Ghosts of Punktown (11 page)

*     *     *

    Still in his lab smock, taking a break from his work on Rhik, Roy went into the recovery room to see how May Azul was doing. Roy had sent Iris in a few minutes ago to revive her, and when he entered May had already swung her bare legs off the side of the bed. She wore a plastic smock. She was already viewing herself in a display of wall screens. Iris stepped aside. Roy's stomach was clenched in a fist of dread.

    "Hello, May." Professional smile. "So what do you think?" Light tone.

    "Well." She fingered it timidly. His sculpture. Her face. "It's a little subtle. I thought we'd agreed to do a little more ." She had checked the time...it hadn't been any three hours. He'd better not charge her for the three hour range.

    "I thought you trusted my artistic instincts."

    "I do. But...well." A small red jewel, glowing with a light inside it, was implanted in her forehead. From the corners of her eyes two implanted, thin rounded black plastic strips extended to her temples, then curved down under the line of her jaw to connect under her chin. That was all. "I still look kind of boring."

    Boring. With those bee-stung lips. "Did you see this?" He picked up a small device. Touched a key. The forehead jewel turned sapphire. Another key. The black plastic half-frame around her face became white. Pink. Metallic gold. The gem became an emerald.

    "Yes," May murmured, only half looking into the screens. "I just...I like it, but I could probably buy jewelry like this and glue it on. I thought from the friends I described, and from the price range we agreed on, you'd do something more distinctive. I  trust your artistic instincts, but this is me ...I'm the one who has to be artistically gratified. Right?"

    Maybe she could be bashful and sweet, but she could be cold and bitter also, he saw. "This is what I saw for you," he said emotionlessly. Iris looked uncomfortable. "I 'm sorry you don't like it."

    "I 'd like a little more, if I have the money left over."

    "You do. But I really don't know what else I might do for you."

    "I've seen your photographs on the walls, Mr. Roy! I saw that guy Rhik in the waiting room! What do you mean you don't know what else you can do?"

    "Iris, will you tend the front?" She nodded, split-faced, left. Roy moved to a coffee maker and got himself a cup. May declined. His back to May, the artist said, "Why does such a lovely woman want to look like an axe murderer attacked her and a drunken doctor patched her back together?"

    "Why are you saying this? Lovely? Nobody looks at me! I don't stand out! I want to make a statement!"

    "Those aren't their statements. They're mine. They aren't individuals. They're all the same. Can't you see how beautiful you are? You want me to ruin that? I don't like Picasso, May...I like Renoir." He faced her.

    "You're a hypocrite, Mr. Roy. You do things like I saw in your photographs and you act like you disapprove."

    "I do." He sipped his coffee grimly.

    "Why?" She gaped at him in disbelief.

    Roy's eyes were hot in a face that was clean-shaven, somewhat plump and boyish, and devoid of any artistic embellishment. Only now did May notice that. He said, "John Merrick the Elephant Man ached to look like regular men. He dreamed of it...in vain. Never had a wife. Died young, after years of pain. And I have a...ludicrous fool on a table in this other room who wants to look like him exactly! If I could only trade his body with Merrick, but I can't. Can you see the horror in this?”

    "What horror? He looked happy to me. He chooses to look like that. Merrick didn't. In our time nobody will make fun of that man or pity him
-- they'll admire him and envy him! So what's so horrible?"

    Now it was Roy's turn to gape in disbelief, coffee hovering in his hand. "Don't you see it isn't natural?"

    "Natural? I don't believe you, not at all! Look at you. Is it natural for humans to wear clothes, jewelry? Is it natural for you to wear deodorant, cut and comb your hair and shave? What's natural? You're  the artist -- why do you do it? Just for the money after all, after your big speech about 'artistic gratification'?" She mocked the words.

    Roy set down his coffee. "I didn't lie to you, Miss Azul. I do achieve a great deal of artistic gratification. More so than when I used to repair people who had been burnt or disfigured, making them beautiful again. I love deforming these fools and blathering, mindless sheep who follow the drunken herdsmen of fashion!"

    "So you're a poet too, eh?" May hugged her arms, sneering her pouty bee-stung lips at him to hide her nervousness.

    "An unhappy poet, Miss Azul. With a talent for working from the black ink well. The dark end of the pallet. I am only too happy to hack the arm off a buffoon like your friend and give him a tentacle instead and take his money. He's a horror to me, a monster. I laugh at him."

    "You're sick! You know that? You're sick."

    "Oh? But he's happy with his tentacle, isn't he? You don't see me with a tentacle. We're all sick, May."

    "I didn't come for a philosophy lecture, Mr. Roy. What do I owe you? I'll go elsewhere for what I want."

    "No." Roy dropped his coffee cup three-quarter
s full into the trash zapper. "I'll finish with Rhik and be right with you -- it will just be an hour."

    "I'm not sure I want you now."

    "You may have to wait elsewhere for weeks for a session. Go read a magazine. One hour."

    "All right," May muttered, slipping off the table, gathering up her belongings. "I just want what I want," she said in a softer tone.

    "I know." Roy didn't look at her, and left her to dress although she had lain naked for him to manipulate before...a field of snow inviting the trampling of a herd of mindless sheep.

    While Roy finished up with Rhik's session he flipped through books from his extensive collection in his mind. Horror movies. Texts on medical anomalies. A half dozen on circus sideshows of old. Bosch. Maybe a little bit of each?

    Mr. Roy was inspired, now.

    He sweated eight hours over May Azul.

Imp

     The child had the most delicate of bodies, long thin limbs, wispy blond hair, the sweetest of smiles, and her entire unclothed form shone a luminous green, a soft phosphorescence, as if she were being viewed through some sort of device that could see in the dark, though Lawr felt this was maybe the light she had been filmed in – a sickly glow of fluorescents, like lights shining down on a coroner’s table.

*     *     *

     Lawr prided himself on having a pretty sophisticated comp system in his apartment, but even with that he still couldn’t filter out every annoying advertisement. Those who designed these things were ever perfecting their craft, in order to slip their imps past just such blocking features as Lawr employed, and subsequently he downloaded fresh barrier software regularly in an ongoing arms race of technology. He was reminded of certain viruses that evolved so quickly through mutation that, even with treatment, the immune system had trouble clearing them from the afflicted body.

     No, he couldn’t intercept them all. Just recently a logo for Vita Vitaminjects had floated out of his main monitor and begun to orbit around his room, as if to keep moving to elude him. It would fade away in a few hours; a minor irritation, not like those imps that circled your wrist like a bracelet or followed you around from room to room like a hungry cat slinking about your ankles. To ward off homing imps, one could spray an atomized solution that would disrupt their focus and send them drifting off in a more random direction. Lawr kept a can of this spray on the top shelf of his comp station both at home and at work. But there were still greater nuisances than these simple homing imps. A whole squad of miniature soldiers in pink uniforms, advertising Screaming Pink Nazis breakfast cereal, had poured out of his system last week when his back was turned, scattering throughout his flat and popping up from their hiding places to fire their mock guns at him. He’d gone hunting for them with his can in a counteroffensive, as determined as if his flat had become infested with poisonous spiders, spraying each soldier he found to break the spell that made them fixate on him – after which they wandered away aimlessly as if shell-shocked. An unwelcome distraction, especially when an unexpected last survivor hopped onto the foot of his bed to shoot at him just when he was about to fall asleep.

     The most aggravating imp he’d encountered in the past few months, though, had been an advertisement for a horror movie called
The Toilet Man
, based on an urban legend that had sprung up here in the city that Earth colonists had come to call Punktown. The legend, and movie, concerned an obese middle-aged man who suffered a fatal heart attack while on the toilet – his body discovered weeks later by teenagers breaking into his rundown apartment building – who returned from the dead as a hideous, vengeful spirit. Lawr had entered his bathroom to find his destination already occupied by a life-sized, utterly solid-looking holograph of the Toilet Man, sitting there with his pants around his ankles, horribly ballooned with the gases of decomposition, his skin greasy and blackened, his bloated arms risen as if he hoped people would take hold of them to hoist him off the seat. Lawr nearly succumbed to a heart attack himself, and later on the news he heard complaints about this publicity stunt, especially from parents whose children had been traumatized – some now preferring to wet their beds rather than venture into the bathroom.

     Lawr’s spray wouldn’t budge the apparition from his toilet, but thankfully it didn’t turn its swollen head to look at him, or worse, rise up and shamble after him as the ghost pursued its victims in the movie. He simply had to wait for the holograph’s brief life to end, for it to lose its illusory solidity and vanish on its own. But until then, he had shut the bathroom door so that he wouldn’t have to see its bulging-eyed visage again.

*     *     *

     On the night that he swiveled in his chair to find the little girl standing at his elbow smiling at him sweetly, Lawr had already been sitting for four hours in front of his comp system.

*     *     *

     He often felt guilty when he surfaced from an almost dream-like submersion to realize that he’d just spent hours of his free time meandering about the net instead of pursuing more constructive endeavors, or venturing outside his apartment where he might meet a new woman now that he’d already been divorced for nearly two years – but he justified to himself that his job was stressful, and a man needed some mindless indulgence to claim a little “me” time from a harsh universe. The very aimlessness of his wandering throughout the net was a relaxing contrast to his intensely focused and numbingly repetitive work at the office.

     His wandering still took certain favorite paths, however. Yes, he might on impulse look up and play a vid for some song he’d loved as a teenager, take a virtual tour around areas of Punktown he would be afraid to visit in person, or through some other city on another colonized world or even on Earth itself – floating like a wraith through their streets at random – or he might check out news stories that had particularly odd or alarming headlines...but there were certain subject matters he always, inevitably, seemed to find his way around to.

     For a while there had been the dating sites, a half dozen of which he’d signed up for last year on one particularly empty weeknight when he should have been sleeping, but he found their free features were so limited that they were ultimately useless; basically he could only browse rows and rows of anonymous faces, send virtual winks and hellos without being able to access any return messages. It was like squeezing a woman’s bottom on a crowded shunt car and getting no further satisfaction than that. He had broken down and paid for membership for two of the sites, however, but only several women had ever expressed enough interest to meet with him. He had felt as uncomfortable with them as they had with him. One woman, considerably younger and larger than himself, had necked and groped with him for a while in his parked hovercar after they had had coffee, but finally they had politely disentangled themselves without pursuing matters to their end, out of an unspoken but mutual disinterest.

     Lately, he had favored other types of sites instead. There was plenty of commonplace smut, to be sure, and his eyes had drunk up so many bodies he thought these people could occupy an entire colony world. But one grew jaded with all that, quickly enough. One needed more, and more, never feeling sated, even when one found they were masturbating to these images twice a day. When the sheer quantity of naked flesh didn’t suffice, one turned down odd little alleyways, didn’t they? Explored areas one had never encountered before, hadn’t anticipated or had been too timid to consider.

     Tonight, Lawr had watched an unusual vid that had for the most part repulsed him, though a small worm of arousal had squirmed somewhere in his guts. The vid had shown a bound man lying on the floor with his head positioned under a chair, the seat of which had been removed like a toilet, with a clear bowl inserted in the space. A chute ran down from this bowl and was fastened over the man’s mouth. Into the scene had come a pretty teenager apparently of Japanese heritage, wearing a school uniform skirt short enough to reveal that she had a stump in place of a right leg. The long white stocking she wore on her remaining leg made the stump all the more glaringly exposed. She set crutches aside and pushed her panties down as she settled herself in the chair. She must have had an enema only moments earlier, because no sooner had she sat when a gush of brown water had burst into the clear bowl, rushing down the chute into the man’s mouth. He had moaned, as if tortured, but Lawr knew it had more to do with pleasure, a pleasure perhaps unbearable in its intensity, swallowing even the solid feces that were mixed with the broth, one by one. In the end, the girl had even used a brush to push the last of the turds down, giggling cutely as she did so.

     Lawr was just curious enough to activate an olfactory simulation feature he’d added to his system, but after only a few seconds of smelling the air in the stark little room he had shut the feature off again. He sat there almost dazed, not masturbating, not sure what to feel. He envied the man’s intensity, though. Had he himself ever felt so acutely, deliriously alive?
Would
he ever?

     He had found the girl cute, at least, and drifted half-heartedly through a few amputee sites (Ampamour, Amputeros), which mildly aroused him, but his interest took him more in the direction of the girl’s youthfulness. A site called Amputeens featured women who were young but obviously above the age of consent, playing up their youthful appearance. There was a particular scenario that drew Lawr, though; a series of stills in which a father was supposedly carrying on with his own daughter, stripping and fondling her, ultimately licking and sucking on the end of her stump. The man and girl bore no familial resemblance to each other, but Lawr was sufficiently inspired to run a search for more incest scenarios, and found sites dedicated to the subject.

     At one site he watched vids of fathers and grown daughters, mothers and grown sons, interviewed about how these behaviors had developed, as if this were some serious documentary, before they turned to their erotic demonstrations. None of these people were especially attractive, and maybe some bore a bit of resemblance to each other, so that Lawr thought perhaps these cases were authentic. He found he
hoped
they were authentic. Well, of course, if one found such a scenario titillating, wouldn’t one hope it was for real? That said, all reality aside, Lawr reasoned to himself that he had never wanted to sleep with his own mother, didn’t find her attractive in a stimulating way at all, no matter how much watching a vid of a mother fellating her son stirred him. He had never had children, never had a daughter, so he needn’t feel guilty for finding these things arousing. Right? Needn’t be ashamed for opening his pants as he gaped into his screen.

     It was only fantasy, and wasn’t fantasy by definition the opposite of reality? By its very nature, fantasy was harmless, and therefore wasn’t any fantasy acceptable? It was the
concept
of having a mother fellate him, the
idea
of having a daughter sit astride his body. Should he be any more ashamed than he was about the absurdities he dreamed about nightly? He didn’t know these people, was not a party to whatever crimes or iniquities they were responsible for in their own lives; he would never truly meet their eyes or touch their skin. They might have been realistic comp constructs for all he could tell.

     But again, all the sons and daughters at this site were above the age of consent. Lawr pulled back as if from a window he had been peeking through, and headed further down a murky little passageway in the network.

*     *     *

     The dainty blond child did not move, stood rigid with her arms at her sides as if at attention. Her skin with its green underwater glow was so smooth it looked waxen. There was not the slightest beginning of breasts, and he judged her to be about eleven. Tiny black moles were sprinkled over her body here and there, like punctuation for secret sentences hidden by invisible ink, if not erased altogether. He had at first thought this was a still image, until her eyes – which were fixed on his, seemed to truly
see
him, eyes as gentle as her smile – blinked their lids.

*     *     *

     A page had come up – like many others he had pored over like a menu – that offered a slew of links, with a sample image from each. There was Mutilady, which apparently featured crime and accident scenes of dead women, the sample showing the victim of a traffic accident thrown into, and integrated horribly with, a median rail, her party skirt riding up to show off legs in shredded black hose. There was Suckicide, dedicated to images of suicide victims, the sample being of a woman who had hung herself but apparently not been discovered straight away, her neck being impossibly stretched by the weight of her stiff body but her face still uncomfortably attractive. Then there was Incestykes, and this was the link Lawr found himself positioning his cursor over.

     He did feel some trepidation. In the past he had always tried to avoid sites that might feature underage girls, for fear that inviting this material onto his comp might work as evidence against him at a later date, especially if the site proved a trap laid by the forcers themselves. But he had roved this far tonight, farther than he had ever ventured before, and he was not willing to turn back. He had gone down the rabbit’s hole, but it was only a fantasy realm. What did he have to apologize for?