Alex told her that “Alex” was not the name they were born with. “I’m only admitting this because I’m kinda drunk, but I picked ‘Alex’ because ‘a-lex’ means ‘outside the law.’ That’s the sort of thing that impresses you when you’re fifteen.”
This was one of the few times she was inspired to say something. “What a coincidence. People never know how to pronounce my name, so I tell them, just think ‘meta,’ like metadata. So, you know, ‘beyond,’ or ‘transcending.’” A-lex and Meta, lovers who transcend the world and its categories, a couple of nerds chuckling over language games.
“I’m falling in love with you,” Alex said, which was ridiculous, but she hummed with ridiculous happiness, she wanted to hear them say it again. Her conch-pink agar dessert was nestled in a transverse cut of a large bamboo. The polished edge of the bowl was stippled with vascular bundles, umber dots on amber, decreasing in size and increasing in density toward the outer edge in a distribution that was partly random but kept tending toward Fibonacci spirals. She marveled at how beautiful it was. She longed to program a model that would mimic just that level of randomness.
By the time she and Alex left the restaurant it was nine degrees outside and windy. Alex held her close and said their apartment was just around the corner. They gave her a long kiss on the lips. She felt panic, which maybe Alex could sense, because they said, “Are you okay?”
She found she couldn’t speak. She nodded.
“Why don’t we get out of this cold?”
She and they turned into the wind, and she shivered, and Alex held her closer. When they reached the corner Alex turned her to the right, but she wished the two of them could just keep going, hugging, matching strides, red frosty cheeks braving the wind, reaching the park along the East River where there were too many BBQ pits and tables and too few trees, but where there was at least a small chance that she might glimpse a chipmunk sprinting away with its tail up, and she would point it out to Alex, who would express sincere interest and want to know more, and she is dimly aware (on the bus) that she must be dozing because of course there would be no chipmunks to see in the middle of winter, they would all be asleep in their burrows.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Saskia is a slave girl in the mumbojumbium mines of Altair VI. “Please, would you untie me?” No doubt she has a skimpy torn scrap of shirt, great abs and firm full breasts, deliciously grimy. Wouldn’t you love to lick them clean, boy-wanderer. Ooh my hardening nipples seem to have burst my shirt straight off me! She does a more urgent take: “Please would you untie me?!” On second thought, don’t touch those knots. Surely a pasty-faced fourteen-year-old such as yourself knows how to take a hogtied woman to heaven. A helpless take: “Please . . . w-would you untie me?” That one for the sados. Only if you suck my cock, bitch. Oh no, please, I’ve never . . . gobble gobble. Hey, Mikey, she likes it!
Now the responses. First fork: “My god! Thank you! You’ve restored my faith in humanity. I haven’t much, but please, take this.” Second fork—if he accepts the offered item, a charmed doodad or a note leading to a hidden cache, whatever—“You deserve it. I wish I had more.” If he doesn’t take it: “Well, thank you for that, too. I could use this myself.” Back to the first fork, if he doesn’t free her: “Thanks for nothing, asshole.” Way to show some sass, girl. Maybe they could have a cutscene of the slave girl kicking him in the balls, the boy-wanderer collapsing in his own vomit. If he clicks on her again: “Unless you’re willing to free me, I’ve got nothing more to say to you.”
Then a series of utterances randomly generated when the wanderer navigates close to her. “Is someone there?” “My family has no idea what happened to me.” “At least I’m not on sublevel six. I’ve heard . . . terrible things.” Then four different sounds of distress. Four more of fear. Huffing, for running. Mild pain grunt. Sharp pain shriek. Mortal wound gasp followed by morendo moan.
On it goes, four hours in the gray box at two hundred dollars an hour. There’s nothing else she’s doing these days that pays so well. If she manages sixteen hours a month, minus her agent’s commission and taxes, it covers her rent. If she can get a second four-hour session on the same day, she always takes it. There’s a lot of yelling (“Fire the laser cannon!” “You miserable worm, I almost feel sorry for you!”) and some actors worry about blowing their voices. But she has steel cords, maybe because she grew up screaming at a clutch of under-supervised younger stepsiblings.
Bye-bye, slave girl. (Good luck! Write!) Now she’s Countess Rhaelga Irtassa of Wherethefuck V, who—she glances ahead through her lines—appears to be a corruptible member of the Imperial Council. “How dare you approach me in my chamber! Explain yourself at once or I shall have my bodyguard slit your throat!”
She asks the team in the engineering booth, “Is this woman young, old, attractive, what?”
Phil’s voice in her ear: “Middle-aged. Heavy face. Enormous headdress.”
She goes for asperity, attempting clumsily to be silken, undercurrent of self-deluding over-the-hill coquetry. “Well that depends, my rash young friend, on whether you’re willing to do
