Game of Death (2 page)

‘What do you expect from someone who chooses
De Sade
as his username? The Marquis de Sade was the king of sick pornography back in the nineteenth century.’

‘He was more than that,’ I say. ‘A lot of people credit him with being the father of the Nihilist movement. They say that Nietzsche and others who followed were just picking up
on the amoralism that De Sade explored.’

‘Look at you with the big words.’

‘I took a philosophy class once,’ I shrug. ‘Anyway, the original De Sade would have loved the Internet – the ultimate amoral world. Maybe this guy’s our perfect
user.’

‘Look, he’s clearly got some serious issues, but you’ve got to admit, until the end, his scenes are pretty erotic. In the LifeScene I was in a few weeks ago he had the girl
tied to a chair, and he was switching off between whipping her lightly with a cat-o’-nine-tails and tickling her with feathers. Hundreds of thousands of them. He kept adding more and more,
fluffing them over her skin while he touched her, and she was talking to him, telling him how much she loved it . . . how much she loved everything he was doing to her.’ Yvette flushes a
little as she recalls the scene.

‘A fantasy of yours?’

‘Is now. I’d never imagined the kinds of things someone could do with a feather.’

‘It sounds very special.’ Sarcasm is my native tongue.

‘It was.’

‘What happens in the end?’

She frowns. ‘He wraps cellophane over her face.’

I look hard at her, wondering exactly how jaded she has become. ‘Lovely.’

‘Better that he’s working out whatever issues he has on the NextLife platform, instead of doing something about it in the real world.’ She looks at me. ‘There
weren’t feathers in the one you just walked, were there?’ She almost seems hopeful.

I shake my head. ‘It was simpler. White room, lace panties.’

‘Was there bondage? He’s really into bondage.’

‘Yeah, but not over-the-top. Just the wrists tied to the headboard. Not some of the really twisted shit he’s into.’

‘Simple, clean,’ she comments.

‘It’s not the scene, it’s the graphics. I’ve never seen anything like them. The girl in this one is just . . . ’
I’m seeing her. The vision of her on the
bed is locked in my mind.
‘I mean, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of good visuals before, but this girl is . . . ’ I lose my words again, and it
takes me a moment to realize it. I glance up and Yvette is giving me a look. She raises an eyebrow, and I can feel myself squirm. Honesty is dangerous with her. She is like a dog with a fresh joint
when she senses the core truth in any personal revelation. She will gnaw on it for hours, sucking the marrow out of every emotional implication until there is nothing left but inert bone, all of
the meat chewed out of it. It’s an exhausting process that usually requires several shots of tequila, and I’m not up for that at the moment.

‘He’s just a very accomplished technologist is all,’ I say with a wave of my hand.

Her face pinches like a dart aimed right between my eyes. ‘
He’s a very accomplished technologist
,’ she repeats in her best nerd voice. ‘Nick, admit it: the man
creates some of the most erotic LifeScenes you’ve ever seen, and you call him an “accomplished technologist”? That’s a little like calling Leonardo da Vinci a
“proficient portraitist”. The man is a genius. A twisted genius, but – shit! – Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear because he was stable.’

‘He’s an artist,’ I concede. I have no interest in dragging this conversation out. ‘You had dinner yet?’ It’s one o’clock in the morning, but the office
is busy. We’re in the basement of an industrial building off Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. It’s an open 4,000-square-foot span with 200 computer stations, each outfitted with
comfortable chairs and full sensory units. The people here monitor nextlife.com’s heaviest users – the most active 10,000 or so – to get a good sense of what people want out of
the LifeScenes. That way, we can figure out what changes to make; figure out what people will pay for. They don’t know we’re there, in the LifeScenes with them, and we don’t know
their real-life identities, but it still gives the company a good idea of what’s happening on the site, and lets us stay ahead of demand.

Most of the stations are manned around the clock. There is no set business schedule; employees are required to put in their research hours, but the company doesn’t particularly care at
what time of day those hours are done. Our members are online 24/7, so we are too. For obvious reasons it’s a secure facility with no windows, which means it has the feel of a Vegas casino.
Time has no meaning once you walk through the door. We get a steady stream of people working, and I oversee the operation. There are two small private offices at the far end of the space, and one
of them is mine, though I spend little time there. I’m usually on the floor.

‘I haven’t even had
breakfast
yet,’ Yvette says. It’s not surprising. One of the things that she likes about the job is that it lets her conform to a
vampire’s schedule. It’s the way she’s been since she was fourteen and dropped out of school. She didn’t need school anymore; she’d figured out how to hack the
Charlestown municipal computer system and graduated with a B+ average without ever attending class. She could have made herself an A+ student, but she didn’t want to set off red flags, and
she never had any inclination toward higher education anyway, so why bother?

‘Diner?’

‘Diner,’ she agrees.

‘I’ll get my coat.’

The Diner is our weigh-station; a stopover between work and the real world. When you spend your professional life hip-deep in the fantasies and fictions of other people’s
minds, it’s helpful to have a buffer before jumping back into the physical realm. It gives you a chance to reframe things; pause and acknowledge the differences between what’s real and
what’s not.

The place has a Sixties feel about it, but that’s mainly because it’s really old. They weren’t trying for a ‘feel’ when they originally decorated; the stuff was
contemporary back then. The throwback decor reinforces the sense that the place straddles the line between reality and dream. If James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were sitting in the booth behind us,
it would complete the scene.

Yvette is sitting across from me behind two huge plates. One has a stack of pancakes so tall it looks like a television-commercial prop, with bacon, eggs and toast on the side. The other has a
burger with onions, pickles and jalapeños and a bucketful of fries. It’s hard to believe that all that food could possibly fit into her thin frame. Then again, my guess is that this is
the first time in a couple of days she’s bothered to eat anything of substance. That’s the way she operates. Binge and starve. Not just with food: work, men, booze, et cetera. I have to
hand it to her, when she turns her attention to something, she gives it all she’s got.

She’s leaning over her food, attacking it. In defense against the late June heatwave, she’s wearing a pink tank-top with the words ‘Man’s Best Friends’ plastered
across the front. It’s a loose top, and it hangs down as she leans over, exposing her cleavage and the black bra she’s wearing. My eyes are drawn with unintentional lechery. I
don’t realize I’m staring, mainly because I’m not seeing Yvette at all; I’m back in the white room.

‘See anything you like?’ she asks without looking up.

‘What?’ My tone is defensive.

She looks at me. ‘What’s the big deal, Slick? You’ve seen ’em before.’

I laugh. ‘When we were fourteen.’

‘I was an early bloomer; they haven’t gotten any bigger.’ She leans and glances over at me. ‘I hope, for your sake, the same isn’t true on your side of the
table.’

‘Nice.’

‘Just sayin’.’

‘You get anything interesting tonight?’

She shakes her head. ‘It was God-awful. I spent about an hour with this middle-aged woman who’s managed to find an old high-school boyfriend. They meet in the same shared LifeScene
over and over and over. They stand there in this Eighties disco – not a very nice one, either – and trade stories about their kids and tell each other how unhappy they are in their
marriages. They won’t touch each other, though. Not even In-World. I’m like:
Jesus Christ, get it over with!’

‘Maybe they don’t want to.’

‘Oh, they want to. Her heartrate peaks at around one-fifty, and I can see the look he’s got in his eyes. For whatever reason, though, they can’t seem to get past it all.
Don’t they realize it’s not real? I mean, it’s not actually cheating.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Don’t get all philosophical on me – it’s a fantasy.’ She pauses long enough to fit half her burger in her mouth. ‘It’s harmless,’ she muffles
through the food.

I take a sip of my coffee. It’s all I’ve ordered; turns out I wasn’t hungry after all. ‘Maybe it’s not harmless to them. I mean, what made them look for each other
after all this time? Both of them are married, right? They’re middle-aged, they’ve got kids, they’ve got lives that are flying around them faster than they can deal with, and yet
they found the time to make this connection?’

‘That’s my point. Why not just dive into the full fantasy? That’s what they’re there for.’

‘If they do that, it becomes real, doesn’t it? At that point, they have fully admitted – to themselves and to each other – how unhappy they really are. And if they can
take that step in NextLife, what’s to stop them from taking that step outside in reality?’

‘Well, first of all, she lives in Atlanta and he lives in Spokane.’

‘Distance can be overcome.’

‘It’s totally different, though, Nick. Just because you do something online doesn’t mean you’re gonna do it in the real world.’

‘No, I suppose it doesn’t,’ I agree. I’m playing devil’s advocate, I realize, and I’m getting tired. If I keep it up, we’ll still be here two hours from
now, and I’ve got an important day tomorrow, so I can’t let that happen. I have to cut things short. ‘You going back to the office?’ I ask.

She nods. ‘I’ve got to. I’ve got another twenty hours I’ve got to make up before Friday or I’m gonna be short on my time sheets. You’d know that, if you were
even a half-assed boss.’

‘I’ve never worried about your ability to get the work done,’ I say. ‘You have better stamina than anyone I’ve ever met for crawling around in other people’s
fucked-up fantasies.’

‘Hey, it beats working for a living. You going back?’

I shake my head. ‘I’ve got a management meeting at ten, and I’d like to get a little sleep before then.’

‘Management meeting, huh? We talkin’ IPO?’

I smile at her. Some secrets I can still keep to myself. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘I’ll walk you back.’

‘Why? You think I can’t take care of myself?’

She is a rare specimen. ‘I’m not worried about you,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to protect the muggers.’

The drive home feels apocalyptic. It’s nearing two in the morning, and the streets are deserted. The traffic lights blink from green to yellow to red without purpose,
like lonely reminders of a civilization long passed. The people are gone, but the machines we have created to manage our lives move sadly along. I cross the threshold from the liberal college
enclave of Cambridge into the working-class neighborhood of Charlestown, where generations have lived in proximity to the wealth of Boston, feeding off it, making their living as hard-working
painters and plumbers and handymen to the elite on Beacon Hill and in the Back Bay. It’s a town that’s proud of its heritage and of its gruff, blue-collar ways; proud even of the strain
of local criminal gangs that filters through the projects. It’s a place where the hard are revered and the soft are swallowed.

No one is prouder of Charlestown and all it stands for than my mother. She’s lived here her entire life, and has made it clear that she will never leave. Not while she’s breathing,
and not thereafter. She purchased her cemetery plot down by the O’Brien Highway in cash to make sure there are no issues with her being planted here for good.

I love Ma. I know it seems unnecessary to verbalize that; I mean, every boy loves his mother, right? And yet for me, it’s not always as easy as that. Ma’s a hard woman. Hard and
demanding. Always has been. Her father was in the rackets back in the days when the gangs had real muscle. She grew up in that world, and it’s where she’s always felt most comfortable.
My father was part of that world, too, until he was killed in an accident when I was seven. I was told he fell off a ladder on a construction job. I stopped believing that when I was ten.

Funny thing is, I think Ma was always disappointed that I never went that way. I could have. I started hanging out with a pretty tough crowd when I was younger, and I was respected. I could have
ended up being a leader in what’s left of that world, but discovered I was different. It wasn’t fear; I think I was bred to disregard fear. It’s just that I always liked school. I
liked learning, and I loved computers. That’s how Yvette and I first became friends. I actually think Ma was ashamed when I got the scholarship to MIT.

Truth be told, I didn’t fit in much in college, either. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the most prestigious universities in America – a mecca for the offspring
of the rich elite and wonder-geek geniuses alike. I fell into neither camp. I was a tough working-class kid dropping my ‘r’s and scratching my head at all the bullshit I’d never
encountered before. I think my hard exterior made it a little difficult to make friends, and my hard interior made it tough for me to care. As a result, I dove into the work, and loved having the
facilities to learn how computers really operate. In that sense, it was one of the best times of my life.

That’s where I was four years ago, doing a joint program with split concentrations in computer science and business when the recession hit. The market crashed, and the savings Ma had from
the insurance settlement she got after my father’s ‘accident’ disappeared. Two months later she was diagnosed with cancer and, without any health insurance, it was clear that she
wasn’t going to survive alone. I quit school and moved back in to help out. Some mothers would have told their only child to stay in school and would have suffered through, in the quiet hope
of a better life for the next generation. I would have been the first in my family to graduate from college. My mother, though, is a realist, and a firm believer in the debt children owe their
parents. Like I say, I love Ma, in part because she is as hard as the town I call home.