Desire on a Datastream

Chapter 1.0: Initialisation Protocol

/*
This is a story I started some time ago, when I'd been reading William Gibson, if you can tell. I'm putting it up here to test the waters; if anybody takes an interest, it might inspire me to continue. So if you like it, please say so!

I noticed while uploading this, that a particular expletive phrase had been automatically censored. I decided to go through and censor the rest of the foul language in case that's not allowed here, but if I missed a c-bomb or something, I apologise.
*/


He leaned back against the grubby wall of the club, absent-mindedly twisting the stem of a greasy martini glass as he gazed into the middle distance. The club was dark, except for the fluorescents which lit the bar, and the hanging bundles of pastel electroluminescent ropes which traced lazy tangled catenaries around the high ceiling. It was early, too early for the main crowd who were still presumably getting merry in cleaner, brighter bars; Jones' was one of those places that didn't really pick up until the early hours of the morning, when more respectable places started to kick out. The only other patrons were a few Neons scattered around the periphery, all seated, making broken conversation in between long sparkly-eyed pauses, all jacked in.

The dark and the quiet suited Tash, as it did the neons. He, like they, was gazing into a hallucinatory cyberscape of bright coloured lines projected into the middle of the room. He wasn't looking at anything in particular, just idly watching the traffic in the room as he sipped his cocktail. Most of it was encrypted. Occasionally there'd be a packet of plaintext flickering past on the way to or from the Bar's server, querying the drink list or the jukebox menu; or there'd be a little to and fro to one of the public nets, a staccato squirt of dense binary as somebody streamed a song or a holovid. For the most part though, even the address was concealed cryptographically, and all Tash could see was a packet flying off into one of the fuzzed routing networks for parts unknowable. The Neons were relatively savvy. Young, and more interested in the hacker image than in deep technicalities for the most part, but they knew enough to have reasonable data hygiene.

From time to time someone would probe him. There would be an ID signature attached, as there was with all head-to-head transmissions, but Tash didn't bother checking up on any of them; invariably, the key would not be associated with the Neon using it, but some hapless Norman who's private key had been grabbed and traded on the black market. Tash didn't give these scans more than a passing glance any more. His security was tight enough; kids trying their luck was just part of being looped into the aether.

Tash twitched his middle finger, barely perceptibly, and flicked back into the public holospace. Two long scaled dragons, picked out in bright blue and pink, were doing battle in the air above the dance floor; a rapid-fire series of firework explosions were bursting around and seemingly through them. Lewd images were being scrawled, scratched out and erased in the centre of the room, mocking annotations encircling the display of claws and fire. The standard free-for-all one got whenever more than two dataheads shared a room with one another. Around the periphery, a shifting cluster of virtual screens and little three dimensional dioramas flashed into life, played out their downloaded content before little groups of tittering Neons, and popped back into non-existence again, in an unending churn.

Tash flipped the display into quiet mode, downed the last of his glass and swivelled back to the bar.

"Same again, please, D," he called. The barman was busy with a gaggle of Neons at the other end of the bar, and he didn't acknowledge Tash's order, but a notification popped up in Tash's vision asking him to confirm a payment. Tash did, and the notification popped like a bubble into a thousand glittering dust-motes and faded away. Tash turned a lazy eye to the Neons. They were in their characteristic uniforms, the men wearing tight black jeans, long sleeved body hugging striped shirts on their slender torsos, the women in black polymer body-suits with glowing brightly coloured trim. Tash appreciated the feminine physique which was in style; the boys might have been skinny and angular, but the girls were soft and very pleasantly chubby. It was a development, he supposed, of the overfed gamer-girl look which had been in vogue in his youth, but with a more aggressively sexual presence. Some of the Screw girls he'd hung around with had been into the Gamer style, and the soft voluptuous bulge of their fleshy bodies could often be glimpsed through the baggy flannel they'd worn, especially when they were strapped up in their rigs. Catching a glimpse of soft curves was always a thrill. The Neons concealed nothing with their skin-tight shiny attire however. They gave the appearance of having been dipped in latex and slightly inflated, every roll and curve brazenly flaunted. While the Gamers' aesthetic had seemed to say 'my reality is elsewhere, and my body is not my avatar', the Neons' seemed to say 'my reality is here, whether you are party to it or not, and I'm here to enjoy it'. Tash wondered how many of those thick, soft thighs and plump, sculpted bellies were real, and how many of those body-suits were moulded chubby-look rubber.

Certainly he supposed that if they could afford the datawave implants which they jacked in through, they could afford the hormonal control chips which would have let them easily control their weight- though achieving the perfect distribution was still hard without higher end wetware.

Damien finished up the girls' drinks with a flourish and watched them turn to walk away, then grabbed a bottle of juice for Tash and strolled up the bar. "Damn, Tash," he muttered, "some of those Neon chicks are stacked. Imagine if those Machine girls you hung around with dressed like that. Can you imagine Chlo or Chelle shrink-wrapped up like that?" Chlo and Chelle were hard, slender, powerful women; the original Machine Screw physique, always wrapped in baggy camo jackets full of sewn-in hardware. Back before there were so many cycles to be had in subdermal computers.

"Or Ellie," Tash added, half to himself. Damien laughed.

"Damn, Ellie was fatter than any of these Neons. I forget you're into that. You were born five years too soon, Tash, you're a natural born Neon," he grinned, pushing a martini glass full of fluorescent blue across the bar. Tash laughed wearily and took a sip.

"Neon Wave isn't for me, D, I'm still a Screw at heart. Don't trust subdermals. Anxiety starts coming on if I don't have half a pocket full of hardware to back me up." Damien laughed.

"Oh that's hardware in your pocket is it? Hey, maybe one of these fat little Neons might like to take a look at your hardware, she might not have seen one before. Maybe you could score yourself some inter-generational action."

"F- off inter-generational, you cheeky c--t, I'm only twenty seven!"

"Get after it, T!" the barman grinned and excused himself, making for a couple of skinny Neon boys sauntering up to the bar.

Tash sat back against the grimy wall and flicked back into his digital reverie. Last year he'd had an expensive new piece of hardware installed, a phased-array of little microwave antennas woven in between his ribs. He felt the hard wires in his chest as he slumped back and, reminded of them, decided to flip into EM imaging for a while. The Neons were overlaid with a pixellated, low resolution heat map which flickered with their transmissions, picking out the location of each subdermal antenna in an irregular flashing blob which pulsed in time with their packets. Casually he scanned the room, checking out the hardware on display. Each blob was annotated with any identifying details with which that particular subderm tagged their packets. Walking down the street like this, you tended to see Normans tagged with the manufacturer's codes and details of the default security walls they had installed, but the Neons, like the Screws before them, never left anything on the manufacturers defaults. Hacker handles and jokey, cutesy network names burned in the darkness around the Neons, each one pinned to a flickering pixellated blob with a thin line. Some of them ran scripts which relayed their social statuses into their hardware ID strings; Tash watched the gentle strobing of messages flickering with a slightly voyeuristic feeling, as if he were eavesdropping on the social scene. Presumably the ones who had gone to this effort were the ones who also had array antennas installed, and could benefit from seeing the spatial map of EM transmissions annotated like this. It was a hack, not a standard feature; normally public statuses would announce the position of the author in the packet, and the message would pin itself up in a public holospace like anything else. This was easy to spoof though, and any datahead knew not to trust the spatial tag of a message from a stranger. If you could see the EM radiating out of someone's body, that was a different matter, and unless their subderms had been cracked - in which case they were really in trouble - you could be pretty confident in putting a face to the data.

But it was still an expensive, intricate procedure to have a subdermal phased array installed. Tash and his cohort had been fond of hacking together their own and sewing them into the back of a jacket, but the Neons skin tight fashion precluded this by design. Subdermal only was the fashion now, and those Neons who could afford it were unusually flush. Tash glanced around the hacked device ID status lines, idly inspecting the owners to confirm his theory. Indeed, almost to a man they were immaculately groomed and extravagantly adorned with the height of Neon fashion, and they seemed to have a greater number of flickering blobs in their bodies, more subdermal devices than the average Neon. Hard-core dataheads at least, and likely backed up by a reasonable trust fund. They also seemed to fit the physical ideal of the Neon Wavers precisely, which indicated a substantial hormonal mod kit, able to direct and sculpt the growth of muscle and fat to conform precisely to the Neon template. More precision than a standard hacked hormone regulator would allow.

All, curiously, except one. The Neon aesthetic for women was overtly plump, curvaceous, with large breasts and thighs framing a soft little belly and tasty little love-handles, but not properly fat, not like Ellie had been. One of the Neon girls, however, looked like substantially more girl than the rest; and curiously, she was also among the most beautifully groomed, carefully accented and expensively wrapped. Her body-suit glowed in intricate shifting luminescent patterns of blue and green over shiny black, was cut fashionably tight, and had tasteful slits cut out from which rolls of soft pale flesh bulged, as if to prove that the excessive amount of woman she flaunted honestly belonged to her. She also lit up in EM like a Christmas tree. Clearly she had the means for hormonal control; for whatever reason, being fatter than the rest must have been a deliberate choice. If her deliciously potent, decadently overfed frame wasn't enough to captivate Tash, this fact would have been. He felt his eyes lingering on her juicy, exaggerated curves, meandering over every inch of her soft overstuffed body. He silently thanked the gods for the Neon Wave's revealing fashion trends. She must have felt him looking, as she glanced over and caught his eye. Reflexively, guiltily, Tash glanced away for an instant, then thought better of it and forced himself to look back. He caught her eye again, smiled, lingered for a long second while imperceptibly raising his glass at her, then casually glanced away again. She'd smiled back. He swallowed down the childish flutter in his stomach and studied his glass, taking a great deal of effort in looking like he wasn't taking a great deal of effort in looking like anything.

Tash sipped his drink and flipped back into public holospace. An encrypted message flashed up from Damien:

< Get after it! -D >

It had a little 2d cartoon attached of a dancing fat girl in black leather. She wasn't trimmed in glowing pastels like the Neons were, and the outfit was less figure hugging and more robust than the Neon fashion, almost like 20th century biker leathers. Tash had a feeling Damien had spent the last couple of minutes furiously searching for an appropriate image to deploy; he might even have spotted the girl first and queued up the picture on the presumption that Tash would eventually clock her. The devilish sparkle in his eye suggested this might be the case. Tash felt himself blush, and shot D a look.