Robert Onopa - The Pleasure Tube

“Look, Kenneth, the oddest thing….”

She is answered by the shutting of an interior door, the word “What?” then the sentence “I can get what I want across the line—I’ve got to go, anyway.” The sound of a firmly shutting heavy door.

She is half rising after the sound, she says, “Kenneth?” leaves the sofa, then turns quickly as if she has sensed the subtle change in light. The videon screen shows the same mauve background, but now the chair is empty. She stands, flushed.

After a moment the doorbell rings. She sighs, strides to the door.

It is a young man in blue coveralls—the same young man, now he’s stretching.

She says, “What do you want?”

He answers slowly, a curl to his lips, “I’ve been watching you.”

“You?” She touches, merely touches, one of the straps of his coveralls; it falls from his shoulder. He begins undressing her—they eventually sink together onto the sofa, arms snaked in thighs, then thighs in thighs. Still shot.

The screen fades again and cuts to tethered women, tethered men, the setting for some kind of game….

Call it videon overload, call it saturation, the long series of programs induces in me a kind of waking sleep, there’s a numbness in my forehead, my eyes. Collette tells me that average daily videon time is more than four hours. I suspect the average viewer is better conditioned than I am. Not that the programming isn’t spectacular: holographic sunrises of the world, Japanese geishas singing, old footage of bullfights in Madrid, Balinese dancing… these narrative interludes, panels, training, and explanations.

It seems as if I have been on theTube forever. The recliner has become familiar, this cabin, the videon itself, with its vivid colors and holographic capabilities, as ordinary as an idle terminal or the back of my hand. The idea of my being here, the surprise of the trip, are diminished—and yet when I calculate that I am well into my fourth day on the ship, and I try to remember what has happened, it seems I’ve been here no time at all, that the four days have passed with unaccountable swiftness: time frozen and accelerated at once.

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The screen cuts again, to a woman seated before a table set with a half-dozen wine bottles. Title: TASTE TUNING//THE EXPERIENCE OF WINE. Voice-over: Stay tuned. Cuts to: a group of dancers, megastars. I find myself thinking of Knuth, the intense little man from Guam—how I’d like to put him in the wine woman’s lap.

I try to contact Giroti, but he is blocked off, we are all blocked off, privatized today. Lunch does not come until it is quite late, but the lunch is crepes, which Collette prepares—light, sweet, delicious—followed by pears and Brie.

I convince Collette that I need some relief from the programming, and she sets up the videon for a MoonGame Co-op—an immensely complicated spinoff from sedentary tennis, played against the computer and other passengers. She is still explaining the rules when the ship jolts.

I feel through the floor the metallic thud, the shudder; I see the draperies sway. We restabilize immediately. I look up at Collette, my heart pounding. The light seems brighter.

“Moving an adjacent unit,” she tells me. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Tricky business.”

“They don’t make many mistakes.” She grins.

Yet before I can get my defense fully organized on the wall screen, she is pulling my channel, the screen flushes….

“Sorry, you have to see this,” she tells me. For a brief moment, still feeling the shudder, I am alarmed about the ship, I am conscious of my breathing, concentrate on steady inhalations, prepare to rise and…

Collette wasn’t kidding—the screen and audio don’t display Damage Control, they display a VisEd whose subject is the total hologram.

“Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation,” a pleasant black man says soothingly.

He is describing a loop.

“Where, best of all, you are in control,” adds a black woman so similar that she might be his sister. They are identically dressed in bright, burnt-orange body stockings, seated together on a lush sofa in an elegant cabin.

“Sometimes,” he laughs, they laugh together.

“In the comfort of your cabin—chemical, electrical, visual, audio, tactile—all systems—full spectrum sensation responds to your deepest needs, an ecstasy beyond compare….”

“The only such system in the cosmos is on this ship,” she reminds the camera. “A hologram that’s more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously….”

“Orgiastically,” the young man adds. “In a way you’ve never experienced before, including direct electrical and chemical stimulation of the hypothalamic center of ecstasy. You are in control.”

“Or out of it,” the woman laughs, her teeth sparkling white, her leg rising as she runs her hand from her knee down the back of her thigh.

The screen dissolves into moving geometric figures—or parts of figures, shifting, a kaleidoscopic effect. The figures are vaguely genital. The sound of a beat—an exaggerated heartbeat.

The couple begin to describe dosages and instrumentation. I wonder if what they say is true. Collette says that it is. They speak of direct electrical stimulation of the orgasm center of the brain.

“That’s dangerous,” I say.

“Which is why there’s medical clearance,” Collette tells me.

“Mmmm. It seems to me that arrangement could, it could, kill you.”

“Some people it does.” She shrugs. “Maybe that’s why it’s the only one, I mean, the circuits and apparatus are only on this kind of ship. Mostly it’s heart attack; it happens.”

“What prevents it?”

“Scanning. And limiting circuits for blood pressure, pulse rate. But it’s a freewill choice; there’s the risk, part of it is the risk,”

I run my hand along the brown velvet arm of the sofa and ask her if she’s tried it, what it’s like.

“Twice,” she tells me. “It’s scary, but… I felt as if I were… toasted; it was incredible and frightening, too, I felt obliterated. I was sick for a week. But God. I couldn’t begin to do it justice.”

“Though if people die…”

“You know,” she says thoughtfully, “they say the deaths have something to do with population control. The managers don’t care, they say it’s up to Medex. It happens more than they say it does. I think you have to be really healthy, your dosages have to be right, and the scanning… That’s what’s important. Then it’s not a problem, it’s just… a special kind of trauma. You never want to come back.” She grins. “It’s so incredible, your mind is filled with the most exciting things, they seem to grow in there and pile up, and then you feel them in every cell of your body….”