She smiled, pushing her hand ever lower, with painstaking slowness. "And do you really think you have that power? To change the whole, entire world?"
Oscar thought about it a moment, but only with part of his brain. The rest of it was focused on the woman beside him, the perfectly crafted flesh and the sweet-smelling hair that tickled the side of his face. He shrugged, shoulders whisking against the sheets.
"Well," she said, as her hand finally completed its journey and grabbed a rapidly swelling part of him. "You've already changed my world, Oscar Graves."
He could have said a lot of things then. He could have asked her the one burning question that remained in their strange relationship. What about the other men? Did she say the same things to them? Was this all just programming, or had she just learned to put on an act, the way any organic human could?
He let the question go, floating off into the fog of his subconscious mind, and focused on what her hands were doing. A few minutes later she swung her leg over and straddled him, clawing gently at his chest as she moved slowly up and down. He watched her intently, drinking in her sultry gaze, her fluttering eyelids, her little gasps.
Oscar had been with plenty of women before. He'd even been married to one. He knew the signs, and he knew the giveaways. There was no act here, not now as she fulfilled her professional obligation, as she earned her sum of money from him. He had no idea how she felt about most of her other clients, but he knew for a fact that she looked forward to her time with him. Technically, it was still work for her; but she seemed to enjoy every second of it.
In his younger years, Oscar would not have been able to hold back. The faces and sounds she made would have driven him wild. Out of his mind. He would have gone too fast, finished quickly, sweaty and out of breath. Now he was at that golden age, pushing sixty years of age in a time when sixty was the new forty-five. Old enough to go slow and steady, young enough not to shut down entirely.
Afterward, he flipped her onto her back and kissed her for a while; from her lips on down, and eventually back up again. By the time he reached her face again, her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her breath flowing in and out in perfectly slow, measured gusts. She was asleep, or very close to it... or perhaps just pretending.
"I love you," he said, and meant it. He had no expectation of hearing it back.
CHAPTER 2
◆◆◆
Oscar Graves left the pleasure house well after dark, as a cold rain washed over the city and turned the streets to dark mirrors. Ponds and puddles clogged with garbage, a smell like a zoo wafting out of the storm drains. Oscar walked fast, his head low, the collar of his coat turned up to cover his neck. He kept his hands in his pockets. His left hand cradled a pack of cigarettes, keeping the damp from soaking in and ruining them. Cancer sticks, he called them. No reason to lie about what they were. They were such an archaic habit anyway. He felt dumb, left behind like some clueless Neanderthal, but sometimes he just needed to feel the burn of smoke down his throat - especially now.
He was a lonely man always, but never so much as these evenings when he left Catalea behind. Her room was so homey. It felt just like an apartment. Cozy. Lived in. His stomach always sank a bit each and every time he stepped into the pleasure house hall though. The illusion always failed as soon as he saw the endless rows of identical rooms. Designed to make the dumb, lonely men who came through here feel like they were part of a real relationship. That their lives were anything but empty.
Half of those men were just like Oscar. Divorced, estranged from adult children. Their glory days long since passed. Their self-worth at an all-time low. Oscar was still in the business as far as his day job went, still taking cases, but it all felt so much emptier now. So much less important. Crime rates were dropping anyway, and the most thrilling thing he got to do now was hunt down cheating spouses and taking pictures of them. He'd had a fair share of those cases in the past as well, but they had always felt more... interesting.
The other half of the guys who went to the pleasure house were just as miserable, just as pathetic, but along different lines. They were guys who were still married, but whose wives hated them. Or vice versa. They came to these places to blow off steam, to feel like real men again, with women who were literally built to make them feel like studs no matter how lame their performances were. Oscar knew this type well. He often spied on them, chased them to rendezvous points, snapped pictures. In fact, that was how he had met Catalea...
A cold night. A slick of ice on the roads, a covering of snow that made every pile of garbage look a little less ugly and a little more like a mound of boulders. The kind of night that made him wish he hadn't screwed up with Gwen, that he could be with her right that second, sitting by a roaring fire with her body pressed against his.
His mark, a guy named Coster, had left work late. When he finally emerged from the office building, swathed in warm clothing and with a cup of steaming joe in his hands, he had not gone for his car. He had departed on foot, heading deeper into downtown.
When following a guy on foot, any good private investigator will go on foot as well. In a car, you'd have to keep doubling back or circling the block. Either that, or you'd have to drive four miles an hour right alongside the son of a bitch. Either way, anyone with an eighth of a brain would spot you in about three seconds and start rethinking their itinerary. They might even get the cops involved.
So, with a great deal of regret, Oscar switched off his car and went slipping and sliding across the road. The wind was blowing hard, and no matter how many turns and changes in direction he made, it always seemed to be blowing right into his face. His instinct was to go fast, but this Coster guy was taking his sweet time. He even ducked into a shop for a refill on his coffee. In retrospect, Oscar figured the guy was trying to stay up late so he could really get his money's worth at the pleasure house.
While Coster was in the shop, Oscar ducked under the awning of a closed cafe across the street. Hiding in shadows, his dark coat a wall against the blizzard, he lit up a cigarette and clutched it with numb fingers. The color of his fingers was flushed and pink, rather than dead and white, which meant he still had some time before a retreat into a heated environment would become necessary. Instead he just smoked, hopped up and down a bit to keep warm, and waited.
What a pathetic sight he must be; and a very troubling one. Depending on who was looking, he would either appear like the saddest, loneliest man in the world or some sort of thief casing the joint and planning his next move.
Damn, it was cold. Even now, four months later, he still thought he could feel the cold tingling in the tips of his toes. It wasn't just the temperature that was frigid, either. It was everything. His heart. His soul. His prospects. He was at a dead end, had been for a long time, and nothing was changing except that dead end was getting darker, narrower.
If he could just get out of this cold. But what did he have to look forward to once he did? A return to his gloomy apartment. A lukewarm shower and a beer, a long sit on a hard chair with a loose spring that dug into his back. A night of watching other people's misery in programs, letting his mind melt a bit further. And in the morning, a hangover, a breakfast of restaurant leftovers, a trip to his client's preferred meeting place to drop off his pictures and collect a bit of money and maybe, if he was lucky, an extension on his assignment. Then another long night, either in the cold watching Coster or at a bar killing his liver and the few stubborn brain cells that insisted on reminding him how miserable he was.
He had no vision of his future that didn't involve some combination of those same events repeated ad infinitum, until the day he was lucky enough to keel over and die.
There was no room or energy for hope or optimism. He didn't know it, but all he really needed was one good thing. One bright light, one beautiful moment of peace. And he found it that night, as he strode through the halls of the pleasure house in search of a good place to post up with his camera.
One of the doors was
open, and a woman stood there. She was dressed in a sheer nightgown, something that failed to hide the shape, color and size of her slightly oversized nipples and the heft of the breast themselves. Apart from this glimpse of Eden hidden under a thin sheet of cloth, the woman looked to Oscar like a widow stood at the end of a dock, waiting for her sailor husband who was never coming back.
He was mesmerized by the sight of her. Completely unable to speak at first.
She asked if she could help him. He explained that she couldn't, unless she knew about a guy named Coster.
She smiled at that. "I know him. I know the girl he likes to see..."
Then she showed him. Oscar was grateful. At some point during the walk over, Coster had looked at the time and apparently saw that he was running late. He booked it, leaving the private investigator behind to hobble on stiff, frozen legs. Oscar managed to stay just close enough behind to see him vanish into this simple, nondescript two-story building, quite like a hotel in structure. The lack of any kind of signage, and the vast collection of vehicles in the parking lot, pegged it immediately as a pleasure house. The only place where a synth could get a paying job, which was still an upgrade from where they were a couple decades ago.
There were a lot of advantages to laying with a synth. The main one was that they could not transmit any kind of STD. Though they felt, tasted and smelled like any organic woman, there were fundamental differences - hidden ones - that disallowed human pathogens from surviving in their bodies. You could still theoretically catch something from them, if you went in within a few minutes of another guy, but the pleasure houses had rules to prevent that.
In return for their service to the public of frustrated men and women, the synths were given money and permanent, private use of their rooms. When they weren't pleasing a client in them, they were living in them. The money was of little use to any synth, so most just let their checks collect in untouched bank accounts. Just in case they were one day freed, considered as actual citizens, allowed to do things like purchase property and hold down other types of jobs.
Oscar came to the pleasure houses often, almost always in the hunt of a mark and not for the intended use. He knew a lot about these places, and about what he often referred to as the lost souls who worked in them. Because to him they did have souls, if the soul existed at all. They were people. And he felt sorry for them, even as he stared at their bodies and contemplated burning a bit of his money on them.
It was the same with Catalea. She was stunning, yet equally tragic, and Oscar fell for her hard, in a perfect storm of lust and that age-old desire to rescue the damsel in distress. She quickly became all he thought about.
That night, as he was coming back down the hall with his pictures of Coster, he saw her again. Waiting in her door. This time, she beckoned to him. Without a thought, he approached her. Close enough to feel her breath on him.
"My bed is empty," she said. "Why don't you help me fill it up?"
Oscar swallowed so hard it hurt. "I don't have any cash on me."
She smiled. "That doesn't matter. I live here, and I'm allowed to have guests..." She turned, glancing toward her bed, then looked back at him. "I just want some company. You seem harmless. Maybe you can make me happy."
It seemed like he had. At any rate, Oscar himself was also happy for the first time in years, he realized.
Things changed after that. He saw Catalea as often as possible. Without trying, without even thinking about it, he cut his drinking down until it was almost nonexistent. And he'd had the same pack of cigarettes in his pocket for over two months. It was still half full. He thought he probably only kept it on him out of superstition, out of a strange, buried fear that things would soon go wrong and he would be miserable once again. Or maybe it just felt strange to have an empty left pocket.
He fell in love with Catalea immediately. She was like no one he'd ever been with before. According to Catalea, the same was true for her with him. Her other clients didn't treat her badly, per se. Just like they didn't treat their hands badly when they couldn't afford a prostitute and had to take care of themselves. They walked in, they took her in whatever position or style they wanted. Words were kept to a minimum. Just basic, dispassionate instructions. Slower, lower, faster... on your belly, on your back, on your knees. She was basically treated like an object.
Not by Oscar though. Their sex was plentiful, but they spent far more time together doing other things. Laying and talking, taking walks on moonlit streets, discussing the future - a thing which neither one of them had any power over. He because he was old and irrelevant, she because she was a synth. Her station in life was likely to change, given enough time, but his was not. He would die of old age long before anyone invented a cure to aging.
Those discussions made Catalea sad, but she never shied away from them. To her, sadness was the most common and the most obvious of emotional states. It was everywhere. It was ample proof that she was human. Oscar knew it, and one day so would the rest of the world.
She was his life, and he was her escape. They spent as much time together as possible, and even when they were apart memories of her, the moisture of a kiss on his cheek, kept Oscar going. It kept him away from the booze, from his former pack-a-day habit. It kept him away from the bars. Slowly, surely, he set himself along a path of self-improvement.
He wasn't so old just yet, he had a number of good decades left in him if he took good care of himself. So that was what he did, as much for his sake as for Catalea's. The excess weight dropped off him. His heart no longer thumped so disconcertingly and so frantically on the rare occasion where he had to run after someone. It had been over ten years since he had been in an actual fight, but he figured it was only a matter of time... So he joined a gym, started working out, and took lessons to break the rust off his dormant combat skills. It wasn't long before he got the hang of it again, like riding a bike, and dropped his entry level coach for someone more advanced.
Catalea saw the changes in him, and she enjoyed them. Not because she was shallow, but because her own body never changed at all. It was something new, another break in the monotony of her life as a synthetic prostitute.
Now, four months later, he once again moved like a tiger down rain-drenched streets, down back alleys in the deep, cold heart of midnight.
He passed by a 24-hour eatery and glanced inside. Happy people. Young people. Drunk and carefree. They had each other. Their human mates, who could go wherever they pleased and do whatever came to mind. It made Oscar sad for Catalea, and it made him sad for himself. He started to pull out a cigarette, got it as far as his lips, then glimpsed a trash can a few feet to his left. With a grunt, he threw the whole pack away. Heard it splash down into the watery, soupy depths of the garbage can. Irretrievable, now. If he wanted more he'd have to find a store and buy them. That was just enough of a barrier, just enough of a pain in the neck, to keep him on the straight and narrow.
He walked on, checking the time. Midnight. Five past, actually. Right now he ought to be in bed with Catalea, since this was her free night. But wouldn't you know it, some bastard had the audacity to promise good payment for prompt service. An urgent matter, they said. And private. Private enough that they wanted the meeting to happen tonight, late, in the quiet hours. He was supposed to be meeting them at some hotel, just a few blocks away.
He fully expected it to be the same old tired business. Someone's partner was running around behind their back, they wanted proof so that they could come out on top of the inevitable divorce settlement. Or maybe they just wanted a way of blackmailing and getting what they wanted out of their wayward spouse.
It wasn't Oscar's place to know. He was impartial. Half the people he worked for were heroes, the other half were villains. It didn't make a bit of difference which, as long as he got paid. This society and this world were stifling anyway, and not a whole lot separated the supposed good from the so-called evil. Neither side really stood apart, and Oscar didn't fear a thing from either c
amp, nor did he feel that any side was particularly interesting.
The hotel was a seedy place. The type of place where a guy would usually bring a prostitute twenty years ago, before the synth girls took over. Now these sorts of hotels were even more dilapidated than before. They stunk to high heaven and they generally had more rodent occupants than human ones. But Oscar was used to it. His clients often liked to meet in these kinds of places, under the assumption that they were ideal hiding spots.
He stepped through the entry door, which wobbled precariously on loose hinges, and stepped across the lobby floor. He felt something crunch under his feet, which was disconcerting since the entire floor was tile. He didn't look down, for fear of what he might see. Instead, he boldly crossed the floor in the direction of the reception desk, which stood behind various panes of horribly scuffed acrylic.
On the way, he passed by the usual cast of characters. The old, shrunken being hidden away in the folds of a coat that was far too big, who sat with a stunned look on his or her toothless face. The rheumy-eyed bum with messy hair and a dirty beard whose only companion was the mystery bottle held in a brown paper bag. The young, scrawny fellow who couldn't stop fidgeting. The young lady who might have been pretty once upon a time, whose breasts were nearly falling out of the skimpy top she wore. Waiting on a john, no doubt, or for her pimp to return from some errand.
Organic prostitutes weren't as popular these days, but they were still around here and there. There were two reasons why a guy might prefer an organic girl. For one, they could be a lot cheaper. For two... some guys, even those who were desperate enough to pay for a woman's affections, were prejudiced against synths. For these reasons only, the oldest profession in the world clung to stubborn life. Oscar doubted very much that it would ever go away. The world would sooner rid itself of cockroaches.
Darkside Dreams - The Complete First Series Page 22