by Brian Parker
In addition to the sex clubs, The Lane had nine strip clubs. They were drastically less expensive than the full treatment establishments and if a client just wanted to watch a dancer and not interact, skin-to-skin, these kinds of places were their best bet. Finally, rounding out the collection of businesses in Easytown, there were seven bars that didn’t qualify as thumpers, three Oriental massage parlors where a happy ending was standard, and the dockyard.
Illicit drugs were everywhere, from the mundane sedatives and stimulants to the more exotic narcotics like synthaine and morphcybin, both of which were as likely to turn the user into a hallucinating, rage-filled killing machine and then stop their heart, as they were to get them high. Overall, Easytown was really a lovely place.
The city barely managed the district. As long as business owners paid their taxes, and people weren’t murdered or robbed in their establishment, they were left alone. Unfortunately, that’s where I came in. All of the homicide detectives in New Orleans were busy, but those of us who were lucky enough to work in Easytown were worked to the bone. Death came quickly to the unsuspecting and unprepared on the streets down here.
A long, vertical rectangle sign clung to the side of the building overhead, announcing that I’d arrived at the Diva. Tiny, light-emitting diodes chased each other around the sign to catch the attention of customers that the doorman didn’t. What caught my eye, though, was the image painted on the only window at street level. It was an original sex bot wearing a schoolgirl uniform kneeling in front of a customer. The nostalgic image was supposed to harken back to the glory days of early sex tourism in the United States, but the idea of those sharp metal angles anywhere near my private parts made me cringe. How people ever thought those things were sexy was beyond me.
“Are you the cop they’re waitin’ for?” the doorman asked.
“That’s me,” I replied, smiling. I tried to keep the department’s social interaction class in the back of my mind. I tended to have a rough demeanor with the residents of Easytown and it landed me in sensitivity training every few months.
“Good. We’ve been losing money every minute the club is closed down,” he growled.
“You’ll be shut down for a few days, kiddo,” I grumbled and pushed past the wannabe tough guy, despite his protests.
As soon as I opened the door, two women stood from where they’d been reclining on a pair of chaise lounges and strutted toward me. I glanced at them and scanned the waiting area quickly. Several men sat looking glum as they waited to be released from the lockdown once they gave their statements to the solitary uniformed officer in the room. A wall of pictures, presumably of the current sex bots, indicated with green or red lighting which droid was currently available. In front of the pictures, an Asian woman with chin-length blue hair sat at the welcome desk.
I tried to make my way over to the attendant, but the two prostitutes blocked my way. On my left, a chocolate-skinned woman smiled and slid her hand around my waist, pulling me against her. “Hey, stranger. I’m ready to make all of your dreams come true. You can do whatever you want to me.”
“Are you…are you a sex bot?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes, I’m a pleasure droid. I’ve been waiting for a stud like you to come in here and show me how a real man takes control.”
I’d seen the latest models in a couple of the other clubs, but had never interacted with one, let alone touched it. The report the department had sent out hadn’t done the realism of these robots justice. These things made the previous model look like rusty metal toasters with a few extra holes drilled into them.
Before I could respond to her, a delicate finger touched the side of my face, pressuring me to look away from the first droid to the next. As I slowly turned my head, all four of her fingers found their way onto my cheek. How the hell does she feel so real?
I found myself looking into a pair of green eyes that sparkled, offering me a glimpse of what could come—for a price. “Forgive Aisha,” the droid said. “She’s too aggressive for you. I’m more your type.”
“I don’t have a type when it comes to robots,” I countered.
“All men do,” she refuted. “I’m Carly.” She leaned over and her lips brushed along my jawline, sending chills down my spine.
I thought I’d seen it all in Easytown, but these things were on a totally new playing field. It didn’t matter what I said, they’d keep pressing forward to fulfill her programming. “Really, girls,” I said as I peeled myself from their arms. “I ain’t your type.”
“I don’t please you?” Carly inquired, pushing her lower lip out and fluttering her eyelashes at me.
I laughed. “Until you did that, I wasn’t entirely sure that you weren’t just a human prostitute pretending to be a bot. Tell your programmer that women don’t really do that thing you did with your lip.”
It was true. The new models looked so real. Their skin didn’t feel rubbery or cold like the older models I’d been around on other cases. These droids blinked like a human. They even inhaled and exhaled softly to simulate breathing. Carly’s breath smelled like strawberries. It was time to let the charade end.
“Alright, get off of me. I’m a police officer.”
Carly stepped back instantly and Aisha dropped her hand from my waist. They both turned and walked back to their couches without a backward glance. “Was it something I said?” I chuckled.
“Yes, Detective. They know of the NOPD’s strict ban on their officers against committing deviant behavior—the so-called Immorality Clauses,” the woman at the desk stated.
“We want our establishment to remain on the city’s authorized pleasure facilities list, so we’ve programmed our girls to respond with assistance of a purely non-sexual manner when they encounter a police officer.”
I looked over at Carly and Aisha. They’d resumed their position on the chaise lounges. “I guess ‘non-sexual’ means ‘ignore the cop’ right?”
The woman shrugged casually. Obviously, it wasn’t her problem.
I walked over to her and said, “I’m Detective Forrest of the New Orleans PD. I received a call from my partner, Sergeant Drake, that there’d been a murder in this establishment.”
“Oh! I thought you were just another asshole cop using the lockdown to get a peek at my girls. Thank you for coming, Detective.” She leaned forward into the light of a desk lamp and my breath caught in my throat. The woman was stunning. She had an elongated oval face, olive skin and gorgeous cornflower-blue eyes—obviously not her natural color. Her hair and lips both matched her blue contacts, adding to the symmetry she possessed naturally and she wore what looked to be a traditional Japanese dress.
“I’m sorry that some of the other officers have done that,” I answered, extending my hand. She glanced at my hand and then back at me. “I’ll, uh, be sure to put it in my report.”
I waited a moment for her to take my hand, but she didn’t, so I dropped it to the desktop. “Can you tell me what happened here, Miss…?”
“Paxton,” she replied, lifting her own hand for a handshake.
What an odd duck, I thought and gripped her hand lightly. “Paxton. Is that a first or last name?” I asked as I released her hand and flipped open my notebook.
She smiled seductively. “It’s my name, Detective. Simply ‘Paxton,’ no surname required.”
“Hmpf,” I grunted. I’d seen a thousand women like her in Easytown. They thought they could bat an eye and sweet-talk me to evade my questions. Wasn’t gonna work. “Cut the act, ma’am. I’ll need your full name for the report and I need to ask you a few preliminary questions.”
The woman seemed taken aback for half a second and then replied, “Paxton Himura.”
“Do you have a middle name, Miss Himura?”
“No. My parents weren’t the traditional Japanese types. They—”
“What’s your position here at The Digital Diva?”
“I’m the House Mistress. I make sure that we match the correct girl to our
clients to give them the most pleasurable experience their money can buy. I also interact with the environmental and tech support staff to coordinate sanitation of the rooms and to ensure that my girls are running properly after the clients have left.”
“So, you’re the manager,” I stated flatly.
“Uh, yes. I guess that would be the closest term,” the mistress answered, dropping the charm.
I guess she got the hint that I wasn’t playing around.
“Place of residence?”
“5134 Ableman Way, apartment twenty-two thirteen.”
As I wrote the information down, I searched my memory. Ableman Way sounded familiar, but it wasn’t in the district. “What neighborhood is that located in?”
“Venetian Isles.”
“Must make some pretty good money down here,” I muttered. The Isles had undergone a major transformation in the last fifty years. When I was a kid, it was still a lot of residual suburban lakeside homes, but with the realization that the loss of Lake Borgne was permanent, the small community was developed into one of the nicest and most expensive neighborhoods in New Orleans.
She frowned slightly. “I do alright for myself, Detective.”
That’s fair. “I must advise you that you are not required to answer any of my questions at this time. If you feel uncomfortable, we can continue the discussion in the presence of your lawyer.”
“I’m the one who called the police.”
I held up my hands to placate her. “Ma’am, you’re not under investigation. But, legally, we have to let you know that you aren’t required to answer any questions.”
My explanation seemed to do the trick and she eased back in her seat. “Go ahead, Detective.”
“Okay,” I flipped my notebook back to the page where I’d written a few preliminary questions while the Jeep brought me down here. “You said you called the police; were you the one who found the body?”
“Yes. The client completed the transaction with one of my girls—”
“Sex bot or human?” I asked for clarification.
“She’s a pleasure droid.”
I gestured toward the robots that had accosted me when I first entered. “So, these are the new sex bots?”
“These are CS98 Pleasure Droids, not sex bots.” A look of disgust crossed her face when she said ‘sex bot.’ “We offer our clients the full companion experience. If someone just wants to have sex with a robot, they may visit fourteen other establishments on Jubilee Lane instead of ours.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to offend you about your little toys.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Toys? Each of our CS98s costs more than you’ll make in your lifetime as a police officer. Top of the line tech, Detective; and they’re programmed to fulfill every desire you could ever have.”
“What’s the ‘CS’ stand for?”
“Cybertronic Solutions—the largest manufacturer of high-end pleasure droids.”
““So, this sex bot,” I emphasized, “finished with the client and…what?”
The mistress picked up the corner of a linen napkin and folded it across the desk. “Kelly—that’s the girl who was with him—went to get cleaned up with our environmental services tech—”
“I need that bot powered off and segregated,” I interrupted as she unfolded the napkin and began to crease it once again. Given the worn lines on the napkin, it must have been a nervous habit of hers.
“Of course. We’ve already done so, although she’d been sanitized before we discovered the murder.”
“A memory sanitize or just a physical bleaching?”
“We don’t use bleach on our girls, Detective. It’s much too caustic and could damage their skin. After the client releases the girl, she reports to the environmental tech, where all of the orifices are flushed with near-scalding soapy water and then she’s bathed in the shower—the same way a human woman cleans herself after sex.”
“Okay… So did it get a memory wipe?”
“No. We don’t typically erase our girls’ memory; it helps their AI learn what repeat clients like.”
“I’ll need a download of that robot’s memory, then.”
“Alright. I’ll send it your way.”
“Thanks. So, the bot—Kelly—left the room and got all freshened up for the next guy. What about the john?”
“John? You mean Charles.”
“Huh? No, the john—the client,” I muttered.
“Oh, sorry. I was confused.”
It was odd to me that she didn’t immediately recognize the slang term for the client of a prostitute.
“The water usage meter on my desk indicated that he got in the shower,” the witness continued.
The price of water was sky-high these days, so I wasn’t surprised that they managed its usage from the desk where the john’s credit was on file. “Is showering here standard practice?”
“For this particular client, yes. Some of our other clients like to bathe with the girls, others like the girl to stay in the room until they leave. Some, like Mr. Wolfe, shower on their own after the girl leaves. We certainly don’t rush them; they are given the privilege of getting whatever they want.”
“For a price,” I snorted as I jotted down a question that I wanted to remember to ask.
“Of course, Detective,” she answered. “Water isn’t free.” Unfold. Refold. “After the standard four minutes, the motion detector in the shower hadn’t registered any movement, so it turned itself off. That’s not entirely out of the ordinary, but the flood sensors mounted in the floor began to go off a few minutes later, after the shower shut off. I rushed back to the room to see what was happening.”
After the last time the levees broke and went unnoticed for six hours overnight, the city council had mandated that all structures in the city limits be outfitted with flood sensors on the ground floor, adding yet another layer of bureaucracy to the bloated system.
“Was that when you found the body?”
She nodded, but didn’t elaborate.
“I know it’s hard for you, ma’am. Did you see anyone enter or leave the room in between the…pleasure droid and when you went back to the room?”
“No,” Paxton said quietly.
The witness had reached the point of negative return. I wasn’t going to get anything useful from her until she had some time to relax and work through what she’d seen. “Okay, I think that’s enough for now, Miss Himura. I’ll need to ask you a few more questions, but those can wait until later.”
“Of course.” She grimaced and said, “I’m always here.”
“Is Sergeant Drake with the body?”
She stood rapidly, disappearing into the shadows once again. “Yes. He’s in the back. Follow me.”
The Digital Diva’s mistress waved her hand over a scanner recessed into the desk and tapped her finger a few times on a holopad before coming around the desk to my side to escort me to the murder scene.
I followed her through a door that slid open when she approached. The scent of perfume and artificial flower blossoms barely covered the antiseptic tang of bleach and other strong cleaners meant to kill any bacteria or viruses lurking around a business like this.
“Looks like you keep a clean establishment here, ma’am,” I said as my eyes wandered into rooms, some clean and empty, others occupied by sex bots sitting with dressed clients behind softly humming horizontal beams of light.
“You know what they say, Detective. Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
I chuckled, repressing a statement about these people playing God as they created lifelike robots. Instead, I remarked, “I see that you’ve followed city protocol and locked all the rooms that are occupied with clients.”
“Yes. Like I said, we want to remain in the good graces of the police department.”
A man jumped up from a bed, separating himself from the two robots flanking him as we passed. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you! Are you a cop?”
I stopped
and saw Paxton Himura continue walking until she was a respectful distance away. The man wore an expensive-looking suit, minus the tie, and stared defiantly at me.
“Yeah, I’m a police officer.”
“I know my rights, this is an illegal detainment and I demand to be released immediately.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s standard procedure to lock down a facility when there’s been an incident.”
“I don’t give a shit what your procedure is,” the suit countered. “I’ve been locked in this room for hours with these things. My wife and kids are probably worried sick about me.”
“You should have thought about them before you came down to a sex club in Easytown. Have any officers came by to get your information and take a statement from you?” I asked, eying the guy. He seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Yeah, I gave my statement to one of the uniformed cops earlier.”
“Okay, sit tight. I need to conduct my initial investigation before anyone is allowed to leave.”
“How long is that going to take? I’ve got to be at work in a couple of hours.”
“Just sit tight,” I answered, then jutted my chin toward the sex bots in the room. “Think of it as complimentary time with your friends.”
“Hey! Hey!” he shouted as I walked away.
After a moment, the man screamed, clearly in agony. The idiot had stepped into the laser barrier that was holding him captive in the room. Dumbass.
A few more turns down the hallway and we came to the murder scene.
TWO: SATURDAY
“Hey, Detective,” Sergeant Drake said as I walked up to the small group of people assembled in the hallway outside of a room.
Greg Drake was a beast at six foot three, and a rock solid two hundred and forty pounds. He’d been a three-year starter at middle linebacker for Tulane right here in New Orleans and even though he was a couple of years older than I was, he hadn’t let any of his muscle deteriorate. I’d known the guy for as long as I’d been on the force and he’d gotten even bigger in that time. Some guys had all the luck.
