Toreth looked round, but Warrick was still beside him. Also still beside him.
"It's a recording," Warrick said.
The sim had never made him feel sick before, and it wasn't the sim that sickened him now, or stirred anger to chase the feeling away. Warrick fucking someone else, and even if it was supposed to be work, nothing fucking personal, he certainly looked to be enjoying himself.
Overly sensitive, perhaps, after Girardin, but he couldn't help it.
"I don't want to — " And then he stopped dead, his mouth open, as the Warrick on the bed leaned back, thrusting down hard, giving Toreth a clearer view of his partner.
It's the sim, isn't it? said the part of his brain not numbed by the sight. You can do anything in the sim. That's the whole point of it.
Dark hair disordered and damp with virtual sweat. Head thrown back to highlight the delicious sweep of his throat. Lips parted as he breathed encouragement.
Warrick.
Or — another thought he didn't like — someone else in Warrick's body?
"Who's that?"
"In a way, they're both me. One of them is me, the other one is a shell — a copy of my sim body, programmed to have sex in the same way I do. To have the same responses and so on. Or approximately so. It's rather more complex than that."
"So which one's you?"
Warrick studied the entwined bodies for a moment. "The one on top."
"Jesus."
It was, Toreth thought, an unfairly juicy secret to have kept. He moved round the bed, to improve the view, absorbing the implications of the situation as he watched the recording. It wasn't conducive to calm thought. The Warrick on his back had his hands clenched in the sheets, his back arching in a way that was so familiar it sizzled down Toreth's spine and straight to his groin.
"Stop."
The voice came from the bed, the first words spoken by either of them, and it took Toreth a moment to work out it was the supine Warrick who had spoken.
"What?" the other replied.
"I'd like you to fuck me."
Kneeling Warrick reached down and touched his mirrored lips. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Good." He nodded, with a detached, assessing satisfaction at variance with his obvious arousal. "Then turn over."
Sim-easy fucking — no preparation, no lubricant, no tedious messing around. Only a few seconds before Warrick thrust deep, once, and then stopped, with an expression Toreth also knew well — Warrick on the edge, perilously close to coming. He clicked his fingers, and the control panel appeared beside him. A few adjustments and he recommenced fucking. Fucking himself.
There was an insult that would never sound the same again.
If it had occurred to Toreth to try to look away, he wouldn't have been able to. The compelling weirdness of the sight before him absorbed him utterly, arousing and yet at the same time rather unsettling. He knew Warrick, knew how he responded, what he wanted, and the picture before him didn't quite match up with what he knew.
Eventually Toreth said, "You're very quiet."
"Who?" Warrick asked from beside the fire.
"The fucking you. Both of you."
"Am I?" Warrick tilted his head, listening, considering. "I suppose I am. That's the difference between professional and personal sex. Also, it requires a certain amount of concentration."
"Yeah? I would've thought doing yourself would be easy."
Warrick smiled. "In a way, yes. Certainly by that stage, when the shell has a significant measure of autonomy. This is one of the later training sessions. At first I had to split my attention between both bodies simultaneously, until the program learned my responses."
Toreth tried to imagine that, and gave up. "You're feeling with both bodies?"
"To begin with, yes."
"Fuck." That on its own opened a whole range of possibilities. On the bed, Warrick's hands slid down his partner's back as he thrust harder. Toreth knew how that felt, both to do it and to have it done to him. Feeling them at the same time, though . . .
"Could we do that? Could I feel what you feel when I fuck you?"
"No. Or rather, theoretically, yes, if I set the system up to do it. However, there are no protocols or safety assessments in place yet. We do have it pencilled in for later development."
Something to persuade Warrick over later. For now, he returned his attention to the recording. Warrick fucking and being fucked, two familiar pictures joined impossibly together. Warrick on his hands and knees, and Warrick kneeling upright. Bodies moving together, so perfectly attuned. Was this what Warrick had been doing for the last three weeks?
It made him feel . . . it was Warrick fucking someone else and even if the someone wasn't real, it stirred feelings he didn't like to acknowledge. How could he possibly be jealous of a computer program?
"What did you say it was called?" Toreth asked.
"The body is a shell. The program directing it is called an ee-ee-es. Evolved Expert System. Usually pronounced 'Yes'."
"How come I've never seen it before?"
"Commercial confidentiality, amongst other reasons. The tests aren't open to non-staff volunteers."
"So why now?"
"We're suspending the project. I thought you might like to see it working, before everything is switched off and uninstalled from the system."
A noise from the bed distracted Toreth, as the Warrick being fucked — the copy, wasn't it? — gasped.
"Yes. Suck . . . mmh, yes." The words changed into a moan as he curled down onto the bed, hands clenching in the rumpled bedspread as he came.
Of course — in the sim, distance was no guarantee of safety from Warrick's mouth.
Before long, the copy-Warrick lifted his head, and then knelt up, revealing an already-restored erection. Inhumanly fast, even for the sim, which had added benefits for male users.
Toreth glanced at Warrick. "Bit of an improvement on the original."
Warrick shook his head, but before he could reply, the copy-Warrick said, "Change places?"
That earned him a proprietorial pat on the shoulder from his creator. "I'd be delighted."
Watching them swap round, Toreth made up his mind. "Turn it on." It was the thing Warrick wanted him to ask, the reason he'd brought him here. "The live version. Go on."
Warrick smiled. "All right."
The pair of Warricks vanished, or at least reduced in number to a single figure seated on the edge of the vast bed. Naked, hands folded in his lap, expression blank.
Counting the Warrick at the controls there were still two of them. Possibilities and permutations raced through Toreth's mind so quickly that he couldn't pin any one of them down.
"Has anyone else had it?" Toreth asked.
"Yes, I'm afraid so. Although not always in that shell — in my body. A trained Yes can be used in different shells, although they work best in a limited set. The self-shells are used primarily for training and for — " He stopped.
"For what?"
"Comparison trials."
"For . . . you mean, for people to fuck that, then fuck you and see which was better?" Jealousy stirred again, rippling quickly through him.
"Not quite. Rather to see if the experiences are comparable. It's a little more technical than that, but that's the gist. The object of the exercise isn't to create exact replicas, but to produce behaviourally autonomous objects to interact with sim users. Within their area of competence, they have to be convincing. You might have noticed that one thing we don't have in general use in the sim is true virtual people. There are human-like objects but their range of behaviour is predefined and so limited."
Computer legislation was something Toreth had only a basic grounding in, but there was one fact he remembered. "Autonomous? Like an AI? Isn't that illegal?"
"Yes. Or rather, sentient AIs are. We're trying to create something that will be suitably interactive, without it being legally sentient. We have all the appropriate permissions, of course. However, the legislation is sadly unclear, as is almost inevitable. Defining sentience, what constitutes a sentient AI, and how to delineate any one example and separate the AI from the systems around it, and so on."
Despite a genuine effort to stay interested, Toreth could feel his eyes glazing over. It never stopped surprising him how Warrick could talk any situation to death once he found a technical angle that interested him.
Warrick shrugged. "A very difficult area to even attempt to set in concrete terms. The Yes is one of our most promising approaches. They become convincing simulacra in a single area, but profoundly limited in others, or at least that is the idea. Stopping them learning isn't easy. We had hoped it would find us a way round the law, in that they could be classified as merely unusually flexible expert systems. However, as soon as you add a human-like physical — or virtual — body, people make assumptions. And by definition, the things have to act human."
A computer creation, not a person. Impossible to think of it as such, though, despite the eerie stillness. It was too exactly like Warrick to be a thing. "So they've forced you to cancel the project?"
"Not as such, no. The permission for the projects requires periodic revision, with an Administration-appointed committee from the Communications Systems Assessment Division being responsible for that."
"They're part of the Data Division," Toreth said with surprise. "They have a building in the Int-Sec complex."
"Yes. The sim is classified as a means of information transfer, so they're responsible for monitoring our compliance with the relevant legislation. They delivered a report on the Yeses three weeks ago, and we were given a month to respond to their concerns. That's why I've been at SimTech all hours of the day since." Warrick sighed. "Unfortunately, our own assessment is that the burden of proving that what we're doing falls within the terms of the licenses has become too great for SimTech to bear. Answering all the points they raised will divert too many euros and people from the rest of the sim, and we have a tight schedule to deliver the first production run. So we've called a halt ourselves."
"Christ. What a waste."
"Not really. The work has been done, we've assessed a number of methods and had considerable success." The attempt to highlight the positive couldn't hide Warrick's disappointment. "It's a delay, not a cancellation. All the code will be archived until we have time to activate the project again."
"Including him? It." 'It' sounded better.
"Yes."
Toreth contemplated the autonomous object on the bed. "Wake it up."
Warrick touched the controls, and turned round, abruptly naked in the firelight. Toreth felt the unreal heat of the fire on his own suddenly bare skin.
"KA-forty-one, initiate interactive mode," Warrick said.
A number, not a name, Toreth noted. Probably Warrick wouldn't be interested in hearing about prisoner depersonalization theory.
The Warrick on the bed looked up at them, then over to the clock and back. "Good evening."
"Good evening," real-Warrick said. He extended his hand, and the Yes took it, rising smoothly to its feet and then standing beside . . . beside himself. They turned to Toreth.
"Go on. If you want to, of course," said real-Warrick.
Except neither of them were real. The
real
Warrick — warm flesh and blood — was elsewhere, still and unresponsive in the couch. The whole sim felt suddenly fragile around him.
Feeling strangely self-conscious, Toreth moved over to the copy. He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do, then settled for kissing it.
Like kissing Warrick, and not like. Physically perfect, but something a little off in the response. Exactly what, he couldn't say. Disappointing in a way, but at the same time oddly reassuring to know that he could tell the difference.
He deepened the kiss, beginning to explore with his hands, and the body leaned into him, responding to his touch and touching in return. Then, with no perceptible transition, he
was
kissing Warrick, unmistakably so.
He pulled back at once, looking between the man he still held, and the figure standing beside him, and for a moment, he wasn't sure. He didn't
know
. Then the explanation occurred, and he released his hold.
"You swapped," he said accusingly to the Warrick he'd kissed.
"Yes." Warrick had the same satisfied expression he'd worn when the Yes asked to change places. "You spotted it very quickly."
"Of course I did." Reflexively, Toreth wiped his mouth.
"No 'of course' about it — some people can't tell, or don't notice for a while."
"Don't do it again."
"No?"
"No. It's — " He wasn't sure what it was, other than extremely unnerving. He hadn't known. For that one small moment, mouths together, virtual breath mingling, he hadn't been sure whether Warrick was real or not. Normally he enjoyed the weirdness of the sim, but the idea of fucking Warrick and not knowing who — or what — he was touching almost frightened him. He shivered.
"Would you like to go out?" Warrick asked. "Now you've seen it."
"No. It's just . . . fucking strange."
Professional curiosity sparked in Warrick's eyes. "Because it's not a real person? Or because it's me?"
"The second one. If it didn't look like you, I think it would be okay."
The copy spread its hands. "I can change my shell, if that would make you more comfortable."
Toreth looked sharply at Warrick, who shook his head. "That's the Yes talking." He smiled. "It's rather more agreeable than I am."
The Yes — or what he thought was the Yes — smiled too, an eerie mirror. "Somewhat. All part of my function. What are your preferences? I'm a far more accomplished male, but I can try female if that's what you'd like."
Had it been listening to everything, then? "Don't you know what I like?"
"How should I? We've never met before and Doctor Warrick left me no instructions. But I always enjoy expanding my knowledge."