by Lee, Edward
“Painfreak is welcomed wherever it travels by those who are in a position to see that its integration and operation occur discreetly. Powerful people of certain appetites. Appetites that are too often only dreamed of. These hosts of Painfreak extend their hospitality to others who share in their tastes for pleasure. Without there being a group, there would be no Painfreak.”
Hunger could be a lonely thing, Devoy would certainly agree. “When could I go?”
“When you are ready.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“I will notify the doormen to be sure to admit you.”
“Thanks,” Devoy said. “I’ll…try it. And you are absolutely sure Khi Ma Soo will be there?”
“You will find what you are looking for. Again, forgive my interruption, Mr. Devoy. I will take my leave now.”
The faceless stranger pivoted neatly toward the door. The panel whisked open, he stepped through the threshold, and when the door had closed Devoy heard a sound behind him. A giggle from the center of the room.
The Kalian woman said, “Don’t turn your back, Bran. No need to be shy.”
4: Painfreak
He hadn’t wanted to leave his vehicle on the street here, nor had he wanted to park at a garage and walk the remaining distance, since the only weapon he had on him was a legal stun gun that didn’t require a license. Thus he had a hovercab drop him off, and asked the driver—a Waiai with sunflower yellow skin, who seemed to navigate just fine despite his lack of eyes—how quickly he could return if he was called.
“One of us could be here in just a few minutes,” the Waiai assured him. Then his vehicle, the same color as his skin, was gliding away and Devoy turned to face the entrance of the former Milagroso Products warehouse, the holographic word RECEPTION floating just above it. Every so often a jolt of interference would skew it. The block-like building’s face loomed over him, a wall of petrified darkness, but a greenish glow shone out from the doorway.
Devoy approached the sickish glow, and when he had almost stepped into it a figure shifted sideways to intercept him. He started. The figure was a bulky silhouette of uncertain shape. When he got past being startled, though, Devoy could make out it was two men fused or grafted together somehow. Certainly not conjoined twins, for the main body was that of a huge and powerfully built Caucasian, his bald head and face scarred as if from countless bouts of hand-to-hand combat, whereas from the left side of his torso (where he was missing one arm) sprouted the upper chest, left arm, and head of a smaller man of East Asian ancestry. Their melded bodies were garbed in a single black jumpsuit. Both wore vision enhancement wraparounds.
“I’m, ah, Bran Devoy,” he said to them. “I was told you’d be expecting me.”
“Please extend your left hand,” said the Asian head of the double man.
Devoy did so, but almost drew it back in fear as the Asian man reached his one hand into a pocket of the roomy jumpsuit and pulled out a small black instrument that at first glance looked like a gun. He positioned its end over the back of Devoy’s hand, and an unpleasant tingling like a concentrated electric shock was felt between his thumb and index finger. He assumed a mark of admittance had been left there, that perhaps their eye gear permitted the two heads to see, though he saw nothing himself.
“You may enter, Mr. Devoy,” said the Asian man, and the hulking figure stepped aside to let him pass into the building.
Ahead of him in a shadowed recess was the reception desk for the defunct Milagroso company’s warehouse facility. To the left of this was an apparent office wing, but the door to it was shut and the door’s window dark. To the right, though, a long corridor led away to the distant thudding bass of music, like the throb of a gigantic heart, distant light strobing like the interior of a thundercloud. Devoy craned his neck to peer down this gloomy hallway toward whatever was going on beyond its end, presumably in the open warehouse area. It just sounded like any other dance club to him, and he disliked such scenes. Was he supposed to find the woman he sought in a crowded mass of thrashing bodies? The idea didn’t appeal to him, and yet if Khi Ma Soo was truly here he couldn’t turn back now.
“Can I help you, Mr. Devoy?” said a voice.
He started again, if only on the inside, and noticed what he hadn’t before: that a woman was seated in the shadows behind the reception desk. She rolled forward a little in her chair, coming into that weak green light. She was of the race called the Tikkihotto, who appeared very much like Earthers except that rather than eyes they had clusters of clear ocular tendrils. Lighted colored beads were spaced along each of her tendrils, but their material had to have been lightweight, since these strands still wriggled freely in the air. He had heard of Tikkihotto prosties who excited a client by inserting these eye tendrils into their anus.
“Yeah, well,” he stammered, “I came here hoping to find a Sinanese woman named Khi Ma Soo. I was told —”
“She can be found here,” said the Tikkihotto. She rose from her seat. She was nude, more of those lighted beads threaded through her nipples and labia. She came out from behind the desk and stepped toward the door to the darkened offices. She saw Devoy glance with confusion toward the hallway that culminated in noisy chaos, and explained, “That way is for tourists. This way is for players.”
He followed her through a murky maze of abandoned office cubicles, lit only by red emergency bulbs. Beyond the cubicles they came to a lift, and entered it together. He felt a delicious tremor go through him at being contained in so small a space with the naked woman. The lift descended one floor, and the door hissed open. They stepped out into a subterranean level, the ceiling of this corridor low and lined with pipes and bundles of power cables. Down here the booming pulse of dance music was gone; in fact, it was so quiet he heard an echoy drip of water from beyond an open doorway they passed by. His guide came to a stop in front of another door, pushed a button to open it, and gestured for him to go in ahead of her.
And just like that, after years of worshipping her from a removed, here she was. Khi Ma Soo. It didn’t seem possible, as though all along he had doubted she actually existed—as if she might only be a realistic comp construct, or a figment of his own imagination—but here was the fantasy in the flesh. He felt stunned.
To be fair, he was also a bit stunned by the tableau before him.
Two groups of three hospital-style beds were arrayed along one wall, and opposite them was a long work station covered in computer equipment, above which floated overlapping holographic screens. Several of the larger of these virtual monitors showed striated fields of pink and white dotted with purple, like alien landscapes seen from on high. These were apparently medical scans of the interior of the subjects who lay upon several of the beds.
A well-dressed, middle-aged human man lay in one of the beds with his eyes closed, interface disks stuck to his temples. The two beds immediately beside him were empty. The other three beds, though, were occupied by a trio of naked people whose wrists and ankles were pinned by restraints. One of these was Khi Ma Soo, her eyes closed also, her face slack as if she were asleep or under anesthesia. The person next to her, also restrained and unconscious, was a male Earther, a youth of maybe eighteen. The third naked subject—her head crested with a metallic-purple Mohawk—was a Choom, the native race of Oasis, who were human in configuration but for having lips cut back to the mandible’s hinges. Her jaw was presently so wide open it looked like it was tearing itself off, and from her mouth’s gaping cavern came a deep, drawn-out moan. She was twisting against her restraints as if suffering an intense nightmare.
Devoy’s guide swept her arm toward the sophisticated tech set up opposite the beds and explained in a pleasant voice, “We’ve introduced a horde of nanomites into her body. The gentleman lying there has been interfaced with them, so that he is seeing through their eyes, so to speak, collectively or individually as he prefers…as they crawl through the tiniest nooks and crannies of her body. What penetration could be more intimate? Within her, he can di
rectly interact with her body in such a way as to stimulate the nociceptors.”
“What does that do?”
“It causes pain.”
The deep moan grew louder, ratcheting higher until it became a sustained whine. The Choom woman’s jaw snapped shut and she gnashed her multiple rows of molars, her eyes scrunching more tightly shut. Tendons stood out in her neck, sweat gave her flesh a sheen in the glow of the monitors. She arched her back up off the bed.
The Tikkihotto guide went on, “He can just as easily administer pleasure. A guest in this room typically likes to alternate between both.” She swept her arm again, gracefully…this time toward Khi Ma Soo. “Would you like to enter into the body of this woman, then?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, as if talking in his sleep. All of this did, indeed, feel dream-like.
He had not come here to cause Khi Ma Soo pain, surely. But might he bring her so much pleasure—tender, gentle pleasure, such as she might never have experienced before in all her years of offering up her flesh—that she would be grateful for it? Grateful enough to want him in her life? To love him?
The guide watched his hesitant face with her writhing tendrils, and before he could say more told him, “This woman is also in the next room. Perhaps you would prefer her there.”
He looked to her with a furrowed brow. “What?”
“Allow me to show you.”
They left the room, Devoy throwing a reluctant look back at the object of his quest. What more could his guide show him—he had found what he was searching for!—and yet passively he followed her, curious to learn what she had meant.
They entered another chamber further along the underground corridor, and the Tikkihotto said, “She is also in here.”
This new room must have been soundproofed, because Devoy didn’t hear the screams and pleading until the door had opened. This front part of the room was small, little more than a booth, but beyond the booth stretched a long narrow section. The walls of the booth were lined with weapons in brackets: a variety of rifles and handguns, power bows, a number of spear gun-like things. A neatly bearded Earther in his thirties, wearing only a pair of boxers and with interface disks pasted over his nipples, stood at a counter with a kind of crossbow tucked into his shoulder. He glanced over irritably at their intrusion.
At the far end of the longer section of the chamber, within a little alcove like an animated statue, a nude woman was shackled to the wall with her arms above her head, squirming and sobbing hysterically, a pair of interface disks fixed to her head. She was a Choom; in fact, with her purple Mohawk cut she looked identical to the Choom who was being tortured from within by a swarm of nanomites in the previous room. Two short bolts were stuck in the white flesh of her midsection, another having pierced all the way through her upper left thigh, like the lances of a picador, or the arrows in a martyred saint.
The Tikkihotto depressed a button to one side of the counter and a panel slid upward next to the Choom, revealing another naked woman shackled in another niche in the wall. As if aroused from sleep, the woman lifted her disk-fitted head and stared back at them. It was Khi Ma Soo. (But how could she have been moved so quickly from that hospital bed to this firing range?) She was too far away for Devoy to see her expression perfectly, but from here she looked tense with fearful anticipation. He couldn’t bear to have her lock eyes with his for the first time like this, so he whirled to face his guide.
“Oh no…no…I don’t want to kill her!”
“You’re distracting me, guy,” said the man at the counter. He turned his attention back to his target.
“Don’t!” Devoy began reaching out to him, thinking the man meant to fire at Khi Ma Soo.
The crossbow-device thwacked. Its bolt flew down the length of the firing range and struck the female Choom in the right eye. Her screaming stopped. The crossbow man went rigid and shook violently as if he were being electrocuted. He let out a long groan, the front of his boxers tenting outward, and Devoy assumed the woman’s disks had transmitted a watered-down version of her pain to him, upon the bolt having entered her body. But as her head slumped heavily, and her body expired, the signal was lost and the man glared at Devoy again.
“I wasn’t ready for that yet, momfuck. You spoiled my aim.”
Devoy was tempted to grab one of the handguns off the wall, but his guide pushed that button again, the panel descended to once more conceal Khi Ma Soo, and she ushered Devoy back out into the hallway.
“There are many more rooms in this facility I can show you.”
“You cloned her, that’s it, isn’t it?” Devoy said. Though he had come to find the real Khi Ma Soo, he was relieved by his realization. He couldn’t otherwise have withdrawn and let that man with the crossbow kill her next. Cloning—except for the production of soldiers and types of laborers—was illegal in Punktown. The people who had facilitated the coming of Painfreak to Punktown must have connections to the Neptune Teeb crime syndy, who were known for their illegal cloning services.
The Tikkihotto didn’t need to confirm it. “If this diversion isn’t to your liking, Mr. Devoy,” she simply said, taking him by the arm, “perhaps the next activity will be more to your taste.”
“How many of her are here?” he asked as he kept up with his guide, down the corridor.
“As many as you want there to be.”
The basement corridor came to a T. To the right, it kept on going, and steam hissed from a rupture in a ceiling pipe down that way. After a few feet the left-hand branch ended with a dented, paint-peeling metal door. The Tikkihotto punched a key, the door drew back with a grating sound, and they passed into a great room that had to have been a subterranean warehouse area. Riveted metal columns helped support the ceiling, which was crisscrossed with thick metal joists. Here and there, puddles of leaked water reflected the far-spaced overhead lights. The lights also shone on several large hulking shapes that lay on the warehouse floor, in the foreground. More such shapes were hinted at further back.
“What…what are those?” Devoy asked with trepidation, even as the Tikkihotto began walking him toward the nearest of these bulky masses.
He smelled something savory. The smokiness of something cooking, and there was a haze in the air that diffused the irregular light and made the deepest reaches of the vast room uncertain.
“Oh my God,” Devoy whispered, when they came to the first giant object.
It was indeed a giant. Devoy recognized the teenage boy from the nanomites room, but now grown through some magic of science to far greater size. The size of a midrange whale. He lay on his side in a fetal position, eyes closed. Drugged? Not dead: he was breathing. He gave off a strong tang of sweat, and a strong tang of blood, because a man was slicing into one of his fuzzed buttocks with a long bladed implement. What Devoy had first taken for dark pools of water were pools of blood. The man wielding the implement wore a rubber apron and goggles to protect himself from spray. His face and the metal column behind him were speckled with spatter. He was naked under his apron, but Devoy wondered if he wore interface disks on his nipples. He saw none on the titan.
Nearby was a wheeled table atop which were more cutting implements, indeed like the flensing tools of some ancient whaling vessel. There was also a chainsaw.
Devoy repressed a gag as the man in the apron completed excising a great slab of flesh from the clean, deep buttock wound, bright yellow inside with exposed fat. It fell to the puddle the man stood in. He set down his cutting tool and a woman came forward to help him lift the chunk of flesh onto another wheeled cart. Devoy took this nude, heavily tattooed woman to be another of Painfreak’s staff, like his escort. She wheeled this cart away, toward the source of the aromatic smoke. The cart’s wheels squeaked. In his slumber, the giant boy sighed.
“Are you hungry, Mr. Devoy?” asked his guide.
“No,” he said, clamping a hand over his nose and mouth. “Not like this, I’m not. This is…it’s…”
“It’s a form of c
ommunion,” she told him. “Haven’t you wanted to commune with the flesh of the one you crave? To have that person inside you, and be one with you? Haven’t you hungered to consume them?”
Devoy looked past the monstrous boy, toward another huge shape somewhat obscured by the smoke from wherever in the mist the meat was being grilled. He staggered toward the hulk and the Tikkihotto followed, smiling placidly.
He heard a grunt behind him, and paused to look back. While he waited for his meat to be cooked for him, the man in the goggles had removed his apron. Standing up, he was pumping into a new, small incision he had made with a knife in the front of the youth’s thigh.
Devoy continued moving toward this other giant. This blue-skinned giant, also lying curled on its side. The floor around it was dry, as yet.
With her hair spread out around her head like a great spill of ink, here lay an immense living copy of Khi Ma Soo. So immense that that pockmark on her forehead that he knew so well from her vids was like a crater in her flesh. Eyes peacefully closed, her lips slightly parted, her side rising and falling with her respiration. Surely she was drugged. If she were awake and alert, would she fight them? Crush them? Or would she merely hold the cheeks of her bottom open for them, as she did in her vids? Roll over into the next position that was expected of her?
“Does it have memories?” Devoy asked. “A mind?” When his guide didn’t answer him he spun toward her. “Is the real Khi Ma Soo in here somewhere?”
He now prayed that she wasn’t. Perhaps the real Khi Ma Soo had died some years ago, and her genetic material had been bequeathed or stolen. Or perhaps she was married now, and content, somewhere else in Punktown or even on Earth, or maybe she had finally returned to her home world. The thought of her being dead, or living far from him, hurt him as much as it extended a kind of hope.
“Why do you ask these questions?” the Tikkihotto said. “What does it matter? And be honest with yourself…do you really care?”