The Seaside Love Palace popped and groaned as it settled in the cold night. Abby flipped through a stack of celebrity biographies until after midnight, when she rose and slipped into the hallway. There was a whole wing of the manse she hadn’t seen yet; now would be a good time to check it out. Every ten feet or so along the hall hung one of Isaac’s garish phantasy paintings, each lit by a single halogen bulb. Here was Isaac in a fishbowl helmet and space suit, firing a laser gun, Kylee in a gold bikini clutching his thigh, fending off what appeared to be a bad seafood experience. In another he raised a sword to deliver the coup de grace to a kind of furry, maybe-dragon sorta thing that had Kylee in its talons. Abby imagined the couple posing for these portraits, frozen in war-gaming gear while a bearded and kilted graphic designer sketched them onto canvas. After studying five or six of these paintings she got the crazy idea that they’d actually loved each other.
Abby descended a flight of stairs and heard music. Sort of a disco/house beat, a track off one of Kylee’s old albums. She maneuvered around shadows of furniture, past a dormant kitchen and a reading room where taxidermy animal heads gawked from the walls. At the end of a short side hall she came to a black door through which she could feel the pulse of the bass. She pushed it open a crack and peeked into a ballroom that smelled like a mashup between a gymnasium and a health clinic. From speakers thumped a hit single about promiscuity and shopping for luxury goods. Abby’s eyes widened. From a chintzy-looking throne atop a dais Kylee barked through a megaphone, directing the Federicos in a mammoth, gay clone orgy!
From her hiding place, for over an hour, Abby observed the carnal ritual like an anthropologist, finding the grunting contortions much like the underground Bionet parties she had attended in college. News of those parties had spread by word of mouth, directions changing and conflicting, secret passwords whispered into ears. One rainy night Abby had piled into a car with three of her friends—Jadie, Megan, and Heather—and headed across the Lions Gate Bridge into a zone of murky abandoned industry. Out here the streets eventually gave up and ended in tangles of debris and broken concrete. They parked in an alley and followed the directions to a metal door marked with a crop-circle glyph. The four friends looked at one another, questioning whether they were really up for this, a quartet of graduate students in a downpour, willingly giving someone else—a stranger—complete control over their bodies. Abby opened the door.
They called these kinds of places pleasure centers. This particular pleasure center was down a musty- smelling flight of stairs that opened into a subterranean space lit with purples and reds, forms gathered around pillars checking out the newcomers, the periphery fuzzed-out visually with hushed conversations and lips occasionally sipping glasses of energy drink. A dance floor, if one wanted to call it that, framed by spotlights. No music, just a low rumble of whispers and body noises. On the dance floor was a human pyramid—three men on the bottom, two in the middle, and a single man standing on his hands, which were planted on the two men beneath him. The pyramid remained stationary for several minutes. The man standing on his hands pulled in one of his arms to balance on one hand. Abby watched the man’s forearm tremble. Was he going to fall? No, actually, he was extending his index finger so that it was the only part of his body touching the man beneath him. He balanced a full minute as a ripple of applause went through the spectators and a patch of blood spread on the leotard of the man beneath him. Carefully, the human pyramid disassembled itself and a couple women carrying towels rushed to the one who’d been the pyramid’s apex. He looked exhausted, slumping into their arms as they wiped his face. A violent shudder racked his body like an epileptic seizure, but short, a jolt.
Over a PA system a calm and reedy voice intoned, “He’s going to be just fine. His nervous system is confused and it will take about an hour before he’s back to feeling like himself. And tomorrow his arms will be a little sore. Don’t worry. We’ll take loving care of him.”
Another flutter of applause. Abby looked around trying to determine the source of the voice and found it in a shaded corner of the room, the DJ’s booth. The DJ stood behind a bank of three laptops, GUIs reflected off the surfaces of his glasses.
Heather pinched Abby’s arm. “No freakin’ way I’m letting the DJ take over my implants. How do you know he won’t make you kill somebody?”
Megan said, “Or worse, fuck somebody?”
Jadie said, “You believe that USA Today bullshit? They’re already breaking the law hacking other peoples ’plants, it’s not like they’re going to completely screw themselves with a murder or rape charge.”
“It’s based on SM,” Abby said. “Every participant has a safe word to break the hack.”
Jadie added, “And the DJ would be ripped apart by the crowd if he tried anything stupid. Everyone’s looking out for everyone else.”
Onto the dance floor marched six hairless eunuchs. This ought to be good, Abby thought. For the next twenty minutes they danced, their eyes miles away, letting themselves get thrown into a choreography controlled remotely from the corner of the room. They leapt, pinwheeled, jerked. Contentwise it wasn’t unlike a lot of archival footage of modern dance Abby had seen. Once the routine concluded the eunuchs wobbled off, regaining their gross motor skills in an almost narcotic fugue. This stuff was often compared to a kind of addiction. The hard-core Bionet abusers begged for DJs to control their every move, even eating, defecation, sex. Abby’d heard about a man in Boise who’d entered into an abusive arrangement with his neighborhood Bionet hacker and given him carte blanche over his vitals. Guy by the name of Paul Garza. The hacker, who went by the handle Salo, set up scripts to run automatically and induce Garza to eat, sleep, take a shower, groom himself, speak, masturbate, read, watch TV. At first Garza thought this was heavenly, watching his body go about its prescribed routines as if from a distance and yet from within himself. He described it as feeling like Salo’s flesh-and-blood embodiment. Garza found himself waking up at a regular time, taking care of his business in the bathroom, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work at the recycling plant, chatting with coworkers with Salo’s distantly typed words in his mouth, making wittier jokes than he’d ever made, going to a bar after work, hooking up with some hottie chick who was herself under 24/7 remote control, maybe even by Salo also, screwing like crazy at her place, coming home, falling asleep, and dreaming. Dreams, though. Dreams were the one thing Bionet hackers couldn’t control, and Garza’s started taking on a panicked element. In the dreams he watched himself as if on a security- camera monitor, painstakingly executing the most mundane rituals of his day. His subconscious was freaking out, saying, Whoa, hold on, buddy, I thought I was calling the shots around here! Alarmed at being usurped, his subconscious sent out these distress calls in the middle of deep REM. As the days dragged and Salo’s routines changed little, if at all, Garza wondered if he should utter his safe word and break the hack. But it was so dreamy, living like this. He was making more friends, getting fit with a daily workout, eating well. The scripts Salo had laid out were truly working the wonders the hacker had promised when they first met in a booth at Game Zone. Somewhere across town on a laptop in a guy’s rec room, Garza’s entire life was being mapped out and executed perfectly. He even got a promotion. He began looking at the life he’d led before giving over his daily routine to Salo as one filled with foibles and inadequacies. This new Garza strode confidently, spoke up for himself, ate right, and bedded the ladies. But the dreams. Full-on thrashing nightmares now, with slaughtered animals and self-castration, the pollution of Hell vomited up through his brain stem. He woke trembling and saw his hand moving toward a bottle of pills prescribed to blunt the edges of these terrors. But I like not being in control, Garza told himself, and told one of his dates, who was far beyond where he was, her eyes gone milky, as mechanically they began to screw. “With the Bionet,” she said, “you can experience another person’s orgasm. Would you like to experience mine?” Garza consented and deep in their brains the software flipped their perceptions of their sense organs so whatever was happening to the date’s body was going into Garza’s brain and vice versa. Garza, disoriented, felt himself being penetrated in a new concavity, understanding the swinging weight of breasts, opening his eyes expecting to see himself pounding away on his now-female form, but finding his date drifting into a somnambulist’s version of sexual intercourse, her eyes like monitors tuned to static, face twitching minutely upon his ejaculation. And the real shitty part was that he never made her come, so Garza missed out on his own orgasm. Or hers. Whatever. Then the next day a crazy thing happened. Salo, the hacker, died. Car wreck, nothing fancy. The scripts ran as per usual, leading Garza through his day on autopilot, then the next day and the next until Salo’s family handed the laptops over to the cops, whose Bionet enforcement division quickly figured out Salo was operating several flesh-and-blood embodiments and put the brakes on the whole operation. One minute Garza was making himself a mango fruit smoothie, the next he sensed a great silence within. The blender kept going on PUREE. He wanted to turn it off but found the only things his hands appeared to be good for were to look at. He stood in the kitchen for an hour, during which time the blender melted down and stopped functioning and great strings of drool dripped from his catatonic
