamite or wrecking balls, they had to be obligatory monstrous stage props. The latest mechanism of destruction had been designed for the Family-Firm by Frank Osbourne. Osbourne, like many Angeleno architects, was enamored of set design and sincerely hated all premodern buildings. He loved to see real-estate leveled.

Osbourne's writhing and rambling urban destroyer had been first designed within an immersive world as a popular hallucination. Still, the toy physics in a modern sealed immersive play world were almost identical to the genuine stress dynamics of real-world architecture. So Osbourne's game contraption worked: it stepped seamlessly out of the immersive play world, into the real-world streets of Los Angeles, and it smashed things.

Osbourne's walking anti-city burned ethanol and ran on three wiggling accordion legs of crystal-steel rebar and nanocarbon cable. Since he'd built only one of these monster devices, it naturally looked like nothing else on Earth. The gamer crowds were delighted to see Osbourne's monster in action. They were used to playing with monsters. They no longer drew distinctions between immersive games and the city streets. Advances in modern entertainment had erased those notions.

The air still stank of the newly doused urban fires when Radmila's twenty backup dancers filed onto their metal stage-a stage bracketed on top of Osbourne's walking monster. The dancers had slightly puppetlike dance steps, for they were following immersive cues.

The cue arrived for her obligatory labors. Radmila bounded onto the stage, with the urban-scale version of her signature entry track. The racket was audible for blocks around.

A flurry of aerial stage lights followed her as she shimmied through her paces. The city wrecker rose beneath her feet like a thrill ride. Its snaky legs slithered, buckled, wriggled. It clomped the cracked sidewalks with the tread of doom.

With its complex, gripping feet and its unstable tentacle legs, Osbourne's city wrecker could walk straight up the sides of buildings. When it did this, the tripod's stage tipped and dropped like a falling elevator. That fluttered the floating veils of the backup dancers.

Of course all this dramatic stunting was entirely safe, since it had been simulated a million times within immersive worlds. Still, a city-crushing metal monster looked very remarkable in daylight, especially if one was ten years old.