Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Great,” he said. “How long is this going to last?” The last thing he needed was for someone to give him a vid call and on their own monitor catch a glimpse of the girl to one side, or worse, for someone to come calling in person. Right, but how often did that happen? He couldn’t remember the last time another flesh and blood being had stood in his flat.

  Straightening, he returned his attention to her. Now that he was out of his chair, she had turned her face up a little to keep her eyes on his. He saw them blink again. “Angel, huh? Next thing you know I’ll be talking to you,” he said, then cut himself off when he realized he already was.

  He circled around her, as much to see what would happen as to see the back of her body, but she shuffled quickly to remain facing him. Was there a way to get her to change positions? A button on the keyboard, an oral command or gesture? What was one supposed to do with her, except sit there ogling her as they pleasured themselves? She couldn’t be physically touched. Maybe her attentive eyes were enough to stimulate those who downloaded her willingly, though Lawr couldn’t understand how he was supposed to have known this was possible, novice that he was to this realm.

  If one were set up for the ultranet, instead of merely the net, one could interact only too convincingly with constructs. He had heard sex in the ultranet was better than the real thing, every sense heightened, and he could believe it, though his only personal experience had come from a friend’s system. He had allowed Lawr to play a horror/action game, in which a pack of bluish, dog-like snipes had chased Lawr through the dark, narrow hallways of a decommissioned space freighter his character had stolen into in search of salvageables. That terrifying episode had been more real than reality, too, and Lawr had heard of people actually dying of fright while interfaced with the ultranet. This experience was part of the reason he settled for the basic net, though it also had a lot to do with his meager office drone’s salary.

  Lawr found that his erection had wilted, and he refastened his pants as if his visitor made him feel self-conscious, despite her own nudity. It was odd that, naked as she was, she almost looked more pure than she did sexual. But he was beginning to suspect that her beatific smile had more to do with the model having been drugged before being filmed, than it had to do with any true pleasure on her part.

  “I have to get to bed,” he told the imp accusingly. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” His flat was small; the living room served also as his bedroom, and if he were to retire now she would no doubt pivot accordingly to watch him as he lay there. How was he supposed to sleep, if that were the case? He’d have to draw the blanket over his head to shut out the green fairy’s glow...and those staring eyes.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he decided, though he usually took one in the morning. He started past her toward his tiny bathroom, but looked back to say, “You’d better be gone by the time I get back.”

  She just beamed at him, as if in adoration of a father.

  * * *

  When he returned from showering and brushing his teeth the girl was indeed gone from her place by his desk, without having left any foot depressions in his shaggy, moss green carpet. He felt relieved, though also grumpily cheated of the release he had been working toward before her arrival.

  He turned to his bed, and she lay there upon it – on her side, her legs curled and her head resting on one crooked arm, watching him as if waiting for him to notice her, and join her there. Though again, her smile was ever innocent, not prurient.

  “Dung!” Lawr hissed, angry for having been startled by this apparition twice in one night.

  So the imp was programmed to shift into a new phase, a new pose, and just as the ad for The Toilet Man movie had known how to seek out his flat’s toilet, so this projection had homed in on his bed. But now what was he supposed to do? How could he sleep beside it? Despite what a fetching creature she was, the idea made him too...uncomfortable.

  Maybe he couldn’t be rid of her altogether until her allotted existence expired, but if he could at least chase her off his bed like an unruly dog. He took up his can of atomized spray, hoping it would break her attachment to the bed the way it unfocused homing imps that buzzed around one like thirsty mosquitoes. He sprayed her foot to head, but she didn’t so much as blink at the mist he covered her with, just watched him placidly. Yeah, the model must have been doped, but the imp’s expression made her look adoring for his attentions.

  “Thanks,” he grumbled, returning the ineffective spray to its shelf. He shut down his comp before moving toward the big reclining chair he had inherited when he’d moved in here. He settled into it, then adjusted it as far back as it would go. “Very nice,” he added, squirming to get comfortable. He glanced over at her. “What are you waiting for,” he snapped, “a bedtime story?” Then he looked away, and closed his eyes.

  He had not shut off the light in the room, but this was not an oversight.

  * * *

  Lawr dreamed he was at work, but weirdly, he saw himself from outside his body. It was as though he stood behind himself, watching this more corporeal Lawr as he hunkered in front of his work comp in his cluttered little cubicle, while other drones in adjoining cubicles labored similarly or spoke in vid calls. But Lawr’s eavesdropping spirit grew alarmed to see that what filled the main monitor was a menu of samples for pornographic galleries and vids.

  “Hey,” he said, to warn himself before someone could enter the cubicle and notice what he was looking at. “Lawrence!” he said, and reached out to tap his own shoulder.

  When he did, the man in the chair swiveled around to face him. His face was scratched out with black lines, as if with a marker.

  * * *

  Lawr woke with a jolt. When he realized he was in the recliner, the small of his back aching from too long a time there, he propped himself up a little to see if the imp had dissipated.

  She had not. She was still in the center of his bed, lying atop his covers. But she had been facing outward previously, and now she had rolled over to face the wall. A third phase? He sat up further, and took her in more closely.

  She had been thin before, almost fragile, but now it seemed she had become brittle. The bumps of her spine and shoulder blades looked ready to tear through a paper thin skin. Her jutting hip bone was alarming. It was as though the imp were deteriorating, wasting away, instead of merely fading from existence.

  Lawr got up from the chair with a groan and approached his bed, moving around to its foot to get a look at the front of her. What he saw made his chest lock up.

  Her ribs jutted, her emaciated chest ready to cave in on itself, but most distressing was the girl’s face. Her eye sockets were so black they looked like the empty pits of a skull, and he couldn’t tell if that was an effect of starvation or bruises from a beating. Her cheeks were gaunt, the end of her nose blackened, again like a hole in a skull (and again, from a blow?), her lips drawn back in a pained grimace. The girl was hugging shockingly thin arms across her nonexistent breasts, and she was shivering. Worst of all, her mouth was working, and he could tell she was whimpering – maybe words – but of course he couldn’t hear it.

  He thanked God that at least this time her eyes were closed.

  “What did they do to you?” Lawr whispered. “Oh my God...what did they do?”

  Starve her? For how long? Or infect her, unintentionally or even willingly, with a deadly STD? He now noticed more bruises scattered upon her body, and he found himself wagging his head. He found himself hugging his chest, as she did.

  He was afraid, and he was angry. This pollution was into his comp’s memory now, and he might never scrub it out on his own. Feeling sickened, almost light-headed, he lurched toward his computer and dropped into his chair, pawed at the keyboard. He returned to the site where he had inadvertently downloaded the imp. There, he went into the information regarding his new account, and found a link for help questions and technical support. There was no live contact for him to call, but there was a feature that enabled him to
send a message. He typed one between glances at the girl in his bed. He was terrified at the idea of looking over his shoulder to discover her propped up, the eyes in those black sockets staring at him – maybe accusingly, as if he had something to do with her suffering – but she remained in her fetal position.

  He wrote, “Last night I accidentally downloaded a holographic program called, I guess, SHE’S AN ANGEL from your site. I had no idea that your site featured such filth, and I’m outraged. Please tell me...”

  He paused. Tell him what? How to rid himself of the imp? Well, these things vanished on their own after a time, didn’t they? So tell him what – how long that would take? How to cleanse his comp’s memory of every trace of the program? After another glance at the trembling, cadaverous body in his bed, he resumed typing.

  “Please tell me when this thing was recorded. The model in this program is in a very dangerous state.”

  As if she might still be rescued in time. Even if this had been recorded a week ago, days ago, wouldn’t the girl already be dead by now if her situation hadn’t changed? She looked on the verge of death already. Who was he kidding? He was looking at a corpse. She...

  SHE’S AN ANGEL. Oh...yes. So very funny, a joke maybe, but it sent a cold ripple up and down his back on centipede legs. Now he understood the words that had appeared on his screen.

  He went on, “This should be called to the attention of the authorities. This is not titillation – this stuff portrays a horrific crime.”

  Not titillating? Well, someone had thought so. The person, or people, who had created the program, if no one else.

  Lawr finished, “Do the forcers know who this girl is? What happened to her?”

  But why was he asking these people? Shouldn’t he be contacting the forcers themselves, to call their attention to this nightmare – assuming they weren’t already aware of it from earlier complaints?

  Ha. Yes, sure, call the forcers. He could invite them up to his flat and introduce them to the girl dying virtually in his bed. After which they could introduce him to a nice cell in the nearest precinct house.

  Almost absentmindedly he sent his message, then rose from his chair to regard the imp again. Despite the fact that this girl surely had to be dead – perhaps even months or years dead – he felt a mounting urgency, a growing desperation. He tried to reassure himself that the people who had done this might already have been caught and punished. The girl might already be long buried or cremated. Dare he hope that she might even have been released by her captors before she could succumb, their fun finished? Might she be recovering in a hospital now, or even safely at home with loving parents?

  SHE’S AN ANGEL.

  No...no, she was dead, that was a fact. His houseguest was a ghost. But even if her body had been found, it could be that her murderers had never been apprehended. What if the forcers had never heard about this download? Might there even be clues about the perpetrators accidentally captured in the recording? A reflection of a face in her pupils – in the earlier sections before her torture had begun, when her gentle eyes had still been open – if one could magnify the image enough? Was there anything he himself could do to study the recording, with the discovery of evidence in mind?

  He felt so...impotent. An anonymous message to the forcers; couldn’t he do that much, at least?

  Outside his windows, the sun was struggling to rise beyond the oppressive, massed towers of Punktown’s cityscape. Lawr hurried to pick up the remote that tinted his windows black, lest some voyeur in an apartment across the street peek into his flat. The city was full of lustful, furtive creatures, wasn’t it?

  How could he think of going to work today, even if the imp disappeared before he left for the office? He was in no condition for it; he’d vibrate in his chair until he exploded across the walls of his tiny cell of a cubicle. No, he’d call in sick. They wouldn’t like it, but at this point he didn’t care.

  He felt like a man who had awoken to find a living, breathing kidnap victim left on his hands. As if he himself shared complicity in such a crime.

  He regarded the girl again, wagged his head again, and muttered to her, “What am I supposed to do, huh? What am I supposed to do about you?”

  He made a sandwich and coffee for a quick breakfast, eating it around the corner of his kitchen as if self-conscious about viewing her starved body while he fed his own meaty form. When enough time had elapsed he made the call to his workplace, uncomfortable about his team leader seeing his image on her own screen, the green imp only feet away from him, just out of her range of sight. His team leader didn’t seem too irritated, after all, so he was grateful for small mercies. As he signed off he saw that a new text message had come in, and immediately he recognized its source as the porn site he had joined, in reply to his own message of only two hours ago. So early? But then, perhaps they were in another time zone, if not on another colony world altogether. Whatever the case, he began to read the words that had come from some anonymous customer support tech.

  “Hello. In response to your message, we’re sorry that you were surprised to have downloaded the program in question. In the future, you will note that there is a tiny icon in the lower left corner of every interactive holograph link, should you wish to avoid any further accidental downloads. As for the subject matter of the download, sir, one can’t help but ask if you ‘accidentally’ joined our site, as well, without having any idea of the kind of content Incestykes offers to its subscribers...”

  “You sarcastic bastard,” Lawr said aloud, blood rising to his face.

  “As for the individual in question, I have no information to offer about the outcome of the situation featured in the recording, or her present condition or whereabouts. Our still images and recordings come from countless sources, and we are not on a first name basis with them. We are offered content, we pay for it, and we post it. All we ask is that they confirm that the subjects involved are above the age of legal consent...”

  “They lie,” Lawr said. “And you’re lying, too. You know she isn’t...you know.” And age of consent or not, the girl was dying. Would they claim they took that to be fake? Or murder with the girl’s own consent, her willing participation, perhaps? That the child had filmed her own suicide by starvation, and pummeled herself for good measure?

  “I will tell you, sir, that though this might not be ‘titillation’ in your eyes, it happens to be one of our site’s most popular downloads...”

  “God,” Lawr whispered.

  “But if it’s of any comfort to you, the program will end on its own after its fourth phase...”

  Fourth? Lawr thought. He stole a nervous peek at his quivering roommate.

  “And sir, it might be rude of me to ask you this, but I can’t help but be curious. Are you new to Punktown?”

  “Fuck you,” Lawr snapped, shaking all over as he stabbed a finger into the key that closed the text message.

  * * *

  Lawr didn’t own a car and thus rode the blue line to another neighborhood, to use a public vidphone that would be distant from his home. The tube was crowded and he was pressed close to one of its entrances, standing up and gripping a metal pole. A short, curvy black woman with thick reddish braids stood chatting with a friend in front of him, and as the tube swerved and swayed along its route her body repeatedly tilted so that her back pressed into his knuckles where they gripped the shaft. Then for a prolonged period she remained leaning back against his fist. Surely she knew it was a hand, his hand, indenting her soft flesh. He wondered if she might be savoring the human contact as much as he did, if only unconsciously. She got out one stop ahead of his, never glancing back, and his heart rolled over with sickening longing as if the love of his life had just abandoned him. He realized, in a stunned kind of way, that he was even on the verge of tears. Then the doors hissed shut, and the tube plunged back into darkness.

  He reached his stop, at street level purchased a coffee at a ubiquitous chain, sipped it as he made his way to the publi
c phone he had recalled could be found here. In its clear plastic booth, the thicket of graffiti on its walls affording him further shelter, he wrapped his finger in a napkin like a bandage so as not to leave prints on the keyboard.

  Back at home he had found the call number for the Paxton Police Force’s anonymous tip hotline. The information at the PPF’s public site had assured him that the call would not be traced, but he wasn’t so sure of that. Supposedly his voice would be distorted, and no vid transmission would be received on their end. He hesitated, his finger poised over the keys. Could he believe them? They wouldn’t dare lie about their methods, would they? Was he really willing to take that chance? And for what – to rescue a dead girl?

  He stalled by sipping his coffee, and watching pedestrians through clear spots in the booth’s painted walls, feeling removed in his observation as if he were peeking at them on a screen. A Choom woman in a smart business suit clacked by on shiny heels, her skirt taut and without wrinkles, her legs almost unnaturally shapely and smooth in their hose, like the legs of a mannequin. Her ear-to-ear lips were painted a metallic blue to match her tie, her face like porcelain with either skin treatments or makeup or both. It seemed to Lawr sometimes that people wanted to make themselves look less – or more – than real.