by Bibi Rizer
The Obsidian Stairway
The City of Dark Pleasures : Book I
By Bibi Rizer
© Bibi Rizer 2014
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 or other commentary.
www.bibirizer.com
Cover Design by Cover Your Dreams
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Chapter One
The oldest things below The City of Dark Pleasures are the stairs. In the regulated districts, only elevators and magways climb over and across buildings, winding through the concrete and glass like the ivy in the humming ruins. People navigate in and out of the web of elevators as easily as blood flowing through veins and valves, waving their citizen passes like white flags if their microchip implants glitch at a checkpoint. Few remember it any other way. Few remember being free to move on foot at ground level, wherever they desired, without registering a journey plan before they left their homes in the sky. Even though the crime and chaos was mostly eradicated by the years of the Expiation, few even venture to ground level anymore – if they have a citizen implant that is.
We live in a dreamlike limbo. Not quite a fully functional society, but not yet able to correct our many imperfections. Sequestered from the world until time erases our shame, we are a living reminder of what unfettered suspicion and fear can do, of all it can destroy. The cold technology that once promised to protect us, now only serves to control us.
But in the Pleasures, much of the more modern infrastructure has been scavenged and cannibalized, the hydraulic motors and electronic controllers put to more visceral uses. So the patrons of the many pleasures offered there have to find their way through the levels via shambling, rusty stairs, some still tiled in the old stone and marble once favored by civic designers. Freed from social constraints, citizens amuse themselves on the stairs almost as much as in the boudoirs. Most nights at least one patron has to be treated for bones broken while sliding down banisters, or simply falling down a flight because of drunkenness. The Pleasures has few limits on what you do and where you go – only that I’ve heard those who work there can never really leave.
I arrive just after nightfall, as is the custom. Outside the Pleasures, the curfew for all non-citizens and minors has begun, and those citizens brave enough to risk the ground level movers and magnetic walkways pour out of the tunnel at the garishly lit entrance to the Pleasures. Most travel in groups, women clutching each other and giggling. The rare men who are seen often have part of their harem of women with them. What these men need to seek in the Pleasures is rather mysterious, but harem women rarely ask questions. They cling to their man, haughty privileged expressions on their faces, as though to endure him paying for pleasure is no insult to their pride. But maybe I’m reading that wrong. Maybe he is paying for pleasure for them.
Occasionally you see men on their own, furtively heading toward the far west side of the Pleasures where they can find other men to fulfill their desires. Such inclinations are viewed dimly, given the imbalance. But I suppose as long as he has a harem at home, who am I to judge if he seeks affection from other men? Many of the men who work in the Amber Columns of the west villas are Culls anyway. Those who use their services are doing them a favor. And perhaps they can’t help their preferences.
“The heart loves who it loves,” my mother used to say, when I cried in her arms about wishing I was one of those lucky girls who found it appealing to seek real love with another girl.
Predictably, my microchip glitches at the entrance. As throngs of patrons press behind me, I step over to the pass scanner, wrist raised. Like many citizens, I wear my secondary pass on a bracelet. The scanner beeps agreeably. A voice intones “Welcome to the City of Dark Pleasures. Today’s safe word is Byzantine.”
“Byzantine,” I repeat, and the gate opens in front of me.
I’m alone, which draws some stares. I would pin my press pass on my jacket if it was a tangible thing. As it is programmed into my microchip and pass, it’s kind of hard to display. Older journalists no doubt get used to the stares. My professors warned me of this. The media is still viewed with great suspicion, not yet absolved of blame for…well, everything. And a woman walking alone in the Pleasures is assumed to be a reviewer, which is even worse than a reporter.
The Sky Level of the Pleasures spreads out along the riverbank, festooned with bright neon lights, gas torches and colored artificial smoke. The Sky Level, so named because patrons can see the sky through the boudoir windows, is where unbroken men entertain women for exorbitant prices. No one seems to mind that they have lost their citizen passes due to some serious infraction. They work in gilded beds, provide the most mainstream and unimaginative of services and live like gluttonous kings. Many of them are fat and soft from their easy lives.
Like many young women, I visited the Pleasures for my first sexual experience. I was eighteen years old and had saved a portion of my student allowance for months to pay for such a luxury. The man I could afford was old, tattooed and perfunctory with me, though meticulous in both cleanliness and consent. He took my money and answered the few questions the burgeoning journalist inside me could not resist asking. How many women he serviced a day (about five to ten). Whether he enjoyed it (mostly). What he did to lose his citizen pass (no comment). Then he spread me out on the bed and fucked me quickly, not at all troubled by my whimpers of pain, or by the blood. He patted me on the shoulder when I left, almost as a parent or mentor would.
“You’re a pretty girl,” he said. “A free man would be lucky to have you in his harem.”
I cried later, in the elevator up to my dorm. Harem life wasn’t for me, I knew. I wanted the life my grandmother had: one man to love her and only her, until death parted them – an idea as archaic and ephemeral as wood smoke.
I’ve only been to the Pleasures twice since then. Once to review a new voyeur service, which I found arousing but ultimately unsatisfying. Some of the women near me were not at all tentative about touching themselves or each other during the performance. Several of them reached loud, extravagant orgasms within minutes. I was alone (again) and justified my reluctance to fully engage with the performance to journalistic impartiality. In truth, I was just embarrassed. But I wrote it all out, in lurid detail, just like a good journalist should. My story on the service was up-voted to #3 that day on the Island servers and breached the top 1000 worldwide. Not unusual for Pleasures reviews, but still I was proud.
The other time I visited, I had a furtive bent-over fuck with a flat-chested Tommy-girl sporting a giant lady thruster. She made me come with a vibrating glove on my clit and barely waited long enough to let me button my jeans before screwing on a fresh dildo and penetrating her next patron. That was on the river level, and cost me nearly a week’s wages. I watched fish swim by her dim, streaky windows as she moved the rubber cock moving inside me, regretting the desperation that had drawn me there. Six months had passed since that humiliating experience.
When my boss, Goldwyn, suggested I review a new service in the Pleasures that had been the subject of much gossip, I couldn’t really refuse. Junior reporters are expected to review Pleasures at least once a year, and it had been fourteen months since my story on the voyeur show. I never reviewed the Tommy-girl. There was nothing new about that that our readers would appreciate.
“It’s at the bottom of the Obsidian Stairs,” Goldwyn said.
“The lowest level?” I’d never been below the subway level before, and there only as a spectator of the many perversions on display in repurposed train cars and kiosks. The lower you got in the Pleasures, the more de
based the services tended to be. “Will I be safe there?”
“Citizens are always safe in the Pleasures,” she assured me. “Make sure you check the safe word of the day, but you won’t need to use it. From what I’ve heard, this servant is as gentle as a lamb.”
“What have you heard?”
Goldwyn shrugged, a conspiratorial gleam in her eye. “Only that you need to experience it to understand. Go have fun, O’Mara. You’ve earned it.”
A uniformed security patrol snaps me out of my brief sojourn inside my own mind. The guards of the Pleasures are recognizable by their tidy grey uniforms and jaunty hats.
“Pass?” she says. “Your implant is glitching.”
“I’m overdue for an upgrade, I think.” I hold my wrist up as she scans my bracelet with a handheld, comparing my face to the image that pops up.
“Name?”
“O’Mara Tanner.”
“You’re reviewing tonight?”
Of course she has my whole preplanned evening on her screen, along with my press permit and the account that will be charged for the service.
“Yes. Something at the bottom of the Obsidian Stairs?”
Her eyebrows rise into her bleached-blonde bangs. “I’ve heard of that.” She chuckles as she holsters her scanner. “I look forward to reading your review. You remember the safe word?”
“Byzantine,” I say, and her scanner whines loudly in response, as it’s designed. She clicks it off with a smile before a scuffle outside one of the liquor outlets draws her away.
I find the Obsidian Stairs easily enough. Each stairway down through the levels is marked with a bold neon sign perched like a bird above the Sky levels. Emerald, where there are pools and waterfalls to add a level of indulgence to the services there. Lapis Lazuli where the women are all intimidatingly beautiful and unaffordable. Obsidian, so named for the darkest of dark pleasures. Services along that passageway into the earth are renowned for being peculiar, disturbing, even painful if that’s what you desire. Several of my friends admit to receiving regular beatings and humiliations there. Probably many others don’t admit it.
And towards the lower levels of the Obsidian Stairs, is also where the machines are peddled. Since the Cull, the Pleasures have grown to become a major economic contributor to our fragile civilization. The servants there are regulated, taxed, kept healthy for the most part, certainly free of communicable diseases. Since they have lost their citizen privileges they are not exactly respected. But they are appreciated. Recognized for the important role they play in our society.
Machines, on the other hand, are frowned upon. While technically they are operated by licensed servants, and so far no one has tried to build one that is self-aware, they make people nervous. It is the goal of The Authority to eventually correct the imbalances the Cull created. Machines represent a threat to that goal. The Authority needs the population to be motivated to redress the imbalance. Breeding. Willingly sex selecting to favor males. And, of course, spending their money in the heavily taxed Pleasures.
A realistic robot, a surrogate male who doesn’t have the air of a costumed female or an animated corpse is the goal of many of the tinkerers along the Obsidian Stairs. A goal so far unattained, but you never know.
I hope the service I’m reviewing is not some kind of machine. I’ve seen them at work. They’re vaguely terrifying – heavy and cold, resembling weapons or instruments of torture more than anything else. I sometimes wonder if those who make them aren’t just angry at the world in general and women in particular. I’ve heard tell of some monstrous creations.
True to their name, the Obsidian Stairs are glossy black, the characteristic shabbiness of the staircases somewhat concealed by layers of gaudy wallpaper and dark metallic paint. I wave my bracelet across a checkpoint before my chip even has a chance to glitch, and begin my descent.
Most of the stairways are five stories deep, so my anxiety rises as I pass the sixth landing, then the seventh. On the eighth, a servant is demonstrating a machine with a comically large cock, straddling it while hydraulic motors pulse the cock in and out of her lubed-up ass. As the servant writhes and moans theatrically, a gaggle of giggling women in matching veils jostles for position. Harem brides out for one last night of unfettered debauchery. A couple of them eye me, pity in their faces, as I move across the landing to the next stairway.
I pass two sweating, red-faced women on my way to the ninth landing.
“My god, you’re in for a treat,” one of them says to me. Her companion can’t even gather enough breath to speak. They continue upwards, cackling.
On the ninth landing, another group of harem brides all crowd around a checkpoint terminal on the wall outside an ornately carved door. I glance around, trying to look casual as I join them. The landing is much smaller than the previous levels and oddly shaped, almost as though it was built as an afterthought. The carved door is the only door in view. It seems this legendary service, whatever it is, is the only one on this level.
“Access denied. Please contact the Administrator of the Obsidian Passage to book an appointment.”
One of the brides huffs with frustration. “You try it, Ellis. It has to let one of us in.”
Another bride stands in front of the checkpoint.
“Access denied. Please contact the Administrator of the Obsidian Passage to book an appointment.”
“I tried that. It wouldn’t give me one.”
“I heard it was by invitation only.”
“Who do you have to fuck around here to get an appointment?”
There are hoots of laughter at this and the brides disperse, trailing back up the stairs with their gold and silver veils streaming behind them.
I step up to the checkpoint and wait for it to scan me, expecting to be rejected just as the harem brides were. But the scanner beeps, my identity flashes up on the screen and the ornate door clicks.
Byzantine, I think, as I push it open.
Behind the door is a large room, dimly lit with feeble tungsten bulbs strung across the ceiling like hanging fruit. There is a cluttered workbench to one side, a comfortable looking chair to another. As my eyes adjust to the gloom I see that among the light bulbs are streams of wires, tangling across the ceiling, down the wall and across the floor. They appear to originate from some machinery on the workbench and terminate somewhere under the comfortable chair. If this is a machine service, it’s unlike any I’ve ever seen before.
I step forward and inspect the chair. There are no bindings apparent – that’s a relief. And I don’t see anything remotely phallic. The chair just looks like a normal chair – somewhere you could read a book or take a nap. I wonder if that’s why this service is so notorious, for its attraction to the overworked.
“So, you must be O’Mara. You’re a journalist?”
I spin around, heart jumping. And there, closing the ornate door to the landing, is a man.
Chapter Two
A man.
A beautiful man.
He can’t be much older than I am, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, with smooth clear skin and a patchy growth of beard on his chin and jaw. His black hair is wavy and longish. He’s wearing fitted jeans and an unzipped grey hoodie with nothing underneath. His chest and abdomen are hairless and toned, not in the exaggerated intentional way of some of the male servants, but in a natural way, as though maybe he plays sports or builds things in his spare time. He looks healthy for a servant. Maybe a little tired, but healthy.
As he steps towards me I notice he’s barefoot. Even his toes are beautiful. He’s nothing like any male servant I could ever dream of affording.
“You want to ask me some questions first? Or should we get started?” His voice has a velvety quality¸ with none of the gruffness other male servants sometimes have.
I fumble in my pocket for my data-stick, and click the record function on. “Questions first, I guess.”
In my adult life, I’ve had three proper conversations with men. One wa
s considering me for a large addition he was making to his harem. Given my feelings about harems, that didn’t go well, especially when he began to ask about how regular my menstrual cycle was and how practiced I was at giving cunnilingus. The prospect of monthly scheduled group sex with him and up to five other wives didn’t appeal to me. The interview with this man was over quickly. Then I spoke to the servant who took my virginity – small talk, routine instructions as he fucked me, and his tepid benediction. The third man was a Cull who cornered me outside my dorm, maniacally quizzing me about whether I had marched in the protests that had finally brought the carnage of The Expiation to an end after five years. He pressed pamphlets into my hand and demanded answers in his soft girlish voice.
“Were you friend or foe? For us or against us? Nothing has changed, you know.”
He was very slight as some Culls are. Not really a threat to me. I wanted to tell him I barely even remember The Expiation, but security guards arrived and dragged him away as he continued to babble.
“We are victimized every day! The true criminals were never punished! What are you going to do about it? NOTHING HAS CHANGED! WHO WILL HELP US?”
The Cull didn’t scare me. I wanted to speak to him. To try to answer his questions. To ask some of my own. I would have pitched him as a story at work if I thought there was any chance Goldwyn would go for it. When journalists write about The Expiation at all, it is discussed like something that ended centuries ago, rather than barely over a decade. But I suppose it’s hard to make an attempted gendercide into a great read. And anyway, most who survived that time prefer not to remember the bloody details. And those of us who don’t remember it are left to our imagination.
Of men, both Culls and not, I’ve been accruing questions for years, so many I’ve lost count. But for this man at the bottom of the Obsidian Stairs, I need to focus on his service. That’s all my readers want to know.
The man invites me to sit with a wave of his hand to the comfy chair. As I sit he drags a worn wooden stool over from the workbench and sits across from me.
