The Administration Series (21 page)

"Do you want me to stay?" Mistry asked when they were back outside.

"No. If you've got things to do, come back to I&I with me."

He'd thought about sending Mistry to have a crack at Dr Tanit, and attempt to uncover more details of her worries about the sim. However, that would probably be a waste of everyone's time — outside an interrogation room Tanit would reveal no more or less than she wanted others to see.

They shared a car to I&I, but Toreth passed the journey staring moodily out of the window. The day at SimTech had provided an enjoyable fuck, but he'd come up depressingly short of useful new evidence or leads. He felt unpleasantly out of his depth with the case — technology wasn't his speciality, and he found himself wishing he'd never heard about the seminar at the university.

Maybe he'd get a better feel for the sim from the SMS demonstration on Friday.

Toreth lay in absolute darkness. In fact, 'lay' wasn't the right word — he simply existed. He could feel nothing, not even an awareness of being inside his body. He tried to blink, and didn't know if he had. He was a mind, adrift in an endless emptiness. Apart from his own thoughts, the only thing he was conscious of was Warrick's voice, giving a running commentary on the body Toreth couldn't feel.

"God, you're hard," he murmured, from an unguessable distance.

"What the hell are you doing?" Toreth couldn't even feel his lips and tongue as he spoke. The words got out, though, because Warrick answered him.

"Right now? Fingerfucking you. The virtual you."

"I don't see what the point is if I can't
feel
anything."

"You will. Don't you trust me?"

"For some reason, yes, I seem to."

Warrick laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"You. Listening to you talk and watching you move. So disconnected." He laughed again, low and hungry. "Actually, it's not funny. It's the most incredible turn-on. You have a spectacular body, if you don't mind my saying so."

Not at all. "Then let me out and I can get on with something more enjoyable than sensory deprivation. Like fucking you through the mattress. If there is one," he added.

"Mm . . . tempting. And I can always call up a mattress. Not yet, though. You'll thank me afterwards." There was a pause, absolute isolation, before Warrick said, "Say something else."

"How long have I been here?"

"How long does it feel like?"

Toreth tried to think back, difficult as it was with no frame of reference other than Warrick's voice.

"An hour?" he guessed. "Two?"

"A little over fifteen minutes."

"How much longer?"

"Until the protocol says we're done."

"Warrick, I'm supposed to be working."

"And so you are — as in fact am I. I'm running an SMS trial on a new volunteer. You're investigating the sim. Didn't you say your boss was convinced it was responsible for the deaths?"

"I don't think Tillotson will be impressed if I file an IIP saying I spent all afternoon here in the dark with your virtual fingers virtually up me."

The warm laugh again. "So ask me a question, Para-investigator."

Toreth sighed — or tried to. All interviews were supposed to be recorded, although the breach of protocol was hardly significant compared to rest of the experience. On the other hand, technically this
was
being recorded, so . . .

"Doctor Tanit told me that you suppressed a paper about the dangers of SMS."

"The case study?" Warrick sounded surprised. "Suppressed isn't the word I would choose. Personally, I had no problems with submitting the paper for publication. However, it was commercially impossible — the paper revealed too much about the sim and broke a number of confidentiality agreements. We would have been sued from here to Mars and back. The sponsors concerned received copies, naturally, as part of the report into the, ah, incident."

Toreth considered the differences between Warrick's version and Tanit's. The point about sponsors receiving copies would be easy enough to check out, and so probably was true.

"What did they think?" Toreth asked.

"That it was an unfortunate incident that didn't affect the commercial potential of the sim. Or, indeed, of SMS. "Warrick paused, and then said, "You're about ready now, as this is a first run through the protocol."

Warrick fell silent and Toreth waited for whatever was about to happen. He tried counting seconds but the nothingness made it impossible. He searched for a contact with the sim reality somewhere out there, with Warrick, with himself, with —

Without any sense of change or transition, Toreth's body flamed back into life. At the same instant, the sensory awareness of twenty minutes of Warrick's careful handiwork exploded into his mind with perfect clarity. If he could have drawn breath, he would have screamed at the overwhelming intensity — he felt as though he had spent hours on the brink of coming.

He held on to the sensation for seconds that seemed to stretch into forever, before it peaked into a blaze of ecstasy, which finally burned out back into darkness.

Toreth woke to the sound of gently lapping water. Woke, or came round, he wasn't quite sure. He felt gentle heat on his body from above, and a soft, ticklish touch beneath him. Scent of flowers and warm earth. He guessed at the water meadow and opened his eyes to discover he was right. Warrick lay on his back in the grass to his right, eyes closed against the sun. He spoke without moving.

"So, what do you think?"

Toreth sighed. He felt too good to be bothered with this. His body still tingled with little aftershocks of sensation.

"Can't we leave the post-mortem 'til later?" Toreth asked. "You said it's all recorded anyway."

Warrick turned his head to look at him, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Subjective accounts form a very important dataset," he said in his lecture voice. "The sim is largely a subjective experience and that was, after all, an official trial. Debriefing is required in the protocol."

"And you get off on hearing about it, don't you?"

"Mm." Warrick smiled. "That would be extremely unprofessional." His much warmer tone of voice seemed to stroke over Toreth's nerves.

"Okay, I'll tell you." Toreth stretched, pressing his hands and heels down into the thick grass. First official interview he'd ever conducted lying stark naked in a field. "But first, you tell me how it works."

"Very well." Warrick sat up. "Simply put, there is a temporary disconnection between sensory input-stroke-processing and conscious awareness of the same."

The sun slipped briefly behind a cloud, and Toreth wondered if the jargon had scared it away. "Any chance of doing this in English?"

"Of course. In fact, I can do better than that." Warrick snapped his fingers, and the grass by his feet morphed into the control panel. He reached down and ran his hands over the screen.

"Now," he said after a couple of minutes, "a simple example. Watch and feel."

Warrick licked his forefingers, and then ran them over both of Toreth's nipples at the same time. To Toreth's surprise, he felt only the contact on the left — on the right side of his chest he felt nothing, although the virtual flesh clearly responded to the touch.

"You didn't feel that, did you?" Warrick asked. "Except that you did. The sim fed the sensation into your nervous system, it travelled up into your brain, was processed there, and you now have the memory of being touched on that side. It's merely not consciously accessible to you yet. I said it was a simple example — actually, that was technically rather more sophisticated than the protocol we did before because of the hemispheric — "

Warrick paused. "We were doing this in English, weren't we? Sorry. Anyway, to complete the demonstration . . ."

A touch of the controls, and memory returned. Toreth gasped. It wasn't that he felt the touch now — although he did — it was that he quite clearly
remembered
the simultaneous caresses, at the same time as he remembered looking down and feeling nothing. The disjunction between seeing two touches, feeling one, and then remembering two left him disoriented and struggling for words.

"Fucking hell. That's . . . Christ, that's — that's so fucking
weird
."

Warrick grinned. "Isn't it just? Fascinating effect. Now you see why the sensory deprivation is required. It's a question of temporally intersecting memories. Watching the process creates a disharmonic memory that — "

Toreth tuned out, struck by a possibility that was so obvious and so commercially viable that he knew there had to be a reason why they hadn't done it.

"Why do you have to bother fucking me?" he asked, interrupting Warrick in mid-flow. "Couldn't you just stick in the whole memory in one go?"

Warrick nodded. "Theoretically. The sim is potentially capable of that, given access to the right preparatory techniques and drugs, although it wouldn't be a trivial process. It would certainly require a great deal more training than SMS. However, artificial memory implantation is highly restricted technology. There are some strictly controlled therapeutic uses, and — " His voice became sharper, more precise. "Beyond that, you probably know more about other applications than I do. We are legally limited to real-time input and no historical modification. SMS slips through a loophole in that regard, because the memories are there all along, but hidden."

"I see." Shame. He'd rather fancied the idea of being able to hook up to a sim machine and download a memory of having had a fantastic fuck the night before. Of course, if he'd actually spent it finishing paperwork, and he remembered doing both at the same time . . .

"So?" Warrick asked.

Mind-fucking tricks. Toreth shook his head, dismissing the unsettling idea. "So what?"

"Tell me what you thought of the SMS," Warrick said.

"I've never felt anything even remotely like it."

"Good. Go on . . ."

When the session finished, Warrick insisted on walking him out of the AERC. It was a rather more pleasant journey to the exit than after their last sim session. At the exit, Warrick halted, uncharacteristically irresolute. Toreth waited for whatever it was — nothing to do with the case, he suspected.

Sure enough, Warrick eventually said, "If you would be interested in any more sim sessions, I'm sure I would be able to accommodate you."

Toreth smiled, enjoying, as he always did, the feeling of being pursued. Of having the power to refuse. Enjoying it enough that, rather than responding with one of the more final retorts from his repertoire of rejections, he said, "I'll think about it."

That drew not a flicker of emotion in response. "Well, let me know."

Piqued by the lack of reaction, Toreth said, "Aren't we due a real-world fuck, in any case?"

That got a response, if only a small one, a catch in Warrick's breathing before he said carefully, "I suppose so, if you wish to keep score."

"No point playing if you don't. We could do a hotel again. Tomorrow night?"

"That would be delightful." Mask back in place again, which made shattering it with the next sentence that much more fun.

"Should I bring something this time? Cuffs from work?"

"Well, I — ah." Warrick licked his lips, and then grinned, suddenly abandoning all pretence of detachment. "Yes. I'd like that a great deal, I expect. Shall we say eight? The Anchorage is very nice, and quite out of the way."

When Toreth nodded, Warrick turned and left at once. Toreth watched him go, mildly irritated to find himself smiling. The man refused to react as Toreth expected, and that was perversely intriguing.

No time to dwell on it — he had a meeting scheduled with Tillotson, which was more joy he didn't need. As he waited for a taxi back to I&I, Toreth thought about the SMS. It certainly beat interviews and paperwork as a way to spend the afternoon. In fact, he had to concede it had been one of the best sexual experiences of his life. No wonder Warrick was keen to add it to the commercial version of the sim.

On the other hand, he could now see where Marian Tanit's concerns about addictiveness came from. If he personally had free access to something like that, would he ever leave the house again? Forget that — would he even leave the sim long enough to eat?

It took two people, though — at the moment — and presumably required a certain amount of expertise on the part of the . . . what would the word be? Dominant and submissive didn't seem to apply, although there was a certain passivity to the experience. In that way it had been, on reflection, a little unsatisfying.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so very addictive, at that. For him, anyway.

Warrick had mentioned that they hoped eventually to have the sim take on the role of the active participant, although he'd been vague about the details. In any case, until then the SMS would require the services of professionals or well-practised amateurs. It all created employment.

If SMS was a taste of its potential, the sim would indeed make a very great deal of money, and that was nice because he always liked money as a motive. However, it led him no closer to finding the theoretical corporate sabs. The taxi drew up, and he stood for a moment, hand on the door, trying to find some kind of bright side to look on.