by A V Kern
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
About the Author
READY PLAYER FUN
A Shockingly Dirty and Silly Parody
by
A.V. Kern
Copyright © 2017 A.V. Kern
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters in this book are over the age of 18 (18+ only). All characters, locations, and situations are either entirely fictional creations of the author or representations presented for the purposes of parody. All media references made are done so as a parody.
Chapter 1
Dedicated to Ernest Cline,
Who wrote a really delightful book that I loved, which doesn’t deserve the awful treatment I’m about to give it.
If you happen to read it, I really hope you don’t hate this book too much, Ernest.
But seriously, so many name-drops, dude.
If you’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie Ready Player One, the many, many silly references in this book are going to seem even more confusing than they already are. So please, go do that first (ideally both).
All characters and events in this book—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrity caricatures are intended as parody. The following book contains coarse language and due to its content should not be read by anyone.
Holy fuck, the 80s were cool, weren’t they?
I’m Bowie Jackson, and I’m obsessed with the 80s. Sex too, but also the 80s. I know you probably think it’s weird for a grown man in the 2050s to be obsessed with pop culture that was cool for teenagers 45 years before I was even born—I mean, it would be the equivalent of an 80s kid loving pop culture from the 1920s, and back then I’m sure it would have been really mega-McFly for your average (insert Breakfast Club stereotype you most identify with) to be all like “Whoa, dapper flappers and prohibition, amirite?”—but fuck it, then I’m weird. Too weird even for weirdos. It’s far from the weirdest thing about me, I promise you.
But it’s 2054 now! Everyone is weird. Either that or they’re so straight-laced and boring that they joined Roger Dodger’s Cult of Real Reality, but the squareheads in the CRR spend all their time hanging out in their weird, culty compounds and avoiding anything that would be fun for them, like alcohol, sim-drugs, or virt-sex. Especially virt-sex.
Everyone knows that VR sex is the best sex because you never have any of those awkward moments you might in real life: there’s never a time when you can’t get it up, or you’re on your period, or someone’s not in the mood, or someone has a headache. There’s no mediocre sex that’s over too fast, or sex that never quite gets you there, or a frustrating ride on the edge of an orgasm that wipes out in spectacularly disappointing style when you misjudge the right time to come and it’s just not as satisfying as it should be (which I think we can all agree is simply The Worst, caps intended). Hell to the no! With VR jacks slotting directly into the brain-interfacing spinal implants everyone is rocking these days—even the squareheads have spinies, I mean come on, only luddites don’t—you’re always guaranteed exactly the delicious flavor of orgasmic satisfaction that you want, and there’s no one standing around, looking over your shoulder with a disapproving gaze going “tsk tsk, what is this deviant porn you’re consuming?” Fuck that noise! I’ll take my preferred pleasure flavor exactly as I please, thank you very much, whatever those bible-thumping CRR idiots think of it (not that I’ve ever gotten to try real sex, but there’s no way it can be better than a direct brain interface).
Anyway, before I get too frothy at the mouth complaining about Roger Dodger and his cult of morons, let’s get back to what’s really important here: the 80s.
You probably think I’m lame, and the best way to talk you out of that is by listing agonizingly cringe-worthy amounts of things we might both think are cool with all of the name-dropping tact of a strung-out, bragging groupy… just kidding. I’m not going to do that. That would be stupid. And also I’d rather not get sued by every modern franchise that wants to protect their IP from deviants like me (and believe me, the Roger Dodgers of the world are legion and litigious).
This story isn’t just about pop culture. It’s also about sex. And about rights, damn it. Freedom, most of all. The god-given right of every man and woman to prance around in whatever over-sexualized avatar they want and shoot lasers at orcs while getting plowed by an anatomically-correct centaur if they damn well please, and fuck what anyone else thinks about it. Does that pique your interest? Would you still like to hear my story?
Good. Because it’s hot. And there’s a lot of sex. A lot of gritty, stupid sex. Like, a lot a lot. An entire alot of it (not a typo—look it up). Now that would be one hell of a fuckbeast.
I digress.
Let me set the stage for you of my descent into nymphomaniac madness: It was during my pubescent sexual awakening, back when my spiny was new to me, I was jerking off fifteen times a day, and I hadn’t really figured out how to push the limits of my VR pleasure sensors, that I’d realized that VR-sex was way more fun better than giving myself a rough handy under threadbare covers. And thanks to some weird modern laws I’ll get to explaining shortly, fucking in VR in the avatar of a mega-hot chick was like ten times better than that, even. Chicks not only got to ride a wave of pleasure that could crest and fall and crest and fall for a very long time, but they got to have multiples!
If easy access to birth control sparked the first great sexual awakening of the 20th century, VR and the rise of spiny-tech sparked the next one in the 21st century, and it was either great for dudes or terrible depending on whether your prefer your sex IRL-flavored or not. I’m not sure anyone knew what the real thing even felt like anymore by the time my generation came around. With VR, not only could ladies ignore all the inconvenient things that had made sex suck for them even with birth control in the mix (including the fact that lots of guys can’t find or work a clit to save their lives), but they could tap into the dark, primal recesses of the feminine brain to produce a guaranteed, ear-splitting, shrieking, head-exploding, fucktastic orgasm every single time and just as easily as guys. Why stop at one, though? Three! Four! Five! Entire handfuls of body-shaking, moan-inducing orgasms, spilling out of their mouths and hands like the glittering coins of a gleeful miser, shrieking with delight at their wealthy excess of blissful sex experiences!
You hardly have to use your imagination to realize that the already challenging prospect of getting a girl into bed for casual sex became nigh impossible for meatspace dudes in this brave new world. Sure, women like cuddling and all, but come on—unless you’re going to woo her or marry her, she isn’t going to want to Netflix and chill with you as a fuckbuddy when she can jack into her spiny, rock her own world with cunnilingus from her favorite celebrity body scan AI, and nuzzle up to him afterward to watch chick flicks for the rest of the night without a peep of complaint. Why sleep with a guy for any reason but procreation when it’s guaranteed to be better in VR? Sometime around 2030, ladies made the decision en masse to switch from real-cock to virt-cock like a sex-hungry flock of lemmings diving off the cliffs of ecstasy.
I was lucky to be born at all in that environment, let me tell you. Fortunately for me, Momma Jackson always wanted a kid, so she let Papa Jackson plow her proper, and in 2032 out popped little Bowie, future sexual deviant and bringer of unbounded joy to one and al
l he came into contact with!
Anyway, while I was busy growing teeth, soiling diapers, and learning not to gum floor-objects, the adults of America were having a grand old time: with all the ladies getting their rocks off almost exclusively in VR, dudes started doing the same thing out of sheer desperation, and basically everyone just fucked online all the time, either with each other or with AIs, avoiding meatspace entirely. Some of the stories you hear these days about the 30s and the weird, experiential recording filters and shit that they did… man, those must have been some wild times, like in the way, way old times when they sold cocaine over the counter and no one had yet figured out that their “miracle drug” had a downside… the key difference being that VR doesn’t ravage your health the same way IRL drugs do, plus it’s a whole hell of a lot cheaper. But there was, of course, an obvious and completely expected moral panic over all this unrestricted sex.
Enter a bright-eyed, young, opportunistic politician, eager to make his mark on the world: the youthful Roger Dodger and his circle of hand-wringing focus on the family types lobbied hard against the alleged depravities of VR. Thanks to the repressive laws they worked to pass, subjective VR sex now had to be limited to the boundaries of real life biological orgasmic experiences. It could be the best of those experiences, but it had to stop at “reasonable” limits set by these hopelessly vanilla law makers—otherwise, they argued, what’s the difference between VR and hard drugs?
Well, that certainly got people talking. You know what a whiff of “hard drugs” does in the political landscape. Pearls were clutched, blustery speeches were given, and hardware limits were quickly imposed in all mass-produced commercial rigs that limited the gear to the scientifically-verified experiences of a red-blooded American man and red-blooded American woman at the height of their respective sexual pleasure.
What a drag, right? I guess we can be glad that Hank Johnson and Mary Smith, the boringly-named progenitors of modern VR sex-tech who were selected as the “upstanding, healthy specimens of normalcy” scanned to set those initial limits, enjoyed sex as much as they did, or else we might be even more limited in our orgasmic bliss. Here’s the thing, though: Mary had to have been a secret freak in the sheets. One of those sex-crazed, high school repressed, dick-loving Catholic girls who couldn’t wait until her man got home to bang her brains out, because having experienced both male and female orgasms in VR, I can say with a great degree of certainty that her limits were an order of magnitude better than boring ol’ Hank’s was (and Hank’s limit is pretty damn good too, I guess). I have no way to know if that subjective differential in pleasure level is normal for men and women in meatspace, but sex sure as shit must have been awesome for Mary, and now it’s codified in both law and “common sense knowledge” that sex is better for women than for men.
Once the limits were set, Roger and his pals could pat themselves on the back and rest assured that they’d accomplished what small-minded bureaucrats have been achieving since time immemorial: very little in terms of broad social impact that did anything but annoy people, and a wealth of smug self-satisfaction and a guaranteed re-election from the type of people who will vote for anyone who promises to stop the fornication.
People still fucked a lot, and they still liked VR sex better than real sex, of course. But the Dodger’s cap on VR bliss ensured that it at least had some pointless limits to make you feel bad that it wasn’t as great as it could be.
If you think I have an axe to grind, you’re right. Roger Dodger and people like him just don’t like weird. Weird makes them uncomfortable. But I’m weird, damn it! And weird motherfuckers being allowed to do weird things that everyone else thinks is stupid is what America is all about. Anyone who do would do something like sail across an entire ocean to an unsettled continent on a wooden boat just so that they could practice their zany religion without morons making fun of them for it is, by definition, pretty fucking weird. It’s a bedrock principle that our great country was built on, and jerks like Roger Dodger just want to chip away at that freedom until the world fits into a narrow box that suits their particular preferences.
So picture little teenage Bowie, hardly into puberty and balls deep in a moaning, green-skinned space lady who’s bucking against his cock like her life depends on it, and he finally comes so hard he’s gasping and shaking and collapsing onto her when he gets a message from his pal Sherman telling him to check out a forum about taking sex to the next level. What teenage boy wouldn’t check that out?
I clicked in and found out that people had done the other thing they will always predictably do: found ways to get around Roger Dodger’s asinine laws and restrictions. There were two loopholes in law that the politicians hadn’t considered. First, even if you’ve reached the physical limits of pleasure, sex is extraordinarily mental as well, and you can always make it better and dirtier and sexier by making the setting, situation, and participants just a little weirder. Second, there’s nothing stopping dudes from using female avatars (or even giving those avatars dicks if they like) to get their brains fucked out just for the novelty of it at the heights of the legally-allowed female orgasm settings. I figured out how to spoof my credentials to log into female avatars and the rest, as they say, is history. I was a certified nympho teenage pervert, getting my rocks off to the simulated orgasmic sensations of hot ladies as administered via the finest modern spiny-tech.
These two loopholes shaped the pubescent, sex-crazed experience of the young Bowie Jackson in ways that would carry forward for the rest of my life so far. Now that I’m 22, I basically spend all my time in VR wearing the avatar of my super-hot alter ego, Felicia McFly, carrying on in the grand tradition of horny guys everywhere who play girls in games to stare at their tits and ass—the 21st-century equivalent of that is just that you get to feel them instead of staring at ‘em. Me and my buddy Sherman, who I’ve never met in meatspace, hang out in a virtual world officially named “The Overlord’s Facade”, or as most players call it, “The O-Face”, a super-exciting power fantasy that’s just dripping with over-the-top excesses of sex and violence. Exactly the type of place that Roger Dodger and his squarehead cultists would love to shut down.
Sadly for them, they can’t! The O-Face runs on cloud-based software that uses processing power distributed across millions of computers worldwide and is funded, maintained and patched via a cobbled-together coalition of faceless open-source hackers and blockchain technology that the government can’t legislate—or rather, they can legislate it all they like, but their legislation does jack-all to actually affect it. They can censor our hardware, but never our software. And even old Roger Dodger can’t build up enough political good will to censor VR sex altogether in the hardware. There would be riots. It’s way too popular, just like the pornography of old: you might not like it, angry old dudes, but good luck stopping it. The people want what they want.
There is one guy who can control, modify, or shut down the O-Face any time he’d like to, because he created the damn thing in the first place and holds the keys to the kingdom. Or he did, that is, until he died. His name was Bartleby Shaw, and people say he died of a heart attack while doing what he loved: getting his brains fucked out in the O-Face by a particularly well-endowed minotaur.
Bartleby Shaw is my hero. Someday when I die, I hope I go out in a way that’s half as cool as he did, and I try every day to live up to his name in my avatar Felicia by playing around in the virtual wonderland he left for us.
There’s just one thing that sucks: Bartleby didn’t go out quietly into the peaceful embrace of eternity, leaving us with a super-cool and politically untouchable virtual paradise. No, unfortunately, he did something monumentally stupid and left control of the O-Face available to the first person who managed to solve this stupid game he put together. Apparently Bartleby had a hard-on for some kind of “chosen hero” mythology or something because he figured a starry-eyed kid would claim his throne and rule over the O-Face with a gracious and benevolent will instead of the f
ar more likely scenario of forcing everyone else to have dicks popping out of their heads all the time or something. Seriously, what was that guy thinking?
And of course, Roger Dodger wants to seize control of the O-Face too—so he can shut it down or disable our genitalia or whatever weird Dodger-themed fantasy gets him off—and he’s had a nearly 30-year political career to amass wealth and power. As soon as Shaw died and announced his great game with a first prize of ownership of the O-Face platform, Roger Dodger founded the “Family Unit” arm of the CRR that was wholly dedicated to solving Bartleby Shaw’s mysterious riddles and trying to claim control of the O-Face for himself.
Sherman and I can’t let that happen. We love the O-Face and all the weird, sexual deviance it houses. We’ll be damned if we sit idly by while Roger Dodger takes away the one thing that makes us truly happy. Along with the other cunters of “Operation Player Fun”, we’re determined to solve Shaw’s riddles and claim the O-Face for ourselves before Roger Dodger gets a hold of it.
Even if that means I have to research 80s pop culture trivia that’s now 70 years out of date until I develop a Stockholm syndrome-like love of it (which I did) and pore over the mind-numbingly boring journals of a sex-starved, nerdy minotaur-fucker to glean whatever little psychological tidbits might be hidden away in them so that I can figure out all of this nonsense before the CRR’s FU Troopers do, I’ll do it.
I’m Bowie Jackson, AKA Felicia McFly, and that’s just how much I love the O-Face.
Chapter 2
“Yo, Felicia!” my best friend Sherman called out in greeting to me as I stepped out into Brony Pastures, where hordes of young men and a much smaller number of young women frolicked in a brightly-colored cartoonish pastel landscape with all sorts of huge-eyed, anatomically correct ponies. You could blast the ponies here for fun and creds—which was the virtual currency the O-Face ran on—but the bronies would get really angry at you if you did, so it was best to spin up a private instance of the place if you really felt the urge to go on a massive pony-frakking spree.
