Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (8 page)

What would the old boy think if he could see me bring it up on a
computer screen?

Indeed, what would he think of the twentieth century? His was an age of Victorian morality, corsets, and incurable syphilis; this was an age of beer commercials, lingerie ads, and AIDS. Would he reel with culture shock, or would he feel perfectly at home? A society that so flagrantly displayed its sexuality while preaching abstinence might either delight or dismay him.

If he ever comes back, he’d better learn a whole new batch of come-ons. Pissing loudly in a pot won’t get him laid anymore.

Marianne found the book’s very quaintness and antiquity delightfully subversive. It corrected a misconception that still lingered in every adult American’s mind from grade school. This was what Marianne liked to think of as the “ungenitaled” theory of history, the idea that sex itself didn’t exist until the movie-rating system came along. Books like
My
Secret Life
proved that Christopher Columbus, the New England Pilgrims, George and Martha Washington, and Queen Victoria herself all had perfectly functional pubic regions.

Although she had entered the book’s sordid world many times, she had never actually read it from cover to cover. This wasn’t a matter of prudery; it was really because the book’s endless fornications were repetitive, even boring.
My Secret Life
was purely a book for browsing.

And I’ve browsed enough for one night.

She entered a command. The book closed with a dull little thud and a tiny cloud of gray-speckled dust. Using her mouse, Marianne maneuvered the volume back to its place on the “Classics” bookcase, in the midst of other titles such as De Sade’s
Justine,
Sellon’s
The Ups and Downs of Life,
Casanova’s
Mémoires,
selections from the infamous Victorian periodical
The Pearl,
and, of course,
Fanny Hill.
It was a modest section, seldom frequented by Bibliothèque patrons who generally gravitated toward better-stocked bookcases bearing labels like “Bondage and Discipline” and “Ensembles.” Patrons probably supposed that the “Classics” weren’t lewd and graphic enough.

If only they knew.

Elfie’s eyes were now floating listlessly among the library shelves.

“Well, sweetie,” Marianne said, “that’s enough culture for tonight, don’t you think? What do you say we have another look at Ernie’s?”

She double-clicked on the eyes, and Elfie was in the desktop maze again.

Insomnimania Manual: Your “Alter”

You are about to enter a world in which
anything
goes
—in which you make all the rules. How are you going to handle all that power? Well, let’s face it. You might find yourself doing things you’d rather nobody knew about. So when you participate in Insomnimania, your actual identity is protected. Nobody needs to know you’re even a member—unless you decide to tell them.

To go online, all you need is your password and any name you
choose. You
can
log on as yourself if you
like. But why not trade in your humdrum, wetware self for a spanking new virtual identity? Or two? Or three … ?

You can create up to five Insomnimania personalities. (Sorry, but five’s the limit. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere.) These personalities are what we call “alters.”

Alters can be designed to fit different moods or different kinds of network activities. This section shows how simple it is to give your alter a name and log on to Insomnimania as a spectator. When you’re ready to give your alter a body, too, turn to the next chapter.

Note:
For complete details concerning each of these steps, turn to the reference section in the back of this manual.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

When you access Insomnimania and enter your ID number, the alter’s dialogue box appears. If you’ve already created alters, their names will be listed in this box. Just select the one you want to use at the moment and click “OK.”

To eliminate an alter or make changes in a name or visual image, select the name and then click the appropriate command. Dialogue boxes appear to guide you through the necessary steps.

To create additional alters (if you have fewer than five) select “Create New” and click “OK.”

When you select a name and click “OK,” a dialogue box appears asking whether you want to log on as a spectator as a participant.

JUST LOOKING, THANK YOU

We hope everybody plunges into the real-time, fully-participational Insomnimania experience sooner or later. But let’s say you’re the shy type. You’d rather browse around a bit before going totally virtual. Well then, you can be a
name
without a
body
. It’s your prerogative to log onto Insomnimania only as a spectator—as long as you’ve created at least one name or alter. Spectators can view activities in any Insomnimania room, read library books, and send e-mail. You can even follow most of the conversations on Insomnimania—though you can’t talk
to
anybody. To log on as a
full participant,
you must first create a personality and cartoon image for your alter. (More on this to follow.)

Select a name and then click “Spectator” if you just want to look around. It’s as easy as that.

When you log on as a spectator, a pair of eyes and your alter’s name appear onscreen in each room you visit. (That’s only fair. Full-fledged participants have a right to know they’re being watched.)

You can use the standard eyes provided by your Insomnimania software.

To personalize a pair of eyes or create your own, choose “Eyes” on the Insomnimania menu and follow the instructions that appear. Eyes that you create for a particular alter automatically appear whenever you log on as a spectator with that alter’s name.

LISTENING IN

Even as a spectator, you can follow most of the conversations on Insomnimania. Sure, a few places are kept strictly private, but you’ll enjoy those when you become a full participant.

When a participant types a comment into a conversation on Insomnimania, that comment is automatically name-tagged (abbreviated to save space).

For example, a comment by John is preceded by: jhn>

jhn>Hi suan!

You’ll also actually
hear
some comments, and the range of those is growing every day.

ANIMATED ALTERS

Insomnimania’s animated graphics make it unique among computer networks—so you have another extraordinary option. Your cartoon “self” can go everywhere on Insomnimania and interact fully with the other animated alters. When you’re ready to plunge into the action, the next chapter tells you how.

00101
CYBERVICE

Sapphire appeared in the doorway to Ernie’s bar. She was decked out, as always, in a tight blue strapless evening gown replete with a white fur stole and innumerable garish necklaces and earrings. She had a hooked nose, crow’s feet around her eyes, and the proportions of a Rubens nude—well rounded and distinctly overweight by today’s standards. Her enormous coiffure was an impossible shade of orange.

Obeying the instructions of her remote operator, Sapphire wiggled her profile view past a couple of tables occupied by a variety of other characters. She popped up onto an empty bar stool. Exaggerated as she was, Sapphire was among the more conventional in a gathering that included antennas and numerous limbs. Aside from apparently extraterrestrial life forms, many of earth’s animal phyla were represented, including arthropods, sponges, and chordates.

One of the arthropods was a literal “barfly” named Buzz. He had transparent wings and big bulging eyes and clutched various drinks in each of his six hands. Little bubbles, symbolic of extreme inebriation, floated out of the top of Buzz’s head, and the poor fellow passed out against the bar in a recurring 120 second loop. Several patrons appeared more human, but even they came in a variety of skin colors that included magenta and turquoise and lime.

Tinkly player-piano music could be heard in the background. Ernie, the perpetual bartender, nodded his poker-faced visage as he mopped the bar with a rag. His long yellowish face, decorated with a handlebar mustache and topped by thick hair parted in the middle, would have looked at home in an old time western saloon.

“Hi Sapphire. Want the usual?” Ernie asked. The computer spoke his words aloud.

“Sure, Ernie. Gimme a strawberry daiquiri,” Sapphire said, giving her standard response in a sultry voice. She rested her arms on the bar.

A couple more key commands rotated the view so that the characters on the bar stools now faced the screen. Sapphire’s head snapped from center to left or right as she looked up and down the row of characters beside her.

“Hi everybody,” she said aloud. The other characters remained mute. The back of Ernie’s head appeared in front of her, and his hand placed a drink on the bar. “Thanks, sweetie,” she verbalized again.

Then typed words began to appear in little balloons above the character’s heads.

prayreedog>hi, safir. wats hot on the net 2day?

safir>i don’t no, u old prairie dog—jst got hre myslf.

sudopod>ws in the dome for a wile. boring 2day, al amatrs.

Above the lines of conversation, a pair of eyes with lengthy lashes blinked into view—an observer checking out the action. Next to the eyes was a set of initials identifying the alter as “flwr.” The watching eyes quickly disappeared. Then another pair of eyes, round and bloodshot, appeared next to the name “goldnrod.” These eyes stayed and watched while other pairs of eyes came and went. The characters below kept talking, generally ignoring the spectators.

Sapphire raised her glass a few times. Her red lips were shaped in an interminable, horsy, gold-plated smile. From time to time, she fingered a ruby necklace hanging among the conglomeration of jewels around her neck.

The typed lines of conversation were punctuated by actual sounds—various kinds of laughter, along with standard phrases like “Sure you do,” “I know I’ve seen you before,” “Fuck you,” “Another round, Ernie”—triggered by keyboard or menu commands. With no human operator, Ernie’s conversation was limited, but he was skillfully programmed to respond to specific situations and signals. Sometimes he could go for a long time without repeating the same response. The effect was often eerie.

So the conversation went on, words and sounds woven together, the cartoon characters bobbing on their bar stools, occasionally coming and going through the swinging doors.

Then Sapphire noticed that Auggie had joined the group …

*

“wildebeest, sudopod, prayreedog, safir, awgy …”

“Sapphire and Auggie!” Marianne exclaimed as she looked over the log for Ernie’s Bar. “So Renee’s logged on! And she tracked Auggie down before I could!”

Marianne double-clicked the Ernie’s Bar icon, and Elfie’s eyes were suddenly floating through the interior of the saloon. Marianne maneuvered the disembodied eyes among the mutated clientele for a few moments before she discovered Auggie and Sapphire—Renee’s Insomnimania alter—sitting in one of the “booths” near the back of the bar.

Sapphire, in all her brassy glory, was nodding and sipping a drink and blinking her heavily lashed eyes at the ragged-looking clown. But unfortunately, there were no written sentences floating above them to indicate what they were saying to each other. Throughout the rest of Ernie’s Bar, one could “eavesdrop” on conversations simply by reading the words floating above the alters’ heads. But in a booth, all conversations were private. No one outside the booth could read what was being said.

Damn! I wonder what’s going on in there?

She had an urge to call Renee right now and find out. But it would be awfully rude to interrupt when Renee was possibly landing the scoop of her life. Marianne decided to wait until later—possibly tomorrow—to get the news.

Out of the loop. The story of my life.

And how, after all, did she expect her search to end? With a dramatic confrontation between Elfie and Auggie? That was impossible. Without a virtual body, Elfie couldn’t even carry on a conversation with the clown.

In fact, the list of things Elfie
couldn’t
do was quite formidable. She couldn’t have drinks in Ernie’s Bar, play canasta in the casino, or ride the Ferris wheel at the carnival. She could only do more passive things, like read porn in La Bibliothèque Érotique or leave notes on the innumerable bulletin boards. She could peek in on the activities of others, of course—appearing only as disembodied eyes floating in the corner of the screen.

Renee often criticized Marianne for not physicalizing Elfie. But Marianne always liked to think of Elfie as having a kind of astral body. Elfie was an
elf,
after all—ethereal, androgynous, elusive, mysterious—always peeking around trees and rocks, hovering at the fringes of the mortal world. Marianne had wanted Elfie to be the stuff of legend, haunting Insomnimania rather than inhabiting it. And what suggested such an existence better than a pair of blinking eyes?

But right now, Marianne really felt Elfie’s limitations. And this anticlimax to her search for Auggie pretty well capped off her day. In less than twenty-four hours, she had fled from a cop, bungled a phone tip to the police, and had located Auggie in the computer maze, only to be helpless to do anything about it.

Marianne slumped over in her chair and groaned.

Guess I’d better leave the go-getting to Renee. I’m not exactly a woman of action.

Marianne wondered what to do now. She was certainly too tired to do any work on her current project. But she wasn’t tired enough to sleep. She might as well stalk the maze in search of other activities. There were
some
things she could participate in, however anonymously.

She clicked Elfie’s eyes out of Ernie’s Bar and guided them through the maze toward the Pleasure Dome, a kind of mini-mall of erotic activities that included La Bibliothèque Érotique, where she had been reading from
My Secret Life
just a little while ago.

She maneuvered Elfie’s eyes over the Weightless Chamber icon and checked the log ...

“panpipe, lickitysplit, 8inches, hotsytwotsy, artfulroger …”

Doesn’t sound like a savory bunch.
She clicked Elfie’s eyes and immediately found herself in the Weightless Chamber’s “lobby” facing a row of twelve naked human figures—six men and six women.

In places like Ernie’s Bar, Marianne had a name but no body. But in the Weightless Chamber, it was the other way around. She would “borrow” one of this stash of anonymous, specially-programmed bodies for the activities inside.

Presumably in the interest of political correctness and cultural diversity, the figures constituted a fair assortment of racial and ethnic types. A couple even had nonhuman colors. In several cases, it was a little hard to tell exactly which types were represented. Were the medium-height, round-faced figures with the brownish skin supposed to be Inuit or Mongolian? Were the tall, lean, olive–skinned figures meant to be Latin or Semitic? And what part of the Far East did the yellow-toned Asiatic figures hail from, to say nothing of those bodies tinged with green or blue?

But none of this really mattered. The figures were meant to be sex slaves, pure and simple. So they were uniform in one respect, and that was physical attractiveness. Whether tall or short, voluptuous or trim, and whatever their skin-tone, all the figures were conventionally good-looking. The men were muscular but not bulky, and the women were soft but not insipid. The sizes of the women’s breasts varied only slightly, and the men’s now-reposeful penises appeared to be identically proportioned. The figures were drawn skillfully if not artistically, with particular attention to chiaroscuro. Replete with colored-pixel shadows, the figures looked exquisitely rounded.

Marianne briefly pondered which body to choose. After her last foray into the Weightless Chamber, she had promised herself to try a male body next time—just for a little vicarious role reversal. But right now she felt too tired for adventurousness. She chose a Caucasion figure—a tall, slender woman who looked much like herself. Marianne tried to recall whether she had chosen this same figure last time.

Who can remember? Who cares?

She clicked on the figure. All the other figures disappeared, and hers was abruptly decked out in a lumpy, shiny, and anything-but-erotic space suit. Even the figure’s face was invisible behind the tinted visor. The sound of slow, heavy breathing came over the computer speaker—more asthmatic than sexual. Marianne maneuvered the figure toward the “airlock”—a formidable-looking sliding door seemingly made of stainless steel. The figure then pushed a button. A harsh, squawking siren went off, and a red light flashed an urgent announcement:

“PRESSURIZING.”

Then the door rumbled open with a raspy, hydraulic hiss to reveal a chrome-encrusted corridor leading to another door. Marianne guided her lumbering figure into the airlock, and a subsequent hiss and slam indicated that the sliding door had closed behind her. Another red sign flashed:

“DISROBE, PLEASE.”

Marianne struck a command, and the shiny pieces came flying off like one of those breakaway suits they used in the movies. Pieces of space suit rattled around the airlock a bit, then mysteriously vanished, leaving the female figure naked again, facing away from Marianne.

The sign flashed again:

“THANK YOU. YOU MAY ENTER THE CHAMBER NOW.”

Then came another hiss as the second door slid open, revealing a large, spherical chamber in which sixteen or so naked figures were languidly, indolently floating through the slightly foggy atmosphere. Marianne gave her figure one last little nudge. The figure slipped through the door and drifted weightlessly among her fellow interstellar hedonists.

Airborne at last!

Marianne let her figure sail passively among the others for a moment while she scanned the Weightless Chamber’s other occupants. Most of the figures were unattached, isolated, reaching and groping for carnal companionship. But there were several midair couplings going on—copulating figures thrashing about in various states of frenzy and excitement. Nothing unconventional was going on—the program did not permit anything but straightforward heterosexual intercourse. But Marianne was sure that this was not due to any prudery on the part of the programmer. The software still had its limitations, that was all.

Just wait for the next upgrade.

In the meantime, the couples didn’t have to do anything particularly original in order to appear exotic. They were doing it in midair, after all. And the sex was completely egalitarian here—no “erotic handicaps” as there were elsewhere in the Pleasure Dome, forcing participants to be dominant or submissive, aggressive or passive. It was a world of complete consensuality and simultaneous orgasms.

A carnal utopia if ever there was one.

All the unattached figures—male or female—seemed absolutely limber and relaxed. There was not the slightest feeling of tension or unease in the whole environment. The women’s limbs stretched in all directions with luxurious flexibility. When the women turned profile, they revealed starkly erect nipples. The males had natural-looking, uncaricatured erections—except for the recently uncoupled few whose cocks remained flaccid for a few moments while recharging took place. The sphere was filled with a cacophony of sighing and moaning and gasping breaths—a loop of sound that ran over and over again regardless of what any of the figures were doing.

Marianne’s figure began to drift inertly toward one of the couples.

That won’t do. No cutting in allowed on
this
dance floor.

The point of the game was to find an unattached partner, and that would take a bit of maneuvering. Figures in the Weightless Chamber did not drift about in a purely random way. In the absence of normal gravity, each male or female exerted its own gravitational pull. To move in the vicinity of another body meant to be drawn toward that body.

Marianne used her mouse to propel her figure toward an unattached male, apparently of African descent, looking spry and spread-eagled and eager for action. Now all she could do was wait and see what happened. If the two figures met each other perfectly face on, they would intertwine and begin to copulate. If they struck at ever-so-slightly the wrong angle, they would deflect away from one another and probably bounce off the sphere’s elegantly padded walls.

Marianne held her breath as she watched. But the magic didn’t happen this time. Her figure struck the dusky male a little too much to the left, and she went spinning away toward the wall. She bounced off the wall, curled spontaneously into a ball shape, and did several forward rolls through the foggy air. Then her limbs unfolded welcomingly as she drifted among the others again.

Marianne exhaled, a little surprised to notice that her heart had started beating faster. Was it possible that she was really getting an erotic kick from this? She didn’t think so, but perhaps she was without quite realizing it.

She remembered going to a hard core X-rated movie one night with Evan—at Evan’s insistence, naturally. She had giggled through much of it, and Evan kept a slightly embarrassed silence. During the drive home, both she and Evan swore to have been utterly unaffected by the movie. But the minute they set foot back in their apartment, they were mauling and unclothing one another ravenously. In less than an hour, they had doubled their already extensive repertoire of sexual techniques.

Marianne hastily shoved the episode from her mind and concentrated on the game at hand. Her figure had started to ricochet slowly and gently off several others. These harmless collisions seemed to imbue the figures with a kind of rubbery, almost sensual softness.

All this activity had a strong kinesthetic effect. The feeling of movement and suspension was truly palpable. It took Marianne back to her days on the high school synchronized swim team—except that this “water” allowed greater freedom, greater movement than any swimming pool could. It never forced you in a particular direction.

Now her figure and another female began to orbit each other slowly. Marianne marveled at the programmer’s ability to suggest reciprocal gravitation.

For every action there is an equal and apposite reaction. Isaac Newton would love this.

But a problem quickly arose. The other female in the dual orbit was her figure’s exact double, and after they’d rounded each other a couple times, Marianne had no idea which was which. The operator of the other figure was undoubtedly just as confused. Then Marianne figured that all she had to do was to move her figure one way or the other; whichever figure moved had to be hers. She used her mouse to jolt her figure gently to the right. But the other figure reciprocated, and the dual orbit simply reversed directions.

Uncanny! The other operator must have tried the same thing!

It was a bit like two people encountering one another in a narrow passageway, each of them trying to step out of the other’s way but winding up stepping in the same direction. But in real life, two such people did not lose track of who was who.