The Avatar Experiment (The Future of Sex Book 3) Read online

  The visual web she used to access The Beam was intuitive, so the pages were arranged in a way that made visual search easier and more obvious. New pages looked like sheaves from a paper book. They were bright white, sharp at the corners, and appeared to have been pressed flat. Older pages — and most of Crossbrace fell into this category — were slightly yellowed, the holograms representing them wilted around the borders. At a slight distance (when Chloe pushed them back further in the web or tossed them aside), they appeared to have wrinkles across their surfaces. But the pages of the Internet, once Chloe realized what she was seeing, looked like scraps dug from an ancient chest of papers. They were fully yellowed, ripped at the edges, and half curled into balls. Chloe was surprised that the age indicators went quite so far (it made the pages difficult to read until she asked the canvas to flatten them) but the visual interface was probably never intended for pages so old.

  Conversely, after some trial and error, Chloe found that she could run a perpetual search on the pages, then ask the canvas to flag pages containing those search items with brightly colored highlights. Chloe chose red, because it felt secret and subversive, like something a spy might find.

  As she sifted and sorted, digging through the visual web like a grieving grandchild would go through their elder’s yellowed papers and records after death, red marks on ancient, crumpled holographic pages stood out like sore thumbs. Brad asked her how she thought to do it, and of all the things he had done or said, that struck Chloe as the strangest. Computers were supposed to answer questions, not ask them. It reminded her of what people said about the new AI — that it might one day become self-aware, just as people had once feared and as people today (with more level, less paranoid minds) hoped it would. Learning meant questions.

  O seemed to be testing Chloe at every turn, now the canvas seemed to be doing the same. O hadn’t given her any instruction on how to use the canvas, expecting her to figure it out. Was it one more system of control — one more way for O to assess her?

  Chloe answered honestly: It seemed to be a natural way to search. She couldn’t have manufactured a better system if she’d thought it out methodically. It made searching easy.

  After a few days of refining her terms, red highlights now indicated pages where the following appeared: Parker Barnes, Olivia Gregory, Benson Young, Charisma Young (née Berkman), Houston (who didn’t seem to have a last name, though Houston’s online presence, like his physical presence, was loud), and of course the inimitable Alexa Mathis. Orange text was secondary — pages that mentioned each of their former companies before they’d formed the collective that became O, the titles of Alexa’s books, names of Olivia’s brothels, and famous vids created by the Youngs, as well as actors and actresses made famous by their touch.

  So many appeared on those old crumpled pages.

  Brad found Chloe’s investigations intrusive, and had argued there was every indication that O had tried to erase the old Internet pages, but shared a lot of metadata that The Beam’s resident AI had saved. That was yet something else Chloe didn’t understand. Brad was Brad, but what else was he? When she closed the canvas and the intuitive Web and Brad both disappeared, where did he go? Chloe asked, but found his answers incomprehensible. He spoke of network sectors as if they were neighborhoods; he spoke of old clusters (the Internet called them “websites”) as if they were neighbors. The connections between new Beam and old Crossbrace and the even older Internet were like a highway that became increasingly rustic as it reached its ancient end. There were backdoors and alleyways that Chloe, after some research, paired with obscure computing terms like DHCP and TCP/IP. The various AI — the oldest being like the simplest robotics and the newest sounding more like Brad — spoke in a variety of old network languages, like the mishmash of old New York when people flooded in droves from the Wild East, then known by its old names, Europe and Asia.

  Chloe found Brad’s logic hard to understand. She argued that the old pages’ existence proved that O hadn’t done its due diligence and maybe even wanted her to find them. Brad said Beam AI didn’t work that way. It saw the legacy Crossbrace pages when the beta was walled off, then read those pages front and back like an ancient book. When the AI realized that the Internet’s underlying legacy pages shared a connection to Crossbrace pages, it pulled those pages in like a genealogist collecting the deepest roots of a family tree. In The Beam’s mind, those old connections were vital in the way a family treasures are precious to humans. Not only was Chloe’s pursuit an invasion of privacy — it was spit in face of the AI that culled them.

  Regardless of the reason, Chloe was fascinated to see how far O’s history actually reached. Alexa Mathis, for one, seemed to be well over 60 years old because she’d published her first erotic novel in 2012 under a pen name. The world didn’t seem to remember that (so much was lost in the fall and neglected during Renewal), but The Beam had put it together. That first novel was amateur and experimental, dealing mainly with raw sex in random places. But within 12 months, Alexa was publishing groundbreaking experimental fiction unlike anything else. She’d collected the names and IDs of her readers as they allowed (the medium was called “electronic mail”), and polled them to unearth their preferences. She built a movement first, focused on empowerment and freedom of thought.

  Alexa seemed to have first crossed paths with Olivia Gregory much earlier than the official story suggested. This was proven by connections through an old social network called MySpace, replaced first by Facebook, the progenitor of modern Hyperdex. Olivia was using her real name at the time, and most of their communication was conducted via private messages that were indistinguishable from public messages to The Beam. They discussed forming a collective as early as 2019, but had tabled the idea as the euphoria surrounding the Mare Frigoris radio telescope installation, the discoveries that had followed, and of course the calamity when the planet had quite unexpectedly fought back all fell on their lives, one after the other.

  While Olivia had been fighting to keep her head above water through increasingly unsavory means in the early ‘30s, she’d sought first consolation and then monetary support from not just Alexa, but also Benson and Charisma Young, who in 2032 were newly married and forming Eros, the erotic video company that had managed, somehow, to make sexual acts trendy in after-hours and mainstream vids. Marcy Deloitte had done her first hardcore scene in 2035 in the dramatic series Switchblade, previously a network series that pushed the lines with nudity, profanity, and implied sexuality. Chloe had known that, of course; the Deloitte full penetration scene was a landmark in the normalization of erotic imagery and had, for many years, held the record for the most flagged and rewatched scene on Crossbrace. Chloe hadn’t known that Marcy Deloitte, then a respected mainstream actress, had done her infamous scene under Charisma Young’s direction.

  Chloe could see Alexa’s handiwork in a series of subtle efforts to normalize sexual language. Much of this Chloe put together herself. Brad didn’t like her detective work because she was following her own intuition rather than The Beam’s to piece things together, but any good modern sex worker had read Alexa Mathis’ novels growing up. Chloe could see her trademark turns of phrase in sexually revolutionary pieces written by Ambrose Suage, a columnist who seemed to exist only between 2013 and 2018 in the archives. She could see how lobbyist propaganda for the sex industry (first to the U.S. congress, then later to both the Directorate and Enterprise parties) used expressions that felt like Alexa hallmarks, as if they’d been ghostwritten.

  Taken one by one, the lobby pieces were innocuous, but once Chloe had her yellow-highlighted pages all in one pile, she began to see common themes: This industry would benefit from a relaxation of this law restricting sexual trade; that industry stood to profit if that other sexually linked business saw an increase in revenue. The earliest of these links tied messaging and voice communication giants to the boon through widespread phone sex, but at each stage the ever-expanding technology sector was clearly shown to grea
tly benefit from relaxed legal restrictions on Internet porn.

  The moves were so subtle, they began to feel like a work of genius — nudging the world slowly to accept more and more sexuality as normal.

  For most of her early career, Alexa adopted a second, longer-lived pen name — once again invisible to the public, but transparent to the Beam archivists, who as digital beings had access to publication databases and could easily see where royalty checks were sent. The pen name was Georgia Bernard. Georgia, unlike Alexa herself, wrote social conscious novels that were widely considered staggering works of brilliance. Georgia’s works were sexually charged, but only in the capacity of making a point about bondage: for instance, the suggestion that women were objectified by the sex industry as it existed at the time because well-meaning pundits made pornography — and hence sex — taboo. The sexual politics of Georgia Bernard’s arguments were complex, but difficult to argue against publicly without coming off as sexist or misogynistic. Georgia was given plenty of credit for moving the ball forward in terms of mainstreaming eroticism, and, no longer coincidentally, Marcy Deloitte credited Georgia with giving her the confidence to do her landmark intercourse scene in Switchblade. “She’s a pioneer making the way for all of us,” Deloitte had said in her Emmy acceptance speech.

  And an unmentioned, uncredited thanks would have been given right back to Charisma and Benson Young for making the scene possible … opening the way for increased membership of their own “softer, kinder, more beautiful, more for loving couples” erotic site … as suggested, supported, and advised by Alexa Mathis … as discussed with Olivia Gregory … and later in private, after-the-fact Hyperdex messages with Parker Barnes.

  Georgia had also done a few other subtle things in her books that Chloe had taken for granted when she’d read them but that now, seeing Georgia as Alexa, clearly realized were part of something bigger. Georgia didn’t use words for sex workers like “hooker,” “prostitute,” porn star,” “hustler,” “streetwalker,” or “whore.” Georgia, who delved deeply into some fairly seedy quarters with her social commentaries, also didn’t refer to men hiring girls to “jerk them off” or as porn. Georgia, instead, spoke of “therapeutic wellness,“ “nontraditional dating,” and “massage” — the last usually without any specific modifiers. Escorts and prostitutes became “companions.” Plenty of others had done the same thing, but Georgia was in a unique position. She was highly respected by the old boy network (largely because they had to, lest look like total assholes), the radical feminist contingent, and everyone in between. Where other literature (both erotic and non-erotic) had tried similar wordplay, it always felt artificial and contrived. Georgia pulled it off. Because Alexa, despite writing early on about nothing but cumshots and fucking in janitor’s closets, was an excellent writer at root. Chloe noticed it when she’d first read Alexa — amazing truths and beautiful language lost and often dismissed because she wrote about sex.

  That went away, thanks to pioneers like Georgia. And by the ‘40s, when O officially formed, Alexa was lauded for her brilliant writing, even though tablets were sticky. Men and women stopped hiding their Alexa Mathis books; back when such things were still readily available for an affordable price, many of Alexa’s readers made a point to buy paper books specifically so they could read them in public where everyone could see. It became a movement — again made possible by groundbreakers like Marcy Deloitte (guided by the Youngs) and Georgia Bernard (actually Alexa).

  Brick by brick and board by board, things got easier for each of O’s famous Six. They showed up at the right time in history with their various enterprises — a time when the world had learned to accept sex as beautiful and worth celebrating, no matter its form. Chloe could easily see that it wasn’t luck. O had made its own way easier by readying the landscape as if they were their own icebreaker vessels cutting through frozen sea.

  When Crossbrace came online, a games manufacturer named Robicon made a significant departure from its core market and released an app called Snoop. A decade earlier, Robicon probably would have pretended that using Snoop was about security and that it cared about every NAU citizen’s God-given right to online privacy, but by the ‘40s the Bernards and Mathises of the world had softened perception of the sex industry so much, it didn’t even bother.

  Robicon was best known at the time for its gardening app Greenery, which helped people farm under the lattice once microfibers in the net had diminished the sun’s intensity inside by 15 percent and the weather patterns became a matter of scheduling rather than chance. A side jaunt into an app that made commercial transactions of a sexual nature virtually untraceable should’ve been a risk to Robicon’s brand, but it boldly marketed the app as a strike for sexual freedom.

  And who pulled Robicon’s strings, obvious now with the Internet laid bare before Chloe in all its red-highlighter glory? Parker Barnes, who was already gaining fame for his innovate approaches to sexual therapy. Parker was closely tied to Houston, who even now appeared to Chloe as having no family or history whatsoever, with a thriving sex toy business. Houston’s wares would have landed in the back of windowless sex shops in the past, but by the time his anatomically adaptive dildos and vibrators hit market, they went to well-lit shelves in specialty shops, and showed up next to palm massagers in major retailers. They were advertised on Crossbrace splash pages as part of the infamous “Wellness” campaign.

  Chloe pulled the pages apart, found more wrinkled holographic pages bleeding red highlights. The campaign, publicly credited to the Los Angeles (now District 1) advertising firm Synaptz, bore the same hallmark writing voice as the early works of Ambrose Suage and Georgia Bernard. And who was on Synaptz’s board of directors? Parker Barnes and Olivia Gregory.

  The Wellness campaign was the final straw, breaking the last of the restrictions in the way of erotic mainstreaming. Prostitution had been legalized a few years earlier (along with a handful of the less-offensive drugs, all handled in one “if we can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” bundle in an attempt to raise NAU revenue during Reconstruction), but it was still in the corners of society and considered shameful. The Wellness campaign changed that, masterfully equating sexual liberation with health in a move that Chloe, looking back now, could hardly believe was possible now that she could see all the strings. The ads showed escorts of all shapes, sizes, races, and ages (all ages over 18, anyway) smiling at the camera with the primary caption, I am the face of Wellness. Wellness was always capitalized as if it were a movement, which it quickly was once already-prepped consumers fresh on the high of NAU revitalization began seeing sex workers as human beings like themselves. Sex and Money, a popular dramatic series, featured an intelligent, well-raised female character who decides to pass over law school in order to become an escort. The character’s parents applauded her decision. As far as Chloe could see, none of the Six had had anything to do with that one, meaning that the Wellness campaign had seeped into the nation’s psyche.

  By the time Chloe reached that point in the timeline, most of O’s bigger movements emerged from the Internet/Crossbrace shadows and became public. Parker Barnes experimented with neural augmentation and stimulation, so was criticized, but it was OK because by then he was the Parker Barnes. Alexa began harvesting questionable data from her readers’ devices, but it was OK because by then she was Alexa Fucking Mathis, and doing what she was to better please her readers. Olivia’s spas offered custom “dates” for major events. Houston’s toys used fledgling AI and failed miserably when the supposedly intelligent nanobots began escaping their plastic and latex prisons to die inside customer’s vaginas. But it didn’t matter because Houston was O, and O was making everyone feel better. Charisma and Benson Young launched an erotic sitcom. It was well-loved and well-followed to see what the characters would do next. It also featured hardcore sex scenes in every episode, and aired at 8 p.m. on the same stations that ran popular crime and techpunk serials.

  Chloe knew most of the rest. O became bigger than the gove
rnment, and arguably more powerful. O opened virtual dating, then augmented what would once have been considered casual cybersex encounters with add-on offerings like anniversary gifts and personalized love letters. Clients found love with escorts, and the escorts found love with many clients at once. Nobody cared. Polyamory became average in the realm of sexual commerce, and O realized that selling personal relationships could be far more lucrative than selling unadorned sex. Inch by inch, the culture changed.

  Chloe had grown up feeling perfectly comfortable telling her friends that her mother was a glass table girl, and had felt no compunctions whatsoever about becoming one herself once of age. She performed for the first time on her 18th birthday, lying flat on her stomach on a Plexiglas surface as a man slid his cock into her from above, and a well-dressed couple ate bloody steak beneath. Afterward she’d gone bowling with friends, who documented the entire thing and posted it on Hyperdex for their mothers and fathers to see and celebrate.

  Using the intuitive Web gave Chloe a workout, holding her hands up for so long. She lowered her Beam gloves, shoulders aching.

  Chloe turned her head, looking through the apartment’s window at the stunning, now-twilit view of the District Zero spires. She realized she was hungry, and asked the canvas for a clock. Chloe had been searching, sorting, and ignoring Brad’s disapproving noises for three hours. Time flew when you were sorting dirty laundry.