Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Another flutter of applause. Abby looked around trying to determine the source of the voice and found it in a shaded corner of the room, the DJ’s booth. The DJ stood behind a bank of three laptops, GUIs reflected off the surfaces of his glasses.

Heather pinched Abby’s arm. “No freakin’ way I’m letting the DJ take over my implants. How do you know he won’t make you kill somebody?”

Megan said, “Or worse, fuck somebody?”

Jadie said, “You believe that USA Today bullshit? They’re already breaking the law hacking other peoples ’plants, it’s not like they’re going to completely screw themselves with a murder or rape charge.”

“It’s based on SM,” Abby said. “Every participant has a safe word to break the hack.”

Jadie added, “And the DJ would be ripped apart by the crowd if he tried anything stupid. Everyone’s looking out for everyone else.”

Onto the dance floor marched six hairless eunuchs. This ought to be good , Abby thought. For the next twenty minutes they danced, their eyes miles away, letting themselves get thrown into a choreography controlled remotely from the corner of the room. They leapt, pinwheeled, jerked. Contentwise it wasn’t unlike a lot of archival footage of modern dance Abby had seen. Once the routine concluded the eunuchs wobbled off, regaining their gross motor skills in an almost narcotic fugue. This stuff was often compared to a kind of addiction. The hard-core Bionet abusers begged for DJs to control their every move, even eating, defecation, sex. Abby’d heard about a man in Boise who’d entered into an abusive arrangement with his neighborhood Bionet hacker and given him carte blanche over his vitals. Guy by the name of Paul Garza. The hacker, who went by the handle Salo, set up scripts to run automatically and induce Garza to eat, sleep, take a shower, groom himself, speak, masturbate, read, watch TV. At first Garza thought this was heavenly, watching his body go about its prescribed routines as if from a distance and yet from within himself. He described it as feeling like Salo’s flesh-and-blood embodiment. Garza found himself waking up at a regular time, taking care of his business in the bathroom, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work at the recycling plant, chatting with coworkers with Salo’s distantly typed words in his mouth, making wittier jokes than he’d ever made, going to a bar after work, hooking up with some hottie chick who was herself under 24/7 remote control, maybe even by Salo also, screwing like crazy at her place, coming home, falling asleep, and dreaming. Dreams, though. Dreams were the one thing Bionet hackers couldn’t control, and Garza’s started taking on a panicked element. In the dreams he watched himself as if on a security-camera monitor, painstakingly executing the most mundane rituals of his day. His subconscious was freaking out, saying, Whoa, hold on, buddy, I thought I was calling the shots around here! Alarmed at being usurped, his subconscious sent out these distress calls in the middle of deep REM. As the days dragged and Salo’s routines changed little, if at all, Garza wondered if he should utter his safe word and break the hack. But it was so dreamy, living like this. He was making more friends, getting fit with a daily workout, eating well. The scripts Salo had laid out were truly working the wonders the hacker had promised when they first met in a booth at Game Zone. Somewhere across town on a laptop in a guy’s rec room, Garza’s entire life was being mapped out and executed perfectly. He even got a promotion. He began looking at the life he’d led before giving over his daily routine to Salo as one filled with foibles and inadequacies. This new Garza strode confidently, spoke up for himself, ate right, and bedded the ladies. But the dreams. Full-on thrashing nightmares now, with slaughtered animals and self-castration, the pollution of Hell vomited up through his brain stem . He woke trembling and saw his hand moving toward a bottle of pills prescribed to blunt the edges of these terrors. But I like not being in control, Garza told himself, and told one of his dates, who was far beyond where he was, her eyes gone milky, as mechanically they began to screw. “With the Bionet,” she said, “you can experience another person’s orgasm. Would you like to experience mine?” Garza consented and deep in their brains the software flipped their perceptions of their sense organs so whatever was happening to the date’s body was going into Garza’s brain and vice versa. Garza, disoriented, felt himself being penetrated in a new concavity, understanding the swinging weight of breasts, opening his eyes expecting to see himself pounding away on his now-female form, but finding his date drifting into a somnambulist’s version of sexual intercourse, her eyes like monitors tuned to static, face twitching minutely upon his ejaculation. And the real shitty part was that he never made her come, so Garza missed out on his own orgasm. Or hers. Whatever. Then the next day a crazy thing happened. Salo, the hacker, died . Car wreck, nothing fancy. The scripts ran as per usual, leading Garza through his day on autopilot, then the next day and the next until Salo’s family handed the laptops over to the cops, whose Bionet enforcement division quickly figured out Salo was operating several flesh-and-blood embodiments and put the brakes on the whole operation. One minute Garza was making himself a mango fruit smoothie, the next he sensed a great silence within. The blender kept going on PUREE. He wanted to turn it off but found the only things his hands appeared to be good for were to look at. He stood in the kitchen for an hour, during which time the blender melted down and stopped functioning and great strings of drool dripped from his catatonic face. The cops traced the signal and found Garza with his pants full of excrement, unable to speak or even close his mouth, immobile in the middle of his kitchen. They’d seen this kind of stuff before, and ferried him to the Bionet wing of the nearest hospital where, Abby supposed, he remained to this day, undergoing a battery of physical and psychological therapies to relearn how to take charge of his own nervous system.

After the eunuchs’ dance the DJ spoke again. “Welcome to the uncharted waters of the Biological Internet. Your heart rate. Your electrolytes. The electricity that flows through your muscles. We control every part of you but your soul. Turn off your mind, children, relax and float downstream.”

Heather was in a corner having her neck massaged by a eunuch who was asking her the model numbers of her implants. Jadie stayed glued to a pillar, looking kind of terrified. And where was Megan? Abby very suddenly didn’t want to be here. She looked frantically for the exit. Some guy grabbed her bicep and spoke into her ear.

“You don’t belong here. Quick, let’s get out. The cops are on their way.”

The guy, who would have been more threatening had he been less handsome, steered her through the crowd toward the restrooms, then through a service door and up some crumbly wood stairs. Behind them, the pleasure center erupted in panicked screaming. Abby stumbled through a door onto a street of boarded-up ex-businesses. Down the block, cop cars spun their blues and reds.

“Just walk at a normal speed,” the guy said, “like we’re a couple on a date. By the way, my name’s Rocco.”

Abby shook his hand reluctantly. “What about my friends? We should go back and help them.”

“They’re probably getting cuffed right now.”

“Why’d you pull me out of there?”

“I could tell you were just checking it out, not into the whole scene. And I think I recognize you. We get our coffee around the same time at Lumiere’s.”

They passed beneath a streetlight, giving Abby a better look. Skin the color of an Idaho potato, scruffy jet-black stubble, a pair of dark eyes squinting in the half-light. Abby said, “You’re the guy who got the last Asiago bagel when I was there a couple days ago.”