Strange Flesh (12 page)

Does that “know” refer to knowledge in the
biblical
sense? Are the people saying, “Lot has two houseguests. Let’s go over there and anally rape
them,” or are they just looking for an introduction, and who knows what might happen after a couple glasses of date palm brandy?

In light of his obligations to his visitors, and knowing the propensities of his neighbors, Lot feels that he can’t allow this. So the gracious host offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead. Which doesn’t speak well of the family feeling in the Lot household. I’m not sure that angels possess the anatomical equipment in which the Sodomites were interested, but regardless, they obviate Lot’s proposition by striking the villagers with a spell. The summary is vague on the details.

Was it blindness? Impotence?

I can’t remember. At any rate, because of their churlishness, the fate of the Sodomites is sealed. For reasons that aren’t made clear, the Gomorreans are lumped in with them to share their punishment.

The angels offer Lot the chance to escape with his family, provided they don’t look back once the show starts. They make it out just as the fire and brimstone start to fall. Of course, Lot’s wife looks back, and, in a rather arbitrary twist, she becomes a pillar of salt. But Lot escapes with the rest of his family. This is where the summary ends, but if I recall correctly, their descendants become some important tribe until the Assyrians come in and kill everyone.

What I can’t figure out from Billy’s speech is how NOD plays into all this. His electrocution video implies that this online world is somehow going to be the medium of his revenge. Maybe the location his ghost rezzed into would tell me more. The riddle he sent to his fellow GAMErs solicits them to find or do something in NOD as well, a mystery to which the croc pendant seems the most important clue.

I fire up NOD and send Jacques_Ynne searching for crocodile-related content. I visit a simulated crocodile farm. Then an overwrought Steve Irwin memorial. I try an actual Lacoste sportswear store for virtual clothes. Finally, I exhaust Jacques searching locations tangentially related to the company’s namesake, tennis great René Lacoste.

At none of these builds do I find anything resembling Billy’s fingerprints. No answers. No further puzzles. And no suspicious characters lurking around to interrogate. Though in a place where representing as a
psychedelic amoeba is considered de rigueur, “suspicious” can be a hard quality to pin down.

Despite all of NOD’s vastness, I end up nowhere.

At a loss, I try placing the pendant in its original context by reattaching it to the card. Now I notice the last line above it, “
Et voilà:
my
beau monde
.”

The French word “voilà” means “there” or “there it is.” “Beau monde” is a term for “fashionable society,” but taken more literally from the French it means “beautiful world.” So the line would read, “There it is: my beautiful world.” And then we have this crocodile pendant. Maybe it refers to a place rather than a person or company.

I search for Lacoste on Wikipedia. I’m confronted with a disambiguation page that mentions several other prominent people, including Carlos Lacoste, the former president of Argentina; and Jean-Yves Lacoste, a “postmodern theologian,” whatever that might be. But also listed are a few specific places. The Bordeaux winery Grand-Puy-Lacoste and also Lacoste, Vaucluse, an ancient town in Provence.

Something about this last one resonates ever so slightly.

There’s nothing like the endorphin bath you get in reward for making a successful guess. My mind wallows in pleasure upon reading the first sentence of the history section that appears when I click through:

Lacoste is best known for its most notorious resident, Donatien Alphonse Francois comte de Sade, the Marquis de Sade, who in the 18th century lived in the castle overlooking the village.

The identity of the town’s favorite son fits with enough contrived perfection that I know I’ve solved my riddle. The Louis Markey of Billy’s verse isn’t a real person, it’s his NODName. Via “Lou Markey,” you arrive at “Le Marquis.” Sade enthusiasts often style him the Divine Marquis. A curious title for one of history’s most infamous villains.

To find out where Billy’s going with all this, I guess I need to take a trip.

NOD’s geography is based on our real-life Global Positioning System, so I just type the coordinates of Lacoste into the teleport box. Before
hitting return, I make sure to mask my IP address so it looks like any session I start with Jacques comes from GAME’s open wifi network.

Jacques materializes on top of one of the few remaining walls ringing the ruins of the Château de Sade. The little town of Lacoste, with its cobbled streets and ancient buildings sagging under red tile roofs, nestles into the forested Provençal hill below. A roman bridge spans a small stream as it meanders through the village.

Billy’s castle, which I see matches his virtual destination at the end of
Jacking Out,
is a limestone husk with a crumbling curtain wall rising to the east. A maze of walled ditches and open cellars surrounds the empty courtyard, and only a two-story side building attached to a stubby tower remains intact. I walk in there and see that Billy has created a modest presentation of biographical artifacts commemorating Sade’s exploits.

His biography disappoints at first blush. Sade was really more of a persecuted writer than anything else and spent much of his life in prison at the behest of his formidable mother-in-law. The crimes for which he was actually convicted consisted primarily of some minor assaults on prostitutes. Poor behavior, of course, but hardly the stuff of enduring infamy.

The tour begins with a display of the bloody shirt taken off the Prince of Conde after the ferocious beating Sade gave him when they were childhood playmates, an incident that would prefigure a lifetime of conflict with authority. We then move to the box of anisette candies he used to allegedly poison three prostitutes with Spanish Fly in the Marseilles affair, which resulted in one of his many stays in prison. The associated info card points out that Sade most likely had them eat the candy solely intending to make them copiously flatulent. Which was apparently how he liked his courtesans.

There’s a collection of props from the plays he staged at Lacoste once he escaped prison for the first time. Then the dreaded
lettres du cachet
his mother-in-law obtained that condemned him to the Bastille.

Next up are the giant glass dildos he had his poor wife Renée procure for him while he was imprisoned. These “engines,” or “prestiges,” as he called them, used in his superhuman jailhouse masturbatory regime, were the source of considerable marital strife.

The last exhibit is a straitjacket of massive proportions that conveys
how grossly fat he had become after the revolution, when he was jailed again for obscenity and confined to the lunatic asylum at Charenton. Thus did Donatien Alphonse François,
comte
de Sade, die: fat, impoverished, and officially insane.

But he left an immortal legacy due to the body of written work he created in life. The château’s exhibits end in a library up a narrow spiral staircase into the castle’s lone remaining tower. There I find volumes that, when selected, offer to download PDFs of all Sade’s major works: his plays, essays, and novels. These writings explore the pleasures to be found in cruelty at such length that the word “sadism” was coined in his honor. Furthermore, his books serve as the foundational documents for the genre of sex practices known as “bondage.” The line in Billy’s rhyme “Let my word be your bond” could refer to no one else. Indeed, all the submissives right now tied up in dungeons across the city surely have him to thank for their restraints.

I download all of them and point my av out of the room. But right at the exit there’s a tasteful placard written with a calligraphic font that says:

I hope you enjoyed my small exhibition,
And that you’re inflamed past all thoughts of contrition.
If now there is more that you desire to know,
Then find and explore my eternal château.

—Louis_Markey

If the Château de Sade isn’t his eternal château, then what is?

For that matter, why would Billy want to send his players to this place? Judging by some of his work, I can see that he might harbor an affinity for Sade, but the renowned rake doesn’t seem to have much to do with either GAME or the Randall family. Still, the card suggests an obvious next move, alleviating any doubt that I’ve discovered a space on Billy’s game board.

I feel a rare tingle of excitement as I start sorting possibilities. Though I haven’t so much as stood up in hours, finding this place in virtual France makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere.

Minutes later, an even more exciting aspect of my investigation
demands cycles. I get an email from Olya expressing with the charming formality of a non-native writer her gratitude for my help last night. A quick look at the header tells me she sent it from GAME’s internal network.

Rather than reply, I jog downtown in the hopes of catching her. Of course I’d like to question her about the incident and her relationship with Billy, but my overriding motivation is that I want to accept her thanks in person.

And to see what more I can do for her.

B
ut she’s not there. I must have just missed her.

Irritated, I start scouting locations for the hidden cameras I’ll install to better monitor the GAMErs’ movements, on the off chance that Billy decides to drop in on his old friends.

As my eyes trace the moldings above the main elevator, I’m surprised to find a small video camera on a gimbal mount already focused straight at me. This must be the detritus of a surveillance game called
Gotcha
someone last night told me took over the building during the previous spring like some form of voyeuristic kudzu. I’m amazed the other residents tolerated it, but for me the remaining network is a blessing from above.

It’s only a few minutes’ work to track a couple cables to a file server dumped in an otherwise abandoned rack room. I glom its address and network ID and head back to my office to probe the box.

Whoever set up the project lacked any notion of network security. I find their server riddled with yawning orifices, and I have root-level control over it within the hour. The box contains about a terabyte of compressed video streams captured at irregular intervals over the past several months.

The last image recorded in many of these is Olya’s stunning countenance, squinting angrily. Then static. She represents a
Ringu
-like supernatural force for them: the last thing the cameras see before they die. Why would such a broadcast-quality woman be so protective of her privacy?

I don’t have time to wade through all this video. Luckily Red Rook has availed itself of a Defense Department development grant to explore robust facial recognition. The software is called ProSoap, from a combination of “
prosopon,
” Greek for “face,” and its ability to “scrub” non-useful frames from a video file. I train the engine with photos from the GAME website’s profile pages. The goal here is to see if the cameras can tell me the last time Billy was at GAME, and with whom he spent time before he disappeared.

While I’m waiting for results, I get up in search of a bathroom. As I’m passing by the steel door across the hall from me, Andrew Garriott peeks his head out. He offers a disappointed, “Hey, mate,” before ducking back in.

It takes quite a while, but ProSoap picks out some interesting action.

As I click through videos starring Billy, they paint a pretty clear portrait of a guy not well liked. He sets down a plate of takeout in the upstairs dining area, and his neighbors promptly get up. He joins a conversation at a bank of vending machines, and the group disperses until he’s left staring at a girl who’s too stoned to acknowledge his presence. He leans over the shoulder of a fellow resident working at a computer, making what seems like a well-intentioned comment. But the guy gives him the bird without even looking at him.