The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (14 page)

“There
is
no business model! There is
no
business model!” Towse was on his feet.

Oh Jesus Christ.

“These are kids!” Towse exploded, his eyes boiling angry. “Sharing photos, textual pi-
gion
English!” His hand fluttered theatrically. Thank God they were in a private room. “Most of ‘em don’t even own a credit card! And I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but online commerce
isn’t so fucking common without a fucking credit card
!”

Ben thought briefly about the alternate payment possibilities of PingPong – but no. “Then what would you do differently with the user base?”

Carmichael cut in: “Paul, we’ve gone too far. Tonight – and down this IPO path,
together
. So let’s all take a day or two, to reflect on this.” He made as though to leave. From nowhere a waiter appeared, ready to pull back his chair. It was irresistible-force-meets-immovable-object, Ben registered – only, too late! Somehow the Clamor IPO was going terribly wrong, bewilderingly fast. And as the ‘lead’ banker on the deal, Ben was witnessing his prospects of partnership receding almost in slow motion, in front of his very eyes –

How could it have come to this?

“
I won’t – be – denied
!” Towse was smacking his palm down, from high above head height, onto the walnut table, with its slenderest of legs, to a God-awful cacophony of glassware, cutlery; the returning sommelier blanching – it looked like it might all collapse!

Oh God, Carmichael is leaving. Leonard Carmichael is getting up, out of his chair, and walking out of the private dining room in which everything was supposed to come together, for my IPO, my job –
my life
! – Ben Silverman now saw with horrible clarity, like a freeway accident unfolding in infinite time.

As the others dispersed, with barely a word said among them, Ben no longer had any idea where he was with the process – or whether indeed there
was
still a process. Into his mind came those three words, Who Knows? –
Towse
.

“Your check sir,” the maitre d’ was saying to him with unusual supplication.

CHAPTER 17

The next day, Natalie spent in her hotel room. Heavy rain drummed down on the windows, the sound drowned out by the hypnotic click of fingertip on MacBook. The proposal to Nguyen had specified that she would write up her data investigations into a report. A hundred and twenty five thousand dollars had already landed in her Bank of America account, twenty five of which she’d kept. The rest she’d paid on to an L.A.-based anti-trafficking organization called Captive Daughters. The report structure was starting to take shape when the phone rang. It was Winston Ma. He had news:

“When we spoke yesterday,” he said, “I mentioned
Grand Theft Auto
– and it got me thinking.”

“How so?”

“Well, a few years ago there was this big hoopla surrounding
GTA
and a mod that a Dutch hacker had written for it. You know what a mod is?”

“Remind me.”

“It’s a software patch that gamers can download, which modifies the game – so that it runs differently to the version the owners develop and release. The
Grand Theft Auto
mod I’m talking about was called ‘Hot Coffee’, and it involved the central character going round to some woman’s house for coffee, then having oral and full sex with her. All pretty lame stuff. You can still find a version on YouTube, if you’re interested.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“So, what was interesting was the furore. It was what got Hilary Clinton all stirred up, proposing legislation to protect underage kids from these new gaming worlds. Most controversial was the role of the game company itself, which maintained that it had no involvement with the mod.”

“Why would anyone think they did?”

“
Because
of the notoriety. Sales of GTA went massive. We’re talking lines round the block, for the subsequent releases – back in the days when you still had to
go
to a physical store to pick up an install-disk –”

“And did they? Have any involvement?”

“Depends who you believe. The Dutch hacker claimed to the end that the developers left code buried in the game that he worked with to create the mod. The developers said Nuh-uh, they had absolutely no control over any of this stuff, to their never-ending frustration and dismay and wah wah wah. So who d’you believe?”

“Who do
you
believe?”

“Hey, I’m just the intern.”

“
Winston
!”

“OK, well let me put it this way: the motive for these gaming companies to push the envelope with new online experiences is
pre
-tty strong. Now,
MultiQuest
.”

“Yes.”

“I was checking out the forums and discussion boards and came across this buzz about a
Hungarian
hacker who’d been boasting ’bout some so-called re-rendering work he’d done. And when I looked into it, I
did
find a mod for the game. You got a pen handy? Or I can text you the link.”

“Verbal is good. And be careful what you leave on your work computer, Winston.”

“OK. It’s called: ‘m’ ‘q’ colon, ‘hot’ hyphen, ‘mod’ hyphen, ‘
e
’
‘l
’ ‘
s
’. Search for it and you’ll find it easily enough. It certainly changes the game.”

“How so?”

“You’ll see.”

Natalie installed the patch and was back in the game, waking up to the sound of someone hammering on her door in the tavern.

“Get up!” the man was yelling, presumably the landlord. “You’ve been asleep so long you’re starting to lose life experience points!”

Clever, this ‘persistence’: the game didn’t just stop because the gamer neglected to log in. Things moved on, quests occurred in absentia. Natalie could see why it kept the gamers coming back, again and again, for ever longer each time.

Dutifully she got up, and saw someone in a looking glass propped against the wall. The looking glass had a heavy patina, but she could now make out the person clearly enough. The sight that confronted her was surprising to say the least. For it was herself! She had a younger, peaches-and-cream complexion; her hair was done in pigtails. Her cape, which she remembered going to sleep in, was gone. In its place was something leather, halfway between a cuirass and a bustier. Her breasts had grown considerably in size. On her lower half was a very un-medieval looking miniskirt, so short that it would ride up into nothing more than a belt on horseback. She was wearing underwear – but a thong, and barely that. This costume was completely ridiculous.

A sensation crept over her, very like the one she’d felt upon seeing her fake Clamor profile: is
this
how people see me? She looked for her cape, then tore down a heavy drape and wrapped it round herself.

She descended the wooden steps into the street. It was broad daylight, the street filled with people going about their business hither and thither. But the mood of the game had changed completely. Men slouched in doorways, consulting with one another, exchanging confidences. The women, for the most part, wore the kind of get-up that Natalie had woken in. It was neither especially sexy nor scandalous: just normal. The men eyed them covetously, lasciviously –
hungrily
, with a palpable sense of entitlement.

Natalie clutched the drape more tightly and hurried down the radial street leading to the gate she’d first entered through. Where was Phariance? Or Brastias? 

Beyond the gate, on a broad expanse of grassland, was a city of tents with brightly colored pennants atop the taller structures. A Renaissance Faire. Jugglers, falconers and animal tamers greeted her, encouraging her in. She shook them off and wandered among the lanes of tradesmen. The deeper recesses of the fair had the flavour of an oriental souk: pans of brilliantly colored spices, rolls of fine silks and other lustrous fabrics… There were also cages of rare and exotic animals – baby lions, snow leopards and small reptiles that she’d never even seen before. And, every so often, groups of young women, chained together.

The first gang that Natalie was invited to inspect, she shied away from entirely, hastening her step down another back lane, starting to feel lost – among smaller, ever more cramped and run-down stalls. Then a man grabbed her arm firmly:

“Mistress looking for slave? Mistress look for slave?” – and before she had chance to free herself, he commanded one of his young girls to dance for her.

“This Yum-Yum,” the huckster said, as the girl disinterestedly swayed her straight hips from side to side. There were angry welts round one ankle where the chain secured her. She was wearing child’s underwear, the upper half a tube top that she shyly began to remove. She barely had breasts: she must have been ten or eleven years old, at most.

Or rather, the near-perfect avatar of a ten or eleven year old. Again, the graphics were extraordinary, mixing in Japanese animé influences this time. 

A dialog box popped up on the screen of Natalie’s MacBook:

‘Take away, today? Click here,’ and Natalie did.

And suddenly she was on the Clamor website.

Looking at the real life photo and profile of ‘Yum-Yum’: thirteen years old, “luscious”, origin Thai and available in the flesh and for keeps for ninety-five hundred dollars.

Outside her hotel room, the rain had turned into a deluge that
smoked
off the sidewalk below. Natalie slumped back in her desk chair and stared at her MacBook screen, stupefied. So often she’d had this feeling: of having been born in the wrong time, or place. Wrong age even?

She thought about the fierce sense of self-sufficiency she’d developed at boarding school and later Seattle. Only once had she truly let her guard down, allowing herself to believe in the future of a white picket-fence, kids, pets – and that man had let her down from a very great height. She was not making that mistake again.

The question that had most often arisen in her mind was why her sexuality had to be this socially sanctioned bargaining chip, to be traded. She didn’t want to ‘give it up’. She didn’t want some suitably eligible man ‘getting some’ from her. And now she saw more clearly why: because of what lay at the less socially acceptable end of that spectrum.

Mother of God, what’s this?

A news alert had landed in her inbox. It was from the
Trumpington Bugle
blog:

   BANKING HEIRESS TO LOSE VIRGINITY LIVE OVER THE INTERNET             

       By Brie DuBois

The article was in the Raw Nerve social commentary section of the blog site and began by debating the ‘recent trend of auctioning your maidenhood off online.’ It referenced the extraordinary recent case of Natalie Dylan
– ‘not her real name of course, real names being so confusing nowadays’ – a 22-year-old girl from San Diego who’d reputedly received a high-bid of five-and-a-half
million
dollars from a 39 year old, unmarried businessman...

Natalie sat upright:

‘But what happens when the girl in question has a real name, and is the real scion of a prestigious West Coast banking dynasty? Wren Carmichael is the only child of Leonard Carmichael and his third wife Mitzi – Len Carmichael being of course Chairman of the same-name San Francisco investment bank claiming to have done every technology deal worth doing (as it happens, they are handling the upcoming IPO of social web sensation Clamor.us)’

– ‘What happens’, according to the rest of the article, is Wren Carmichael accepts offer from adult film company to star in a feature-length production titled
Wrendition
‘sparing no detail of the deed, and all themed on the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison scandal’:

‘Wren Carmichael’s appearance fee allegedly exceeds even the Natalie Dylan windfall. The cherry never falls far from the tree, as they say. It must come as a bitter irony indeed for Len Carmichael that the venue for his daughter’s de-flowering will be your friendly neighbuorhood Clamor group space, although the soon-to-be-IPO’d phenomenon would of course neither confirm nor deny anything, and neither Leonard nor Mitzi Carmichael were available for comment at the time this EXCLUSIVE went to upload’

                                                                               Bugled Tuesday 03:18 PST

That’s MY opinion – I welcome yours...

Ben was calling her on her cell phone.

“Bad time?” he said.

She thought about her interrupted report. “No, it’s fine. Welcome distraction, actually. Have you seen this news report about your boss’s daughter?”

“Schweitzer doesn’t have a daughter.”

“No, Carmichael’s.”

She could hear him tapping at his computer.

“Damn that Brie DuBois. She’s been bugging me for days now to comment on the sex trafficking she saw at that investor presentation.”

“I guess she’s gone with another story.”

“No, she’s working up to a big investigative feature-special. Which is wonderful, just wonderful…”

Natalie could hear him scrolling down the article using the wheel of his mouse. It sounded over the phone like a real mouse nibbling lettuce.

“Wow,” he finally said. “This would explain Carmichael’s mood last night at dinner, with Paul Towse.”

“You had dinner with Paul Towse?”

“That’s what I’m calling you about. There’s been a development. Towse wants to buy Clamor and merge it into Further Online Gaming.”

“Oh great,” Natalie said. “So now we’re dealing with Further Online Clamor.”

He laughed. “What’s happening your end?”

She caught Ben up on the game and the ‘mq:hot-MOD-els’ patch Winston had found, the links through to Clamor once installed, and, “something else: a missing piece. Because there has to be a mechanism by which the johns – clients of these prostitute-slaves – are able to exploit the Surefar Enjoy website, via Clamor. Meaning, minimally a login and password, but I’m guessing a real world point of interaction too.”

“Because of the sums involved?”

“Yeah, partly that. It’s hard to imagine putting ten grand on your credit card at some Russian domain name website without alarm bells going off all over your card issuer’s fraud department. But there’s also the physical delivery of these girls: how does that work? And, the risk that some unknown john is in fact an undercover cop. No, it could only really work if there’s a physical world location these johns have first visited, frequented even – where they’ve become known to the slaver-pimps.”

“Like a club maybe?”

“Maybe.” Natalie thought for a moment. “What about Towse? You say he wants to buy Clamor. Sounds a bit extreme.”

“Clamor has invented this piece of technology that reconstructs people’s identities online, or fragments them, or something –”