The Art of Adaptation Read online

  The Beam was tapping into something — not created by technicians in labs or geniuses in think tanks, but something that was already out there in the world. A sense of natural intelligence. Of energy.

  Of eternity.

  The video above Chloe disappeared and was replaced by a starlit sky — something she’d never seen in her lifetime but had studied on Crossbrace pages and in old vidstreams. The moon wasn’t visible. With only pinpricks of light, the room again fell into darkness.

  She was suddenly disembodied. Looking up at the stars, Chloe was a refugee soul floating up to the heavens.

  Then there was a sensation in the void, and Chloe realized she was coming again. It was unusual; her hand had stopped moving and fallen aside. All she could sense below was the feeling of her parted legs. She couldn’t precisely feel the pressure of her feet, legs, or sacrum on the comforter, but she could still feel the opening: the way something throbbed and screamed for attention.

  Something was giving it to her, though it wasn’t Chloe’s hand, another hand, or any sort of device. It was the air itself. As if the universe above was reaching down and sliding inside her, filling her with its vast emptiness.

  The next orgasm was astonishing. But it was also common. Amazing. Nothing. Shivers gripped her pussy from the inside out, like a cock being stroked. Chloe imagined her head tipping back but didn’t think it actually did. The sensation was more like falling. Or maybe dissolving.

  Energy surrounded her and she came into it — it in her and her in it.

  The sensations passed. Chloe could no longer feel her body, but instead felt herself in a cloud of well-being, like a blanket, hugging her tight. Chloe’s eyes — or whatever could still see — gazed up into the star field, and what she saw (whether she was actually seeing or imagining it, Chloe couldn’t say) began to magnify.

  She had the sensation of sliding down a tunnel, slipping into something like skin on skin. Stars spread as if parted and slid by. She began to move faster.

  Faster. Faster.

  Soon there was nothing. The stars were gone, and there was only nothing left in front of what was once her eyes. This was different than her earlier nothing; this void had presence.

  Chloe felt as if she were a part of everything. She was at home. Content.

  The world was so big. Eternity so … eternal. Infinity so … infinite.

  She was only a speck inside it, but it was okay — it was right — because that was how it was supposed to be, because Chloe was part of it, and it was part of her, and she was all of the universe and the universe was all of her, and she was everyone and everyone was her, and it was okay, and it was okay, and it was okay, and …

  CHAPTER SIX

  “She’s okay?”

  “She’s more than okay.”

  “But I mean, she—”

  “Yes. I know. But you saw the metrics. Was that an orgasm? I don’t know. It went on and on. Her neurals are like nothing I’ve ever seen. This at one end, I’d say, is definite pleasure. Activity stays in that area of her brain, then spreads. And spreads. And spreads.”

  Alexa sat back in her chair, resisting the urge to put her feet on Parker’s glass coffee table. This was his apartment, not the office, and she wasn’t in charge here. Not that she ever officially was.

  She and Parker were off the record. This was strictly forbidden by the unwritten rules governing the Six, but what had happened in the immersion room was, in Parker’s word, “frightening.” Alexa had reviewed the infrared vidstream, and they were going over the reports now.

  What Parker had said in his panicked call was true: It had seemed like Chloe was dying.

  “You’re the psychologist, Parker, what does it mean?”

  “Mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Parker shook his head, shrugging. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just how she reacted. The tech was so terrified I thought he was going to speechify through the microphone again, telling Chloe her mission was over and to report back to headquarters.”

  “It’s good you were there.”

  “To tell you the truth, it didn’t matter. Not in the end. Chloe Shaw used 17 minutes of her given hour, but that’s not because we rushed in with a crash cart to revive her. I was about to run in, but when I did, Chloe came out of it, rolled onto her side, and curled into a fetal comma, leg twitching like a satisfied dog. She was asleep by the time I got in there. I had the medic check her, and she never woke through the exam. He said she was fine, just exhausted. He didn’t seem to understand my concern and certainly didn’t share it, but he also hadn’t seen the session. ‘She’s just sleeping,’ he said, like I was an idiot. ‘Let her sleep.’ So we did, turning off the sensors and projectors and giving her muted light. When she finished sleeping three hours later, Chloe sat up, pulled on her clothes, and asked the room, out loud, for water. The tech opened up and gave it to her. She asked if she was done, and that was that.”

  “You didn’t get your test.”

  Parker shrugged. “Well, the point wasn’t really to test the room, was it? It was to test Chloe. You wanted to see how she pleasured herself.”

  “We, Parker.”

  “Fine. We wanted to see how she pleasured herself. Remind me again what our thinking was on the matter?”

  Alexa suppressed her annoyance. It had been her idea to delve into the psyche of their new discovery, but they had all agreed on it. O wasn’t an Alexa Mathis endeavor; they made decisions together. But now wasn’t the time to call Parker on either his passing the buck or his passive-aggressiveness. Now was the time to assess their new finds, no matter how strange.

  “We need to know what makes Chloe Chloe” said Alexa. “We need to know how she’s so intuitive, so we can teach our AI and use it in our smart toys and immersion research.”

  Alexa picked up the tablet, scrolling through the long record of what looked, physiologically, like an intense orgasm combined with a stroke. The doctors had already seen it, having been told nothing about the identity or circumstances of the subject, and labeled the data sustained mental stimulation of an undefined nature. The complete panel suggested nothing dangerous or ominous, so the medical staff had simply shrugged and left it at that.

  “Well, good luck,” said Parker, rolling his eyes at the records.

  “What did Chloe say?”

  “I called her canvas after she left. Totally secure, filtered through all of The Beam firewalls. She asked if she had screwed up, because she knew she’d been in the room too long, and knew she’d fallen asleep. She thought she might have disappointed us, not given us what we needed. She sounded like she was afraid of getting fired.”

  “Did she say anything about what she felt?”

  “I asked her, after plenty of assurances that we had what we needed. She said she didn’t totally remember. She blamed it on sleep, said she’s been up late touring The Beam with her porter. Funny thing about that girl — she fucks for a living, but talks about things like a shy schoolgirl. She’ll say things like, ‘I was right in the middle of the session and the next thing I knew, I was waking up confused.’ But she won’t say what she was doing. I had to ask her. How many times she came and what she was doing at the time. She remembered two or three orgasms but was vague about what she was doing and wouldn’t speak straight. She said she ‘got started’ with the first video, ‘got there’ once before the video changed, then ‘started up again’ … I’ll tell you, we might as well be playing charades. But Chloe’s story, such that I could suss it, agrees with the chart.”

  Parker picked up the tablet, stood it up, and zoomed out, showing Chloe’s biometrics as a series of long lines broken by bursts of ups and down that, at this scale, looked like blobs on a horizontal string. He pointed to the first blob on one of the lines in the middle.

  “That’s the first orgasm, obviously.” He pointed to one line, then another. “That’s brainwaves, and this one is vaginal contractions. Here’s the second, again with brain and vaginal, and—”r />
  “Did you ever think, growing up, that you’d one day have a job where you monitored the number of times a girl’s pussy clenched and came?”

  “You joke, but I’m proud of that technology. Do you have any idea how hard it was to develop sensors sensitive enough to read signals that small from across the room — and filter them down to only those in the desired area?”

  “The research must have been torture. You poor man — constantly having to aim your equipment at a girl while she petted her clam over and over and over.”

  “Do you have some sort of a problem with it? Because without this data, we’ve either got a girl rubbing it out on video, or polluted by experimental bias because she’d be wearing sensor pads everywhere.”

  “Calm down, Parker. You called me over here like the building was on fire, and here we are pissing off the others by meeting without them. I’m only trying to break the tension.”

  Parker looked at her for a long moment, then returned to the data. “As I was saying …” He looked at Alexa, apparently wanting to remind her that he’d been on task and that she was the one who’d derailed him. “That’s two up front. Fairly straightforward, compared to normal orgasmic vitals.”

  Parker scrolled further, showing the session’s later moments.

  “This is number three. Pretty good, hard orgasm there, but look at the tail. What is this?” Parker pointed to a long, undulating blob that increased in intensity before backing down. “Here’s where the fun started.” He tapped one line on the chart after another. “Brain and vaginal again here, but look at her heart. See how slow and flat it got? And remember, this is happening while she’s having this insane activity here and here. Her pussy is clenching hard enough to break a pipe in half, and she’s off in la-la land upstairs, but everything between the two is slowing. If her heart rate’s falling, we should see constricted pupils, constricted breathing, increased digestive motility … but no. Just about the only thing that matches the heart slowing is her clitoral arousal, but it’s not aroused, it’s hot to trot. Again, wrong set of neural signals.”

  “I don’t understand any of this, Parker. I never went to medical school.”

  “You understand pussy, though, right? You have one, and you made a fortune writing about them.”

  “I haven’t dissected mine — and I was writing erotica, not Gray’s Anatomy.”

  “Well, then you tell me, Alexa,” he said, putting a hand on his hip. “When you’re wrist-deep in the hole between your legs, does your heart go still? Does your breath get slow and even?” He tapped the tablet. “Chloe’s does. At least this time. And yet she’s physiologically typical, so far as we can see without an exam. If you want, I can put out feelers to have her checked by—”

  “Jesus, no, Parker. Don’t even joke about that to me. Charisma or Olivia either. You men can fantasize about swapping gynecologists to ‘gather data’ on—”

  “Goddammit, Alexa, stop acting like I’m some kind of a fucking pervert! You want data. You’re part of the biggest, most innovative company this industry’s ever seen. And let’s not forget that you — even more than me — have been after avatar-level data since the fucking twenty-teens, when we tried to use HALO to find our avatar and ended up with Bridget fucking Miller instead — a smart move that got all tangled up with fucking Caspian White. We’ve all done things the others would love to jail us for, so stop acting so high and mighty. You authorized getting the doc on retainer; we brought it up at a meeting same as anything else.” He jabbed at the tablet. “This right here? This is our business, Alexa. You wanted to talk about the future of sex? Well, here it is. You wanted to get into that whacked-out anthroposophy thing? You wanted your intuitive Chosen One, or whatever the hell it is? Okay. Well, I’ve just told you our new girl had a deathlike experience while diddling herself in a beta immersion room. So how about you take it seriously for a change and stop attacking me?”

  Alexa forced herself to meet Parker’s eyes. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Parker took a moment to heavily sigh. “It’s fine.”

  “I don’t know enough about this stuff to understand the … the depth, I guess.”

  “To put it simply,” said Parker, “Chloe did a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense. I won’t speculate beyond that. All I can say for sure is that she managed to come like nobody’s business, apparently without even realizing it, and sustained it for eight minutes before passing out. Oh, and I didn’t even tell you about the creepiest part. She was watching porn loaded into the system for a while, but then it gave her a star map. She came while drawing a star map off The Beam. Without touching herself, by the way. And at the end, her eyes were still wide open, and she was staring at nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “The room was black? The screen was off?”

  Parker shook his head. “It was on, showing an image of nothing.”

  Alexa had risen to her feet when Parker was having his tiff. Now she sat down in the chair again, leaned back, and crossed her arms. “Personal opinion, Parker: Is this good?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What Chloe did. Is it good? Can we use it? Did it tell you anything at all — about her intuitive ability, her potential facility with AI … anything?”

  Parker shook his head. “I don’t think it’s good or bad. It is what it is. I’m a psychologist. You want an opinion on this freak show, call a philosopher. Same as her Orion data. She came all over the place, clearly not a panic responder. But …” Parker paused, looking thoughtful.

  “What, Parker?”

  “Well, I never thought of it this way before, but it’s like Chloe didn’t need the Orion at all. I figured she was just having an odd response, but I suppose the same thing could be caused by actively resisting the inputs.”

  “You think she was fighting it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no precedent. She came like crazy, with no complaints. Panic responders try to fight, and lose because they get lost in the alarm. That’s why it’s so bad. They don’t want to lose control, so they fight to keep it. But rather than finding a way to replace the inputs with their own, which I’m not sure is possible, they feed into the panic, obsessing. It’s like a loop. But if it were possible to supplant the Orion’s stream — which again, I’m not saying it is — you’d have to do it calmly. And if I set aside my doubts and pretend for a moment, that’s kind of what Chloe’s metrics looked like — like she was saying, ‘I don’t need your pleasure. I can make my own.’”

  Alexa shook her head. She didn’t know what to make of it any more than Parker. “So,” she finally said, “what do we tell the others?”

  “Everything. You wanted to withhold it?”

  “Of course not. You called me, Parker. Just me. Like it was an emergency.”

  Parker looked at the tablet. “I guess not. She was fine. Even the medic cleared her, and it was a thorough exam. Like I said, better medical minds than mine have seen the graphs. Whatever happened to Chloe wasn’t dangerous or damaging, and if I had to guess I’d say it was totally within her control — below the surface, maybe, but not any sort of a syndrome. But if you’d been there, Alexa …”

  Alexa nodded. “I’m sure. And I understand. So, we bring it up tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we don’t mention that we chatted first.”

  “Naturally.”

  Alexa rolled the balls in her head, seeing if they could find a place to lie still. Parker wasn’t a physician, but he’d gone to medical school. And she trusted his judgment, now that he’d filtered the data that mattered.

  Chloe was in no danger. Chloe was inexplicable. Chloe was still an amazing asset despite the fact that she was increasingly an enigma.

  If she floated high enough to see the bird’s eye view of why they had started this project, and her decades-long search, Alexa had to admit something important: Scary or not, Chloe had done something they’d never seen. Wasn’t that what forward thought — what the future — was
all about?

  “Parker?”

  He looked at Alexa.

  “Is it possible she’s damaged somehow? That Chloe’s reacting to things like this because she’s … crazy?”

  Parker shook his head. “I don’t know what she is — but Chloe Shaw is something, for sure.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chloe was on the floor again, the canvas open before her.

  She had finally gotten over the temptation to put the thing on her lap, which she’d fought for the first few weeks. It looked like a laptop Crossbrace terminal, but Chloe did all her searching and surfing through the use of a projected holo web or an immersive hologram, and did all her interfacing by voice. Her porter had even stopped being quite so bitchy since their little chat, and that had reverted him back into more of a guide than a temperamental roommate.

  Having the device on her lap was pointless. Besides, the canvas itself kind of freaked Chloe out. It was too smooth and featureless. Like a malformed brick. Its surface was cold, almost slick. It didn’t seem like a logic device. It seemed like a stone from some living thing’s intestine.

  Chloe had fallen into a rhythm with the canvas, and found herself adapting to it as much as it seemed to be adapting to her. While it had learned her search patterns and begun putting the most Chloe-relevant results up front, she was likewise learning which searches were most likely to bear fruit, and how best to request what she wanted.

  She also learned when to talk and when not to. Despite the voice interface and porter guide, she still sometimes wanted quiet. Sometimes, Chloe thought best when wandering through a projected immersion — the walls and accouterments of a place projected around her environment as ghosts of themselves. Sometimes she worked best with her hands, pulling a web apart as if peeling fruit. And sometimes she worked best on a virtual walk, taking small steps on a manual treadmill in the middle of a holo immersion while the canvas pushed relevant information past her, as if she were the one moving.