The Avatar Experiment Page 3

  She rolled, now unable to see him behind her. Anticipation made everything hotter — with her face in the pillow, she couldn’t know when it was coming. She was flat on her stomach, nipples brushing the bed’s soft comforter, hips down and legs together.

  The thing that touched her ass wasn’t a dick. It was a finger again — a surprise as he straddled her, his knees on the bed on each side of her ass. His hot cock rested on her as his finger slid inside.

  It had something on it. Some sort of plastic.

  Warm pleasure melted inside her.

  Chloe came instantly, her body pinned to the bed by his weight. He’d used some sort of anal aid — what, specifically, she couldn’t tell, but she couldn’t stop coming.

  Tony’s cock pressed against her now. Her ass was hungry for his entry. He pressed against her opening, sliding inside, filling her.

  He didn’t last long. He fucked her asshole for a few minutes as Chloe lost track of her orgasms. She bit the pillow, made fists in the covers on the bed. She could feel the soaking sheets beneath her. His cock felt good in her ass. When she came, it gave her something hard to grip.

  Tony pulled out, yelled something she was beyond hearing. She felt warmth spatter her ass.

  “I’m so glad I didn’t wear underwear,” Chloe said once the moment was over, turning her head to the side.

  “Yeah, baby,” Tony said, totally over the top, “I fucked you good.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Yeah, baby, I fucked you good,” Parker said in an unaccented monotone, as if reading from a box of breakfast cereal.

  “He was following her lead,” said Charisma.

  “This is all shit, even if I mute it.” Benson shook his head, disgusted by the scene. This was their third review, after the best editing Benson and Charisma could manage. “The things they say, the way they act …” He sighed. “Hell, I couldn’t sully us with a scene like that. It’s bargain-basement fucking. In my grandfather’s day, she would’ve asked him to check her oil.”

  Benson ran his fingers across the editing screen, scrubbing footage of Chloe and Vic back and forth, still shaking his head. The experiment had been the worst kind of failure. The footage was totally unusable: cornball, the wrong angles and improper positioning, all the best things in shadow.

  A stationary camera on a lone tripod would have been better.

  “We could try it again,” Alexa suggested. “With a less shitty actor.”

  Parker shook his head. “The idea is fundamentally flawed. She can’t respond to viewers she doesn’t know are there. Maybe Chloe could learn to mimic Slava’s tricks, but only if she knew she was supposed to — and why, and for what audience. She’s a chameleon. You’re telling her not to match her current background, but to match a totally different background — one she’s not aware of — based on your market research. Good luck with that.”

  “A voyeur scene, then,” said Alexa.

  “A voyeur scene will look like a voyeur scene,” said Benson. “We want a feature film.”

  Alexa tapped her chin.

  “Here’s an idea,” Benson said, still toying with footage. “How about we just tell her to do a scene?”

  Alexa shook her head. “No way. Same reason as before. Chloe Shaw is a bomb. We don’t want her going off until we have her positioned for maximum damage — and by damage, I mean to the rest of the industry.”

  “It’s one vidstream, Alexa,” argued Charisma. “What’s the chance a single vidstream will make a difference and send her spiraling out of control?”

  “By the same logic, why do it?” Alexa countered. “It’s one video. Why risk rocking Chloe’s boat? You have hundreds of the hottest men and women on the planet eager to stick parts of themselves into each other. Chloe is the one we’re hanging so much forward development on. She’s the avatar. She’s the future of sex! So why don’t you let it go, and record your scenes with other girls?”

  Benson grumbled.

  Charisma turned toward the screen with a sigh. “For something so terrible, it was incredibly hot. She almost made retro porn sexy.”

  “Close doesn’t count,” Benson said.

  “Still, she even got a good performance — sex-wise, not dialogue — out of Vic. When he used that dilator and had her begging for him to put it in her ass? Holy shit!”

  “That’s exactly why this is worth doing!” said Benson. “Her escort work is fantastic. And sure, we can charge higher and higher prices. But I think this stopped being about money for all of us a while ago. We want to push the ball, and Chloe isn’t scalable as an escort. A proper scene with Chloe could revolutionize what we do. Imagine if we could train her to ‘harmonize’ — or whatever it is she does — with viewers, according to our stipulations. We could shoot three or five versions of each scene, with her playing to a different customer schema in every one.”

  Benson stood and smiled.

  “We repackage the existing Nectar viewer in a new casing and call it ‘interactive,’ tune the sensors so they read the user, and play the scene most likely to get them off. We could charge three times as much for the vidstreams — shit, a hell of a lot more if we did holos — and we could up the price of the viewers along with adoption, because you can only watch the interactive scenes on the interactive viewers.”

  Benson’s smile was now as wide as it could go.

  “We’d own the market because no one else would have anything like it. Secure the patents, do it right when The Beam comes out of beta, and harness that AI. By the time the patent expired, we’d have enough of a head start in mindshare to leave everyone else permanently behind. And, as a side benefit, think how much more data we’d have to throw at R&D if everyone was using our viewers and sending us biometrics!”

  Alexa nodded slowly. “I know. The point is, we can only go so far while keeping Chloe in the dark — with vidstreams, holos, or the rest of what we want to do with her. Eventually, she has to enter all of this, and we’ll have to pay her a ton once she recognizes her value. That day will come. But as you said, Benson — we get as much of a head start now as we can.”

  Parker rolled his head. “I see where you’re going, and I don’t like it.”

  “Shut it, Parker,” Alexa said. “The first time you try anything, it’s tricky. You know that. And hell, you’re a shrink; you can help with the next one. The trick to making this work is finding the ideal guy. We need a perfect subject, not a Nectar reject. When we find him, we don’t send Chloe on a job to meet him. Instead, it has to be natural, like what we do for elite spa clients. They don’t know we’re throwing a bone, why would she?”

  Benson perked up. Charisma stood from her chair beside him. The two filmmakers looked like puppy dogs waiting for a treat.

  “Yes, kids,” said Alexa, looking around at Olivia, Parker, and Houston, daring them to contradict her. Even if all three protested, it would still be three to three. O’s ties went to Alexa. “We’re going to let you try again.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Chloe,” Brad said, “I must remind you this is forbidden space. You’re trespassing.”

  Chloe was sitting on the floor, gloves on, hands up and working. The intuitive web of Beam, Crossbrace, and even ancient Internet pages were spread before her. The Web, as Chloe worked on it over time and threw more and more pages aside in her search, was as sloppy as any real space. She thought of her days as a girl with her mother, and Mom yelling at a young Chloe to clean her room.

  She answered without looking over at the hologram. “Noted.”

  “I don’t think your employers gave you this canvas to snoop through their archives.”

  “Really? Are you sure? For all we know, they wanted us to uncover this. They basically duplicated a section of Crossbrace to wall off The Beam beta. Then they gave me the canvas, which accessed that walled-off section, and told me nothing. I believe Parker’s exact and exhaustive instructions were ‘Have fun.’ As far as I’m concerned, this is like overachiever parents dropping a minia
ture violin into a baby’s crib and expecting a prodigy. The baby will screw around with the thing, and eventually maybe make a note or two. You know what they say about Little Harajuku? How DZPD looks the other way on all sorts of tech crimes because some of those crimes are shortcuts to innovation? I figure they gave me the canvas, they told me to explore, same as with all my clients. ‘Hey, Chloe, here’s some guy who you know nothing about. Have fun.’ Same deal. They want me to figure things out, Brad. For all we know, they put this all in here on purpose, meaning for me to find it.”

  Brad said nothing, just stared at Chloe as she looked over with a handful of holographic Crossbrace pages clenched in her fist, ready for the trash. She wouldn’t have thought it possible for a hologram to convey condescension with a look, but there it was.

  “You think I’m rationalizing.”

  “Maybe. But hey, if this console is just another client with a giant dick …”

  Chloe wasn’t sure where Brad was going, but she’d stopped trying to figure the porter out. Sometimes, he acted friendly. Sometimes moody. And sometimes, as impossible as it should have been, he seemed jealous.

  “You’re a hologram, Brad.”

  “I’m more than a hologram.”

  “You don’t have a dick. Even if you did, I wouldn’t suck it. So if this is about you and me and what I do for a living, I’ll just remind you the only people who shame others over sex in 2060 are the worst kind of bigoted, close-minded—”

  “The history of ‘you and me’ began when you opened the box,” Brad interrupted.

  Chloe eyed Brad, then mentally said, Whatever.

  “Your objection to my trespass is noted, Brad. Now if you could verify that my connection is isolated, that’d be peachy.”

  “The only party you might not be isolated from — and who might care what you’re doing — is O,” said Brad. “I think it’s safe to say that if they wanted to snoop on you, they wouldn’t program me to give it away. So yes, with that out of the way, your connection is secure.”

  Chloe ignored him. If O didn’t want her snooping in the ancient section of the 2000s-era Internet she’d discovered under the Crossbrace framework upon which The Beam beta was built (a structure on top of a structure on top of a structure), then they should have cleaned it more completely before giving her access. Finders keepers.

  And the first thing she’d found had been so intriguing, she couldn’t resist returning for more.

  The visual web she used to access The Beam was intuitive, so pages were arranged in a way that made visual search easier and more obvious. New pages looked like sheaves from a paper book. Bright white, sharp at the corners, pressed flat. Older pages (and most of Crossbrace fell into this category) were slightly yellowed, the holograms representing them wilted around the borders. At a slight distance (when Chloe pushed them back further in the web or tossed them aside), they appeared to have wrinkles across their surfaces.

  But the pages of the Internet, once Chloe realized what she was seeing, looked like scraps dug from an ancient chest of papers. They were fully yellowed, ripped at the edges, and half-curled into balls. Chloe was surprised the age indicators went quite so far (it made the pages difficult to read until she asked the canvas to flatten them) but the visual interface was probably never intended for pages so old.

  After some trial and error, Chloe found she could run a perpetual search on the pages, then ask the canvas to flag pages containing those search items using brightly colored highlights. She chose red for the highlight color because it felt secret and subversive, like something a spy might find.

  As she sifted and sorted, digging through the visual web like a grieving child would mine a parent’s posthumous records, red highlights stood out like sore thumbs.

  That was how it had been the second day. And the third. But as Chloe kept searching, she’d adjusted and refined. She’d added multicolored highlights. She’d discovered decent search terms, then better ones.

  Now, as Brad sat beside her sulking, Chloe’s red highlights indicated pages where the following appeared: Parker Barnes, Olivia Gregory, Benson Young, Charisma Young (née Berkman), Houston (who didn’t seem to have a last name, though Houston’s online presence, like his physical presence, was loud), and of course the inimitable Alexa Mathis.

  Orange highlights denoted secondary search terms: pages that mentioned the companies the Six had owned before they’d formed the collective that became O, the titles of Alexa’s books, the names of Olivia’s brothels, and famous vids created by the Youngs, as well as actors and actresses made famous by them.

  Chloe had discovered that the old, crumpled pages contained so many mentions of those people she’d thought were only recently famous.

  Brad found Chloe’s investigations intrusive. He argued in vain that O had tried to erase the old Internet pages, but that The Beam’s resident AI had saved it anyway. And that right there — the notion of AI as curators rather than mindless software — was another thing Chloe didn’t understand.

  Brad spoke of network sectors as if they were neighborhoods, old clusters (the Internet called them “websites”) as if they were neighbors. The connections between new Beam and old Crossbrace and the even older Internet were like a highway that became increasingly rustic as it reached its ancient end.

  There were back doors and alleyways that Chloe, after some research, paired with obscure computing terms like DHCP and TCP/IP. The various AI — the oldest being like the simplest robotics and the newest sounding more like Brad — spoke in a variety of old network languages, like the mishmash of old New York when people had flooded in droves from the Wild East and into what had once been the great Melting Pot.

  Regardless, Chloe was fascinated to see how far O’s history actually reached. Alexa Mathis, for one, seemed to be well over 60 years old because she’d published her first erotic novel in 2012 under a pen name. The world didn’t seem to remember that (so much was lost in the fall and neglected during Renewal), but The Beam’s AI had put it together. That first novel was amateur and experimental, dealing mainly with raw sex in random places. But within 12 months, Alexa was publishing groundbreaking experimental fiction unlike anything else. She’d collected the names and IDs of her readers as they allowed (the medium was called “electronic mail”), then polled them to unearth their preferences. She’d built a movement first, focused on empowerment and freedom of thought. Only then had she truly tried to sell.

  Alexa seemed to have first crossed paths with Olivia Gregory much earlier than the official story suggested. This was proven by connections through an old social network called MySpace, replaced quickly by LiveLyfe, the progenitor of modern Hyperdex. Olivia was using her real name at the time, and most of their communication was conducted via private messages that were indistinguishable from public messages in The Beam’s unblinking eye. Alexa and Olivia had discussed forming a collective as early as 2019, but had tabled the idea.

  Alexa’s entanglement with Parker was even more complex — and looking through the Mathis/Barnes history, Chloe suspected most of what she was seeing had once been confidential. Still, the Beam historian AI presented it to her now as dispassionately as genealogical records.

  Alexa had worked with Parker in some capacity for nearly as long as she’d known Olivia, but Alexa and Parker’s relationship seemed less casual and far more strategic. They’d worked with a company called Eros, and in that capacity had co-presided over some sort of sexual experiment with names Chloe didn’t recognize — Daniel Rice, Trevor Stone.

  Everything somehow revolved around an algorithm called HALO. Chloe couldn’t discover much about HALO, but did find a partial trail following one Bridget Rice (née Miller) and a schism within Eros. Beyond that, more important sounding men (Nathan Turner, Onyx Scott, Mateo Saint, many others) and a few Chloe recognized: Caspian White, who everyone knew, and Anthony Ross, who’d once been a legend, before his disappearance in 2017 … right around the time Alexa, Parker, and Eros crossed his path.
r />   “Chloe …” Brad warned.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Chloe said, holding out a hand.

  She scanned the Alexa/Parker pages. A dead end. Something had happened with Eros, Ross, and some sort of “Syndicate,” but what it was, she didn’t think she’d find in the web. It had either been successfully erased unlike the rest (or too heavily encrypted?) or had been severed at the edge when Quark replicated this section of Crossbrace for the beta.

  She turned her attention to the Olivia thread, following Alexa’s history through the other channels.

  While Olivia had been fighting to keep her head above water through increasingly unsavory means in the early ’30s, she’d sought first consolation and then monetary support from not just Alexa, but Benson and Charisma Young, who in 2032 were newly married and forming Nectar, the erotic video company that had managed, somehow, to make sexual acts trendy in after-hours and mainstream vids.

  Marcy Deloitte had done her first hardcore scene in 2035 in the dramatic series Switchblade, previously a network series that pushed the lines with nudity, profanity, and implied sexuality. Chloe had known that, of course; the Deloitte full-penetration scene was a landmark in the normalization of erotic imagery and had for many years held the record for the most flagged and rewatched scene on Crossbrace. But until now, Chloe hadn’t known that Marcy Deloitte, then a respected mainstream actress, had done her infamous scene under Charisma Young’s direction.

  But the hole went deeper …

  Chloe could also see Alexa’s handiwork in a series of subtle efforts to normalize sexual language. Much of this Chloe put together herself. Brad didn’t like her detective work because she was following her own intuition rather than The Beam’s to piece things together, but any good modern sex worker had read Alexa Mathis’s novels growing up. They were the groundbreaking social landmarks that had made sex work as respectable and empowering as most saw it today — but, with The Beam’s help, Chloe could see Alexa’s influence spanning even further: Alexa’s trademark turns of phrase in sexually revolutionary pieces written by Ambrose Suage, a columnist who seemed to have existed only between 2013 and 2018 in the archives. Chloe could see how lobbyist propaganda for the sex industry (first to the U.S. congress, then later to both the Directorate and Enterprise parties) had used expressions that felt like Alexa hallmarks, as if they’d been ghostwritten.