Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  Now that I think about it, NOD is perfect for the iTeam too. Being a feckless user-driven environment, it largely falls to the players to entertain themselves. The principal activity they’ve discovered is to copulate with all the frenetic energy and staggering variety one finds on earth. More, probably. In NOD, you’ll find everything from white weddings to gilded scheisse palaces. Bondage, age play, garment fixation, deformity adoration, and forbidden Orc-Ewok liaisons. But while this might seem exciting and new, it really boils down to spicy chat and some ribald but low-fi animation. Behind it is old-fashioned jerking off. Which, while amusing and effective, is perhaps in need of an update. This is the iTeam’s mission.

  “Absolutely. Nutting Over Data. I try to have all my sex there. It’s cheap, hygienic, and nobody knows I’m a dog.”

  “A dog? Ah, you are kidding. But what you say is correct. Even more important, they are the only major world with the truly open-source software, so we can modify it to our, ah . . . specific needs. This is what you must now do: hook us up.”

  “That will not be trivial.”

  “Ya. So we give you four weeks.”

  The traditional absurd deadline. “What’s the hurry?”

  “We want to leak video then. So we can get TODD invite for formal launch.”

  TODD is a rapidly growing tech conference held annually in New York. The name stands for Totally Obsessed with Digital Depravity, and its founders conceived it as an antidote to the earnest nerdiness of the establishment’s Technology Entertainment Design seminar, “TED.” The target participants are dissolute digerati from all over the world, and the occasion tends to punch above its weight in terms of media coverage. Given their daily ration of boring cell phones and laptops, the tech press is notoriously receptive to stories with a little flesh tone.

  “Formal launch. That implies you have a business plan.”

  “An artist is concerned about the filthy money?”

  “They say it’s the root of all evil. So if your filthy robots are going to enslave humanity, I suppose we’ll need some pretty soon.”

  “But our robots will be very clean. Dishwasher safe, and they won’t give you gonorrhea. The Dancers, we call them. The name is important. We want them to be elegant, classy. Like Fred and Ginger. Like iPhone. Expensive to make, but we get by so far.”

  “But eventually . . .”

  “Eventually we need servants to peel our grapes, so yes, I have been talking to some people. You do not need to worry with this now. You worry about your work. We made the decision to start with a ready prototype, so we keep more equity.”

  “Speaking of equity . . .”

  “Ya, ya. What is your ‘end,’ yes?”

  “A girl’s gotta eat.”

  “Right. We must all sign the papers soon. When we get corporate structure set up. A business, it must be capitalized. So, with all that, we determine correct shares very soon. But I guarantee”—she leans over and caresses the back of my neck—“we make you happy.”

  We both know that signing up for a venture without having the business elements on paper at the outset is totally moronic. Is Olya just reflexively trying to manipulate a number-dumb video geek, or does she really think that brandishing her cleavage at me like it’s a mind-control ray will make me do what she says? Excellent breasts have elicited from me a long list of ill-advised actions, but their allure tends to wear off after a few hours of coding.

  “Well, I guess we’re working for love, not money.”

  Of course, in the workplace, money is the only thing that actually counts. That’s true often enough in the bedroom as well. People say that sex drives technology, but they’re skipping a step. Money drives technology. Sex is just one of the few things people are reliably willing to pay for.

  But I’m getting paid in any case. What she doesn’t know is that I might get fired from my real job if I queer this relationship by digging in my heels over a fantasy fortune.

  Olya flashes a feral smile. “That is the correct attitude. Welcome to our team, Mr. Pryce.” She takes my hand in both of hers. “We’ll enjoy having you.”

  22

  After the meeting, I’d planned to spend the next twelve hours in bed, but the lure of Olya’s challenge proves too strong to ignore. So instead, I go to my office to start downloading the NOD software developer’s kit, the files one uses to create customized NOD worlds.

  A text from Blake asking me to breakfast disrupts this plan. He’s chosen Demeter, a painfully recherché cafe near his apartment that’s advanced the recent farm-to-table obsession to the possibly satirical point of allowing diners to inspect online the genealogy of the chickens supplying their eggs. Hoping a $34 thoroughbred omelet can at least do something for my hungover stomach, I head toward SoHo.

  Blake’s idea of breakfast varies widely from mine. As I walk into the haute-country dining room, I see him already surrounded by food, conducting a meeting. A tall, svelte gentleman in an ostentatiously well-tailored black cashmere suit is delivering a heated lecture, jabbing his finger twice over the remains of his French toast. Blake gives me a “one sec” gesture and turns his blank business face back to his companion. I go in search of some coffee.

  Who in the world gets to talk to Blake Randall that way?

  When I return, the guy has vanished, and Blake waves me over. I sit, noticing the absence of a menu.

  “So I’m not your first breakfast.” I tilt my eyes toward the door.

  Blake isn’t fielding inquiries about the argument. He just says, “Fourth, actually.”

  “You must be a hell of a morning person.”

  “The empire of trade tends to swift decay.”

  “Right. I assume your sister told you that I think Billy has started another one of his experimental games?”

  Blake nods.

  I continue. “So if you follow the clues in the riddle he sent out, they take you to a private NOD sim that’s a replica of the castle from Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know yet. Do you have any idea why your brother would be particularly interested in the Marquis de Sade?”

  “No. Though he seems to delight in torturing me. Whatever this is, that’ll be his ultimate objective.” Blake goes pensive. Then he asks, “Can you, given your skills, ah, make this thing go away?”

  “There are steps we could take to obstruct him. But someone with Billy’s resources, if he wants to put something on the web, it would be very hard to stop him. Also, I don’t know why you’d want to do that. Right now, it’s our only line on him. My advice would be to tread very lightly until we know more. If we start attacking his boxes, he might go to ground again.”

  “Understood. What else?”

  “I’ve found a group of people at GAME that your brother’s been spying on.”

  A neutral nod from Blake.

  I ask, “It doesn’t surprise you to hear that?”

  “Nothing you could tell me about my brother’s behavior would surprise me. Spying is not unusual for him. As a child, he had a mania for it. He’d gotten ahold of a video camera by his sixth birthday. The same impulse led him to become a hacker. He’s always been obsessed with snooping around in other people’s affairs. Trying to learn their secrets.” Blake stops for a moment, recalling something unpleasant. He blinks and then asks me, “So you’ve found files he kept on these colleagues?”

  “Not yet. But his arrest in Boston was due to a conflict with someone in the group, and Billy clearly had an abnormal interest in these people. I’m insinuating myself among them to find out why. They’ve picked me up for this thing they’re working on.”

  “Thing?”

  I’m not sure why, but I can’t bring myself to tell him. The Dancers just seem like something I need to keep to myself for the time being. Beyond the trouble I have getting my tongue around the word “teledildonics,” I just don’t know how he would react.

  “Yeah. They’re working on force feedback gadgets
for these virtual worlds. So you can see the connection to your brother’s pursuits.”

  Blake looks up at the ceiling. “So I’m paying your firm three hundred dollars an hour for you to play video games and tinker with vibrating joysticks?”

  I have to suppress a smile at how close he comes to the mark. “You’re paying us because we’re adept at finding hackers in hiding. If your brother were into bird-watching, you’d have people out in a swamp somewhere.”

  He screws up his face like his salmon cake has gone off, shaking his head minutely. Then he exhales and closes his eyes. I’m disturbed at my jolt of anxiety that he might not approve this iTeam infiltration, and I’ll have to resign my new post. The Dancers have excited me well beyond their possible relevance to my assignment. Odd that last night’s virtual tryst has inspired the first real passion I’ve felt in months.

  A waiter arrives to interrupt Blake’s consideration. Skinny and unkempt, the guy’s wearing chunky fashion-nerd glasses and sports a very thick, slightly off-color handlebar mustache, a parody of the kind seen on jazz age French waiters.

  His accent is equally preposterous. As he sets a silver-domed plate in front of Blake and says, “Dessert, compliments de le maître!” it occurs to me that both are fake. He whips off the cover. Too slowly I recall that this is not a French restaurant.

  Then the smell hits.

  Lying on that field of pristine china like a bloating mackerel is a prodigious turd. A garnish of parsley and lemon serves to emphasize the thing’s foul menace.

  Blake leaps out of his seat. But the horror only hits his eyes. By the time he’s standing, the veneer of control has locked back into place. He opts for that ubiquitous word of disdainful reproach: “Really?”

  The waiter appears nonplussed by this, as though his duet partner has wandered from the score. He lifts the plate toward Blake’s face, offering it again.

  Trying to forestall anything too disgusting, I lunge across the table, but I’m only able to get the tips of my fingers on the upper edge of the plate. The turd tumbles back onto the table and then falls to the floor, leaving most of its reeking mush on the linen. Other patrons catch the scent and gasp in outraged revulsion.

  The waiter frowns at me. “Merde,” he says. Then he takes off running. When I move to follow, Blake places a staying hand at my ribs. I gather he wants to avoid any further spectacle.

  Across the room, another scruffy dude pockets a small video camera as he slips out the exit. Blake nods at a concerned diner to indicate he’s okay. Seeing several financial luminaries on their feet, I realize he probably knows half the people in here.

  He smiles broadly, delivering a fine rendition of the pie-in-the-face-at-Davos good humor charade. He says to the room, “Please forgive the disturbance, everyone. Another one of our adoring fans, I’m afraid.” This gets a few knowing chuckles, but much of the crowd is still murmuring with opprobrium. I see a tiny muscle under Blake’s eye start to twitch.

  Demeter’s owner bursts out of the kitchen looking like she actually has eaten something repellent. A crack team of gloved busboys follow her and attack the table like a trained hazmat squad.

  Before Blake steps off with the owner, he says, “James, find my brother. Do whatever you need to do.”

  23

  The weekend is filled with all-night work sessions for the iTeam. That means I spend sleep-deprived days making gross animation in NOD to establish Jacques as an avid player of Billy’s game. Having to choreograph such vile puppet shows while barely clinging to consciousness proves to be a form of torture that would warm Sade’s heart. However, the positive effect of all this virtual vice is that I haven’t once indulged my compulsion toward dangerous RL depravity since I met with the twins.

  As I delve into the lecherous minutiae of Billy’s hybrid world, I find his ultimate purpose has become even less clear to me. While Sade’s book is pretty good material on which to base yet another piece of virulent agitprop, we’ve assumed from the beginning that he’s working to seriously attack his older brother. The stunt at Demeter, though unnerving, seemed juvenile and used a fairly limiting medium. I’m sure he has a more harmful message for Blake, but for now, I don’t see the stiletto in his garter belt.

  Maybe what we need is a strip search. Perhaps Billy has concealed his real agenda under all these layers of virtual-world frippery. His game timeframe is unlikely to accord with mine, which puts me in the position of wanting to know the outcome of a game without having to play it. So there’s really only one thing to do:

  Cheat.

  Today I will spend the morning compromising the virtue of an innocent server.

  Doing so is the skill I have the longest practice in. Fittingly, given my new job with the Dancers, the first thing I ever penetrated for sexual reasons was a computer. Even for a twelve-year-old, hacking has in it something of the same thrill of a successful seduction.

  As with a real seduction, there are many ways to tempt a system. Unfortunately, given the male-dominated ranks of practicing hackers, penetration lingo tends toward distastefully sexualized terminology. At Red Rook we call script kiddies necrophiliacs, since they are looking for zombie systems with brain-dead security. “Physical” attackers, who actually break into a facility, are rapists. The most common type of system compromise is the inside job. These people are onanists: they represent the organization fucking itself. Normal hackers are Rohypnotists, always trying to slip something dangerous inside you. I prefer the more civilized approach of convincing someone that they actually want to sleep with me. I like to be gentle about it too.

  The host of Billy’s Savant box, Scream Comm, isn’t such a roundheels as to use social-plus-mom’s-maiden for verification, but she does allow users to reset their passwords by answering security questions. The internet is refreshingly promiscuous in its development methods. When working on a site, you check what other people are doing and just take the code or procedure you need. This practice makes it easy and fast to get things up and running, but it allows bad ideas to spread like mayonnaise. In this case, the problem is the queries used to establish a user’s identity: parents’ middle names, city of birth, first car, first pet, high school mascot, favorite movie. I don’t know where these questions came from, but almost everyone uses them. And they’re not very good.

  I have answers to all of them for Billy except favorite movie, and for that one, I have a strong feeling about The Game. In the end, his high school mascot, the lion rampant, gets me in. I quickly create a stealth admin account and reset his password back to the old one. A lightweight process copies an image of the hard drive to a secure Red Rook server. When that comes back complete, I start drilling into it.

  But what I find is a dry hole.

  Billy’s been quite careful in making sure that nothing in this public-facing server points to his current location. The whole NOD install that constitutes Savant was uploaded two weeks before the GAME party from an open proxy in Taiwan. The disk contains no documents that might give a read on Billy’s plans. All I have from him is the source code, which is spread out over thousands of objects and will take days or even weeks to untangle. And in all likelihood that process will be futile anyway.

  His players, on the other hand, have left loads of material to sift through. There are thousands of nefarious cartoons, of course, but I also see several offerings containing live action. Some of these are from mainstream porn, including a stimulating clip from Marquis de Sade starring Rocco Siffredi’s monster cock. The nastier vignettes degenerate into low-rent amateur stuff barely related to the source material.

  However, some of the most recent submissions come from groups of people making original pornography explicitly for the game. Today there’s a new video holding top billing for the “Dog’s Breakfast” story. It stars two Great Danes, both naturals in front of the camera.

  The segment has high production values: good video quality, nice candlelight, and even a gesture at period costumes. At first, I resist the notion
that someone in the eighteenth century would adorn his animals in feathered tricorne hats. But the most cursory research convinces me that the urge to costume one’s pet is fundamental to mankind.

  These homemade videos, irrespective of their quality, share one thing in common: they’ve all been declared winners for their vignette.

  Maybe Billy’s sending a simple message by elevating those clips: in this contest, images of real people are preferred. He didn’t set up this sprawling virtual infrastructure to compile a scrapbook of odious little films, he wants to see the stories enacted. So his players’ formerly virtual activities leach into the real world. The Bleed in action.

  Curious though that when Billy rewards his more creative players for their accomplishments, they tend to stop playing. Or at least they stop posting new videos and go silent in the forums.

  Now, why would that be?

  I think he must be graduating them into an otherwise locked part of his game. And I suspect Blake’s breakfast is an example of how these secret levels play out. They’re still enacting elements from Sade’s despicable script, but out in the real world, and sometimes with unwilling costars.

  Olya’s disrupted necklace delivery is probably another example. Though the reference behind it eludes me at first. There are a couple of possibly relevant scenes, but I’ll bet it derives from the way Sade’s villains mark their victims for specific tortures by decorating their necks with different ornaments. A promise from Billy of future persecution.

  What strikes me about that idea is that if you read ahead in the book, you quickly get into some horrible behavior. Right now we’re still in the first month, and already the stories gleefully violate a number of state and federal laws, to say nothing of the dictates of hygiene. Once into the month of February, we’re talking about mutilations and murder. And so the question becomes:

  Where does it stop?