Out There: Stories

by Kate Folk

Genres: Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad).

“Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading.”—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble

FINALIST FOR THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews

With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection. 

Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

Release date: March 29, 2022

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 245

Sample

Out There

I was putting myself out there. On my return to San Francisco from a gloomy Thanksgiving with my mother in Illinois, I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other dating apps I’d seen Instagram ads for. I was thirty, too young to accept a life void of excitement, romance, and perhaps, eventually, the lively antics of a child. I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day, and to make an effort to message the few I matched with. I was picky enough that this seemed not wholly absurd. It would be like a new workout routine, a daily regimen to forestall a future of more permanent aloneness, and enjoy my relative youth in the meantime.

I’d never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the same way you’d order pizza or an Uber. Such a method seemed to reduce love to another transaction. I had always felt it catered to lazy, unimaginative people. A worthy man would be out in the world doing things, not swiping on women’s pictures in his dim apartment, like a coward. To further complicate matters, it was estimated that men on dating apps in the city were now 50 percent blots. But what choice did I have? Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days. After my last breakup, I spent a while “letting something happen,” which meant doing nothing. Years passed and nothing did happen, and I realized that without my intervention, my hand pushing against the warm back of fate, it was possible nothing ever would. In the end, it seemed to come down to never dating again, or taking the chance of being blotted. Though I supposed there had always been risks.

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The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing. Their skin was smooth and glowing, and they were uniformly tall and lean. Jawlines you could cut bread with. They were the best-looking men in any room, and had no sense of humor.

I met one of these early blots several years ago. My friend Peter had invited me to a dinner party hosted by a tech founder he’d grown up with in the Sunset District, and with whom he’d once followed the band Phish around the country, selling nitrous and poppers to concertgoers. Peter and I didn’t really hang out, beyond the meetings we attended in church basements for people who no longer drank. But I was bored, and it was a free dinner, and Peter made it sound like he’d already asked a bunch of other people who’d said no, which took some of the pressure off.

At dinner, I sat next to a guy named Roger. He had the telltale blot look—high forehead, lush hair, shapely eyebrows—but I didn’t recognize him for what he was, because the blot phenomenon hadn’t yet been exposed. Roger was solicitous, asking about my family, my work as a teacher, and my resentment toward the tech industry. When I declined the server’s offer of wine, Roger’s golden eyes flared with recognition, and he asked if I was in recovery. I said yes, for five years at that point, and he nodded gravely, saying he admired my commitment to this lifestyle; his dear aunt was also sober.

Roger seemed eager to charm, but I was not charmed. I felt spotlighted by his attentiveness, his anticipation of what I might want—another helping of fava bean salad, more water, an extra napkin when I dropped a chunk of braised pork on my skirt. I would say something self-deprecating, and he’d regard me steadily and assure me that I was a wonderful person, deserving of all I wanted from life, which wasn’t what I’d been asking for. Roger didn’t know me and wasn’t a credible judge of my worth—unless his position was that all people had worth, which made him no judge at all. When I shifted the subject to him, he supplied a backstory that seemed pre-written.

“I came from ranchland in the northern United States,” he told me. “My father was stern but loving, in his way. My mother is a wonderful woman who raised the four of us into strong, capable adults. My childhood was not without hardship, but these adversities shaped me into the person I am today. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, land of innovation and possibility. I am grateful for the life I’ve been given, and I know it is thanks to the people who have loved and supported me on the journey.”

I forced a chuckle of acknowledgment. “Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”

As I drove Peter back to the Richmond District in my decrepit Corolla, he revealed that his friend, the event’s host, had sprinkled the dinner party with blots.

“Blots?”

“It’s an acronym for something,” Peter said. “They’re biomorphic humanoids. The latest advancement in the field of tactile illusion.” He paused. “Fake people,” he added.

I concealed my shock, not wanting to give Peter the satisfaction. “So you invited me to be the subject of a Turing test for some company’s new product, without compensation,” I said.

“You got a free dinner, didn’t you?”

“Well, he was boring,” I said. “And too handsome. I hate guys like that.”

“Handsome guys?”

“Yeah. I’m not attracted to them.”

Peter said he hoped I’d written all this on the comment card that had been distributed with the gelato, which asked me to rate my dinner companions’ various attributes. I’d given Roger all fives, out of habit, and in retrospect I was glad not to have aided the blot revolution with my honest feedback.

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The blots were originally designed to perform caretaking jobs that necessitated a high level of empathy. They were meant to work in hospices and elder-care centers, tending to people who were suffering and who would soon die. Such jobs were typically low-paying, and it would be better, more ethical, so the thinking went, to place blots in those roles. They would do a fine job, and then after a few months they’d dematerialize, their corporeal presence dissipating into a cloud of vapor.

But aside from a few elite facilities, hospitals weren’t able to invest in the blot program, which was prohibitively expensive and unpopular among donors. The families who could afford top-flight medical care didn’t like the idea of their loved ones being cared for by blots, even when it was shown that blots performed these tasks more effectively than humans. Soon blot technology was appropriated by a Russian company, and blots were employed in illegal activities—most commonly, identity fraud. Blots began using dating apps to target vulnerable women. It happened to my friend Alicia, last summer.

“Friend” is a term I use loosely. Alicia was someone I knew from the recovery community. We sometimes went out for food after a meeting, and it was on such an occasion, six months ago, that Alicia told us about her experience with a blot named Steve. I already suspected Alicia had been blotted, because her Facebook profile had engaged me in eerie conversation a few weeks earlier. I have always admired your shoes, she messaged me, late one night, and I thought at first that she’d relapsed and was taking the opportunity to insult me.

Five of us were out at a diner on Geary, a place we liked even though the food was overpriced and bad. Alicia ordered a chocolate milkshake—like a child, I thought—and recounted the ordeal. Steve had proposed they go on a weekend trip to Big Sur, after just a few weeks of dating. This was textbook blot, a red flag Alicia should have recognized. Blots always wanted to go to Big Sur, where cell service was spotty, to give themselves some lead time with the victim’s data. They’d lavish a woman with praise, rich food, and vigorous sex, and then in the middle of the night they’d steal the data stored in her phone, copy her credit card info, and disappear with a voluptuous “bloop” sound, like a raindrop hitting the floor of a metal bucket, a cloud of lavender-scented vapor all that remained.

“I woke up and he was gone,” Alicia said. “The room smelled great, though.”

Alicia canceled her credit cards immediately, but the blot had hacked her laptop and changed all her passwords. It took months to untangle Steve’s work. His tactics were vindictive, and strangely intimate. He’d sent personalized emails to everyone in her contact lists, exploiting every scrap of personal information Alicia had divulged over the weeks they’d dated. On her Facebook page, he posted provocative selfies she’d sent to him or kept on her phone. We had all seen these photos—Alicia, in a lace bralette and thong, posing in a full-length mirror in the dingy shared bathroom of her apartment, her back arched at what looked like a painful angle to showcase her ass.

At the diner, Alicia framed herself as a woman with a hard-won ounce of wisdom. “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” she said, then kept sucking air through her milkshake straw. I nodded along with the others, thinking that Alicia was an idiot. Steve had not even done a good job of concealing his blot identity, and she’d fallen for it anyway, clinging to the hope that her time had finally come.

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Blot technology continued to advance. They were now said to be programmed with more complex psychological profiles, overt flaws, and varied physical characteristics, which made detection increasingly difficult. Blots were always male, because their original creators believed that male blots would more easily convey authority, minimizing the risk of sexual exploitation by unscrupulous hospital employees. I didn’t want to join Alicia among the ranks of the blotted, so I was vigilant as I chatted with men on the apps.

A few weeks into my new routine, I matched with Sam. His profile was brief and inoffensive, referencing his love of yoga, backpacking, and seeing live music. He worked for a tech company, something about firewalls. I wasn’t sure what those were, and he didn’t care to explain. It’s just a job, he wrote, then changed the subject to bands he wanted to see.

On our first date, we went to a Thai restaurant near my house. Sam was tall and reasonably attractive, but not in the polished, male-model blot way. His body was thick, shoulders broad beneath his black denim jacket. His brown hair reached his shoulders, and his face was covered in a patchy beard that seemed incidental, as if he’d simply run out of razors one day and been too lazy to buy more.

Sam brooded over the menu. I proposed that we split curry and noodles, and he agreed, seeming relieved to have the burden of deciding removed. After we ordered, he provided a cursory sketch of his childhood in Wisconsin, at my prompting. His account was less eloquent than Roger’s had been, and this helped assure me of its authenticity. He lingered over his brother, who had quit law school and now worked as a salmon fisherman in Alaska. “He always went his own way,” Sam said, with admiration and perhaps a touch of resentment. Sam had remained in Wisconsin, near their family. He’d finished a master’s degree in computer science at UW–Madison, then broken off an engagement to his longtime girlfriend; when I asked why they’d split, he said only that they’d begun dating too young and had grown apart over the years. He’d moved to San Francisco eight months ago, seeking a new start.

I told Sam that I’d lived in the city for ten years, and waited for him to ask why I’d moved here. But then our food came, and the thread was lost. This had happened several times while we were messaging on the app—I would drop some reference to my life, and Sam would fail to ask a logical follow-up question. I savored these instances of human selfishness. Even if the new generation of blots had more flaws than the old ones, I figured they’d still be primed to retrieve any breadcrumb of a woman’s past that might help them more thoroughly fuck her over when the time came. Sam’s inattention was a kind of freedom. I could say anything, and he’d simply nod, and a moment later begin talking about something else.

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In the past I had approached dating with the typical fervor of an addict. I’d worked independently to construct the scaffolding of a relationship, then waited for the man I was seeing to step into the blank space I’d retained in his form. Inevitably, he would either balk at the role I’d assigned him, or accede to my formidable will, at which point I’d realize I didn’t really want him as my boyfriend anyway. With Sam, I resolved to do nothing. I would root myself in the present moment, accepting the man before me without judgment. I allowed Sam to set the pace of our dating, waiting for him to initiate contact and propose when we should hang out next.

On our third date, I invited him back to my apartment after dinner, and we had sex. Sam handled my body thoughtfully, like a new pair of shoes he would break in and wear often. It was not mind-blowing, but early sex rarely was. It wasn’t horrifyingly bad, and in this I glimpsed limitless potential. He was careful with his weight and with where he placed his knees. I liked how, as he hovered his body above mine, he cupped the side of my face in his hand.

That first night, as I lay in the dark with my arm slung across Sam’s chest, I waited for the old void-opening feeling to take me, the particular loneliness of lying next to another person. But for once, this sadness didn’t arrive. It felt good having Sam there, as if the last puzzle piece had been set into place. For the first time in years, my apartment was full. The cats, who usually slept on the bed with me, had been displaced to alternate positions in the apartment. I sensed their presence out in the dark, on the chair or the couch or in the closet. Sam had petted them for a while when he arrived. He’d allowed one cat to bite his hand gently, the other to drool on the thigh of his jeans. It was nice to have four mammals under one roof, each of us trusting the others not to kill us while we slept. This was the appeal, I thought, of a family. This was what everyone had been going on about all these years.

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On Monday, I went to work as usual, though the plates of my life had shifted. I was dating someone now. My senses felt heightened as I biked down Market Street in the morning. I saw the world through the eyes of a recently fucked woman.

I was a teacher, of sorts. I’d had the same two part-time jobs for years, for a private ESL school and a for-profit art university that did heavy recruiting in China. In the mornings, I taught Upper-Intermediate English to a class of fourteen students in a narrow, orange-walled room, located on the fifteenth floor of a glass skyscraper on Montgomery Street. The students were in their late teens and early twenties, mostly from Switzerland, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. The roster changed from week to week. There was no sense of continuity or progression toward an end point. We worked through the proprietary textbook, then started again at the beginning.

In the afternoon, I’d head south of Market to one of the art classes for which I was providing what the college termed “language support.” I took notes while the instructor lectured on fashion design or computer animation or art history. After the lecture, I would wait for the international students to ask for my help—to explain difficult vocabulary and American colloquialisms, providing a verbal Cliffs Notes of what we’d just heard—but they rarely did.

I moved through that Monday in a neurochemical fog. I’d been single long enough that my tendrils of attachment had dried up and ceased issuing their commands. Now they’d been activated again, and I wondered how I had ever cared about anything other than sex. The students no longer annoyed me; they now seemed righteous, bristling with youthful energy. They, too, were probably horny, and resentful at having to sit through class when they could be fucking and exploring the city. ...