by Jae Vogel
“I don’t think I'll be needing anything from you, Mavis.”
The words came out of my mouth with a level of force, that I perhaps would not have used in a previous conversation with the man. I had always portrayed myself as someone who was begrudgingly stoned, and compliant. Mavis fell quite easily into the role of the annoyed older male figure, who happened to also have intimate knowledge with inserting cock-shaped, silicon sensors into my asshole.
I was evaluating whether or not I would have time to disappear before he managed to call the cops and eek out whatever financial or social standing bounty had been placed on my head over the last week and a half. I thought about whether or not I had enough time to run, and then realized that I needed to eliminate the threat before the vector spread, and I was faced with a handful of other interested hunters — likely with badges and guns instead of secret crushes and dubious morality.
I grabbed him by the collar of his pressed shirt and brought him close to my lips. The impulse had been so sudden, and completely intuitive. Something else inside of me was in control in this moment, and I was completely fine with letting it have its way with Mavis.
There was no internal repulsion at kissing him. I didn’t think about anything except for a complete immersion in that singular moment. While I leaned forward and kissed him, the memory of the lie he had told initially came to my mind, in the form of a vision.
Between the two of us, I saw the lie for what it was — a distractingly shiny bubble of nothingness, designed to misdirect perceptive intuition from accurately assessing non-verbal cues. I took the lie for what it was and allowed it to flow upward between our bodies. A simple voice within me reached out, and offered instruction.
Return that which he has given to you.
In the easiest way possible, I allowed the artfully created bubble of nothingness to rise up into his brain. I watched as the bubble grew in size, and then, when he had reached full capacity, I saw the bubble pop.
As though the sound of the psychic event itself had stunned him, I watched Mavis fall backward against the wall of the front of Quarantine. He sat there, feet out on both sides, totally and completely speechless; drool coming down slightly from his bottom lip.
When I turned around, I saw that Hep and his new boyfriend had arrived at some point while I had been interacting with Mavis, and had observed the entire phenomenon. I was greeted with a form of applause and with looks indicating how impressed they were. It wasn't apparent to me whether or not any recognition had flashed across Hep's face, regarding Mavis. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever encountered Mavis outside of the Tech Room, and I'm fairly certain Hep has never seen me in the tech room while Mavis has been around.
I accepted the strange compartmentalization of my social life as an aspect of sex work, and when I viewed things in that light, the whole thing didn't seem to matter much any longer. For instance, I had never actually met any of Hep's clients, except for a guess which might have betrayed more than was immediately apparent, in terms of a casual social passing.
"I'm about done with this place.”
Hep tried to put things together in his mind, and then Rae, bless their heart, pulled the two of them closer together and Hep's attention immediately departed from whatever processing he happened to be focused on.
"Alright,” he said, struggling passively to maintain a respectful amount of attention to me during the course of our conversation.
I smiled at him, and nodded.
I didn't need him to pay attention to me, not when he was getting so much more companionship out of his friend. That was part of our understanding together. We were well aware that neither of us had the ability to provide what the other was looking for all of the time, but that didn't mean that there wasn't an opportunity for the two of us to support each other in finding the things that did end up working out best for us.
Really, it was casual polyamory at its best, but we didn't bother to give it a label.
"I've got some cash. We could go hit up Luna's Place and get a private room for the rest of the night."
The suggestion came from Hep's friend.
I wouldn't have necessarily gone for it on a regular basis. For as little as I enjoyed pretension, Luna's was one of the low maintenance blowjob cafes just off the strip. You had to be all right sleeping on a pillow of cum when you went to those kind of places. Usually I was so high that my senses were shut down, but tonight I was operating in a totally different sphere of perception.
Hep looked at me with hope in his eyes, and I realized that, like me, he didn't exactly have a place to be tonight.
"Luna's sounds great,” I said. “Thanks for the love."
I looked Rae in the eye when I spoke. They had beautiful clear, green eyes, and a sort of bashful smile about them.
"Lead on, cute thing."
As it turned out, Luna's was under new management, and so the whole place had been given an upgrade in the form of regular faux exotic linens and regular laundering. The prices were a little bit higher, but I didn't hear any complaints from either Rae or Hep.
We rented out a space in the back and got a bit of a special deal because we turned it into an overnight. That basically meant, we had enough time to lose track of time itself, and then get kicked out tomorrow during the district's Walk of Shame - around 10 AM.
We made our way to back, and the thing that struck me most was the intense designs on the surfaces of all of the tapestries. They were subtle, but I noticed that each and every one of them was highly sexual. The sexuality itself came in the form of shapes and fluids; impressions more than blatant pornographic images. The entire experience was labial - meaning that I felt as though I were perpetually entering into some form of sensual, warm, private place.
As soon as we got into our own space, both Hep and Rae came out as the drug fiends that they really were. The room was quickly transformed into a bacchanal of ecstatic excess.
Lines of Coke cut on a portable makeup mirror. Bottles of Hard Alcohol used as chasers for chemical drips. MDMA cut with heroin shoved up an asshole with the tip of another person's tongue. Whatever edge of sanity and hyper-vigilance I had experienced outside of the Quarantine was now long gone, and had been replaced by a fevered dream of depravity.
Both Hep and Rae shot up, sending their bodies into a blissful, comatose state, where they would eventually drift off to sleep. Hep had offered to give me a shot as well, but something didn't sit right with me about the experience.
In retrospect, I don't think I actually consumed a lot of drugs that night, though I'm sure I took a sampling of just about everything. The sheer overwhelming presence of excess was more than enough to convince my mind that it didn't matter if the drugs were going into my body, or not. The sheer power of their physical presence was enough to push me into a state of mind where it didn't seem to matter if I was getting a contact high or not. I felt the result would have been the same.
Beyond everything else, the mescaline, or whatever it was, stuck with me throughout the entirety of the evening. On a fundamental level, I felt my soul was literally burning up inside of me. The vitality and power of my spirit was raging through the hours of the evening, seeking to dominate every form of excess that I was pushing in its direction. When I think about why I didn't shoot up at the end of the night, I think it was actually out of sympathy for that spirit. I knew that I had given it a difficult enough time this evening, and I was actually interested in giving it some space to pull out a victory in the face of habitual drug abuse - a first for me, to be completely honest.
I looked over and saw that though the three of us had started our journey into unconsciousness together, only I remained up. Both Hep and Rae were cuddling with one another, barely covered by some thin fabric. Needles, cigarettes, tipped over bottles of booze, and every other general display of chaos that you could imagine was scattered around the three of us.
Having nothing better to do, and not really wishing to sit in bed any
longer, I decided to get dressed, and go for a walk.
Chapter 7
The trip into the early morning air was more refreshing than I had anticipated.
The sky was still dark, but it was late enough into the evening to where I didn't have to deal with any more of the glaring light from the neon signs that poisoned the skyline. If it could be said that there was a holy hour anywhere in Solis Red Light District, this had to be somewhere between 4 AM and Dawn. Any time after that, and you had to look at eager shopkeepers coming in and trying to get the proverbial early worm. Any time before that and you're basically just catching the final ravings of the late night crowd.
If I were a sociologist, of some sort, I would imagine that the entire Red Light District was a totally fascinating place to spend your time. The major difficulty in spending any time in that place was that you inevitably ended up catching one of the bugs that was going around at the time. Addiction, whether it was to drugs, sex, or some other form of electronic escapism was the basis of the entire financial wealth of the district. A person could show up one week, doing a special live news report about the terrors of drug abuse and the complications between drug use and the sex work industry.
Back when Solis first legalized all forms of drugs and prostitution, these forms of 'news reports' proliferated amongst conservative newspapers. All of the stay at home families wanted to know exactly how dangerous and ugly the new world was. The early adopters, like Hep and myself, often joked about how we were nothing more than rats in a cage with a whole team of profiteers and audience members, just waiting to see the dramas of our performance.
The metaphor extended perfectly into my own line of work, but it was not something I tried to think about too often. The result was the complete realization that the line between fantasy and reality was not as clearly divided as we made it out to be. The audience was looking for drama, that much was true, but when you were an early adopter, the drama unfortunately took the form in a friend of yours who overdosed last week. In sex work, the drama was when you got sick, catching an STD from a client who didn't even bother to tip, and permanently changed your outlook on the world.
On the outside, people reading these newspaper columns would read reports like ‘Intravenous Needle Use’, Up forty-nine Percent since last Tuesday!’, and the article would go on to describe the life of a group of gutter punks who were sucking off of a trust fund while hustling for change on the street. These people would become icons of the movement, and all of the conservative, stay-at-home dads would be outraged that someone in their position would be so callous and wasteful with their existence. The emotional disconnect between all parties involved was impressive. Most likely not one of them cared for one another in a truly deep and meaningful way, except perhaps for one of the gutter punks might have a dog. Junkies and animals get along well.
Anyways, the article would continue for a while, and then taper off into another startling expose of modern journalism.
‘Statistics from Gratis Clinics say that Sexually Transmitted Diseases is Up Thirty-Two Percent!’
No time frame.
No context given.
This article won't even mention that the actual patients who are going to the free clinics downtown are primarily made up of the children of those same suburban households. In a libertine evening on the town, they go out for a night of drinks and debauchery. Every story is different, but the elements are pretty easily interchangeable if you give your brain half a second to play puzzle between the variations that come out each week.
Something in the lines of a daughter out for Halloween night, doing her best to fit into a new crowd of friends, drinks too much and has some dubious encounter with local frat boy. Again, you can modify the story however you like, but the point is these tourists end up causing the problems that they are either writing about themselves - in the case of the journalists - or that their parents are reading about in the morning paper.
The whole complicated charade was a microcosm of the larger societal issue of prohibition, demonstrated over and over, ad nauseam. The one thing that was new, or at least relatively different than the last time escapism and personal responsibility was a prominent issue in our media, was the issue of Virtual Reality.
I don't just mean the porn theaters where I worked, though they were the major commercial thrust of the thing. Like everything else, some people saw VR as a hobby, while others saw it as a way of life. There were people who were so committed to the virtual lifestyle that they developed whole lives for themselves within a surrogate matrix of being. The real world became nothing more than a place where you could perform whatever mundane tasks necessary to keep the lights on, and the service flowing to your network access.
Most humans these days were chipped to some extent or another. The majority of the populace went in for one of those good old fashioned ‘Mark of the Beast’ chips, having to do with whether or not you would buy or sell in a given market. They weren't mandatory, of course, but so many places used them that it was super inconvenient if you wanted to get along without them for any reasonable period of time.
Hep and I were one of the same on this issue. We both were scared as hell of the societal implications of making any modifications to consciousness through physical implantation. I guess that was one of the long-standing consequences of too many science fiction/horror flicks while growing up. Maybe it had to do with an innate distrust of the system. Or maybe we were just chicken shit. Hard to tell, really.
One thing that we didn't waste any compassion over was the fact that neither of us were very impressed with the full time VR crew. This niche of society made permanent implants into their body which allowed them to experience the joys and terrors of virtual reality all day, any day. These people claimed to find love, fulfilment and happiness through the simulacrum of their programmed existence.
Being someone who worked in creating that kind of pleasure for others, I couldn't help but feel a bit responsible for the propagation of that particular strain of escapist addiction. Regardless, the guilt didn't stick long. All you had to do was watch them for any length of time and you would realize that they have given up the fight long ago.
The common practice was to inject a chip in the base of the skull, though there were variants on the practice. An entire micro-culture had sprung up overnight as soon as the technology had hit mainstream. As humans tend to push things into as far of a direction as possible, the barriers were tested, and soon enough, they were discovered. Chipping proved to lead irreconcilably to brain tumors which arose from the site of the implantation.
The research which demonstrated these issues were of the more modern miracles of science, and one of the only positive things Gratis has done since its inception, in my opinion. Of course, just because official documents come out, revealing that something is not healthy for you doesn't mean that people are actually going to listen to the reports and shun the toxic product.
As usual, people flocked to Virtual Reality like moths to the flame. It became a matter of course, that if you were serious enough about the world that you discovered there, then you too would concede to becoming chipped. The justifications were as simple as a pro and con list. Unfortunately, for most of the people involved in that world, the trauma and problems of external reality didn't really hold much appeal in the face of its artificial surrogate.
In consequence, a whole new breed of people came into existence. Junkies called them ‘The Walking Dead’. I'm not sure what the other folks called them, but they acted like god damned zombies, so I wouldn't be surprised if a word similar to that was used. The most enthusiastic of the bunch went to the trouble of getting their retinas surgically modified. The more practical ones just went for a basic chip and glasses.
I passed by one of their dens while I was on my walk. Looking inside, I could see the dim neon glow of VR headsets. The owner of the hovel was likely just facilitating his own continued addiction by providing the experience for others, and ren
ting out cubicles. Outside, one of them had roamed free of his cage and was gesticulating into the early morning air. Nobody was around to take care of him, and in that moment, I was certain that he must have felt very free. Perhaps he was slaying some kind of dragon, or making love to a beautiful woman. Perhaps he was in a gypsy encampment somewhere on the far continent, haggling over the price of silk.
His clothes were in shreds, and he was thin enough to make a junky uncomfortable. I don't doubt that he smelled terrible, though I have never bothered to get close enough to one of them to actually find out. This particular walker was completely immersed, in that he was using a goggle set which completely covered his eyes and ears. He would walk around like that until the early hours of the day, when someone would invariably complain and push him back into whatever stall he was renting for the day.
Even in my state of expanded consciousness, I couldn't bring myself to invest emotional energy in that type of existence. The implications of completely losing faith in physical reality was far too heavy for me to consider as a possibility. I actually hoped I might pass a few real people during my walk, but I didn't end up meeting a soul — the walking dead hardly count.
The air was cold, and in spite of the fact that I was still sticky with sweat and spilled liquor, I was actually pretty well off, in terms of consciousness.
I didn't mind the relatively poor state of being, and it didn't seem to have too many adverse effects. I'm sure if I had been around anyone with a sober state of mind, and a desire to be within a foot or two of me, they would have found me repulsive. Fortunately, there were no such judges present, so I allowed that role to pass off from my shoulders until that point when it might be needed again.