CHAPTER FOUR
“Chloe,” Brad said, “I must remind you this is forbidden space. You’re trespassing.”
Chloe was sitting on the floor, gloves on, hands up and working. The intuitive web of Beam, Crossbrace, and even ancient Internet pages were spread before her. The Web, as Chloe worked on it over time and threw more and more pages aside in her search, was as sloppy as any real space. She thought of her days as a girl with her mother, and Mom yelling at a young Chloe to clean her room.
She answered without looking over at the hologram. “Noted.”
“I don’t think your employers gave you this canvas to snoop through their archives.”
“Really? Are you sure? For all we know, they wanted us to uncover this. They basically duplicated a section of Crossbrace to wall off The Beam beta. Then they gave me the canvas, which accessed that walled-off section, and told me nothing. I believe Parker’s exact and exhaustive instructions were ‘Have fun.’ As far as I’m concerned, this is like overachiever parents dropping a miniature violin into a baby’s crib and expecting a prodigy. The baby will screw around with the thing, and eventually maybe make a note or two. You know what they say about Little Harajuku? How DZPD looks the other way on all sorts of tech crimes because some of those crimes are shortcuts to innovation? I figure they gave me the canvas, they told me to explore, same as with all my clients. ‘Hey, Chloe, here’s some guy who you know nothing about. Have fun.’ Same deal. They want me to figure things out, Brad. For all we know, they put this all in here on purpose, meaning for me to find it.”
Brad said nothing, just stared at Chloe as she looked over with a handful of holographic Crossbrace pages clenched in her fist, ready for the trash. She wouldn’t have thought it possible for a hologram to convey condescension with a look, but there it was.
“You think I’m rationalizing.”
“Maybe. But hey, if this console is just another client with a giant dick …”
Chloe wasn’t sure where Brad was going, but she’d stopped trying to figure the porter out. Sometimes, he acted friendly. Sometimes moody. And sometimes, as impossible as it should have been, he seemed jealous.
“You’re a hologram, Brad.”
“I’m more than a hologram.”
“You don’t have a dick. Even if you did, I wouldn’t suck it. So if this is about you and me and what I do for a living, I’ll just remind you the only people who shame others over sex in 2060 are the worst kind of bigoted, close-minded—”
“The history of ‘you and me’ began when you opened the box,” Brad interrupted.
Chloe eyed Brad, then mentally said, Whatever.
“Your objection to my trespass is noted, Brad. Now if you could verify that my connection is isolated, that’d be peachy.”
“The only party you might not be isolated from — and who might care what you’re doing — is O,” said Brad. “I think it’s safe to say that if they wanted to snoop on you, they wouldn’t program me to give it away. So yes, with that out of the way, your connection is secure.”
Chloe ignored him. If O didn’t want her snooping in the ancient section of the 2000s-era Internet she’d discovered under the Crossbrace framework upon which The Beam beta was built (a structure on top of a structure on top of a structure), then they should have cleaned it more completely before giving her access. Finders keepers.
And the first thing she’d found had been so intriguing, she couldn’t resist returning for more.
The visual web she used to access The Beam was intuitive, so pages were arranged in a way that made visual search easier and more obvious. New pages looked like sheaves from a paper book. Bright white, sharp at the corners, pressed flat. Older pages (and most of Crossbrace fell into this category) were slightly yellowed, the holograms representing them wilted around the borders. At a slight distance (when Chloe pushed them back further in the web or tossed them aside), they appeared to have wrinkles across their surfaces.
But the pages of the Internet, once Chloe realized what she was seeing, looked like scraps dug from an ancient chest of papers. They were fully yellowed, ripped at the edges, and half-curled into balls. Chloe was surprised the age indicators went quite so far (it made the pages difficult to read until she asked the canvas to flatten them) but the visual interface was probably never intended for pages so old.
After some trial and error, Chloe found she could run a perpetual search on the pages, then ask the canvas to flag pages containing those search items using brightly colored highlights. She chose red for the highlight color because it felt secret and subversive, like something a spy might find.
As she sifted and sorted, digging through the visual web like a grieving child would mine a parent’s posthumous records, red highlights stood out like sore thumbs.
That was how it had been the second day. And the third. But as Chloe kept searching, she’d adjusted and refined. She’d added multicolored highlights. She’d discovered decent search terms, then better ones.
Now, as Brad sat beside her sulking, Chloe’s red highlights indicated pages where the following appeared: Parker Barnes, Olivia Gregory, Benson Young, Charisma Young (née Berkman), Houston (who didn’t seem to have a last name, though Houston’s online presence, like his physical presence, was loud), and of course the inimitable Alexa Mathis.
Orange highlights denoted secondary search terms: pages that mentioned the companies the Six had owned before they’d formed the collective that became O, the titles of Alexa’s books, the names of Olivia’s brothels, and famous vids created by the Youngs, as well as actors and actresses made famous by them.
Chloe had discovered that the old, crumpled pages contained so many mentions of those people she’d thought were only recently famous.
Brad found Chloe’s investigations intrusive. He argued in vain that O had tried to erase the old Internet pages, but that The Beam’s resident AI had saved it anyway. And that right there — the notion of AI as curators rather than mindless software — was another thing Chloe didn’t understand.
Brad spoke of network sectors as if they were neighborhoods, old clusters (the Internet called them “websites”) as if they were neighbors. The connections between new Beam and old Crossbrace and the even older Internet were like a highway that became increasingly rustic as it reached its ancient end.
There were back doors and alleyways that Chloe, after some research, paired with obscure computing terms like DHCP and TCP/IP. The various AI — the oldest being like the simplest robotics and the newest sounding more like Brad — spoke in a variety of old network languages, like the mishmash of old New York when people had flooded in droves from the Wild East and into what had once been the great Melting Pot.
Regardless, Chloe was fascinated to see how far O’s history actually reached. Alexa Mathis, for one, seemed to be well over 60 years old because she’d published her first erotic novel in 2012 under a pen name. The world didn’t seem to remember that (so much was lost in the fall and neglected during Renewal), but The Beam’s AI had put it together. That first novel was amateur and experimental, dealing mainly with raw sex in random places. But within 12 months, Alexa was publishing groundbreaking experimental fiction unlike anything else. She’d collected the names and IDs of her readers as they allowed (the medium was called “electronic mail”), then polled them to unearth their preferences. She’d built a movement first, focused on empowerment and freedom of thought. Only then had she truly tried to sell.
Alexa seemed to have first crossed paths with Olivia Gregory much earlier than the official story suggested. This was proven by connections through an old social network called MySpace, replaced quickly by LiveLyfe, the progenitor of modern Hyperdex. Olivia was using her real name at the time, and most of their communication was conducted via private messages that were indistinguishable from public messages in The Beam’s unblinking eye. Alexa and Olivia had discussed forming a collective as early as 2019, but had tabled the idea.
Alexa’s entanglement with Parker was even more complex — and looking through the Mathis/Barnes history, Chloe suspected most of what she was seeing had once been confidential. Still, the Beam historian AI presented it to her now as dispassionately as genealogical records.
Alexa had worked with Parker in some capacity for nearly as long as she’d known Olivia, but Alexa and Parker’s relationship seemed less casual and far more strategic. They’d worked with a company called Eros, and in that capacity had co-presided over some sort of sexual experiment with names Chloe didn’t recognize — Daniel Rice, Trevor Stone.
Everything somehow revolved around an algorithm called HALO. Chloe couldn’t discover much about HALO, but did find a partial trail following one Bridget Rice (née Miller) and a schism within Eros. Beyond that, more important sounding men (Nathan Turner, Onyx Scott, Mateo Saint, many others) and a few Chloe recognized: Caspian White, who everyone knew, and Anthony Ross, who’d once been a legend, before his disappearance in 2017 … right around the time Alexa, Parker, and Eros crossed his path.
“Chloe …” Brad warned.
“Don’t interrupt,” Chloe said, holding out a hand.
She scanned the Alexa/Parker pages. A dead end. Something had happened with Eros, Ross, and some sort of “Syndicate,” but what it was, she didn’t think she’d find in the web. It had either been successfully erased unlike the rest (or too heavily encrypted?) or had been severed at the edge when Quark replicated this section of Crossbrace for the beta.
She turned her attention to the Olivia thread, following Alexa’s history through the other channels.
While Olivia had been fighting to keep her head above water through increasingly unsavory means in the early ’30s, she’d sought first consolation and then monetary support from not just Alexa, but Benson and Charisma Young, who in 2032 were newly married and forming Nectar, the erotic video company that had managed, somehow, to make sexual acts trendy in after-hours and mainstream vids.
Marcy Deloitte had done her first hardcore scene in 2035 in the dramatic series Switchblade, previously a network series that pushed the lines with nudity, profanity, and implied sexuality. Chloe had known that, of course; the Deloitte full-penetration scene was a landmark in the normalization of erotic imagery and had for many years held the record for the most flagged and rewatched scene on Crossbrace. But until now, Chloe hadn’t known that Marcy Deloitte, then a respected mainstream actress, had done her infamous scene under Charisma Young’s direction.
But the hole went deeper …
Chloe could also see Alexa’s handiwork in a series of subtle efforts to normalize sexual language. Much of this Chloe put together herself. Brad didn’t like her detective work because she was following her own intuition rather than The Beam’s to piece things together, but any good modern sex worker had read Alexa Mathis’s novels growing up. They were the groundbreaking social landmarks that had made sex work as respectable and empowering as most saw it today — but, with The Beam’s help, Chloe could see Alexa’s influence spanning even further: Alexa’s trademark turns of phrase in sexually revolutionary pieces written by Ambrose Suage, a columnist who seemed to have existed only between 2013 and 2018 in the archives. Chloe could see how lobbyist propaganda for the sex industry (first to the U.S. congress, then later to both the Directorate and Enterprise parties) had used expressions that felt like Alexa hallmarks, as if they’d been ghostwritten.
Taken one by one, the lobby pieces were innocuous. But once Chloe had her highlighted pages all in one pile, she clearly saw some common themes: a particular industry would benefit from a relaxation of a certain law restricting sexual trade; another industry stood to profit if a sexually linked business saw an increase in revenue. The earliest of these links tied messaging and voice communication giants to the boon through widespread phone sex, but at each stage the ever-expanding technology sector was clearly shown to greatly benefit from relaxed legal restrictions on Internet porn.
The moves were a subtle work of genius — nudging the world slowly to accept more and more sexuality as normal.
For most of her early career, Alexa adopted a second, longer-lived pen name — again invisible to the public but transparent to Beam archivists, who as digital beings had access to publication databases and could easily see where royalty checks were sent. The pen name was Georgia Bernard.
Georgia, unlike Alexa herself, wrote socially conscious novels that were widely considered staggering works of brilliance. Georgia’s works were sexually charged, but only in the capacity of making a point about bondage — for instance, the suggestion that women were objectified by the sex industry as it had existed at the time because well-meaning pundits made pornography, and hence sex, taboo.
The sexual politics of Georgia Bernard’s arguments were complex, but difficult to argue against publicly without coming off as sexist or misogynistic. Georgia was given plenty of credit for moving the ball forward in terms of mainstreaming eroticism — and, no longer coincidentally, Marcy Deloitte credited Georgia with giving her the confidence to do her landmark intercourse scene in Switchblade. “She’s a pioneer making the way for all of us,” Deloitte had said in her Emmy acceptance speech.
And an unmentioned, uncredited thanks would have been given right back to Charisma and Benson Young for making the scene possible … opening the way for increased membership of their own “softer, kinder, more beautiful, more for loving couples” erotic site … as suggested, supported, and advised by Alexa Mathis … as discussed with Olivia Gregory and Parker Barnes.
“Georgia Bernard” had also done a few subtle things in her books that Chloe had taken for granted when she’d read them but that she now clearly realized were part of something bigger. Georgia didn’t use words for sex workers like “hooker,” “prostitute,” porn star,” “hustler,” “streetwalker,” or “whore.”
Georgia Bernard used none of those words. Instead, she subtly shifted the lexicon of sexuality … and mindsets with her change of language. Instead of using old crass terms, Georgia spoke of sex in terms of “therapeutic wellness,” “nontraditional dating,” and “massage” — the last usually without any specific modifiers. Escorts and prostitutes became “companions.”
Plenty of others had tried the same verbal ninjutsu, but Georgia succeeded thanks to her unique position: highly respected by the old-boy network (maybe because of Alexa’s old-boy entanglements in the teens?), the radical feminist contingent during and after the fall, and everyone in between. Where other literature (both erotic and non-erotic) had tried similar wordplay, it had always felt artificial and contrived. Georgia, however, pulled it off.
Because Alexa, despite writing early-on about nothing but cumshots and fucking in janitor’s closets, was an excellent writer. Chloe had noticed that much when she’d read her first Mathis: amazing truths and beautiful language — lost, and often dismissed, because she wrote about sex.
But the stigma around sexual fiction and sex careers soon faded, thanks to pioneers like Georgia. And by the ’40s, when O officially formed, Alexa was lauded for her brilliant writing. Men and women stopped hiding their Alexa Mathis books. Sexuality became an even more mainstream movement than it had in the 1960s — made possible by groundbreakers like Marcy Deloitte (guided by the Youngs) and Georgia Bernard (who was actually Alexa).
Brick by brick and board by board, things got easier for each of O’s famous Six. They showed up at the right time in history with their various enterprises — a time when the world had learned to accept sex as beautiful and worth celebrating, no matter its form. Chloe, with holographic evidence scattered around her, could easily see that it wasn’t luck. O had made its own way easier by readying the landscape as if they were their own icebreaker vessels cutting through frozen seas.
When Crossbrace came online, a games manufacturer named Robicon made a significant departure from its core market and released an app called Snoop. A decade earlier, Robicon probably would have pretended that using Snoop was about security and that it cared about every NAU citizen’s God-given right to online privacy, but by the ’40s the world’s Bernards and Mathises had softened peoples’ perception of the sex industry so much, it didn’t even bother.
Robicon was best known at the time for its gardening app Greenery, which helped people farm under the lattice once microfibers in the net had diminished the sun’s intensity inside by 15 percent and the weather patterns became a matter of scheduling rather than chance. A side jaunt into an app that made commercial transactions of a sexual nature virtually untraceable should’ve been a risk to Robicon’s brand, but it boldly marketed the app as a strike for sexual freedom.
And who pulled Robicon’s strings, obvious now with the Internet laid bare before Chloe in all its red-highlighter glory? Parker Barnes, who was already gaining fame for his innovate approaches to sexual therapy.
Parker was closely tied to Houston, who even now appeared to Chloe as having no family or history whatsoever. Houston’s wares would have landed in the back of windowless sex shops in the past, but by the time his anatomically adaptive dildos and vibrators hit the market, they went to well-lit shelves in specialty shops and showed up right beside palm massagers in major retailers. They were advertised on Crossbrace splash pages as part of the infamous “Wellness” campaign.
Chloe pulled the pages apart, found more wrinkled holographic pages bleeding red highlights. And she saw that the Wellness campaign, publicly credited to the Los Angeles (now District 1) advertising firm Synaptz, bore the same hallmark writing voice as the early works of Ambrose Suage and Georgia Bernard. And who was on Synaptz’s board of directors? Parker Barnes and Olivia Gregory.
The Wellness campaign was the final straw, breaking the last of the restrictions in the way of erotic mainstreaming. Prostitution had been legalized a few years earlier (along with a handful of the less-offensive drugs, all handled in one “if we can’t beat ’em, join ’em” bundle in an attempt to raise NAU revenue during Renewal), but it was still in the corners of society and considered shameful. The Wellness campaign changed that, masterfully equating sexual liberation with health in a move that Chloe, looking back now, could hardly believe had been possible now that she could see all the strings.
The ads showed escorts of all shapes, sizes, races, and ages (all ages over 18, anyway) smiling at the camera with the primary caption, I am the face of Wellness. “Wellness” was always capitalized as if it were a movement, which it quickly became once already-prepped consumers fresh on the high of NAU revitalization began seeing sex workers as human beings like themselves.
Sex and Money, a popular dramatic series, featured an intelligent, well-raised female character who decides to pass over law school to become an escort. The character’s parents applauded her decision. As far as Chloe could see, none of the Six had had anything to do with that one, proving that the Wellness campaign had seeped into the nation’s psyche.
By the time Chloe reached that point in the timeline, most of O’s bigger initiatives had emerged from the Internet/Crossbrace shadows to public praise.
Parker Barnes experimented with neural augmentation and stimulation and was criticized, but it was okay because by then he was the Parker Barnes.
Alexa harvested questionable data from her customers’ devices, but it was okay because by then she was Alexa Fucking Mathis, and doing it to better please everyone.
Olivia’s spas offered custom “dates” for major events.
Houston’s toys used fledgling AI and failed miserably when the supposedly intelligent nanos began escaping their plastic and latex prisons to die inside customer’s vaginas. But it didn’t matter because Houston was O, and O was making everyone feel better.
And Charisma and Benson Young, who’d never abandoned their visuals business, launched the erotic sitcom Happy Endings. It was well-loved and well-followed and everyone wanted to see what the characters would do next. It also featured hardcore sex scenes in every episode and aired at 8 p.m. on the same stations running popular crime and techpunk serials.
Chloe already knew most of the rest. O became bigger than the government — and arguably more powerful. O opened virtual dating, then augmented what would once have been considered casual cybersex encounters with add-on offerings like anniversary gifts and personalized love letters. Clients found love with escorts, and the escorts found love with many clients at once. Nobody cared. Polyamory became average in the realm of sexual commerce, and O realized that selling personal relationships could be far more lucrative than selling unadorned sex. Inch by inch, the culture changed.
Chloe had grown up feeling perfectly comfortable telling her friends her mother was a glass table girl, and had felt no compunctions whatsoever about becoming one herself. She performed for the first time on her 18th birthday, lying flat on her stomach on a Plexiglas surface as a man slid his cock into her from behind, and a well-dressed couple ate bloody steak beneath them. Afterward, she’d gone bowling with friends, who’d documented the entire night and posted it on Hyperdex for their parents to see and celebrate.
Using the intuitive Web, holding her hands up for so long, had given Chloe a workout. She lowered her Beam gloves, shoulders aching, and turned her head to look through the apartment window at the stunning, now-twilit view of the District Zero spires. She realized she was hungry, and asked the canvas for a clock.
She’d been searching, sorting, and ignoring Brad’s disapproving noises for three hours. Time flew when you were sorting dirty laundry. She swiped the Web, storing it for later exploration, then removed the gloves and put them away. Before she closed the canvas, she looked over at Brad to find him staring at her, slowly shaking his head.
“You can’t understand, Chloe. You’re a person out here in the physical world, and can’t understand how offensive this would be to the digital memories of those you’re snooping on.”
Chloe shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to keep their digital memories in the dark, and deal with them as real people.”
She snapped the canvas shut, then stood for dinner.