Ghosts of Punktown (12 page)

     His cursor hovered, uncertain, over the flesh of the model in the sample, a young girl with long dark hair and overripe lips parted in a numb expression, her hands splayed against a shower stall’s tiles while a man of indeterminate age, fractionally seen, pressed against her from behind. She looked younger than what was legal, but could that be so? Why not? Why shouldn’t he be able to find his way to this rumored, dreaded forest, haunted by its sad little fairies and its predatory hairy wolves? He vacillated at its border, its periphery, but with heartbeat suspended he depressed the cursor, and he was through and inside.

      The arrayed photos – apparently linked to vids and galleries – dizzied him not only with choices, but with another flush of dread. Yes, some of these models
had
to be below the age of consent. His comp’s history was stained now, and even his skills might not entirely expunge the taint should anyone care to come looking into its guts. Well, he had already come too far, so he could only go further...deeper...

     Or tried to, but he found clicking on any image only brought him to the same page, offering registration for a fee. He felt thwarted, but then he decided not to be thwarted, just as he had once given up and tried membership with a couple of dating services. He paid for a one month trial to Incestykes, hoping that his bank account would be safe from any misconduct. Then, as if he had correctly answered the question of a sphinx blocking his path, he was permitted into the forest’s shadowy heart.

*     *     *

     Thank God she didn’t speak, he thought, as she stared at him, smiled at him. He had leapt out of his chair, almost overturning it, and he stood across the room as they regarded each other. She had shifted her body a sideways step or two to remain facing him. His comp’s audio was on, but she made no sound. He was almost afraid her lips would part and she would say his name. Some imps could do that, address you personally. Maybe he could activate his olfactory simulator, though, and smell...what? Her flesh, her breath, her sweat? Scents could be recorded at the time of filming, but even if they weren’t, the simulator would do just that: instantly fabricate scents that seemed appropriate for the images. Though why, with his startled heart still reverberating, should he feel this imp of the perverse to smell her hair, her body? In any case, even though he now knew her for what she was, he was still too afraid as yet to move closer to his comp to act upon this impulse. And more than he wanted a heightened sense of her, he wanted to back out of this link in the hope of banishing her, but he was reluctant to reach out toward his system to act upon this desire, too – lest she reach out for him at the same time.

*     *     *

     Lawr stared at a photo of a man with a hairy, swollen belly standing at the edge of a bed. Only the lower body of the girl was in view, her upward-bent legs evincing the baby fat of youth, her pudgy feet so small. She had no hair down there, and it might have been shaved, but Lawr didn’t think so. This had to be the real thing. This man had crossed the boundary of fantasy. Was he a father? Uncle? Friend of the family? Was his face cut out of the frame to protect his identity, or so that men like Lawr could superimpose themselves?

     He tried one of the vids, and in this the man’s face was also hidden, but not made blurry as one might expect. More disturbingly, his face was scribbled out with black lines like magic marker that followed his movements. The girl seated before him was a Choom, one of the native people of this world Oasis, human in aspect aside from a mouth as wide as a frog’s. Her sun-browned arms and legs were twigs, and her long hair was bound with a cute something-or-other with the plastic head of a kitten or bear incorporated into it. The man’s contrastingly big, pallid body made Lawr feel a twinge of repulsion – or was it only envy? – as the girl applied that huge, accommodating mouth to him. Lawr began to work his own hardening organ, but was unsettled when the man turned his scribbled face to the camera and spoke in a voice that was made distorted, the audio equivalent of his scrawled out features. His concluding cry of pleasure sounded like some large animal being slaughtered.

     Lawr was still stroking himself when he settled on a new photo, this one of a girl with wispy blond hair and a sweet smile, shown bare to the tiny dots of her nipples, so delicate she was almost frail, and filmed in a weird greenish light. Lawr didn’t know if it was a link to a vid or to a stills gallery.

     When he pressed the girl’s chest with his cursor, he turned to find that she had left the screen and stood beside his chair instead.

*     *     *

     “Very funny,” he said to the girl, as if she had engineered this trick herself. As if this were designed as a prank to startle people rather than excite them – though she was decidedly more appealing than the Toilet Man.

     He turned his eyes to the main monitor. Where before the girl had appeared on his screen, now it was black except for the words: SHE’S AN ANGEL. Yes, appropriate given her ethereal prettiness. He finally felt composed enough to approach his system, but when he hit the back button the girl did not return to the screen, the genie to its bottle. He was merely taken back to the menu. The girl remained, unfazed.

     “Great,” he said. “How long is this going to last?” The last thing he needed was for someone to give him a vid call and on their own monitor catch a glimpse of the girl to one side, or worse, for someone to come calling in person. Right, but how often did that happen? He couldn’t remember the last time another flesh and blood being had stood in his flat.

     Straightening, he returned his attention to her. Now that he was out of his chair, she had turned her face up a little to keep her eyes on his. He saw them blink again. “Angel, huh? Next thing you know I’ll be talking to you,” he said, then cut himself off when he realized he already was.

     He circled around her, as much to see what would happen as to see the back of her body, but she shuffled quickly to remain facing him. Was there a way to get her to change positions? A button on the keyboard, an oral command or gesture? What was one supposed to do with her, except sit there ogling her as they pleasured themselves? She couldn’t be physically touched. Maybe her attentive eyes were enough to stimulate those who downloaded her willingly, though Lawr couldn’t understand how he was supposed to have known this was possible, novice that he was to this realm.

     If one were set up for the ultranet, instead of merely the net, one could interact only too convincingly with constructs. He had heard sex in the ultranet was better than the real thing, every sense heightened, and he could believe it, though his only personal experience had come from a friend’s system. He had allowed Lawr to play a horror/action game, in which a pack of bluish, dog-like snipes had chased Lawr through the dark, narrow hallways of a decommissioned space freighter his character had stolen into in search of salvageables. That terrifying episode had been more real than reality, too, and Lawr had heard of people actually dying of fright while interfaced with the ultranet. This experience was part of the reason he settled for the basic net, though it also had a lot to do with his meager office drone’s salary.

     Lawr found that his erection had wilted, and he refastened his pants as if his visitor made him feel self-conscious, despite her own nudity. It was odd that, naked as she was, she almost looked more pure than she did sexual. But he was beginning to suspect that her beatific smile had more to do with the model having been drugged before being filmed, than it had to do with any true pleasure on her part.

     “I have to get to bed,” he told the imp accusingly. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” His flat was small; the living room served also as his bedroom, and if he were to retire now she would no doubt pivot accordingly to watch him as he lay there. How was he supposed to sleep, if that were the case? He’d have to draw the blanket over his head to shut out the green fairy’s glow...and those staring eyes.

     “I’m going to take a shower,” he decided, though he usually took one in the morning. He started past her toward his tiny bathroom, but looked back to say, “You’d better be gone by the time I get back.”

     She just beamed at him, as if in adoration of a father.

*     *     *

     When he returned from showering and brushing his teeth the girl was indeed gone from her place by his desk, without having left any foot depressions in his shaggy, moss green carpet. He felt relieved, though also grumpily cheated of the release he had been working toward before her arrival.

     He turned to his bed, and she lay there upon it – on her side, her legs curled and her head resting on one crooked arm, watching him as if waiting for him to notice her, and join her there. Though again, her smile was ever innocent, not prurient.

     “Dung!” Lawr hissed, angry for having been startled by this apparition twice in one night.

     So the imp was programmed to shift into a new phase, a new pose, and just as the ad for
The Toilet Man
movie had known how to seek out his flat’s toilet, so this projection had homed in on his bed. But now what was he supposed to do? How could he sleep beside it? Despite what a fetching creature she was, the idea made him too...uncomfortable.

     Maybe he couldn’t be rid of her altogether until her allotted existence expired, but if he could at least chase her off his bed like an unruly dog. He took up his can of atomized spray, hoping it would break her attachment to the bed the way it unfocused homing imps that buzzed around one like thirsty mosquitoes. He sprayed her foot to head, but she didn’t so much as blink at the mist he covered her with, just watched him placidly. Yeah, the model must have been doped, but the imp’s expression made her look adoring for his attentions.

     “Thanks,” he grumbled, returning the ineffective spray to its shelf. He shut down his comp before moving toward the big reclining chair he had inherited when he’d moved in here. He settled into it, then adjusted it as far back as it would go. “Very nice,” he added, squirming to get comfortable. He glanced over at her. “What are you waiting for,” he snapped, “a bedtime story?” Then he looked away, and closed his eyes.

     He had not shut off the light in the room, but this was not an oversight.

*     *     *

     Lawr dreamed he was at work, but weirdly, he saw himself from outside his body. It was as though he stood behind himself, watching this more corporeal Lawr as he hunkered in front of his work comp in his cluttered little cubicle, while other drones in adjoining cubicles labored similarly or spoke in vid calls. But Lawr’s eavesdropping spirit grew alarmed to see that what filled the main monitor was a menu of samples for pornographic galleries and vids.

     “Hey,” he said, to warn himself before someone could enter the cubicle and notice what he was looking at. “Lawrence!” he said, and reached out to tap his own shoulder.

     When he did, the man in the chair swiveled around to face him. His face was scratched out with black lines, as if with a marker.

*     *     *

     Lawr woke with a jolt. When he realized he was in the recliner, the small of his back aching from too long a time there, he propped himself up a little to see if the imp had dissipated.

     She had not. She was still in the center of his bed, lying atop his covers. But she had been facing outward previously, and now she had rolled over to face the wall. A third phase? He sat up further, and took her in more closely.

     She had been thin before, almost fragile, but now it seemed she had become brittle. The bumps of her spine and shoulder blades looked ready to tear through a paper thin skin. Her jutting hip bone was alarming. It was as though the imp were deteriorating, wasting away, instead of merely fading from existence.

     Lawr got up from the chair with a groan and approached his bed, moving around to its foot to get a look at the front of her. What he saw made his chest lock up.

     Her ribs jutted, her emaciated chest ready to cave in on itself, but most distressing was the girl’s face. Her eye sockets were so black they looked like the empty pits of a skull, and he couldn’t tell if that was an effect of starvation or bruises from a beating. Her cheeks were gaunt, the end of her nose blackened, again like a hole in a skull (and again, from a blow?), her lips drawn back in a pained grimace. The girl was hugging shockingly thin arms across her nonexistent breasts, and she was shivering. Worst of all, her mouth was working, and he could tell she was whimpering – maybe words – but of course he couldn’t hear it.