'If everything happens in the mind anyway, why bother investing in people who are vulnerable to mental and physical disease and the passage of time?' was what management asked itself. And as it was, Candy Metal was one of the last remaining human stars, and she had to compete with purely digital creations who were prettier and younger than her, and immortal. Candy would not even be in contention if not for her divine voice that hardly needed any Vision Pro enhancement.
“Stars are only in the skies, and up my ass,” Star used to say and point to the digital star ceiling in his Creation office. Now they were up her ass too.
She was twenty-four when she first met the head of Creation, up on the ninety-ninth floor of an extravagant skyscraper. From the office windows, a frozen lake could be seen, its waters a shade between dark blue and gray. Similar skyscrapers stood proudly on its opposite shore. The view gave Star the feeling of stardust – an obvious wordplay on the dual meaning of his name that a friend once pointed out, and he was happy to make his own.
She came with a supportive boyfriend, two parents, and her silvery voice - the girl who was destined for success. From the very first moment, Jeffrey, a forty-year-old global citizen, saw sparks of stardom in her. True, she had a lousy taste in clothes, she was too shy and her life story was a coma inducing bore, but she still had that certain something that people loved - 'pristine charisma,' the dream of every image creator.
“You have the Big Nothing that I'm looking for,” he told her with excitement. “A clean slate you can build anything on.”
“And is that good?” she asked in concern.
“It's excellent,” he said and smiled for the benefit of her parents, who were staring at him in a slight shock. They always believed she had personality.
Jeffrey presented her with a draconian holo contract in which she committed herself, as was the custom, to turn into anything the company saw fit to turn her into. Her identity was forfeit in order to become a basis for the finished product – ‘Candy Metal.’ Her real name was Lucy Frost. But they already had one singer called Lucy who generated millions, and no one wanted another.
It was not long before Jeffrey told her in so many words what she had to do in order to land the contract, and that it would only happen in her mind, and what difference did it make? She was going to like it. He did not hide his eagerness, and swore not to let her parents know, and that if she did, she could consider the contract nullified. She yielded.
***
He sat there in front of her in the Mind Pod, moaning in pleasure.
Sometimes she thought he was making those noises on purpose to make her sick. On her part, was thinking about anything but the act itself. She was breathing heavily and praying for it to be over. Sitting there and knowing that he was having his way with her image was more revolting than she expected it to be.
“Good times, Candy, right?” he dug at her from the other side of the room. “You're quiet, I can't hear you.”
She stayed quiet.
“I'm coming... I'm coming...” he said, moving in his chair, flushed and huffing at an increased rate. “Ohhhhh, yeah!”
“Good,” she said and looked away.
Candy had some small comforts. One was knowing that on the next online Minds sync, she would instruct her private brain Cloud to not save that ill-gotten memory of being mind fucked, and new memories would soon take its place.
After completing the act, the abuser and abused sat down to thoughtmit business. They still had a detailed business plan to go over. Jeffrey got up to feed his parrot-penguin, Parguin, who just then landed on top of an icicle that kept his body cool. The oversized neopet had fur in shades of blue, green and yellow, and was very sensitive to his environment. When his boss was engrossed in thoughts with his starlets, Parguin elected to fly out the window and avoid the man's strange facial expressions. For some reason, this time he stayed attentive to Jeffrey and Candy's thoughtmission.
Jeffrey had lots of plans for Candy.
“From now on, Parguin is your trademark,” he decided. “You'll have your picture taken with him on every marketing campaign, every commercial, every clip, every brain ad, everything. He'll be your visual motif. It's going to be brilliant, it’ll convey freedom, a humanity, kindness to animals.”
“I'm allergic to neopets,” she said in almost a whisper, afraid of making him angry.
“Get over it. It's not up for discussion,” he made clear, and petted the furry creature. “From now on, Parguin is your best friend. Oh, and lose the guy you came with.”
“He's my boyfriend.”
“Was your boyfriend.”
Leaving the office, she walked past long walls that projected the fleeting stars of the moment, who rose to fame and disappeared just as quickly. For a moment she tried remembering what they were about. She could not.
***
“Why do you even love me?” Candy asked her last boyfriend, in a memory from before she became famous.
“You're authentic, you do what's right for you,” he said and fluttered a finger on her breasts as she lay with her back against him. The two were naked and covered with Dream Cream, a lotion that extracted toxins and excreted moisture and anti-oxidants every several hours.
“Sometimes I'm not sure it’s the clever way to go in this world, being honest all the time.”
“I'm sure. There's no shortage of girls who’d do anything to make it big, and you're prepared to work hard and not sell yourself. I appreciate that.”
“So is that why you love me?” she protested. She sat on his cock and started swaying.
“No, I love you for your tits – small, perky, just right.”
“You're just a horndog, like the rest of them,” she laughed, and their bodies clinched.
“What a nice big cock,” she said and rode it. She knew he liked it when she glorified his cock.
“I love it when you talk about it like that. It feels so good.”
After coming, Ryan would always hold her, inhaling her body for that smell of hers.
“What if I can't get there on my own, legitimately?” she asked, worried, as if she wasn't moaning in pleasure a moment before.
“I trust you to always do the right thing. And why are you thinking about this now?”
“No reason, just thinking about the future.”
“Let the future think about you. Come here now,” he said and pulled her closer.
Candy hated remembering herself in that situation, and still, she could not keep her thoughts from straying there.
Sugar Trash
As expected, the Candy project was a lot of work. The advanced Vision Pro tool allowed designers to create a polished image based on an actual person, or a virtual image from scratch. Candy's smooth black hair was fluffed up and dyed bright pink, and her brown eyes had a metallic dark blue hue added to them. Her nose was slightly adjusted and her lips plumped up. Her skin was brightened by several shades, her face stretched longer, and her cheekbones raised. She was still thin, but now also curvy. Even her accent was adjusted to match target audiences. At the end of the process, there was nothing left to connect the image with its model, but the result made management happy, and as Jeffrey blurted out once on an inner circulation thoughtmission, “Candy is a personally customized sweet; everyone gets their own dream confection, a perfect suspension of disbelief and cynicism.”
After they finished grooming and designing their new candy, Jeffrey came to pay a visit. His bright eyes sparkled with pleasure when he saw the impeccable result.
“You're perfect for everyone.”
She just stood there in gratitude.
According to her strict contract, Candy had to portray her mother as a woman who had lost her mind after finding out that her husband, Candy's father, used to rape Candy as a child. It was a blatant lie, but a great story. She would not be seen in public with her parents, because she had to keep the appearance of a grudge. She also received a new Minds account for Candy Metal, and her old Lucy Fr
ost identity was erased from the network and from her life.
You could not go far if your life story had no impact. Candy knew this, Star knew it, and so did her parents and everyone else involved in her progress. If Candy wanted to rise to the top, she had to be seen as someone who pulled herself up from the mud. The background they came up with was painful and eerie, but mostly light years away from the boring truth.
Keeping to the contract, Jeffrey had her living in an enormous luxury apartment designed like a candy shop. He filled her walls with colorful candies and a slide show of exotic animals. She had a marshmallow bed, sugar pillows and a branded pink sofa whose shape changed with sponsorship. All the items in her home were advertised products, a designed experience that people could walk through and shop in. The crown jewel was Candy herself, whose life and thoughts were broadcast to the network around the clock.
To maintain her image, Candy was equipped with a set of four tending owls who groomed her twenty-four-seven, applying makeup and treating her hair and skin. The company that made the little owls plugged them in any way possible. The tiny wonders, who could also massage gray matter through the skull, were delivered all the way to the doors of opinion leaders. They were multi-functional: they cleaned, groomed, caressed and gave off heat.
Parguin's look was matched to Candy's; he had his own personal stylist who programmed his feathers on Vision Pro to match her wardrobe. She was forced to carry him around, and used an antihistamine patch to prevent coughing fits that could end in suffocation. She knew that image came first. The company promised to make her a superstar with a parade of branded content centered on her, broadcast series and also Earth-friendly campaigns aimed at saving endangered animals like the Chinese pug and Angora cats – always with Parguin riding on her shoulder.
She promoted perfumes blended from scents she herself handpicked, and put together wardrobes with clothes chosen for her by the best designers, arranged by color, fabric and cut. Nano-fiber rich clothes reflected light like tiny mirrors, and allowed their wearer to change colors on a whim; all she had to do was say “pink fuchsia skirt,” and her voice print would prompt Vision Pro to change the color of the item. The service obviously came with a fee, and many women willingly paid crippling sums.
Despite the alleged freedom she enjoyed, Candy was required to choose between shades of pink, white, or black, because that was what Jeffrey prescribed. She was told to project a sweet air of mischief together with a hyper-cool aura. She did not fight it, but envied other girls her age who passed by wearing every other color on the spectrum.
The results started coming in after a few weeks. The marketing campaign for Candy Metal was a huge success. The company paid 20,000 teens to promote the emerging icon on their clothes, to listen to her songs and share them with friends. Parrot-penguin sales skyrocketed. Her first single was played non-stop on Great Minds and echoed in people's thoughts. The songs were catchy, space pop for light hearted individuals, and dark melodies for complex souls. 'Harmonies converged to a shriek,' 'honey dripping melodies on a razor sharp edge' – critics defined the sound.
Not long into her stardom, Candy let herself get drunk on fame and power. She convinced herself that she had earned it all with hard work. From an inflating marshmallow bed, she shared pink thoughts with her followers, the Mind Readers. If you did not let the world know it, there was no point to anything. Candy kept signaling them the idea that all options were open, and so filled boys' heads with her innocent sexual presence and girls' heads with a perfect manikin chic. She was the next big thing until the next, and the next next big thing came around, and everyone wanted a piece of the coded lollipop who left even the worst cynics wanting more sweetness.
Every day she thoughtmitted her ideas to her hundred million mind readers around the world. Her enlightened musings were instantly converted to cash. Everyone was hungry and thirsty for what she had to say. Her mind followers were like piranhas, biting with sharp teeth into every trinket of information. She enjoyed the attention and started obsessively counting her mind readers.
She was not the only one counting. The people at the Dream Company were also closely monitoring her thought follower traffic. If Candy could not generate interest with the thoughts she phrased on her own, some worker bee took over and upgraded what she thought she was thinking. It was all scripted, obviously, but with a level of sophistication that allowed less sophisticated users to trust in her and buy into every ploy.
As her success took off, she started obsessing with thoughts like, Will I deliver? and Will the next thought get a good response like the last? even when the Dream Company actually took care of the thinking. The program continued where Candy stopped. It kept her active even when she was sleeping – recording songs, thoughtmitting. Very quickly, she had become a puppet on digital strings. Every thought got several seconds of air in the minds of her readership, and she never repeated herself. The last thing Candy wanted was to be thought of as coded… a pellet sized sweetener.
When things got hard, and everything seemed too demanding, Candy returned to images from her previous life, from the time before she sold her virtual soul. The walls of her room flooded with pleasant memories and turned into an amusement park of beautiful moments: at twelve years old, when she received a thought-operated musical instrument program; when she performed an impromptu concert to the abandoned Angora cats on her street, who watched her and meowed to the refrain, the first time she ever captivated an audience.
Another memory burnt into Re-Minds was the one when she looked down from her poor parents' dilapidated flying sofa and saw much nicer neighborhoods below. She was sixteen then, and knew that one day she would be able to give them a better life.
“One day, Momma, we'll move to a much nicer house,” Candy said.
“Your father and I are used to this area. It’s alright,” the mother answered to comfort her daughter, and they continued to look out the window of their dismal apartment toward some distant point on the horizon. A glaring sun broke through the clouds and shone in their eyes, until they started blinking and turned back into the living room.
“You deserve to be living in the prettiest place money can buy. I'll be a famous singer and it’ll happen, I promise.”
“You be a famous singer for yourself first. We're doing fine.”
“I don't care. One day you'll have a perfect apartment.”
Candy hugged her mother. It was a hug of sadness, for her parents living in poverty and still finding a way to give her everything so that she wouldn't feel poor. She wanted so much for them to have a better life. They were good, honest people who worked hard for their living, and still they could not be rich. It’s so unfair, she thought.
“Don't think about us, think of yourself!” Her mother demanded and pulled Candy back to look into her eyes.
Candy nodded in agreement, but only to pacify her mother. Inside, she knew the promise she was made, and that she was going to keep it.
That moment played on Re-Minds again and again, she cried again and again, and every time it moved her again. In the end, she slept.
***
The next day, as in every day, she sent the audience a corporate prepared thought:
“I drank lots of Gin Plus, got wasted and had an insane time! I jumped into the golden dolphin pool and swam with them. Science has given us so much! We're taught to swim along with everyone, but sometimes we have to swim against the current.”
Millions of mind readers echoed back to her, and thousands added the thought ‘Gin Plus’ to purchase the drink. A good deal all around. She thoughtmitted again, a second thought recommended by Jeffrey:
“I'm so happy that you liked my first single, The Cosmic Light in my Life, which I wrote about my last boyfriend, who left me just when I needed him the most. I want to dedicate it to my parrot-penguin, Parguin - I adopted him to cheer myself up right after it happened. I left a father who raped me, and a mother who couldn't take care of me because she was sick. We shou
ld always remember all the animals out there, especially those who have no home!”
The masses who thoughtmitted The Cosmic Light in my Life received the track directly to their ears. The sales charts shot through the roof. Jeffrey was happy.
But then another thoughtmission made it through: I'm sick and tired of that penguin parrot. I'm going to 'lose' him today and tell Jeffrey he was run over by a flying sofa. Apart from staring at me, what’s the thing good for? I'm even allergic to that flying shit, ughhh!
What was that?
A roaring wave of incoming thoughts almost deafened Candy's ears. She breathed heavily, and then it happened again:
And that fucking Jeffrey! Shoved his Parguin down my throat, and tomorrow I have to take pictures with him again on my shoulder and smile like a retard. What a jerk. How did I agree to that? Selling myself to that animal loving image and blah blah blah. I have no character. I wanted to sing, that's all fine, it's just that the price is being a puppet. I'm allergic to that thing! What does he want me to do? Die?!
She couldn't believe it was happening. She was lost in the tens of thousands of incoming thoughts: Who's Jeffrey? What did he do with Parguin?
“Candy?” It was Jeffrey, who called her on their encrypted thoughtmission channel. “Tell me, is this joke?! What's going through your head, bitch? Keep your personal thoughts to 'isolate' mode.”
“But I did switch to isolate… I don't know what happened! I didn't thoughtmit that.”
“Reality proves otherwise.”
“I wouldn't do this, not to me and not to you, I swear!”
“Are you on drugs? Are you hooked on memories?”
“I would never do that.”
“I'm getting thousands of incoming calls, it's a shitstorm!”
“But -”
“Listen to me well, we started working together, but I’ve no problem erasing you, you hear? Erasing you and calling Lucy Frost back to swim with the rats in the gutter!”
Netopia: A Thrilling Dystopian Novel (Science Fiction & Action) Page 20