The Future of Sex Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Future of Sex

  Copyright

  The Future of Sex

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

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  The Future of Sex

  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.

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  Aubrey Parker

  CHAPTER ONE

  July 15, 2060 — District Zero

  “Is this your first trip to the city?”

  Chloe turned. The man who had entered the darkened room was an almost ridiculously apt embodiment of “tall, dark, and handsome.” He was at least six-three, solidly built with a powerful jaw, surprisingly soft brown eyes, and deeply tanned skin. His hair was dark brown, not quite black, combed neatly across his head. He was younger than Chloe had suspected, given his position in the Six, but these days people simply seemed to look younger longer. Either there was something in the air, or high-end nanobot treatments (for those who could afford them) were more effective than she’d imagined.

  Gossip sheets said Parker Barnes had been born before the turn of the millennium, but he looked mid-forties, tops — and a trim, well-maintained mid-forties at that.

  “No,” she said. “I grew up here.”

  “How old are you? You don’t look old enough to have ‘grown up’ anywhere other than where you live now.”

  Chloe tried a sly smile, knowing it was important to play the part rather than just looking it. “Never ask a girl her age.”

  Barnes smirked, then sat in a black leather seat behind a slim table in the center of the room. It was black and made of something synthetic — either Plasteel or a Warp matrix — and looked nothing like a conference room table, a meeting desk, or anything else. It was barely two feet across, like a long espresso bar.

  Barnes tapped the desk and Chloe’s resume appeared on its surface — only it wasn’t precisely a resume. A resume was something you created yourself, to fool people. Barnes was looking at a form to which Chloe had added details, but its hard data had come directly from whatever information source O had that the rest of the world didn’t. Everyone had access to Crossbrace, of course, but O seemed to have some sort of next-level access. If you were going to become the NAU’s biggest sex company, it helped to have the advantage of knowing exactly what your customers wanted.

  “Twenty.” Barnes looked up. “That’s younger than what we normally hire for these positions.”

  “I’m eager.”

  “When did you lose your virginity?”

  Chloe blushed. That wasn’t good. She was asking this man to hire her into one of the most prestigious sex jobs in existence — the kind of job that could make girls world famous, command exorbitant engagement fees, and launch careers in music and entertainment — and the one thing a high-class resort girl couldn’t be was shy.

  “I could look it up, you know.” Barnes smiled slightly, holding his finger above the table’s Crossbrace-enabled surface.

  The lights were low, banked in a ring fifteen feet or so above their heads, and cast a muted, grayish hue. The walls were dark gray as well, steel-smooth. Five feet above the lights, nude girls—more scenery than anything—writhed on glass-bottomed tables.

  The room’s somber, temple-like feel made his playful look seem out of place — or perhaps Parker Barnes wasn’t actually playful at all, but was good at playing his new public image instead of the old one from his questionable rumored past.

  “I was nineteen.”

  They seemed to know Chloe’s sexual history, beyond her work as a glass table girl at O’s island resort’s lower tier. There were rumbles that Crossbrace’s imminent successor — what they were calling The Beam — would take data-gathering to new levels while enhancing immersion and connectivity for its users. O probably had a leg up on Beam access, too.

  “So you’ve only been sexually active for a year.”

  “Almost two,” said Chloe, a tad defensively. She stood, arms in front of her narrow waist, blue-green eyes turning toward the floor as if dragged there. Her long, dark brown hair billowed in her peripheral vision. “It was right after I turned nineteen. I’m nearly 21 now.”

  Barnes, in his expensive gray suit and red band tie, was watching her with an amused look that said he knew she was in over her head, but he was willing to play along. “Chloe,” he said.

  She looked up.

  Barnes set his foot on a chair opposite him and gave a small shove. It scooted two feet from the table. “Have a seat.”

  Chloe exhaled, then sat.

  She’d been to the city before, yes. But it had been a decade since Chloe had left District Zero for an island vacation with her mom. The island lattices were much smaller and more vulnerable, and being back under the main lattice was like being in the womb.

  The NAU was safe, with the world’s only stable government. It was the place every barbarian in the Wild East wanted to invade and loot. They’d never be able to — not even if they could marshal their destroyed resources enough to amass an army — but that didn’t change their desire.

  And Chloe wasn’t just in DZ, she was at the headquarters of O, the company that had employed her mother for two decades and her for nearly a year. She wasn’t interviewing for a glass table position. If Chloe got this gig, she wouldn’t be performing like the women on the glass above them. Instead, she’d be servicing O’s biggest clients, tasked with ensuring that the world’s foremost sexual connoisseurs left satisfied. It was a job most of her friends growing up would have envied — so yes, it was all a bit intimidating.

  “It’s okay if you’re nervous,” Barnes said. “It’s actually good if you don’t come off as untouchable. Our clients like to feel they’re breaking new ground, so to speak, and they’re affecting you as much as you’re affecting them. You’ve been working tables on Voyos, yes?”

  Chloe had been on Voyos Island forever, but only performing on glass for nine months or so. She nodded.

  “Well, it’s not like that, you understand. If you want to work as an escort in the actual spa — and believe me, Voyos is about as exclusive as our spas get, and the spas themselves are at the top of our offerings — it’s not just about rote sex.” He stopped, tapped his desk. “You’ve worked with men on the tables?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, when you do that, you’re almost a decoration, and that changes what you do. For example, when I look up —” They looked toward the room’s ceiling, watching a naked blonde pressed to the glass as her partner slid his cock inside from behind, both laying flat to provide the best view. “Do I get hard? Eventually, I suppose, if I
sit and stare at them fucking. But it’s really just background. The most beautiful people in the world, screwing above me, and it’s practically wallpaper.”

  Parker laughed, then kept right on talking.

  “We have other conference rooms with horizontal cells where girls push themselves against the windows. But for all of us who work here — and for the vacation islands outside the lattice — performers are pieces of art more than anything else. The Six can be in a meeting discussing profits, and one of our male performers will pull out of a girl he’s fucking along one of the conference room walls. She’ll press her face to the glass, and he’ll come in her mouth … and we’ll see it, but only barely. Or, rather, we see and appreciate it as beautiful, but the whole thing has become normalized for us. That’s how it is in the spas.

  “The real action — dick and pussy, as it were — happens in the rooms. When you’re working your table above people eating dinner, you can be mechanical, but that will never fly as an escort. Clients demand your presence. You need to move and moan and know how to deliver optimum pleasure to the organ between the ears, not just the one between the legs. So, if you’re demure — if it doesn’t seem like you’re cranking out another day on the job? Well, that can be good in an escort.”

  Chloe nodded. She wasn’t shy; she’d been having sex with men and women she barely knew or didn’t know at all (or just with herself) in exchange for universal credits for nearly a year. A sex-worker mother could numb a girl to the shame that some people, even in the enlightened 2060s, still had about sex.

  The reservations she felt now had to do with the prestige of this new position, and the fact that she had hiked up her ovaries enough to apply. Her mother had been happy as a table girl, model, and escort in her own right, but she’d never been an escort at an O spa. The idea was absurd. Nicole Shaw was attractive and sexy and had earned plenty of credits since joining Enterprise, but O escorts were beyond elite.

  Everything at O was exclusive … but the spa girls were best of the best. Even being here was ballsy to the point of arrogance. Sure, Chloe was naturally attractive in an age when so many people had artificial enhancements, and could move with a rhythm she felt both above the collar and below the belt. But Barnes was right: Chloe was 20, with barely 18 months of carnal experience. Even her mother had wanted to know just who in the hell she thought she was.

  “I have to be honest with you,” Barnes said. “I don’t think your chances are good. We usually agree to see legacy girls as a courtesy to their parents. This interview is, more than anything, a thank-you to your mother for all her time with O. But you’re too young. You can’t know what you’re doing well enough to please our most elite clients.”

  “I’m good,” Chloe said. “Give me a chance, and I’ll show you.”

  Barnes crossed his legs and leaned back, arms across his chest, assessing. Everything about this interview was designed to intimidate: the dim room, the couples screwing on the glass overhead, the smooth gray walls in a stark room with the table and chairs as its only furniture, even Barnes’s hand-tailored suit — though the man himself appeared unduly understanding. Chloe felt like he probably “got” her, but that wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

  Barnes leaned forward again, engaging her. “Let me tell you something about O, Chloe. It’s a long story, but bear with me — it’s important.”

  Chloe was reminded that, prior to joining the Six, Barnes had led a storied career. He’d been on the defunct Eros board, had worked with the legendary and reclusive Anthony Ross, and had made his fame as a celebrity sex therapist renowned for making uncomfortable subjects seem perfectly agreeable.

  “O’s tagline, as you know, is The Future of Sex. But the thing is, the five other founding partners and I got together not because we’re into sex, but because of our predilection for being bold, demanding more of ourselves than anyone else could have, and taking risks.”

  Barnes paused, seemed to gauge Chloe’s attention, and continued.

  “Before we formed O, all six of us were pushing boundaries in our respective fields to a point where it became uncomfortable for those around us. The expression is that when others zig, you should zag — well, all of us were zagging, and we caught a lot of flack for it. Alexa Mathis wasn’t merely pushing the boundaries of erotica. She was pushing the boundaries of distribution and engagement. That made her unpopular at Eros, especially after the whole Ross affair … but don’t believe the lies that she and I were kicked out of the company. Alexa left because she had bigger, bolder plans than the others could handle, and she made good on them both before and after the fall — which made her even less popular for a while. People told her nobody would want sensory immersion while reading, because visual experiences and reading were distinct and different.”

  Barnes shook his head, silently telling Chloe the world was filled with idiots. He sighed, shrugged, then kept right on going.

  “People said that reading, as a whole, was dead. When sensory immersion became popular, they told Alexa she should abandon writing entirely. And when her stories still held their strength, people criticized Alexa for the tracking software she used to monitor her readers’ habits — how long they read, what positions their handhelds were in when they read (indicating whether they were sitting, lying down, and so on), where they started and stopped, whether their handhelds were in close proximity to others, indicating that couples read together. But it was all open source on Crossbrace, and Alexa used it well. Suits were brought against her for invasion of privacy, but none of them stuck because she was never doing anything illegal. It was simply new — something no one had ever done. And the same went for me and the toys I developed as my practice grew, and how there were groups appropriating those toys for torture, or using my release techniques for brainwashing. People tried to sue me, too, but the world will always march forward. It’s the bold who will do what is unpopular in the interest of nudging the ball forward. Do you understand?”

  Chloe nodded. “More or less.”

  “Another way of saying it, Chloe, is that fortune favors the bold. But what no one really speaks of — even today — is that often so does ruin. People called the six of us stupid, foolhardy … sometimes criminal. Today, now that our little joint venture has proven successful, those same people call us fortunate and greedy. They say O is such a juggernaut that no one can touch it. And it’s true. We are the largest entertainment company in the NAU, the largest manufacturer of non-infrastructure goods, and the country’s third-largest employer — not just in our cache of front-line sex workers, but in our backend support staff, administrators, our marketing department, hover drivers and mag train crews … you get the idea. Our R&D department — and nobody discusses this — is neck and neck with the innovations being made at Xenia Labs. But whereas Xenia is improving virtual reality experiences for business, we’re focused on sex. They’re creating neural enhancements that allow people to be stronger, faster … all sorts of things. But we’re developing better enhancements that allow people to feel and deliver new levels of pleasure. Do you know why, Chloe?”

  She shook her head.

  Barnes smiled. “Demand. An implantable ocular tracking implant that eases eyestrain while processing spreadsheets is functional, but an implantable ocular tracking implant that makes sexual partners appear more attractive and makes their movements electric is exciting. Our customers demand exhilaration. Our experiences are superior because they must be. Better-resolution porn holos. Better interaction environments with better visors and tactile gloves, so the soak of flesh as your fingers slide into a virtual pussy is no differently than if you were doing it for real. People will always pay for better, more thrilling experiences.”

  Chloe stared at Barnes, wondering if she should say anything.

  Barnes continued. “I’m telling you this because you’re pretty, but pretty is day-old bread. And yes, you may be natural. But does it matter? I grew up in the early days of enhancement, when it was called ‘plast
ic surgery,’ can you believe that? You could tell when a woman had had her breasts enhanced because it looked a little like … well … plastic. But now you can’t. More and more people are getting nanobot injections that can scavenge fat, retune muscle, keep legs long and lean without a workout. And it is natural. The new natural.” Barnes opened his arms, indicating himself. “I don’t mind telling you, Chloe, that even I’ve gotten a little prettier with age.”

  Chloe found it hard to return this man’s smile. Was he serious? Barnes had to be one of the world’s richest people, so if anyone could afford elite nano-treatments, it was him.

  “We only see beautiful girls with perfect bodies and so we’ve learned to look beyond that. Which brings me back to my point: O is the best of the best. You’re asking to be the standard by which this entire trend-setting, curve-shattering, benchmark-establishing company will be judged. Do you understand the enormity of your request? Of what you’re asking me to gamble on a girl who, two years ago, had never even had a man inside her?”

  Chloe kept her features firm. She understood, all right.

  Barnes stood. He walked to one wall, tapped its surface, and brought up a complicated map of documents. He gestured with his fingers, pulling one after another to the front and reading them out: escort qualifications, specs on O’s exclusive line of sex toys, graphic films showing every shade of vice and fetish. He swiped through photos, then diagrams, then an anatomy text in virtual space, showing little-known locations of nerve clusters and pressure points.

  Barnes stopped reading and looked at Chloe. The color and files vanished. The wall returned to its earlier gray.

  “That is what an escort must know.” Barnes returned to Chloe and stood before her. “That’s the curriculum of pleasure, one might say. But we can forget about that for now and focus on you. So tell me: what can you, Chloe Anne Shaw, do?”