Strange Flesh by Michael Olson Read Free Book Online Page A

buildings loom around the Tiananmen-sized central square. Like a NASCAR driver’s uniform, every square inch of real estate is drafted to serve commerce, which is denominated in “Noodles” (NOD dollars). Blinking animated advertisements offer to satisfy unbelievably specialized fetishes:
     
Victorian Firefighters for your discreet pleasure.
     
Fraggle Bed-wetter?
     
Cum 2 Hershel’s Hate Hotel. U WILL Regret It.
     
    Throngs of ersatz Wookies, zombies, and anatomically enhanced Pokémon stand around chatting.
    Immediately I’m besieged by avs teleporting to my location to make lewd pitches in Viagra-spam patois. The first in line are a woolly mammoth, a female Napoleon, and a little Oliver Twist clone.
    DeeDee_Pea:
    Caveman Enema??? Don’t wait!
    Jessica_A_Belle:
    Hottt Machinima Man-Sluts ONLY N$399.99 / min. Yes!!! HAVE SOME!
    Raymond_Richard_Euliss:
    Hello, fine sir! Might I be of some assistance?
     
    Their appeals are unsurprising. I’d first rezzed into NOD a couple months ago, in an attempt to add some variety to my diet of online smut. “Cybering,” slang for in-game sexual activity, is a favorite MMO pastime, and NOD is notorious among the major social worlds for having the best cybering tools by a long shot. NODlings like to flaunt this fact by making huge libraries of 3D animation, called machinima, that document theirskills in the v-rotic arts. Recently, an anonymous developer produced LibIA (Library of Intercourse Applications), an extremely swanky tool set for neterosexuals that has the population of NOD acting like bonobos on crystal meth.
    I dispel the first two avs as obvious NoBots (NOD robots are avatars controlled by programs rather than people). Raymond might be worth talking to. Right-clicking him shows me his profile data:
    Name:
    Jonathan Gurwicsz
    RL Location:
    Boca Raton, FL, USA
    Rez Date:
    03/16/2008
    Interests:
    . . .
     
    Only the elderly and fraudulent chat-bot operators trying to make their automata more convincing use actual information in their profiles. I decide to give little Raymond a Turing test—queries meant to determine whether a fellow av is an actual person.
    Jacques_Ynne:
    What does NOD stand for?
     
    A trick question. The world’s denizens love debating what its name signifies. The obvious answer comes from the Bible. The Land of Nod is the place to which Cain fled after killing Abel. Scholars observed that the Hebrew root of the word means “wandering,” so the verse could refer less to an actual place than to the act of fleeing. Nod later came to be known as the “land of dreams,” primarily through the popular children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. So most people see the name as derived from the idea of “wandering through a dreamscape.”
    Raymond_Richard_Euliss:
    Nerds Only Dungeon
Network Often Down
No Obscenity Denied
Take your pick. I’ve got others.
    Jacques_Ynne:
    Thanks.
    Raymond_Richard_Euliss:
    You’re welcome . . . So does the noob want to spank me, or what?
     
    Before I can evaluate his proposal, my screen goes black. Eventually I determine that some asshole griefer has affixed a giant black starfish to my face, and I can’t see any obvious way to remove it.
    Such is life in NOD.
     
    Which raises the question of why Billy would choose this world as the place to receive his final reward. It’s only to be expected that a game-focused artist would take an interest in MMOs. Though taking an interest in one and faking your death to send some kind of message to your brother are very different things. Not to mention the meaning conveyed by flipping the switch wearing nothing but a gilded lizard dangling from your urethra.
    And if Billy’s motivations are opaque, I’m also uneasy about the twins’. Why are they so concerned about his virtualization video? If there’s so little love lost with their obnoxious sibling, why do they want to find him so badly?
    What is it they’re afraid of?

7

     
     
    T hat evening I start getting some