She’s black, and that’s part of the reason. He wonders, if he were ever found out, if there would be any way they could find out that this is the
wedge he likes best. He wonders if that would have any political repercussions that would be different from the ones with the white girls. If so, he thinks to himself, which would be worse? A guy of Vietnamese ancestry who likes the idea of raping black girls (hello, traditional hatreds between ethnic ghettos) or white girls (hello, wrong race and white women)?
Well, whatever may come, he’s here tonight, and he wants DeLana first. Then he’ll do Michelline, then Kimbie Dee, and finally back to DeLana. He sets them up, programs the deck to begin on his voice cue, and stretches out on the table. The butt plug goes into his anus, the merkin fits over his penis, the scalpnet onto his head. He stops to fasten his legs and the waistband, then lies back after making sure the other straps are lying where he needs them. Muffs on, goggles on, fasten head strap, press arms into restraint calipers … ready to go—
“Cue ready. Cue up,” he says.
He is DeLana, and he is the man who abducts her from the street. He clutches her hair in his fist and feels the agony in her scalp; tastes the gun barrel thrust into her mouth and feels his finger vibrating, ever so slightly, on the trigger; screams for her mama at the moment that he comes into her anus. He feels the miserable soreness in her breasts the day after and gloats at the dark bruises, feels her will break and her resistance crumble as she is forced to submission, tastes the shit licked from Master’s asshole, feels her little wet tongue cleaning him—and finally … no, no, no cut away, not yet … .
Ah. Michelline. Struggling, squirming under the covers, terrified because Dad has done this before but never so hard and it hurts; Dad feeling her come alive as she struggles to get away—
The objects he puts in become bigger and rougher, as blood covers her thighs (feeling it bleed, feeling her blood on her slick thighs)—and then the moment when her head is snapped back against the headboard, and the Michelline channel goes dead, literally, utterly blank, and Dad climbs into bed on top of the little, still-warm body.
Diem ejaculates hard at that, his scrotum twisting and aching, and slides into stalking Kimbie Dee down a hallway after she has been working out alone in the gym, feels the warm water of the shower on her as he closes in, revels in the hour during which the maimed janitor batters her small breasts, forces the mop handle into her, rapes her on the cold floor, knots the bra around her neck as she lies keening with pain—now Diem is coming dry and fast, over and over, knowing his penis will be sore for days afterward—and watches as her nude body drops from the showerhead, the shocked expression still on her face as the makeshift noose catches—and feels the noose grab the throat, the sobs of shame squeezed shut forever—
And Diem drops back to hurling DeLana from the high window, and the feel of the subzero wind screaming by her nude body, the intensity of the headache from the beating and the effects of the cold on her skull—the pavement rushing up toward her, the incomprehension that what will happen next—
There is a great burst of terrible pain and he is alone in the dark.
Diem ejaculates now, or tries to, there’s no fluid left but he rears and screams against the bonds, and the contractions feel like he’s tearing himself in two between his loins. As always, he passes out completely and falls into a dreamless dead sleep, waking about an hour later.
He releases his bonds and sits up; as usual he uses the spray painkiller, and then the warm soft oil, on his penis before he does anything else. Somewhere in all of it he lost bladder control, so he is covered with his own urine; he never remembers how or when that happens but it seems to intensify the feeling.
The room has a poisonous stench that he wants to flee, to hand off to someone to clean up for him, but of course he can’t do that; he’s exhausted and the painkiller isn’t quite working, he’s all but hysterical with guilt and relief, but he must spend this next half hour on the cleanup.
The sheets go into the washer-dryer, and he turns it on. The little gadget will get the blood, shit, semen, sweat, and urine out again, though the sheets are getting old and stained.
God, his arms ache and he’s never been this tired before while doing this, but he racks the wedges up and locks the cabinet, then takes the disinfectant and wipes down the bed, restraints, and fittings. He’s so tired he drops the bucket and it spills, running into a floor drain; his heart sinks at the thought of mopping, and then he realizes he won’t have to, it will dry on the waterproof floor, he can mop it some time when he has the time.
At last he can have his shower. It’s hot and there’s plenty of it, and the disinfectant body shampoo smells wonderful to him; he’s all but weeping with pleasure because it’s over—
But unlike other nights, perhaps just because this was so intense, there is a thing he can’t quite get out of his mind. As Diem works the pounding warm water over his scalp, his mind drifts back to the beginning, to when the first “parallel experience” pom was showing up, back during Brittany Lynn Hardshaw’s first stint as a Federal prosecutor, and then when she was Idaho Attorney General.
God, how had anyone discovered it? It was obvious in retrospect … but what kind of person would have thought of it in the first place? Rapists and molesters enjoyed what they were doing because they
did
know what they were doing to the victim—that was part of why it was so
common for abused children to grow up to be abusers—so rape-porn enthusiasts got far more excitement from sharing the event from both viewpoints.
Almost there was a kind of business genius behind it.
For that matter, what kind of brain wiring had been installed in men like … well, like Diem himself? He scours his back with the long-handled loofah, hard enough to turn it pink and achy. He still doesn’t feel clean, and he’s so tired … .
It started with deciding to see what this was like; and then it was easy to copy confiscated wedges. Before this stuff, Diem had always just figured he was sort of sexless—college experiments with a couple of young women and one young man had left him bored. It was easier to just stay home and masturbate, and before he found parallel experience he never fantasized about anything … at least not with any awareness that it was turning him on—
Well, there you had it. He supposes he could have gone to see an analyst. There have been some successes with treating all this. But that would mean confessing to a lot of things, including that his “experiments” in college had all been stranger rapes in distant cities … .
The country might well have been worse off, he thinks, honestly. Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has been one of the most effective leaders of the last fifty years, and that’s not just his opinion—to do his job Diem has had to know how to judge accurately rather than with his loyalty. Even if he didn’t trust his own judgment, there’s also the nearly universal opinion of the historians and political scientists, even the ones who hate her guts.
And so many people know that part of her greatness was her Shadow … .
He finds himself sinking to the floor of the shower, and starts rattling off accomplishments. He would guess that between one action and another that he’s managed, he’s put three million people into homes, thirteen million into jobs, gotten justice for another couple of million who would never have seen it otherwise—
His one term in Congress led to the Diem Act, and more than a thousand people have been put to death for making wedges like the ones locked in his cabinet. He even saw to it that a few specific ones he had contact with came to the notice of the cops … did he want to get caught? Or just want
them
to get caught?
He’s still ill; the pain from the convulsions that ripped through his groin earlier, the soreness leaking from where the merkin abraded his penis and where he forced himself down so hard on the butt plug, all of that is mixing with overpowering nausea. He barely gets out of the shower to the toilet
in time to heave up several times, heavy retching that leaves him feeling wrung from chest to ass, his legs trembling, head aching, like the worst flu he’s ever had.
A really bad reaction tends to follow a really intense session. The unbearable demanding buzz at the base of his skull isn’t there, won’t return for weeks or months. But now there is something else he can’t shut out.
What he can’t shut out just keeps coming back at him; he gets under the shower again, scours off the flecks of his own vomit, dries in haste and pulls on the bathrobe. On good nights, the ritual of the shower works like a baptism, bringing him back into the world feeling clean again, if wrung out and in pain; on bad nights, it just goes on and on.
What he can’t shut out has its grip on him tonight. He staggers upstairs, stops for one long moment at the landing because he must go back and string the filament of rubber cement, then carefully memorize its shape for the next time—
God, the next time. D.C. itself may be washed away, Diem is slated for the last part of the government to leave and he may be killed here like those poor bastards in Hawaii … and it doesn’t matter, he’s got to make sure this place is secure. No one must know—
He makes himself look long and hard at the thin string of drying rubber cement, remembers the unique shape of its bumps. Once someone breaks that they’ll never successfully copy it into place, and he’ll have at least some warning—
Then he feels his legs bending and buckling. What he can’t shut out comes howling up the stairs like a vicious dog at his heels. He turns, slams the door, locks it, flees up the back stairs that are forbidden to servants, enters his own bedroom. The bathrobe flies off him like a great winged bat and lands on his writing desk, currently holding three books he was reading weeks ago before it all got crazy.
He throws himself between the soft sheets of the big waterbed and buries his head under the covers, pausing only a quarter-breath to say “Room lights off” to the house computer.
What he can’t shut out is this:
All the wedges except the three “specials,” the ones he experienced tonight, are copies of parallel-experience porn that was confiscated from people who were dealing this stuff. He prosecuted some of them himself.
Three wedges—the three he played tonight—are different. He commissioned those.
Each of these three wedges cost him four times as much as his car.
And just before he falls asleep he hears it, what he can’t shut out, his own voice cutting into him, as if he had himself on the witness stand:
Mr. Diem, surely you know that these wedges are made by forcible short-term memory extraction after the rape has been committed, and the extractor is then left in place for the killing itself.
But you ordered the wedges, Mr. Diem. He who bids a thing done by others, does it himself. And at the prices you paid, Mr. Diem, you know what they did. They made those wedges special for you. And what they did to those three young girls was exactly what you wanted them to do.
And if you don’t believe that, Mr. Diem, remember that the final orgasm, the big one, the one you’ve got to have, comes not with the horrible torture of Kimbie Dee, Michelline, and DeLana … not even with their wretched disgusting deaths at the hands of those ghouls … no, Mr. Diem. That’s not what makes you come.
You come from knowing that it all really happened, don’t you?
Blackness descends. He oversleeps the next morning. When he does get up, it’s past ten, the day is gray and dreary, and there’s a note from President Hardshaw asking him to take a day off and recover from his overwork.
Berlina Jameson often wishes that she were more of an old hand. If the world ran the way it is supposed to, then she’d have spent ages covering school board meetings and standing in front of car wrecks with a camera pointed at her before she got her big break, and so she’d have lots of experience talking with biz types. But as it is, she’s going to have to wing it.
Glinda Gray, the person from GateTech who has one of those strangely unexplanatory job titles that mean either she’s a flunky or a real power and you’re supposed to be kept guessing, is not telling the whole truth. Berlina is sure of that much. She’s also sure that if she just had ten years or so of experience at this, she’d know exactly what it was that she wasn’t being told. Unfortunately she not only doesn’t have enough experience to sort that out—she also doesn’t have enough experience to comprehend what seems to be a series of hints that Ms. Gray is sending at her.
Well, gee, what would Edward R. Murrow or Morley Safer have done?
Berlina thinks. She’s rolling south toward the Gulf Coast just now, en route to getting some stock footage shot for the before-and-after sequences that are sure to come. But just now she’s not thinking of getting footage of the soon-to-be-destroyed areas; she is stretched out in the back of the car, looking into a sterovisor and assembling the images of the two of them virtually, so that what she sees looks like the inside of a TV studio but she has to be careful not to stick her arm through a potted plant. It’s clear that Glinda Gray is at least as at home in the environment as Berlina Jameson.
When in doubt, try the truth. “So,” Berlina Jameson says, “the documentation is pretty convincing. The USSF and NASA are completely illegally looting the Japanese and European parts of Moonbase, and what’s more
they’ve had NSA assistance in cracking security codes so that they’re also using all sorts of privately owned equipment without paying for it. I’ll certainly go with that material, but there’s at least two questions you haven’t answered. The first one is why you picked
Sniffings
rather than
Scuttlebytes
, and the second is, What’s in all this for GateTech?”