The Avatar Experiment Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Avatar Experiment

  Copyright

  The Avatar Experiment

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Want to know what happens next?

  The Avatar Experiment

  Aubrey Parker

  Copyright © 2017 by Aubrey Parker. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read this work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

  Thank you for supporting Aubrey Parker

  CHAPTER ONE

  “So, you see,” said Benson.

  Olivia squinted at the multiple monitors of the dark editing bay. The top screen showed a beautiful girl, thin and pale, with wide lips and black hair, as she rose up, used her hands to spread herself open, and slowly lower her pussy onto an erect cock. As it was with such videos, the cock and small patch of attached torso didn’t seem to be part of a person, but rather a kind of disembodied cock/crotch engineered for maximal erotic value. The woman slid the cock fully home, her slit mating against the disembodied dick and balls like an airlock sealing. Appropriately, the balls below the cock were waxed hairless.

  Below the monitor was a complex set of rolling lines and bars, like an ancient sound equalizer showing a soundtrack’s relative volume. Benson was pointing, his eyes waiting and expectant.

  “I don’t,” Olivia said.

  Benson shook his head, unbelieving. He looked to his wife, then to Parker Barnes. A psychologist had to get it. “You see — right, Parker?”

  “It’s peaking,” Parker answered.

  “Exactly.” Benson tapped the readout and pointed at the stunning black-haired woman on-screen. “This is Slava. She’s Russian. Actually Russian, like one generation removed from the Wild East. Her parents got into the NAU juuuuust before the borders closed. They’re really close with their daughter and, despite being Old World themselves, seem to have enlightened NAU values about her work. Slava was raised here, of course, but her parents talk like criminals in an old spy vidstream. Slava speaks fluent Russian, which I didn’t even know they still used over there. Anyway, she’s one of our most popular actresses, and always does that thing she just did there, with kind of pulling her pussy open then sliding down on it. And her face? Did you catch her face when she did it?”

  The remaining Six shook their heads.

  Benson reached for the screen. For a moment, it looked like he was so absorbed with Slava’s performance that he wanted to touch her, but he was actually scrubbing the video backward.

  On the lower screen, lines and graphs moved backward with the video. Benson stopped, and they all watched as the girl again spread herself open (a fist held the cock up at its base, though the shot didn’t make it clear whether the hand was in any way associated with the penis) and again slid down. This time, all eyes were on the actress’s face, visible above small breasts pierced with gold rings. The expression on her lips and in her green eyes was somehow both wanton and playful. By the time the Six finished watching, smooth pussy lips had again formed their airtight seal against equally smooth balls.

  “Right?” said Benson, excited. “And did you see the biometrics?”

  “Oh, those biometrics were so hot.”

  “The graphs, Olivia,” Benson said, again pointing at the graphs below the screen. “Did you see the heart rates and skin temperatures?”

  Olivia stared at Benson.

  He rolled his eyes and paused the video. The camera had moved in for a close-up; now the cock and pussy were even more disembodied. It wasn’t two people fucking so much as an anatomy lesson.

  Benson tapped the screen. Above the rolling graphs was a tiny triangle at the screen’s horizontal center, indicating the spot corresponding to Benson’s paused point.

  “Biometrics,” he said. “Measures of the vital stats from people watching this vidstream on any of our O devices. They watch. Our devices track their bodies and report the data back to us. You know at least that much, I assume?”

  Now Olivia looked annoyed.

  Benson tapped the top graph. It showed a simple straight line that appeared to be slowly rising, reaching its apex just past the arrow. Beyond that, it turned and sloped gently downward. “Heart rate up top. Skin temperature is this line below. This squiggly one indicates eye focus — where the viewer is looking — but I can never get much out of it. This is breath rate, and brainwaves … or some other complex way to explain things. I’m sure Parker’s eager to show he understands what the rest of us do not.”

  “Ambient neural impulses.”

  “Look,” Benson went on, ignoring Parker, “don’t worry about the details. You’re used to seeing this data on the R&D reports, and this is just what it looks like before the eggheads get it. We put biometric sensors on our devices for a reason. Does nobody see what I’m saying?”

  Alexa, who had been mostly silent in the back of the dark editing room, spoke: “He’s saying this is the spot in the video where most watchers have orgasms.”

  “Exactly,” Benson said. “But here’s the thing. Check the time index. This scene is half over. We’d normally see the biggest peak at the end, when goo starts flying.”

  Again he reached for the screen. He pinched the still, dragged a minimized duplicate from behind it, pulled his fingers apart like taffy to show the timeline, then scanned the right side of the screen.

  He paused the second video on a shot of Slava; her mouth was open and her eyes, ringed with dark eyeliner, were wide. A frozen geyser of white spunk sprang from the end of a still-disembodied cock to hang suspended in the air. Seeing it, Alexa repressed the urge to ask if there was an actual man in Benson and Charisma’s scene or if they’d rented an anatomically correct CPR dummy.

  “You can see a second peak at the cumshot in this scene, too,” he said, “but it’s smaller. Statistically, most people are getting off at that earlier point about halfway through.”

  Olivia shook her head. “So what?”

  “Slava is unique in her ability to split the graph like this. Oh, there are always people beating off throughout any scene, but only Slava videos have a distinct peak somewhere other than the end. We noticed it, got curious, and then started testing.”

  “Testing,” said Houston. “So, you finally installed robotic arms in the viewers to reach out and diddle the people using them.” He laughed until Parker joined him.

  Charisma rolled her eyes, then answered for Benson. “We experimented with the scenes, he means. Interactive porn, almost. It’s like focus group testing, only the focus group doesn’t know it’s observed.”

  “We tried to figure out what makes Slava special,” Benson explained. “She’s doing something at certain specific points that people agree is hot enough to blow their loads to, and we wanted to know what it was. Was it the framing? The audio ? Was she moaning just right at those times? I don’t suppose you heard that in the bit I showed you—Slava makes a signature little yip, like she’s surprised, right at the key point. Viewers lose their shit.”

  Nobody responded. Benson started talking faster, apparently realizing that he’d blabbed too long and was losing interest.

  “Anyway, long story short, we had Slava try a bunch of different things as experiments and shifted some of the ways we were shooting. Then
we released the videos to see what would happen and found two things: To get that distinct second peak, we needed to have a well-lit, well-framed insertion, and Slava needed to lower her forehead and lift her eyes with that little expression you see here. Those two things together caused our second biometric peak.”

  Benson waited for the room to applaud his discovery. There were a few beats then Olivia said, “Well, this was worth the trip across town.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Olivia,” said Charisma.

  Olivia turned to face her. “You’ve just told me if a girl makes O faces while getting fucked, guys shoot their loads. Wow. Congratulations, you two. You’re really pioneering shit people didn’t know in caves.”

  “Dammit, Olivia,” said Benson. “You’re not getting it at all. Only Slava videos show this pattern. It’s not just O faces; it’s her O face. And it’s not even an O face—she doesn’t actually get off when she makes them. Slava’s orgasms are actually over the top, and watcher stats are low when they happen. It’s just a seductive face, if anything. Or kind of a ‘penetrating the surprised shy girl’ face.”

  “So what?”

  Benson tapped the lower screen. “You don’t think it’s interesting to learn about a stimulus so incredibly agreed-upon — right here in real data from real users — it causes a definitive spike in arousal? The entire scene is supposed to be hot, and everyone has different tastes. Do you seriously not see the tremendous value in knowing such a specific trigger?”

  Parker nodded, staring at the screen. His face was lit by the glow of the monitors, but like the rest of them, his head stayed mostly in shadow. Alexa was amused to see that despite his constant exposure to sex, his pants had pitched a tent while watching Slava make her signature look.

  “He’s right,” Parker said, and Benson looked at him gratefully. “The stimuli that trigger certain states are often very specific. Making sex scenes is scattershot, because if you get two attractive people fucking and run them through enough positions and scenarios, you’re bound to trigger arousal in most people. But that only happens because there’s enough action to hit specific cues. People don’t even know what turns them on. There are a ton of examples of this in the regular world. They once did a study and determined that the sound of a turkey chick will make a mother care for it even if it’s a stuffed dummy, whereas the mother will kill a real chick if it’s mute. There was a study that determined as long as someone used the word ‘because’ when they were trying to cut in line, most people let it happen … even if whatever followed the ‘because’ was idiotic, selfish, or senseless.”

  Olivia said, “Imagine if Slava said ‘because’ while making that face.”

  “Why do we gather data if we’re not going to use it, Olivia?” Barnes snapped. “Do you really not see that selling sex is also psychology?”

  “Oh, that’s convenient,” said Houston. Then he added, “Doctor.”

  “No, he’s right,” Alexa said. “Let’s remember our roots. The Anthony Ross project back in 2017, with the Syndicate, was always about data and psychology. The Syndicate was willing to invest a hundred billion old-US dollars into our social change initiative mainly because the Ross platform and all that went with it would give them access to the largest bank of mined data ever assembled.”

  Alexa pointed at the screen — at the highly specific sexual trigger Benson had found amid piles of raw data.

  “This,” she said, “is the kind of thing we’ve been searching for since Trevor’s Harem.”

  “Well … let’s not overstate it,” Barnes said.

  Alexa gave him a look that said, Not now.

  Obviously they’d been searching for an intuitive avatar a lot more than O faces and orgasm points, but the world had changed immeasurably since 2017 — and the things AI could do now, given the right data, had changed with it.

  “Well, that’s fascinating,” Houston said, now looking at Alexa, Parker, and Benson as if they’d allied against him. “But what exactly are we supposed to do with this information? Have girls start to make that face — right at the end, like a cliffhanger — then make them buy up to see rest of the video?” He chuckled. “Sounds like those peep show booths that used to be in DZ’s Times Square.”

  “That’s just it, though,” said Benson. “Other girls can’t ‘make a face’ and get the same reaction. Only Slava. No matter how much we have our other girls try to mimic what she does, no one can pull it off. We’ve given them dark eyeliner and green contacts. We’ve pattern-matched and manipulated the girls’ faces in post-production so they look more like her. We’ve gotten them to move like Slava. We’ve even reverse-tanned them, to make them pale like her. But no matter what, we can’t duplicate the response.”

  “So … what?” Olivia said. “Are you saying we have a second Chosen One? Because I’ve gotta tell you, putting all our eggs in Chloe Shaw’s basket has me exhausted.”

  Alexa said, “That’s a bit of an exaggeration for a company worth nearly a trillion credits and with fourteen core services, don’t you think?”

  “Actually,” Charisma said, “funny you mention Chloe, because this isn’t about Slava. She’s our best responder by far, but we’ve seen small upswells with other actresses who are similar — not peaks, but … let’s say ‘potential.’ With a little massaging and a bit of work by a master chameleon, we got to thinking we could …” She trailed off, her eyebrows raising.

  Parker had leaned against a workbench. Now he stood, waving his hands in the dark air. “No way. No. Way. I see where this is going. If you think you’re going to take the most versatile, most valuable asset we have and use her as a dime-a-dozen vidstream sperm catcher, you’re—”

  “She wouldn’t have any trouble at all mimicking these triggers!” Charisma blurted, pointing at the paused video. “We have mountains of data. We know she can find the hot spots on any man, but that’s a one-to-one thing. It isn’t scaleable. Imagine if she could do the same thing for vidstream customers!”

  “Any hot girl can be in a vidstream or holos, Charisma,” Olivia said. “Hell, they don’t even really need to be that hot. I’ve seen how some of them look without makeup. Why would you need Chloe?”

  “Because she’s not like anyone else. She could be huge!”

  “Exactly,” Olivia retorted. “She could be. In fact, she would be, then we’d lose control. I hate to break it to you, but we’re a few decades past the time when porn actresses kept their fame in adult circles. Look at Nella. She has a fucking cereal. Kids eat it at breakfast. The cereal is even shaped like a hole. Every adult who sees those commercials catches the innuendo and knows the slogan should really be Pour yourself a bowl of vaginas!, but porn is so goddamn mainstream now that people—”

  “Why do we still have the Nectar line, then, Olivia?” Benson asked. “Nectar is an O company, same as Houston’s toy line or the spas. Why would you want to hamstring part of the company? Why not create big stars? They’re still our stars, under contract. Let Chloe do a video. See what she can do. We’ve identified a dozen triggers like this one with Slava, and Chloe can do them all. She’d be—”

  “It’s not about hamstringing your company, Benson!”

  “O’s company,” Benson corrected.

  “Stop taking everything so goddamned personally! Instead of us thinking about your vidstreams and holos, how about you start thinking like a board member, responsible for doing what’s best for the company as a whole?”

  “You don’t think blowing up our vidstream line is best for the company as a whole?”

  “Not at the expense of our biggest asset, no!”

  “Jesus, Olivia!” Benson spat. “It’s not at the expense of Chloe. I’m not proposing we cut her up and sell off the pieces. I’m talking about using her as an asset, which you said she is, in a way she’d be excellent at, and in a way—”

  “Makes her like every other porn girl!”

  “She’s definitely not like every other porn girl,” Benson argued. “I’m making a si
mple proposal: Let Charisma and me use her in one Nectar film — something that can be released on Crossbrace in the public sector, then later on The Beam with some semi-immersive, interactive bonus material. Let’s try that and see what happens. An experiment.” He pointed at Alexa. “To gather more of the data we all agree is so important.”

  “Then what, Benson?” Olivia said. “What happens when she becomes famous and the Big Five decide to fight for her contract? She’ll be on vidboards, on every pop-over on Crossbrace, in magazines, advertising tampons, making guest appearances on sitcom streams — all things that are permitted by our standard contract, I’ll add. Sure, she’ll prop us up for a while, and her vids will sell like crazy. We could do a line of Chloe dolls and toys and make some fuckable video models — for shitty VR now and for the slightly less-shitty VR on The Beam later — but then what? What happens when her contract ends and she’s too goddamned big to need us … maybe even at a critical time, when The Beam goes live and we need her more than ever? I folded my clubs and spas into O, same as the rest of you added your companies, and I’m not planning to ever try pulling them out, so believe me: I want what’s best for the company, but this isn’t it. This is short-term thinking, Benson.” She sighed. “Seriously, a film? That is the quickest, dirtiest, most flash-in-the-pan way I can possibly think of to use the most phenomenally talented girl we’ve ever found.”

  Olivia’s words were sinking into the room, but Parker still couldn’t resist a jab: “Coming around on Chloe Shaw then, are we, Olivia?”

  Olivia ignored Parker as all eyes turned to the oddly quiet Alexa. They already had their majority — Olivia, Houston, and Parker against putting Chloe into a movie, with Benson and Charisma for— but Alexa was their unofficial head.

  “I have an idea,” Alexa said. “Olivia, Parker, and Houston are right that putting Chloe into a film is dangerous and potentially shortsighted, but Benson and Charisma are right that there’s a lot to be learned from the experiment.”