by Nick Salomon
“It was so strange,” she says dead serious. “Having sex as a man. It was disturbing.”
“I wouldn’t think it’s that bad.”
“It’s not like it was disgusting or anything,” she clarifies. “It’s just so different the way a man’s mind works during it.”
This picks my curiosity. Sex is sex. How different can it be for either gender? I make a mental note of catching a lucid female rama so I can experience the difference for myself. “Good,” I say. “We’ll have a target audience for such a thing. Transsexuals will pay top dollar.”
“Is money the only thing you ever think about?” she asks but does so with more disappointment than annoyance in her voice. She speaks softly. Almost melancholically so.
“I’m sorry,” I say, modulating my voice closer to hers. Maybe I should drop the greedy asshole act for a bit, at least until the after-sex daze wears off. “It’s just so exciting. Imagine the possibilities. Anyone could be a good dreamer, we wouldn’t even need to rely on rama celebrities to get started.”
Lucy continues to hold on to me as if for dear life. Reminds me of how much of a fuck up I am. Breaking up with her for no real reason. Too scared of things getting too serious? Bullshit. No, so fucked up I am that I did it for fun. To hurt her, like many others had hurt me before her. Just to get that rush. That feeling of being in control over someone else’s happiness. To have power and use it.
We lie in there for what feels like an hour. Lucy happens to have motion-sensing light switches and eventually they turn off. We silently agree to lie there, holding on to each other. No need to talk about anything else. No need to explain or justify what just happened between us. Just two people embracing in each other’s warmth for no other reason than enjoying it. She falls asleep on me. I feel her body go limp and her breathing slow down. I have no idea what time it is but I’m exhausted and so I relax and eventually fall asleep too.
*
My body shakes itself out of sleep as I keep thinking I’m going to be late for work. The temporary disorientation subsides and I remember what happened last night. Fuck, my back hurts. Last night it was a romantic thing to fall asleep in each other’s embrace but now I realize sleeping on the floor was probably not the best idea. Lucy still sleeps with her face against my chest. She looks relaxed. Maybe even happy. I feel muscle cramps coming and the dried-up bodily fluids caked on our lower halves become too unbearable. I can’t just push her off me so instead I gently kiss her forehead. She wakes up and meet my eyes with a smile.
“Good morning,” I say gently, almost whispering.
“Hey there,” she replies then continues using me as a body pillow.
“Hey… I have to email the boss man.”
“Oh yeah, sorry,” she says and sits up. I take a few seconds to admire her body. Lucy is not exactly athletic but I wouldn’t call her fat either. She’s got meat on her bones. More of a full body, really. Just my type. I get a hard on just staring at her but stop myself. We have business to attend to. Lucy turns to look at me in all my obese 250-pound naked glory and giggles as she stands up.
“What?” I say, faking outrage. “You fail to appreciate my unique physique.”
She ignores the comment and picks up her clothes, walks to the room and locks the door behind her. A few seconds later, I hear she’s taking a shower. I don’t have any clothes so I just put the bathrobe back on. Lucy’s nerd throne is one of those ‘gaming’ chairs with built in speakers in the headrest. It’s very comfortable. I should get myself one of these. In her computer, I open a web browser and login to my Dreamax email account and type a quick bullshit excuse to not come in to the office. Something about feeling under the weather. I CC Linda from HR in case Steve misses it. There, no more obligations from me and I still get paid.
After a while, Lucy comes out of the room wearing her own white bathrobe.
“Hey, let’s do breakfast,” I say. “We have much to discuss.”
“Listen, what happened last night,” ugh here we go, back to cliché girl-speak.
“Don’t worry, I get it.” I say. “I mean, we have a business to build.”
“Yeah,” she says, biting her lower lip. “Okay, I’ll get dressed. What about you?”
“We’ll stop by my place to drop off the shit water clothes and get fresh ones.”
“Alright.”
*
We left my place not too long ago. I got to take a shower myself and get dressed too. I threw the bag with the shit water clothes in the trash container. Lucy has been quiet ever since we left her place. She’s probably regretting last night but I don’t mind. She’s probably thinking about the sentimental implications and whatnot. I think about that stuff too but damn, why can’t an impulse fuck be just that and nothing else to women?
I’m driving to a coffee house a few blocks away. They have desks and free WiFi for the cash strapped entrepreneur who wishes to run a business from there. Not a bad deal. In exchange, they get to sell $10 coffee. I park nearby and exit the car. Lucy follows. The damn trash bag I put on the seat is uncomfortable but at least fresh clothes won’t be ruined by it. It’s starting to annoy me how quiet she is. We get to the front door and I open it for her. We go in and order whatever fancy named coffee, milk and artificial flavoring concoction they have on sale for the season. Then we sit down and I open my laptop.
“Okay, sorry to push but what’s going on?” I ask, knowing it’s not the best idea as she hates being pressured.
Lucy takes a sip of her warm coffee and looks away. “I don’t want to go through it all over again is all.”
“Look, one thing led to the next. We were both probably feeling lonely or something and-“
“So it was just a spontaneous fuck then?”
“Yeah,” I say. Must carefully measure words. Talking to women about relationship stuff is like defusing a nuclear bomb. “I mean, I think so. Do you?”
“I guess,” she says, staring at nothing in particular.
“We can discuss it later. Can we please talk about the historical breakthrough we just built?”
She smiles and finally, snaps out of it. “Alright.”
“Great,” I say, returning the smile. “So, what we have here is a new class of diorama. Something that has never been done before. I don’t think we can even call them dioramas anymore.”
“Lucid Diorama,” Lucy says as if testing the words out loud. “Liorama? Lucirama?”
“That sounds terrible.”
“I know,” she says, chuckling.
“Catchy names aside, do you know how it happened?”
“Well, I’m hoping it’s not a one-time thing caused by the wino’s mental state or whatever combination of medication and alcohol he was in at the time of the catch. Could be some brains or certain mental states are ripe for a full neural catch.”
“Full neural catch?” I ask. I like how those words mix together.
“Yeah,” she explains. Thank god the awkwardness of impulse sex is gone and now she’s back at her know-it-all usual self. “A traditional catch is initiated at a neural entry point provided by the dreamer by focusing on the particular memory. We don’t really understand what happens in the brain when we do this. It’s almost as if the dreamer retrieves the target diorama from neural archive memory consciously. Then, a dreamcatcher takes a brainwave snapshot which can then be reproduced in a powerful enough computer for the memory to be relived in full sensory form. This is when the diorama is ready for consumer immersion.”
Damn. That was a mouthful and she didn’t even take a sip of coffee once. It’s why she caught my attention all those months ago. Cute and sharp as hell. The complete package. I nod every now and then through her explanation and when she’s done, I ask “what makes this one lucid then? What set it apart?”
“I’m hoping it had nothing to do with the wino’s brain and it was all about the prototype dream catcher. I built the firmware as efficiently as humanly possible and in turn, you took advantage of efficie
nt coding to make the catch process much faster. I think it’s the way you built it. The location of the brainwave sensors and the power output. Might have been blind luck for all I know. It seems to me the prototype snapshots not just a memory but a full neural state. A full catch all around.”
“Huh,” I mumble. “A full catch diorama.”
“Now that sounds stupid.”
“No, it doesn’t. It sounds cool like the title of a 90’s anime or maybe an indie science fiction novel a whole dozen people might read.”
“Whatever,” Lucy says, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Anyway, I’m thinking the setting in this rama we got is generic enough that couldn’t be traced to our anonymous business partner.”
“Stop calling him that,” she says, annoyed. “It’s bad enough we used and dumped him in an alley when were done with him.”
“Fair enough. Our ‘dreamer’, then,” I say, placing emphasis on the word and abstaining from reminding her I did pay him for services rendered. “I’m too excited about this. I want to unleash our full catch diorama to the world at large.”
“I could build a showcase website for it. But the question is, how are we going to monetize it?”
“I’m thinking we host your website on pirate distributed hosting, accessible only through TOR, then I put a bitcoin plugin in it to charge people,” I explain the master plan as I pull the smartphone out of my pocket and do a web search. “Let’s seeeeee… bitcoin still leads the cryptocurrency pack in popularity and the price has been stable enough for the last year at $2,376, give or take a few dollars.”
“Tax evasion added to the list of laws we’ve been breaking,” Lucy says, making a checkmark gesture with her right hand.
I scoff and put the phone back and say “if you think modern technology giants made it big by following the rules, I have bad news for you. And if you’re done, I’d like to get back to your place and start building our empire.”
Once again, Lucy is back at that tensed up state so I add, “we’ll be working only. I swear, no more naked stuff.”
She nods, apparently relieved and stands up. I feel like reminding her she is the one who initiated last night’s ‘naked stuff’ but fine, I’ll let it go and pretend I was just fulfilling my role as the creepy guy forcing myself onto a sweet innocent butterfly or a woman incapable of a single impure thought.
*
Lucy has been working her keyboard frenetically as usual for the last couple hours while I sit in the couch going over the bitcoin stuff. I created a wallet, confirmed it belongs in the blockchain and can take incoming payments.
“Hey Lucy,” I say, looking up from my laptop. She turns her nerd throne to face me and I ask “how much do you think we should charge for each download.”
“Uhm…” she mumbles, looking away as if putting some real thought into it. “We want to keep them cheap so people in less developed countries buy into it too. Our priority right now should be to establish a customer base. We can bump the prices later.”
“Marketing genius over here,” I say with a smile. Fuck, that’s a good point. “Say, 99 cents?”
“Sounds about right,” she says with a nod.
“Agreed. The plugin will charge whatever the local currency equivalent is in bitcoin when they confirm the purchase.”
Lucy turns her chair to continue working. I buy in-game currency in an obscure Korean MMORPG[1] then sell it to a player offering bitcoin, which in turn I use to purchase a domain for our nascent empire. Good luck tracing it back to who purchased fullcatchdiorama.com, NSA. I add www.fullcatchdiorama.com too because not all boomers have died off and some people still think you have to have a ‘www’ to go ‘surf the information superhighway.’
In the middle of covering my illicit tracks, I look up and stare at Lucy for a moment, maybe wishing she gets in the mood like last night. Maybe it was an altered state of mind caused by full catch diorama immersion, something not likely to happen again. Back when we were dating she was somewhat cold and distant and it was usually up to me to figure out how to get her going. Last night was a god damn surprise I don’t think either of us saw coming. On the other hand, I did not wake up from diorama full of murderous rage. It could be the alien dude at the end calmed me down enough to get back to normal and she just didn’t get that sort of a buffer. If these things get as popular as I think they will, millions of people may soon be walking around dazed and confused.
Eh… there’s already a legion of anti-depressant addicted, oversocialized social media slaves out there. Things wouldn’t be that much different.
Moving On To Other Opportunities
I have a love-hate relationship with coffee. On the one hand, I do appreciate the flavor despite its bitterness. On the other, well, coffee makes me jittery and emotional. I avoid it as much as I can, especially when I know I’m going to be tested on my ability to keep my cool, like a job interview or public speaking. But today, I’m too hammered, having slept only three hours after spending a long evening coding like crazy at Lucy’s apartment. We didn’t even fuck again but at least we got the marketplace going. We still have to figure out marketing, translations, international markets and new content but it’s a good start.
The Dreamax lunch room feels so empty. It’s 9:15 AM and there should be at least a dozen slaves chatting away the first couple hours of their workday. Fascinating discussions about fantasy football and the latest Instagram trend should be overheard around the room, but instead I’m by myself, adding a second sugar substitute packet to my mug. Oh well, less PDF readers to install, I suppose.
It’s a day not much different than any other. Steve hasn’t poked me yet. The boss man usually comes around this time to discuss the daily list of PDF reader installations and whatever else will keep me busy for the day. Maybe he figured I’m still recovering from yesterday’s ‘sickness’. I’m typing some ticket reports and already can feel my hands subtly shaking as the effects of the caffeine kick in. Boy, I sure hope nothing stressful happens today.
“Helloooooo…” says Linda from HR in her distinctive acute vocal fry, forcing me to look up past the wall of my cubicle. Just the tone of her high-pitched screeching voice slightly enrages me. I can feel my right eyelid twitching but must remain calm. Must promote synergy and all that.
“Hey, Linda. How can I help you?”
“Good morning, Teeeeeed. I heard you weren’t feeling very well yessssterdaaayyyyy,” she says with the widest, fakest smile she seems capable of mustering.
“Yeah,” I say, reclining back on my chair, giving myself a little massage on the belly. “Guess I ate something that had been dead for too long.”
Lifestyle vegetarians. Too easy to push their buttons. I see the faintest sign the fake smile might drop but by God she has the temperament of a bull and keeps it up, then says, “oh no! I hope you’re feeling better now!”
“Yeah, I am, thanks. Nothing like a bottle of Pepto and easy access to the restroom to get it all out.”
“I’m so happy to hear thaaaaaaat,” she says, tilting her head to the side like puppies do. Makes me wonder if puppies learned it from people or, since people find the gesture cute, they appropriated it from the animals. “Say, could you come to my office for a minute?”
“Oh, I’m very sorry but I’m in the middle of something. But feel free to open a ticket and we’ll get right back at you.”
“No worries, it’s not a computer probleeeeeeeem.”
Huh. Impromptu invitation to the HR office. I wonder if that one Adderall fan club cheerleader upstairs reported me for sexual harassment for the one time our eyes met from 20 feet away in the lunch room for 2 seconds. Guys have been fired and careers ruined for less than that. #MeToo. #BelieveWomen. Oh well, not like I’ll need a job in a couple weeks anyway.
The HR office is a short walk away from the IT nerds general area. I follow Linda and she goes in first. Before I even step in, I see Paul from Loss Prevention and Steve already there. Waiting for me. Oh fuck.
My hands start shaking a little faster. I hope it’s not noticeable.
“Please take a seaaaat,” Linda says and points to a chair in front of her desk. Steve sits in another right next and Paul chills comfortably in the sofa against the wall.
“Hey guys,” I greet them with an innocent smile and sit down. They mumble something in return.
“I’m going to take the lead heeere gentlemen,” says Linda. I look to the side to see if Steve is as annoyed by the vocal fry but he simply looks at me and nods. “Ted, it has come to our attentioooon that a certain piece of hardwareeee is missing from the catch shoooop.”
“Oh no,” I say, holding a hand to my mouth in shock. It’s obvious they know it was me and they have evidence to prove it. I want to fuck with them for a bit but I’m too stupefied by caffeine overload.
I hear Paul sighing behind me, perhaps due to the smell of bullshit, then I turn my chair when he says “yes, and we have logs showing that you initiated a flood attack from a server, targeting the IP camera covering the catch chair from where its neural scanner disappeared.”
“Not only that,” says Steve, taking his turn. “We see you in the cameras going to the shop, then exiting while the video feed was interrupted. As soon as you get back to your desk, you type something in your computer and the IP camera goes back to normal.”
“Wait, am I a suspect?” I ask. I refrain from asking for a lawyer.
“Let’s all calm doooooown,” says Linda. “You can imagine the position we’re iiiiiin. The evidence suggests you may have… erm… borrowed equipment that belongs to the companyyyyyy.”
The effects of the coffee cup appear to become amplified. But I don’t fight it. I let my body tremble to the concoction of caffeine, sugar and adrenaline rushing through my veins. I let it show. “Well, that’s just not fair,” I say and hear my own voice crack. “I went to the lunch room to get a drink and now you’re calling me a thief?”
