by Alden Odessa
But she was still of use, and that use was information.
12
How This All Works
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked her.
“A long time,” Betty said with a hint of shame, but less, probably, than she should have.
“How does it work?”
“People give us money, usually men, and then we do what they ask of us.”
“I’ve got the basic textbook definition of prostitution, Betty. I need to know how this whole, pimp-hooker relationship works.”
“Oh, of course,” she said. She then went on to lay out all the information I could have possibly wanted. Or at least what I could think I would want. I’m sure I would have to do some learning on the fly. A little boots-on-the-ground research.
She told me that the typical split was seventy percent went to the pimp, and thirty percent went to the girl. I thought those numbers were a little skewed in the pimp favors and let her know as much. Then she told me what a pimp did, and why some charged more than others. The best pimps got a higher percentage. Sometimes as much as ninety percent. The best pimps provided the best accommodations including lodging, food and protection. Nobody would mess with the best pimps because if you did, there would be repercussions. A good pimp protected his girls, and they never got hurt or did anything they didn’t want to do.
When I asked what the oversight of this was, she didn’t know. It’s just how it is.
The best prostitutes could get anywhere from two-thousand to five-thousand dollars in the best part of town. She said the city worked in a valley type of system. The Reference was the peak of the city, that is where the best girls were, the best clubs and the best casinos. The further you got away from The Reference in either direction the lower the cost and the lower the quality. On this side of The Reference, the quality went down the closer you got to the Lower Bottoms and that is where it both proverbialy and literally bottomed out. Things were the cheapest there, and they were also the most dangerous. On the other side of the Lower Bottoms was the other side of the economic valley. The quality and the expense got higher the closer you got to the coast. Although the coast still wasn’t as high dollar as The Reference area, but it was close. This is where a lot of the more successful business owners lived and there was less gambling and drugs but still a good amount of prostitution. Mostly with the tourists.
When she said tourists I knew what she meant even if she didn’t. These were gamers who had logged on to play and wanted to spend some time on the beach. This lead me down a path to more questions, however. These were questions that I could only ask internally though, since if I brought this up with them, boom; I zero out.
How did the gamers get to the beach? Did they travel all the way through the Bottoms to get there? That seemed unlikely. I assumed that many of the people playing the game where a lot like myself. They were here for one reason and that was to have sex with hookers. It made little sense they would travel this far just to get laid. I didn’t even know how far it was to the coast, it could be days away for all I knew. I didn’t know how far it was from where I spawned to here even. I knew it had been long. At least a day, this was how I pieced together the time cycles here, because it had been such a long journey.
The only answer to this was that there had to be different spawning points. I remember when I signed up and plunked down my money for the crowd funding of the game that there were different levels. I wondered if the level you funded at dictated where you spawned. That would make some semblance of sense, I funded at the highest level, so I was dropped off at the best part of town. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what the rest of the crowd funding levels were. I remember there were a lot though.
I remember something about relaxation and it seems like there was something else about danger and another one about illicit behavior. I assumed this was just a reference to sex, but what if it was about drugs, and if it was about drugs, could that be a reference to The Bottoms? I don’t know if any of this was right, but it made sense to me.
Did the lowest level of crowd funding drop you off at The Bottoms, and if so, could I find this spawn point? If I found the spawn point, then maybe I could get players straight off the boat, so to speak. Most of them may be here to buy drugs, but if they were willing to do that, then they probably wouldn’t have an aversion to getting their dick sucked too. They also wouldn’t know how the money system worked yet, so I could gouge them a little bit. Not to mention, some of these players would just be broke and couldn’t afford to hit the most expensive level. So they were looking for sex, but maybe they were college students and funded at the lowest level, all for budgetary reasons.
I would put a pin in this idea for a moment as this would take some searching on my part to find the spawn point. I had to take off my most important points of concern first, and that was getting money.
Before I did that, however, this new information led me to think other things about the guests down there, and all throughout Canny Valley. How long had this game been active?
I thought I jumped on the train pretty early when I signed up. It wasn’t fully funded yet, in fact the crowd funding campaign had only been live for five days when I found out about it. I put in my money three days later.
I understand that the game could be designed so that some parts of the city would look older than other parts and I understand the same thing about the NPC’s. But the players? How long had they been there?
I remember getting the email that I had been waiting for, the email that said Hot House Harem Online was shipping and then a week later I got it. As far as I knew it wasn’t a staggered release, meaning they all shipped at about the same time. So everybody would have been getting the game at the same time. The way that Betty made it sound was that these tourists had been coming here for as long as she could remember. Granted, stuff like this could always be programmed in, but that seemed odd.
All this time that I had been here I didn’t see anyone that appeared to me to be players. In fact, it would make sense that someone would actually look like me, since I was just a character to choose. I didn’t spend any time modifying my character and I’m sure that others had, but they should at least bear a passing resemblance. I couldn’t be the only one that just picked the stock character and moved on.
Something was fishy and there were a few explanations.
It was possible that time moved differently here, an hour in real life could be a month inside the game. I was actually hoping for something along these lines, maybe I could still beat my wife home. If a player got the game even a few hours before me, then they could have been here for months, hell, years. I don’t know the rules of the game I’m playing. Much less the way the game is played.
Another theory I had going through my head, and the one I like the least although it is the coolest of the options I have in front of me, was that this was an entirely different reality. As soon as I plugged that game in, I was transported to another dimension, or some sort of other universe. It was possible, but unlikely. As far-fetched as it was, it was still within the realm of possibility. Once you started thinking along those lines though, it really started making your mind spin just with all the Mandela Effect, string theory of it all.
If this was a simulation, then that meant accepting the possibility of my own reality being a simulation and then the possibility of the people simulating my simulation were a simulation themselves and if you go much deeper than that it certainly does make you feel very alone and insignificant in the universe.
The one thought I had that debunked this theory, however, was: Who the fuck would want to come to my world? I mean, how fucked up would your own world have to be to want to come to mine for a vacation or adventure?
Betty had said The Reference area was kind of peak area of the city. She didn’t mean that literally as it seemed to be lower geographically than where we were at now. But rather it was what everything else went away from. It was also the peak eco
nomically.
I asked her what was on the other side of The Reference and she didn’t know. She said she had never been past the hotel before. In fact, she had never even been to it or seen the inside.
I assured her it was lovely, and we’d get back there, eventually. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
This also encouraged me to the theory that this was a game, or simulation, and not a reality. It would seem to me that the two main spawning areas were by The Reference and then the coast, and then everything in between was the proverbial valley of Canny Valley. Once again, not literally, but economically.
If my theory held true, then there was nothing on the other side of where I spawned. I asked what was on the other side of the coast. Was it a lake or an ocean? If it was an ocean what country was on the other side. She just gave my a quizzical look. She didn’t even understand the question at first, and then once she did, she said she had no idea. Wouldn’t have she learned this at some point?
I was asking her too many questions about things that a NPC wouldn’t know, and if I continued with this line of questioning, she would eventually catch on that I may or may not be from another place. I certainly didn’t want her to start asking me questions. Like where I came from. It apparently never occurred to anybody here that the tourists had to come from somewhere.
So I asked Betty to continue telling me more about The Lower Bottoms and how they ran.
She said the casinos were run by shady mobsters, usually pimps who did not understand how to run a casino, and the girls were run by pimps who didn’t care whether his girls lived or died. They could always find girls willing to join their harem who didn’t already have a pimp. Not to mention, there wasn’t enough business down here, or at least high-paying business, to care about the girl. There was more money in the casinos and drugs.
I was slightly regretting my decision to come down here. It didn’t look like I would make much money off of girls, and I knew nothing about running a casino and I didn’t much care to sell drugs. But since I was really close to running out of money altogether, it limited my options and I was listening to any and all ideas.
“What’s the protection like down there?” I asked.
“Non-existent,” she said. “Like I said, the pimps really don’t care about you. If you get hurt, abused, or crippled they just tell you that those are the job hazards and to quit bitching.”
“So it’s a bunch of real stand-up guys down here?”
“No, they’re terrible.”
“Sarcasm.”
“Oh.”
She told me that when she was last here, not too long ago as that was where Bruce did a lot of work, the pimp scene was failing. There just wasn’t the market for it; but if we wanted to get girls, this was the place since there wasn’t much, if any protection. Most of the girls were on their own and it was common knowledge that girls didn’t last too long down here without protection.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Guys down here, well, they can get a little rough.”
“Like, sex stuff?”
“Like, violent.”
It was coming together a little better in my mind what was happening here, this wasn’t so much a place for men to come down to and get laid. This is where sociopath’s came. Men, or women I guess, that needed something a little more to get their rocks off.
I’d known a guy once who was like this. He couldn’t get off without beating up his wife first. It got worse and worse until the better of the two options of how a story like this ended happened. She finally turned him in; last I knew he was in jail. The other natural conclusion to this story would have been her death as he continued to get increasingly violent. She knew that, and did the smart thing.
That was one of the dark sides that this game offered, a way for men to act out these fantasies in a virtual world. But there was genuine sadness in Betty’s voice. This was real to her, she lost friends this way. She said it was why she went with Bruce in the first place because the enemy she knew is better than the enemy she didn’t. He was cruel, occasionally rough and getting worse, but he provided some level of protection for her. It allowed her to live, which is something she seemed very interested in continuing.
When she spoke, she did not sound like a digital character. Did a virtual creation have fears? Did she seek comfort and safety? Did she make actual choices based on that?
I looked at Bogo, who was eating, he was always eating. Did one’s and zero’s get hungry, or was it just his programming to eat? I don’t understand it and I find it best to continue to ignore it and wipe these thoughts from my head. It’s that rabbit hole that keeps calling back to me and I should use all of my brain’s power, what little is left, to find a way out of this, because that was one thing that I did know, I was real. I had a real life, with a real family and people who would miss me if I didn’t make it out of this game.
“So what’s our next move?” Betty asked.
I sat there for a second before answering. I looked at her and then at Bogo, they really were counting on me here and I wasn’t even sure if they knew why. What would happen if I did nothing? If I zero’d out or somehow otherwise left the game what would happen to them? I assume they would just go on, or maybe they would reset, who knows?
Well, I know who knows, but I can’t exactly ring up The Man in Blue.
“Well,” I said, “I have an idea, a thought really, but I can’t be sure of it. I need to get down there and see what it’s like.”
“And then?”
“Then it’ll either work, or it won’t.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“Then we keep making plans until one of them works,” I said. Remarkably self-assured. They seemed to trust me on this, and why wouldn’t they, I was probably nicer to them than anybody had been to them in their entire lives. I also seemed to be in charge, which is a place I didn’t really want to be, but it’s the hand I was dealt.
Betty looked to Bogo, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “Whatever you say, boss.”
“Yeah, just tell me what to do,” Betty said.
I stood up, walked over to the nightstand beside the bed. I opened it and the handgun that The Man in Blue had given me was still there. I still hadn’t practiced with it, as in fired it, but I had opened it up and figured out how to load it. I can only hope I did it right.
I reached behind me and stuck it down the back of my pants, just the way that I had done it before,. It was starting to get more comfortable and I don’t know if that’s something I was doing to make it more at ease or if I was just getting used to it.
I walked back to them; they were both standing, and I motioned to the door.
“Let’s go.”
13
The Lower Bottoms
The Lower Bottoms were a dark place. I mean that literally, this place was dark. The more and more stories I hear about it, I also believe I mean that figuratively.
But I came up with a plan once we walked away from it.
We had entered The Lower Bottoms at The Landscape Bridge. The reason that it was called that was because it was made out of the actual landscape. Whatever earth it was the street of Canny Valley covered is what it was made of. The earth here looked like solid rock. Granite to be exact. I don’t know much about granite other than it’s used to make countertops. But that’s what the surface looked like, countertops. On top of it, all throughout the city, was concrete and steel. Although there were a lot of roads here, there did not seem to be a lot of cars. At least not in this part of town. Most people got around by way of their own feet.
Canny Valley seemed to be a very literal place. Something like The Landscape Bridge was named that because it was literally formed out of the landscape. I hadn’t seen any libraries or other places where I could learn about the town's history, but my guess was that I would never find it. I don’t think it had a history. It just was and then continued to be. Things had been named long before anyone here could seem to remember.
When I tried to ask any questions about any of these things, about the town’s past or history, I was met with curious looks. It seemed that not only had they never been asked such a thing but they also hadn’t even ever thought about it. All Betty ever said was that this was the way that it had always been.
Again, just leave it alone and learn the terrain. Build my harem. Run the city. Win the game.
At The Landscape there was a path with some poorly maintained steps, going down. They went down almost a quarter mile until we were well below the main part of the city.
Canny Valley had been filled with buildings, neon, and lights. The Lower Bottoms didn’t seem to have the same aesthetic. I quickly learned that it was divided into five parts, almost split equally.
The part we walked into, after coming off the steps, was called The Landing, and it was the nearest to the hotel we were staying at that was sitting on the cliff. The reason it was called The Landing and why the hotel was called The Falls was that this was a popular suicide location (“How long has it been called that?”, “What do you mean?”, “When did it earn that nickname?”, “It’s not a nickname, it’s always been called that.” No history. No back story).
The Landing seemed to have a few businesses. Mostly there were just empty streets, there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic down here.
I also learned of directions here. Ahead, on the other side of The Landing, was a section called South Light. The section directly to our right was called The Northern Night. It’s a small thing, but knowing which way was North and South in this world was a tremendous relief. It was kind of like the feeling I got when I figured out a way to tell day from night; it made me feel a little more secure, a little more—and I hate to say this—at home.
