K Jeter - Noir

“Traveling tattoos? I’ve seen ’em.”

“Don’t be stupid.” The Adder clome looked down with evident admiration at the sleeping girl’s form. “Rev up to the present. Tattoos that move around, that even pass from one body to another-that’s strictly old technology. Been there, done that, had the rusty nails driven through my hands and feet. This is something new. What we’ve got here-” A clinical finger pointed to the markings on the girl; they could be seen more clearly now that the muscle spasms had started to subside. “It’s essentially a network of implanted receptor sites. In one grand conceptual stroke, we solve the age-old Theodora’s-lament problem. Not enough altars at which to receive libations to the gods, as she put it? What nature didn’t provide, science-or at least industry-can. There’s a lot of unused territory in the human brain, just waiting to be hooked up to something fun. There’s territory that most people are abandoning inside their heads-linguistic skills, higher-cognition faculties, emotional levels. Why leave all that just to become cerebral ghost towns, empty buildings, dust inside old closets? If you don’t use ’em, somebody else will. Nothing remains uncolonized for long, not when there’s corporations like DynaZauber around. They’ll be happy to move their furniture inside your head. That’s their business; that’s how they make their money.”

“You don’t have to tell me about DZ business,” said McNihil. “What I don’t know about it, I’m not interested in.”

“You should be.” The Adder clome spoke with sudden vehemence, eyes bright through the smoke. “You’re looking at the future here, pal; the future and the present and the past, all rolled up into one. The goal of commerce is to destroy history, to put its customers into the eternal Now, the big happy theme park of desires that are always at the brink of satisfaction but somehow never get there. Because if they did, the game would be over and everybody would go home. They might even move back inside their own heads and boot the happy corporations out.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think so, either.” Self-loathing seeped through the Adder clome’s words. “That’s why I sold out to DZ, joined up with them so hard it’d take a titanium crowbar to pry me loose.” He passed his hands, fingers spread wide, a few inches above the sleeping girl, like a magician beginning a levitation act. “Me and the rest of the ones like me, plus everybody at the Snake Medicine™ franchise headquarters-we could see the handwriting on the wall. Mene mene tekel up-your-ass . Which is corporate-speak for You’ve been weighed in the balance and we’ve found you worthwhile enough to buy, so you can either sell out now or go back to selling rubber vibrators at strip-mall discount outlets . Not much of a choice.”

McNihil had been there as well. “If Harrisch wanted you to have a choice, he’d have given it to you.”

“Exactly.” The Adder clome looked down at the sleeping girl, examining the naked form more critically now. “So that’s why there’s Snake Medicine™ fingerprints all over this concept; we were happy to get the consulting gig with DynaZauber.”

“Let me guess.” Smoke had made McNihil’s voice even raspier, painfully so. He nodded toward the cube bunny and her markings. “This is TIAC?”

“TIAC Mark Two; Two Point Five, actually. The DZ labs took the initial design revisions and did a little fine-tuning on them. Before they pulled the plug on the whole project.”

“Why didn’t they go to Three? Or even beyond that. It was my understanding that Harrisch and his crowd are always looking for new products to push.” McNihil glanced down at the sleeping girl, then back up to the Adder clome. “Didn’t this one work out?”

“Worked out like a champ.” The Adder clome’s own gaze was filled with longing, the girl’s image that of unfulfilled possibilities. “In some ways, better than they wanted it to. Maybe that was the problem; DynaZauber wound up with a kind of refutation of their whole turd-in-a-can marketing concept. Because this baby really delivered. Look here.” The moving tattoos followed the point of the Adder clome’s finger, like tropical fish in a skin aquarium, waiting to be fed. “It’s not just the images, that’s just what you see . You do see them, don’t you?”

McNihil nodded. “Go on.”

“There’s a whole system here of transmission and reception, sites and stimuli. The tattoos are triggers for previously implanted neural feed-through points. There’s enough redundant, unused processor space in the human brain’s occipital lobes, the vision centers, that a DZ surgeon-or a Snake Medicine™ clinic technician, for that matter, once the procedure’s been sufficiently dumbed down-can route a subcutaneous perception matrix to the deep limbic sexual areas.” The Adder clome sounded enthusiastic now. “It’s like having eyes all over your body-but a specialized organ; you couldn’t read a book with your big toe or something. More like a frog’s eye, adapted to perceive only a limited range of stimulus. In this case, the patterns of the traveling tattoos. A predetermined library of tattoo designs-some historicals, Rock of Ages-type stuff, some Iban primitivos, a lot of originals and public-domain stuff-is loaded into unconscious memory, using the basic prowler download technology. It’s pretty versatile that way.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

The Adder clome rolled on, words coming faster. “Then you just have to load in the connections, the link between each tattoo and the subarea of the cortex that it should stimulate. All sorts of variations are possible: a basic Arrow-Pierced Heart with Banner Doves image is hooked up to a generalized, low-level stroke of the major pleasure centers, while an early-sixties Hot-Rod Demon, some classic Big Daddy Roth design, has a much higher-voltage, short-duration groin-chakra zap linked to it. The first gets you that warm-and-fuzzy bliss glow that lasts for hours, the other is your classic short-fast-and-hard number, twenty seconds or less standing up, from erection, insertion, and climax like a bullet to the center of the skull. Just like old-fashioned sexual encounters in that way: you don’t necessarily know just what you’re going to get until skin contact’s been made.”

“Sounds,” said McNihil drily, “more like sexual disease than sexual encounters.”

“Yeah, but this is the disease you want . Well, maybe not you-but somebody always does. They wouldn’t put their tongues inside prowlers’ mouths if they didn’t want it. But with skin as the active, receptive element…” The Adder clome nodded slowly. “You add the public factor. People know what you’ve got, what you’ve done, what other skin you’ve rubbed up against… and what’s rubbed off on you. Like trading cards, some of the tattoos are rarer than others; some are so rare as to be legendary, things to be whispered and conjectured about. Mysterious, sharp-edged emblems, pseudo-Arabic calligraphy, bleeding hearts-of-Jesus that can trigger cortical pleasure centers that nothing else can, soft gray padlocks that only one key can fit. If somebody’s going to collect the set, they’ll have to put some work in, chase down the missing pieces. There’s a whole collector economy that develops off this system: people become major players by what they’ve got, what they can give you.”

“Just like the regular world.” A lot of this was stuff that McNihil hadn’t heard of before, but it depressed more than surprised him. “It’s all economics. Congratulations-between you and DZ, you’ve managed to complete the process of turning sex into a pure capitalist endeavor.”