The Art of Adaptation Read online

Brad kept his arms crossed.

  Ahem.

  The canvas kept its arms crossed.

  “Canvas,” Chloe said, forcing herself to let it go, “has an Orion user ever reported an experience like mine?” She thought fast, eager to forestall another episode of his bitchiness, “ … as detailed in my journal entry, dated 072060?”

  “You’d have to run a search. It needs to be phrased as, ‘search X,’ where ‘X’ is your query.”

  Chloe looked at the porter, then stood, crossed the floor, and sat in a kitchen chair opposite the holographic porter. Now she wasn’t just hanging out with a ghost. It looked like she was about to break bread.

  “Tell me something,” she said, then added: “Yes. I’m talking to you.”

  “Yes, Chloe?” Back to polite.

  It was strange. Chloe had interacted with virtual reality porters before, and this was how they usually behaved. Response was driven by pre-programmed answers to queries. At some point, wiseass programmers had started giving porters attitudes, teaching them to swear for shits and giggles. But because they were ultimately fueled by inquiries and the inquiries had stock responses, you could get one riled up, then derail it back to being perfectly accommodating with your next question. Chloe’s porter was acting like that now. It seemed hybrid: half program, half something else.

  “You’re intelligent, right? Like, artificially intelligent? With rudimentary AI?”

  She thought it might react to her use of the word “rudimentary,” but the porter didn’t. It was rudimentary. No machine could truly work out logic problems on its own; it was all semantics.

  “Yes,” said the porter.

  “And ‘intelligent’ means you can learn, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And adapt. So, like, you have some kind of intuitive response capability. Basically, you should get used to me, right? See how I operate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your purpose, finally, is to be my guide. That’s what you told me that first day — that you were here to show me The Beam, to help me understand it. From the information on it to the … well, to the intuitive response, as a new network. It’s your job to be helpful. Right?”

  “Yes, Chloe.”

  She shook her head. “Is there a reason why you can’t learn that when I’m in the apartment and you’re in the apartment and we’re the only ones here, when I talk, I’m talking to you?”

  The porter blinked. It actually blinked, as if a realization had just dawned. Could programs — even AI-driven programs — have realizations?

  “I can do that if you’d like.”

  “And when I ask you a question like I just did about my experience on the Orion, is there a reason you can’t just formulate a search from my question?”

  “No, Chloe. I can do that for you.”

  Now it was being almost too conciliatory. She wondered if it was in communication with users at O, connected to the same walled-off network. Could it be reprimanded for not doing its job, for pissing off the company’s new VIP? Or was this its strange, hybrid nature, moving back and forth between polite and irritated programmed responses? Was it truly intelligent, or built with a highly advanced rolodex of detailed responses?

  “Good. Thank you.”

  The porter said nothing, holding its stare, a kitchen shelf visible through its transparent head.

  “Let’s do away with the ‘I’m not Brad’ thing, too,” Chloe added. “I’m apparently going to call you Brad whether I like it or not, and when you refuse to respond it makes me want to punch a hole in your holographic face.”

  “Okay, Chloe.”

  “Besides … Brad is a cunt. You’re easily as cunty as he is in real life.”

  Chloe meant it as a joke (mostly, though it was true), but the porter didn’t register her comment as funny. It turned toward her, waiting for further directions. She didn’t think he would pout, but he wouldn’t go out of his way to be friendly — always assuming such a concept made sense for a program, which it didn’t.

  “Okay, so answer my question. About the Orion and my experience.”

  “Experiences with the Orion device aren’t widely or publicly available,” Brad said, now standing. “The Beam has only 15 specific reports in the protected network, from Quark — both firsthand and via converted external research files — and O’s own reports. On Crossbrace, there are another 452 referring to a device rather than the constellation or a brand name of soap available until 2044. Of those reporting the user’s experience, none expresses the user feeling ‘curious’ or ‘analytical,’ which are two words you used in your journal.”

  Chloe tapped the table, then stood and went to the window.

  The view from so high was fantastic. She had never seen the city she loved quite like she was seeing it now. She’d largely seen its other end. Her room window had looked out on the opposite wall in an alley, her Mom gone more often than seemed to make sense for the mother of such a young girl.

  But now she was living life high in a DZ spire, able to see the sky from end to end, and the moon when it shone through the protective NAU lattice dome at night. Chloe was making more money than she’d ever dreamed possible, and was only just starting.

  In many ways, her job at O fit well enough to spook her. Parker and the others knew more than they were saying, and the oddity of her experience with the Orion was simply one more symptom.

  “What does it mean, Brad?” Chloe turned to her porter — to the ghostly shape of her ex-boyfriend, frighteningly true to his namesake.

  “Mean?”

  “Why do I react differently to the Orion? And why doesn’t my reaction surprise anyone? Does O know, from the stats, that I’m almost beyond the sensations — hovering above, while my body apparently convulses and orgasms?”

  “I don’t know, Chloe.”

  “But you’re AI.”

  “Artificial intelligence is still intelligence, Chloe. I can draw conclusions based on data — but you, as a human, would be better at guesses and speculation.”

  “Or fortune telling.”

  “Or that, yes,” said Brad.

  The canvas chirped. Chloe approached it. As if sensing her approach, the screen lit with a message from the Six.

  Chloe had a job.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chloe’s grandfather, Amos, was still alive and living in old Brooklyn. He was 81 and looked it, having been born in 1979 and having never taken a single biological enhancement or rejuvenation treatment. Grandpa Amos loved an old broadcast show called Mission Impossible, so Chloe, who’d visited him often as a child, knew all the episodes.

  Mostly she knew that a secret agent’s mission always began with the words, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”

  As Chloe stood in the pitch-black room, unable to see even an inch in front of her, she wondered if she should point out that this voice was basically saying the same thing.

  Even after a month at O, everything felt like a test. Her first session with the undercover O man was a test. Her trial with that asshole Falls was a test. The Orion experience had, of course, been a test — and, she suspected, the very oddity of her own reaction was a test.

  Did Parker know she’d been neither pained nor pleasured by the machine? Or was her reaction to his (possibly feigned) ignorance another type of test? It had gone on from there; every encounter had nuances that felt more like assessment than work.

  Even her time with Gregory Bordeaux felt in its way like a test: Could the new girl crack the shy, ideal customer? Maybe that was her wiring; maybe everything for her was a puzzle to solve.

  Her loss of vision was so complete Chloe wondered if O had managed to reach into her brain and disrupt the nerve signals between her eyes and mind. It seemed possible. She’d been living in an O-owned apartment, and she’d seen enough to suggest that rumors of neural nano enhancement were true. Was it possible that, as she slept, nanobots had crawled in through her ears, perched on her optic nerves …
and shut them off when asked?

  “Can you repeat that?” Chloe asked the darkness. She made her voice somewhat nervous. This simple tactic (because of course, anything could be a test, and she had to perform her best) would handle both possibilities. If the man whose voice Chloe heard was issuing a command, he should hear her voice and assume the black was unsettling. But if he was making a random allusion to Grandpa Amos and her childhood, having him repeat it now should make it clear that it hadn’t passed her by.

  Again, out of the darkness — like a thought in her mind — the deep, male voice said, “Your task, should you choose to participate, is to give yourself the optimum amount of pleasure you can in one hour.”

  Chloe looked around and saw nothing. She’d met the O receptionist at the front, same as always, then sat and waited to be called. She’d walked down a long and unfamiliar hallway. Lights faded as she went, until they were dim. With no escort, Chloe followed the light-green, luminescent path. By the time she’d stepped through a sliding door that hissed open at her approach, the hallway had looked (and felt) like late evening in the woods.

  The door had closed behind her to nothing but black.

  She’d been in the room for a good five minutes, and was beginning to realize that seeing wasn’t simply a matter of allowing her eyes to adjust. They were as adjusted as they were going to get. She held a hand in front of her face, wiggled her fingers, saw nothing.

  “Will this message self-destruct?”

  The voice said, “What?”

  She sat on what felt like a smooth floor, perhaps industrial tile. Standing was disorienting. Without visuals to anchor her sight, Chloe kept feeling like she might fall. After enough time in the room, she might lose her sense of space and balance as her feet forgot they were standing and she was upright. Chloe might lose track of whether she was standing still or tumbling through an endless void.

  She felt better with the hard surface under her ass and legs. Her dizziness began to subside.

  Rather than responding, she considered the voice. She didn’t want to decline — and wouldn’t — but also didn’t understand how this was supposed to work.

  “Do you accept?” said the voice, apparently dismissing her earlier remark.

  “Yes.”

  There was the briefest of pauses before the voice responded. Chloe could tell volumes about the man. She knew he’d nodded, as if she could see him. She was already forming thoughts on so much about the man based on his one small pause, and cues gathered from his voice and his reaction to her little joke.

  “Your time begins now,” he said.

  Then there was nothing — a total loss of sound to follow her sight.

  Alone, Chloe wondered what exactly she was supposed to do. Take off her pants and start strumming her fiddle?

  Why? To what purpose? Was she putting on a peep show for someone watching in infrared? She supposed it was possible, but if so it would be a fetish she’d never heard of — and she’d heard of plenty.

  Doing the act wasn’t the only issue. Without someone else to read and play off, Chloe couldn’t untangle the room’s intention. Without intention, she couldn’t know how best to perform to the room’s expectations — to pass what felt like yet another test. There were no more sources of information. The room was a pit, like the deepest of spaces inside her own head. Even the disembodied voice had gone missing.

  Thirty seconds passed. She considered asking the room a question, but before she could, Chloe found herself thinking about her earlier conversation with Brad.

  She remembered going to the window and looking out across the District Zero cityscape, thinking of how everything she’d done with O had fit like a hand in a glove. Her month in their employ had been thick with odd experiences and plenty of pleasure. Chloe was a chameleon, adapting her colors to fit any situation. She’d been submissive, aggressive, lusty, starry-eyed, in love, needful, passionate, and disinterested as her lovers or testers required, but never — not even once — had Chloe been pretending.

  She would figure out what a given situation required, then she would become that girl — complete with that girl’s thoughts and feelings, no matter how complex. She’d found indulgence in simple missionary sex beneath a bald man with a lisp. She’d found delight in subduing a man with black leather straps. She’d been on the other end, as a willing submissive, and had found exquisite pleasure in pain.

  Still, Chloe couldn’t help but shake the feeling that every encounter was a test.

  The light in the room changed. She saw the moon.

  She sat up, seeing the great, round orb above her. It wasn’t the view from her window, but did appear to be a modern view, seen through the lattice’s slight obscuring fog. Chloe looked down, realizing she could see herself. She was wearing simple, black pants and a white blouse. She’d unbuttoned the top button on her pants, but was now spellbound by the view. It was as if it had responded to her.

  She thought of sex.

  The moon vanished, and Chloe was watching a scene from what she immediately recognized as a Nectar film — a Benson and Charisma classic. It wasn’t a scene Chloe would’ve chosen, but she had thought of sex and the room had delivered. The scene seemed to be projected on a domed ceiling above her, much like the planetarium she’d visited in school. Chloe watched bodies writhe, three men plugging a trio of holes on a small woman still half-dressed in red leather.

  It was responding to her. Inexpertly (the moon was as wrong as the sex), but responding nonetheless. A few realizations clicked, and Chloe kept them moving so the room wouldn’t show her. Parker had already indicated she could read her clients better than most girls, and had expressed the desire to incorporate that kind of sexual telepathy into O’s offerings. So was this some sort of a beta? An immature effort to read a client who wasn’t plugged in, who wasn’t opening his or her mouth?

  Chloe wondered if this was Beam technology. If so, it had a long way to go. Her first dalliances on The Beam with Brad had suggested the network could learn. It would improve, and things would get better.

  Aware that time was passing, Chloe unzipped and slid out of her pants. She spread her legs wide and ran a finger between her pussy lips. She was inexplicably wet. Or maybe not inexplicably; as poorly as the room was reading her thoughts, Chloe could read the test’s intentions fine.

  She was supposed to get off.

  Watching the people fuck above her, she slipped a finger into her pussy.

  The scene was too rough for Chloe’s native tastes, so her first thought was to adapt and become her usual chameleon, turning herself into the kind of girl who watched rough, four-way porn. But that didn’t feel right, and as the room inexpertly read her, she was already reading the room and the unseen man behind the voice enough to know this wasn’t a normal job.

  She wasn’t supposed to do what someone else wanted.

  Chloe was supposed to do what Chloe wanted.

  So she thought hard, trying to summon a different kind of sexual play.

  The scene changed into another vidstream: still the Young’s work, but this time with two people. They were on a bright-white bed, like the one in Gregory’s room. The girl had long, dark-brown hair like Chloe, eyes like hers, and a slight overbite — again, like her own. The girl stroked the cock of a strong and broad-chested man, built like an athlete.

  Chloe thrust with her finger. A light came on at the side of the room and a shelf slid from the wall. It held many toys: dildos, vibrators, neural stimulators, nano sprays, molding adaptive prosthetics, suction chambers.

  Chloe shook her head and the shelf retracted.

  At home, she used only her fingers.

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the girl was climbing atop her partner, sitting tall, guiding his dick into her smooth, shaved slit. The room delivered the soundtrack’s moans, grunts, and wet noises so authentically and so nearby it was as if the couple was whispering directly into her ears.

  She licked her lips. Touched a spot. L
ooked up, watched the man’s member slide in and out during a close-up, watching his shaft coat with her slippery, slick juices. The girl was totally wet, clearly aroused. A Young hallmark; actors only fucked when they were truly into one another — and their orgasms, so far as Chloe could tell, were always real.

  With her ears filled with moaning, she found herself ramping up from diddling to thrumming in seconds. Her ass clenched. Her hips rose. She ran her fingers across her clit and came as her head rolled to the side.

  Her hand slowed, applying pressure where she wanted, staying away from the overly sensitive area. She looked up again, now slipping a finger inside. She added a second, then reached down so she could thrust up and in.

  It started slow, then gathered speed. She could usually have a second orgasm quickly. Waves rolled through her. Lubrication licked her inner thighs, coating the smooth skin where her legs met. She could feel it running down her ass, and as she squirmed on the tile she could feel it all slippery beneath her.

  She sat up and took off her blouse. The fingers of her right hand went to one nipple, then the other, lightly cupping their weight.

  She wanted a bed.

  A light came on at one end of the circular room, and a large bed emerged like the toy shelf. It wasn’t what she’d pictured (Chloe wanted something white and soft like a cloud, same as the couple above her) but as she climbed on top, she found it comfortable. She lay atop the comforter, now naked, and spread her legs.

  Her pussy was blushed with warmth. Her lips were full and sensitive to the touch. Her clit was tired but ready for more.

  Looking up, she felt an enormous sense of possibility. O probably didn’t even feel what she felt. It wasn’t about visuals and audio and anticipation of need and toys and beds on demand; it was about the way The Beam — assuming that was what ran the room — seemed not just able to adapt, but willing to.

  It was about the feeling she’d already sensed on her few excursions with the Brad porter. When boiled down, Chloe felt at home on The Beam. It was a learning network, and she could already, in its beta, feel the way intention and intelligence radiated from it as if from a living being.