The Art of Adaptation Read online

He turned her around, pushed her bare ass into the car behind her, and ran his hand up her slit, looking down to admire her. He parted her thighs and settled the tip of his dick against her pink pussy, rolling its wet head up and down before pushing his full length inside her.

  He was still in his shirt. She wanted to touch him more, wanted them skin to skin. So she pulled off his shirt and then her hands were on his solid chest, neck, and face. He thrust in and out, his breath coming faster.

  Chloe felt his hot length spread her pussy. His movements were fast, almost rushed. She was at a sexual buffet, overwhelmed by options, hunger encouraging a sample of everything. She wanted him to bend her over the car and fuck her from behind; she wanted to blow him until he came down her throat; she wanted him to lick her clit until she covered his face with her juices; she even, in the moment’s ridiculous heat, wanted him to fuck her in the ass — something that wasn’t usually on Chloe’s menu.

  But time was short, and she was hot, too wet to last.

  Gregory, holding it in, was running low on restraint. He paused, swelling and throbbing inside her.

  “Come inside me,” she purred into his ear. “Oh, God, I want you to come inside me.”

  Chloe’s hands moved below her pussy and cupped Gregory’s balls. Then her hands were on his ass, pulling him tighter. His body slapped her clit with each stroke, sending undulating waves up her spine. She held him tight, forcing him to press against it, another orgasm building. Then it came, and her pussy pulsed, squeezing his thrusting head.

  Gregory heaved and filled her with come. Pulse followed pulse, harmonizing with her aftershocks. He finally pulled out, cock heavy, and she felt his seed run down her thigh. Then he collapsed, her tits against his chest, his flagging dick drawing semicircles on her skin.

  They took their quiet moment in the downpour, the last of Gregory’s seed dripping from Chloe onto the car.

  The rain would surely wash it away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Alexa entered the conference room to meet with the Six, crossed to the center, and slapped a piece of plain white paper onto the table’s smooth service. It always seemed strange that the company still used paper for its more delicate operations; in her mind, paper was tangible proof. But ever since Crossbrace, people had begun to think of the electronic world as immutable. Paper, on the other hand, still could be burned.

  Parker looked up, meeting Alexa’s eyes instead of giving his attention to the paper. Behind him, in one of the booths around the room’s edge, a slim brunette woman was pressed fully against the glass, her breasts flat, while a muscular black man worked her from behind.

  Alexa sat in her chair along one side of the long conference table. “Gregory Bordeaux just signed up for a membership.”

  Charisma and Benson, opposite her, traded small smiles. Houston seemed unfazed. Olivia, who’d been critical of the new girl at first but had done a turnaround soon after, gave a pleased gasp and clasped her hands together.

  “You’re kidding,” said Parker.

  Alexa shook her head slowly. They’d been working on Bordeaux’s spa membership for years. Across the entire spa network, there were only 143 members. Even the richest, horniest clients almost all paid à la carte, reluctant to plunk down the exorbitant price tag for full access — a level of service that included guarded access to O’s fledgling immersive offerings, spun from The Beam connection they weren’t supposed to be sharing.

  But Alexa didn’t really care about the revenue; she cared about the bonding the membership implied. Every O spa member was another indication of the company’s intertwining with society — and Bordeaux, who had as much social cachet as he had money, had been tipping for absolutely forever.

  “Nope.” She tapped the paper. It was a duplicate, of course; Bordeaux’s signature on the contract was entirely too valuable (pride, not profit) to carry willy-nilly. “That’s his signature right there.”

  Olivia barked laughter.

  “Chloe Shaw performs another miracle,” said Parker, leaning back.

  Alexa ignored the subtext. Parker had been the first to believe in Chloe, and getting the rest of them to give her a chance had been an uphill battle.

  And, of course, his use of the world “miracle” was especially infuriating. Just because they’d been looking for an avatar of sorts — and Alexa specifically, in a slightly different way — didn’t mean blasphemy would earn anyone’s favor.

  “Are you sure it was her that got him to do it?” Houston said, pulling his bulk closer to the table. “Maybe it was just time for him to join.”

  Charisma looked to Houston, then to Alexa. Houston had taken a call earlier — some problem with one of his manufacturers and a new line of high-end nano-vibrators. He hadn’t been in the room when the rest of the Six had reviewed the footage of Bordeaux and Chloe. To Alexa, she said, “You didn’t show him?”

  “Show me what?”

  Charisma stood, then started tapping buttons on the conference table. The screen didn’t activate, so she swore, then went for the satchel she’d set under the table and pulled out her own tablet. She did a quick check that it was connected to the protected network, then tapped the screen and handed the tablet to Houston.

  Houston watched the video. His stubbled face contorted as if he’d never seen a tablet, let alone a simple vidstream. He scratched his big chin, suddenly looking more like a fat, previous-century cowboy than ever. “What am I looking at here?”

  “Chloe,” said Charisma, coming around to watch the video beside him.

  “Why isn’t there a holo?”

  “We don’t have holo recorders in the parking lot,” said Charisma. She reached toward the screen, then pinched to zoom out. What had looked like Chloe and Gregory Bordeaux kissing in the shower turned into a more obvious shot of them kissing in a downpour among a bunch of cars. Houston gasped.

  Which, Alexa realized, had been Charisma’s dramatic intention all along.

  “Why the fuck are they in the parking lot?”

  “Remember how, when we lined her up with Gregory, you said you were eager to see what magic tricks she might pull to impress our happiest client?”

  Houston’s fat face looked up. “Yeah.” It came out like Yeeaw.

  “And do you remember how you said it like an asshole, totally sarcastic, implying it was a waste of time to sic her on someone who wasn’t a problem?”

  Houston said nothing, waiting for the punchline.

  “And do you remember how, when you said it—”

  “I remember,” said Houston.

  “Well, her magic trick turned out to be not fucking him.”

  Houston looked at the screen. The shot, taken from a security camera outside the building, wasn’t great, but it was good enough to show Chloe with a dick in her mouth. He looked back up at Charisma.

  “You’re watching a freebie,” said Charisma. “He’d already finished his session with her. He’d already paid. Tipped her really well, too.”

  Houston handed the tablet back. “I don’t get it.”

  “Exactly, Houston,” said Parker. In the booth twenty feet behind his chair, the black man had pressed his partner flat from crotch to face and was ramming her so deftly from underneath that his balls were swinging into the glass. “You don’t get it. How do you crack a client who isn’t dissatisfied? Bordeaux never had any complaints. He’s a total gentlemen. The girls actually request him, when it’s supposed to be the other way around. I pushed to have him try a session with Chloe — over your loud, salami-breath objections — because I figured there was something the guy wanted that he wouldn’t admit to us. We have surveillance on him. We’ve got years of preference data and gigs of biometrics from sensors in our spa rooms. We even tried conditioning him. After years, nothing.”

  Alexa nodded. Sexual wave conditioning had been one of Parker’s more brilliant ideas, and the kind of thing that made him an invaluable part of the Six no matter how obnoxious he could be. O, thanks to its obsessive data-
collecting, knew more about its clients than the clients knew about themselves — such as the times of day, week, and month they were most aroused relative to the times they actually booked appointments to get off.

  Most people couldn’t drop their schedules and fuck whenever they got the urge, but they could be trained to experience arousal at the most opportune times through a mixture of behavior modification and unauthorized alterations to their chemistry. It was no wonder O’s spas had such loyal clients. You couldn’t help but love the people who aligned your orgasms with the times you needed them most, even if you hadn’t given them permission to do so.

  “He didn’t want to fuck?” Houston seemed to remember the tablet. “And then he did want to fuck later, in the parking lot?”

  “He wanted to be loved,” said Charisma.

  Olivia, who didn’t really believe in love (not the kind that couldn’t be purchased, anyway), laughed. But the answer was very Charisma — who, despite and perhaps due to co-founding an erotic visuals empire with her husband, tended to wear permanent stars in her eyes.

  Charisma barked. “You think that’s funny?”

  “That a trillionaire came to a hooker for love?” Olivia shook her head. “Oh, no, that’s not at all hilarious.”

  Charisma looked at Houston, who wasn’t much more of a romantic than Olivia, then finally to Parker. He was at least in her corner on this one. Parker believed in love. He’d spent decades as a psychiatrist trying to cure his clients of it, and all its dangerous entanglements.

  She turned back to Houston. “We thought Bordeaux needed new sensations. But what happened when we put stimulators and our best toys in the room with him? Nothing. He just wanted to have sex with the girls. He doesn’t even have borderline tastes. No light bondage, no role-playing, no vibrators or dildos. We all assumed nobody could be as clean as he seems to be, and he had to be hiding something. I mean, didn’t he have anything he still wanted? Did he really pay all those credits to fuck girls in the plain old normal way? Who does that anymore? No creams, no sizzle lamps, no cortical enhancers, no visuals on the walls … nothing. We have equipment that rivals anything they used to build the moon elevator — or Crossbrace — but all Bordeaux wanted was to do things you could do in a fleabag motel with any streetwalker. Why?”

  “The girlfriend experience,” said Alexa.

  Charisma pointed at Alexa, nodding. “That’s exactly it. Not more; less. He wasn’t looking to have his world rocked. He was looking to be brought back down to earth. We kept bashing at him, figuring we’d get him to admit he wanted a finger up his ass or to be called Judy while wearing a dress. That’s what Parker thought, right?”

  She looked at Parker, who shrugged before nodding. He didn’t seem willing to stake that Bordeaux had wanted to be called Judy, but Charisma was in the ballpark.

  “And that’s what we all thought Chloe would uncover about Bordeaux, given the kind of intuition she’s shown so far. But we were looking at him wrong. And, now that we’ve seen this, maybe we’ve been looking at a lot of our clients wrong!” Charisma tapped the table with a finger. This was a point she’d been trying to impress on the Six for months, and now she was finally getting to make it. “We’re so concerned with innovation that we’ve pushed the bar too far forward. People are trained to expect fireworks, to feel their nerves on fire every time they have sex. Because why not? Who doesn’t want their nerves on fire? I’ll tell you who.” She held up her tablet. “Gregory Bordeaux. He could have had anything, but the only thing he wanted was to believe a girl could want him for him — just him, without his money or influence. Without any fancy gadgets. Just two people screwing in the rain because the mood slapped them silly, without money changing hands.”

  “He paid,” said Olivia.

  Alexa shook her head. She was already on Charisma’s side, and found the fact that they’d missed something so simple — that a client might want nothing more than to feel genuinely desired, in the simple, unenhanced real world — downright frightening.

  If anyone needed to understand human desire, it was O. And yet, O’s dominance in the North American Union had changed the perception of sex so much that a segment of their customers was almost certainly moving backward: able to access anything they could possibly ever dream of, yet isolated and lonely for true connection.

  Ironically, the future of sex might include a push toward the past’s forgotten secrets. Crossbrace’s everpresence and the popularity of cybernetic upgrades (and nano-tech in the beau monde) had even changed the NAU’s collective biology. Teenage girls were getting lip sensitizers, and their boyfriends were getting penile resonation implants to match. The modern citizen could do things that hadn’t so much as been imagined 50 years earlier.

  Yet Gregory Bordeaux’s session proved they’d forgotten sex tricks that could be performed by cave people.

  “He paid before he fucked her,” Alexa told Olivia.

  “Right. He paid.”

  “No, he was checked out. Done. He tipped her, for Christ’s sake. Then he talked to her about her feelings for an hour.”

  “It was nauseating,” said Benson.

  Charisma slapped his arm. “He paid for a private room,” she said, “sequestered from watchers. The fact that they thought they were alone means—”

  “He,” Parker corrected. “He thought they were alone, not they.’There’s no way we fooled Chloe.”

  “Regardless,” Alexa continued, “Gregory thought he was fooling O by paying and then not having sex with her. He knew she’d face a reprimand if she didn’t perform, even if it had been his idea. That’s why we have the Happy Hooker rule in the first place. ‘Thou shalt not manipulate thy client into not fucking you.’ A client pays, he gets his pole greased … period. Or she gets her slit greased, whatever. If girls start getting paid not to work, clients will stop coming back. They start to think of the girls as who they really are, rather than who they’re being paid to be. Client desires first at all times, right? Can you imagine how powerful it was for her to chase him down in the parking lot like that? In his mind, there was no reason for her to do it — and, actually, a very good reason for her not to. And the rain? Shit. We’ll get a citation for that stunt, but I don’t care. It was brilliant, just for the mood. And I never would have thought of it. None of our people would have. Two people in the rain. That’s all it was. That’s all it took to turn Bordeaux into a believer.”

  “So … what? Should we start having the girls pretend to give freebies?” Houston asked.

  Parker shook his head. “They’d catch on. It’d happen once and they’d love it, but then it’d happen again and it’d be obvious. I’ve even seen the neural metrics on the people we’ve sent secret shoppers after. Maybe it’s because the girls and guys we’ve sent to fuck on those fake dates in the real world don’t understand the dynamics of true attraction? Who knows. Regardless of what’s going wrong, it’s clear from the data that nobody’s really buying it. They don’t know it’s O sending them perks, but they do know something’s not right, and the disconnect impacts their enjoyment.” He looked at Benson. “I don’t suppose we have neurals on Bordeaux during that parking lot session?”

  Benson shook his head. “Nobody knew she was going to do it. I doubt she knew she was going to do it — until she did.”

  “That’s it right there,” Alexa said, standing. “Intuition. We can’t focus entirely on plans, because plans aren’t adaptable enough. The secret shopper bonuses were all based on plans: Meet him in a bar, tell him this, tell him that, take him back to his apartment, fuck him blue. But once they’re out of the controlled environment, any number of things can change. What if they’re going to hook up in the guy’s office and one of his partners is working late? Do they go right past the partner, waving, then fuck in the back office? Do they sneak past the partner because it’s a thrill to think they’re doing something naughty and might get caught? Or would the guy secretly be turned on by having the partner join them in a threesome — and,
of course, would the partner be game? That kind of thing is a split-second decision and can’t be plotted beforehand. You have to read a situation and be able to respond in real time. Read those things wrong in the spur of the moment, and the moment crumbles. Our shoppers are faced with an infinity of choices and can ultimately do one of two things: take a risk on a behavior that might excite the client more but also carries the potential to turn them off entirely, or they can play it safe and stick to the plan. If they take a risk and choose poorly, we lose. If they play it safe, the client is happy … but not as happy as he or she could be. The best scenario is the one in which they take the risk, but only if it’s the correct choice.”

  “So they have to be able to predict the future,” Houston said.

  “They have to be intuitive,” Alexa said. “But unfortunately, that’s something you can’t train.”

  “Not today, anyway,” said Charisma.

  Houston looked over. “Not today?”

  Charisma had an eternally young face and short, bright-red hair that was several shades past any sort of natural color. Houston was dressed in a bright-blue, Western-style shirt too tight on his pudgy frame, had jowls, and looked particularly stodgy at the moment. They looked like old versus new, squaring off over music or whether or not some kids should get the hell off their lawn.

  “Honestly,” said Benson, picking up his wife’s argument, “we ran into the same problem at Nectar. First with our 2-Ds, then our holo shows. Everyone in porn is hot. Everyday people can’t compare to our actors. That’s bothered me for a while: We’re trying to help people have better sex, by setting a ridiculous standard. After Nectar blew up, our high standard slowly became the NAU’s. Girls could fuck their guys under waterfalls and take blasts on their faces if they wanted to porn it up, but they couldn’t look like our actors unless they had stupid money for the best nano treatments. So while our vidstreams and holos got people off, they also changed real life expectations.” He looked around the table. “Same for O. It’s time we stop being so modest. We are the standard in sex. What we say goes. And we’ve walked into a bit of a trap. Charisma’s right. Most people don’t know how to be people, without our enhancements.”