He stuck out a stubby-fingered hand. “Zack. Zack Pickles.”
“Mike McGill.” I nodded at the building. “This your business?”
“Yep. Welcome to the Farm.” He had a goofy, childlike grin that made me kind of like him right off the bat.
“What kind of business?”
“Internet business. You?”
“I’m a private investigator.” I laughed as he instantly turned paler than ghost shit. “Relax. I’m not from around here, I’m already on a case, and I never heard of you. I’m staying with a friend of a friend…hell, somewhere back over there, I’m a little bit kind of totally fucking lost at this point. And it’s a lost property case. So, you know, go me. You can restart your heart now.”
“That obvious?”
“’Fraid so. Whatever your business is, I give you my word I couldn’t care less.”
He blew out a breath, sagging in his skin. “Jesus. This is why I don’t leave the server room. You’re from out of town?”
“Manhattan.” I struggled my wallet out and gave him one of my few remaining business cards. The ones that survived going around the washing machine six weeks earlier. “The trail led me here, though I don’t hold out a hell of a lot of hope. And, well, I think I just fucked things up with a girl, and I’m walking, and…”
“And here you are. Girls are nothing but trouble anyway. They are not like us.”
“This one especially. Trust me.”
He grinned. “You look like a man who could use a drink. And I never met a real live PI before. You want a beer?”
“That is the first sane thing I’ve heard all day.”
“C’mon. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”
We went into the building’s lobby, where I was blasted half to death by L.A.-style arctic air-conditioning. A sour-looking girl gave me a handwritten visitor’s badge on a lanyard stolen from an adult movie expo in 2001 at Zack’s request.
“So what do you farm here, Zack?”
“Money. Information. Also cum.”
Pushing through the big double doors at the end of the lobby, we entered a massive space filled with three- walled cubicles. I leaned around the missing wall of the first one. The cubicle had been made to look like a teenager’s bedroom. On the single bed was a young woman in schoolgirl gear and a headset preparing to do something disgusting and probably quite painful with a pink rubber dildo the size of my entire arm. There was a laptop on the bed next to her. Set in the doorway was a camera on a tripod, thick cables running out of it and chasing into the floor.
I looked at Zack. “The hell?”
He pointed ahead, smiling proudly. Every cubicle I looked in had a similar arrangement. Some of them replaced girls with boys. A few had boys dressed as girls. One had a woman in her late sixties. The only cubicle with two people in it featured a pair of Japanese girls doing something just frighteningly hideous with a bucket of baby eels. Every last one of them was performing sex acts in front of a dedicated camera.
We went through the next set of heavy double doors, into a corridor.
“What did I just see, Zack?”
“One part of my business. Cool, no?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I just saw.”
“Okay. You go to one of my Web sites. The Web site connects to the laptops in the cubes. The girl with the laptop performs to the camera. The camera connects to the Net. The video from the cam shoots down the Net to the Web site. You see the girl in the cube. The whole thing’s on a ten-second delay. The signal basically wraps around the world before it comes to your computer. Legal reasons, I’m not going into it. You pay for the video by credit card, I sanitize the sale in Russia, we’re all good.”
“But…Why so many? Jesus Christ, man, why the
Zack giggled. “Because everyone has a different kink, man. The more Web sites with unique content I provide, the more customers I get. Not everyone gets off on a softcore murder mystery on Skinemax, you know? And once the infrastructure was down, adding new sites was almost costless.”
“Kinda fringe-y, though, surely? I mean, girls with eels in their…Is there a lot of call for that?”
“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”
“Exploded television.”
“Exactly. Exploded television. I am the
“Whoa. Hold up.” I wanted a minute to catch up with this. “You’ve got like fifty people in wired-up video Internet sex boxes out there…and that’s not the whole thing?”
“It’s not even the whole of the cubicle farm. We’ve got another hundred people upstairs.”
