She was no longer screaming just to please Fred.
He had real talent. There were too few people like him, who could regularly make her feel something beyond the ordinary boredom of day-to-day existence. Out of trillions, Caroline could count those she respected enough to think of as lovers on her fingers.
It was over too soon. With flesh yet on her bones (though the worms in Fred's ejaculate had made good headway), he granted her one final burst of ecstasy and released her, returning her body to normal.
They had a party to attend.
In Cyberspace, there was always a party going on.
But there were conventions as to how a party could be conducted. A host could invite the world, or only a limited guest list; Prime Intellect would never allow a party to be crashed. The host decided on the environment. You either agreed to the host's rules or you didn't go. In Cyberspace it was particularly important to establish dress codes; in fact, it was usually necessary to have body codes if you didn't want folks like Fred showing up. The Change had created some very unique etiquette problems.
Convention held that all guests would enter and exit through a common door, with no teleporting around the site. This limited the largest parties to several tens of thousands of people, though half a million had managed to attend the one Lawrence threw ten years after the Change. A party could go on as long as the host wanted. It cost nothing to hold one.
But to be a host, you needed guests. You either needed other guests of renown, or artworks to show off (such as Death exhibitions), or some other attraction to draw guests. Free food and booze were no longer enough. Anybody could have those in limitless quantity in the privacy of their own personal space.
Raven held her first party only a few months after the Change, and had been holding it annually since. Not a few people marked the passage of years by the banner above Raven's door; this time it would say 590th REUNION. Contrary to usual practice, there was no dress or body code. But there was one simple admission requirement: You had to have killed someone before the Change. In other words, permanently.
Raven was one of only a few hundred people worldwide who had been sentenced to death, but not yet executed, at the time of the Change. Her crime had been the murder of her own children in their Chicago slum walk-up. She told the court it was because she couldn't bear to hear them crying from hunger, but the neighbors all said their hunger was due to her well-documented drug habit.
Fred was another. In fact, had the Night of Miracles occurred only a few weeks later, there was a good chance that Fred would have missed it; he had one appeal left and at that point fully expected to keep his date with the electric chair. He had killed two kids, a brother and sister, ages nine and twelve. He hadn't been particularly bright back then, and he had kept a little journal to help his memory. They said he had gotten the death penalty because of the one entry: "Killed the girl today. It was fine and hot." When that was read in court, Fred's attorney put his face in his hands and shook his head.
But the Change had given Fred all the time in the world to educate himself. His first lesson had been the value of a secret well hidden, and he no longer kept a diary.
There were about seven hundred thousand who were formally invited, who were known to have killed when it mattered. But the serial killers and mass murderers were the stars. People who killed for a cause were not welcome, nor those who had killed because they had to, in self-defense or as part of their normal duties in war or police work. Raven meant her reunion to be a gathering for those who had tasted the nectar of human blood and found the taste addictive.
Technically, Caroline didn't qualify for admission. Killing had been the furthest thing from her mind back then; had she not been so ill at the time, she might easily have added her own voice to those calling for Fred's head on a pike. Even her bizarre post-Change friendship with Fred couldn't get her in. But Raven did make a very few exceptions for those who she felt were worthy.
Caroline's friendship with Fred hadn't made her worthy, but rabies had.
Caroline hadn't become a Death Jockey overnight. After she had learned to die, she had to learn to die gracefully. Finally she had learned to die imaginatively. Fred had been a great instructor in that regard.
At first Death had been little more than a parlor trick, or a private ritual to be experienced alone. But within months of the Change there were impromptu competitions to stage the most savage, outre', and unique demonstration. Ironically it was Caroline, who hated everything formal and social about Cyberspace, who formalized the Death contract and helped to organize the social structure of the Death Jockey "circuit." Fred noticed this lack of consistency but never mentioned it to her; having drowned her emptiness in a sea of rage, even Fred could see she needed an outlet for the rage. And one thing she quickly found out once she started Dying regularly was that pleasure and pain were still real.
Especially pain. Sometimes the pleasure didn't come, but the pain always did. And that was enough for her.
After a busy round of hangings, stabbings, shootings, electrocutions, falling from tall objects, and drownings, Caroline had decided to check out diseases. In the medical library, she homed in on one of the most horrible deaths known to man, rabies infection. She noted that many rabies victims had killed themselves rather than continue their suffering, so she had taken steps to prevent herself from making such an easy escape from her self-imposed ordeal. She declared an exhibition and arranged with Prime Intellect to have herself handcuffed and dropped into an open pit with a rabid dog.
The dog had savaged her before she managed to kill it by sitting on its ribcage until it suffocated. She hadn't yet embarked on her body-building campaign, and the dog had been a big one, half German Shepherd and half foam-drenched teeth. For a while she feared she would die of blood loss before the infection could take hold. But she did survive the immediate attack. The pit was earthen so she couldn't kill herself by bashing her head on the sides or floor; the walls crumbled when she tried to climb out. And of course it was hard to climb with her hands tied behind her.
She waited.
Her wounds became infected and ran with pus; she lost feeling in her left leg. For a couple of days she wondered if she would die of gangrene before the rabies showed up. Then on the tenth day she began to feel weak and feverish. She had been ravenously hungry; she had arranged for no food, just to make things worse for herself. But her hunger disappeared. She felt her throat constrict. On the eleventh day she began to foam at the mouth.
The pit swam with colors. Her body seemed to catch fire as the disease entered its excitative phase. She shook. She was immersed in fire, pins and needles, unbearable sound, and terrible light. For the first time in years she felt real fear. It was worse than the worst bad acid trip. It was exactly what she had hoped for. How much worse could it get?
Suddenly she was standing above the pit, looking down on her own dead body. Something was wrong; Prime Intellect was never, ever supposed to keep two copies of a person. She noted with professional detachment that «her» body was covered with shit and twisted into an impossible position. Prime Intellect's console appeared before her:
* Your infection has run its course. I hope you are pleased.
Her fingers danced on the keyboard.
> Why was I taken from the pit early?
* You were not. However, it is impossible for me to construct a coherent memory in a healthy brain of the events after the point you last remember. Irreversible damage progressed beyond the actual neural network and affected the data structures which make you conscious and capable of memory.