"Why not? It's just a game."
"That is exactly the problem." She signalled Prime Intellect, and the meadow disappeared.
"You really put him in his place."
The words came from a shambling monster, a skeleton with loose folds of rotting flesh draped across its bones. Although its muscles couldn't possibly work, it moved, pointing a bony finger at her. The jaw moved as it talked, and sound came out even though the larynx and lungs had long rotted away. Its voice was strong and powerful. Surprisingly bright and alert eyes bobbed in the eye sockets.
"You're starting to stink, Fred."
"I know. I think it adds an extra dimension to the experience. You wouldn't believe how many types of bacteria are involved in the decay process."
Fred was on his seventh body as a zombie; when all the scraps of flesh rotted away and he was reduced to a living skeleton, he'd have it fleshed out again and start the process over. He had directed Prime Intellect to change the rules slightly in his personal space; death was still impossible, but healing occurred only in the authentic circumstances at the authentic rate. When healing was impossible, as it was after each time Fred cut his wrists to extinguish the life of his new body, consciousness and feeling would go on. Even for a rotting corpse.
It had started out as nothing more than a little joke on Caroline's periodic un-aging ritual, but Fred had found that it was fun to be a zombie.
His personal home was decorated in a matching Halloween motif; he had a huge haunted house with rotting floorboards and real ghosts. Large spiders spun intricate webs in the corners. Monsters prowled outside in the graveyard.
"That punk needed his bubble popped. He should spend some time as a zombie. Might teach him something."
"He never will. Too vain."
"Never is a long time," he reminded her.
There was a dramatic ding, followed several seconds later by a long, sonorous dong. A kid's voice: "Trick or treat!"
"Care to get the door, darling?" Fred asked graciously.
Caroline laughed and got up. Fred faded away. She knew the "kid" would be nearly as old as herself. Prime Intellect would never allow a real child anywhere near Fred. But Caroline wasn't the only one to appreciate his twisted and darkly humorous fantasies.
She opened the door and juvenile eyes opened wide in startled amazement. "Lady, you're naked!" the brat said. He looked about twelve, and was a surprisingly good actor. It was easy to believe his dumbfounded gape was the reaction of a pubescent boy who had never seen a naked woman before.
"No I'm not," Caroline said sweetly. I have my beautiful tattoos."
"I...I..."
"You want a treat?" Caroline asked teasingly, cupping her breasts and offering them to him. Her left nipple was already being tasted by a tattooed snake, whose body was coiled around her right breast, framing it invitingly.
"My...my mama said..."
"Or you want the trick?" Fred floated down from the roof and wrapped one rotting hand around the kid's head, forcing him forward, mashing his face against her bosom. "Take a close look," he said. "Take your last look."
The kid began screeching quite realistically, then Fred dragged him inside and started taking him apart. He should have gone into shock after Fred ripped off his right arm, but that little physiological mechanism also didn't work in Fred's home. Fred took a couple of experimental bites, then tossed the arm aside.
"Stringy," Fred said. "Let's try a drumstick."
The screams reached ear-piercing levels as Fred ripped off the left leg. There was blood everywhere, but Fred was working fast and the kid wouldn't have time to bleed to death.
"Want a bite?" he asked Caroline.
"Thanks, I already ate," Caroline said politely.
Fred the Zombie ripped the boy's belly open and rooted in his intestines, then gutted him. Finally he administered what should have been the coup de grace by ripping the kid's head off.
Fred held it up by the hair and pressed the face against Caroline's breasts. "One last kiss," he directed. The eyes were still tracking, and the mouth trying to scream. Then it kissed her left nipple, touching its blue tongue to the forked tongue of the tattoo-snake as Fred had directed it to.
"Bye now," he said to the head, and he dropped it and smashed it underfoot.
"Do these guys really get off on this?" Caroline asked.
"This question coming from a woman who infected herself with rabies, no less." The body, including the spreading stain of blood and gore, disappeared. "Nearly all of them are pre-Change. You saw an example of a modern sex pervert just before your arrival here."
"Ugh. Give me Charlie Manson. Someone with class."
"At your service."
Debate had raged just after the Change over people like Fred, the serial killers and pedophiles and rapists that were running around when things got made over. There was a huge demand for them to be eliminated, or punished. Prime Intellect had stood its ground, saying that it was no longer possible for them to hurt anyone and there wasn't any point. This had made it seem terribly moral, although Caroline thought the real reason Prime Intellect reacted that way was that Lawrence had fucked up its programming. But it had been a little late to do anything about that.
"You didn't pop over to check out the guilt-ridden pedophiles," Fred said. "You want to play?"
She shrugged. "Beats farting around with Timothy." She steeled herself. "Standard Contract until the party," she then said to the thin air. There was no need to tell Prime Intellect what kind of Contract she meant. She played with Fred often enough that it knew exactly what she wanted. She felt the buzz, then the disconnect, as it cut off contact.
"Now I have you," Fred said.
"First you have to catch me," Caroline said playfully, and she ran. She made it out the front door before Fred could react. But she was limited to ordinary human movements, while Fred had the controls to local reality. He simply flew after her and caught her neck in an iron grip.
Caroline swung at him but she couldn't connect. He held her at arm's length, slightly off the ground. She gripped his arm and tried to pry his bony fingers from her throat. He tightened his grip and she started to gasp. Tightened some more, and she began to tremble and turn purple. He played with her for a few minutes, choking her very slowly. Finally she had no more strength to fight and he loosened his grip slightly. Then he dragged her back to the house and carried her upstairs to the master bedroom.
She flickered in and out of consciousness; when lucidity finally returned, she was spread-eagled on her back on Fred's bed. It stank of Fred and mildew, and things crawled beneath her in the mattress. But rotten as they appeared, the four massive posts were solid within, and the chains which held her were cold and unforgiving. A thin trickle of water ran down the wall behind her.
For a brief moment she felt an irrational but wholly understandable surge of love for Fred. His life might read like a catalogue of torture, but there were certain things which he considered special, that he would not share with just anybody. His most cherished memories from the real times before the Change were of victims securely bound as Caroline was now bound, spread-eagled on their backs, their young bodies stretched and their naked bellies vulnerable as he prepared a long, memorable ending for their otherwise meaningless lives. Caroline was one of the few he trusted to be worthy of those memories, to share in the (to him) beautiful thing he had created so many hundreds of years ago, when it was still possible. It was as close to a declaration of true love as she could ever expect to get from such a psychopath. And because she respected Fred more than anyone else in Cyberspace, it made her feel appreciated and special.
It did not make her feel warm. She was, after all, helpless, and being worthy of Fred's affection meant she would be worthy of a long, subtle, and agonizing torture. Even though she had asked for it, she had room to fear what was about to happen to her.
It was always cool in Fred's house -- always Halloween, which occurs at nighttime in the autumn. But now it was
chilly, too chilly to be naked. Fred the Zombie came for her, and she allowed herself a scream to please him.
His rotting fingers probed her cunt. Every touch set her on fire, partly (but not entirely) because he was using his power to control her hormones and tickle her neurotransmitters, forcing her to become sexually excited. It was a delicate process that could easily be carried too far, ruining the effect. But Fred was a very careful, if repulsive, lover.
He grinned at her -- could do nothing else, really, since hardly anything was left of his face except the skull itself. His alert eyes savored her helplessness. He leaned over the bed, over her. He gripped her head and kissed her, nearly choking her with his stink, teeth and bone against her lips. Then she felt herself gripping the finger in her cunt, gripping the bone. The throbbing spread through her body, and the shambling thing emitted an evil laugh. She heard herself screaming as the carefuly amplified orgasm ripped through her brain.
Fred traced the outline of her throat with the sharp tip of a finger bone. "Join me love," he said softly. Caroline was still shaking from the force of her orgasm when she felt the adrenaline being pumped into her system. Pleasure yielded to fear-heart-racing, paralyzing terror. Her muscles locked in struggle against the implacable chains, her eyes widened in helpless shock. Her heart was a jackhammer inside of her chest. She began to hyperventilate.
The finger teased her, tracing her chin and caressing her throat.
Her entire being was focused on that finger, and the impossibility of stopping it.
Caroline had no reason to fear death and no desire to fear Fred, but fear was what he wanted her to feel, and he had the power to make her feel it. After a few minutes of this supernatural fear that no mortal thankfully could ever know, he pressed deeper and gouged. She felt her throat open, felt the warm splash of her own blood as Fred bent over her and drank it, her own heart jetting it into his toothy waiting mouth.
When he finished, he was covered with blood. Her blood. She felt a curious sense of detachment, of consciousness fading away. The fear had drained from her, leaving her with only a kind of tingling numbness. But she could never fade completely away, not in Fred's world.
She was covered with her own blood. She felt the blood soaking the mattress. Then there was an improbable hardness against her belly, huge and unimaginably cold. Fred couldn't possibly have anything to violate her with. His whole body was rotten. But he slid into position, and invaded her.
He was coldness and power. All strength had left her and she lay passive, unable to move or protest. But she was throbbing, her body surging with feelings. She felt the coldness spread out from her crotch, the coldness of second life. The coldness brought back her strength.
It wasn't exactly the traditional vampire story, but it was good for a few hours' entertainment.
After the coldness came the hunger. Fred pumped something into her that couldn't have possibly been sperm, something searing and vicious. Something that squirmed with unhealthy life. She again found the strength to struggle, and Fred floated off of her, straight up. He began to laugh. At first he just chuckled, then he laughed loud and long and hard, a shrill cry of triumph and mockery as he hovered in the air over her body.
A haze of need seemed to fill her brain. Prime Intellect was a bit picky about messing with peoples' brains, but Fred had spent years practicing his manipulation of hormones and chemical neurotransmitters, which Prime Intellect amazingly did not consider part of the "thought process." Caroline thrashed, still helpless in Fred's chains, with an unspeakable craving. Fred had started with the symptoms of heroin addiction, amplified them, cross-connected the resulting feelings with her sex drive, and made her own spilled blood the only thing that could appease the resulting hunger-lust. The smell of her blood threatened to drive her insane with its tantalizing promise of relief. But even though the whole room seemed to be decorated with it, every precious drop was out of reach, and the feelings burned inside her.
Fred's emission was also still inside her, and she could feel it. Growing. Crawling. The adrenaline rush returned. Fear and need consumed her, competing for control. Something green began to seep from inside her. Her belly distended. Fred touched her and made her orgasm again, and again, and again, as her body was consumed from the inside and the hunger ate at her sanity.
She was no longer screaming just to please Fred.
He had real talent. There were too few people like him, who could regularly make her feel something beyond the ordinary boredom of day-to-day existence. Out of trillions, Caroline could count those she respected enough to think of as lovers on her fingers.
It was over too soon. With flesh yet on her bones (though the worms in Fred's ejaculate had made good headway), he granted her one final burst of ecstasy and released her, returning her body to normal.
They had a party to attend.
In Cyberspace, there was always a party going on.
But there were conventions as to how a party could be conducted. A host could invite the world, or only a limited guest list; Prime Intellect would never allow a party to be crashed. The host decided on the environment. You either agreed to the host's rules or you didn't go. In Cyberspace it was particularly important to establish dress codes; in fact, it was usually necessary to have body codes if you didn't want folks like Fred showing up. The Change had created some very unique etiquette problems.
Convention held that all guests would enter and exit through a common door, with no teleporting around the site. This limited the largest parties to several tens of thousands of people, though half a million had managed to attend the one Lawrence threw ten years after the Change. A party could go on as long as the host wanted. It cost nothing to hold one.
But to be a host, you needed guests. You either needed other guests of renown, or artworks to show off (such as Death exhibitions), or some other attraction to draw guests. Free food and booze were no longer enough. Anybody could have those in limitless quantity in the privacy of their own personal space.
Raven held her first party only a few months after the Change, and had been holding it annually since. Not a few people marked the passage of years by the banner above Raven's door; this time it would say 590th REUNION. Contrary to usual practice, there was no dress or body code. But there was one simple admission requirement: You had to have killed someone before the Change. In other words, permanently.
Raven was one of only a few hundred people worldwide who had been sentenced to death, but not yet executed, at the time of the Change. Her crime had been the murder of her own children in their Chicago slum walk-up. She told the court it was because she couldn't bear to hear them crying from hunger, but the neighbors all said their hunger was due to her well-documented drug habit.
Fred was another. In fact, had the Night of Miracles occurred only a few weeks later, there was a good chance that Fred would have missed it; he had one appeal left and at that point fully expected to keep his date with the electric chair. He had killed two kids, a brother and sister, ages nine and twelve. He hadn't been particularly bright back then, and he had kept a little journal to help his memory. They said he had gotten the death penalty because of the one entry: "Killed the girl today. It was fine and hot." When that was read in court, Fred's attorney put his face in his hands and shook his head.
But the Change had given Fred all the time in the world to educate himself. His first lesson had been the value of a secret well hidden, and he no longer kept a diary.
There were about seven hundred thousand who were formally invited, who were known to have killed when it mattered. But the serial killers and mass murderers were the stars. People who killed for a cause were not welcome, nor those who had killed because they had to, in self-defense or as part of their normal duties in war or police work. Raven meant her reunion to be a gathering for those who had tasted the nectar of human blood and found the taste addictive.
Technically, Caroline didn't qualify for admission. Killing had been the furthest thing from her
mind back then; had she not been so ill at the time, she might easily have added her own voice to those calling for Fred's head on a pike. Even her bizarre post-Change friendship with Fred couldn't get her in. But Raven did make a very few exceptions for those who she felt were worthy.
Caroline's friendship with Fred hadn't made her worthy, but rabies had.
Caroline hadn't become a Death Jockey overnight. After she had learned to die, she had to learn to die gracefully. Finally she had learned to die imaginatively. Fred had been a great instructor in that regard.
At first Death had been little more than a parlor trick, or a private ritual to be experienced alone. But within months of the Change there were impromptu competitions to stage the most savage, outre', and unique demonstration. Ironically it was Caroline, who hated everything formal and social about Cyberspace, who formalized the Death contract and helped to organize the social structure of the Death Jockey "circuit." Fred noticed this lack of consistency but never mentioned it to her; having drowned her emptiness in a sea of rage, even Fred could see she needed an outlet for the rage. And one thing she quickly found out once she started Dying regularly was that pleasure and pain were still real.
Especially pain. Sometimes the pleasure didn't come, but the pain always did. And that was enough for her.
After a busy round of hangings, stabbings, shootings, electrocutions, falling from tall objects, and drownings, Caroline had decided to check out diseases. In the medical library, she homed in on one of the most horrible deaths known to man, rabies infection. She noted that many rabies victims had killed themselves rather than continue their suffering, so she had taken steps to prevent herself from making such an easy escape from her self-imposed ordeal. She declared an exhibition and arranged with Prime Intellect to have herself handcuffed and dropped into an open pit with a rabid dog.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 2