Read Online Multireal by David Louis Edelman - Free Book Online Page B

years as Lucas Sentinel's
apprentice, the stabbing desire for Natch that would not go away.

    Bonneth listened intently from her well-padded chair. I think I
know how you feel, she said. Wanting something you just can't have, not being
able to let go. She raised her arms feebly and made a gesture at her brittle
frame, twisted in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Bonneth had Mai-Lo Syndrome, one of those rare instances of genetic engineering gone awry. The bones in her arms and legs were fragile as
eggshells, beyond even the skill of bio/logics to repair.
    When you've got multi and SeeNaRee and powered exoskeletons, it's not
such a handicap, continued Bonneth. But I'll admit ... sometimes I just
have to know. Late at night, after I've repeated all those Dr. Plugenpatch statistics to myself a million times ... I just need to know what it's like, even for
a couple of hours, and then I can go on again.
    So how do you do that? Jara asked.
    That's easy, said Bonneth, with an impish smile. The Sigh.
    Jara hardly knew where to start. She had taken plenty of practice
laps around the shallow end of the Sigh when she was a teenager. But
back then her options were limited by the boundaries of her parents'
L-PRACG: no partners over eighteen, no extreme stuff. Now suddenly
she was free to explore the three hundred thousand channels running
on Sigh protocols-free to dive deep and explore the crevices and
trenches, the scabrous surfaces, free to coax the hidden pearls from
their shells. Most channels simply connected people of similar interests. There were other channels that specialized in every perversion
humanity had dreamt up in the last hundred thousand years. Adventurous souls could dally with automated pleasure bots that had survived the long Darwinian slog through the competitive market of
sexual programming. When the pleasure bots grew tiresome, there
were channels that circumvented bodily mechanics altogether and
delivered massive unadulterated doses of endorphins.

    But how to exorcise this obsession with Natch? It wasn't as easy as
it sounded.
    The Sigh was not restrained by the same limits as the multi network, so it was simple enough to plaster someone else's face on your
partner and be done with it. But while this subterfuge might suffice
for the man living down the street or the faintly glimpsed woman on
the tube, the illusion simply didn't work for an intimate acquaintance.
Call it a failure of technology or psychology; virtual simulacra just
could not fool the discerning human brain.
    Enter the Doppelganger channel.
    Jara found a series of intriguing promos featuring celebrity impostors of stars like Juan Nguyen and Jeannie Q. Christina, all with
ridiculously mundane names and occupations. I'm Lester James, hoverbird repair technician, said an Angel Palmero look-alike. And I've been
searching for you on Doppelganger.
    It was a simple system. Point the interface to the Data Sea profile
of your lust object. Doppelganger proceeds to track down his unwitting twins spread throughout human space. Each twin is presented
with an invitation to meet. Given a pool of sixty billion people to
choose from, the odds were high that someone would accept the invitation. Frequently that someone was looking for a person just like you,
which gave the arrangement a nice symmetry. The closer the match,
the higher the fee.
    Jara had fired off a Vault credit authorization to Doppelganger,
along with a video of Natch at his most beautiful and solipsistic. Two
days later, Doppelganger had led her to Geronimo.
    The relationship worked very nicely for a week or so. Geronimo
tried to fulfill Jara's fantasy of bedding her boss, and Jara tried to fulfill Geronimo's fantasy of bedding ... who? A neighbor, a co-worker,
some woman who had caught his eye in a Beijing night club? Jara
didn't know and didn't care. This was the Sigh, after all, where mutual
fulfillment was the decorum and questions were bad