Sam made her way into the club, then through the top floor, past the dance floor where the bar girls in their skimpy skintight dresses danced with Chinese and American men twice their age, tempting them to pay for the even greater pleasures that could be had in private. Past the bars where the tourists ordered rounds of shots and glowing or bubbling or smoking drinks. Past the hookah couches where the younger set reclined, and sucked on water pipes loaded with genetically potentiated hashish, or engineered blissweed with its enzymatically produced ecstasy, or perhaps just a tiny bit of discreetly sprinkled opium. Her heels tapped the floor, sending little pulses of light up them on every step.
She found the stairs down to the next level, walked down them. The grotesquely enhanced bouncers stiffened as she came near. She read the tension on their bodies, the wide eyes as they tracked her, and walked by them as if they weren’t there at all. The stairwell opened into a floor that was casino mixed with strip club. Men and a few women played at games of chance while nude and semi-nude Thai girls danced and writhed on stage, or pressed their bodies against the gamblers, stroking them discreetly beneath the tables, earning payment for their dances and caresses in chips, all while distracting the gamblers, tilting the odds ever more in favor of the house.
Sam caught flashes of Nexus as she crossed the floor. The zombified, addictive haze of the gamblers, laying down chip after chip, jonesing, dysphoric, craving that hit of pleasure that came with three cherries or a winning hand. The saccharine seduction oozing from the minds of the dancers, the semblance of arousal, the promises of sweet delights, for a price.
It all disgusted her.
She found the stairs across the oversexed casino, took them down to the third level, the flesh market. They stopped her at the portal. More oversized bouncers in dark suits. More big men, tense, amped up.
Were you there for my fight against Glao Bot? Sam wondered. Did you see what I did to that big man? Think you can do better?
It cost just to enter this floor, they told her. A thousand baht. She heard the tremor in their voices, but she paid it. They frisked her, professionally, carefully, thoroughly.
Does it relieve you that I don’t have a gun, or knife? she thought at them. Does that make you feel any better, when you’ve seen what I can do with my bare hands?
They nodded to Sam when they were done, opened the door to this final level of Lo Prang’s pleasure palace.
Sex buffeted her mind immediately. Overwhelmingly intimate sensations from men and women alike. Sam clenched her mind against it, pushed out the unwanted thoughts and feelings.
The floor was a maze of darkened alcoves with corridors threading between them. The alcoves had stages, live sex shows with men and women in every possible permutation of twos or threes or fours or more. Each step she took sent a minor flash of light out, illuminating people in the throes of depravity.
Things had changed in the months she’d been gone. Nexus was endemic here now. Every alcove and door offered delights to the senses and the flesh. Every one of them also offered additional delights for those using Nexus.
Audiences watched, used Nexus to tune in to the sensations they wanted to absorb. She passed offers to live out any fantasy she’d ever thought of here, and dozens more she hadn’t. She was given the option to ride any of these bodies, to put her mind in theirs, to steer the action if she paid the right price, to feel every single sensation that was happening on stage, from the point of view of either gender, without ever having to soil her own hands.
A sign let her know she could always tune in to ride a performer from anywhere in the world, if she liked.
Girls and boys approached her, offered themselves to her for her personal, physical use. Bargains at twice the price, they told her. They all came loaded with Nexus, so she could feel every bit of their pleasure as she had them, or experience their pain and humiliation in exquisite detail as she hurt or degraded them, if that was her kink. Sam thought of Sarai’s mother, of how that had scarred Sarai. She clenched her fists in anger and pushed through them.
Other alcoves offered her girls and boys ready to fall in love with her, to use Nexus to twist their own minds. No more tolerating pretend passion, here. Why not hire a whore that is truly attracted to you, aroused by you, insatiably hungry for your touch? Isn’t that what you really want?
Sam felt bile rising up inside her. This place embodied everything she hated about Nexus.
No, she corrected herself. Not Nexus. The people who use it this way.
It was a hard-won distinction, a hard-won realization, that technology could be used for good or bad, could be disgusting or sublime. She wouldn’t let the vileness of this place taint the beauty she felt when she touched the children’s minds.
The things happening in the alcoves became more and more unspeakable as she progressed. Perversions and debasements. Women – mostly women – doing things for money that no human being should be subjected to, voluntarily or not. Eager audience members tuning in to witness it, to relish it, from the standpoint of debased or debaser. Sam’s nausea rose and rose.
Then she was past the last of them, and into the curving hallway that led to Lo Prang.
The feel of sex and degradation left her mind as she rounded the corner. Lo Prang surely had another way to reach his inner sanctum, she realized. But this was the way he wanted his supplicants to come to him, walking through his domain, forced to experience it, to be aroused by it or disturbed by it. Either way, it set them off balance.
Sam held her head high. She had an agenda. Nothing else mattered.
The door was guarded by two more oversized Thai men in black suits. Muscle grafts and gene tweaks broadened their backs and shoulders to ridiculous proportions. Weapons bulged beneath their jackets. Earpieces were in their ears. Unlike the others, these two had minds she could feel. Hard shells of ruthlessly controlled Nexus emanations surrounded them both.
Their eyes crept over her body as she approached, her heels flashing with every step. They scanned her for weapons. No fear on these two. They were harder than the others, perhaps, or more ready for her.
Fools.
Sam stepped up to them, head unbowed.
“I want to talk to Lo Prang,” she said. “Tell him the Jade Tiger is back.”
45
NEVER LET YOU GO
Sunday October 28th
One day the BAD MEN in the white coats came into the room where Bobby lived with all his new friends and they took Alfonso away for a test and Alfonso went with them into the special testing room and then a little while after that he went into the even more special testing room and they closed the door and he DISAPPEARED from their heads. But that was OK because they’d done this before, and like Tim had told Bobby they always came back and Bobby had come back and Tim had come back and Alfonso would probably come back and show them how he’d had a test on trigonometry or French or something else Alfonso didn’t know about, but he’d learn while he slept because one of them knew about it and it would be just fine.
Alfonso was gone a long time and Bobby started to worry and he told Tim he was worried and Tim said not to worry, but Bobby could tell that Tim was worried too because no one had been gone this long and now Jose was worried and Parker was worried and Tyrone was worried, and they were all telling each other not to worry with their voices but their heads were saying to WORRY and WORRY A LOT and the more scared Bobby got the more scared he felt Tyrone and Pedro and Parker and Nick and even Tim get, and that made him even more scared!