Strange Flesh (24 page)

Xan pulls me into the iTeam’s workroom, affectionately known as the Orifice. She needs a new data loop for debugging the sex avs, which are still twisting into positions not seen outside of particularly violent
Road Runner
cartoons. The session runs well until Ginger drops into a catatonic loop and begins humping my kneecap. Not for the first time, I ask myself whether we’re doing the devil’s work by making sex subject to technical difficulties. Or maybe God is as prudish as they say, and through us he’s working a subtle sort of revenge against the unchaste.

Even outside of mundane moral categories, I have to confess that after my initial fascination abated, I began feeling some unease with the larger aims of our project. IT is a technology meant to address the eternal problem that you can’t have unlimited sex with whoever you want. But as such, it introduces its own set of limitations.

For me, sex represents the zenith of human experience, and much of my mental energy has always been dedicated to endlessly rehearsing the act and scheming about how to achieve it. Nature has given us this profound ability to really
connect
with one another in a way that feels nothing short of divine when done right.

As technology marches ever onward, we immerse ourselves in more and more connection but accept compromises that reduce its finer qualities. A hurried cell phone conversation is, and will always be, a far cry from words spoken while gazing into your lover’s eyes. The rise of email,
chat, and SMS has robbed us of even the emotive color of our voices. And so, with our current venture, do we risk allowing some of the ineffable beauty of Eros to leak out along the phone lines?

Sex had seemed pristine in this regard. But now we’re making inroads. Excavating the mysterious and secret shrine. As a lifelong technophile, I can’t turn back any more than an archaeologist on the precipice of a tomb, but I have felt the occasional shiver of dread that we’re setting out to defile something sacred.

In counterpoint to my uneasy reflections, Olya and Garriott start a round of gleeful sparring over the spec. This culminates in Olya throwing the 150-page document at him. The impact knocks his hand loose from its hold on one of Fred’s retaining rings. With the air pressure on high, Fred’s plastic member rockets into the wall and shatters just over Xan’s head.

We’re expecting a well-deserved freak-out, but Xan just sighs and says, “We’re not building the bloody Panama Canal here, are we? I should like to live to feel the fruits of this grand endeavor. So let’s be more careful with our private parts, shall we?”

Later that day, I check in with
Savant
. Already the number of players has jumped by a factor of ten since that first post about it in the NOD forums. The formerly rather idle Château de Silling now hosts a continuous stream of NODlings, from cyber-swingers looking to meet like-minded avs to machinima drones obsessively working their way through the available scenes.

Billy’s conjured all these people to help him build something, but despite their labor, I can’t make out the structure. I’m sure his game holds a story beyond the retelling of Sade’s malignant fairy tale, but so far he’s left me in suspense. Though if he’s aiming to honor
120 Days,
then we need to shut him up long before he gets to the climax.

T
hough much of my life is lived online in domains defined by data, long experience has shown me that the human antennae, quirky though they are, can pick up signals invisible to any machine. To the extent that Gina’s death is a significant flash point for Billy’s hostility, I want to see where it happened.

So the next morning finds me standing in front of 301 Conover Street in Red Hook: Gina Delaney’s last apartment. My secondary reason for coming here is that since I’m supposed to be working on this documentary, I should be able to produce a bunch of relevant raw footage if called upon. This is a pretty obvious choice for coverage, and so I’m trying to achieve arty framings of the semiconverted warehouse against the bright January sky. A small sign in front indicates that unit 4B is for rent and that interested parties should inquire with the landlord in 1A.

From the police report, I remember Gina lived in apartment 4B. Given the newspaper jammed in the building’s entrance and the cloud of marijuana smoke coming from a ground-floor window, I’m guessing that the landlord won’t mind if I just let myself in. At the top of a groaning spiral of stairs, I find the apartment door ajar as well.

The place has been redone. The walls painted, the floors reconditioned. The raw wood columns to which she attached those fatal pulleys have been sanded and covered with thick white acrylic.

After taking a couple photos, I start a shot that I hope will evoke spectral wandering. Midway through, I jump at a loud creak coming from the
front door. A small black lady stands there, making no effort to conceal the joint she’s holding.

“What are you doing, son?”

“Oh, sorry, I was just looking at the apartment.”

“You want to rent it?”

“Maybe.”

“But you taking pictures like one of them sickos?”

“Sickos?”

“People come because of the girl that died here.”

I flash her a photo of Billy and a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. “This guy come here?”

“Oh yeah. He’s a strange one.”

“How so?”

“He came three days after. Took lots of pictures. Then he just stood there for a long time. It got late, so I come up to ask him what he’s doing. He said he’s ‘conducting a séance.’ But I seen a real séance in Flatbush, and that boy, he was just standing there.”

After I thank her for the information, she lingers to watch me for a while but then departs.

I walk to the large bank of windows along the front of the apartment to take in what would, in a better neighborhood, be a million-dollar prospect of the Manhattan skyline. In the background is the mercantile majesty of the financial district, with a gorgeous front view of the Statue of Liberty standing off to the side, her arm outstretched as though she’s hailing a cab on her way to some important meeting. In the foreground is the ruined beauty of Red Hook, presenting a stark contrast to the spider-eyed gleam of Wall Street. The decayed industrial port now bears clear signs of financial miscegenation. A tony coffee shop inhabiting a former loading dock here, a shiny BMW zipping past rusted hulks there. It’s like a bleached coral reef spontaneously regenerating. And yet still dominating the area are giant loading cranes standing as though sentinels for long-forgotten gods of industry.

My camera feels drawn to them, and I reflect on the way that the once-packed shores of Red Hook, which sat quiet for so long as blue-collar activity fled, are slowly growing new factories filled with artisans creating things that exist somewhere on a continuum between idea and object. Figments fixed in our electrical web that you can see and hear, and maybe
soon feel, but that would disappear if you tried to remove them. Gina spent her life in this fiber-optic dream catcher.

Beyond the windows, the crystalline winter day has lured people outside to enjoy the unaccountable warmth of the sun. Kids joyously traverse a huge piece of playground equipment. I wonder what Gina saw when she looked out onto this world. What was it that made her first retreat from it, and then finally decide to abandon it forever?

I know the answer is usually just malfunctioning brain chemistry. But I can’t picture how all those misfiring neurons twisted her eyes. How could her filter have been so dark as to compel her to set her grisly machine in motion and make the last thing she saw her own blood spraying the wall?

T
oday Olya demands a “Stakhanovite” effort from the team, and we do our best to emulate the Soviet earth-moving hero, though as latte-sipping developers, the results are weak. But we beaver with a will late into the night.

Xan is the first to break. I notice a long period of silence from her fancy Dvorak keyboard and turn to find her asleep. The weight of my gaze wakes her, and without a word, she rises from the table and walks out of the room. Garriott’s eyes follow her longingly.

A few minutes later, she bursts back into the Orifice, flushed and breathless, vibrations of panic projecting ahead of her. She drops a necklace-sized felt jewel case on the worktable.

Garriott asks, “Good lord. What’s the matter?”

Xan takes a second to steady herself and then says, “I . . . these men outside—ah . . . grabbed me.”

I jump out of my seat. “Are you okay? What happened?”

She wraps her arms around herself. “Yeah. I’m fine. I—I was just leaving, and there was this car parked on Suffolk with two creepy guys with cameras leaning against it. I walk past, and one of them snatches my arm and says, ‘You need to give this to your friend Olya.’” She points at the case. “I ran back here and locked the back door. I think they might have been following me.”

Olya steps over to the case. Before I can object, she flips open the lid, which blocks my view of its contents. Whatever it is makes her teeth
grind together. She spins toward the door, and I have to move fast to get in front of her. She tries to push through me.

“Olya, no! Stop. Let me. I’ll take care of it.”

“Fuck off—” She keeps struggling.

“Garriott, get over here and hold her.”

With that laughable suggestion, I race down the hall toward the stairs to the alley. I can hear what sounds like someone trying to yank the door open. There’s a short burst of muffled swearing. I pause until they’re really pulling hard, then slam the latch forward, and the door wrenches outward. The person on the other side is caught off balance, and a jerk on his ankle sends him toppling to the ground.

I vault up the seven steps, scanning for the partner, but it seems he’s alone. I’m about to jump on him, but then I recognize the steel bone through his nose. He’s just Goat, an authorized PODling.

He says, “What the fuck?”

“Did you run into two guys coming in here?”

“Wha . . . Uh, yeah. Going through the gate. They were—”

I’m already running to the alley’s entrance. Looking right and left, at first I don’t see anything. But then a black Dodge Charger peels out, heading the wrong way up Suffolk. The parked cars obstruct my line of sight, and I can’t get past them quickly enough to see the plate as the car makes a screeching left on Rivington, swiping out the brake light of an innocent Audi.

They’re bombing up Essex before I can make the turn. The Audi’s alarm wails as I entertain the bleak thought that dealing with a single determined stalker is challenge enough. And Billy’s called up a whole battalion of them to torment Olya.

Back down in the POD, Garriott brews Earl Grey while Olya rolls out the third degree on Xan, who has recovered enough to get irritated.

“I said I didn’t turn around to watch them. I, being a meek little Asian girl, as you’re quite fond of pointing out, was fleeing!”

“But you must have seen—” Olya notices me come in and inquires, “So?”

“They took off before I could get there. I scared the shit out of Goat, however. Maybe they bailed when they saw him coming in.”