And then there’s the Face. Who is a nobody, a real person, who comes and takes your place at the table. They get an education, the best health care, a salary, all the nice clothes and all the same toys that you get. They get your parents whenever the Olds’ team decides there’s a need or an opportunity. If you go online, or turn on the TV, there they are, being you. Being better than you will ever be at being you. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you have to be careful, or you’ll start to feel very strange. Is that really you?

Most politicians have Faces, too. For safety. Because it shouldn’t matter what someone looks like, or how good they are at making a speech, but of course it does. The difference is that politicians choose to have their Faces. They choose.

The Olds like to say it’s because we’re children. We’ll understand when we’re older, when we start our adult lives without blemish, without online evidence of our mistakes, our indiscretions. No sexytime videos. No embarrassing photos of ourselves in Nazi regalia or topless in Nice. No footage before the nose job, before the boob job, before the acne clears up.

The Olds get us into good colleges, and then the world tilts just for a moment. Our Faces retire. We get a few years to make our own mistakes, out in the open, and then we settle down, and we come into our millions or billions or whatever. We inherit the earth, like that proverb says. The rich shall inherit the earth.

We get married, merge our money with other money, im prove our Q ratings, become Olds, acquire kids, and you bet your ass those kids are going to have Faces, just like we did.

I never got into the Egyptian thing the way the girls did. I always liked the Norse gods better. You know. Loki. The slaying of Baldur. Ragnarok.

None of the other guys showed up for ’s party. It’s just their Faces. The guys all left for the moon about a week ago. They’ve been partying up there all week. I’ve never been into the space travel thing. Plenty of ways to have fun without leaving the planet.

It wasn’t hard to get hold of the thing I was looking for. Darius couldn’t help me, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about. We met in Las Vegas, because why not? We saw a show together, and then we went online and watched a video that had been filmed in his lab. Somewhere in Moldova, he said. He said his name was Nikolay.

I showed him my video. The one I’d made for the party for ’s pyramid dedication thingy.