by Sean Platt
“They threw shit at her, Nicolai. Tomatoes. Fucking tomatoes, like Vaudeville. It took fifty police to stop what almost became a full-scale riot. She’s terrified. Well, of course, this is Natasha, so she’s not outwardly terrified, but she is just the same. I can see it. But she’s also… hang on, Nicolai.”
Nicolai had seen this move before and knew what was coming. Isaac was going to run out to his patio to say something he didn’t want Natasha to hear. Despite taking the call as voice-only, Nicolai could almost see Isaac scamper outside in his mind. Couldn’t Natasha see right through it? His departure had to say more than his words ever could.
Nicolai paced, waiting. He crossed the bank of windows looking out onto the city night below. As he passed his grand piano, his fingers feathered the keys. He kept promising himself he’d learn to play it one of these days, but a man only had so much time. Right now, he had his work writing for Isaac, plus his private creative writing projects. The piano would have to wait.
“You still there?” said Isaac’s voice. It seemed to be right in front of Nicolai.
“Where would I be?”
“I’d know, if you’d use video like a normal person.”
“Not everyone wants to be on video all the time, Isaac. What if I’m naked?”
Isaac made an impatient noise and continued. “Anyway, I was going to say that Natasha is hurt. Not like injured, but like… well, you know how she is.”
Nicolai knew. Natasha had practically grown up in the spotlight, and appreciation was, for her, like blood to a vampire.
“I understand.”
“The rioters were from our own party, from the Directorate. I don’t like it. It makes us look like a mob.”
“Of course it was our people,” said Nicolai. “Enterprise don’t riot.” And it was true. There were plenty of Enterprise members in the rabble (there were more Enterprise than Directorate below the line, actually, seeing as Directorate received support from their party whether they worked or not) but those poor Enterprise were starving artists, not disgruntled workmen. Artists didn’t rise up. When artists took a gamble and failed their way into ghettos, they sat in dark corners, slit their wrists, and listened to Morrissey drawl on from a century in the past.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, Isaac. Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. But I have a speech tomorrow. A speech to these… these fuckers.”
Nicolai couldn’t help but chuckle, keeping the sound low in his throat. He paced his apartment as Isaac’s voice followed.
“I’ll rewrite your speech,” Nicolai said. “This could be good. Don’t worry. I can spin anything.”
Isaac blurted. “How could it be good?”
“Unrest over inequity should actually work in our favor, not against us. Sure, Natasha is your wife and you’re Mr. Directorate, but where’s most of the wealth outside of Directorate leaders? Is it in the Directorate?”
“Well… no…”
“Of course not. So do you see what I’m saying?”
Isaac was probably nodding. It was an affect some people had when they took most of their calls via video.
“So get some rest,” said Nicolai. “Tell Natasha I said it’ll all be fine. I’ll get you a new draft of the speech and you’ll see. This is good. We want the Directorate upset. If they aren’t upset, they might decide to go Enterprise when Shift comes. But if they are angry and make noise, then not only will it solidify them against a common opponent and make them want to stay where they are, but their bitching will also raise the antenna of some of the complacent Enterprise — folks who are living below the line and might move to us just so they don’t starve. You’ll see.”
Isaac mumbled, mollified.
Nicolai said his goodbye and then swiped the air, ending the call. A beep said he was alone again, so he made another circuit of his apartment, looking out over District Zero.
As he paced, Nicolai looked at his piano — an astonishing black and white trophy appropriate to a man of his station. The thing was worth thousands upon thousands of credits — and was, as Nicolai saw it, a giant status symbol begging in vain to be used for the creation of art. Nicolai didn’t have room for any more art in his life, though. He told himself for the millionth time that his scattered bursts of creative writing were enough. They would have to be. Eventually, he’d find time for music, just as he’d find time to birth a painting on the decorative easel that now supported a plant.
He plopped onto his couch, swiped a square in the air with his fingers, and watched as the overhead Beam projector gave him a screen. Then he reached over and grabbed a keyboard from the endtable beside him. A canvas as expensive as Nicolai’s could project him an airboard, but Nicolai had never understood how people could use those things. It was neat to wave your fingers in the air as if hitting keys, but without tactile feedback, the experience was clunky at best. Such failures of common sense understanding were almost standard in a lot of modern (elite) technology. Sure, it was neat and cool and fun. But was it practical? In Nicolai’s opinion, airboards were for people who wanted to pretend they were writing but never actually did.
His fingers clacked on keys. Words lit the screen. This went on for a while, until Nicolai realized he was just rehashing Directorate propaganda and rewriting an old speech — one of the few standard speeches from the party’s archives that had been given by Directorate leaders over and over and over again. He had told Isaac that unrest was good, but the problem was that Nicolai didn’t know if he actually believed it. You couldn’t quell unrest; you could only redirect it. Those people had come after Natasha because she was at the top of the credit/income ladder, not because of her party affiliation. Nicolai couldn’t make that class-based anger vanish, so his best bet was to refocus it in a useful way. The rioters’ problems — and all of the problems plaguing the Directorate — were the result of the Enterprise. They control the wealth. They are keeping you down.
With a strange punched-in-the-gut feeling, Nicolai realized that it wasn’t the first time such deflection had been used. Back when there had been mass immigration into America (in the days before it joined the North American Union), economic woes were usually blamed on foreigners coming in and taking jobs. Before that, the default enemy was the Jews.
Nicolai swiped the window closed, then set the keyboard back on the end table. He stood, walked to his window wall, and once again took in the streets of District Zero below. The city was alive with light, but the sky above it was a smooth nothingness. Nicolai missed being able to see the stars and the moon through the Shell miles above as he had in his youth, but night objects weren’t bright enough to blast through the three-layered defensive barrier like the sun did. The nights seemed so dark, even in the city. It was the price you paid for protection.
From all the way up high, the city seemed peaceful. But that was the thing about distance: from far enough away, everything became an average. There were rich and there were poor. There were Enterprise and Directorate. There was the NAU and the Wild East, out past the ant farm wall that covered the continent. But if you kept pulling back, eventually everything averaged out to people. And when the Mars project was finished — and if the elite then moved a planet away — the only thing needed to restore a sense of equity would be to zoom out another level or two.
Nicolai sighed. He had to clear his head. He needed someone to talk to and to be with who wouldn’t care about socioeconomic woes. Someone who could make the world vanish for a few hours at an exorbitant price — or sometimes longer than a few hours, if she was feeling generous.
“Canvas,” Nicolai said to his empty apartment.
A single chirp answered him.
“Get me Kai Dreyfus.”
Chapter 3
The trick to being a good escort, Kai knew, was to make the man she was with feel like he was the only person in the world she’d ever care about. That meant she couldn’t discuss other clients, leave remnants or mementos of other clients around, h
alf-ass her affection, or talk business. For the time she was booked, Kai became her client’s girlfriend, wife, confidant — whatever he wanted. She kept extensive records of each client’s background in a characteristics file in her canvas. Subtle cameras in her apartment and embedded in her retinas recorded every second of their every interaction, and a sophisticated AI algorithm stripped the footage for relevant details.
Client A had three kids. His oldest knew about his dalliances, but didn’t care.
Client B had a cluster of moles on his arm that Kai had once said looked like the constellation Orion, and he’d thought that was delightfully clever.
Client C had insecurities surrounding his manner of dress; she’d once innocently commented on his shoes and incited a mopey incident that it had taken her hours to rescue him from.
Client D liked to fuck her from behind every single time, because he wanted to pretend that she was his wife, who he was desperately attracted to but who’d turned icy after their only child.
When a night with Kai ended, it was like she and the client pressed a giant pause button on their relationship. When the client booked her again, their relationship resumed. They always picked up exactly where they’d left off. An intuitive program in Kai’s canvas even told a ‘bot, through her Beam connection, to arrange the apartment exactly as it had been when the client had last left. A man could leave a half-eaten pizza in Kai’s fridge, then wander back a month later and pull a piece from the fridge as if it were the same pizza. If he’d left crusts in the box, the same number of crusts would still be there, just as his memory told him they would be.
Being a great escort was only half about the sex. Men didn’t just need sex from her. If all they wanted was physical release, they could beat off. Kai knew her clients didn’t come simply to insert tab A into slot B. They came to feel wanted, to feel desired, to feel understood and comfortable. So yes, she had to move as they wanted and do the things that pleased them. But she also had to stock her racks with the towels they liked, have their preferred sheets on the bed (in both thread count and color), and set her walls to project the art most pleasing to their eye. Each client wasn’t just a man. He was a project.
So when Nicolai’s call came through, his identity rang into a small cochlear implant in Kai’s ear, too quiet for her current client — a new man who liked it a little rough — to hear. And because she was busy smacking her new client around, she couldn’t take Nicolai’s call even though she very much wanted to. Nicolai was her favorite… but right now, this man was her boyfriend. And because Kai was her new client’s girlfriend at the moment, she wouldn’t get calls from other men because she was his and his alone. So as Kai’s petite frame sat atop her man’s back in red lingerie with her black hair swinging in her face, she sighed internally as she subtly cocked her head to decline the call.
Her current boyfriend, she thought as she slapped him across the back with a small black crop, was an asshole. And playing coy.
First of all, his name clearly wasn’t Ralph McGuinness, as he’d told her it was. Kai’s AI software had already filtered that name through the Beam servers and found nobody close to his description. Second, the AI had already analyzed the timber of his voice and determined (quite redundantly, in Kai’s opinion) that he was probably lying. None of this was really unusual. All of Kai’s clients were wealthy, and hence were more often than not people of significant standing. Many of them were high-ranking officials within either Enterprise or Directorate. Those kinds of men didn’t want people to know they visited an escort, but it usually didn’t matter because Kai always found them out no matter what bullshit story they fed her. It was her business to know. The more she knew about a client, the better she could satisfy him. If she knew, for instance, that a man who claimed to own a textile company was in fact up for a senate seat, she’d know those days he was in most need of relief and which topics she should and should not broach. Knowing a man’s true identity helped her know which opinions and leanings she should pretend to have, and guess at how empowered or subservient to be.
And of course, if Kai knew a man’s true identity, she could attach video of the acts, infidelities and atrocities they committed together to those identities in her database. A bit of information like “A man calling himself ‘Ron Barber’ likes to dress in young girls’ panties” was of limited use, but “The Commissioner of Such and Such likes to dress in young girls’ panties” was quite valuable indeed. Kai had never, ever, ever revealed any of the millions of secrets she’d collected over the years… but a girl had to have a Plan B (or a nest egg) saved for the inevitable rainy day.
She looked down at her client’s back, then rose up enough to turn him over onto his back. He had a handsome face with a square jaw, with a five o’clock shadow spread across it. He had hazel eyes and sandy blonde hair. His chest and arms were well-muscled. In most ways, he was an ideal client for Kai, if for no other reason than that she would probably have been attracted to him anyway. He’d come at her with such flair and bravado that she’d decided on impulse to quote him twice her normal rate. He hadn’t blinked. So he was rich, and probably connected.
“Have you had enough?” said Kai.
“Not even close,” he said.
She slapped him across the face. “Speak when spoken to, Ralph,” she said.
He smiled — not at her command, but at the name. He knew she knew, and found it hilarious.
She hit him again, harder.
The smile widened.
He’d hired her for the entire evening and night. Seventeen hours. “Ralph” had picked her up at five, and she was his until ten in the morning. They’d gone to a ridiculously expensive dinner, and he’d become moderately lubricated with a multi-hundred-credit bottle of champagne. Then they’d headed to the Aphora, where they’d watched what Kai felt was perhaps the most raw, heartbreaking performance from Natasha Ryan she’d seen in all the years Kai had spent following her. Then those assholes had started booing, and things had quickly fallen apart. Kai had been totally shocked by the incident, but throughout it all “Ralph” had seemed totally nonplussed. That in itself was a clue to something. Kai wondered what her canvas’s AI would make of it, if anything.
As she straddled her client with her hand cocked back, Kai looked down at the mystery man. She probably didn’t truly need to know who he was. She might never see him again, and he might simply be a horny man with a ton of credits to blow. But Kai didn’t like a puzzle she couldn’t crack, and so far, she hadn’t been able to crack this one. She had a tiny nano-enhancement in the index finger of her right hand that allowed her to read Beam IDs without a scanner, but the man either didn’t have one (unthinkable; he was too conservative-looking to be an Organa) or had had it encrypted. So she’d used another enhancement to sample DNA from a piece of his hair, but again, she came up empty. It made no sense that he’d be off the grid. He had to be hiding something. But how? And why?
“Take off that bra,” he said, reaching up to paw at Kai’s small breasts through the lace.
“I give the orders here,” she said, then slipped her bra off and tied it around her client’s head at the mouth, halfway gagging him.
Kai hid it well, but she was pissed. Or rather, she was indignant. After her years in this business (more years than she’d care to admit, though she looked twenty-five at most), she’d come to see information as an entitlement. “Ralph” wasn’t doing anything overt to keep her out, but the mere fact that he represented an impenetrable wall irked her something fierce. Kai wanted to hit him again to vent her frustration, but he’d like it too much.
Even if she didn’t need to know who he was, she absolutely did.
Kai climbed off her client. He twitched to the side, reaching for her ass. She dodged the hand, then slapped it away. Oh yes, he was quite the character. He couldn’t decide if he was the sub or the dom. Or perhaps he was the bad boy who was an asshole… and hence needed to be taught a lesson.
“Where are you going?” h
e slurred around the bra in his mouth.
“What fucking business is it of yours?” She gave him the smallest of sexy smiles, to make sure he understood that this was all still just part of the play.
“Come back here,” he said.
Kai turned, fast, and grabbed her client by the chin. “You’re bad,” she said. “You ask too many questions.”
“I’m bad,” he mumbled between his compressed cheeks. Further down, his biology indicated that the way she was treating him wasn’t a problem.
“I’m going to have to punish you.”
“Oh no,” he said, falling back onto the bed.
Kai reached into the endtable and removed a pair of handcuffs. Before closing the drawer, she also palmed a small vial with a tiny sponge on its top.
“I’ll have to restrain you,” she said, securing the first handcuff to the headboard.
“Mercy,” said the man, now smiling openly.
Kai straddled him to reach the second cuff and he responded beneath her. As she raised his arm to secure the second cuff, she discreetly swabbed her neck with the sponge on the vial. Then, as she lowered her face toward his, she tucked the vial under the mattress.
The man inhaled, drawing her scent. As he did, his eyelids fluttered.
