and I will be paired for a few weeks starting tonight. Quaz is leaving for another assignment.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that. Um … can I ask … is there one you like better?”
According to Passionet, this is the question she must never answer, but here she is trying to have some kind of conversation with an ordinary experiencer, and now that she thinks of it, it’s also the most natural question in the world. Still, she temporizes … . “Like in what way?”
“Oh, um—” He blushes almost purple. Clearly he did mean that way.
“Well, uh, let’s see. Quaz is very well-informed. Stride is kind of the bad boy of the lot, and he’s rude, but—well, he’s really hot when we’re, you know. He knows a lot about being satisfying. Rock … well, he’s a very warm, down-to-earth kind of guy. I guess there’s more affection there than the other two.”
The bellhop’s eyes are full of gratitude.
“That’s important to you—the being likable part, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asks, hoping to keep the puzzlement out of her voice. “Being likable,” after all, is a pretty basic set of acting tricks, ever since Petrokin developed the Sincere Mode Technique twenty years ago.
“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to be as smart as Quaz, or as—uh, you know—as Stride, but it’s that kind of warm feeling that Rock has around him that … oh, well. I guess you know what I mean. I’d rather have people like me than anything else.” He smiles a little. The way he smiles—quite unconsciously, she’s sure—is a not-quite-right (because it’s just a bit exaggerated) copy of Rock’s Sincere Mode smile.
They talk for another minute or so, and she explains that yes, she really did get to be Synthi Venture just by going to the right audition, but she had six years of acting school before that, and she waited a lot of tables, played in a lot of Equity Showcases, and did a lot of data patterning before she got the break. It’s a nice story, happens to be true, and who knows, maybe he’ll get famous and tell it.
After he goes, she realizes that she is going to eat the whole huge breakfast. It’s not quite as perfect as a big breakfast used to be at three in the morning when they’d just closed and struck a Showcase Uncle Vanya, in a café full of theatre people and Lefties and random street lunatics, but it’s still pretty good, and it isn’t any of the overpriced, overseasoned weird stuff Synthi eats. She finishes breakfast without reading more, and gives herself a good scrub all over. Two hours of her time off are now gone as she towels off.
She looks at herself in the full-length mirror, and damn if she isn’t going to cry again. One problem with XV is that it comes at the experiencer through a thick curtain of emotional gauze; that’s why a melodramatic character like Synthi comes through more clearly, and why newspom, with its acute physical pain and terror, is such a big seller. So there, in the mirror,
is the evidence of the “lovemaking” with Quaz the night before. Big blotchy bruises on the perfectly shaped breasts and long scratches from his nails—practically his claws—on her thighs and belly. They gave her a pain block, like they always do, but it doesn’t override the memory of having her jaw forced painfully wide open and him biting her tongue till she bled.
Of course, the experiencers got something much less intense, and they never knew … or did they? She looks more closely, under the bruises and scrapes, touching where she can feel her soreness like an echo through the pain blocks, and she sees the fine little lines the laser leaves, sees that where a healthy woman with big breasts would have a bit of extra skin, her armpits have been fitted with something that works like a tiny accordion, that the skin where they take marks and scars off her breasts twice a year is a kind of raw, callused pink—she can’t even feel her own long thumbnail scraping it, and her trim and tidy labia show all
“Thanks, I’ll remember that. Um … can I ask … is there one you like better?”
According to Passionet, this is the question she must never answer, but here she is trying to have some kind of conversation with an ordinary experiencer, and now that she thinks of it, it’s also the most natural question in the world. Still, she temporizes … . “Like in what way?”
“Oh, um—” He blushes almost purple. Clearly he did mean that way.
“Well, uh, let’s see. Quaz is very well-informed. Stride is kind of the bad boy of the lot, and he’s rude, but—well, he’s really hot when we’re, you know. He knows a lot about being satisfying. Rock … well, he’s a very warm, down-to-earth kind of guy. I guess there’s more affection there than the other two.”
The bellhop’s eyes are full of gratitude.
“That’s important to you—the being likable part, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asks, hoping to keep the puzzlement out of her voice. “Being likable,” after all, is a pretty basic set of acting tricks, ever since Petrokin developed the Sincere Mode Technique twenty years ago.
“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to be as smart as Quaz, or as—uh, you know—as Stride, but it’s that kind of warm feeling that Rock has around him that … oh, well. I guess you know what I mean. I’d rather have people like me than anything else.” He smiles a little. The way he smiles—quite unconsciously, she’s sure—is a not-quite-right (because it’s just a bit exaggerated) copy of Rock’s Sincere Mode smile.
They talk for another minute or so, and she explains that yes, she really did get to be Synthi Venture just by going to the right audition, but she had six years of acting school before that, and she waited a lot of tables, played in a lot of Equity Showcases, and did a lot of data patterning before she got the break. It’s a nice story, happens to be true, and who knows, maybe he’ll get famous and tell it.
After he goes, she realizes that she is going to eat the whole huge breakfast. It’s not quite as perfect as a big breakfast used to be at three in the morning when they’d just closed and struck a Showcase Uncle Vanya, in a café full of theatre people and Lefties and random street lunatics, but it’s still pretty good, and it isn’t any of the overpriced, overseasoned weird stuff Synthi eats. She finishes breakfast without reading more, and gives herself a good scrub all over. Two hours of her time off are now gone as she towels off.
She looks at herself in the full-length mirror, and damn if she isn’t going to cry again. One problem with XV is that it comes at the experiencer through a thick curtain of emotional gauze; that’s why a melodramatic character like Synthi comes through more clearly, and why newspom, with its acute physical pain and terror, is such a big seller. So there, in the mirror,
is the evidence of the “lovemaking” with Quaz the night before. Big blotchy bruises on the perfectly shaped breasts and long scratches from his nails—practically his claws—on her thighs and belly. They gave her a pain block, like they always do, but it doesn’t override the memory of having her jaw forced painfully wide open and him biting her tongue till she bled.
Of course, the experiencers got something much less intense, and they never knew … or did they? She looks more closely, under the bruises and scrapes, touching where she can feel her soreness like an echo through the pain blocks, and she sees the fine little lines the laser leaves, sees that where a healthy woman with big breasts would have a bit of extra skin, her armpits have been fitted with something that works like a tiny accordion, that the skin where they take marks and scars off her breasts twice a year is a kind of raw, callused pink—she can’t even feel her own long thumbnail scraping it, and her trim and tidy labia show all
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