The Avatar Experiment Read online

  “So says whatever you read. But that sounds awfully sci-fi to me.”

  Andrew pointed at the street as a hover cab passed. “When sci-fi was new, it promised the world flying cars. Now that we have ’em, I figure the rest can’t be far behind. Like killer robots. And big space ships that fly to Alpha Centauri. What do you do for a living, Chloe?”

  Chloe blinked. There had been absolutely no transition. “I work for O.”

  “Like, how?”

  “I’m an escort.”

  “Hey, that’s cool.” He dodged the predictable response: making a joke. Someone as young as Andrew wouldn’t judge her for having a sex job, but sometimes she saw surprise. Or maybe awe, given the esteemed position O escorts held in the eyes of society. “You get to meet a lot of interesting people?”

  “I’m not allowed to discuss my clients.”

  “I get it. Me neither. I’m a writer. Like, I write books. On my own. Books nobody reads. It’s why I asked about your book. And no, I don’t get to meet many interesting people, and yes, I’m allowed to talk about every little detail because nobody cares.”

  Chloe realized she did care about some of those details. Not only had she pegged Andrew’s spirit exactly (he’d be Enterprise, and probably always a little in danger given that the Enterprise party offered no safety net), but she didn’t know any writers at all other than Alexa. Thinking of it all, she was suddenly more curious than she’d have expected.

  “That’s fascinating.”

  “Thank you.” Then, in a confidential tone, he added, “You know, I have sold upwards of six copies.”

  “So you really don’t write for a company? I mean … you’re Enterprise, right?”

  “Yes. Starving artist and all. I’m not stupid, though. I tell people I’m a writer and it’s true, and when they ask what I write, I tell them the titles of my books, and that’s true. Only when they keep prodding — or when they just keep letting me sit with them as you’re doing — will I admit I also write a lot of articles for boring publications. A lot of Crossbrace page copy, too. Anything I can find to pay the bills, really.”

  “Is there a lot of work out there for writers?”

  It was a personal question, but that was probably okay because Chloe had just told him she had sex for a living.

  “There is for someone who’s willing to sell out if it’ll give them a bit more freedom to write books nobody reads anymore. Bacon?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You want some of this bacon? They gave me like 10 strips. I don’t know why. I mean, I like bacon, but this is fucking ridiculous.” He put his hand over his mouth. “I just said ‘fucking.’ I’m sorry.”

  Chloe couldn’t believe it. Only the dullest of yokels wouldn’t know what her job entailed — yet Andrew had thought it might be inappropriate to swear around her. The unadorned sweetness melted her heart.

  She was about to reply, but he said, “Chloe.”

  “Andrew.”

  “I’d like to go on a date with you. Something boring and traditional. You like movies?”

  Chloe found herself nodding before she had a chance to think. Andrew had been delightfully in charge of this conversation from the start and her body seemed to feel compelled to go with the flow. She felt somewhere between swept away and elated, warm in a way she’d almost forgotten.

  “Dinner and a movie, then. Not a holo-movie — just a 2-D. On a screen. A girl who reads paper books would want to watch a movie the way movies were intended. I even know a place that uses a projector. In Harlem.”

  “I can’t afford to eat in Harlem!” Chloe said, aghast. She’d been there several times with high-end clients, but that had been entirely different, going there as an ordinary girl.

  “Ha! Neither can I. Not even on my income of at least a handful of credits each and every year. Yeah, you heard that right. No, the theater is in Harlem. A leftover old place, not at all fancy. We could eat here.” He seemed to think and asked nobody in particular, “How much do two slices cost?” Then he waved a hand in the air. “Oh, never mind. You seem worth it.”

  Chloe, surprised, felt a chuckle bubble up from inside. “Okay.”

  She scrawled her Crossbrace ID on a napkin and handed it to him, feeling ridiculous for the tingle she felt as his skin grazed hers.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Friday?”

  “Can’t do Friday. Or Saturday. I work.”

  “How about Tuesday?”

  She nodded. “Tuesday is great.”

  “Even better. That way, I don’t have to wait until Friday.”

  “Right.”

  “You know I’m not really going to take you to a pizza place, right?”

  She giggled.

  “That was a joke.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’ll see you, Chloe,” Andrew said, standing.

  Chloe didn’t return his goodbye. Instead, she looked up at him, then down at the table, where his plate of food was still mostly uneaten.

  He sat again, settling in for his unfinished breakfast. He picked up another piece of bacon and rolled his eyes at his own foolishness. “Writers,” he mumbled. “They’re all nuts.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Alexa paced her apartment’s smooth wood floor at the top of Cathedral, arguably one of District Zero’s most prestigious spires. The apartment was lush without being overly extravagant. It boasted two floors and sole access to a rooftop deck where she could see almost all of Manhattan.

  It was a nice apartment for a girl who’d started scribbling the sex scenes she saw in her head because they made for excellent alone-time material. She’d read other erotica in her late teens and 20s, of course, but it was so rare to find writing that tickled her in just the right way. Trash at the time was clichéd and amateur; reading through it depressed Alexa as much as it irritated her.

  Was this really what sold? Babysitter fantasies and fucking the pool boy?

  The scenes themselves were as clichéd as the setups, filled with bullshit dialogue and cardboard characters, goo-filled action that read like an autopsy. Either most of the erotica on the market was written by men, or by women who were nothing like her.

  Alexa had needed good erotica for herself, and felt like she had something to prove. She’d known she could do better with minimal effort. So she’d tried, and had seen her work go nowhere … until she’d finally put on her marketing hat and got creative. She’d found a fine line between “arty” and “ruthless,” but that unrelenting mindset had nabbed her Eros’s attention — which, like any good businesswoman, she’d parlayed into much, much bigger things.

  And now this. Her magnificent view from a spire, all so carefully earned.

  The door buzzed. Alexa walked down from the patio to answer. She opened the door and Parker Barnes strode in alone.

  Predictably, he said, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  “You say that every time, Parker.”

  “I know.” He had a light raincoat slung over one arm and tossed it onto one of Alexa’s chairs. The chair cost 14,000 credits, but she decided not to yell at Parker because he’d never learn anyway. She was considering this as he added, “It’s my signature catchphrase. Like how Emeril used to say, ‘BAM!’”

  “Who’s Emeril?”

  Parker rolled his eyes. “My cousin. But seriously, we’re supposed to meet as a full group of six, and this is the second time in a month we’re meeting as two.”

  “I’m having you over for wine.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” He plunked himself into another 14,000-credit chair. “I opt to skip the wine. Instead, let’s allow our casual, non-O conversation to drift until we’re talking about why you’re on board with Benson and Charisma’s vidstream idea — as long as it’s not another Vic-slash-Tony porn fiasco.”

  “It’s a good idea if it can be done right. I could have recorded Benson’s little marketing speech the other day and made a poster from it. All of what he said was true. Interactive porn? Requiring
an interactive viewer to work? The potential is astonishing, with the side benefit that more of our devices in customers’ hands — instead of people watching on standard terminals — means more data for us. More data means better custom interactive products. Boom.”

  “It’s ‘BAM!’” said Parker.

  “What?”

  Again Parker rolled his eyes. “Never mind.”

  “We can’t get distracted, Parker. The others only see market share and sales, but that’s like seeing symptoms instead of the disease — or in this case, the cure. The best data drives the best market innovations, which expands our market share and makes the sales. But chasing credits without understanding what’s behind it all is shortsighted. Let’s not forget how this all began.”

  “How O began?”

  Alexa shook her head. “How we began. Back with HALO, back when the best we could do was to create an algorithm.”

  “How dare I forget HALO. That gem.”

  “You know as well as I do that failures are stepping stones to success. We learned from HALO. If the Syndicate had backed the Ross plan, HALO would have had enough self-referential data to start learning on its own. It would have stopped being an algorithm and become the AI we were looking for.”

  “AI.” Parker scoffed as if the term itself were ridiculous. “AI before the fall was a joke.”

  “A necessary stepping stone.”

  “What’s your point, Alexa?” Parker said, clearly as exasperated with Alexa’s philosophy as she was with his repeated jokes. “It all worked out. We got to the finish line anyway. The fact that we never got that early AI doesn’t matter.”

  “My point is, this has always been about the kind of AI we’ve been after. We wanted the first generation of HALO to learn how to adapt and make its own decisions in the Trevor’s Harem experiment, but Bridget and Daniel cut it off at the knees. Then we wanted the second generation to use the Ross app’s data, mined in concert with all those social change initiatives over intended decades, to learn not just stimulus and response, but how to intuit what a customer wanted most. Even back then, it was all about intuition. And now look, Parker. Look what fate has dropped into our laps.”

  “Noah Fucking West, Alexa. This isn’t about fate. Chloe isn’t some sort of special chosen one. You’ve been beating this over the head for … what … fifty years now? It’s time to give it a rest.”

  Alexa opened her mouth to argue, but Parker would only build another blustery wall then try to knock her down. He’d use reason, and if she persisted, he’d turn to mocking her. No one would win. So Alexa kept the rest inside, knowing she’d convince him later.

  Logic was on her side whether Parker believed in fate or not. HALO and the AI that would have grown from HALO — as well as everything Alexa, Parker, and the Six had pursued ever since — had always been about developing intuition. The more intuitive the source, the more omniscient O would become. And when it came to intuition, who was more like a “chosen one” than Chloe Shaw?

  Alexa closed her mouth, biding her time. She let Parker chew on his words, knowing her arguments were already in his head like a virus.

  “Look,” he finally said. “The idea isn’t without merit. Let’s set aside your logical leap from we’ve found an incredibly valuable asset to let’s squander that asset on dime-a-dozen porn vidstreams and consider—”

  “What I have in mind with Andrew is hardly ‘dime a dozen.’”

  Parker held up a hand. “Let me finish. Setting that aside, what Benson described is a good idea in concept. But the execution sucks. What Chloe did on film with Vic was the hottest shitty porn I never want to see again. That’s a dead end in terms of the terrible product it created. And besides, even if we can record Chloe … without her knowing … and get the right shots with the right lighting, in line with Nectar’s usual standards … without her responding to shit-ass acting … with her doing her thing for the viewer rather than her partner … I’m still not convinced it’s the right idea.”

  “Why?”

  “For one, it’s just plain wrong. If we snap a straightforward voyeur vid and release that, it’s a blurry line as to whether we’d have the right to do so anyway, with her being an escort in our employ — our Directorate employ, no less. But the harder we work to keep her out of the loop, the more obvious it becomes that we’re simply manipulating and exploiting her.”

  “Really? Are you seriously trying to take a moral stand? Are you new to this, Parker? Didn’t you used to experiment on your patients using the Orion?”

  “Experiment is the wrong word. I encouraged them to try things that were borderline.”

  “And recorded them.”

  “Yes, but I never distributed the vids. Look, we’ve all done questionable shit. I get it. But what’s the big deal about simply telling her? Chloe’s a pleaser. She fucked two guys without being paid before we even leaned toward hiring her, and she knocked both out of the park. She didn’t ask for payment, or about her likelihood of getting the job. She’d heard rumors about the Orion, but still hopped right onto one when we asked her to. I’m sure if we requested a video — with three versions of each scene, mimicking whatever triggers Benson can give us from his girl Stolichnaya or whatever her name is — she’d do it in a second.”

  “Of course she would,” Alexa said. “That’s not the point. The question is: what happens if the vid is a hit and too many people get to know Chloe Shaw?”

  “You’re afraid she’ll leave us for a better company?” Parker laughed. “O is the top of the mountain and Chloe knows it. Or are you worried she’ll demand too much money to renew? So fucking what? That’s the argument Houston and Olivia never really understand: we can pay all the money in the world for something that makes us even more money. As long as we get more than one credit back for every credit we put in, the whole thing is a win.”

  Alexa sighed. “It’s not just that, Parker. I’m also concerned about her fame growing too fast, which will happen if we put her in vids. If Chloe becomes a star now, it’ll dilute our plans for later. She won’t be fresh. People will say, ‘I know that girl from all those popular videos,’ and never be able to get their minds out of the way enough to see her as something else — something bigger.”

  “But what, Alexa? What bigger thing are you planning to save her for?”

  Alexa shrugged. The true answer was, I just get a feeling Chloe Shaw is destined for more. But she wouldn’t dare say that to Parker.

  “I’m lost here, Alexa. You’re the one who wants to follow Benson’s plan, not me. I’m just trying to see all sides of the coin, but now I feel like I’m working to convince you. If you’re a no, just say so. We’ll save a lot of time.”

  “I’m a yes, but it needs to be done a certain way.” Alexa crossed her legs. “The way I pitched. The way that involves Andrew meeting her at our request, pretending to be an average Joe.”

  Parker exhaled as if to say, Not this again. But Andrew had already contacted Chloe, and Parker seemed to want to understand Alexa’s viewpoint — to make things work the way the two of them always eventually did. “What if, instead of using Andrew, we bring her in and tell her what we want her to do, then scramble her identity in the vids. Instead of recording her in secret and scrambling her identity anyway.”

  “And when she sees the vid and holos come out and asks why we didn’t just show her face?”

  Parker shrugged. “Minor problem.”

  “So, you’re not against putting her in videos. You’re against doing it without her knowledge.”

  “Well,” said Parker, “don’t make me sound so noble. All in all, I’d rather not do it at all. But you seem so damned insistent.”

  Alexa crossed her legs in the other direction, settling back. “Done correctly, this way of doing things is a testing ground. That’s why I like it.”

  “Testing for what?”

  “You know what.”

  “Apples and oranges, Alexa.”

  She shrugged. “Look, it do
esn’t hurt to try again. We have Andrew on her already, and they seem to be getting along. We selected him based on all the psychographic criteria you pulled from our user data, so whatever she does in adapting to him should match at least a nice-sized group of viewers, too. They’ll eventually have sex. We’ll film it. See how that goes. If it fails again …” She held up her hands as if to say, No biggie.

  “Fine,” said Parker. “Where’s my wine?”

  Alexa stood. “You seriously want some?”

  “Sure. I’m a connoisseur. Wine is the stuff with three X’s on the jug, right?”

  Alexa went into the kitchen and poured them both a glass of 2042 Etude Heirloom. When she returned, Parker was still in his chair as if awaiting a waitress.

  Alexa handed him his glass and sat. “There’s another benefit to Benson and Charisma doing their project, too,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a nice distraction for the rest of the Six. I want their attention the other way for a while, so we can do something on the Q.T. Something that will help us all in the end, but that I know right now will mean too many bitchy discussions — mostly from Olivia — that I don’t feel like having until it’s done.”

  Parker sat up, interested.

  “I need your help,” Alexa added. “Chloe is special. And by ‘special,’ I also mean ‘strange.’ She’s like no one — like nothing — any of us has ever seen. Do you disagree?”

  Parker shook his head. Their discussion of Chloe’s otherworldly experience in the dark room was still fresh in both of their minds. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I want to go back to the beginning,” Alexa said, “and see if we can uncover who Chloe Shaw really is.”

  WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

  The Future of Sex continues in The Girlfriend Experience.