Strange Flesh (16 page)

While such a spectacle would certainly be entertaining, we didn’t have the special effects budget to bring it about. Given that even the very first, ostensibly mild, crimes mentioned involve priests, children, and urophilia, we quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work as a party template.

The self-described “most impure tale ever told” concerns four wealthy libertines: a bishop, the banker Durcet, a judge named Curval, and their leader, the Duc de Blangis, who serves as a sort of Sadean superhero.
He’s an aristocrat blessed with the ability to ejaculate at will, an attribute as important as any to the basic plotline.

These four hit on the idea of sequestering themselves for the winter in an impregnable fortress where they’ll aspire toward an eternal pinnacle of debauchery. Perhaps an honorable goal, except that these characters’ tastes run to pedophilia, coprophilia, torture (not the slap-and-tickle variety), and murder. To aid them in their endeavors, they kidnap sixteen of the most noble and beautiful children from across the country. Four wizened whores (Madames Duclos, Champville, Martaine, and Desgranges) come along to stimulate the goings-on by telling stories from their lifetimes spent in carnal riot.

The book consists of descriptions of the six hundred tortures inflicted upon the castle’s inmates over the course of the winter. Sade wrote this monstrosity in thirty-seven days while in prison. Due to his incarceration, he had to write the book on a twelve-meter toilet paper–like scroll that he could easily hide from his jailers. He claimed to have “wept tears of blood” when his manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille.

But after the rioters looted his former cell, someone found the scroll and kept it in his family for over a hundred years before a German psychologist discovered it and had the nerve to publish it in 1905. Of course, it was immediately banned, but by the midfifties Sade was receiving a radical rethink among certain intellectuals, and they started printing it again.

One can now easily find Sadean ideas and aesthetics throughout popular culture. Indeed, NOD already has several builds that pay homage to his work. It seems Billy’s decided we need another one, which means I have to search the place until I find out why.

Just to the side of the portcullis is a small iron door over which is engraved a double-headed eagle, the Sade family crest. Beside this entrance I find the Château de Silling’s guest registry. I have to fill in a bunch of personal information, including email address and phone number, in order to unlock the postern gate. For these I use new Gmail and Google Voice accounts forwarded to a brand-new work cell. Upon doing so, I get a message telling me that I have to install this NOD build’s special
plug-ins for “enhanced features.” I shudder to think what those might be, but I agree.

Through the courtyard is a spooky gallery lit with torches standing in bronze sconces. The seeping stone walls are hung with obscene tapestries. After wandering through several hallways admiring the period detail, I enter a room I remember well from the text: the amphitheater.

This is the chamber in which much of the book is set, the place where the Libertines gather every evening to hear the whores’ stories. There’s a small stage in front that supports an extravagant gilded throne. Madame Duclos, the first of Sade’s courtesan raconteurs, sits there. Cut into the curved back wall of the room is a series of five alcoves, each containing a comfortable couch. Four of them seat avatars representing each of the Libertines.

The fifth one, in the center, is empty. I presume it is meant for me.

I trip a hidden switch somewhere that causes the Duke to rise and say, “Welcome to Château de Silling. Our redoubt was built for those who wish to walk in the shadow of the Divine Marquis. Enjoy yourself. We’ll be watching.”

I walk over to the center niche and sit on the chaise. As my av relaxes into it, Madame Duclos begins her narration in a deep French-inflected voice:

Although I had not yet attained my fifth year, one day, returning from my holy occupations in the monastery, my sister asked me whether I had yet encountered Father Laurent.

I get impatient quickly. I’ve always thought audiobooks proceed at an insufferably slow pace, and with Sade you know generally what’s about to happen anyway (here, a golden shower). So I drop a “listener” object to keep streaming her stories aloud and then begin a tour of the rest of the castle.

The door on the other side of the great hall leads to the chapel. Sade was rabidly anticlerical throughout his life, so this room is tricked out as a voyeur’s privy with an abundance of peculiar glass furniture, containers, and tools. I carefully search the chamber and finally settle on the stone
step in front of the altar. It opens to reveal a staircase spiraling into the floor.

The entrance to the dungeon.

Silling’s dungeon is the site of the worst crimes that take place at the climax of the book. It’s supposed to contain all the specialized torture mechanisms needed to mount a successful Inquisition. However, Billy’s rendition has only a dark stone hallway that passes a long row of wooden doors. I randomly try the fourth one, which opens onto the av of a frail girl around seven years old. Next to her is a small table with some cups and a glass tube with a rubber bulb at its end.

The waif sniffles. Then she turns to me, and a text bubble says:

Zelmire:

You wanted to see me?

I stare at the odd configuration of objects and the little girl, and it dawns on me that this is an exact staging of the story Duclos is telling now: a bracing episode involving the ingestion of a child’s snot. I hit F6 to bring up NOD’s machinima interface. Sure enough, Billy has helpfully placed a series of pose balls, sound effect notes, and camera tracks around the room. Handy props for making some virtual kiddie porn. That is, if the act in question can be considered pornographic. By any reckoning, it isn’t
Sesame Street
.

I shut the door.

What is this place?

I doubt it’s just a celebration of one of literature’s more demented imaginations. Billy’s recent behavior points to a larger agenda. Also, his Château de Silling appears to make demands on its guests. He’s constructed a factory for twisted animation that will probably make the stuff currently coming out of NOD look downright quaint.

But why?

In the threatening video he sent Blake, Billy alludes to his friend Gina’s death. Here I find the word “Sodom” connecting the most loathsome book ever written to Lot’s story in the Bible, which Gina mentioned in her last words.

This elaborate NOD build suggests a major investment of time and resources, so Billy must have been planning it for quite a while. And yet, Gina died only two months ago. So maybe he decided to transform
a project already in progress into a kind of eulogy. But though Gina may have loved NOD, this virtual porn studio is a strange form of tribute.

Billy’s creation will demand a detailed exploration, but I have a feeling it’s not going anywhere, and I’m well overdue a trip to the real Land of Nod. Before signing off, I fire up a sniffer program to trace the details of my connection. I’m talking to a box hosted at a server farm here in New York owned by a company called Scream Communications.

So now I’ve got a fixed internet address Billy must use to run his game. I briefly indulge myself by picturing Blythe’s smile when I bring this to her. Our first real line on her brother. One I’m sure we can use to start reeling him in.

E
arly the next morning I shift my attention from Billy’s virtual fortress to the iTeam’s dungeon laboratory. Learning more about their endeavor might help me worm my way into their confidence. I hope someone in the group will then illuminate why Billy’s so fixated on Olya.

As befits a secret project, the iTeam likes to be alone during the wee hours. Excepting Olya’s occasional morning punishment meetings, they have yet to arrive in time for breakfast, so now is a good time for some light recon.

Unlike most of the workrooms, the iTeam’s studio outside my office has a new Yale dead bolt securing its door to a steel frame. I have some primitive lock-picking skills, but this imposing matron would take a far surer hand than mine. I’ll need to find an alternative.

The basement’s center hallway runs from the elevator to the back bulkhead doors that lead to a thin, grimy alleyway at the south side of the building. The iTeam workroom’s door opens off this hall, so I’ll see if there’s another way in from the back.

A simple lock bump gets me into the office of David Cross, GAME’s resident puppeteer, who has permanent tenure as the person most essential to mounting the haunted house. The back wall of his office is penetrated by a huge air-handler duct running along the low ceiling. Cross has rigged a decorative curtain that pulls back to expose a large piece of plywood roughly cut to cover the much larger hole in the wall created during the duct’s installation. Only a couple screws connect it to
the surrounding drywall, and removing it opens a space I can just wriggle through.

The beam from my Maglite cuts through the dark, illuminating a three-sided storage niche adjoining the main work area. Some strenuous contortions get me through the gap, and I roll onto the floor below.

In the center of the room I now find two odd pieces of equipment that look like lawn chairs from the future. They’re made of nested aluminum tubes, and each has three mesh surfaces that permit a wide range of orientations. One is set up as a straight-backed chair, the other is configured to resemble a camp bed. Draped over these things is an array of exotic devices including a pair of late-model eMagin head-mounted displays (HMDs) and matching CyberGloves that allow one to control a computer with finger gestures. There’s a pile of black fabric decorated with shiny polka dots. Off to the side of the chairs are six high-resolution video cameras with tiny infrared lights clustered around their lenses. While not really my technical bailiwick, I can identify this stuff as mocap—motion capture—gear used to track the movement of one’s body. Toward the front of the room, a bank of new PCs rounds out the setup.

So the iTeam is working on a virtual reality project.

Not at all what I would have predicted. While online worlds have seen amazing growth recently, we still interact with them using mostly the same interface technology as we did in 1983. The hardware side of VR has long been a graveyard of broken dreams for its visionaries.

I’m disappointed. The idea that some gamer-artists are going to revolutionize anything with the outdated technical notions of the late eighties strains credulity. And yet the iTeam members are far from stupid, and they seem genuinely consumed with their secret project.

What could it be?

Next to the bank of computers are two large metal cabinets, each fastened with a rugged padlock. Maybe this is where the real treasure is stored. I unroll my picks and am just starting to fiddle with the first when I hear steps coming down the hall.

Could be nothing, but it wouldn’t do to get caught in here, so I grab my tools and retreat to the storage nook. A wedge of light breaks the
darkness, and I hear something dropping onto one of the tables. The room’s fluorescent lights flicker to life.

Damn
.

Xan and Garriott enter. They’re in the midst of a dispute about the quality of data passing between two elements of their project. There are some brief clicking sounds, and then I hear the squeak of one of the cabinets’ doors swinging open. I’m dying to take a look but decide I can’t risk it.

They argue for another minute until I hear the sound of someone relocking the cabinet. The lights go out, and the second they throw the dead bolt, I scamper back through the hole in the wall and drop into Cross’s office. I run out the door and around to the main hallway.

Xan is saying, “—never going to work unless you can clean the stream—”

I almost slam into Garriott as I turn the corner.

Xan yelps. Her hand snaps to her mouth. Andrew jumps back, bumping into her. He drops the handle of the large aluminum case he’s rolling behind him. It hits the ground with a loud crack.