The Future of Love Page 3

  Alexa smiled and nodded toward the holo above the conference table. “And this recording, cobbled from a mobile device using one of Clive’s chips, was what it gave me.”

  Parker looked affronted. He hadn’t known everything after all.

  “I was going to tell you eventually, Parker. But you know the rules. I had to tell the board all at once.”

  “What did you ask it, Alexa?” Parker said. “What was the query you sent through all that bullshit spy data gathered by the bones of Ross’s behavioral app?”

  Instead of answering, Alexa looked the holo. As if on cue — as if everything really did happen according to a plan and always for a reason, a male voice within it said, “I want the lights on.”

  Everyone watched, but only Alexa was wearing a smile.

  “I asked it, What is the future of sex?’”

  There was a shuffling noise. The lights in the holo came on.

  Chloe saw a bedroom she recognized.

  Reality crashed like a fallen piano.

  One of the people in the holo was herself, from before she’d begun working at O. The person in it with her, removing his clothing as she removed hers, was a man. A boy, actually, maybe 18 years old.

  The holo had been made in secret when Chloe was still a private citizen.

  And the man in the recording with her was Brad.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “How did you get this?” Chloe looked from the holo to Alexa, eyes wide. She’d learned a lot from The Beam, but Alexa had still managed to surprise her. Until seconds ago, Chloe had believed there was still privacy in the world.

  “Answer me!” Chloe said, stepping closer to Alexa. “How the fuck did you get this? I didn’t work for you then! Why were you watching me?”

  Calmly, Alexa said, “We weren’t watching you.”

  Her eyes flitted to the other members of the board. Technically, of course, they had been watching Chloe. But so what? Technically, they’d been watching everyone who had Spooner’s chip in their mobile device, thanks to the little Trojan code from the uncompleted, unused Anthony Ross app. But it had always been so much data offloaded from hijacked Fi signals that it had been practically meaningless. There was simply too much to sift, too much to translate; nobody would ever know where to start. The board had indulged Alexa the way they’d indulged a child with ridiculous dreams. Nobody had ever expected to hear about her quixotic hobby again. Not here in this boardroom. It was supposed to be a black hole for data, a way to let Alexa safely indulge in her insane faith so that her quests wouldn’t impact O business.

  “Turn it off,” Chloe said, barely calm.

  “I’m trying to make a point.”

  “You’ve made it.” A little muscle was jumping along Chloe’s jawline, making her skin pop. Alexa didn’t know if she was more angry or nervous. “Now turn this thing off.”

  Alexa took her time responding. In the holo, Brad had removed Chloe’s shirt and was reaching up to unfasten her bra. She waited until the bra was off then tapped the control panel.

  The holo didn’t vanish but it did pause, now with Brad’s hands holding palmfuls of Chloe’s breasts. Brad’s expression was full of ecstasy. Chloe’s was almost administrative, as if she were checking items off a list — which, in a way, was one of the many reasons this video mattered. Chloe would soon see why. They all would.

  “I said off.”

  “I can tell you’re upset,” Alexa said.

  “I’m upset? Really? How can you tell, Alexa? I thought I was excited. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “We weren’t watching you,” Alexa repeated. “The nature of Clive’s privacy chips meant that the data was everywhere. The sheer amount recorded from mobiles’ holo-recorders and microphones is immense. Too much to sift through. Even if I’d wanted to find your files specifically, there’s no easy way. We don’t have the carrier databases. Each stream is paired to a chip ID but not to the name of the person who owns the device. And the IDs change all the time; that was one of the key requirements when Clive’s chips first went to market. It’s randomized. Even if someone managed to get a location ping out of a mobile, they wouldn’t know who it belonged to. The fact that we have to send out dew-catcher nanos to pull the signals from the air just confuses it more because it’s all fragmentary, coming from many mobiles at once. I don’t have a neatly ordered set of videos indexed by person surveilled in the spindle drive, Chloe. It’s closer to having a big pile of celluloid film that’s been shredded and randomized.”

  Chloe wasn’t listening. She was staring at the holo, jaw firm and muscle still twitching, shaking her head. “My whole damn life,” she said to herself.

  “I need you to understand this, Chloe. I know you’re angry. But if you can understand the monumental importance of what this” — she indicated the holo — “means, then we can move forward and—”

  “What it means? What it fucking means?” Chloe turned full-on toward Alexa. Her face was red, her blue eyes full of malice.

  Alexa took a step back and held up her hands. “Calm down, Chloe.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what it means, then? Because from where I’m standing, the fact that you were spying on me losing my virginity means you’re all a bunch of evil fucking bastards who I should never have gotten involved—”

  “Why did you get involved, Chloe?” Alexa asked.

  Chloe stared, then shook her head. She wanted to do something rash: to smash an object, to claw at someone’s face, to get her hands on a weapon and go to battle. But there were no objects to smash or weapons to draw, and despite the fury, her divine mind knew that tantrums were pointless.

  Chloe glanced at the door, then at the room. “I’m done here. With all of you.” She turned to go.

  “I asked you a question,” Alexa called after her.

  “Fuck your questions. You want answers, ask The Beam.”

  “If you leave now, you’ll never find the answers you’re looking for.”

  Chloe paused with her hand on the handle.

  “Not just about your father, but all of it. I haven’t told you why this matters yet — this episode with Brad. I haven’t told you the rest of what my query told me.”

  Alexa knew Chloe resented her hesitation, but it was already clear that she could be plied. Chloe thought she was making a decision, but that’s not how it was. She was a marionette, and Alexa the puppeteer.

  “Why did you come to us?” Alexa repeated. “You were working glass tables like your mother. You’d never been to DZ. You didn’t know anyone here. You were too young and too inexperienced to be an escort in one of our spas; you’re not stupid or naive enough for that to have never occurred to you. I’m sure your mother and friends told you that you were being ridiculous. You had to come all the way in and use your own money, and by all obvious standards, it was a waste of everyone’s time. So why audition?”

  Reluctantly: “I wanted to be an escort. I wanted to try.”

  “Why did you want to be an escort, Chloe? For the money? For the fame? For the toe-curling sex our escorts get to have?”

  Chloe didn’t answer or turn. Nor did she open the door.

  “You don’t know why you came,” Alexa said.

  “Did your crystal ball tell you that?”

  “In a way,” Alexa said. “Now stop acting like a spoiled little brat and get back over here. You can have my chair.”

  “Fuck you,” Chloe said.

  Alexa sighed. “We both know you’re going to stay. You need to know the truth. Where will you go if you leave? And how long before all the things you can’t find the answers to drive you insane?”

  Chloe didn’t move.

  “You’re going to stay,” Alexa said. “So just do it now, while you still have some self-respect.”

  Chloe’s hand fell to her side. Slowly she turned. Without making eye contact with anyone, she returned to the room’s center.

  Alexa pulled out her own boardroom seat and Chloe obediently sat, looking down at her ha
nds, forehead bunched.

  “As I was saying,” Alexa continued, “we haven’t been ‘watching you’ for any longer than you’ve been with our company. The data’s nature makes that impossible.”

  Chloe turned to look at Parker. Maybe, with the whole world suddenly against her, she saw him — her first contact at O — as an unlikely ally.

  “It’s true,” Parker said, glancing up at Alexa. He didn’t want to support her on this, but outmatched was outmatched. “It’s a mess. This is one of our ongoing fights. Space on the spindle drive is enormous, but not infinite. Many man-hours go into this little hobby of Alexa’s: wrangling her little nanobots that go out and steal signals off the network. It’s true that Spooner’s chip turns almost every mobile into a spy device, but who cares? There’s so much data it’s worse than useless. Alexa is hoarding and has been forever, just to have more and more data for her obsession.”

  Chloe glanced at the paused holo, then at Alexa.

  “I couldn’t have found this recording out of all the data if I’d wanted to, Chloe,” Alexa said. “The only custodians able to remotely come close to getting through it all are the walled-off AI in the spindle, and they’re not even Beam level. I can only ask the archive questions. Every time I’ve done it in the past, I’ve felt like the idiot they all think I am.”

  She regarded the paused image above the table and resumed.

  “But this time, it meant something.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Alexa,” Olivia said.

  “I asked for the future of sex. It gave me this.”

  “Only because you’ve already decided that Chloe is the future,” Olivia insisted. “You loaded the question in advance.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “No offense, Alexa,” said Benson, “but you don’t have the slightest fucking idea how it works. And Anthony Ross is the only person who might. You’ve wasted too much of the board’s time and the company’s resources on this crap. I think we’ve all had enough. We’re all tired of playing along with your little fantasies.”

  Charisma stood and started to shuffle her belongings.

  “Where are you going?” Alexa asked.

  “Benson and I have work to do.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  Alexa looked at Parker. “Parker? Explain it to them.”

  “Explain what, Alexa? You decided she was O’s savior and now you have this recording of Chloe getting her cherry popped. So what? I’m with Benson. Maybe this ‘thing’ of yours has gone on long enough.”

  “Don’t do this, Parker. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t do it on purpose. I was going to tell you today, but Chloe barged in before I got a chance.”

  “Whatever you say, Alexa.” Parker wasn’t listening. Alexa had cried wolf too many times. He’d had enough, same as Benson.

  “Five minutes,” Alexa said. “Just give me five minutes to make my point.”

  Subtle groans. Muted acquiescence.

  When Alexa saw that she had their temporary attention again, she exhaled and tapped on the control surface tipped up from the conference table.

  “Let me show you what else my search found.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chloe looked up at the paused holo.

  She was half-naked astride Brad, his hands on her tits.

  She remembered the moment with photographic clarity. The rapture in his eyes had been unreal; he’d finally talked her into fucking and now it was going to happen with the lights on so he’d see it to remember forever.

  They’d groped, but now it was going to completion. Brad’s cock had been a rail spike between her legs, but she’d been too busy gathering her own data to enjoy it.

  Her mother’s voice had been in her ear the entire time, reminding Chloe to keep sex and affection in separate piles. If she didn’t analyze and categorize her first time with Brad, how would she know to react later: both to Brad without sex, and to sex without Brad?

  Her eyes went to the boy beneath her holographic counterpart. It was strange to see him this way. If she counted hours, she’d probably spent more time with Porter Brad than the real one.

  The guy in the recording was literally an entirely different person than the Brad she was used to. Seeing this man with his hands on her — and knowing what came next — was somehow far more awkward than any sexual encounter Chloe had ever had or witnessed. She would have thought herself incapable of being embarrassed about sex, but it turned out she wasn’t.

  This Brad was about to fuck her, but the Brad she knew best was like a brother.

  The holo shrank as Alexa tapped the console, then slid to the left.

  A second holo came up beside it, this one offering much better resolution. Chloe recognized it immediately. Her with Logan — the tester she’d auditioned with that first day.

  For a few seconds, Alexa scrubbed through both sets of footage, rotating them, apparently searching for the perfect angle in each, passing her first encounter with Logan, when she was on the Rocker, before she first took the man into her mouth.

  When Alexa finally lifted her hands from the console and looked around at the others, the holos were almost mirror images of each other. In both, the man was sitting with his legs dangling, Chloe positioned between them. In both, she’d grabbed the man’s unzipped pants by the waist and was paused in the process of pulling them down.

  “Now watch,” she said.

  The scenes progressed like a pair of stereopticon images just slightly out of sync. On the left, Chloe lowered Brad’s jeans, followed by his boxers. At the same time, she saw herself do the same to Logan at almost exactly the same pace.

  Their cocks sprang free. Chloe watched her images take each by the shaft, lick it with her tongue, then slip the tip between her lips.

  Alexa paused the footage again. “Do you see it?”

  The room looked confused. Alexa sighed and resumed the footage.

  Chloe watched herself suck each man’s cock, but the stereo feel was already tearing. Now that the two Chloes were sucking in earnest, they weren’t in sync. Each used a spit-slicked hand to stroke her man and each licked him up and down, but they weren’t working at the same pace.

  Brad had been on a hair trigger whereas Logan, a professional, had been far steadier. Chloe remembered wondering if Brad would fire off in her mouth; and if so, if he’d then require a second session for intercourse so she could learn what she needed to.

  “Now?” Alexa asked.

  Mutters.

  Alexa shook her head. She moved forward, then skipped around to find scenes that were again about the same, these with Chloe on her back, legs parted, pink-blushed pussy wrapped around each man’s shaft.

  Once the scenes were synced, Alexa let them play again, rotating the angle so they could all see Chloe’s face while cocks slid wetly in and out.

  Parker sat up, leaning forward. His face was curious.

  Houston watched Parker rise.

  “The AI found this?” he asked Alexa. “The Spooner-Ross AI, I mean? It dug it out from all the shit it’s gathered over the years?”

  Alexa nodded. “It came back in with the same query: when I asked it to show me the future of sex.”

  “What?” Houston said, still looking at Parker.

  Parker was looking at the holo from multiple angles. The sound for both projections was on but low, and while Parker examined, Chloe heard the slick sounds of sex and four sets of moans, two belonging to her.

  Parker was now rotating the holos with his fingers, pinching in and out. A pair of cocks fucked a pair of Chloes, pistoning in and out of her soaking wet slit.

  “Fascinating,” Parker said.

  “What, Parker?” Olivia asked.

  Still watching Brad fuck Chloe, Parker waved for her to stand. He pointed. When nothing was still apparent, he said, “She’s using the Volsatz Technique.” When no one responded to that, he added, “It’s something we t
each all our escorts as part of their standard training. The girls pace a man’s orgasm based on his galvanic skin response. It’s fantastically difficult to master.”

  Charisma shrugged. “So? She’s a fast learner.”

  “This, with Logan, was her first day. We hadn’t taught her anything yet.”

  “We never taught her anything.” Alexa half-laughed and looked at Chloe. “You never got your on-boarding.”

  Chloe, who didn’t know a thing about the so-called Volsatz Technique or the galvanic skin response it was apparently based on. She waited for the others to weigh in.

  “Then she intuited it from Logan,” Benson said. “Same as she read how to use the Rocker and later read Hartford.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Parker said. “She’s doing it in both videos.”

  The board looked at the holo of Chloe and Brad.

  Brad’s O-face was coming on strong. Watching it — watching herself on her back with her legs spread wide, Brad’s cock filling her in long thrusts — Chloe remembered the curious feeling she’d had during the encounter.

  Looking back, she’d thought she hadn’t enjoyed her single time with Brad, but that was only half true. It was more accurate that she’d been unable to enjoy because she’d been carefully taking notes, slotting sensations and emotions into separate buckets.

  But even now, thinking back, she could almost recall the ghost of those feelings. Her precise memory still had all that sensory input deep inside. If she concentrated, Chloe could almost feel his cock inside her now, filling her, making her wet even as she simply went through the motions.

  Why had Chloe thought that she hadn’t enjoyed it? Even if her mind hadn’t, her body had. She’d been wired from the start. Even now her nipples were stiffening, and as she watched the scenes play out with the others watching, Chloe was getting increasingly wet.