Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  “No, you need to determine whether you’re capable of doing this job.”

  So here it finally is. The imperious master lecturing his deficient servant. We’re not old college buddies anymore. I want to reply that I was the only one of his underlings who was able to locate his brother in the first place. I’m tempted to offer my resignation, but then I think about the Dancers and stifle the impulse. Luckily, Blake is winding up for a diatribe that doesn’t require any input.

  “You take off half-cocked into a situation where you’re not in control, and without backup? We have a team of ex-SEALs on retainer, and somehow my little brother subdues you, and now we’ve lost the only real leverage we had over him. This is your progress over the last several weeks? Forgive me if I sound less than thrilled.”

  “Blake, I told you at the outset—”

  “You’ve told me a lot of things, but my brother is still out there fucking with me!”

  I’m almost relieved when I hear the strains of a smooth jazz cover of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” issue from my BlackBerry. I’d selected the song for alerts that Billy’s av has appeared in Savant. “Looks like he wants to join the conversation.”

  I lean over Blake’s laptop and log in to NOD.

  Louis_Markey is standing at Château de Silling’s gate. He’s got audio chat turned on, so we hear him say, “Hello, James. Sorry about our misunderstanding earlier. But these things can happen when you make yourself the plaything of monsters.”

  “Monsters? Where’s Rosa, Billy?”

  He ignores my question. “And speaking of which, I take it my brother is there with you?”

  How could he know that? Probably tracing our IP to an IMP domain. Or maybe just a good guess after the day’s events. I hesitate to answer him.

  But Blake presses on. In a faux conciliatory tone he says, “I think it’s time we sat down and talked, Billy. Resolved our differences. Let’s straighten things out once and for all.”

  This draws a distorted laugh from the laptop’s speakers. Billy adds, “It’s too late for that, Blake.”

  “It’s never too late for a new beginning.”

  “Actually, I think an ending is long overdue. See Blake, I know everything now. I know what you’ve done. And it’s time that you received judgment.”

  Blake snaps, “Jesus Christ, Billy. You are a delusional little poseur. You don’t even believe in God.”

  “But I believe in retribution. And where better to find inspiration than the Good Book? Are you prepared to be judged, Blake? To feel the flames of righteous vengeance?”

  “You really played too much Dungeons and Dragons as a child.”

  “Blake, you’re a seeker of strange flesh. Get ready to suffer for it.”

  “These threats won’t look good at your commitment hearing.”

  I’m not sure Blake should have openly declared his agenda like that, but Billy’s already gone.

  Blake pushes away from his desk in nearly terminal frustration. He starts making crabbed “You see?” gestures. But then he subsides back into his chair. We stare at each other for what seems like a long time.

  He lets out a tired breath. “You have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  I think about his question. “Well, this is coming just after he saw the video of his friend Gina’s suicide. He believes you bear some responsibility for that.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Even so. How exactly were you connected with Gina?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Blake, I know she invented the Dancers. So there’s no point in hiding the truth here. I’m on your team, remember?”

  “Okay. She helped in getting the project off the ground. But I was just brought in as an investor through Olya. Gina was the engineer. I only met with her once.”

  This is a Blake I never knew in college. This Blake is uncomfortable. On edge. Given his earlier severity, I’m disinclined to make things easier for him. “But you knew her before that. Didn’t you?”

  He starts to answer, but we’re distracted by sudden motion on his laptop. In Savant, apparently the world is ending.

  The meteors come screaming in from a high angle in the western sky. They’re beautiful: startling confections of flame effects and smoky particle systems. His graphics card gives a hitch of admiration as the screen fills with fire.

  Then they’re upon us. The first clips one of Silling’s towers, smashing it and sending stones and masonry into a small group of avs who are watching the spectacle. The meteor buries itself into a nearby mountainside, causing a massive explosion. The ground quakes as two more hit, one much closer to Jacques, and then the whole world vanishes in the inferno.

  With the chaos of fire, ash, and airborne earth, visibility shrinks to a few feet. Still, I can see several avs remain standing. All of us are on fire, our avs’ clothes and hair incinerated almost instantly. We’re treated to the abnormal sight of people watching themselves combust, saying things like “Kewl” and “WTF!?!”

  Eventually my avatar freezes. I rotate the camera around him and see that poor Jacques has become a charcoal cinder, now rapidly eroding in the raging winds. Moments later, he’s completely gone, and all I can see is the fire and, through an occasional gap in the haze, the ruins of Billy’s chamber of horrors.

  Quite a show. But what does it mean? Why all the wanton, albeit virtual, destruction?

  And more destruction follows. NOD suddenly crashes, but not back to the desktop. Sitting there on a black screen is a lonely blinking cursor. I try to restore Windows, but Billy seems to have formatted Blake’s hard drive as a Parthian shot. And that means he must have compromised his brother’s laptop some time ago. Which would be an easy way to monitor Blake’s activities. But why would Billy scuttle such a valuable asset? Perhaps, like he said, he really thinks he does “know everything.”

  I say, “You’re going to need a new laptop.”

  But Billy’s just getting started.

  Blake’s office door opens to reveal Blythe. She looks over her shoulder and then back at us. “What’s going on, Blake? What did you do to him?” Her voice is low and freighted with tension.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about that.” Her arm shoots out toward the frosted-glass ambient display on Blake’s bookcase that indicates movement in IMP’s stock by changing colors. It’s turned a bloody crimson and has started pulsing ominously. “That is our stock collapsing!”

  “What? Wait . . . Why do you think it’s my fault?”

  “It’s Billy. He’s trying to dump his entire trust into the open market. I’ve called Ger. He’s going to have the NYSE suspend trading for the rest of the day.”

  The red globe begins flashing more urgently. Blythe closes her eyes.

  She says, “We’ll discuss it later. Right now, you need to call your bankers and get liquid. You and I are going to step in and absorb some of this or we will have panic selling come Monday.”

  “Wait, Blythe, I can’t really—”

  “You can, and you will. I don’t need to tell you what this is going to do to our deal with TelAmerica.”

  “Now, let’s just calm down a second.”

  Blythe makes an exasperated “please the court” gesture at his stock indicator. “Let me ask again, what did you—two—do?”

  Blake falls into aphasia. “I . . . I—”

  I’ve never seen Blake at a loss for words. He’s rattled. His brother is getting to him.

  “I have to testify in front of Congress next month with this shit going on? I can’t work while I’m always worrying about one of you exploding a bomb under me. I can’t live like this. Blake, please”—here her voice breaks—“is it never going to stop?”

  Blake is up like a shot, taking her in his arms. I assume this is my cue to leave. On my way out, I see written on Blake’s face a plan to exchange every tear shed by his sister for a liter of Billy’s blood.

  Blake stops me with a sharp, “
James.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d hate to think you’ve been subject to conflicting priorities recently.”

  I squint at him, not sure what he means. Is he talking about the Dancers?

  He adds, “Find my brother before the bell on Monday. Or we’ll need to find someone who can.”

  62

  Billy still isn’t done.

  I soon learn that his virtual firestorm was but a fitting prelude to the digital mayhem he’s unleashed.

  Only a few minutes after I leave Blake’s office, an emergency email alert arrives saying that Billy’s hacked an IMP server. I have a couple of their tech people pull me a disk image. Live for only minutes before they shut it down, the box is filled with the stuff of IT personnel nightmares.

  Billy had reconfigured the server as his own NOD node. I set it up on a clean machine and rez in Jacques to find a duplicate of Château de Silling after the meteor blitz. Only the blackened shell of the castle remains.

  However, that leaves the dungeon intact.

  And the dungeon has changed. Rebuilt as a prison for the avatars of Billy’s players, each of its cells contains the skin of someone who signed on to the game. Since his labyrinth now stretches hundreds of levels into the bowels of Silling’s mountain, I gather that nearly a quarter million people have at least dropped in to check out his creation.

  I walk through the dank halls, taking in the vast array of avs he’s captured. There’s something wrong with these skins. Billy has removed all privacy protections on their users’ underlying profiles.

  Even worse: all of the avs’ RL names and addresses appear convincing. I punch a few into the Experian credit bureau database, and they each come back current and accurate. As does phone number, marital status, and occupation. Billy has tied real identities to all these avatars. Looks like Savant’s special NOD plug-ins contained some nasty surprises.

  Nastier still are their inventories. They’re stuffed with way more text, image, and video files than one normally picks up in-world. An aggregation of dirty data that seems to represent anything untoward these people have ever seen online. Billy must have developed some kind of automated system to sift their hard drives for the “naughty bits.” Maybe he’s reversed one of the flesh-tone and bad-word filters kid-friendly internet companies use to exclude adult content.

  Browsing through the videos, I find a mix of Savant creations, amateur porn (including some hidden-camera stuff), and genre porn: fetish, bestiality, torture, child. The volume and variety would astonish even the Divine Marquis. I dredge up note cards containing lewd chats with mistresses, employees, and even a babysitter. There’s evidence of infidelity, abuse, and some serious crimes.

  To refute any claims of innocence, Billy provides links to forensic support, including full hard drive images. He instrumented his hapless victims’ computers with all sorts of system monitoring: browsing histories, screen capture, and keystroke logging. The first selection I check shows a Kansas City paramedic logging out of her wedding website. Then she punches in a password to Adultfriendfinder.com. Next I look for my own name, and I’m relieved to see that Red Rook’s custom security suite has prevented Billy from completely defiling my system. But many, many others haven’t been so fortunate.

  Ms. Charlene Sweatmon, of Champagne-Urbana, IL, mother of three, created a series of lush videos of 120 Days vignettes, including the notorious “sticky toilet seat” interlude. Dave Loeffler’s Little League team might like to view his NOD wedding video in which he marries a ten-year-old boy. Glenn Ricardo of Tempe, AZ, is a middle school English teacher who likes commanding (in very colorful language) amputees to coat themselves with tapioca pudding. Ernie Lemuel seems to have a regrettably close relationship with his Labradoodle. Just by dipping my toe in this torrent of twisted video, I can tell that many of the worst offenders are the Pyrexian Innoculytes.

  Trusting that I have a pretty good sense of Billy’s dramatic instincts at this point, I pilot my av to the bottom of the dungeon.

  True to form, he’s tricked out the lowest level as a sort of antechamber to hell, complete with stalactites dripping blood and a fiery lake. In the middle is an island on which two avatars are seated in gilded skull thrones. The Duc de Blangis, the leader of Sade’s Friends from 120 Days, is represented by Dr_B_Longey, a handsome re-creation of Robert Randall at his predatory peak. Next to him is Fedor_Sett standing in for Blake.

  Dr_B_Longey has a single video file in his inventory. Billy has spliced together a concise summary of his father’s dubious business deals along with an account of his many crimes against his family. Among others, there’s the clip of Billy’s mother displaying the dire effects of their bedroom activity. A kitchen argument that degenerates into his beating her with a spatula and then coming after the cameraman. A particularly harrowing episode of his stuffing Billy’s face into a toilet.

  Blake’s profile contains his personal information (for “occupation,” Billy cheekily entered “Malefactor of Great Wealth”) but no media. He has a single note card, which reads:

  One day his plagues will overtake him:

  death, mourning, and famine.

  He will be consumed by fire,

  for mighty is the one who judges him.

  That turns out to be Revelation 18:8 with the gender of the pronouns changed. The original passage refers to the Whore of Babylon, a typically subtle dig at Blake. His use of “one day” implies that, though he seems intent on judging his brother for his crimes, Billy has started the trial by granting him a continuance.

  Why would he do that? Is it simple showmanship, building suspense for his audience? Or maybe he believes Blake is liable to commit even greater villainy than his father, and Billy simply wants to wait until all the evidence is in.

  My friend Eeyore sees the biblical dimensions of Billy’s leak as well. He texts me:

  Pornaggedon draws nigh.

  I call him to see what he’s learned.

  “You think a lot of innocent perverts are going to be spraying their morning coffee all over their computer screens?”

  “James, I’ve just determined that our congressman collects crush videos. Women in high heels mashing insects mostly, which is a relief. The attorney general of Delaware has footage with, ah, various mammals.”

  “How did you rez in?”

  “No, James. Not NOD. I’m using the web database our target has helpfully provided. A nice Flash interface for the casual browser.”

  I pull up the link he sends me and can’t resist trying a few searches to get my head around it. After sorting by occupation, I’m not too surprised to see several state reps, a judge, seven clergy, two semifamous actors, and a child welfare specialist among those indulging some peculiar tastes. Though I’m sure these people will be surprised to have their private delights so publicly exposed.

  Eeyore says, “He’s even got pictures of most people. And linked their addresses to Google Maps.”

  “I’m glad I finally have some icebreakers for when I see the neighborhood celebrities in the deli.”

  “If you can fight through the camera scrum.”

  I check the magnitude of the disclosure. Billy has just shy of a million people pinned to his digital Styrofoam. Like a collection of exotic insects he neglected to suffocate before display, their legs still twitching. That’s a far bigger group than just his Savant players, and there’s something else strange about the data.

  “Eeyore, how can this database be growing?”

  “We don’t know yet. Probably some kind of worm. Maybe he’s got black hats on the payroll. We have the trawl nets out.”

  “Money is no object.”

  “That’s true more and more these days.”

  I sit, remembering the terror I felt the first time I was too reckless online and found my laptop at the mercy of a Czech cracker co-op. When you get infected, you worry first about your bank passwords, then about your files, and finally you deal with the notion that your secrets have been exposed to
prying eyes. But most crackers just want your bandwidth and couldn’t care less that you spend too much time at MILFmonitor.com. Billy’s worm is different, however. Here, exposure is the sole purpose. If his Hell Is Other People experiment sought to explore fear, then this turn in Savant is clearly meant to explore shame.

  Anonymity is the lifeblood of the frenzy of raunchiness that followed in the wake of the internet. I can’t think of a better way to kill a sex-related business than to start revealing personal details about its clients. What chaos might be created for Blake if his investment in NOD blows up from being implicated in a privacy scandal? He mentioned his board shitting Yorkshire terriers over material losses from his VR project. If Billy’s successful here, I think we’ll see them trying to pass a mastodon.

  Assuming he has one, Billy’s larger artistic objective must be to remind everyone that while the internet affords us our aliases and avatars, the same technology also makes it feasible to record all our purchases, conversations, and actions with frightening ease. In most cases, our beloved disguises are distressingly fragile, and the volume of secrets that can be disclosed is greater than it’s ever been.

  McClaren calls me two hours later.

  “You have any hot ideas for getting this genie back in its bottle?”

  I’d been assessing the possibility of containment just before he called. A couple net-crawlers I sent out searching for sample file names told me Billy already has his NOD shard up on another server. It will only be a matter of hours before his dungeon reconnects to the main grid.

  “Well, since he’s distributing child porn, I’m sure the ISPs will move fast to shut down his backups. In the meantime, you can have Red Rook hose down sites as they crop up.” I’m suggesting he mount a denial-of-service (DOS) attack to cripple any servers found hosting the files. “So if not back in its bottle, maybe we can wash it down the drain.”