Autoerotic Christopher Hunt
Just because times change, people don't. Sex is still sex. Secrets are still secrets. And spying is a two-edged sword.
She stared at the john's face. Hovering above her like a small, pinched moon, it was pale and luminescent in the fractured darkness. Eyes clenched, mouth a gaping crater, it was as much the face of a squalling baby as the face of a man in the paroxysms of love. Poking out behind his earlobes she could see the protruding nodes of the Sensation jacks, plugged into temporary digital ultrasound terminals attached to the base of his skull, feeding him dreams, ecstasy, heaven. A salty spray of perspiration splashed on her face as he shook his head.
His sweat stung her eyes, made her blink. His ass was heaving up and down rapidly now. Stars clustered thickly on his back, swirling galaxies flowed across his face, dust clouds collected behind his knees, a supernova flashed between his toes. She wondered if he was experiencing this in the Sensation ecstasy. Or if he was in some other place altogether.
Perhaps he was. His hands had fallen away from her buttocks, and he was starting to drift away from her. His penis slipped out, bumped her thigh, flapping wildly in the star-crusted darkness like a baton. He seemed unaware, his face still rapt, his buttocks still pumping as he floated away. She was almost tempted to let him go, to let him spurt his ecstasy into the empty vacuum of the simulated galaxy he was tumbling through.
Instead, she reached for him, wrapping the fingers of one hand around his penis, placing the other on his left cheek, bringing him back down, guiding him back in. She knotted her legs around his back, her arms around his neck, moving her body to the rhythm of his thrusts, twisting her hips in a slow, languid rotation.
The movement shifted their center of gravity and they started to spin. He was becoming frenzied, his stomach smacking wetly against hers in a sticky staccato.
Now they were upside down, though it felt no different. His clothes hovered in a carefully folded pile nearby. His shoes hung suspended above the clothes, the toes pointed together to form a V -- "So I can find my clothes afterward," he had said, laughing. His one attempt to break the ice, like the obligatory joke before a business meeting.
He wasn't so bad, she supposed. Not like the older ones with their sour breath and nicotine-brown teeth who kneaded her breasts callously with rough, dry fingers, commenting on their firmness and bounce as if they were loaves of bread or rolls of toilet paper, men who had long since passed the point where they needed or cared to give pleasure to a woman, men whose power Earthside could be measured by how low their balls dangled in their gravity-stretched sacks.
This one -- Fukuda was his name, a hotshot young biosoft engineer up here on a prepaid company bonus plan -- was a real high-flier. Literally. Anybody who came up here was on the inside track, if they weren't already at the top. That's why all the boys and girls who worked the zero-g chambers at Serenity Station had to submit to a thorough debriefing after each contact. Hypnotherapy, lie-detector tests, and drugs were all part of the routine. Selective memory wipes were frequent.
At least it was all clean, safe, sterile. Not like some of the privately run stations. At Serenity, you didn't have to gather information from the clients. Your job didn't depend on the quantity of valuable data you processed. When you were used up, you weren't wiped, wired, and dumped Earthside with your brain full of black holes and shattered synapses, your mouth snapping out garbled messages that no one -- least of all you -- could understand. Messages that had to be incomprehensible because if somebody ever did understand, then you were dead.
The private stations were for losers. Dead-end street kids with no smarts. Kids who thought a gig on a station -- any station -- was the ultimate score. Kids who were going to soon die one way or another anyway.
Serenity was a MITI operation. And as a gateway to the good life, it ranked on a par with Tokyo University. Unlike the private stations, it didn't deal in black market data. MITI, the far-thinking government department that had guided Japan's industrious corporations to their current economic dominance, simply liked to keep tabs on its corporate partners -- like a mother reading her children's diaries. And that meant Serenity had to be a clean operation. The kids who worked the zero-g chambers were clean, smart, beautiful, all with the rough, raw street edge that would make them ideal special ops executives. Serenity was a kind of training center whose graduates often went on to top-paying positions in the intelligence and security departments of the big zaibatsu.
For a kid on the outside looking for a way in, Serenity was a golden opportunity. It was a place to make contacts.
Like this slicker. Young, moving up fast. Shy, nervous, kind of embarrassed about the whole business. But eager. Treat him right and in a few years he'd come looking for you. They always remembered the first time.
He was grunting loudly in her ear. And wheezing. A harsh, whistling sound, abrupt and irregular. She held tight, digging black-lacquered nails into his back, deliberately raking them across the skin to leave him with the scars that were proof of his victory, of his sexual power. He would come soon. The chemicals he had taken to delay ejaculation would be wearing off now.
She felt him swelling inside her, the bony protrusions of his hips scraping against her own, rubbing her raw. He had slowed now to a final grinding push, pushing as far inside her as he could, fingers jammed in the cleft of her buttocks, pulling her toward him as if trying to dissolve the fragile boundaries of skin, bone, and electrons that separated them, to merge them into a single ecstatic entity. She shivered as he ground against her clitoris, tiny flutters of pleasure rippling through her. When he came, it was explosive. The convulsion shuddered against the walls of her vagina, teasing her with half-hearted promises of indeterminate pleasure -- a pleasure she doubted existed anywhere outside the minds of men. The feeling wasn't unpleasant -- it was warm, comfortable, like a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. But it wasn't an orgasm. In fact, only one person other than herself had ever given her an orgasm, and it hadn't been a man.
She felt vaguely relieved that it was over. And with that relief came tenderness -- a feeling she experienced even less often than pleasure, and a feeling for which she had little use. She had for so long cultivated the image of the hard woman, the ice-woman -- tough, cold, and glamorous, a woman whose popularity with her clients increased in direct proportion to how small and worthless and despicable she made them feel -- that when she fell prey to emotions such as tenderness, sympathy, and sadness, she became confused and angry. They melted the impermeable shell she had molded around herself, leaving her vulnerable and open to attack.
Even now, as she cradled the john's head against her breast, running her fingers through his damp hair, feeling the pounding of his heart against her stomach, she wanted to take that trusting skull and crush it, to switch on the gravity and let him plummet to the floor.
He looked up at her and smiled.
"Thank you, Zazu-san," he said.
The Sensation input was programmed to terminate following orgasm. He was back in the real world now. She wondered how much of his pleasure she had been responsible for. It was difficult to tell. Her own previous Sensation experiences had always been shared with the client; the sensory data and imagery flowing into their minds were shaped by the physical activities of their bodies and directed by the fantasies of their subconscious minds. Her own conscious fantasies were always quelled, if indeed she even had any. It was part of the training. The client was paying. It was his trip. She was just along for the ride.
Some trips were pretty smooth. Soft-focus holoflick passion brought to life, fast-cutting from one sexual position to another. Others were rollercoaster rides into a nightmare of sexual deviance and fetishism. And sometimes -- as in this case -- the client didn't want you along.
Those were the strangest clients. What were they doing in there?
She smiled at him, still stroking his hair, letting the long, coarse ponytail fall through her splayed fingers. He nestled against her like a cat. She was tempted to be cruel. She hated it when they didn't take her on the Sensation ride. It underscored the fact that she was just a vehicle for their pleasure, not an active participant.
More than that, she wanted to know why they didn't take her. Sure, the fantasies were always intercut with flash fragments that had nothing to do with sex -- wives, husbands, children, marketing strategies, research projects -- but the images were blurred, disconnected, out of context. The station monitors analyzed them, tried to piece them together, but they were seldom able to come up with anything coherent. More information was gained from inadvertent comments, bragging, and things left unsaid than from the distorted reflections of the subconscious conjured up by the Sensation experience.
So why?
"It's in my contract," he said, smiling wanly.
"What is?" she asked, wondering if there were some new little game he wanted to play, something he'd signed on for but that they'd forgotten to tell her about in the briefing.
"That I don't share the Sensation experience," he said, tapping his temple with his index finger. "Too much classified data."
"You a mind-reader?" she said.
He shrugged. "I can see it in your face."
They spoke English. Though she was fluent in Japanese, had grown up speaking it, he didn't know that and there was no need to tell him. The less the client knew, the better. These days, English was de rigueur for Japanese businessmen, its legacy of dominance lingering in the business world much as French had remained the language of diplomacy long after that country had slipped from the center of the world stage.
"Some champagne?" he said.
"Sure."
He propelled himself rather awkwardly toward the bar.
"Let me get it," she said, pushing herself smoothly past him. "I'm more familiar with the routine."
He caressed her flank as she glided by. She felt his eyes lingering on her body. The sensation was not as distasteful as she expected.
She paused at the bar. "Would you prefer to switch on the gravity?" she asked. "It's much more elegant that way."
He smiled thankfully. "That would be wonderful."
He kept coming back. Sometimes as often as twice a month. Whatever he was doing Earthside, he must have been doing well. And he always asked for her, always brought her gifts. At first, just duty-free goods picked up on the shuttle -- perfume, scarves, liquor, stamped cubes of Lebanese or Moroccan hash wrapped in gold foil, expensive rejuvenating creams and lotions. Then, later, diamonds, Chanel dresses, Comme des Garcons suits, sculptures, paintings -- he was more lavish with his gifts than a corporate president.
She wondered how he could afford it all. According to his job description, he was only a team leader in Matsushita's biosoft R&D department -- a respectable position, to be sure, but not one that merited such an apparently limitless expense account.
She enjoyed the gifts, the flattery, but refused to lower the barrier that separated them. It was part of her mystique, after all. Showing him love or affection, whether false or not, was not part of the deal. If he preferred her, it was because of her cool reserve and not in spite of it.
She took the gifts as her due, made love to him as was her duty, and ignored him as was her custom.
And still he refused to share the Sensation experience with her.
She wasn't surprised when Tan Katsumura called her in after his last visit. She was surprised only that it hadn't happened sooner.
Tan was Serenity's chief monitor. Suave, elegant, with a manner sweet as roses and an attitude tough as nails, she was typical of Japan's first generation of female executives. And at 87, she had no time for unnecessary pleasantries.
Tan's sharp brown eyes watched her expressionlessly from behind a pair of old-style horn-rimmed glasses, her remodeled face smooth and businesslike beneath a carefully-applied veneer of foundation and artful strokes of blush.
Rumor had it that Tan had been one of the last geishas.
Tan tapped the stack of printouts on her black Formica desk, her voice clipped, deceptively frail. "Nearly three hours of conversation, 18 hours of body analysis, 18 hours of Sensation probes, and not one single byte of hard data."
Zazu shrugged. "I'm not paid to gather data," she said, her voice inevitably surly, provocative in its insolence, knowing her high, wide cheekbones were thrown into stark relief by her downturned mouth. "I'm paid to provide pleasure."
Tan glared at her. "Don't take that tone with me, Zazu-chan." She bit off the affectionate address form as if the word burned her tongue. "You know our primary function as well as I do. We do not demand that you obtain data from the clients. But we expect something." She slapped the pile of printouts again. "We expect more than this."
Zazu stared at the cold black Formica, familiar feelings of anger welling up inside her. The trainers had left her temper intact, regarding it as a potential asset not only in her work as a prostitute, but for any possible future assignment Earthside. Special ops executives needed a streak of meanness, though they also needed to know how to control it -- a discipline that, in Zazu's case, the trainers had overlooked. Gritting her teeth, she muttered, "I've followed all the procedures. The man is well trained. He reveals nothing. If you're looking for some insight that you haven't uncovered in your analysis, I can't give it to you. I'm as puzzled as you are."
Tan sighed. "I am aware of that. As you should be aware that special circumstances call for special measures. This man worries us. He is too young, he is too wealthy. His personal data does not equate. Matsushita acknowledges him, but nothing in his official status indicates that he is in a position to lavish gifts upon you as he does. Nor, for that matter, is there anything to indicate why he is able to visit us so frequently."
"So?"
"So!" Tan's carefully-modulated voice slipped for a moment, a granny's high-pitched squeal. "So, he is an anomaly. Whatever he does for Matsushita, it is not what they say he does. Our inability to learn his secret discredits us with MITI. This worries us. More importantly, it worries MITI. For more than a century, MITI has been privy to the secrets of the zaibatsu -- if not officially, then unofficially. The fact that Japan's largest electronics manufacturer is going to such lengths to keep something from MITI is unprecedented. And that is why we must find out what is going on."
"I'll tell you what's even stranger," said Zazu, leaning back in her chair, lighting one of the Gauloises he had brought her on his last visit. "They go to all this trouble to keep us from finding out their secret; meanwhile they make it obvious as hell that something weird's going on. Why send him up here in the first place? If he's such a classified piece of goods, why don't they keep him locked up tight in a max-security R&D center Earthside? Why tease us?"
Tan's hard brown eyes blinked, her smooth face cracking with distaste, as a waft of dark French tobacco smoke drifted across the desk. She switched on a directional air filter. "Yes." She nodded. "A good question. Perhaps, with a little more effort on your part, we might find the answer."
Zazu leaned forward, glaring at Tan across the desk, hazel eyes unblinking, the hot rush of anger burning her skin. "Fuck you, Tan. You may be chief monitor, but I don't have to answer to you. I'm a free agent. I do my job, and I do it better than anyone here. The credits I bring up must account for half the fucking budget. Don't tell me about effort. You think it's easy to screw just any slack-gut that flies in and slaps a few credits on the table? You think it doesn't take any effort to float around in that goddam zero-g chamber while some mealy-mouthed corporate shit is pushing and poking at my body like I'm some kind of fucking toy? Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me to make more of an effort?"
Tan leaned back in her heavy padded chair as if trying to distance herself from this sloppy display of emotion. But her face remained composed, its smoothness marred only by the barely perceptible clenching of her jaw, by the slight tremor in the muscles around her mouth. "And who do you think you are?" she hissed, the words, corrosive as acid, at odds with the expressionless face. "You were nothing before Serenity. Just a skinny, mean Kabuki-cho street tramp giving head to any Yakuza errand boy who was willing to slip you enough credits to buy a few grams of bootleg Filipino ice. You were trash. A bundle of wired nerve-endings with a nice ass and a lot of potential on the fast track to nowhere. Whatever you are, we made you. So what gives you the right to act as if you owe us nothing but your body? There are plenty of bodies out there, Zazu. What makes yours so special?"
"You tell me, mama-san."
"Do you think we selected you because of your body? Is that how you view your work here -- an overpaid hooker in a government-subsidized brothel?"
Zazu shrugged, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. "Sounds like a fair enough description to me."
"If it were your body we were interested in, we could have found a much better one at half the price and with none of the aggravation." She paused, folding her arms across her chest, eyes straying to the stack of printouts on the desk. "Why are you here, Zazu?"
"It's a good gig."
Tan sighed. "Don't play games with me, Zazu. You're here because you wanted to get off the streets, because you wanted to stop selling your body for the drugs that made selling it bearable. You're here because this is the only chance that someone like you will ever get to break into the system."
Zazu stubbed her cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray that squatted like a tortoise on the edge of Tan's desk. "Fuck the system," she said.
Tan rolled her eyes. "If you wish to follow the accepted career track for Serenity staff, you will play by the rules. Thus far, the indiscretions of your clients have made it easy for you. Now that that is no longer the case, you will have to work a little harder. Just a little, Zazu." She leaned forward, carefully spitting out each syllable as if it were an olive pit. " Just... a... lit... tle... har... der."
Zazu was silent. Memories of the streets reverberated in her brain with the abrasive persistence of a German metalbeat band: the sour taste of cheap Japanese whisky in the back of her mouth; stale sperm gluing her ass to plastic sheets; the piss-taste of unwashed cocks in the neon glare; calloused hands dark with city grit groping her awkwardly on thin, damp futons in cramped capsule hotels, the cool, electric rush of low-grade ice cut with codeine; and the awful, mind-numbing grip of the speed-jitters that kept her constantly searching for another hit.
"Fine," said Zazu finally, lighting another cigarette, wondering for the first time if life on the inside was really all that much better than life on the outside. Cleaner, maybe. Safer. More comfortable. But better? She'd always felt trapped on the streets, at the mercy of forces she couldn't control, forced to sell her soul for a patch of stick-on ice and the dreams of freedom it gave her. She'd thought Serenity was her ticket to real freedom. Now it was starting to look more like an upscale version of the same prison.
"Fine," she repeated, her voice thin and empty as the universe outside. "What do you want me to do?"
Behind Tan's owlish head, the moon drifted across the viewport, fat and white as a melon. It passed by quickly, though it would return soon. In order to achieve the degree of centrifugal force required to maintain a comfortable level of gravity, Serenity rotated on its axis every 43 minutes. Even so, the gravity was not nearly as strong as Earth's, and those kids brought in while they were still growing developed a long-legged lissomeness that many of the Earthbound company men found especially attractive. An unfortunate side effect of this low-grav limb-stretching was that bones lost their resilience, becoming too frail to cope with the oppressive weight of Earth's gravity. As a result, many of the kids had to have their bones reinforced with lightweight metal composites before discharge. In the worst cases, they required a complete non-removable exoskeleton. This gave them an illusory aura of cyborg invulnerability, increasing their attractiveness as special ops executives.
"Make him share the Sensation experience with you."
"Oh, sure. No problem. Seven times he's been here and every time he's insisted that he do it alone. What am I supposed to do? Bargain with him? No Sensation for me. No fuck for you." She shook her head. "He'll just ask for someone else."
"Zazu, you disappoint me. You know how easy it is to manipulate clients -- especially the men. And this man clearly has more than a passing interest in you. Find out what it is he likes about you, and use it. It's really quite simple. I'm sure he'll do anything you ask." She smiled, thin lips pressed together, a smile as tight and humorless as a zipper.
Zazu flashed a marionette grin back at her. "Sure, Tan. Sure he will."
Tan nodded. "Good. See to it." She paused, staring at Zazu over the printouts. "There's something else."
Zazu waited, staring back. "What?"
"He's been mapping you."
Tan certainly had a sense of drama, she had to give her that much. But she hadn't explained it very well. Like most clients, Fukuda ran his own customized Sensation program on Zazu's board, slipping the tiny ROM crystal disc into her external drive before each session. Nothing unusual in that. In an effort to keep the outflow of data to a minimum, Sensation users built as many failsafes as possible into their programs, lock-out macros that automatically edited out classified imagery. Still, even the cleverest programmer couldn't predict all the possibilities, and a few isolated fragments always slipped through. Enough of those fragments, together with data gained from body and conversation analyses, created a pertinent database of classified corporate and private material sufficient to keep Serenity in business.
In Fukuda's case, however, not only was nothing coming out, but data was going in. Somehow he had penetrated the various passcodes that allowed access to the station's security and analysis systems, pulling in the station's own data on Zazu, mapping her sensory and motor responses, charting her brain patterns, sampling the electrical and chemical discharges of her neurons. Strict privacy regulations and the usual delays between visits and analysis had ensured that this serious lapse in security went undetected for over a month. When Tan discovered it, she had kept it to herself, unsure of its veracity and disturbed by its implications. Finally, on receiving a communication from MITI concerning Fukuda, she decided that Serenity -- and Zazu in particular -- would have to pull out all the stops and find out what was going on.
Tan had been strangely reticent regarding the possible political and technological implications. She hinted at Matsushita's growing resentment of the Sony-Philips group's increasing influence on MITI policy, and, more particularly, its anger at Sony-Philips' refusal to license its patent on the Sensation interface. What she didn't say, but what seemed clear enough to Zazu, was that with a program able to exploit the Sensation interface as a gateway to classified databases, Matsushita was aiming at a technological coup and the destruction of MITI's credibility. The Japanese powerhouse had been straining at the leash for years and now, with governments around the world becoming increasingly subservient to corporate masters, it seemed natural that Matsushita would attempt to seize the power it thought it deserved.
But something nagged at Zazu, scratching at the back of her brain like an electrode ghost. Something was wrong. Why would he be interested in Serenity's data on her physical, mental, and emotional states? Why not download the thousands of files packed with classified data on rival corporations? The whole scenario seemed oddly out of joint, overlaid with subtle incongruities, illusions within illusions, like a computer-generated simulation of the fourth dimension.
She stretched on the low-slung body-contour couch, curling one silk-sheathed leg against her chest, watching him, eyes wide and glowing in the starlight like a cat's.
He was attaching the Sensation terminals to prepared implant pads at the base of his skull. The terminals were flat, square pieces of aerated ceramic about the size of an old-fashioned postage stamp. Each was fitted with 256 micropins that penetrated the thin epidermal layer to rest gently on the bone. Each pin transmitted a specific signal frequency to the brain stem and thence to the medusa oblongata, cerebellum, or cerebrum, depending on the frequency. Circular ultrasound transceivers protruded from the outside face of the terminals. These extended about twenty millimeters, and their configuration and angle gave the wearer an eerie resemblance to the Frankensteins who staggered maniacally through some of the ancient monochrome horror vids. Built-in digital processors and decoders sampled the sensory and mental data from the brain using 36-bit quantization and compressed it into packet form for transmission to the computer. There the data was run through the Sensation program and transmitted back to the user. It was a tight closed loop, one that performed something on the order of one million simultaneous logic operations per second. As far as the user was concerned, it was a fantasy come to life.
Hallucinogens could do much the same thing, of course. And there were plenty of drugs on the market specifically designed to intensify the sexual experience. But none could provide anything like the sophistication, the coherence, the reliability, and, above all, the safety of the Sensation experience. In any case, drugs were often used in conjunction with the Sensation program, creating an extraordinary ripple effect that defied comparison.
He had removed all his clothes and stood now beside the board, his pale, hairless body glowing like old ivory in the cool blue starlight, cascading shadows filling the hollows of his rib-cage, pooling beneath his cheekbones. Between his thumb and forefinger, the Sensation disc glittered like a broken star.
She knew there was no point in trying to trick him into sharing the Sensation experience. He must know by now that they were on to him.
He slid the Sensation disc into its slot, tapped a touch key, sleepy, downturned eyes brightening almost immediately. The program was running.
For now, its effect was minimal -- electrifying the senses, heightening perception. Responding to the body's physical changes, the program increased in intensity as the user became more and more aroused.
He could still communicate in a normal manner.
She raised herself from the couch, propelling herself forward in a languid glide, arched toes skimming the floor. He watched her, body trembling perceptibly, penis starting to thicken and distend.
She went to him, ran soft fingers across his smooth, hard chest, tickling the sparse hair around his nipples, burying her mouth in the soft flesh at the base of his throat, nuzzling him with wet, gentle kisses.
Still kissing him, she reached behind him and switched off the board.
His body tensed, the light in his eyes blinking out.
She pressed harder against him, felt his cool skin grow clammy, his tumescent penis shrinking and softening against her belly.
"What are you doing?" he whispered, voice cracking.
"Don't you know?" She traced circles around his cold nipples, felt them stiffen beneath her touch. He seemed unnaturally disturbed, frightened even. Surely he must have known that he would be found out sooner or later. She had expected him to act more nonchalant, to be more prepared.
"No," he said, pulling her hands away from his chest, holding her out at arm's length. He looked awkward, plainly embarrassed now by his nakedness, fumbling with the Sensation terminals, frightened eyes flitting about the chamber, searching for his clothes.
She turned away, moving through spinning galaxies, a shimmering, dark-hued goddess, lean, muscular legs spanning a thousand light years in a single stride. Reached the bar. Poured herself a Lemon Sour. Lit a cigarette.
She heard his voice behind her. Weak. Plaintive. "Zazu-san?"
She turned, regarding him coolly through lazy curls of tobacco smoke. "Mmmm?" she said, sipping the tart shochu.
"What is wrong?"
He seemed so bewildered, so truly distressed. Maybe he really didn't know what was going on. Maybe he was just a patsy.
"Your specs don't correlate, Fukuda-san," she said, watching him over the rim of her glass. He had put on his trousers, was shrugging into his shirt, a pale, half-naked ghost floating in the vast emptiness of the holo-projected universe. "You seem to be getting all the perks that go with being a chief executive, yet you're only a junior staffer."
"Oh," he said, sounding vaguely relieved. "I'm too young to be a chief executive. There are certain... er, proprieties to be observed." He looked down at his chest, shaky fingers fumbling with the buttons on his shirt. "At the same time," he continued, speaking to the floor, "the company feels I should be rewarded for my services. And this is one of the few perks -- as you put it -- that can be awarded with some assurance of discretion."
She decided to be blunt. "That doesn't explain why you won't share the Sensation experience or why you've been stealing data from our banks."
His head jerked up, dark eyes blinking rapidly. "Stealing data?"
"Don't play games, Fukuda-san. You must have known we would find out. Stealing data is a crime. If it wasn't so damaging to our credibility, we would probably have you charged."
He shook his head, flicking a stray tendril of limp, black hair across his face.
She snapped open the control panel on the bar, flicking on the main light. The stars faded in a burst of halogen as the dark universe exploded into light. He stood shivering in the brightness, pathetic and small, like an animal trapped in the paralyzing glare of a car headlamp.
She felt sorry for him. A pawn sacrificed in some devious corporate chess game.
Like her.
Finally, he spoke, his voice apologetic. "It was only meant as a demonstration. To show that the Sensation interface can be penetrated and embarrass Sony-Philips into releasing its patent."
He was still looking at the floor, hands clasped in front of him like a chastised schoolboy. "The data," he went on, "the data was not important." He glanced at her furtively from beneath his downturned brow, gauging her reaction.
She took a long drag on her cigarette, staring at him through slit eyes. She had expected to feel anger. But she felt nothing. Only emptiness. A cold chill emanated from her stomach, spreading through her body, freezing her heart. She had never been raped before.
"Get out," she said, her voice brittle.
A few weeks later, Sony-Philips announced that, in the spirit of good will and cooperation, it would license its Sensation interface for manufacture by competing companies -- including Matsushita.
Almost immediately, Matsushita dropped its own bombshell. The Matsushita version of the Sensation program not only offered users the standard benefits of the Sensation-enhanced sexual experience, it offered them the opportunity to enjoy the full experience alone.
Matsushita had developed a program that contained all the data necessary to provide the user with a fully tangible partner. Special add-on external pads delivered the same kind of physical stimulation that a real partner would. Mental and emotional data supplied through the program would interact with the user's own thoughts and sensations to ensure a complete, fully satisfying, and thoroughly realistic sexual experience. Because the programmed partner had been so thoroughly mapped, the experience would not only be different for each user, it would be different each time. Currently, Matsushita had only programmed a heterosexual female partner. A heterosexual male partner would be forthcoming, to be followed by homosexuals of both sexes. The company promised to respond promptly to market feedback and anticipated the creation of a variety of partners to meet any sexual need - no matter how unique.
As an added bonus, Matsushita had given the program the ability to simulate a variety of specific environments -- including an orbital zero-g chamber.
She looked at the face in the mirror, at its thick, sensuous lips, smooth skin the color of sandalwood stretched tight over sharp-angled bones, smoky brown eyes fading into their sockets, a face as harsh and precise as a Balinese mask, a face no longer her own. A face owned by millions, leered at daily. A face that in a few short weeks had come to know the kisses of more men than any other face in history.
And she wasn't even receiving residuals.
She wondered again if he had known. Obviously the real reason that he hadn't shared the Sensation experience with her was because it would have distorted her responses, preventing an accurate mapping. Had he known what he was doing, what he was doing to her?
She stared for a moment longer, curling her lips in a fierce sneer, then picked up a heavy jar of rejuvenating creme from her vanity and hurled it at the mirror. The heavy, unbreakable glass shivered as a thousand threadlike cracks spread across it like a spiderweb. So thin, so imperceptible were the cracks that it seemed almost as if the glass had been designed that way, the spider-web pattern delicately etched by an unknown robot craftsman.
She looked at her face now, fragmented into a thousand discrete pieces, all of them a part of her but none of them belonging to her. Tears and mascara streaked across the broken planes of her features like viscous oil flowing over the cracked mud-flats of an ancient seabed. Vacant eyes stared out at her, dark and hollow like extinct volcanoes, like the eyes of her mother, a soya-brown Eritrean with stiff-kinked hair who had come to Japan as a domestic, was compromised by the man of the house, then thrown out on the streets, pregnant and creditless. "Time is your enemy," she had told the young Zazu, sad, thin face cracked by abuse and nicotine. "You must defeat it while you are young or remain its prisoner forever."
She had learned fast. When the Serenity scouts found her, her wire-thin elasticity twisted their bodies in knots, her laser-sharp tongue perforated their bloated egos. Impressed, they signed her up. She was seventeen. She had beaten Time.
She sipped from a half-empty tumbler of scotch, savoring the fire in her chest, the warm liquid embrace that for a moment filled the cold hollows in her gut, somehow sensing that this was all that was left of her, a cold, empty vessel waiting to be filled. Lulled by dreams of power, she had allowed herself to be conquered. No longer could she define herself by her ability to command desire, by her dual role as both victim and victor in the tawdry, ongoing war between the sexes.
She had been robbed. Stripped, violated, and vivisected. Her spirit had been drained by a digitized vampire, leaving her with only a physical shell, a dry, empty husk that drifted in orbit like a discarded spacesuit.
She sat quietly, eyes fixed on her shattered image, the sound of her breathing the roar of a cockleshell ocean in her ears. The slick velveteen flesh that lined her empty body tingled as the liquor spread its fiery tentacles outwards from her stomach, high-octane molecules searing raw nerve-endings like a cauterizing laser, leaving her numb and senseless, a hot, scotch-soaked cunt spread wide for all.
Darkness fell across her face like a low-budget video fade as Serenity drifted out of the blaze of filtered sunlight and passed quietly into Earth's shadow. She heard the faint hum of the nuclear generator as it kicked in, switching on night-power. The lights came on.
She glanced at the Earth monitor. Thousands of kilometers below, the night-shrouded Korean peninsula jabbed at Japan like an accusing finger.
She counted the seconds on her fingers. Waiting.
Since the release of Matsushita's upgraded Sensation program, business had slowed to a trickle. A few grim-faced Sony-Philips executives occasionally stalked the near-empty chambers, recouping lost pride in joyless orgies of pain, muttering about psychosexual side effects and personality disorders.
None of her regular clients had made the trip and no new ones had been assigned to her.
Talk in the staff lounge had been downbeat but cautiously optimistic. Once the novelty had worn off, it would be business as usual. Nothing could ever beat the real thing, even if the perceived benefits of the real thing were more psychological than real. The Matsushita program was just a hightech sex toy, a surrogate partner for losers and perverts. A few of the more cynical kids had speculated the novelty would not wear off. Instead, prostitutes would be recruited into providing the raw data for multiple versions of the program, a possibility all agreed beat the hell out of having live sex with not-always-attractive strangers. None of them knew Zazu had already provided the raw material for the first version.
Zazu didn't care one way or the other. She floated lazily in a tranquilized haze, discreetly applying stick-on epidermal downers whose active ingredients blended quickly with the alcohol in her bloodstream, washing through her body like liquid sleep.
She watched herself in the mirror, watched the broken fragments of her soul swirling across the mirror's silvery surface, scattering like ashes on the dark waters of the Pacific.
The man in the wraparound mirrorshades offered her a cigarette. "You must understand, " he was saying, thin-lipped face blank and subtly menacing behind the reflecting glasses, "that Matsushita was not aware of the source of the data used in the Sensation Plus program. We were under the impression that the data was gained from a volunteer at the research center involved."
Zazu spoke slowly, her jaw heavy and sticky as clay, squeezing words from her mouth like soft candied cherries. "He said it didn't matter... the data, it didn't matter." She fumbled with the cigarette, flipping it through stiff, nerveless fingers.
Tan was hunched at her desk, hands folded tightly in front of her. "Inoue-san, Matsushita authorized the penetration of our data banks. You have already admitted as much. Surely you are aware that the only data removed was that pertaining to Miss Zazu?"
"No data at all should have been removed. Our intention was merely to demonstrate our ability to exploit the Sensation interface, not to commit a felony." He sucked on his Mild Seven, turning his silvered gaze on Zazu, capturing and absorbing her reflection like the mirror in her quarters.
Zazu barely listened to them. Their whitewashed exchange of political doubletalk crackled like satellite static in the upper stratosphere of her mind. One of Matsushita's top special ops sharps, he had come here to arrange compensation for Zazu, and for Serenity; to atone, he said, for Fukuda's unforgivable error in judgment. In his expensive charcoal-gray London-tailored suit, he was as smooth, and as believable, as a video real-estate shark.
She knew why he was here. He hadn't come here to make amends for the violation of her spirit. He had come here to buy her off. Matsushita was in trouble. Sensation Plus had a bug in it. After only three weeks on the market, there were already hints of serious problems with the program. One man had developed a split personality. Another had killed himself. Reports of less extreme personality disorders were piling up. It seemed that the computer-facilitated interaction of two personalities in a single mind seriously disrupted the host mind's sense of self. Frequent users of the program -- and there were many -- soon found their simulated sex partner was taking up permanent residence in their subconscious and, on occasion, making forays into the conscious mind.
She puffed obsessively on the Mild Seven he had given her, the constant stream of smoke stinging her eyes. She stared at him through narrow, tear-misted slits. As part of the deal, he wanted her to come down to Tokyo with him, to allow Matsushita's scientists to access her mind and body directly, to search for a key in her neural data that would allow them to lock her troublesome silicone clones into the program.
"A permanent salaried position with Matsushita's Special Operations Department plus six percent of the gross profits on the debugged Sensation program." He had spread several sheets of hard copy on Tan's desk, was pointing out specific clauses in the agreement.
She glanced at her watch. 19:45. There was a shuttle leaving for Seattle in fifteen minutes.
Tan and Inoue were absorbed with the contract. Behind them, the Earth hung in the viewport, its blue-white bulk filling the meteorite-proof plastic like a huge mural.
She stood up silently, slow and quiet as a slow-motion replay, feeling invisible, an ephemeral computer ghost drifting unnoticed through the space station's hollow shell. She left her cigarette, still burning, on the arm of the chair, and walked unhurriedly to the automatic door.
She'd make them pay, all right.
Christopher Hunt (chrish@wimsey.com) was an encyclopedia salesman, waiter, cook, clerk in a porno bookstore, and factory laborer before ending up in Japan, where he taught English and later worked as a copywriter with a Japanese ad agency. He's now a Vancouver-based freelance writer and library junkie who wonders why he has to work so hard to make a living. When he has time, he edits the Web 'zine Circuit Traces.
InterText stories written by Christopher Hunt: "Game Over" (v5n3), "Dust" (v5n6), "Autoerotic" (v6n3).