Strange Flesh (7 page)

Men invariably prescribe a single remedy for a serious breakup: get
as many bodies as possible between you and her. The underlying theory being that your anatomy will convince your pining mind that there isn’t really any “one” woman. There is only all women. And that by screwing a diverse cast of these lovelies, you’re reminded of all the scintillating possibilities life has to offer.

Though I’ve fully adopted that course of treatment in recent months, the difficulty has been recruiting willing therapists. I don’t know what does it; maybe my eyes skitter away from theirs, maybe my manufactured smile betrays the flux of pain within. But most women can sense that there’s something a little broken with me. And the ones who can’t, well, there’s usually something very broken with them.

This state of affairs leaves me, like the majority of my demographic, to content myself with the fire hydrant of pornography that is my cable modem. I can’t imagine what people did before the internet arrived with its grand smorgasbord of pictures, video, chat, and webcam girls. But too much netporn turns one’s mind into a Superfund site of frustrated lust. I find myself wearing out into the world the subtle but alienating caul of shame one gets from constantly wallowing in commodified filth. Another thing women can sense. Which makes me a more and more permanent citizen of this virtual Gomorrah we’ve built, the gateway to which sits innocently on our desks, pretending it’s for work.

But on occasion, the ache of solitude simply demands real human warmth. So I’ve recently been driven to the teeming swamp of no-strings dating sites, erotic social networks, and “casual encounters” ads on Craigslist. In that arena, “real” becomes a somewhat loaded term.

One thing the internet reveals is that the world contains multitudes of people
just like you
. We’ve always known that there’s this vast nation of lonely, isolated people out there, but now we’re not just watching TV anymore. We’ve started coming up with ways to reach out. Some people are looking to share their thoughts, others are looking to share . . . other things.

Usually one finds a fellow forsaken soul who just wants a dose of companionship or a specific act performed and isn’t very particular about the details. But often enough, you’ll open the door on a lunatic or a criminal. The varieties of each are astounding.

On the crazy side, I’ve found everything from garden-variety weepies to scary “Miss Andreas”—women trying to work out profound
man-hatred through anonymous sexual episodes. They want to hurt you, or at least scare you.

For example, Penny_S_Evers delivers a very hot oral experience with perhaps a little too much biting. In the morning, you wake to find “AIDS” scrawled on your mirror in lipstick. Of course, we’ve all already heard that story, but it’s still enough to make you upchuck your Cheerios. I took the time to scope her medical records. She doesn’t have AIDS, just a whopper of a borderline personality disorder. There are freelance voodoo surgeons and ladies possessed by dead celebrities. I’m still not able to parse the treatment I suffered at the hands, or rather other body parts, of Ms_Ophelia.

It all makes me curious what kind of ghastly characters the W4M dredge up.

The criminal side is occupied mostly by those aspiring to blackmail straying husbands. Rumors of organ harvesters abound, but I’ve never uncovered a credible case. Though as illustrated by my most recent debacle, I have run across plenty of more traditional thieves.

Last night, I’d found someone calling herself 1Ton_1—which I read as “wanton one” rather than “one-ton Juan”—posting about her desire to “party with an open-minded stud.” A possible sneeze hooker, but since she didn’t actually demand “skiing” (cocaine), I thought I’d take a chance with the pic4pic exchange. She emailed me an authentic-looking shot from her phone that showed a slender Mediterranean girl who could well have been the nursing student she claimed to be. I traced her IP and ran the name and address on her account through the NICS and KnowX crime databases just to make sure. She came up clean, so I invited her over.

In my foyer, she seemed a little nervous, but that’s not unusual. Some guys like to play up the erotic tension of walking into a complete stranger’s home for sex with dangerous looks and chilly silence, but I try to put people at ease with church-social friendliness.

I made drinks while she took off her shoes and got cozy on the couch. She savored the first sip of her rum and Coke and then asked slyly if perhaps I might have a lime. Something breathy in her voice implied she had perverse intentions toward the fruit, so I eagerly brought her drink back to the kitchen and sliced up a garnish.

A rookie mistake.

When I got back, she’d shed a layer of clothing and had draped herself
with a blanket, which helped prevent me from thinking clearly. We clinked glasses, and she downed her entire cocktail, a gesture meant to impatiently dispense with the preliminaries. I slammed mine too, liking this girl more by the moment.

I registered the faintest hint of an acrid taste to my bourbon, like an evil spirit had crawled into the barrel while it aged. But she started kissing me with an ardor that emptied my head of petty cares. My last impressions were that her mouth didn’t feel quite right, and for that matter, neither did mine. And why was I drooling down my chin?

I woke up bound, choking on an inexpertly applied gag. 1Ton_1 was a honey trap after all. I assume her boyfriend had been waiting in a car downstairs.

The appalling thing is that this has happened before. I’ve been prowling the no-strings world relentlessly in the past months. The incessant probing of my day job now leeching into my nightlife. Always searching, always trying to connect. In the past six months, I’ve been left tied up three times, robbed four times, and assaulted twice. Yet none of it has been enough to make me stop. The compulsion is strong, the risk outweighed by what I’m seeking.

But what exactly am I looking for? Solace? Pleasure? Action?

This last incident makes me fear the real answer is a darker word.

In penance for my behavior, I make it a point to flag or otherwise warn the community about the more egregious scams, blackmailers, and crooks I happen upon, alerting the police when it feels warranted. As though I fancy myself some kind of prurient superhero. Of course, the lonely and lustful are ever willing to make themselves victims. The police are correspondingly unsympathetic.

Despite this, my nighttime search goes on. And it had appeared I’d keep collecting rope burns until one day, not unlike this morning, the devil would take his due, and I’d miss my next meeting with Mercer.

But now I’ve felt the earth shift, and a new passageway has opened. This morning, Blythe’s delicate smile made me remember a time when I felt almost normal. And she’s asking me to take on an undercover assignment that offers a brand-new artificial world to inhabit. Just the thing for someone who insists on making a shambles of his real one.

E
ven if I wanted to ponder the merits of their cause, the Randall twins don’t allow me the leisure. Judging from the welcome message I get from the director of Billy’s most recent “place of business,” my assignment has already begun.

They want me to infiltrate GAME, the Gnostic Atelier for Machined Experience. Founded as a colony for artists working in tech-heavy media, it’s become the forward operating base for the Jackanapes movement.

The abuse of the term “Gnostic” by so many New Age sects has drained it of precise meaning. I gather from reading their online manifesto that GAME uses its original definition: that certain esoteric knowledge allows one to transcend the corrupt material universe into the realm of mystical Truth. This idea has been repurposed by hard-core trans-humanists who believe that as mankind merges with machines, we’ll be able to remake reality into a Platonic wonder of pure data. Thus liberating ourselves from the scarcity, ugliness, and strife of physical existence. Unsurprisingly, obsessive gamers make up the bulk of adherents to that theory.

The twins have secured a position for me at GAME based on a large donation that eliminated whatever red tape might otherwise complicate the process of adding a new fellow. My cover is that I’m a “conceptual video artist” with a manufactured portfolio who wants to make a documentary about Coit S. D. Files and his cohort of avant-gamers.

My real objective is to integrate myself into the community by joining
whatever backgammon tournaments or tantra workshops they might hold to keep themselves occupied while awaiting the digital rapture, with an eye toward finding out whether anyone might know where Billy is. There’s likely to be only some trivial hacking and casual surveillance. Best of all, GAME is reputed to throw fantastic parties. If you’re into strip Twister and prescription bingo.

Since I’m officially undercover as of now, I’m banned from the Red Rook offices. So I go home to my apartment, a spacious loft at Lafayette and Bond near NYU, to change out of my suit, pour myself a Kentucky coffee, and get up to speed on this online world called NOD. The Randalls hadn’t really touched on why their brother might want to symbolically electrocute himself into it, but I suppose that’s a question I’ll ask when I speak with IMP’s security chief about Billy’s recent corporeal whereabouts.

One of the biggest cultural trends of this century’s first decade was the rise of the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) world as a truly widespread phenomenon, consuming an ever-growing share of the public’s spare time. NOD is one of these digital environments that range from Tolkienian role playing like World of Warcraft to kiddie-crack mini-gaming like Club Penguin.

Akin to Second Life and IMVU, NOD appears on-screen as a 3D game, though there’s no actual objective other than to amuse yourself if you can. This pursuit of virtual happiness can inspire people to do curious things. They quit their real-life jobs to become pretend haberdashers and legally marry people whom they first met as lime-green panda bears. Once in NOD, you quickly find yourself reducing the whole concept of “real life” to mere initials: RL. And untold millions of people worldwide have taken on new identities in one of these microtopias.

To start, you sign up and create a character called an avatar, which could be anything from a busty milkmaid to a ham sandwich. I already have one: Jacques_Ynne (pronounced “Jack In”). NODlings harbor a passion for double entendres equaled only by professionals in the adult film industry. Sadly, I never really bonded with my av. Poor Jacques has been even more lonely than I have in the past weeks.

After I log in to my account, the default location resolves from
wireframe to lushly shaded volumes like a skeletal mummy coming back to life.

NOD Zero (NOD0), the center of the world, is a cross between an interplanetary Epcot Center and Bangkok’s Patpong red-light district. Giant garishly colored buildings loom around the Tiananmen-sized central square. Like a NASCAR driver’s uniform, every square inch of real estate is drafted to serve commerce, which is denominated in “Noodles” (NOD dollars). Blinking animated advertisements offer to satisfy unbelievably specialized fetishes:

Victorian Firefighters for your discreet pleasure.

Fraggle Bed-wetter?

Cum 2 Hershel’s Hate Hotel. U WILL Regret It.

Throngs of ersatz Wookies, zombies, and anatomically enhanced Pokémon stand around chatting.

Immediately I’m besieged by avs teleporting to my location to make lewd pitches in Viagra-spam patois. The first in line are a woolly mammoth, a female Napoleon, and a little Oliver Twist clone.

DeeDee_Pea:

Caveman Enema??? Don’t wait!

Jessica_A_Belle:

Hottt Machinima Man-Sluts ONLY N$399.99 / min. Yes!!! HAVE SOME!

Raymond_Richard_Euliss:

Hello, fine sir! Might I be of some assistance?

Their appeals are unsurprising. I’d first rezzed into NOD a couple months ago, in an attempt to add some variety to my diet of online smut. “Cybering,” slang for in-game sexual activity, is a favorite MMO pastime, and NOD is notorious among the major social worlds for having the best cybering tools by a long shot. NODlings like to flaunt this fact by making huge libraries of 3D animation, called machinima, that document their
skills in the v-rotic arts. Recently, an anonymous developer produced LibIA (Library of Intercourse Applications), an extremely swanky tool set for neterosexuals that has the population of NOD acting like bonobos on crystal meth.