King of the Worlds (26 page)

With the exception of the queef and the golden shower, Dylan didn't have a clue what any of those things were, but if they were in a league with something called “kick-fucking,” they couldn't possibly be good. His suspicions were confirmed: this poor girl's body was now being exploited as a cum dumpster for the rich and famous.

“And we've still got another twenty minutes, correct?” Pan said.

“That's right.”

“So, speaking of music, Jade, I wonder if you've ever played an instrument?”

“I took piano lessons when I was little,” Jade replied.

“Of course you did. You should be a quick study, then, while I teach you a new one. It's called the Rusty Trombone. Are you ready for your first lesson?”

Dylan let go of his nose, forced himself to ignore the reek, and cracked the door a few more inches. It squeaked, but then Jade did too, so neither of her tormenters seemed to notice.

The room was dimly lit from sconces, but Dylan could make out their figures now, just a few yards away. Midway between them and him, separated from the wall by a couple of feet, was a leather divan. Between here and there lay some intuitive point beyond which he would become not just an eavesdropper but a
trespasser
. He hesitated for a moment until Jade made some awful choking sound and then he dropped flat on his belly and leopard-crawled—slowly, slowly—to just behind the divan. Dylan's eyes had adjusted to the light by now and he had a clear view of Pan, who stood with his pants around his ankles and was reaching back and holding what must have been Jade Astrophil's head tight to his own ass. Dylan had a view of his face now, and it was clear that, from the side at least, he looked uncannily like George Clooney. Blond-boy Hollister lay on a bed on the far side of the room, cackling.

“That's it, Jade,” Pan went on. “Toss that salad. And while you're doing that, reach around and jerk me off. No, like this. Excellent. You should go to the conservatory. All right, now here come the sixty-fourth notes. Faster, faster. That's it. Keep going now. See if you can get me to shoot the ceiling.”

Hollister laughed some more.

Dylan had never felt such unchecked bloodlust in his life, but just as it was about to impel him to act, something literally incredible happened, a kind of grotesque miracle: Pan began to come, and the heavy jet of his semen was like water from a fire hose. He sprayed the ceiling and the walls with it and then turned the jet on Jade herself. The pressure was so great that Jade was sent flying backwards across the room and into the divan. Dylan cowered, even as he peered over a throw pillow for a better view. Jade was two feet from him now, shiny and naked and every bit as beautiful as he'd imagined. He could just make out the scars on her wrists.

“Now, Ryan,” Pan said. “I'm very sorry to do this, but would you mind if we do S through Z another day? I've just realized that I need to have a word with Jade in private.”

“No problem,” Hollister said, promptly getting off of the bed. On his way out of the room, he patted Pan on the back. “You're a diabolical genius,” he said.

“Thank you,” Pan said. “And you're a sick fuck. I'll see you at the track later on? I've got several small moons on the Andromeda panther.”

“Great.”

The room went silent. The only sound was that of Hollister's footfalls as he left the hut and went crunching across the sands.

At length, Pan spoke again, “Go ahead, Dylan Greenyears. Touch her. You've come such a long way.”

Dylan's stomach sank. He was discovered! But how in the hell did Pan know his name?

Jade followed Pan's eyes until she spotted him there behind the divan. She leapt up and retreated to a spot on the bed beside him. She had a marvelous body—petite and just curvaceous enough. Cute face too.

“Who the
fuck
are you?” she asked.

“Get up,” Pan said to Dylan, “or I'll shoot you with my cum too, and neither of us wants that.”

Dylan stood and looked Pan in the eye. He nearly went into shock. Pan, who'd so closely resembled George Clooney a minute ago, was now very definitely Leonardo DiCaprio. This was no mere resemblance either: it was
identity
.

“What the…you…I don't…how…?”

“Let's have a talk, shall we?”

Dylan nodded.

“Dylan Greenyears, meet Jade Astrophil. You already know a thing or two about her, though far less than you imagine. In fact, you met her once in her former guise as Mei-Ling Chen, I believe, yes? At a film premiere in Taipei? Jade, meet Dylan Greenyears again. He's come all the way from New Taiwan to save you from your bondage.”

“My
what
?”

“He's right,” Dylan said to Jade. “I don't know how he knows it, but I've come here to rescue you from this horrible place.”

“
My hero
…” she swooned. “Look, I don't know who you think you are, but I can leave here anytime I want, okay?”

“You can?” Dylan said, incredulous. “But surely it's more complicated than that? Surely you're indentured in some way or other, if not to your rulers exactly then to all the various forces that conspired to make you debase yourself like this?”

She looked askance. “Who are you supposed to be again?”

“Dylan Greenyears? I played Elliott in
E.T. II
?”

A flash of recognition. “You've changed.”

He tried to unhear the implicit criticism.
Of course
he'd changed. She had too, no doubt. That's what people
do.

“And do you remember,” he continued, “that you wrote me a letter some years ago to the effect that I had somehow saved your life with my acting?”

She chuckled. “Sorry. I used to write lots of letters like that.”

What?
It had never occurred to him that he might be but one star in a constellation of them inside of Jade. He'd assumed there was some sort of special connection between them. “Why would you have done that?” he asked.

“Because I wanted to fuck a star.”

It was as if she'd kicked him square in the testes. “What?”

Pan chimed in, “Dylan, let me tell you a little story about Jade's past, all right?”

“Okay,” Dylan said, “but first would you mind telling me why in God's name you look exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio?”

“We'll get there,” Pan said. “There's lots to tell. For now, just
humor
me, would you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Okay, so maybe you know that after the Great Up-and-Out, as the non-zero-sum paradigm began to unite all Earth and the peace settled in, a few stubborn nations held onto their old grievances just long enough to make some last-minute land grabs?”

“Sure.”

“And probably, since you live on New Taiwan, you know that the last and largest of these was China's siege of Taiwan, which it had claimed as its own for centuries?”

Dylan nodded. He had indeed known that, if only vaguely.

“Now suppose Jade here was the daughter of a Taiwanese nationalist—a staunch resister of Chinese hegemony, willing to fight the invaders to his own certain death in the name of Taiwanese independence. And suppose that while Chinese soldiers raided their home and held a gun to her father's head, they raped Jade's mother repeatedly on the kitchen floor, first with their cocks and then with their bayonets. You with me so far?”

“Uh-huh,” Dylan replied queasily.

“And suppose, meanwhile, that little Jade here, who was called Mei-Ling in those days, was hiding under the sofa watching all of this, and that her mother stared lovingly, if surreptitiously, in her daughter's eyes as she was fucked to death and disemboweled. And that little Jade watched as the soldiers sliced off her father's dick and made him eat it, moving his jaw for him with their hands while he bled out on the kitchen floor. Can you imagine all that?”

“Yes,” Dylan said, the pity overflowing from his tear ducts now.

“And can you imagine how Mei-Ling, once she came out of hiding, might be forced to spend a few formative years in a strict Chinese orphanage? How the trauma of watching her parents get raped and mutilated could haunt every day of her life and manifest in some rather fucked-up sexual tendencies of her own someday? Can you imagine how she might feel immense survivor's guilt and harbor fantasies of getting fucked to death in her own right? Can you imagine that she might take to cutting her wrists on occasion? And can you imagine how, as an adolescent, she might fantasize about escaping her part of the world and how she might take a liking to Western men, about whom she knew only what she saw in the movies that occasionally came on the TV she was allowed to watch for one hour a week at the orphanage? Can you imagine how the desire for escape might be so fervid that she'd begin to write letters to those actors? And can you imagine how some semi-successful, fat, pasty, middle-aged American actor with plenty of his own psychosexual baggage might be intrigued by Mei-Ling's overtures and go as far as to adopt her so that he could fuck her to sleep whenever he felt like it? And can you imagine the sorts of rage and self-loathing that would build in Mei-Ling as her last illusions died and she understood that men everywhere were evil, power-hungry sons of bitches? Can you then imagine how, when one of the members of her ‘dad's' pedophilia ring—another fucked-up, drug-addled, B-list actor—took her aside and invited her, without her dad's knowing, to be a sex slave to the stars inside the moon where she'd get a steady wage and have the freedom to leave and start a new life with a new identity whenever she chose, she might leap at the chance?”

“Yes,” Dylan said, a tear streaming down each of his cheeks. “It breaks my heart, but I can imagine all of it!”

“Of course you can,” Pan said, “because you just did.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I'm just pulling all of that out of your own imagination. That's a thing I can do.”

Dylan was nonplussed. “You mean…that wasn't a true story?”

“Why don't you ask Jade?”

Dylan turned to her. “Was that a true story?”

“Almost none of it,” she said. “Don't flatter yourself. My parents are alive and well and living in Beijing. They couldn't give two fucks about Taiwanese independence. And I'm pretty sure your timeline doesn't even make sense.”

“What part
was
true, then?”

“I did cut my wrists when I was a teenager. I don't know why. I think I was just bored. And I do like to fuck stars, obviously. Better yet, I like to get fucked
by
them. In case you haven't noticed, I'm the resident masochist around here.”

“But
why
?”

“Who knows why? It's just my thing. Why are you into whatever kink you're into?”

She had a point. Dylan had always been a leg man, but why that should be was beyond him.

“Okay, but do you really mean to tell me you
enjoyed
the Rusty Trombone?”

“It was okay. The Alabama Hot Pocket was better. Anyway, it's a job. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and I spent most of my twenties pretending I wanted that too, but the simple truth is I get way more gratification out of doing this. I probably get more money too. And it's not like I'll be able to do this forever. I'm thirty-four. I look younger, I know, but realistically speaking, how much longer are these assholes going to want me around? I may become a doctor yet.”

“What about being erased from Omni? It doesn't bother you that your identity has been rubbed out of existence altogether?”

“Not at all. It makes things that much simpler. I keep every penny I earn. And I can have my identity back whenever I want, isn't that right?”

Pan nodded.

Dylan furrowed his brow. “I don't know what to say. I shouldn't have come here, I guess.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Pan said. “You're here for a reason.”

“Oh, and what is that exactly?”

Pan turned to Jade, “Why don't you go take five, darling. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.”

Jade nodded her thanks to Omni, directed a sassy wink at Dylan, and made her exit.

Omni continued: “Suffice it to say I was
expecting
you.”

“I'm sorry,” Dylan said, “but before we proceed, can you please tell me why you're Leonardo DiCaprio? And why you were George Clooney a few minutes ago? It's phenomenally distracting.”

“Would you prefer I be someone else?”

“What are you, like, an androcabby?”

“Something like that.”

“Let's see you be André the Giant then.”

No sooner had Dylan made the request than DiCaprio had morphed into the exact likeness of the iconic wrestler, complete with prodigious stature, black singlet and boots, and frizzy muttonchops.

“My God.”

“Not just yet,” André the Giant replied in that voice that Dylan knew from
The Princess Bride
—nasal, slo-mo deep, and about as accented as Depardieu's. “As of now, I'm still just Omni.”

“What do you
mean
you're Omni?”

“I mean just that. I am the physical incarnation of the great, squamous lattice of information you humanoids call ‘Omni.'”

“Oh,” Dylan said, relieved and bewildered at once. “I guess that makes some kind of sense.” He had always imagined Omni as a sort of abstract cloud; it had never occurred to him that it might manifest in physical form with a body and a personality. But then he himself was made of information—QT had proven that again and again—so why shouldn't something that consisted of exponentially
more
information self-organize into a shape-shifting humanoid if it wanted to? But then, why would it ever want to?