“My sex life has been regular and traditional. As a child and an adolescent, I paid my tribute to the fad for group sex. Upon passing my specialization and becoming a pastry chef-spesh, I entered into a normal tripartite family. But something has been bothering me and making me suffer. I’ve been feeling dissatisfied. Often during the night, I stand at the open window, watching swift Charon pass through the waning half-moon of Cerberus, and dreaming… of what? I have not been quite prepared to admit my inclinations to myself…”
Alex waited patiently, though the commentary was obviously going to be long and nebulous.
He stepped forward, and the voice stopped abruptly in mid-word, then continued at a faster, more energetic pace:
“I’ve come to the Fast Transit company office to hand-deliver a wonderful chocolate cake to the company’s vice president. He’s celebrating the one hundred and first birthday of his mother, the founder and the first president of Fast Transit…”
A soft push made Alex step toward one of the elevators. He could’ve resisted it, of course, but that would defeat the whole purpose of his being there.
The elevator doors opened with a melodious chime. Alex went in, and immediately felt that something was not quite right.
First of all, there was only one other passenger in the elevator: a small, gray-haired, elderly lady, wrinkled and stooping. She wore a shapeless brown dress, and a headscarf covered her thin, faded hair.
Secondly, the floor in the elevator was covered with a soft rug.
“Good morning, ma’am…” Alex forced himself to say. The granny said nothing, only nodded, tilting her flabby chin, and stared at the mirrored wall.
Maybe he’d still luck out? The elevator started to crawl up smoothly.
“My heart skipped a sweet beat…” triumphantly announced the commentator.
“Shit!” Alex hissed, clenching his fists.
“For some reason, I started thinking of my mother…” continued the voice musingly. “Those times when, as a youth, I’d come home late at night and climb into a bath, and then my mom would come in and, for a long time, she would slowly, tenderly wash my hair…”
Alex pressed his back into the corner of the elevator. No, he wouldn’t move! He still had his free will, after all!
“The elevator went on climbing and climbing,” the narrator said, commenting on the obvious. “And suddenly!”
Alex dug his fingers into the walls. But in virtuality, even his spesh reflexes failed him. The elevator halted, literally in an instant. He was tossed upwards, thrown against the wall, and hurled onto the floor. The cake carton was ripped out of his hands and smashed against the wall. Icing squirted out, and pieces of broken chocolate figures came cascading down. There was a nasty grinding squeak. The elevator stopped, swaying a little, as though it was being pulled up not by a gravitational field, but a common cable.
His own instincts played a bad trick on him. He couldn’t help perceiving what had just happened as anything other than a catastrophe.
And a captain’s duty was to take care of the passengers.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Alex asked, kneeling beside the granny, who had dropped to the floor. Her puffy, reddish eyelids fluttered. The elderly lady glanced myopically up at Alex.
“Oh… sonny… my poor bones…”
“Do not move, ma’am.” He had forgotten that he was in virtuality… and a very peculiar one, at that. “The emergency systems will be triggered any minute now….”
But the elevator wasn’t about to open the doors.
“I’m scared…” the granny whimpered. She stretched out her arm, wrapping it around Alex’s neck. “I am claustrophobic, sonny. It’s a medical condition. A hundred and twenty years old is no joke…”
The unseen commentator gushed on, triumphantly:
“I looked and looked at her sweet, wrinkled face, bearing the traces of every year lived, every worry, every sorrow… And at that moment, I realized that I had never really loved anyone but these most wonderful of all human creatures, the embodiments of life’s ripeness and the highest expression of femininity—elderly ladies! And now, at long last, a bad accident leaves me all alone with…”
“I think I wet myself,” said the lady, coyly lowering her eyes. “But no broken bones!”
“Morons!” yelled Alex, throwing off the poor patient’s arm and jumping to his feet. “Hacks! If the elevator gear had failed, we would’ve been smeared all over the walls! Quit program!”
Even the emergency exit was realistically presented here. The doors flew open. A team of paramedics rushed in. The granny, still reaching for Alex, was carried off on a stretcher. A quick-moving youth in a waiter’s uniform scraped the remnants of the cake off the wall and stuffed them back into the carton.
Only after that came a tide of fog, and Alex found himself back at the starting place of the “Kaleidoscope.”
“Do you have complaints?” the system asked him with alarm.
“Yes I do! Tons of complaints!” Alex cut himself short, realizing that he was yelling at the simplest service program. “Okay. Remove geriatric sex from the list!”
“The social importance of gerontophilia is immense,” objected the system. “Its roots…”
“Never mind! Remove! Give me something else. But give me a synopsis first!”
For a few seconds, the system shuffled the possible options.
“An extremely interesting and unusual adventure…”
“Synopsis?”
“A middle-aged male accountant-spesh, who used to have a binary family, which had dissolved through no fault of his, works at the Imperial Committee for Lightweight Armaments. He is extremely shy, and that interferes with his sex life, as well as his career advancement.”
The system was silent for a moment, as if waiting for any objections. Alex shrugged his shoulders. It was a typical beginning.
“The head of the committee is a female coordinator-spesh. Completely absorbed by her work, she dedicates very little time to socially beneficial sexual activities. A socially and professionally successful male comrade of the accountant joins the committee team. He advises your character to become a sexual partner of the coordinator-spesh in order to get promoted and to satisfy sexual instincts. Does this suit you so far?”
“Yes, fine,” said Alex cautiously.
“After a series of comical and captivating adventures, the accountant-spesh manages to gain the love of the coordinator-spesh. However, as circumstances would have it, the character’s villainous male comrade informs the coordinator-spesh of the true motivations behind the accountant’s sexual activities. But that does not hinder the happiness of the two lovers. They form a solid, happy binary family and live together for a long time.”
Alex was silent, totally stunned.
“Does this suit you?”
“Do the committee members engage in sexual orgies?” he asked cautiously. “Is there a failed romance between the main character and his male comrade, which causes the comrade to betray him?”
“No.”
“Any sadomasochistic aspects of the accountant’s love with the coordinator?”
The system hesitated. “Hardly worth mentioning. The accountant splashes the coordinator with water from a decanter. The coordinator tosses a few print-outs in the face of the accountant.”
Alex had never had occasion to deal with such a plot in the past.
“That’s interesting,” he conceded. “Good… unusual, but good.”
“The duration of the plot is thirty-eight hours,” the system warned him.
“Can you speed it up?”