An Analog Christmas, by Kal Cobalt

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An Analog Christmas, by Kal Cobalt

All the themes at the Palmetto run together once you’ve lived in The Vegas as long as I have. They don’t correspond, at least not to each other. Icy blue can be discount days or fetish night. The last crimson-and-silver theme commemorated fifty percent off in honor of the latest group murder – the Palmetto likes to help its patrons stave off the depression that comes from that kind of news – but the crimson-and-silver before that was for the virgin brunch.

This time the halls were waves of red and green, chasing one another along the undulating walls. Even if I’d wanted to read the theme information ping that popped up on my visual spectrum, I couldn’t have; it was red like the giant PERFORM GIVING +12 (37) directive blocking half my sight. A week ago, an uptight corrective action officer tagged me for calling it an asshole, and that bumped Perform Giving up from a do-in-time directive to one that made it progressively harder to do anything else.

Still, I wasn’t at the Palmetto to Perform Giving. I was there because they have flash decks, and that would be enough to get me my fix around the giant red letters. My flash specs were useless, too weak to get through that kind of optical blockage. I needed the Palmetto’s luxuriously huge goggle-pillars and a good strong flash before I could start sorting out my directives.

The Palmetto’s casino floor is a riot of fun, even if you show up directive-crippled. It was one of the pilot casinos for sex fields – those transparent closet-sized places to have sex standing up in full view but protected from the wandering hands of strangers – and The Vegas’s Own Original Sex Fields At The Palmetto were always busy, and usually kinky. Sometimes bloody vats wandered up from the basement arena before they were regenehealed, spouting artificial blood from limbs severed by the historical reenactments engaged in there, mostly swordfighting and gang wars. Sexbots wandered around naked, or at least naked enough to display the targets on their backs and the corresponding discounts for distance and force of ejaculation. It was a fucking wonderland to the left of my visual field, and PERFORM GIVING +12 (37) to my right. Perverse.

I couldn’t remember where the flash decks were, or maybe they’d moved, or maybe the rumors about directives short-circuiting memory were true. I kept turning corners and finding more sex, more bots, more blood, until I ran facefirst into an ad field. It refused to dismiss until it identified that my eye movements had read it, but the letters kept surging red and green, and I could only read them half the time. Pinned there, I read as much as I could in between the red surges: AN ANCIENT HOLIDAY…AN EXOTIC DEAL AT…THE PALMETTO THIS…CHRISTMAS. WE INVITE…YOU TO EXPERIENCE THE…SENSATION OF CHARITY…BY ASSISTING THE ANALOG FOR…THE VERY SPECIAL RECOMPENSE…OF 50 GIVING.

I hadn’t been out of Giving debt in years. Hell, with 13 extras, I could tell the next corrective action officer to go fuck itself and probably get out of it with no debt. The ad de-shimmered, focusing my eyes on the booth beyond it that read Learn About Christmas and Get Giving Credit! I was hooked.

The man behind the counter was dressed in a vintage suit and had grown out a little carefully-trimmed facial hair, like I did. He smiled as I approached, and something about him made me uneasy immediately.

“Welcome to the Palmetto,” he said, as everyone did. “I’m Brom. Been ignoring that directive for quite some time now, haven’t you?”

I blinked. “Readers are illegal, you know.”

He tapped his forehead. “It isn’t a reader. You’re trying to look around the letters at me. I can tell by the way you lean ever so slightly to the side. It’s just my eyes and my brain.”

“Oh.” I leaned both forearms on the counter, getting close to this squirrelly little guy. “So what’s the deal here?”

“We’ve put analogs up in a block of rooms upstairs. A mini-vacation from their mundane little lives. You’re matched up to one of them and given a pass to an analog who’s expecting you. The two of you have a little nicey-nicey, and you transfer some piece of personal tech to them. Something you agree on together; you of course have final say. Once you’ve got them set up with some starter tech so they can begin the painstaking process of building themselves up to societal norms, you say goodbye, get 50 Giving automatically added to your account, and that’s the end of it.”

“That’s buying Giving,” I said. “That’s not legal. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Brom shook his head. “No. It’s recompensed charity. Believe me, we’ve been through all of this very thoroughly.”

“Then what’s the take for you? The Palmetto doles out a room and 50 Giving for every analog, for what?”

He gave me a very satisfied little smile. “The Palmetto sells tech, doesn’t it? You do the conversion, we do the monetization.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded, trying to think it all through with the damn directive gaping at me. “Okay, listen, I just gotta get flashed and I’ll be back, okay?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Uh-huh, why not?” This had every inkling of a scam to me, and that feeling was only getting stronger, although I couldn’t pin it down.

“Flashing scrambles your brains. You might part with more than you want to.”

“Trust me, I flash all the time, I know what I’m doing.”

He smiled at me again. Not kindly. “Trust me. I curate the analogs all the time. I know what I see.”

“Look, buddy, I’ll be back in a minute. Just mind your own.”

He shrugged, raising his hands. “Of course. No offense intended.”

“None taken.”

I felt almost blind from the directive and the disorientation that comes from a long wait for your next flash. I wasn’t sure if my flash specs had really taken yesterday; I felt a mild buzz, but you never know if that’s psychosomatic. I finally found the flash decks, but as usual, I lost a little memory around the flash; I don’t remember how I got there from the Christmas booth, or how I paid. Just coming to myself as I pulled away from the goggles and nodded for the attendant to unstrap me from the seat. “You were dark, man, weren’t you?” he asked. “You were jumping all over the place during that flash! With a huge grin on your face.”

“Flash specs are never as good,” I told him. He held up his tip jar and I smeared my thumbprint across it. “Thanks, kid.”

Flash is weird. It makes you more confident in what you’re doing and where you’re going, even though all your physical control goes loco. It’s one reason why the Palmetto is so fucking awesome; the undulating walls gently push you back into the walkways without assigning directives against disruptive behavior. I made my way back to the Christmas booth, where Brom smirked at me as he assigned me to the analog in 1225. He had some kind of story about how the number was very significant when it came to the ancient holiday of Christmas, but I tuned him out. I just wanted this over with, and my directive wiped, so I could get a pick-me-up flash and enjoy the rest of my day flat on my back.

It’s hard to navigate a hotel on flash, even when you have the room location on visual field sonar. I’m pretty sure I took a dozen wrong turns before I got there – and I’m pretty sure Brom programmed the sonar signal himself; it exploded into fireworks and displayed a ridiculously frilly Congratulations!, as if I had completed some kind of incredibly difficult task.

The guy in the room looked just like the analogs in the ads. He was little, and bald even though he wasn’t old enough to be that way naturally. He wore a dumpy loose sweater and pants, and it was weird to see him squint at me knowing he did it because he couldn’t see very well, rather than because he was checking any of his visuals. “Hi,” he said. He looked at me like he had no idea who I was, and it took me a minute to realize that was true – there wasn’t any over-the-air proximity handshaking going on here.

“Hi. The guy at the counter sent me up here. The Christmas guy.”

“Oh. Hi.” He looked at me again, carefully, from my head to my toes. “Come inside.”

He’d turned off everything he could in the room and piled up pillows to cover some of the dedicated visual surfaces. The lights were down low. I couldn’t imagine what he must have been doing in there. Staring at nothing? “So, uh, we talk about what I have that I’m willing to give you?”

He gave me another long look. “Are you high?”

“High?”

“Under the influence of something mind-altering.”

“Oh, yeah, I just got flashed. Uh – it’s a thing where you get really focused strobes slammed into your eyes, with patterns that–”

“I know what flashing is.” He spoke very quietly and calmly, and just a little coldly. Even through the flash, I started getting a bad feeling, although I wasn’t sure if all analogs were this weird or what. “Sit down before you fall down.”

“Thanks.” I flopped onto the bed, blinking heavily up at the ceiling and its dead visual display. Creepy.

“Did you know they won’t let us bunk together?” the analog asked.

“Huh?”

“We have to stay in separate rooms. Do you know why that is?”

I turned my head to make him swim into focus. “I have no idea, man. I’m just a guy who signed up for the program.”

“I think it’s because they’re afraid of us.”

I snorted out a little laugh. “Afraid of analogs? Afraid you’ll gang up and get so unruly you need somebody to shush you?”

“Afraid that we’re more powerful than you think,” he said. “My name is Ori, and this is Neen.”

I sat up abruptly. My stomach was hot with the sudden awareness that something was wrong. Neen stood at the foot of the bed, not quite as slight a guy as Ori, but in the same loose clothes. Neen had long hair and dark eyes, and waved at me a little. “Hello.”

“Uh-huh.” I looked from him to Ori and back again. “Okay, if this is a shakedown or something, I just bought a huge flash. I don’t have much on me.”

“It isn’t a shakedown,” Ori said.

“It is in some ways,” Neen said.

“Okay, you – why don’t you two have a conference and figure out what you’re doing? Because you seem confused, and you’re confusing me.” I shook my head; I probably shouldn’t have flashed quite so bright anyway, and I definitely wasn’t clearheaded enough to handle whatever was developing.

“It isn’t confusion, just a difference of opinion,” Neen said. “We would like to show you another way.”

“Another way of what?”

“Another way of being. You signed up to give, but we’d like to give to you instead.”

I snorted. “You’re analogs. You don’t have anything.”

Ori leaned in and rested a hand on my arm. I didn’t feel it coming; he didn’t have any personal proximity meter hooked up to the network. “We have analog.”

“I don’t understand anything you’re saying.” I looked up at Ori, uneasy about his motives even as I noticed that his hand was warm and a little sweaty against my arm – not digital-feeling at all.

“You don’t have to understand the words,” Neen said, and sat beside me on the bed.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I did not get the whorehouse special.”

“Just words.” Neen smiled at me.

“Listen,” I said. My hands were clammy. I knew desperate men when I saw them. “Let’s work this out. Okay? We’ll work together. What is it you want?”

“We want to show you another way of being,” Neen said again. He took my hand, examining my black-laquor nail implants. “We would like to help you return to an analog state. Only for tonight, to remember what it is like.”

“Neen knows how to disable everything and put it all back together,” Ori told me. “It’s a hobby.”

“Uh…I’m not sure about…” But Neen had already picked up a pincered metal instrument, and he set to peeling the top layer of passcode-embedded decor off my nails. “You can’t strip me completely,” I protested. “I have implants, laser surgeries, digestive enzymes–”

“We’re more interested in the immediate and the experiential,” Ori told me, watching Neen deposit my nailtops into a container with neatly-labeled compartments.

“Not that different from us after all,” I joked. Nobody laughed.

Neen was a fucking pro. He had static-protected storage, demagnetized storage, sterile-field storage – a place for everything. My caloric intake regulator: gone. My “personal space” deactivator: slipped into a box. My over-the-air protocols: scrambled. Then he pulled out a tool that made me flinch: a black-market overlay-suction tool.

“That will fuck me up good,” I protested. “It ruins the implants.”

“It ruins the implants when used by an unpracticed hand,” Ori assured. “If you hold still, everything will be fine.” Then he had both hands on my wrists, and Neen came at me with the archaic-looking little plunger thing, and I held very still and kept my eyes very wide.

Getting a biointegration lens peeled off isn’t fun, especially when it’s been there long enough to begin the process of merging into the eye itself. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it wasn’t damn pleasant, and when it was over I just held my hands over my face, keeping my weird-feeling eyes shut.

“Here,” Ori offered. He stroked my back, just long, broad strokes of his hands down either side of my spine. Something that simple shouldn’t have felt so good, but I felt my muscles relax, just as if he’d flashed me with a relaxant. I let my hands fall from my face into my lap, groaning softly as he stroked and stroked.

“See?” Neen asked. I opened my eyes to find him smiling at me, a little less intimidating than he’d been before. “It is not so bad to be analog.” He petted my hair back from my face. It felt warm and sort of tender. Not like anything else I’d felt. Then he kissed me. Just a small kiss, not the sloppy tongue-dueling things you see every day – just a nice little touch of lips. I never thought about how sensitive my lips were. He kept changing the pressure, and I could feel everything.

“Just relax,” Ori whispered in my ear, sliding his hands up under my shirt. So I did.

Sex for me, like most people I guess, is another high: get it fast, get it good, crank your pleasure centers to 11 and peel yourself off the ceiling just to do it all over again ten minutes later, until the law of diminishing returns kicks in and it’s time to go get flashed or amped or scrubbed or darked. That wasn’t what Ori and Neen were doing, though. Ori and Neen were undressing me and exploring me, touching me everywhere. I found out that touching the back of my knees made my stomach knot up a little. That a hand wrapped around my hipbone made me relax. Then Neen kissed the very tip of my penis and I felt something I didn’t recognize even from all my experienced years taking in all the wonders tech had to offer, something that felt like wanting and satisfaction simultaneously.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Ori murmured in my ear, rubbing the heel of his hand against my sternum. It made me want to feel that rub all over my body. “This isn’t about orgasm.”

“It’s not?” I panted. Neen had his head buried between my legs, his long hair tickling my balls as he rubbed his cheek against the inside of my thigh. My cock was beyond hard, angled up tight against my belly like it used to before they outlawed the Stone Boner program.

“Trust me,” Ori said as Neen broke open a capsule of lube.

We did everything. I mean, everything. Neen got his tongue inside my ass, and found a way to get fingers inside too, and then held me open for Ori’s cock. I knew some people did that, but I’d never been fucked before, and something about how close that felt, how inside me it felt – not like programming, not like implants, but like Ori had reached into me somehow – overrode my emotional balance programming and I started crying. Not because it was bad, but because it was huge, I guess. The feeling, I mean. Not Ori’s cock.

Then we were kissing, and kissing, and kissing. Neen knew all these little places to touch that made me feel warm and relaxed and tense all at once. I fell asleep for a little while, nestled between both of them in bed, with both of them still stroking and touching me. My skin felt hypersensitized, like it was reaching out for their touch. When I woke up, they were both leaning over me to kiss each other, like they couldn’t get enough touch. Suddenly, I knew the feeling.

Ori taught me how to suck Neen’s cock, and I got addicted to the little whimpering moans Neen made when I played my tongue across his frenulum just so. He kept balling his hands up in the sheets, and Ori kept patiently prying Neen’s fists open and telling him to stop holding back.

The walls were displaying faint signs of impending artificial dawn when Ori said, “Now that you see what it’s really about when you aren’t pushing so hard for it to end, it’s time to come.”

Ori went first, kissing me and touching me with his cock down Neen’s throat. I had never seen anyone swallow come before – it’s not visual, so it doesn’t happen – and I started understanding what our ancestors must have been after with the whole idea of taboo. Watching Neen’s throat muscles work and hearing him choke a little, even seeing a little drop of come bubble up against the corner of his lips, made me feel like I was seeing something private and unknowable. Something a lot more interesting than a bunch of scattered droplets on some sexbot’s back.

I wanted to know what that was like, so I sucked Neen off next. I kept his fingers interlaced in mine so he wouldn’t be tempted to ball up the sheets. It was weird, feeling his hands tense and relax against mine. I could understand what he liked and what he didn’t like that way, without any of the usual over-the-air transmissions. It was strange how well it worked. I found the one thing that seemed to make his hands and his thighs and his voice all clench up and just kept doing it, rubbing my tongue down the underside of his cock again and again even though my pain receptors weren’t blocked anymore and my neck ached, and then he came.

It was the wildest thing I’ve ever done. I hadn’t thought about how hard the come would jet out, and he was bucking under me and I was trying to suck him and swallow and breathe all at the same time, all while trying to depend on crutches Neen himself had disabled. Come came out my nose and dribbled down my chin and got sucked into my lungs, and I held onto Neen too hard and bruised the webs of his fingers, and he bucked so hard he hit my nose and it gave me that numb, not-right feeling.

It was awesome.

Neen surged up and kissed me, licking his come off my lips and my chin and from inside my mouth, and then he set to my cock with a fierceness I hadn’t even felt from vacuum bots. Ori knelt up behind me to swirl his palm around my nipples and bite lightly at the nape of my neck, and it took no time at all for me to come, crying out and shaking, looking down at Neen’s blissful face as he swallowed up my come with his hands on my thighs, and Ori’s hands on his hands as we all came down.

We slept in a tangle of too-hot limbs. Total bliss. Until the Palmetto pinged us: checkout time loomed.

“We’d like to see you again,” Ori told me quietly as he got dressed; Neen busied himself putting me back together, the directive blotting out half my vision again. “Would you like that?”

I nodded. “Definitely.”

Neen smiled, leaning down to kiss my hand as he put the last nailtop back into place.

Down at the counter, the little man gave me a satisfied smile. “Well done. Your analog filled out your report card–”

“My what?”

“A vintage figure of speech. He was pleased with your interaction and indicates that he’s very motivated to purchase technology in the foyer.”

I almost laughed. Ori, you liar. “Great,” I said. “Can we do something about my, uh…?” I gestured toward my eyes.

“Of course.” Brom called up an airscreen, made a few stylized little gestures surely all his own, and the directive blinked out of existence. For the first time, absolutely nothing displayed for me, outside of the usual datapoints.

“Thanks.” And then I couldn’t help myself: “See? I handled it just fine after my flash. Don’t judge.”

He smirked. “Fair enough. I apologize.”

It wasn’t sincere, but it was the best I was going to get. “Thanks.”

I headed off automatically in the direction of the flash decks, but halfway there, I realized…I didn’t really feel like it. In fact, I felt good. Not flashed, not amped, but good. Okay with things. Happy.

I reversed direction to head to the rail to go home instead. As I approached the Giving Booth, I caught sight of Ori and Neen, holding hands…and talking to Brom. Frowning, I ducked back a little, tuning up my hearing to listen in.

“Well done,” Brom said.

“This was a good one,” Ori said, swinging Neen’s hand gently. “Definitely a convert.”

“See you back tomorrow, then?”

Ori looked to Neen. “We might take some time off. This one…meant something. I’d like to see where it goes.”

“Fair enough. I appreciate all you’ve volunteered, do take some time.”

I waited till Ori and Neen had left, then walked directly across the lobby, right in front of the counter. Brom glanced up, and I paused, giving him a wink.

A moment of surprise crossed his face. Then he smiled and winked back. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “And thank you for participating in the Palmetto’s Giving project. We are very grateful for your help.”

I gave him a big smile. “It was my pleasure. Merry Christmas.”

–
Kal Cobalt is the author of ROBOTICA and contributor to Wired Hard 4, among other things. Follow Kal on Twitter or at KalCobalt.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 1:01 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.