AFTER
Six years later
-1-
The two women were historians, and as they entered the nesting cubicle they were deep in a heated discussion about meat as art. “Fischer’s oils create a visceral response,” one said. “Raw flesh becomes an object of worship. Whereas with Sterbak, it’s often more about human flesh and our response as it is presented under circumstances that are jarring to the viewer. It’s the difference between consumption for sustenance versus sexual pleasure. You see?”
“I wouldn’t call her House of Pain sexual.”
“Ah, but that’s exactly it.” The two women settled back in soft, contoured zero gravity chairs, their weight perfectly balanced within the contact suits they wore like second skins. The cubicle was bare, the smooth cream walls meant to swallow noise and reflect sensation. It was rented by the hour. “Sex and death. Ever read The Tears of Eros? They’re inextricably linked.”
“Bataille was a surrealist.”
“Only when it was convenient.” The second woman, taller and nicely plump, rubbed her ample breasts. “These suits always make me feel like I’m wearing nothing at all. Are you ready, Dobs?”
The other woman nodded and handed her the headgear. “I want a tall one this time, a royal perhaps, with chest hair.”
The plump woman, whose name was Stephie, slipped the gear over her head and settled it into place. No corneal implants for either of them, at least not yet, although Deborah could have finally afforded something like that after all these years.
She looked at Stephie. So enthusiastic, like a child with a new toy. A net virgin until university, born to card-carrying members of the virtual resistance who were obsessed with organic cloned fruits, historical recreations of 18th century France and leg hair, the experience was still relatively new to her. Deborah assumed the history degree in 21st century art had been her version of rebellion. Now she seemed to be making up for lost time.
Stephie’s voice came muffled from within; they hadn’t established a com-link yet. “Sustenance versus sexual pleasure, indeed. I’m thinking Nordic, with a fighter’s build—”
“That’s what you always choose!”
“And a brooding, artistic type. Eric Bloodaxe and Poe. Wouldn’t it be fun to have an intellectual discussion with one, while the other bends you over a chair?”
Deborah giggled. “You’re so dirty, Stephie.”
“We’re on vacation. I feel it’s appropriate.”
“I suppose I need to invest in my own equipment.”
“Then you’d use it all the time,” Stephie said. “I’m not ready to give up on the physical, regardless of what our lovely government is preaching, but the temptation would be too much if it were right in front of me. As Gutenberg has made abundantly clear, once the illusion of reality is seamless, humanity will have difficulty finding reason to return. You’ve experienced his Transformations, haven’t you?”
Deborah nodded. Of course she had; everyone had at least once, even the non-believers. She had experienced it originally as a historian concerned with understanding the modern belief structures of humanity. She was not one to attach herself to religious movements; she considered herself a practical person. But she had to admit that the idea of Transforming was, regardless of her natural aversion to technology, quite appealing.
“Are there really natural sensitives?”
“Of course there are. I saw a documentary on one just the other day. I asked the AI what it was like, and he said it was just like experiencing a serotonin dip.”
“He was pulling your leg.”
“I asked for an immersive, and he showed it to me. Seamless, blinking in, blinking out, as natural as breathing.”
The lights in the room began to dim. Deborah sighed and adjusted her gear as the link popped. Steph’s voice was inside her head. “See you on the other side, Dobs.”
The room went black. Deborah felt the familiar sensation of panic as her senses reacted to the lack of stimuli, the feeling of floating through endless, deep space making her want to jerk out her arms and legs for balance like a sleeping child falling from bed, before the system blinked into life. Sterback would have enjoyed an experience like this, Deborah thought. Sexual expression that was real, and yet not real; would she have studied the reactions of users and considered them authentic? The ability to control an encounter compromised the experiment, perhaps. No matter how far you took it, there was always the safety net.
Sex and death. Two of humankind’s most powerful experiences. It was no wonder so many of them got the two confused.
—–
Sometime later Deborah said goodbye to her version of King Henry the eighth, who had become tiresome. She had thought it would be good fun and a bit of a dangerous thrill to be intimate with such a legendary rogue, one she had spent so many years studying. But after their initial conversations about the Boleyn sisters and the torture and execution of John Fisher, she found him terminally boring. The program could draw from recorded history, but it was unable to make him react with truly unexpected responses, the way a real human would. He could not tell her with any weight how the colors on his feasting room walls made him feel, or describe the smell of torchlight at an execution. Besides, she was feeling sore.
Stephie, on the other hand, seemed to have an endless appetite for these sorts of encounters, as if her parents’ resistance fighting had given her an addict’s temperament. Deborah switched off the gear and let the blackness envelop her for a moment, enjoying the floating, disconnected feeling as much as anything that had come before it. She talked a good game for Stephie’s sake, but truth be told she would rather spend her days buried among the actual pages of old books than inside the net. She’d grown up among the orphanages of Bangalore, where instead of ubiquitous net access, they had a room full of books nobody had any use for anymore, old fashioned novels and illustrated art history encyclopedias with vivid full color prints. Her early schooling was taken within the bounds of Indian slave traders between hours of begging for assistance for her father, crippled from the War, and who did not actually exist.
Perhaps that was why she and Stephie got along so well, she thought. They hit it off instantly when they met in a class on the impact of Tata’s Nano on the population explosion and industrialization of the Third World; perhaps by then they had been the last two net virgins on earth.
Even through the lack of any external stimuli, floating weightless in the void, she imagined she could feel the city of New London rising up around her, steaming streets full of the heat and humidity of nearly constant rain since the collapse of Old Greenland, the smell of twenty million humans, stray dogs and garbage filling her nostrils. This was her third trip to New London, and she found it terrifying. Giant OLED video screens and holographic projectors streamed customized infomercials and dark marketing broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. The latest wave technology beamed some of them straight into the brain like tiny, focused lasers of capitalism. They seemed to know Deborah’s every whim and wish before she knew herself, and the alternate reality games made her thirsty to buy things. Stephie said they were altering her alphas without her consent, although that was supposedly illegal. She didn’t like the feeling. It was more than a little unsettling for a woman who had lived unplugged for a good portion of her early life.
But Stephie embraced all new experiences with her typical gusto, her appetites huge, her enthusiasm limitless. Deborah was more than a little in love with her. Not in a sexual way, of course. And anyway, she would never say such a thing out loud.
When King Henry had sufficiently faded from memory and she removed her gear, the first thing she noticed was the heat in the room. It seemed to have risen twenty degrees.
She turned to Stephie, but it was too dark to see much other than the barest outline of her body. She seemed to be jerking back and forth.
“Steph?” Deborah whispered, wondering if she were out again. But no; she could just see the suggestion of headgear over her companion’s face. Stephie was still inside.
There was a smell in the air. Burned hair? Not quite. Deborah pinched her nostrils shut. It was growing stronger by the minute. Something was wrong.
“Lights,” she said, but nothing happened. Now she was feeling panicked, and knowing she was inside a seven foot square cubicle didn’t help. She tried to get up, but the zero gravity chair made it nearly impossible. The controls weren’t working at all.
A sudden tingle in the fingers of her right hand made her realize she was still holding onto the headgear. The tingle came again, much stronger this time, and she threw the gear against the wall like she’d been scalded. Her friend was thrashing more violently now. “Stephie!” she shouted, rolling against the contoured surfaces of the chair, damn these armrests, until she rolled over the edge and onto the floor with a thump.
Sex and death, Deborah thought, for reasons she only vaguely understood at the moment. She got to her feet with the smell of burning flesh in her nostrils, and she realized she could see now because Stephie’s hair was on fire.
Deborah screamed, but the room’s acoustics deadened the sound. Drawn forward by a mixture of fascination and dread, and driven by an animalistic urge to know, to see, she leaned over her friend’s body. It had arched upward so far it was as if her spine had cracked, her lips had peeled back from her teeth in a rictus of pleasure or pain, and her skin was blistering and turning black amid the flickering flames.
