His All-in-One tweaked. It was Susan Foster, wondering whether he’d made that call.
“Press! Press the fucking button!”
Kyle Bentley-Briggs could not press the button. Something deep inside him couldn’t. Something Kyle did not understand, and did not want to understand, and feared, and wished would go away, or wither up and die inside him. He broke down sobbing. Heaving. Convulsing. He switched on the HC HomeSystems Viewer and turned up the volume to mask the sound. He pushed his face into a puffy pillow and sat there on the sofa and screamed. He wailed. He wept. He keened and whined, the muscles in his face contorting as if they were taking massive Gs. It felt like maybe his ribs were breaking. His hands were coiled into fists, and the pain ... and he cursed the One and the fucking Many ... and the tears ran down his face like rain.
He called Greg Cramer at 1640 from his Business Class seat on the southbound WhisperTrain. He was on his way back from Breckenridge Village, where he had visited Catherine, who had told him nothing. However, one of the Seaview aides had been kind enough to check the logs and confirm that Valentina had spent the day (i.e., the day before he left on his trip), or the better part of that day, with Catherine ... doing what, exactly, Kyle couldn’t imagine. Catherine was completely uncommunicative. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could fake. Kyle had studied her for five or six minutes. She was not in there. No one was. No, whatever Val had gone there looking for, she hadn’t gotten it, not from Catherine ... and yet, she’d come home and ordered that box of whatever it was from EasyStore Storage. Maybe she had hallucinated something. Something which had set her off. Whatever it was had something to do with all that broken black glass in the kitchen, which Kyle had sealed in a Ziploc bag and locked in a drawer in his desk in the office. That was after he took a quick shower ... by which time he had already decided to definitely probably call Greg Crame r
Kyle had decided to call Greg Cramer shortly after he awoke on the sofa, where he had finally passed out and slept for two hours after weeping convulsively for who knew how long. He awoke with a headache. The Viewer was blaring. He clicked it off and sat there trying to remember who he was and what had just happened. Then he remembered his cousin, Greg Cramer, who worked in some Info-related department of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and who the odds were probably knew somebody who knew somebody who worked in Security. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something. If he contacted Greg, and Greg was willing, and he knew the right people, and had any juice, strings could be pulled, corners cut, possibly even blind eyes turned, and Valentina could be delivered to Kyle, and not to a locked-down hospital facility. In any event, it was worth a shot. However, before he took that shot, he wanted to ride up to Breckenridge Village and talk to Catherine, or the staff, at least, and gather what information he could ...
He called Greg Cramer from the southbound Orange at 1640, and got his assistant, Lorie, or something, who was not a real person, and who asked if she could ask what it was regarding, which she did, then promptly put him on hold. After a minute, Greg picked up. Kyle couldn’t say very much on the phone, but he told Greg it was a Security issue involving Valentina, and Greg was no dummy. He seemed to be willing, even eager to help. He suggested they meet that night at Rosie’s. Kyle agreed, and rerouted accordingly.
Rosie’s was one of these exclusive upscale simulated downscale cocktail lounges where the scuz on the tiles in the restrooms was fake and a blue-gray haze of certified-harmless pseudo-cigarette smoke hung in the air. It was down at the bottom of the business district, right on the border of Center City. The bartenders all had spray-on tattoos. The waitresses dressed like aging prostitutes. The bar was festooned with emerging executives, Variant-Positives with designer stubble, loosened tie-knots and perfect teeth, shouting into their Viewers and implants and drinking their non-alcoholic beers out of dirty glasses that weren’t really dirty. Everyone in there was over thirty.
Cramer was waiting in a booth in the back. He waved Kyle over. They ordered their drinks, HalfLife whiskeys, which were alcoholic, but the buzz wore off after twenty minutes. They switched off their Viewers, and Kyle laid it on him. He spilled his guts. He told Greg everything.
“Wow. Man. I’m really sorry.”
“I didn’t know who else to turn to, you know?”
“Totally. No, you did the right thing.”
“Is there anything ... anyone ... what can we do here?”
“I don’t know. Let me think for a minute.”
Cramer sat there and thought for a minute, or just stared across the room intently, looking like he was thinking for a minute. The Viewer behind the bar was running some soft-core porno, or an ad for condoms. A Swedish android with gargantuan breasts stared into the lens of the camera and cooed and drooled as she licked her own nipples.
“OK, listen. Here’s what we’ll do. I know a guy who knows a guy in Domestic Security who owes me a favor.”
“The guy in Security?”
“No, the guy who knows him. Let me talk to him.”
“OK, good.”
“Maybe my guy can get his guy to flag her as a drug reaction.”
“A drug reaction?”
“Happens all the time. Somebody takes the wrong combination, temporary psychosis ensues. You get ’em, sedate ’em, no muss, no fuss. Released to a doctor or family member.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but, look, don’t get your hopes up. It’s worth a try, but it’s not a sure thing. Drug reactions stay domestic. That’s what we want. Domestic is good. If it goes Territorial, forget about it. Hospital stay, then Special Needs City. If we can get my ...”
Cramer stopped mid-sentence. A derivatives trader with an eyebrow piercing was passing their booth on his way to the men’s room. Cramer waited until the coast was clear.
“Let me talk to my guy tomorrow. The only thing is, technically speaking, the incident report needs to come from a doctor. Who’s your psychiatrist?”
“Graell, at Cleveland.”
“Cleveland Medical. ”
Kyle nodded, gravely.
“Forget about that then.”
“So, what? That’s it?”
“No, but we’ll have to work around that. We’re going to need copies of both your prescriptions.”
“I’ll send them tonight.”
“Send them tomorrow.”
Cramer sipped his whiskey slowly.
“How many people know about this?”
“Me, you, one of the neighbors.”
“A neighbor?”
“Susan. Susan Foster.”
“Married?”
“Yeah. It’s her and her husband.”
“She told the husband?”
“No. Well ... maybe.”
“OK. We assume she told the husband. Kids?”
“No. They’re grown. They’re gone. Why?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Why? What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. Drink your drink.”
Kyle hadn’t touched it. He picked it up. His hand was shaking. He set it back down. Cramer leaned in and whispered to him.
“Look, stuff like this. It happens all the time. To all kinds of people. Hadley people ... or not to them, but to family, you know. Wives, kids. Arrangements get made. Thing is ... it’s got to be handled cleanly.”
“Cleanly?”
Cramer didn’t respond.
Someone up at the bar was laughing.
“I’ll do whatever is necessary, Greg.”
“I know you will, buddy. But let me handle it. You go home and get some sleep. Clean yourself up. Go back to work.”
“What do I say to Susan Foster?”
“Nothing. Tell her you called it in.”
Cramer scanned the room a moment, waved down a waitress and gestured for the check. Kyle automatically reached for his wallet .
“No. I got this.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Cramer had his company card out ... the Hadley slogan embossed at the bottom. He was watching the Viewer behind the bar, or staring off in that direction at least.
“Everything happens for a reason, right?”
“What?”
Kyle turned and checked the Viewer. The nipple-licking Swedish android was walking through a tunnel that went on forever ... or no, it wasn’t the Swedish android. It looked like ... was it Kiki Brezinski?
“Everything happens for a reason.”
The tunnel wasn’t a tunnel either. It was just a MoveWay in a mall somewhere.
“Right ... I guess. I mean, sure ... yes.”
“How far along is she?”
“Who?”
“Val.”
“Oh. Three months ... three and a half.”
Kyle was having trouble concentrating.
“Boy? Girl?”
“Girl.”
“You name her?”
“Zoey, we think.”
“Zoey. Nice.”
The screen dissolved to an aerial shot ... skimming across an endless field of bright green genetically-modified soybeans. The smiling face of “Jimbo” Cartwright faded in above the horizon. The waitress arrived and took Cramer’s card. Neither one of them looked at the waitress. Her name was Tamara. She was in her forties. She lived in a studio in Center City and worked the night shift six nights a week. The moment Cramer walked into Rosie’s and took a six-top booth in her station, she’d made him for a lousy tip.
Sarah’s Game
Three months earlier, so back in December, presumably right around the time Valentina was having her spiritual awakening in the lobby of 6262 Lomax after finding out she was finally pregnant with the Clarion baby both she and Kyle wanted, and that was going to make everything so much better, Taylor was starting to begin to believe (or at least he was starting to begin to suspect) that getting involved with whatever faith-based, baby-smuggling Terrorist outfit he’d unknowingly gotten himself deeply involved with had maybe not been such a brilliant idea. Things were getting complicated ... or maybe they had always been complicated, and Taylor, in his fervor to save Cassandra, and dump this baby on the baby smugglers, and get a little action on the side in the process, had seriously misjudged the whole situation.
For starters, he’d been wrong about Sarah. She didn’t come in ninety seconds. It took her about twenty-five minutes, actually, the first time at least, back in early November.
What had happened was, a few days later (i.e., after their initial Pussyhorse meeting), while Jamie, or Jamé, or whatever her name was, was reading the Standard Eighth Revision of the Standardized Preamble to all A.S.U. meetings, she’d leaned up, Sarah, who in some kind of seriously special ops fashion had snuck up behind him, and whispered in Taylor’s ear again. She wanted to meet alone, she whispered ... which Taylor figured, here we go. By this time, of course, he’d completely forgotten his vow to keep things on a businesslike basis, and he was looking at another five excruciating months of sitting around in the back of these meetings pretending to resist all Corporatist oppression, and he was bored, which Anti-Socials were prone to, and up for a little sexual distraction. He figured Sarah was also bored. She didn’t seem all that engaged with the D.A.D.A., which was clearly mostly Adam’s thing.
They met that night at a bar called Frankie’s, down in the thick of the deep Inner Zone, took a few sips of their lukewarm beers and retired to one of the rooms upstairs, where Sarah promptly sat him down on the bed and did not rip his clothes off. Instead, she said they needed to talk. Which was fine with Taylor. Taylor could talk. Taylor was more than happy to talk. Taylor knew how to talk to women. He had no problem talking to women. It wasn’t like he was some heartless hard-on whose only interest was in getting his nut. Taylor had sat and talked to Cassandra (or at least he had sat and listened to Cassandra) on several occasions, for nearly an hour. No, Taylor could definitely talk to women. Just normally not at a place like Frankie’s. People didn’t go to Frankie’s to talk. People went to Frankie’s to fuck. They also fucked at home, of course, and up against walls, and ... well, wherever, but if you wanted some privacy, you went to Frankie’s, or one of the other sex clubs like Frankie’s, and so, naturally, when Sarah suggested Frankie’s, Taylor figured that’s what she wanted, which it turned out it was, but after they talked, which, if Taylor had known, he’d have brought his beer up.
The thing was, for Sarah, unlike for Taylor, sex was not a simple, physical, animalistic, instinctual act, but, rather, was a complex, quasi-spiritual, ritual experience involving “levels” and “stages” and assorted “states of surrender” that one “attained” and “explored” and “heightened” through the use of certain fairly common but nonetheless deviant sexual practices, about which Sarah was very specific. She told him exactly what she needed, how she needed it, how long she needed it, how she’d probably act when she got it, and what would probably happen if she didn’t. She said of course she’d understand if Taylor wasn’t into such practices, and couldn’t provide her with what she needed, and so wanted to call it off right then, in which case there would be no hard feelings, and it wouldn’t affect their baby-smuggling plans, which deviantly fucking Taylor at Frankie’s in any event had nothing to do with. Taylor, bless him, was undeterred.
By late December, 2609, the Year of the Mekong Giant Catfish, and 6370, and 2049, and all the other years it officially was, they were meeting three, four times a week, and going at it like a couple of fuck monkeys. They met at places like Frankie’s, Henry’s, and Hardcore Carla’s, and the original Darkside, which were sleazy, deeply Inner Zone dives with rooms upstairs you could rent by the hour, or (as in the case of the original Darkside) straight ahead old-fashioned BDSM clubs, the ones with the swings and slings and cages, and the antique dentist chairs, and all like that, but also with private rooms you could use, because Sarah, whose deviant sexual behaviors were very specific, was not an exhibitionist.
Now the thing you have to keep in mind, in terms of deviant sexual behavior in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, is that among the Normal population (where Sarah had begun her sexual activity, and had likely discovered her deviant proclivities), sex was somewhat complicated, or fraught ... or was like a potential minefield. It wasn’t that the Normals didn’t have sex. They did. The Normals enjoyed having sex. Sex was a healthy, pleasurable activity. There was absolutely nothing wrong with sex. On the contrary, sex was strongly encouraged, and openly celebrated, and widely marketed, and constantly discussed and fleeped and tweaked about, and taught in schools and workshops, and so on. And it wasn’t like the Normals didn’t get kinky. They did. The Normals got totally kinky, but they did so in a non-aggressive, loving, mutually respectful manner that had nothing to do with, and bore no resemblance to, anything approaching sexual abuse, or sexual assault, or rape, or torture, or that “potentially stimulated ideations or sexual fantasies involving same.” According to the DSM XXXIII, sexual practices which crossed that line (wherever it was, which wasn’t that clear) and led to such ideations or fantasies (of being raped, say, or sexually tortured, or of performing such acts on another person) were clearly symptoms of late-stage disease, and sexually deviant, and designateable. Which meant the Normals had to be careful, very careful, extremely careful, as all it took was one complaint by a sexual partner, or husband or wife, that one was possibly having such fantasies, and that would be it, they’d be off to the hospital, and eventually off to a Quarantine Zone, where rumor had it rape, abuse, and other somewhat more consensual but no less violent sexual practices, although officially forbidden, were fairly rampant .. .
Which, all right, in this case, the rumors were true. It wasn’t that the Zone was a non-stop rape-fest, or some kind of year-round S&M orgy, but people did tend to get raped a bit, and the deep Inner Zone was definitely home to a staggering number of seedy establishments where Anti-Social Persons could go and indulge in a variety of deviant practices.
Class 3 Anti-Social
Person that he was, Taylor was not entirely inexperienced when it came to deviant sexual practices. In fact, prior to “settling down” with Cassandra (as Taylor had taken to calling it at some point), his sexual adventures had been of a nature some might describe as indiscriminate. In his wilder days, with a head full of whiskey, or sometimes tequila, or rum, or gin, but mostly just good old DMLX, he would hop in the sack with just about anyone, and do whatever, or almost whatever (everyone has their limits, naturally). During the course of these dissolute decades, Taylor had been with tops, bottoms, switches, witches, yankers, spankers, electrical sadists, shavers, ravers, garden variety garment fetishists, women who wanted to whip or be whipped, to call him names, or to be called names, to pee or be peed on, poo enthusiasts, asphyxiophiliacs, needle freaks, and a couple of women who could only come if you tied them upside down and did this jackhammer thing while they masturbated.
Sarah was nowhere near in that league. Actually, once she let go of her head, or attained her state of surrender, or whatever, she wasn’t all that deviant at all, or at least not in Taylor’s professional opinion. The thing was getting her to that point, which took some time, which was fine with Taylor, as long as it eventually led to the two of them screaming together at the top of their lungs as their heads exploded with violent orgasms that shot up their spines like electric currents, and not to Sarah convulsively sobbing in a fetal position for thirty-five minutes. What usually worked was binding her wrists and ankles to the rusty old wrought iron bedposts (or, if available, the stainless steel eye-bolts some helpful person had attached to the wall) and then teasing her mercilessly for twenty-five minutes. Halfway through this, she would start to beg in a half-hearted “listen-to-me-begging” kind of way, which Taylor had learned to ignore completely. When the begging didn’t work, and the teasing continued, she’d get aggressive and order Taylor to stop with the fucking tongue already, or the wax, or ice, or nipple clamps, or pinching fingers, or nibbling teeth, or whatever he happened to be using at the time, and fucking untie her ankles and fuck her. Then, when Taylor did not untie her, and the merciless teasing with the tongue, or fingers, or the Pyrex dildo with the clitoral stimulator, or whatever he happened to be using, continued, she would lose it completely, her body convulsing and shuddering in waves as she had this series of mini-orgasms that punched little holes in the wall in her head that she had to get through. Now, the crucial thing at this stage of the process was to not let up and untie her too soon, which would leave her hanging and plunge her into The Pit of Despair and Uncontrollable Sobbing, which once that had happened she wouldn’t be able to move or speak for extended periods. Occasionally, this was unavoidable, but usually it was if Taylor kept on teasing her until her eyes rolled back in her head and she finally let go utterly. Then, and only then, he’d untie her, which he normally managed in just under four seconds, pulling the cords of the quick-release knots he’d had to relearn, and practice tying, at which point Sarah would spring up off the mattress in a state of animal frenzy and throw him down on his back and mount him and just fuck them both completely senseless.
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