“Your brother is a terrorist,” she said.
“Maybe. But if he’s right…”
“He’s wrong. I practically run this company, Vic. Your wish to be left alone had been granted. Don’t you think I’d know if something freaky was going on?”
“Something freaky’s always going on,” Linda said, and gently squeezed Victor’s shoulder. “This is different.”
“This not different,” Irina countered. “Nothing’s ever different. He wants you dead. He wants me erased. He’s psychotic.”
“He might be right,” Victor said. “Nothing else matters.”
Irina turned and pressed her firm buttocks against the imaginary glass; the illusion was perfect. “Fine.” She turned back. “As for you, Linda, tell me… what makes you think you can march into my business partner’s office and tell him what to do?”
“I—”
“Yes” — Irina cocked her head — “you.” She took a step back, and put her hands on her hips. “You’re nothing but a glorified secretary. I’d made you one of the richest people in the country, and this is how you repay me? You. Who else?” She smiled. “Tell me, Linda… who are you?”
Victor had played this game before, too.
Linda looked at the floor, blushing. “We… we need to start preparing for Victor’s trip—”
“I didn’t ask you what we need to be doing. I asked you who you are.”
Victor had always admired Irina’s skill of turning conflict into sex. They were similar that way: everything was a game; sex, doubly so. He clicked his tongue in anticipation, looked at Linda like a hungry animal at a piece of meat. Linda’s skirt was the color of an ocean wave and reached below her knees, but that’s where her conservatism ended. The elastic fabric stretched tightly across the curves of her breasts, the deep V of her blouse running past her cleavage, down to her navel. “Answer her.”
“I am a slut,” Linda replied without lifting her gaze. “I am your dirty slut; a cunt; do with me as you please.”
“Good girl,” said Irina. “Now, Vic, what do you think we should do with her for being such an insolent bitch?”
Victor stood, walked around his desk, and put his hands on Linda’s shoulders. She shuddered as if hit by an electric shock. He smiled and wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck, pushed her head to the desk. “I think we should punish her,” he said, lifting Linda’s skirt up to her waist. He examined her tanned butt cheeks, separated by the red line of her thong.
Victor smacked her with an open palm.
“Ow!”
“’Ow’ is incorrect,” Irina said. “Victor, would you be so kind?”
“With pleasure.” He unbuckled his belt. “How many?”
Linda tried to raise her head, but Victor pushed her back down, pressing his crotch against her butt.
“Five. On each side.”
“With pleasure,” he said again, and he stepped back, folded his belt in two, then brought it down hard on Linda’s left ass cheek. Leather smacked against skin. She jerked, but remained quiet.
“One,” Irina said.
He smacked Linda’s other ass cheek. A red stripe remained. “Two.” Another strike. “Three.” Another. “Four.” Linda half-subdued a squeal. With “five,” her entire body shook, yet she kept her head down and her hands on the desk. She cried out on strike six. Strike eight brought a muffled whine. Victor’s last hit came the hardest; the belt snapped against her flesh, and Linda screamed a short scream.
“Ten,” Irina counted.
Victor looked at his work. Linda’s ass had become the color of her underwear, her muscles contracting in spasms. He grabbed her panties and pulled them down with one hand, licked two fingers and touched her between the legs. He slid both fingers inside. She was ready.
He put the belt on her back and dropped his pants. Victor wrapped the belt around Linda’s neck and, grasping one end in each hand, raised her head up, forcing her to look at Irina as he entered her from behind.
Victor kicked her legs apart and fucked her hard, intense, holding her head up by the belt as though riding an animal, choking it for control. He eased the pressure occasionally, giving her small chances to breathe before tightening the belt again, warm, wet, deep, inside her, hips against hips.
When he was ready, Victor let go of the belt, grabbed Linda by the hair, and came inside. Linda’s head fell back onto the desk. He watched his sperm trickle down her thigh before locking eyes with Irina, who watched him from across the room.
“I love you,” she said.
The elevator doors opened without a sound, and Victor stepped into the subterranean corridor. Graffiti depicting people engaged in all types of sexual activity adorned the walls amidst a detailed painting of a bloody Viking battle that morphed into a raging sea, and finally into the stars of space. Dozens of electric cables, both thick and thin, ran from the elevator to the metal door at the corridor’s end. In some places, the plaster had fallen off, revealing the red bricks underneath. The scent of moss hung in the humid air. It smelled like home.
Victor opened the door and stepped inside. Few people knew of Server Room Thirteen; the name was a ruse. There were no servers on the lowest level of the Dreamweb LLC Headquarters. Instead, a leather chair fit for a home cinema experience sat in the center of the room. Cables coiled around it in chaotic knots. A motorcycle helmet hung from the ceiling on a metal cord, connected via a spiderweb of wires to the computers lining the walls; the same technology he and Mark had used to create Irina, the same technology she’d been begging him to use to upload himself. He knew Irina was lonely — she was unique — but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He would’ve sooner had his dick pierced, than live with two of himself in the world. And Irina’s own solution to this problem had held little appeal.
Victor fell into the seat, took a UF205 capsule out of his enameled pillbox, swallowed it, and pulled the helmet over his head. The in-built headphones went click, click, click in uneven intervals. He closed his eyes and prepared for submersion.
He’d jumped into the Source before — it was an inevitable part of his job as the company’s president — but he still couldn’t get used to the experience. The dreamweb, as he’d called it, was not a virtual reality in the sense of how novelists from the eighties had imagined it. The software was a means to an end, not the end in itself.
The web — the reality plane beyond the physical world which connected everything and everyone — spread around him in a network of interconnected nodes, each representing a worldspace someone had built. Millions of imaginary worlds created by his company’s customers pulsated in all colors of the rainbow. He recognized a green node for an urban horror world where users could try being a taxi driver in a post-apocalyptic future, next to the orange sphere of a distant off-world colony, where adventures awaited the brave. Another node was a mansion for the most depraved to turn their fantasies to (relative) reality. It floated under yet another node that led to a world with no grounding in any physical rules whatsoever; you could be a snake one minute, and a ball of energy the next.
Victor transferred his disembodied self to the node-cluster of worldspaces by the users from the Czech Republic. Diving in from the Source gave him powers beyond any others’ inside the dreamweb, and this was the time to put those powers to use. With his mind, he reached out toward the nodes, feeling for the psychic residue of their creators and searching for emotions, thoughts… anything that would give him insight into Mark’s recent movements across the web. Instead, he found lust, greed, gluttony, murder, and the worst of all sins: fear. Lots of fear. It cascaded from the nodes in waterfalls of emotion, tingling his hypertrophied senses like God’s promise of the end of the world.