by Toby Weston
Shouts and cries stretched into a single vocal tone, which sustained, lifting all precariously higher. The dancers on the floors were held captive, raised on tiptoes, arms pulsing—reaching up across the Woruld, well past their climax, sustained by sound. Faces lined the rims of the suspended disks. Bodies turned in their seats, kneeling on red plush, hands gripping brass rails; watching, enthralled, reaching hungry fingers to the dancers.
Finally, the bass returned. With a thousand screams and cries, the entire club achieved its single distributed orgasm.
—Breathe—
Wrapped again in two metres of fine crocheted lace, Stella pushed her way through the applauding crowd and headed back to her seat. She ‘subvocalised’ to her Spex and had them highlight Sheena among the spent throngs. Sheena had paused her pornographic floorshow. Their eyes met briefly. Stella placed two fingers onto her crimson lips and sent her adversary a kiss—which flapped its butterfly wings and set off erratically across the confused space that separated them. Sheena looked away in disgust and huffed off to surround herself with her fans.
Jeno was happy—which was Stella’s clue that the punters were, too. She ordered another drink—determined to more than taste this one—and settled back on the soft velvet, shifting the shawl to allow a soft breeze to touch her clammy skin.
A young man and woman entered the VIP zone. They sat down on the section of the perimeter sofa that the ‘tutters’ had vacated—or, at least, the man did. The woman veered off and, instead of sitting, kept going, walking the circumference of the seating disk. She blundered through legs not retracted with sufficient haste, showing very little respect for either people or geometric integrity.
The club was filling up. Stella shook her head with something like scorn and pity at Sheena, who was desperately trying to match Stella’s tightly choreographed, perfectly executed, high-production-value routine, by stepping up her gyrating and flashing the odd nipple: just like the subscriber-whore that she was.
Stella could feel the new arrival staring at her impolitely. She ignored him for as long as she could, then snapped: “What?”
The man looked away quickly. He had been staring, stealing illicit glances, but now seemed inordinately interested in something nonspecific on the other side of the dance floor. Stella didn’t let him off the hook, he had been caught red-handed. She continued to glare at the side of his reddening cheek, ignoring the crazy, circular power walking of his girlfriend.
Eventually, he was compelled to turn into the heat of her stare.
“Hey, Stella… it’s me.”
Over the previous two years that she had been working for TeenLife™, Stella had established herself as one of the stable’s hottest properties. The voyeuristic impulse, which had explained her audience’s early fascination with the rescued, trafficked orphan, had become displaced into a parasocial bonding, where Stella was a self-surrogate for fans to vicariously experience triumphs—and, more often, tragedies—as they dialled in from their own perplexing and unsatisfactory lives.
Stella the beautiful; the whimsical; the irrepressible serial victim of a harsh patriarchal world—who still managed to look great and meet boys.
Look at her, she’s out there, so I don’t need to be.
Stella stared at the stranger, who, without altering his features, seemed to transform into Marcel—in the years she had been away, he had become a man. His face was more angular, his nose bigger, his jaw square and dimpled; but it was the same wavy mass of brown hair, and now he flashed the same, bashful smile, which finally erased any doubt.
She was literally struck dumb for long moments of frozen time.
This life was a Styrofoam package around the fragile core of her soul. The Coin, the clubs, the clothes and her hyper-managed synthetic celebrity life—these all formed a buffer zone between her and any sharp objects that might pierce the cyst, which had grown over her psychological wounds.
The first emotion was shock—if that even counted as an emotion. It was certainly a feeling, and, breaking through the internal stalemate, Stella was suddenly feeling very angry.
What was he even doing here? This was an exclusive club. Her deal with the place and with TeenLife™ was, very specifically, her right to absolute hermit-like privacy.
Old friends shouldn’t be able to just sit down next to her and talk—that was the entire point!
She got up to go. She’d deal with whatever the security lapse was later. Now, she just needed to be gone.
“Hey, don’t go! This took too long to set up!”
[Message] – Super Fan —10 mins 1-1 time remaining.
“You!” Stella said with incredulity. “You’re a Super Fan?!” Astonishment momentarily triumphed over rage.
“Yeah, sure. Not me, it’s the Pussycat really. I’m sharing the Madam’s account.”
“Jeno, privacy please.” Stella glared briefly at her pouting virtual boyfriend. Jeno shrugged, got up and moved away, taking the live stream with him. He would be scanning the dance floors for something to fill the sudden gap in 50 million attention spans.
“Marcel, you damn idiot! What a waste of time!”
“What were we supposed to do? We missed you too much.” Marcel slid over so that they were no longer shouting above the resurgent mukka.
Stella was warmed by involuntary happiness; but anger and defensive snark were just below the surface.
“Look, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk to anybody. It’s not fair for you to barge in like this!”
“But we are family, Stella. You’ve got to come home. It’s been too long. We want you back. The girls at the Pussycat all stream you like every day. It’s not just me, we all miss you. You’ve got to come home some time…”
“Come home? To the Farm? It’s a shit slum! Why would I want to go back to float through garbage?”
“Don’t be so mean!”
“You’re a Super Fan, so I’ve got to give you ten minutes. We can dance if you want, but I’m not coming home. Don’t even talk about it once Jeno comes back. TeenLife won’t like it and you’ll just get kicked out.”
“No, they hit me up. It must be good drama for your fake life! A big audience to see you push away your friends.” Marcel looked away.
The woman had completed another circle of the seating disk and was jogging in a tight loop around Marcel, who had now stood up.
“I’m going. No need to dance with me. Dance with your oid!”
Jeno was on his way back, frowning, clearly not happy to be referred to in such a way. However, the Sages who ran him would be more concerned about breaking the fourth wall and reminding Stella’s fans that he was just pixels and not a real boy.
“Shut up, for God’s sake,” said Stella. “You spy on me anyway, so take your dance! I’m a whore after all, right?”
[Message] – Contract breach – R-Rated Content – Fine 0.5Mc
“What’s wrong with you?!” said Marcel. “I thought you might be happy to see me!”
“Well, I’m not. I didn’t want to see you! I don’t want to see you.”
“Please…” he begged, suddenly aware of the precarious crust they were walking out on to. “Don’t let’s part like this. I’ll go. But maybe I might come back and we can talk? You don’t need this…”
Marcel reached out his hand to hold Stella’s shoulder, to make her admit that, at least in some sense, she still wanted his friendship. But Jeno jealously reached past her and slapped Marcel’s avatar’s hand out the way.
“Step off, bud!” Jeno, the synthetic hallucination, said to Marcel, the virtual avatar. “She doesn’t want you.”
“Shut the fuck up. Fake person!”
Marcel stepped past Stella, getting right up to Jeno’s face, bringing his nose to just centimetres away from the virtual boy’s flawless skin and puppy-dog eyes. But something deep in the uncanny valley of those eyes must have conjured revulsion—with a sharp, two-handed push, Marcel shoved Jeno in the chest.
At some
base level, he was trying to get this artificial enabler away from his damaged friend; trying to separate Stella from TeenLife™ and its insidious whispering, so that he could tell her how much he missed her. How much they all missed her, and how bad for her this fake life was. She didn’t need to sell her soul and stream her body.
He had fucked it all up. He had wanted to start with a message from Chris: Sagong Marine needed her. She could make money doing real work. Or, perhaps he would have begun with Segi’s offer to take her back to his garden, for real this time if she wanted. But, as it turned out, he had been stunned by her and struck dumb. The icy crust that seemed to block all emotional warmth had robbed him of his confidence and he had fucked up this one chance.
The push must have been harder than intended. Jeno tripped backwards and fell heavily onto the rich carpet, his head barely missing the edge of a glass table on his way down.
“What are you doing! How dare you bully us!” Stella said, shocked.
“Stella, I’m sorry. Chris said he needs you back at Sagong…”
“Shut up!” She turned towards her boyfriend, who, having executed a rippling ninja flex, was standing again. “Jeno, are you okay?” she asked with apparently genuine concern.
Jeno nodded curtly to Stella, then rounded on Marcel. He crossed the two steps separating them in a sort of crouching, sliding lunge. As he closed the final metre, he dropped deeper and span like a dancer. Mid spin, his back to his enemy, Jeno’s trailing leg slid out behind him, swept low and connected with Marcel’s ankles. With both legs knocked from under him, Marcel’s body rotated like a wheel; legs ascending, head descending. Meanwhile, Jeno completed his spin and, in a fluid continuation, pivoting up on the leg which had just swept Marcel, he rose from the crouch and used his momentum to deliver a brutal kick with his other leg.
The follow-up connected with the airborne Marcel. He was swatted like a toy—or a weightless computer avatar—and smashed through metres of empty air to thud heavily into the wall behind the sofa. As Marcel entered the perpendicular geometry, Mundo’s virtual gravity took over, reality rotated and the wall became floor. From Stella’s perspective, Marcel thudded into the wall, then became stuck there like a squashed fly on a windscreen.
Jeno leapt over the sofa in pursuit. An elegant somersault brought him into compliance with local digital gravity. He faced Marcel, who was struggling to his feet.
A few thousand miles away, the furious Marcel began fumbling in a box under his bed for his favourite controller.
“Fucking sucker punching bastard! We’ll see about this!” he mumbled.
Jeno waited patiently while Marcel got up. As Marcel paged through menus and paired his controller to his Spex, his avatar did some limbering-up pantomime. A grinning audience had spontaneously formed a ring around the combatants and they had taken up the chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“All this action is freaking out the dolphin.”
Stella looked away from where the two figures were facing each other inside a circle of baying observers.
“What?”
“The dolphin.” The guy speaking must have come over to stand next to her while she had been distracted. He was slightly below average height and slightly above healthy weight; the slightly too-small suit he was wearing didn’t help with his overall image. Stella suddenly recognised him from outside. Instead of a dress shirt, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a low-key, sans-serif ‘N’. He appeared to be vaping from something that looked like a retro Sci-Fi ray-gun. His avatar’s face was blurred and pixelated.
The man nodded towards the woman who had arrived with Marcel, and who was now running briskly around the interior perimeter of the seating disk—completely ignoring, and passing effortlessly through—the legs in her way.
“What? Wait! That’s Tinkerbell?!”
Stella watched as the woman awkwardly climbed onto the back of the sofa and half jumped, half fell across to Mundo. The dolphin’s human avatar was unable to get any closer because consensus was preventing anyone from entering the area it had isolated around the two combatants. Not understanding the rules, Tinkerbell persisted in butting her nose into the invisible bubble of exclusion.
“It is,” the man nodded. “Come on, sit back down. Let’s have a chat while all your fans shout for your friend’s blood. This should be a big one for you, right? Bitch-off with Sheena B, followed by a grudge fight between boyfriends…”
“What’s your problem…” Stella began, but then moderated her tone. The man had been allowed in the VIP area, so he might be important or stream-worthy. She decided it was okay to chat a bit and perhaps set up some interaction for when Jeno returned, along with the attention of her fans. “Marcel was never my boyfriend.”
“Well, that hardly matters to them, does it?” the man said, gesturing to the ring of growing spectators as fans manifested to be part of the spontaneous live event. Some tried to approach her, but consensus and the club’s bouncers kept them outside the VIP ropes.
“Your friend’s right, you know,” he said, while Marcel and Jeno began to circle and jab. “You don’t need this. It is a waste of your talents. If I was your therapist—which I’m not, because I don’t believe in all that bullshit—I would say you’ve put enough distance between yourself and your past. It’s time to reintegrate.” While speaking, the man was absentmindedly stroking some sort of dreadlocked pet on his lap. Stella tried to get a better look, but it was dim in Dunia and the creature remained a mysterious shadow.
She didn’t have any more luck with the man’s face. From a distance, or from the corner of the eye, he looked perfectly normal; but up close, his features were a blur of rosy cheeks and smudged, shifting eyes, which appeared smeared and animated at a lower frame rate than the rest of his body.
“Who are you?” she said. “You know you’ve outgrown your prom suit?”
“Nice,” he said, nodding with exaggerated appreciation at her rather lame insult.
Behind her, Jeno tried for a punch to Marcel’s face, but Marcel leant away, turning the evasion into an opportunity; bending at the waist and, in the same motion, raising his knee. Jeno had overextended, underestimating his opponent and, perhaps, hoping to end the fight with an embarrassing one-punch knock-out. Marcel straightened his leg and landed a thundering roundhouse kick to the side of Jeno’s face. There was an explosion of light and Jeno was hurled backwards, collapsing onto his butt.
“Nasty! I guess your boyfriend’s done this before.”
Stella looked over her shoulder. “He’s not—and never was—my boyfriend.”
“Well, at least he’s human. Not like this golem.” The man nodded to where Jeno was still sprawled on the floor. “I would say Pinocchio, but at least Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. All this bag of algorithms wants is to increase shareholder value—and he doesn’t even want that in any meaningful way. It’s just numbers.”
Marcel surged forward, ready to stamp down with his heel between the dazed mOid’s eyes, but Jeno managed to grab Marcel’s foot and flip him backwards. Jeno flew up and pressed his temporary advantage. He was on top of Marcel before he had fully come to a rest. He slapped Marcel’s hands away, and crawled up his body to kneel on Marcel’s chest—kneeing him in the groin and solar plexus on the way. Marcel tried to tip him off, but Jeno took both sides of Marcel’s face and lifted his head a few centimetres off the floor, dashing it back down viciously. Marcel’s vision flashed once, then filled with confetti as Jeno followed up with a twenty-second tight fist-drum roll to Marcel’s face.
“I thought they might let the human win?”
“You don’t understand,” Stella said. “Jeno is human, at least to them. The fans don’t make a distinction.”
Flashes of light continued to burst as Jeno’s punches landed, but they dropped in intensity as Marcel lost consciousness.
The black shape shuffled off the man’s lap and padded across the cushions of the sofa towards her. It appeared to be a woolly black sheep with distur
bing, penetrating eyes. It sat beside her on the red velvet, looking up expectantly. It clearly wanted to be petted. Stella extended her hand and was surprised to feel solidity under her fingers.
“It’s real!” she said with a start.
“Of course,” said the man. “Real and here. Like me.” Then, as if to confirm his physical presence, the strange man proffered the fat, glass ray-gun vaporiser. Up until Stella had touched his pet, she had assumed the man, the sheep—if that’s what the mechanical tamagochi was supposed to be—and the Sci-Fi pipe were all virtual. “Want a go?” he asked.
“I thought you were remoting. What’s with the mask?”
“Fashion; privacy; a little of both. So, you want some of this before your chaperone comes back?”
