Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  Olya takes a deep breath and says with a thick voice, “Dixon, you have seen what I think about this dolboeb Billy and his games. Maybe you tell your little friends what happen to them if I hear any more of this.”

  She pushes past them and stomps the opposite way down the hall without seeing me. I decide it’s not the right time to interrogate her. Dixon and his buddy follow her at a respectful distance.

  That scene certainly confirms that Billy’s recruiting GAMErs to harass Olya. At first I’d thought Blake would be his primary target, but maybe he harbors a whole list of enemies he plans to sic his players on. Given what the twins told me about NeoRazi, I’m not surprised. Game designers will often co-opt early participants into an elite cadre they use to help advance the narrative.

  Olya however clearly has no intention of cooperating, though Billy seems bent on forcing her to play along. Maybe he sees her as the white queen he’s beset with pawns from GAME.

  I spot Garriott standing just inside their workroom.

  “Trouble in paradise?” I ask.

  He peeks out to make sure she’s departed. “What, that? That’s nothing. You should see what happens when she gets stroppy. I think your man Billy disappeared to prevent her from killing him.”

  “They fought a lot?”

  “Hammer and tongs, mate. You didn’t hear about the funeral?”

  “You mean Gina Delaney’s?” McClaren had mentioned that Billy’s first arrest happened at her funeral.

  Garriott tilts his head with an anxious grin, like he’s considering something that he’s supposed to abhor but secretly loves. “You must see this.”

  He brings his laptop over to my office and pulls up a video.

  Someone’s cell captures a group somberly toasting the departed. The person leading the toast addresses the camera. Maybe they’re streaming the recording to friends who couldn’t make it to Boston.

  In the far left of the shot, there’s a violent motion. Garriott stops it, expands that part of the clip, and starts a frame-by-frame. He’s got it focused on the back of a tall blonde in a black dress, clearly Olya. Then Billy enters the frame and leans over to say something to her. Olya doesn’t look at him, but almost lazily, she pulls her right hand across her body and then rams her elbow hard into Billy’s face. He goes down, lights out, and the camera now pans over to the commotion.

  Olya steps forward to continue her assault, but someone grabs her and wrestles her away. The camera stays on Billy, but you can see her in the background breaking free and striding coolly out of the frame. We do not see Billy get up.

  The feed ends.

  I blink at Garriott. “I guess y’all won’t be putting that in your team recruiting videos.”

  Garriott grins. “Isn’t that just fucked though?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, nothing life-threatening. Badly split lip, a bit of a bump on his head. I don’t think his nose was broken. But all in all, a rather poor showing. Especially given all his aggro theatrics from earlier.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “So the service was closed casket, and when Billy walks by, he tries to lift the bloody lid. He wants to place something in the coffin with her. Her dad sees this and is having none of it, and he confiscates whatever it was. Makes it known that poor Billy isn’t welcome. Fine. But then the barmy bastard comes back for the actual burial, and he’s taking photos. And again, her dad, who is a bit off it himself, goes over, grabs his camera, and tosses the kid out on his ear. Sasha, one of their PiMP friends, goes off to try to console him, and that’s the last we expect to hear of him.”

  “But he came back again.”

  “There wasn’t a reception, so her friends gathered at that bar for a post-funeral piss-up. Imagine our consternation when he shows up there. The family wasn’t around, and we knew he was close to Genes, so we don’t say anything, just avoid him like the plague, right? And everything’s aces for a bit while he’s downing Bombay and sort of talking to himself. Then he fancies having a chat with our savage Siberian, and . . . well, you saw how that interaction turned out.”

  “Scary.”

  “After all that shite, I suppose he deserved it.”

  “What did he say to her?”

  “I didn’t hear it, but our mate Dix was standing right there. Told me he said, ‘Are you happy now?’”

  15

  Later that night, as I return from GAME, I see three orange-vested municipal workers standing around a steaming manhole. They peer into it as if one of their number just disappeared down there and they’re about to draw straws to see who has to go after him and wrestle the albino alligators. The scene reminds me that I’ve yet to discover an entry point to Billy’s latest rabbit hole from the clues he’s offered. So by the time I flop down on my bed, my mind is spinning up on the problem, and I know I won’t be able to sleep.

  I send Jacques back to Sade’s castle to stare at its crumbled crenellations. This can’t possibly be a dead end. The placard inside speaks of an “eternal château,” so must I now canvass all the period theme communities in NOD for another stupid castle? In the Nerds Only Dungeon every other build is a fortress, and the place’s swarming immensity would swallow any direct search. So where in the world should I start looking?

  Well, how did I find my way here?

  I followed a reference from the poem that came with the croc pendants. Maybe it has yet to yield all its instructions.

  The verse invokes NOD with the phrase “Narration Of Death.” Focusing on those words again, I decide that an “eternal” castle wouldn’t be one subject to the entropy of the real world. But such a building could be preserved forever through art, like the castle in a painting. Or a book.

  All of Sade’s work deals liberally with death and the suffering that precedes it, but “Narration Of Death” would apply to one title above all the others. One that also happens to feature a castle infamous in the history of literature.

  I scan through the first several pages of the book, and then start typing coordinates into Jacques’s teleport box.

  My av winds up staring into a thousand-foot ravine. I take a second to pull up the sim’s property page and confirm that it’s owned by an av named Louis_Markey. The ruined castle at Lacoste was just a set of virtual objects on one of NOD’s public servers—the equivalent of an inert brochure. But now I’ve discovered a complete, privately hosted NOD build, which is more like someone’s personal website.

  Panning my view, I see a mountain landscape with jagged peaks looming all around me. Just to the side is a stout wooden bridge that leads across the chasm toward an ominous gothic castle. The kind of place a monster would take his kidnapped princess in one of the darker fairy tales. One that revolves around revenge rather than escape.

  Chiseled below the ramparts of the gatehouse I see the name of the fortress: the Château de Silling.

  This castle is the setting of Sade’s epic of filth Les cent vingt journées de Sodome, ou l’Ecole du libertinage, known in English as The 120 Days of Sodom. I’d first flipped through it in college, where it was somebody’s bright idea that the Bat call our big winter party “120 Minutes of Sodom.”

  Unfortunately the book is more of a catalog of heinous atrocities than a novel. The entries run along the lines of:

  31. He fucks a goat from behind while being flogged; the goat conceives and gives birth to a monster. Monster though it be, he embuggers it.

  While such a spectacle would certainly be entertaining, we didn’t have the special effects budget to bring it about. Given that even the very first, ostensibly mild, crimes mentioned involve priests, children, and urophilia, we quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work as a party template.

  The self-described “most impure tale ever told” concerns four wealthy libertines: a bishop, the banker Durcet, a judge named Curval, and their leader, the Duc de Blangis, who serves as a sort of Sadean superhero. He’s an aristocrat blessed with the ability to ejaculate at will, a
n attribute as important as any to the basic plotline.

  These four hit on the idea of sequestering themselves for the winter in an impregnable fortress where they’ll aspire toward an eternal pinnacle of debauchery. Perhaps an honorable goal, except that these characters’ tastes run to pedophilia, coprophilia, torture (not the slap-and-tickle variety), and murder. To aid them in their endeavors, they kidnap sixteen of the most noble and beautiful children from across the country. Four wizened whores (Madames Duclos, Champville, Martaine, and Desgranges) come along to stimulate the goings-on by telling stories from their lifetimes spent in carnal riot.

  The book consists of descriptions of the six hundred tortures inflicted upon the castle’s inmates over the course of the winter. Sade wrote this monstrosity in thirty-seven days while in prison. Due to his incarceration, he had to write the book on a twelve-meter toilet paper–like scroll that he could easily hide from his jailers. He claimed to have “wept tears of blood” when his manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille.

  But after the rioters looted his former cell, someone found the scroll and kept it in his family for over a hundred years before a German psychologist discovered it and had the nerve to publish it in 1905. Of course, it was immediately banned, but by the midfifties Sade was receiving a radical rethink among certain intellectuals, and they started printing it again.

  One can now easily find Sadean ideas and aesthetics throughout popular culture. Indeed, NOD already has several builds that pay homage to his work. It seems Billy’s decided we need another one, which means I have to search the place until I find out why.

  Just to the side of the portcullis is a small iron door over which is engraved a double-headed eagle, the Sade family crest. Beside this entrance I find the Château de Silling’s guest registry. I have to fill in a bunch of personal information, including email address and phone number, in order to unlock the postern gate. For these I use new Gmail and Google Voice accounts forwarded to a brand-new work cell. Upon doing so, I get a message telling me that I have to install this NOD build’s special plug-ins for “enhanced features.” I shudder to think what those might be, but I agree.

  Through the courtyard is a spooky gallery lit with torches standing in bronze sconces. The seeping stone walls are hung with obscene tapestries. After wandering through several hallways admiring the period detail, I enter a room I remember well from the text: the amphitheater.

  This is the chamber in which much of the book is set, the place where the Libertines gather every evening to hear the whores’ stories. There’s a small stage in front that supports an extravagant gilded throne. Madame Duclos, the first of Sade’s courtesan raconteurs, sits there. Cut into the curved back wall of the room is a series of five alcoves, each containing a comfortable couch. Four of them seat avatars representing each of the Libertines.

  The fifth one, in the center, is empty. I presume it is meant for me.

  I trip a hidden switch somewhere that causes the Duke to rise and say, “Welcome to Château de Silling. Our redoubt was built for those who wish to walk in the shadow of the Divine Marquis. Enjoy yourself. We’ll be watching.”

  I walk over to the center niche and sit on the chaise. As my av relaxes into it, Madame Duclos begins her narration in a deep French-inflected voice:

  Although I had not yet attained my fifth year, one day, returning from my holy occupations in the monastery, my sister asked me whether I had yet encountered Father Laurent.

  I get impatient quickly. I’ve always thought audiobooks proceed at an insufferably slow pace, and with Sade you know generally what’s about to happen anyway (here, a golden shower). So I drop a “listener” object to keep streaming her stories aloud and then begin a tour of the rest of the castle.

  The door on the other side of the great hall leads to the chapel. Sade was rabidly anticlerical throughout his life, so this room is tricked out as a voyeur’s privy with an abundance of peculiar glass furniture, containers, and tools. I carefully search the chamber and finally settle on the stone step in front of the altar. It opens to reveal a staircase spiraling into the floor.

  The entrance to the dungeon.

  Silling’s dungeon is the site of the worst crimes that take place at the climax of the book. It’s supposed to contain all the specialized torture mechanisms needed to mount a successful Inquisition. However, Billy’s rendition has only a dark stone hallway that passes a long row of wooden doors. I randomly try the fourth one, which opens onto the av of a frail girl around seven years old. Next to her is a small table with some cups and a glass tube with a rubber bulb at its end.

  The waif sniffles. Then she turns to me, and a text bubble says:

  Zelmire:

  You wanted to see me?

  I stare at the odd configuration of objects and the little girl, and it dawns on me that this is an exact staging of the story Duclos is telling now: a bracing episode involving the ingestion of a child’s snot. I hit F6 to bring up NOD’s machinima interface. Sure enough, Billy has helpfully placed a series of pose balls, sound effect notes, and camera tracks around the room. Handy props for making some virtual kiddie porn. That is, if the act in question can be considered pornographic. By any reckoning, it isn’t Sesame Street.

  I shut the door.

  What is this place?

  I doubt it’s just a celebration of one of literature’s more demented imaginations. Billy’s recent behavior points to a larger agenda. Also, his Château de Silling appears to make demands on its guests. He’s constructed a factory for twisted animation that will probably make the stuff currently coming out of NOD look downright quaint.

  But why?

  In the threatening video he sent Blake, Billy alludes to his friend Gina’s death. Here I find the word “Sodom” connecting the most loathsome book ever written to Lot’s story in the Bible, which Gina mentioned in her last words.

  This elaborate NOD build suggests a major investment of time and resources, so Billy must have been planning it for quite a while. And yet, Gina died only two months ago. So maybe he decided to transform a project already in progress into a kind of eulogy. But though Gina may have loved NOD, this virtual porn studio is a strange form of tribute.

  Billy’s creation will demand a detailed exploration, but I have a feeling it’s not going anywhere, and I’m well overdue a trip to the real Land of Nod. Before signing off, I fire up a sniffer program to trace the details of my connection. I’m talking to a box hosted at a server farm here in New York owned by a company called Scream Communications.

  So now I’ve got a fixed internet address Billy must use to run his game. I briefly indulge myself by picturing Blythe’s smile when I bring this to her. Our first real line on her brother. One I’m sure we can use to start reeling him in.

  16

  Early the next morning I shift my attention from Billy’s virtual fortress to the iTeam’s dungeon laboratory. Learning more about their endeavor might help me worm my way into their confidence. I hope someone in the group will then illuminate why Billy’s so fixated on Olya.

  As befits a secret project, the iTeam likes to be alone during the wee hours. Excepting Olya’s occasional morning punishment meetings, they have yet to arrive in time for breakfast, so now is a good time for some light recon.

  Unlike most of the workrooms, the iTeam’s studio outside my office has a new Yale dead bolt securing its door to a steel frame. I have some primitive lock-picking skills, but this imposing matron would take a far surer hand than mine. I’ll need to find an alternative.

  The basement’s center hallway runs from the elevator to the back bulkhead doors that lead to a thin, grimy alleyway at the south side of the building. The iTeam workroom’s door opens off this hall, so I’ll see if there’s another way in from the back.

  A simple lock bump gets me into the office of David Cross, GAME’s resident puppeteer, who has permanent tenure as the person most essential to mounting the haunted house. The back wall of his office is penetrated by
a huge air-handler duct running along the low ceiling. Cross has rigged a decorative curtain that pulls back to expose a large piece of plywood roughly cut to cover the much larger hole in the wall created during the duct’s installation. Only a couple screws connect it to the surrounding drywall, and removing it opens a space I can just wriggle through.

  The beam from my Maglite cuts through the dark, illuminating a three-sided storage niche adjoining the main work area. Some strenuous contortions get me through the gap, and I roll onto the floor below.

  In the center of the room I now find two odd pieces of equipment that look like lawn chairs from the future. They’re made of nested aluminum tubes, and each has three mesh surfaces that permit a wide range of orientations. One is set up as a straight-backed chair, the other is configured to resemble a camp bed. Draped over these things is an array of exotic devices including a pair of late-model eMagin head-mounted displays (HMDs) and matching CyberGloves that allow one to control a computer with finger gestures. There’s a pile of black fabric decorated with shiny polka dots. Off to the side of the chairs are six high-resolution video cameras with tiny infrared lights clustered around their lenses. While not really my technical bailiwick, I can identify this stuff as mocap—motion capture—gear used to track the movement of one’s body. Toward the front of the room, a bank of new PCs rounds out the setup.

  So the iTeam is working on a virtual reality project.

  Not at all what I would have predicted. While online worlds have seen amazing growth recently, we still interact with them using mostly the same interface technology as we did in 1983. The hardware side of VR has long been a graveyard of broken dreams for its visionaries.

  I’m disappointed. The idea that some gamer-artists are going to revolutionize anything with the outdated technical notions of the late eighties strains credulity. And yet the iTeam members are far from stupid, and they seem genuinely consumed with their secret project.