The Future of Love Read online

  Chloe wanted to say that she didn’t trust Alexa, but they were well past that point. She set the helmet over her own head. The front piece was still up, but it wobbled. It was meant to close over her face after all.

  Alexa did the same, then put on a pair of black gloves and handed a matching pair to Chloe. Then she moved toward one of the big chairs and nodded Chloe toward the other.

  “Best sit before lowering the visor. Otherwise, you’ll need to feel your way.”

  Chloe did. The fabric on the chair was actually more like a gel. Once fully inside, Chloe felt like she was floating. After a few moments, it was hard to feel the chair.

  “This is cutting-edge,” Alexa said, “but Xenia tells us that they’re working on nanobots that will be injected into a user’s system to go with rigs like this. The nanobots will turn off your sight, hearing, and sense of touch. The rig’s inputs will provide new senses for you. This is an advanced virtual reality. Beam immersion. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Chloe nodded. Afraid nonetheless.

  “Close and latch the visor. Sit back in the chair. I’ll do the rest.”

  Chloe did. There were seals on the helmet that completed the darkness. The silence was equally full. There was nothing to taste or smell, and with her sense of touch mostly lost to the floaty chair, Chloe was instantly claustrophobic. Or perhaps agoraphobic. Neither and both.

  Darkness.

  Then new light.

  The sensation was strange. It took Chloe a moment to get used to it, because the helmet wasn’t precisely showing her video and playing audio into her ears. This was something different. Better.

  The view was complete, for one, and when Chloe turned her head, she saw the view change like it would if she turned her head in real life. The ambient sound had to be coming from her helmet’s speakers, but some sleight of hand made her mind hear it from the corners of the room, the floor, the ceiling.

  “Don’t resist it,” said Alexa’s voice. “That’s the trick.”

  Chloe looked to her left, already unsure whether she was turning her physical head or just her attention, scrolling video in the visor.

  She saw Alexa about four feet away — standing, not sitting, bare-headed without any helmet. There were no chairs behind either of them. Chloe looked down and realized she could see her own chest, legs, and feet.

  “What is this?”

  “Immersion,” Alexa told her.

  Chloe was about to ask why they’d put on rigs and sat in weightless chairs just to experience the same white room without their paraphernalia in place, but just as she was opening her mouth, Alexa’s hands started pawing the air before her.

  A bed blinked into existence. They were right in front of it. Chloe’s sight told her she was standing and reaching toward the comforter, but her body’s acuity indicated she was still sitting, probably also with her hand out.

  The warring senses were strange. She forced herself to do as Alexa said, and not to resist the helmet’s display.

  She touched the comforter, expecting to wave right through it. But Chloe touched fabric instead. She felt it, pure and true. If she forced her hand down, the illusion crumbled, but as long as she allowed herself to believe the bed was solid and held her hand high, the glove continued to give her all the nuances: soft down, high thread-count sheets. She could even smell the linen.

  And why not? The helmet seemed airtight, so it had to be giving her oxygen, somehow infused with sensory enrichment.

  “Am I supposed to lay down on it or something?”

  “You can’t,” Alexa said. “You’re still sitting in your chair.”

  Chloe wanted to protest. She’d walked to the bed; she’d taken another step to touch the comforter, sheets, and now pillow. But it was trickery. Her feet hadn’t moved. Something in the immersion knew where she’d wanted to go and made her sights and sounds bring her there.

  Step back, Chloe thought. Stand back by Alexa.

  And it happened, slowly.

  “I have one final lie to confess,” Alexa said. “One last little bit of trickery.”

  Chloe looked over. She didn’t feel the helmet.

  Was her head turning? She hadn’t a clue.

  “When Andrew picked you up and said he wanted to take you somewhere to surprise you … do you remember?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “He blindfolded you.”

  Nodded again.

  “He didn’t take you to a hotel. He brought you here.”

  That didn’t seem right, but Chloe remembered the night well enough to know that she barely remembered it at all. They’d had a few drinks. Then Andrew blindfolded her and said he had a surprise.

  She’d been pleasantly woozy. Andrew had led her to a luxurious suite and removed the blindfold. And after they’d made love, she’d fallen asleep and woken in the same bed. They’d left in daylight, obviously clear-sighted.

  If they’d gone to O instead of a hotel, that had to mean she’d been transported to a real hotel in her sleep. Had he drugged her?

  She wanted to be furious but found herself fascinated instead. The sheets were rising as if someone was slowly inflating a large balloon beneath them. A moment later she saw Caucasian flesh among the white. Then brown hair and the motion of bodies.

  “That was the only time, Chloe. I felt we needed more metrics than tiny flying cameras could offer. We needed Beam data, and couldn’t risk giving Andrew a canvas. The only way to sample a full experience — inside and out — was to move you to a controlled environment, here at O. Don’t blame Andrew. He never had a choice. He was in too deep and tried his best to get out. If you want to blame someone for what you’re about to see, blame me.”

  Chloe’s mind was too blown to assign any blame. She’d used all of her anger against Alexa and had no more to give. She’d been furious with Andrew. All the little things Alexa had said about his involvement with O paradoxically made Chloe feel better.

  Andrew had tried to escape. He’d tried to come clean, but was bound without options; O wouldn’t let him.

  “What do you mean, ‘inside and out’?”

  “It’s the difference between a doctor conducting a superficial exam versus taking scans and drawing blood. We’d seen you and Andrew together, but we needed more to see the full picture. This technology was built by Xenia Labs, augmented by Quark, and tweaked by O’s own R&D department. But Parker designed the software that analyzed the two of you while you were here. We watched your brainwaves. Your endocrine patterns. Your glandular and lymphatic response. We know everything about this encounter, Chloe. This time, nothing was invisible.”

  Chloe scanned the room. Furniture grew like weeds around the edges, turning the immersion into the hotel suite she’d believed she and Andrew had they’d visited that night — a mirror of the real suite she’d apparently been transported to and woken up in. Paintings bled from the walls like ink stains. A light fixture dropped and solidified from above like a hanging flower.

  The covers shifted. More flesh came into view. They hadn’t shed their clothes under the covers that night; they’d stripped and gotten into bed fully naked. Now she could see herself, on her side, facing Andrew. One hand was on his face. The other was still below the sheets, moving slowly. As was one of Andrew’s hands, disappearing where the covers still draped her waist.

  “I told you that things were different with Andrew,” Alexa said. “I told you that in love, your sex became something better. Something important. Something more than simple carnal pleasures.”

  Chloe stepped forward, fascinated. She reached out and touched Andrew’s hair, seeing her hand without a glove. She felt his brown hair brush her fingertips. The immersion responded in small ways, shifting the hair so that her fingers moved through it.

  Chloe’s breath deepened. Her heart thrummed more heavily. It felt deep. Like yearning.

  “Are you able to see what I mean?”

  Alexa’s phrasing was strange, indicating ability rather than a shift in Chl
oe’s frame of mind. Her mind reached out, carried by her new attachment to The Beam. The room was wired directly into O’s beta. Chloe imagined she could reach out through the network’s fibers, through the Fi connections open all over the building. She could touch Quark from here. She could touch Crossbrace through the firewalls. She could light up the Empire State Building. She could change all the traffic lights across the river in New Jersey.

  Andrew moved under Chloe, shifting her hand away.

  She lowered her arm to her side. The sheets moved down farther. Chloe could see the groping couple’s other hands: Andrew’s between Immersion-Chloe’s legs, Chloe’s gently stroking Andrew’s erect cock.

  “Can you see it, Chloe?”

  She focused again. The sense of touching The Beam became less generalized and omnipotent. She brought it back to the room, to the sights and sounds in front of her. And yes. She could see it.

  A data stream beneath it all.

  Untold terabytes of biometrics, detailing the scene inside and out.

  “Yes. I see it.”

  But it was only half true. Once she’d tuned into the network chatter beneath the immersion, Chloe couldn’t tune it out.

  She wasn’t just seeing it. She was feeling it. Experiencing it. Sinking all the way down into it.

  In front of her, Immersion Chloe turned end for end. The people in bed were still on their sides, moving into a lying 69. From where Real Chloe was standing, watching and recalling the scene carried arousal. But the data stream told another story — one that Chloe, when she’d been the Chloe in bed, had been too caught in the moment to appreciate.

  Real Chloe watched Immersion Chloe’s response curve as the data scrolled past her awareness, easily decipherable thanks to her new nanobot-taught abilities. She saw how hot Chloe had become before moving and how much hotter she became as they shifted around on the bed.

  She saw the neural spike as Chloe anticipated Andrew’s mouth on her pussy. And in turn, she saw the neural spike anticipating Andrew’s cock in her mouth.

  Beyond that were Andrew’s responses, also twinned. They both yearned to be pleased. To give pleasure. It was carnal and beautiful. Physical and emotional.

  Andrew’s face nestled between Chloe’s legs. She took his shaft in one hand, then wrapped her lips around it. They moved in tandem.

  Chloe watched their arousal grow, both outside and in.

  “This recording,” Alexa said, “is the most comprehensive sexual documentary anyone has ever done. The technology is brand new, but that’s not the reason that ground was broken. You and I, witnessing this immersion, don’t matter. Even if we couldn’t be here to see it as we are — even if the technology didn’t exist to allow us to witness it like physical bystanders — it’s still the most comprehensive and best there is. You know why that is, don’t you?”

  Long, silent moments passed. Alexa didn’t repeat her question; she seemed content to wait until Chloe was ready to respond. She watched the pair pleasure each other. She watched Andrew’s saliva-slicked dick move in and out of her mouth. She saw her parted legs, Andrew’s fingers spreading her open to lick her clit, lapping her from top to bottom. Everything was worthy of note. Every detail mattered.

  Chloe climbed on top. She reached back, then slid Andrew’s cock inside her. They moved for several strokes, Chloe high with her chest out, then she leaned forward and covered his mouth with kisses.

  Real Chloe watched them, feeling a curious emotion.

  Was it jealousy?

  But she’d been so angry with him.

  She was still so angry with him.

  “It’s because of me,” Chloe finally answered.

  Alexa nodded. “When we did this experiment, we didn’t yet know who you were. We had no idea that your intuition and digital responsiveness was because the network had behaved like a parent. We didn’t know how deeply you had your mind — even then — intertwined with all the room’s sensors. We only knew that the data stream was anomalous. Everything became muddied in ways that never happened when you were with clients. Tricks the nanobots taught you allowed you to change the local node of The Beam itself. Without even realizing, you were causing it to grow and adapt to suit you.”

  In front of them, as real as life, Andrew pulled Chloe tight so they were chest to chest as her hips continued to rise and fall. Then he rolled them over, opening Chloe’s legs, running his fingers across her body before gripping his cock and sliding it into her pussy.

  Chloe moaned. Andrew moaned with her.

  And behind the moment, the data peaked. Changed. Became fundamentally different in some undefinable way.

  “It took us a long time to figure out why things were different for this recording. We thought the equipment might have been malfunctioning. We had nothing to compare it directly to. We only knew that the outputs were so different from everything we’d recorded between you and O clients, they seemed to be corrupted. We hadn’t anticipated any of it. We almost aborted. Parker was afraid it would spread.”

  “What would spread?”

  Alexa shrugged. “At the time, we thought it was a virus.”

  On the bed, Andrew thrust into Chloe. Her eyes closed, and behind the visual Real Chloe watched the signal adapt and evolve. On the bed, Chloe was about to come. But if Real Chloe pushed logic and sense aside, an additional conclusion was also true: the room’s network signal seemed to be coming, too.

  Andrew ground into her while kissing Chloe’s gasping mouth. She heard the orchestra of their moans, felt more than saw the rising of their mutual energy. At the apex, he spilled inside her, two chests heaving, her hands pawing his back to draw him closer.

  And in that mutually orgasmic moment, Chloe saw all that Alexa had been describing. She saw the signals. She saw what, in the network itself, had changed.

  “We’re rewriting code,” Chloe whispered.

  “That was our engineers’ conclusion too.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “That you, Chloe Shaw, are something this world has never seen.”

  On the bed, Andrew’s body went slack. Chloe’s hands, across his back, clenched and then relaxed. They lay together like the dead because nothing left in the living world mattered.

  “You can do things with The Beam that I’ll never be able to do,” Alexa said, looking over. “It can’t hide its secrets from you and it wouldn’t want to. But even you can’t change The Beam, Chloe.”

  Chloe looked over.

  “At least not by yourself.”

  And Chloe saw. She realized what Alexa had meant. What was different about Chloe and Andrew, versus Chloe alone or Chloe with anyone else.

  Together, she and Andrew made the alchemy Alexa had been referring to. The alchemy Chloe’s own mother had warned her about, combining love and sex in a girl such as her.

  Alone, Chloe couldn’t rewrite The Beam. Nothing, nowhere, could rewrite The Beam without its consent.

  But she could teach it.

  And then The Beam could rewrite itself.

  “We think that when you were in your mother’s womb, the nanobots taught you how to live and how to be,” Alexa said. “And we think that now, with Andrew, you’re returning the favor.”

  “I’m teaching The Beam,” Chloe said.

  It fit. The changes she’d seen. The revelations. The moments of lost ecstasy becoming something bigger and brighter and better.

  “The future of sex means the future of this world, Chloe,” Alexa agreed. “And the future of this world is the future of us.”

  WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

  The Future of Sex concludes with The Future of Us

 

 

 
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