Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  Maybe that’s exactly what Billy wants to find out.

  24

  That afternoon, I remind Xan of the interview she owes me, and we end up in the back corner of a busy French bistro in Alphabet City.

  “So for this documentary I’m working on,” I say, “I wanted to get a better sense of Gina Delaney. You were already teaching when she enrolled at PiMP. But weren’t you two both ’03 at MIT also?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Were you friends?”

  Xan stirs the martini she’s drinking and sets aside the olives before tasting it. “Yeah, we were friends. Especially our freshman year.”

  “Did you have a falling out?”

  “Not really. That spring she withdrew from school near the end of the semester.”

  “She was depressed?”

  “Quite.”

  “Something specific bring it on?”

  Xan nods vacantly. Then she recovers herself and looks at me sharply. “James, I’ll tell you this if I must, but you can’t go putting it in your docudrama.”

  “Okay. Deep background helps.”

  She takes a slow breath. “So Gina was raised as some kind of religious nutter. This hellfire church her parents belonged to. Not just strict . . . weird. There are more of them in Boston than you might think. But she claws her way out of their local slum and goes to MIT. She’s a brilliant engineer. Not just smart, but someone even we Beavers think is a freak. But college isn’t all work. Anyone who’s raised that way is going to experiment a bit once they’re at liberty. She doesn’t take it too far, so things are just ducky.” Xan takes an olive off her cocktail spear. “That is, until she meets the boy of her dreams.”

  “And who was that?”

  “One of your lot actually. Maybe you know Blake Randall?”

  I pride myself on my poker face, but I guess Xan is able to read the word “holyfuckingshit” in my eyes.

  “You do know him,” she says.

  I put on a thoughtful expression. “Yeah. Two years above me. I saw him at parties.”

  “Hmm . . . ,” she says, still observing me.

  “So, ah, I take it something happened between him and Gina?”

  “Right, so we get hauled over to one of those inane Porcellian parties—everyone wearing rep ties and talking shite about sailing and hunting.” This makes me wince inwardly since I’d enjoyed many such occasions. The Beavers always have been barbarians.

  She continues. “So Blake is there, and someone introduces him to Gina. She was a very pretty girl as you might know, and so they’re quite taken with each other. Maybe he thinks he’s going to score, but Gina doesn’t really play that way. Fine. So this bloke starts to woo her. Boat rides up the Charles. Picnics at his country house, if you can imagine such bollocks. Treating her like they’re in a Jane Austen novel. But that’s just how she believes it’s supposed to be. He’s hot and rich, and probably has a whole line of girls, but he’s putting in time with Gina.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Not until he gets impatient.” She leans back, quiet now.

  “Did she press charges?”

  Xan waves away the idea. “It wasn’t like that. She comes back to the dorm in a party dress and tears. One of those big black-tie dinners you all seem to insist upon. So she has a little too much champagne. Then a lot too much cognac. And then a fat cosmo for dessert. Wakes up without her knickers next to a Somewhat Distant Boyfriend.”

  Hearing this as an indictment of my gender, I try frowning to convey that I would never, ever even think of being involved in such an episode. Xan tsks at my display.

  “Anyway, it’s pretty typical. Gina is exactly the type of girl to get buyer’s remorse. Little sophisticates that we are, her friends try to convince her that it’s not a big deal. But she’s different. For her it is a big deal. She doesn’t blame him or anything, probably never told him she was a virgin. Anyway, he should have known. But what do you expect?”

  I can only shake my head at the predatory nature of my brethren. I don’t pull this off well, and Xan kicks me under the table.

  “Oh, I know you’re a pig just like the rest of them.”

  “So this messed her up enough to make her drop?”

  “I don’t think so. The problem was that her friends didn’t understand. So she got the bright idea to talk things over with her mother.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah. Her father showed up at the dorm that day, and she didn’t come back. I guess some real fire and brimstone shite went down in the Delaney house that spring.”

  “And then she was back the next fall?”

  “Yeah. Commuting from home. But I was in Barcelona my sophomore year. So we basically lost touch. I guess she lost touch with most of her friends. She went virtual.”

  “It sounds like she had some success with it.”

  “Oh yeah. Gina was troubled, but still a complete genius. That first start-up she joined, Ichidna Interface, was a one-woman show, wasn’t it? But I’d have thought her greatest success would be getting out of that awful house and coming here.”

  “So she seemed better at PiMP?”

  “Not at first. When I saw her at the welcome party, she was like a totally different person. Shaky, nervous . . . like she’d been too long in a space station and wasn’t used to people.”

  Xan tells me how she reintroduced herself, and while Gina had remained as sweet as ever, she couldn’t really look her in the eye. Xan asked about some of her well-known professional triumphs, but Gina seemed like she was yearning to escape her former work, or at least the isolation she self-imposed while doing it.

  Gina said to her, “I looked up my new classmates, and they all seem so creative and interesting. I’m—I’m just excited to be here where I can maybe make some new . . . things. Ah, you know, work on my own ideas.”

  Recalling that pitiful sentence makes Xan stop her narration and squeeze her eyes shut for a second.

  Xan stayed with her a bit more, but eventually she got pulled away to welcome other new students. But she kept an eye on Gina.

  “The poor girl just stood there, fairly shaking with terror. She kept checking her phone like she had a preemie in the neonatal ward. I could tell she was mortified by her awkwardness. One of our friendlier lads tried to chat her up, but he didn’t get past one-word answers. I could see Gina’s eyes start to well up. Obviously she’d made some kind of death pact with herself to resist her shyness. So she just stood there rooted in place. Alone and miserable.”

  Xan tells me she couldn’t bear watching it anymore and moved to rescue her old friend. But before she got there, she saw Billy stomp his way over to Gina’s side. He put his fist up in her face and said something in a hostile tone. Xan couldn’t make it out at first and rushed toward them to stop any kind of trauma this little kook might inflict. But she pulled up short when she saw Gina smile for the first time that night. Later she figured out what Billy said to her:

  “Best of seven. Bet I crush you in four. I’m throwing rock.”

  As Xan tells it, Gina’s eyes lit up, and she said, “Bring it.”

  Rock Paper Scissors. The child’s amusement that obsesses geeks the world over, since it forms the conceptual underpinning for certain types of video games. Contests can become mental duels requiring Jedi-like powers of perception and dissimulation.

  Billy came with scissors. Gina threw rock. Xan was relieved to hear her giggle. She decided to leave her in the hands of her unlikely savior.

  A while later, Xan witnessed Gina actually drinking a beer and laughing with a group of her new classmates who had started a mini Rocham-beau tournament. She noticed her exchange a secret smile of thanks with Billy. For his part, he seemed utterly in awe that fortune had blessed him with such a moment.

  “So playing a kid’s game isn’t exactly the kind of brilliant wit that’s going to get you invited to meet the queen. But any game is a sort of conversation. And I mean, the lingua franc
a of PiMP is Klingon, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, because of Billy, Gina’s suddenly no longer this schizoid loser on the verge of tears. She’s winning. Both of them love games, and because of that, along with some luck, I think they won a little love for each other too. In Billy’s case, a lot. Things got better for Genes after that. She seemed more comfortable eventually . . . When you could catch her offline.”

  “Offline?”

  “Yeah, she was working a lot with NOD. Playing there too, I guess. That’s where she and Billy would hang out.” I flash to Nash’s description of the pictures in her apartment. The family photos of avatars.

  “Sounds like the makings of quite a romance.”

  “Yeah, we all thought so. But it seems Gina’s mind was elsewhere.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Well, nowhere at first. But then, after a while . . .”

  “What?”

  “She started fucking Olya.”

  “You mean . . .?”

  “Yes, James. Hot girl-on-girl action. Close your mouth, dear, you look retarded.”

  “So—”

  “Yeah, software aside, the main thing Gina developed upon graduating was Sapphic tendencies. It’s not that unusual. The women here in New York are amazing.”

  “And Olya?”

  “Her sexual persuasion? I’d say it’s carnivorous.”

  “Like Catherine the Great?”

  “More like a praying mantis.”

  “I guess an aggressive interest in sex is only appropriate considering our project.”

  “That’s not really what I mean. But forget it. We can’t be gossiping about our partners in crime, can we?”

  “Were they, ah, dating when . . .”

  “I don’t really know much about it. I was in Hong Kong when it happened. Before I left, I heard they’d had a couple fairly public blowups. The rumor was that the relationship was flaming out. Gina was devastated. Olya can be cold as winter in Moscow—”

  “And Russian campaigns don’t end in parades.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I came back early for the funeral.”

  “So did people blame Olya for pushing her over the edge?”

  “No. We all knew Gina was a bit of a head case. There was talk, but you can’t really blame a person for someone else’s suicide, can you?”

  “I’m sure it happens.”

  “Yeah, now that you mention it, I guess that’s what started her famous row with Billy. But then he was a head case as well.”

  “Does Olya blame herself?”

  “I wouldn’t mention it to her.”

  25

  Back at GAME, things do not go smoothly.

  Xan pulls me into the iTeam’s workroom, affectionately known as the Orifice. She needs a new data loop for debugging the sex avs, which are still twisting into positions not seen outside of particularly violent Road Runner cartoons. The session runs well until Ginger drops into a catatonic loop and begins humping my kneecap. Not for the first time, I ask myself whether we’re doing the devil’s work by making sex subject to technical difficulties. Or maybe God is as prudish as they say, and through us he’s working a subtle sort of revenge against the unchaste.

  Even outside of mundane moral categories, I have to confess that after my initial fascination abated, I began feeling some unease with the larger aims of our project. IT is a technology meant to address the eternal problem that you can’t have unlimited sex with whoever you want. But as such, it introduces its own set of limitations.

  For me, sex represents the zenith of human experience, and much of my mental energy has always been dedicated to endlessly rehearsing the act and scheming about how to achieve it. Nature has given us this profound ability to really connect with one another in a way that feels nothing short of divine when done right.

  As technology marches ever onward, we immerse ourselves in more and more connection but accept compromises that reduce its finer qualities. A hurried cell phone conversation is, and will always be, a far cry from words spoken while gazing into your lover’s eyes. The rise of email, chat, and SMS has robbed us of even the emotive color of our voices. And so, with our current venture, do we risk allowing some of the ineffable beauty of Eros to leak out along the phone lines?

  Sex had seemed pristine in this regard. But now we’re making inroads. Excavating the mysterious and secret shrine. As a lifelong technophile, I can’t turn back any more than an archaeologist on the precipice of a tomb, but I have felt the occasional shiver of dread that we’re setting out to defile something sacred.

  In counterpoint to my uneasy reflections, Olya and Garriott start a round of gleeful sparring over the spec. This culminates in Olya throwing the 150-page document at him. The impact knocks his hand loose from its hold on one of Fred’s retaining rings. With the air pressure on high, Fred’s plastic member rockets into the wall and shatters just over Xan’s head.

  We’re expecting a well-deserved freak-out, but Xan just sighs and says, “We’re not building the bloody Panama Canal here, are we? I should like to live to feel the fruits of this grand endeavor. So let’s be more careful with our private parts, shall we?”

  Later that day, I check in with Savant. Already the number of players has jumped by a factor of ten since that first post about it in the NOD forums. The formerly rather idle Château de Silling now hosts a continuous stream of NODlings, from cyber-swingers looking to meet like-minded avs to machinima drones obsessively working their way through the available scenes.

  Billy’s conjured all these people to help him build something, but despite their labor, I can’t make out the structure. I’m sure his game holds a story beyond the retelling of Sade’s malignant fairy tale, but so far he’s left me in suspense. Though if he’s aiming to honor 120 Days, then we need to shut him up long before he gets to the climax.

  26

  Though much of my life is lived online in domains defined by data, long experience has shown me that the human antennae, quirky though they are, can pick up signals invisible to any machine. To the extent that Gina’s death is a significant flash point for Billy’s hostility, I want to see where it happened.

  So the next morning finds me standing in front of 301 Conover Street in Red Hook: Gina Delaney’s last apartment. My secondary reason for coming here is that since I’m supposed to be working on this documentary, I should be able to produce a bunch of relevant raw footage if called upon. This is a pretty obvious choice for coverage, and so I’m trying to achieve arty framings of the semiconverted warehouse against the bright January sky. A small sign in front indicates that unit 4B is for rent and that interested parties should inquire with the landlord in 1A.

  From the police report, I remember Gina lived in apartment 4B. Given the newspaper jammed in the building’s entrance and the cloud of marijuana smoke coming from a ground-floor window, I’m guessing that the landlord won’t mind if I just let myself in. At the top of a groaning spiral of stairs, I find the apartment door ajar as well.

  The place has been redone. The walls painted, the floors reconditioned. The raw wood columns to which she attached those fatal pulleys have been sanded and covered with thick white acrylic.

  After taking a couple photos, I start a shot that I hope will evoke spectral wandering. Midway through, I jump at a loud creak coming from the front door. A small black lady stands there, making no effort to conceal the joint she’s holding.

  “What are you doing, son?”

  “Oh, sorry, I was just looking at the apartment.”

  “You want to rent it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you taking pictures like one of them sickos?”

  “Sickos?”

  “People come because of the girl that died here.”

  I flash her a photo of Billy and a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. “This guy come here?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s a strange one.”

  “How so?”

  “He came three days after. Took lots of pictures. Then he just stood the
re for a long time. It got late, so I come up to ask him what he’s doing. He said he’s ‘conducting a séance.’ But I seen a real séance in Flatbush, and that boy, he was just standing there.”

  After I thank her for the information, she lingers to watch me for a while but then departs.

  I walk to the large bank of windows along the front of the apartment to take in what would, in a better neighborhood, be a million-dollar prospect of the Manhattan skyline. In the background is the mercantile majesty of the financial district, with a gorgeous front view of the Statue of Liberty standing off to the side, her arm outstretched as though she’s hailing a cab on her way to some important meeting. In the foreground is the ruined beauty of Red Hook, presenting a stark contrast to the spider-eyed gleam of Wall Street. The decayed industrial port now bears clear signs of financial miscegenation. A tony coffee shop inhabiting a former loading dock here, a shiny BMW zipping past rusted hulks there. It’s like a bleached coral reef spontaneously regenerating. And yet still dominating the area are giant loading cranes standing as though sentinels for long-forgotten gods of industry.

  My camera feels drawn to them, and I reflect on the way that the once-packed shores of Red Hook, which sat quiet for so long as blue-collar activity fled, are slowly growing new factories filled with artisans creating things that exist somewhere on a continuum between idea and object. Figments fixed in our electrical web that you can see and hear, and maybe soon feel, but that would disappear if you tried to remove them. Gina spent her life in this fiber-optic dream catcher.

  Beyond the windows, the crystalline winter day has lured people outside to enjoy the unaccountable warmth of the sun. Kids joyously traverse a huge piece of playground equipment. I wonder what Gina saw when she looked out onto this world. What was it that made her first retreat from it, and then finally decide to abandon it forever?

  I know the answer is usually just malfunctioning brain chemistry. But I can’t picture how all those misfiring neurons twisted her eyes. How could her filter have been so dark as to compel her to set her grisly machine in motion and make the last thing she saw her own blood spraying the wall?