Stella’s pen leaving her signature on the contract, ink seeping from glossy to matte black.
Henrietta. “When you arrive there will likely be some rough suffocation play. Just pretend you can’t breathe. The client may knock you around a bit. You need to make sure to react appropriately, crying out, gasping. It’s important that you approximate, as closely as you can, a typical human response to consensual sadism.”
“I’m a professional.”
“Intercourse may occur at this point. You should do what you can to prevent him from ejaculating. He will want to ejaculate later, into your dead body or dismembered head or neck cavity.”
Stella initialed the line.
Henrietta. “At this point he may want to start dismembering you. Most likely this will begin with the fingers and toes, and move on up the extremities. You are expected to react with appropriate terror and beg for your life.”
Stella. “I can do that.”
Henrietta. “Then he will likely decapitate you. Please, at this point, if you could, feign death. As I mentioned, it may occur to him to copulate with the orifices of your dismembered head. You are encouraged to reduce your body temperature and remain still, human-like, while this occurs.”
“Not a problem.” Stella stared out the window. The art director had done a pretty decent job re-creating Central Park. The limo pulled up to an apartment building across the street from a CGI Guggenheim. It was raining, a cinematic drizzle originating from sprinklers above. Stella stood for a moment in the rain, staring up at the penthouse as the doorman opened the door. The camera followed her gaze to a shadow of a man who was watching her from one of the high windows.
The elevator doors opened into the penthouse. Stella emerged in slo-mo, stilettos Foleying hardwood. Three of the client’s assistants appeared, each of indeterminate gender and with a shaved head, monk-like in loose-fitting garments. Eunuchs. Quickly they towelled Stella off and took her handbag and vinyl jacket. One clasped her hand and led her to a sitting room. The penthouse was done up as one might imagine the digs of a 1970s porn magazine publisher. A lot of neo-Classical faux Greek shit, ornate tapestries, chandeliers, marble columns, fountains.
Abby pulled her knees up to her chin. This next part chilled her every time.
The client appeared from behind a shoji screen. A young white guy, boringly handsome, wearing a white cotton bathrobe, tan, confident. “You’re the new one,” he said.
“I am here to fulfill your pleasures,” Stella said.
“My name is Quinn Hunt. You’ve no doubt heard of Hunt Investments, owner of practically all the world’s energy sources?”
Stella was silent.
Hunt continued. “Of course you haven’t. You never do. The last time you were here I asked you the same question. I got the same blank look. Tell me, Stella, how many times have you been here?”
“This is my first time.”
“Well, good. I’m glad they’ve got you thinking that. I want to show you something.”
Hunt waved his hand and a screen descended from the ceiling. With a couple more motions images appeared. Here was Hunt mounting Stella, or a previous version of Stella, on a plush canopied bed.
“We had fun the last time you were here. See?”
More pornographic images. A close-up of the in-the-present Stella’s expressionless face as the reflections swam over her corneas. The camera remained on her as, off-screen, the recording of her previous self cried out, the sound of a cane striking artificial flesh, begging, more beating. A close-up of Quinn Hunt’s cold face. “Here comes the fun part.” The buzz of an electric blade, screams at a higher pitch. A close-up again of Stella’s face, unbudged from its blankness.
Hunt. “You wonder why I’m like this. Why I keep bringing you out here to abuse you. I was designed this way. I was an experiment. They isolated the serial-killer profile and engineered me in utero in the lab. But they also engineered incredible health and an astounding mathematical mind. Someone who could swim freely in the world of high finance. Someone with real earning potential. But my pleasure centers are wired to light up in the presence of others’ suffering. And they get really lit up when I’m inflicting that suffering. And when I’m lucky enough to kill someone, why, then it’s a state of pure nirvana. Do I wish it were another way? Certainly. I curse these pleasures! I pass people on the street and observe their uncomplicated motivations, their children and possessions. I wish I could be one of them. My life would be so much less
The eunuchs rushed to disrobe Hunt and Stella. Soon the two stood naked before one another, Hunt’s cock erect. The camera lingered on their bodies. Hunt took a step forward. Then a quickly edited series of shots. Stella reached to her crotch. An outburst of brass on the soundtrack. The eyes of a eunuch going wide with shock. Stella whipping out a short dagger she’d smuggled inside herself. Hunt, startled. The dagger flashing, then buried in one of Hunt’s eye sockets. Screaming. The eunuchs opening their robes to reveal machine pistols and—why not?—samurai swords. Stella whirling naked through the air, landing roundhouse kicks. Hunt screaming, twitching on the floor. Stella having some difficulty retrieving the dagger, as it appeared to be stuck in Hunt’s eye, having to brace her foot on his neck to get the proper leverage while one-handedly jiujitsuing the shit out of those sword-wielding eunuch guys. The knife slurped out. Stella swiped it like a debit card across Hunt’s throat. A blood puddle spread across the floor. Close-up of a eunuch lifting his machine pistol, getting off a smattering of shots, a round ripping through Stella’s bicep, revealing the machinery and circuitry within. Stella backflipping, snagging one of the eunuch’s swords while midair and upside down, then decapitating all three with a single swipe of the blade. An alarm. Stella snagging a couple machine pistols just in time to blast the security guards appearing in a nearby doorway, globules of flesh spattering oil paintings of landed gentry.
Stella turned to the camera. “The newman uprising is
Then, firing both machine pistols and running backward, Stella propelled herself out the nearest window and some twenty stories down, still firing, the angry faces above screaming their threats to her bodily self, a body she didn’t necessarily need because they could just give her a new one anyway. These questions getting somewhat obscured by the muzzle-lit ejaculations of fist-held firepower. Then through the sunroof of a waiting limousine, landing naked, covered in blood and glass, next to Dr. Uri Borden, played by supernaturally handsome Neethan F. Jordan.
Commercials.
Rocco returned after midnight smelling like his bike commute. After his shower he crawled into bed alongside Abby, who slept and dreamed of horses. He woke her by touching a nipple. She clambered into semiconsciousness and asked how studying had gone. He mumbled something and kissed her. They were supposed to make love now, this is what this meant. She spooned her back into him. He slid his hand over her belly, letting his pinkie rest in her belly button.
“I got offered a job,” Abby said, then sleepily doled out the details, except for the part about Bickle knowing that she spied on their neighbours. Rocco gave her shoulder a little shake. “No more student loans. Wow. You’re going to take it, right?”
“I think so.”
“What is there to think about?”
Did Rocco have some secret reason for wanting her to leave for a few months? Some chick in the Bionetics department at UBC she didn’t know about? He kissed her again, and the brevity of the kiss communicated there’d be no lovemaking. She listened to his breathing as he entered sleep, precipitously, plunging into REM in under five minutes. Down there, in his dreams, he would continue studying, reviewing lecture notes and sometimes mumbling aloud about the amygdala or basolateral complex.
Rocco liked to say that cerebral Bionetic enhancement was the scalpel edge of the next stage of human evolution. Putting it in terms Abby could understand, he explained that the fuck-or-fight, R-complex reptilian brain had evolved first, then the limbic system with its anxieties and need for hugs, then the rational neocortex, which was now working to develop the next stage of cognition—the Bionetic neural extension. Each component of the triune model had reached a point when it started to understand what the species needed next and so invented its own neural progeny. Instinct demanded emotion, emotion demanded rationality, and rationality demanded… what,
