Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  What follows, as SuccubOlya’s mouth descends, is without a doubt the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced.

  A feeling like warm wet flesh pours all the way down my length, but it’s unusually hot and soft. I gasp as a glissando of small squeezes runs from stem to stern, and I almost lift my visor to see who’s gotten hold of me, so convinced am I that the iTeam is pulling a bait and switch. But as the velvet wave pulls back by slow, agonizing increments, I observe that really it doesn’t feel anything like an actual woman.

  It feels better.

  Olya’s sex devil seems sprung from a lubricious reverie, but it’s the thought of the real person behind her av that lends the scenario its blistering power. Far from the sterile repetition of porn, and yet still maintaining a pleasant buffer of fantasy, she’s an ideal balance between the virtual and the real. While my brain indulges itself, my skin just believes.

  But I quickly lose this train of thought as she plunges into a rapid full-stroke deep throat. No frightening snags on her hard palate. Superhuman muscle control, like she’s somehow able to use her very vocal cords to pleasure me. As she comes back up, I wiggle and notice the lack of teeth. She squeezes hard at the base, bares her fangs, and murmurs, “Hold still, dorogoi.”

  She speeds up the rhythm, and my jaw drops. I suppress the urge to place my hands on her head.

  Well, what would happen if I did?

  I send out an exploratory finger. Incredibly, something’s there. Not exactly the silky black tresses I’m seeing, but there’s a soft surface exactly where her cranium should be.

  As sometimes happens in real life, SuccubOlya stops, but she leers at me, saying, “You like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you stand up and really fuck my mouth?”

  That’s sufficient invitation for me. It’s not like I’m going to stimulate any unfortunate reflexes in a robot. Being able to put my hips into it really adds a dimension to the feeling. SuccubOlya even offers a few dirty words of encouragement that she couldn’t possibly say under the circumstances. Her av throws in some pornographic visual grace notes, but it feels so good that I actually close my eyes.

  She allows me a few joyous moments of that before pressing me lightly back against the altar and then straddling me in a reverse cowgirl. The sensation is totally different, but I don’t have time to analyze the variation, since seconds later, I realize this episode is about to come to its unnatural conclusion. Olya must sense this, because right then she dials up the heat and pressure. I don’t want it to end, and I wonder if I can prolong things, or if I should just surrender to the inevitable. As usual, my genitals reach their own decision, and I’m helpless in the face of an all-consuming orgasm that feels like it’s never going to stop.

  Then suddenly—pain. It shoots into me like a bear trap just snapped shut on my package. The vids go out, so I’m drowned in blackness. Total agony throbs up into my groin, and I try to slap this horrible thing off my cock. It seems dead now, but there’s still suction remaining. And fuck! It’s completely unbearable!

  Finally I wrench it off, and the pain starts to abate. A burnt, ozone-ish smell fills the air. I tear away my HMD to see what happened to James Jr.

  This British twit is yelling, “Oh my God, what’s he done?”

  I still can’t see my injury because the lights are inexplicably out, and Garriott is in my face with a flashlight.

  I shout at him, “You people fried my dick!”

  “You were supposed pull out!”

  “You didn’t tell me that!”

  “It’s a prototype. What did you think was going to happen?”

  Xan comes over giggling. She grabs Garriott’s light, places a steadying hand on my shoulder, and bends low to inspect me.

  “Your penis is intact, Mr. Pryce, I assure you. There may be a small blister here at the end, but a little unguent will have you back at it in no time.”

  I take stock. The pain has lessened, and the stress hormones are slowly falling off. I get embarrassed about the spooge dripping down my tights. Garriott examines his gently smoking apparatus.

  The overhead lights twinkle to life, and we see Olya over by the fuse box. She’s out of her mocap gear, in a demure bathrobe, but I can see a rosy flush creeping up around the hollow of her throat.

  “So, Zhimbo, how was I?”

  I pause for a second, assessing what I’ve just experienced. The word forces itself out of my mouth:

  “Electrifying.”

  20

  We’re gathered around their usual table at Foo Bar. Xan twists the key to a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and says, “James will not be the only one popping a cork tonight.” She thumbs off the foil while caressing the bottle’s neck suggestively. Garriott begins moaning in falsetto. Xan is not afraid to hose down the table, and I become damp for the second time that evening.

  When what’s left is poured, Olya raises her glass and says solemnly, “Team . . . To a great fucking day at the office.”

  We all make the “2-I-T” sign, but Xan puts up a hand to stop the toast. “I guess we can tell James what ‘IT’ really stands for.”

  “What?”

  “Imminent Teledildonics, mate,” says Garriott.

  “Teledildonics” is the fancy word for virtual sex coined by Theodor Nelson of “hypertext” fame. The term gained currency due to its fine blend of nerdy and naughty, though I think we’ll need a new one to describe what I just went through.

  After a boisterous clink that leaves much of the remaining champagne on the table, a waitress appears with an armful of Guinness and Jameson.

  Garriott takes his shot glass and says, “To Fred!”

  Xan follows, holding up her stout: “To Ginger. May she rest in peace.” We drop our whiskey into the beer. Garriott is steeling himself for the race and says to me, “I can’t believe you killed my girlfriend.”

  This causes a choking fit on Xan’s part. Olya finishes smoothly and slams down her pint. She immediately waves to the waitress. I’m just behind her, and after a deep breath, I ask, “Why do y’all call the bots Fred and Ginger?”

  Olya says, “This stupid obsession with scooters.”

  Garriott finishes quickly to defend himself. “Right. Remember how we were talking about that infuriating Segway hype? So the first prototypes were named Fred and Ginger, because they glided around so gracefully. And yet . . . there’s something asexual about a scooter. So we took the names for our little darlings. Who really aspire to glide gracefully. They seem to move together well enough for you?”

  “I guess the proof was in the pudding.”

  Olya, ever the heavy, says, “Of course, like any good demo, maybe eighty percent of it was faked.”

  “I’d say that’s about par for the course.”

  Olya frowns. Xan clarifies. “He’s talking about real women, and has betrayed the fact that he’s never met one.”

  Olya rolls her eyes, as if the idea of women faking orgasms were a childish fairy tale. “Maybe now you can fuck penguins if you don’t like women.”

  I want to change the subject from my bedtime preferences, so I try, “What do you mean it was faked? If it’s virtual—”

  Xan says, “No, she means the machines’ capabilities. They can’t really do everything you might think from your experience tonight. We preloaded most of that. It wasn’t all real-time.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Yeah, we’re counting on the natural phenomenon that men don’t tend to ask a lot of questions when they’re getting blown,” Garriott says. “Which is why certain transsexual prostitutes—”

  “The point is we have very much work still to do,” says Olya.

  Xan and Garriott put on pouty faces. Olya throws her hands up. “But not tonight, not tonight. Now we celebrate the coming of Zhimbo.”

  “Well then,” says Xan, “with apologies to Richard Powers and his beautiful, if rather chaste, book about our vocation, let me propose: to plowing the dark.”r />
  Our glasses clink again. Xan winks at me over the rim of her whiskey, and I feel like I’m finally inside.

  Hours later, we’re at an unlicensed club in a big loft in Greenpoint. Olya insisted we go due to the presence of some Polish DJ she knows, and she and Xan are out on the dance floor causing tension to flare between the male patrons and their dates. Garriott tries to train me in some of the simpler rituals of the iTeam, such as learning all the words (and grunts) to James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.”

  After quite a while of failing to meet his rigorous but rapidly deteriorating standards, Xan comes over to take her leave. Olya leans over to finish Garriott’s drink and bite him on the ear, which I suppose is what passes for affection with her.

  She pours me a shot and says, “The little one always leaves early. She is delicate. Not like Andy here. But he is small too. He stays, but he can barely talk.”

  Garriott primly downs a shot in silence. Olya continues. “Speaking of talking. James, you are a smart man. And not afraid of sex. We have to complete this very fast. Maybe you want to help us. It’s good work I think.”

  “I think I’d like that.”

  “Da. Good. Well, before you are officially on the team, you and I, we sit down. Have what they call the ‘Come into Jesus’ talk. Maybe eight AM?”

  Only three hours from now. But I can’t keep myself from saying yes.

  21

  All the champagne and stardust has fled from Olya’s demeanor when I roll into GAME very near the appointed hour. I meet Garriott in the hall, and he mumbles that he’s going to Bellevue to see about getting his stomach pumped, if not replaced. Olya seems completely fine. She’s wearing a conservative charcoal pantsuit, albeit with a see-through blouse and patent leather demi bra. Her head starts shaking before I can even sit down.

  “Zhimbo, this is no condition for serious talk—”

  “Olya, trust me. You have my undivided attention.”

  A frustrated exhalation and pursed lips. Not much of a welcome, but what would someone raised under communism know about how to conduct a “Come to Jesus” meeting?

  “So for background, you know I was at this Pervasive Media Program—where Xan teaches. A place for people who love computers. Webcams, online dating, social networking, all these things. So of course we talk of having sex with them all the time. But no one ever thinks about it. I have degree in materials engineering, so my knowledge of surfaces is very deep. But I spend my summers at boring design firm. Eventually I think, Enough of this!” A bona fide fist-thump on the desk. “Why not try to do this thing we all want? So at GAME I find the little ones—they are very bright, you know—and we start work. Now maybe we have you too.”

  “You had me at ‘fuck my mouth.’” Olya squints quizzically. I realize that paraphrasing Jerry Maguire to a recent Russian immigrant is silly. “But do you really think normal people are going to want this?”

  “Who is normal? No, it’s not whether people want to do virtual sex. The question is, once you give it to them, will they want to do anything else?”

  I chuckle and concede the point.

  She continues. “Everybody in the world wants real VR. We know what it looks like, but we don’t know how to get there. In the science fiction it is always these jacks you plug into network with. Jacks in the neck, chips in the head. Like Billy, this foolish artiste you are so interested in.” She waves dismissively. “I think nature already has given us the right sort of jack.” She places a hand over the juncture of her legs. “And this is the channel that will give birth to the technology. VR will arrive when it comes.”

  Her head tilts thoughtfully for a moment. “Now, are we the first ones to think of this? Of course not. People have always made love to objects. Sailors used dolls made of wood, burlap, and hair of horse. They called them ‘sea wives.’ Now we can do a little better.”

  She goes on to detail the more recent history of teledildonics. The subtleties of Allen Stein’s “Thrillhammer,” an internet-enabled dildo chair that, while something to behold, provides only a visual experience for hetero males. Many device enthusiasts swear by their Venus 2000 / Sybian setups; these are a powerful pair of his-and-hers sex machines, but they’re operated only by simple remotes and cannot actually communicate. At the other end of the technological continuum, one finds the purely mechanical charms of a contraption called the Monkey Rocker.

  If one artificial coupling strategy has been to sexually enable furniture, another is to simulate actual humans. In response to a crackdown on prostitutes, the Koreans created Robot Hotels, populated with anatomically equipped mannequins. The U.S. has seen the debut of the gorgeous but inert Real Dolls and their more cerebral cousin Roxxxy, who actually runs some pretty respectable AI.

  But Olya scorns such literal substitutes. “All these robo-whores give new meaning to the term ‘uncanny valley.’” She means the hypothesis that almost-lifelike human facsimiles produce feelings of revulsion in their living counterparts.

  “Maybe one day, perhaps they will be very sexy, but now I think our way is better. We want the machine, the interface, to disappear, and leave you with two real people making love.”

  Other companies have taken the iTeam’s approach as well. Currently on the market is the RealTouch, which is a belt-driven device for men that produces friction in concert with specially produced porn loops. For the ladies, there’s the Sinulator, a vibrator control module that they’ve hooked up to Second Life. Olya sniffs, “A broken metaphor. I do not need someone else to run my Rabbit. If you’re fucking, there must be thrust. We are trying to simulate, not just interact. The problem, it is much harder.”

  I’d like to explore Olya’s ideas at length, but she abruptly stands up and moves over to the room’s giant whiteboard. She wipes out a small colony of Garriott’s intricate drawings and with precise strokes sketches a block diagram of the system. As she’s doing this, she describes the team members’ respective roles.

  She handles what they call the “skinterface,” literally where the machines touch the users. This includes much of the sensing package, which is currently being upgraded. The anatomical rendering is a series of air muscles operated by tiny valves controlling pressure from a small, but powerful, air compressor. Miniature heating elements provide an approximation of body temperature, and then finally there’s the “lubrication management” system.

  Garriott’s responsibilities cover the gross mechanical engineering, including head and neck positions, the hand-tracking wings, and almost all the programming for the bots’ internal computers. He also built the configurable seats they call “MetaChairs.” Olya notes that while all these components seem to be working well, when run in real time, sometimes erratic, “maybe painful” behavior can result. Thus the software running in the devices’ embedded brains is called the ErrOS, supposedly for “ERotic Operating System,” but really a dig at the reliability of Garriott’s code.

  In fairness, his challenge is the most difficult. It’s hard enough for two live humans to coordinate all the urgent motions of love, and the issues are multiplied exponentially when you insert two dumb robots into the mix. Olya explains that the team has found that people are very forgiving of sensory infidelity as long as some kind of rhythm is maintained. The dreaded “pop-out” in real sex must be avoided at all costs.

  The iTeam combats this problem by having the large heads try to always maintain contact with the reflectors on their user’s crotch. Internal to the heads one finds the appropriate sex organ, a mechanized vagina for Ginger and an adjustable dildo for Fred. As the male user enters into Ginger, she feels this and sends a message asking Fred to thrust out accordingly. Since the woman moves too, much of Garriott’s massive code base is dedicated to hashing through data about who is doing what and determining the proper response for the robots.

  Physically, Fred and Ginger are almost exclusively focused on points of genital contact. The exception is the “wings.” These armatures provide a
very rough sense of the rest of your partner’s anatomy. They track the motion of your hands along the surface of your bedmate’s virtual body, making no attempt to render subtleties like earlobes or nipples. They mainly just stand in for places you might be prone to hang on to: breast, torso, ass cheeks, and back of the head. The arms cover a large volume of space, but they also fold into a compact form that allows a single robot to be stored in a good-sized suitcase. The team planned for two more arms to allow v-lovers to feel the glide of each other’s fingertips, but they’ve decided that the intricacies of that feature will have to wait for a future release.

  Xan joined to create characters and animation, and she ended up with all of the demo’s programming as well. But the iTeam’s objectives have recently become more ambitious. They want a system that lets users all over the world come together using any skin they choose and start building their own scenes from day one. This is where I come in.

  “James, the little ones tell me you are very good with networks.”

  “I’ve played around a little. I can’t say I’m a 3D wizard though.”

  “I think this is okay. Maybe you have heard of NOD?”

  I should have seen this coming. The whole reason I’m involved with these mecha-molesters is because a billionaire game maven seems unnaturally interested in them. Why should it surprise me that they’d use the same tech platform to pursue their deviant agendas?