Her expression darkens again. She’s about to deny it but then shrugs irritably. “So what? We will need lots of money. He has it. And he owns half the media in this shitty country.”
“Well, let’s leave the good old USA out of it. But Blake Randall is the leader of a public company, and so if he has to invest through this shady porno proxy—”
“Exotica knows the industry. Their experience is essential.”
“Exotica is a mobbed-up filth factory that sells giant black dildos called ‘the Negro Problem.’ You want your brilliant invention competing for shelf space with that?”
“Ugh. Zhames, you think you’re not working on a sex toy? What is this stupid saying? Ah . . . ‘It is what it is.’ Now you are getting romantic about a cow-milking machine.” She steps over and grabs Ginger by her neck and drags her toward me. “So this is going to be your lovely new girlfriend? No. You will hide her under the bed.”
“I thought we were going to challenge that impulse by injecting some class. Like Fred and Ginger, remember?”
“You are naïve. We could spend years making fine design. Nice packaging, but this is still a sex toy. The only thing you inject is spermu.”
She moves closer, pulling Ginger with her. I put my hands up. “Olya—”
She bats them away irritably but without her former violence. “I show you.”
Lots of things about Olya have amazed me to this point, but the new pinnacle is the dexterity with which she has my fly down and my dick out before I can react. She stretches across me and dips her fingers into one of the tubs of Ginger’s special lubricant. It’s sharply cold as she applies it. Exciting. Then Olya jams Ginger’s mouth over me. Without the heating elements and wiggling air bladders, it feels plastic and alien.
“Eh, Zhimbo? It’s like fucking a Barbie, no? You will not make love with this. You will never use it with a lover. It will be strange bitches who talk dirty and disappear, and charge you for the arm and leg. Exotica knows how to do this. Make you play with this plastic toy.”
“You, ah, have to turn it on.”
“No, Zhames, you cannot turn this on. It is a machine. It does what we tell it. And not very much at that. Just this.” She jerks Ginger’s head back and forth roughly. “Da, you like that?”
“It feels fucking great. That’s why we’re doing it. I don’t know why you want to let them make it cheap and tawdry. Ugly, like all that other shit.”
“Oh, do I insult your girlfriend? Please. You must know that this”—she raps Ginger’s head with her rings—“is not at all like this.”
She takes my hand and places it under her dress.
Had I been asked, I would have bet that Olya doesn’t wear underwear with formal attire, but it’s nonetheless shocking to feel bare flesh under my fingers.
“She will never be like a real woman, Zhames.” She’s close to me now, whispering in my ear. “You forget what one feels like?”
My head is still pounding from our earlier altercation, and I’m not entirely sure when this changed from an interrogation to a seduction. But it makes sense to me that Olya would operate this way. My blood was up before I got here, and I don’t need to be asked twice.
Ginger goes hard over sideways as I lunge at her. Olya steps back and I get a twitch of panic that she’s retreating. But the heavens open and hurl a bolt of sweet elation into my brain when she props herself on the table and seizes me with her legs. I go instantly inside, like our bodies are precision-milled parts finally snapping together.
It doesn’t take long. She makes very little noise, just an occasional quick intake of breath. But as we recline, she’s pushing against me with an urgency that I take to be a challenge.
For a few luscious moments I know nothing but the animal imperative to thrust for all I’m worth. Olya shakes so violently that my grip on her shoulder slips, and my knuckles thump painfully against the table. She convulses in a way that’s borderline distressing. Like she really can’t breathe, and it goes on for longer than I thought possible. Maybe I’m discomfited and hesitate, because she gasps, “Don’t stop.” I’m shaking right along with her moments later.
The end comes as suddenly as it started. She covers her face with one hand for a second. I take my weight off her and start to straighten up while remaining inside, because I can’t bring myself to leave just yet. As I shift, her right leg flashes by my face. But she’s not attacking me again, just stretching with her usual flamboyant aggression. Her lips twist slightly at my flinch, and she puts her foot on my chest and slowly pushes me out.
I gaze down at her breathtaking chest and see what looks at first like some horrible attack of hives spreading all the way up to her neck. But then I realize it’s just an uncommonly intense sex flush. I reach out to trace the boundary of her inflamed skin, marveling at the depth of sensation that it must take to cause this. Her body feels like cooling lava.
When I glance up at her face, her eyes have turned dark, and she says softly, “We have so much to do.”
43
We’re at it again the next day. By unspoken agreement, Olya and I both show up at the unheard-of hour of six AM. I don’t get so much as a “good morning.” She just steps into my office, hikes her skirt, and beckons with a peremptory flick of her fingers. I start to say something, but she presses her hand over my mouth and unzips my fly. Olya’s rule number one is no talking. Rather suspicious that our relationship flowered just as I started asking her uncomfortable questions. But for the moment, I’m more than happy to keep my mouth shut.
She’s pretty indifferent to foreplay as well. I start trotting out what few lovemaking niceties I possess, but before I’ve even made a single circuit around her earlobe with my tongue, she’s got me inside her and is hammering on my ass with her heels.
I’ve never been confronted with such naked physical need. Her eyes clamp shut, and I’m certain they won’t open until she’s done. Right now, my identity as a fellow human is of zero consequence to Olya. She’s totally consumed with her own body, and all she needs from me is a strong rhythm and mammalian heat. In this, she’s the opposite of Blythe, my only other experience with a goddess-level bedmate. For Blythe, ecstasy was a hollow thing if it wasn’t shared and mutually reveled in.
I might feel depersonalized by Olya’s sexual trance, but instead I find it incredibly liberating. There’s no trace of anxiety about timing, performance, or emotional synchronicity. I’m left with the sheer joy of drowning myself in her incomparable flesh.
She comes hard, fast, and, as near as I can tell, automatically. During our second attempt she completely clears my desk. But a broken monitor is a small price to pay for the memory of this woman panting and writhing in my arms.
Last night she’d unsettled me with her dismissive talk about the robots she normally refers to as her children. Previously, I entertained certain doubts about our project. But finally having real sex after all this time has freed me of any ambivalence.
What I’m feeling with Olya now is a living dream.
This particular dream we’ve been chasing together for weeks now through a digital fantasyland. Far from being an alienating, sterile technology, the Dancers have fostered a sense of erotic ease among the iTeam. They’ve been a safe sandbox in which we’ve gradually gotten comfortable with each other. Not only Olya, but I’m beginning to see stirrings with Xan as well. Our dream world may even be working on Garriott’s congenital shyness.
I wonder what Olya’s like with other, normal lovers. Does she whisper endearments, stare longingly into their eyes? In a sense, she’s already had sex with me any number of times, and she feels totally entitled to treat me like I’m a machine. Which may sound unfortunate, but in practice brings pure bliss.
People tend to be at their best when they feel empowered. And there’s nothing like the malleable magic of virtuality for inciting that sense of possibility. Liberated from our corporeal prisons we feel superhuman, not ghostly. You can try anything, since mistakes can be wiped out wit
h the click of a button. And that lets you do things, explore emotions you would never consider in the squalid permanence of meatspace. In NOD there’s no conversation that can’t be had. No activity too risky. No thing you cannot do.
Is it perfect? No, far from it. But the Dancers are powerful in this way, and I want other people to feel it. Not to adopt them as any kind of replacement, but to use them to explore. This sense of adventurous communion they can encourage seems to diffuse into reality. As evidenced by the glory of the current moment.
Just as I’m starting to worry about my endurance, Olya emerges from a decisive series of shudders and pushes me away. She steps back quickly and looks at me like she’s awakened to find a stranger in her bedroom. Her eyes close as she takes a deep breath and cracks her neck. I get a veiled smile and an ambiguous, “Hmm . . .”
Then she walks out.
At nine fifteen AM, I get a message that the RAT embedded in the email I sent Nash last night has been activated. The text had simply requested that he download a voice sample of Billy and ask around if anyone had fielded inquiries from this guy about Gina’s death. As hacks go, this one hardly deserves the name, but infecting someone when you’ve established a trusted relationship is always pretty easy.
Nash emailed me back, tersely saying he’d look into it, but by then, using a brand-new flaw Red Rook found in Microsoft’s Media Player software, my file had already released its toxins, and I’m now busy dumping his hard drive and installing keystroke loggers. He doesn’t have a copy of Gina’s video, so I’ll have to wait until he logs into the NYPD’s digital evidence vault to get it.
44
Back in Savant, I find a message from the Duke congratulating me on reaching the Third Degree. To do so I’ve had to satisfy an ever-more-egregious series of commands. Sourcing abominable porn has been fairly easy due to my contacts in law enforcement, but four of the “crimes” have required that I personally appear in the videos. Though I seem to have no problem with robot sodomy, when it comes to Sadean levels of pain, perversion, and paraphilia, I’m simply not varsity material. Fortunately, the genre permitted me to wear a mask in each of these cases.
My most recent chore required that Adrian hook me up with a local role-play specialist to spend a couple hours reenacting a weird armpit frotteurism episode from 120 Days. While probably not fulfilling the stipulated quotas of bodily fluids, we put enough vigor into it that I thought it might suffice. And it saved me from having to violate any health codes.
Normally, a new quest is transmitted right after completing the previous one, and today is no different. Though the tasks usually come as messages from one of the Friends, here I’m confronted by a NoBot called Madame Champville, who was another one of the storytellers from the book.
She hands me an envelope that contains a note written in flowing cursive with little pictograms substituting for certain words:
Gather the from the in time
Leave at the , and please know that I’m
Observing your courage or noting its lack
So make sure in this case that you never look back.
So far, the orders I’ve received from Silling’s inmates have been quite explicit. But this one is in code. As my tasks tread the line of legality, a criminal organization like the Pyrexians would start encoding their commands. I suppose anyone seeking to join them lusts after forbidden images and is therefore familiar with the methods one uses to conceal them.
This particular code seems fairly simple. The image files standing in for the words “rose,” “table,” and “grave” are unusually grainy. I could spend hours scouring them for information, but Red Rook has a whole department dedicated to this kind of image analysis work. So I zip them up and forward them to our Stegosauri.
Half an hour later, I get a response:
From: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2015 0:45 am
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Lost my decoder ring
Mr. Pryce,
Please note that you sent these images to Red Rook’s Steganography department. Steganography means “hidden message,” not “message advertised by preposterously sloppy enciphering.” In this case, an insultingly trivial high-density LSB encoding on the carrier files. Your payloads are enclosed, but in the future, please send such work to Red Rook’s “dallying with dimwitted dilettantes” division.
-DeNigma.
Though wanting in professional courtesy, I can’t argue with our Cryptiles’ results. Attached to the note are three new, even-lower-resolution files.
The rose holds a portrait of a skinny girl who looks about seventeen. She has caramel skin and green eyes set off with too much eyeliner. She’s wearing a tight pink baby tee with the name “Rosita” spelled out in gangster-Gothic script. The pattern I’ve seen with the Degrees is that for any names that come up, Billy always picks some variation on a child victim from the book. In this case, Rosita is a Spanish version of little Rosette, the general’s daughter kidnapped from her mother’s house in the countryside.
Needless to say, she does not fare well.
The wooden table’s image shows a different kind of table: here the schedule board at a train station. Given that it lists Metroliner departures to both Boston and Washington, DC, I assume that it’s Penn Station. Only an Acela from DC currently occupies a gate. One of those red time stamps, the kind nobody uses anymore, sits in the lower right corner of the photo. The date reads “01.24.15 12:47 AM,” which would mean that the picture was taken tomorrow night, a revolutionary advance in digital photography.
Finally, the headstone file contains an image of a graveyard, though the flowering riot of tulips and overhanging redbud tree give this one a distinctly cheerful cast. I’m further cheered by the ease with which this particular graveyard can be identified. The building filling the background has a granite façade inscribed with the words AMERICAN STOCK EXCHANGE.
That would place the shot at Trinity Church, which lies just at the foot of Wall Street. The time stamp on this one shows two AM, about twenty-five hours from now.
Substituting these new images into my original orders reveals pretty clear instructions: pick up this Rosita woman from Penn Station at the specified time. Leave her at the Trinity Church graveyard an hour later.
For Jacques, Billy’s game so far has been purely virtual. It’s located in NOD and deals with digital objects: avatars and video images. But now I’ve finally caught up with the elite players, and Savant seems primed to start hemorrhaging into real life.
45
The train is right on time. I see her step off the escalator and start scanning the station.
“Rosita?”
She examines me, a little startled, as though she hadn’t expected to be met. In case someone is monitoring this exchange, I’ve disguised myself in a woolen cap with tinted glasses. A real human-hair mustache rounds out my “I drive at night until the art world evolves enough to understand my work” look.
Rosita’s dressed in a dissonant combination of a nice suit, a casual blouse, and fuck-me heels. She seems young and nervous underneath it. Like she’s going to a business meeting, but no one’s ever told her how to dress. The way she squints at her surroundings tells me that she hasn’t been to Penn Station before. But she marshals an edgy smile and puts out her hand.
“Rosa de la Cruz,” she says. She’s carrying a beat-up duffel bag, which I move to take, but she shifts away and says, “I got it,” her accent second-generation Hispanic. We assess each other for a moment. She says, “You’re with Sweetest Taboo?”
Her question resolves in my head too late to prevent me from saying, “What?”
“The Sweetest Taboo” was a hit single from the British-Nigerian singer Sade Adu. Her name is pronounced Shah-day, but the connection is clear. Rosa rocks back on her heels, reconsidering me.
I try to recover. “Oh, right. Yeah. I’m just the driver.”
She thinks about this for a second
and then hands me her bag. “So where are we going?”
Her second query also throws me. Unless Rosa’s the consummate actress, she honestly doesn’t know the answer. I can’t bring myself to say that I’m taking her to a graveyard in the middle of the night, so I go with, “Downtown.”
She relaxes somewhat in the front seat of my rented Lincoln Town Car. As I drive her down the West Side Highway, I wonder what happens once we get to our destination.
I start with small talk about her trip. Whether she’s ever been to New York before. She gazes avidly at the bright skyline. I ask what brings her to the city.
“Business.”
“You look a little young to be doing business. How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.” She doesn’t hesitate, but she paints her answer with an emphatically blasé shade that destroys the realism. “I’m a fashion designer. Your company wants me to do a line for them. That’s why they invited me up here.”
“A whole clothing line?” I take in her tone-deaf outfit. “For real?”
“No, man, it’s virtual clothing. I design for NOD avatars.”
“Oh, like one of those video games?”
“It’s not a game. I get paid real money. Here, I’ll show you.”
She extracts a sketch book from her portfolio, flipping to a section pasted with color pictures taken from NOD. Rosa’s designs range from belle époque confections of satin and lace to fanciful barbarian marmot brassieres. They’re good enough to make me want to commission some RL pieces. I give her a soft wolf whistle.
She brightens at the compliment. “Yeah, I like that stuff. But Taboo’s new store is on this island where all the desviados hang. They spend a lot more money than normal people. So . . .” She fans through several pages. They contain drawings of buxom women wearing unicorn blindfolds, the business ends of which are circumcised to match their dildo-spurred boots. She’s got supervillain men with tentacle hands and some animal outfits that flip by too quickly for me to make sense of. Again I see that for fauna fetishists, the beast itself isn’t always sufficient. We have to go one better and put Bowser in a latex nun’s habit.
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