Strange Flesh (36 page)

I might feel depersonalized by Olya’s sexual trance, but instead I find it incredibly liberating. There’s no trace of anxiety about timing,
performance, or emotional synchronicity. I’m left with the sheer joy of drowning myself in her incomparable flesh.

She comes hard, fast, and, as near as I can tell, automatically. During our second attempt she completely clears my desk. But a broken monitor is a small price to pay for the memory of this woman panting and writhing in my arms.

Last night she’d unsettled me with her dismissive talk about the robots she normally refers to as her children. Previously, I entertained certain doubts about our project. But finally having real sex after all this time has freed me of any ambivalence.

What I’m feeling with Olya now is a living dream.

This particular dream we’ve been chasing together for weeks now through a digital fantasyland. Far from being an alienating, sterile technology, the Dancers have fostered a sense of erotic ease among the iTeam. They’ve been a safe sandbox in which we’ve gradually gotten comfortable with each other. Not only Olya, but I’m beginning to see stirrings with Xan as well. Our dream world may even be working on Garriott’s congenital shyness.

I wonder what Olya’s like with other, normal lovers. Does she whisper endearments, stare longingly into their eyes? In a sense, she’s already
had
sex with me any number of times, and she feels totally entitled to treat me like I’m a machine. Which may sound unfortunate, but in practice brings pure bliss.

People tend to be at their best when they feel empowered. And there’s nothing like the malleable magic of virtuality for inciting that sense of possibility. Liberated from our corporeal prisons we feel superhuman, not ghostly. You can try anything, since mistakes can be wiped out with the click of a button. And that lets you do things, explore emotions you would never consider in the squalid permanence of meatspace. In NOD there’s no conversation that can’t be had. No activity too risky. No thing you cannot do.

Is it perfect? No, far from it. But the Dancers are powerful in this way, and I want other people to feel it. Not to adopt them as any kind of replacement, but to use them to explore. This sense of adventurous communion they can encourage seems to diffuse into reality. As evidenced by the glory of the current moment.

Just as I’m starting to worry about my endurance, Olya emerges from a decisive series of shudders and pushes me away. She steps back quickly and looks at me like she’s awakened to find a stranger in her bedroom. Her eyes close as she takes a deep breath and cracks her neck. I get a veiled smile and an ambiguous, “Hmm . . .”

Then she walks out.

At nine fifteen
AM
, I get a message that the RAT embedded in the email I sent Nash last night has been activated. The text had simply requested that he download a voice sample of Billy and ask around if anyone had fielded inquiries from this guy about Gina’s death. As hacks go, this one hardly deserves the name, but infecting someone when you’ve established a trusted relationship is always pretty easy.

Nash emailed me back, tersely saying he’d look into it, but by then, using a brand-new flaw Red Rook found in Microsoft’s Media Player software, my file had already released its toxins, and I’m now busy dumping his hard drive and installing keystroke loggers. He doesn’t have a copy of Gina’s video, so I’ll have to wait until he logs into the NYPD’s digital evidence vault to get it.

B
ack in
Savant
, I find a message from the Duke congratulating me on reaching the Third Degree. To do so I’ve had to satisfy an ever-more-egregious series of commands. Sourcing abominable porn has been fairly easy due to my contacts in law enforcement, but four of the “crimes” have required that I personally appear in the videos. Though I seem to have no problem with robot sodomy, when it comes to Sadean levels of pain, perversion, and paraphilia, I’m simply not varsity material. Fortunately, the genre permitted me to wear a mask in each of these cases.

My most recent chore required that Adrian hook me up with a local role-play specialist to spend a couple hours reenacting a weird armpit frotteurism episode from
120 Days
. While probably not fulfilling the stipulated quotas of bodily fluids, we put enough vigor into it that I thought it might suffice. And it saved me from having to violate any health codes.

Normally, a new quest is transmitted right after completing the previous one, and today is no different. Though the tasks usually come as messages from one of the Friends, here I’m confronted by a NoBot called Madame Champville, who was another one of the storytellers from the book.

She hands me an envelope that contains a note written in flowing cursive with little pictograms substituting for certain words:

Gather the
from the
in time

Leave at the
, and please know that I’m

Observing your courage or noting its lack

So make sure in this case that you never look back.

So far, the orders I’ve received from Silling’s inmates have been quite explicit. But this one is in code. As my tasks tread the line of legality, a criminal organization like the Pyrexians
would
start encoding their commands. I suppose anyone seeking to join them lusts after forbidden images and is therefore familiar with the methods one uses to conceal them.

This particular code seems fairly simple. The image files standing in for the words “rose,” “table,” and “grave” are unusually grainy. I could spend hours scouring them for information, but Red Rook has a whole department dedicated to this kind of image analysis work. So I zip them up and forward them to our Stegosauri.

Though wanting in professional courtesy, I can’t argue with our Cryptiles’ results. Attached to the note are three new, even-lower-resolution files.

The rose holds a portrait of a skinny girl who looks about seventeen. She has caramel skin and green eyes set off with too much eyeliner. She’s wearing a tight pink baby tee with the name “Rosita” spelled out in gangster-Gothic script. The pattern I’ve seen with the Degrees is that for any names that come up, Billy always picks some variation on a child victim from the book. In this case, Rosita is a Spanish version of little Rosette, the general’s daughter kidnapped from her mother’s house in the countryside.

Needless to say, she does not fare well.

The wooden table’s image shows a different kind of table: here the schedule board at a train station. Given that it lists Metroliner departures to both Boston and Washington, DC, I assume that it’s Penn Station. Only an Acela from DC currently occupies a gate. One of those red time stamps, the kind nobody uses anymore, sits in the lower right corner of the photo. The date reads “01.24.15 12:47 AM,” which would mean that the picture was taken tomorrow night, a revolutionary advance in digital photography.

Finally, the headstone file contains an image of a graveyard, though the flowering riot of tulips and overhanging redbud tree give this one a distinctly cheerful cast. I’m further cheered by the ease with which this particular graveyard can be identified. The building filling the background has a granite façade inscribed with the words
AMERICAN STOCK EXCHANGE
.

That would place the shot at Trinity Church, which lies just at the foot of Wall Street. The time stamp on this one shows two
AM
, about twenty-five hours from now.

Substituting these new images into my original orders reveals pretty clear instructions: pick up this Rosita woman from Penn Station at the specified time. Leave her at the Trinity Church graveyard an hour later.

For Jacques, Billy’s game so far has been purely virtual. It’s located in NOD and deals with digital objects: avatars and video images. But now I’ve finally caught up with the elite players, and
Savant
seems primed to start hemorrhaging into real life.