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Fantasy of the Month 11 (Online Help)
Area: talk.bizarre Date: 07 Nov 93 23:58:51 From: nikolai kingsley To: all Subj: on-line cocktease It's evening. Outside, night lights are coming on as dusk arrives, faster in some spots, slower in others. Each street light adjusts its brightness accordingly. They're all connected to the Net. It would be easier to have each one connected to a sensor, but the NoSanNoOs Associative- Processing Artificial Intelligence likes to be able to control things, even such ephemeral things as street lights. As the lights outside come on, he awakes, lying on a wrinkled mass of sheets, sweat-stained, nightmare-knotted. He didn't sleep well, but then, he rarely does. There's half a cold cup of coffee near. He drinks it, wrinkling his nose at the taste. Sheet wrapped around his shoulders like an unkempt Roman senator, he goes to the terminal and dials User Assistance. There is a brief pause, the WAIT pattern glowing red, and then a face appears, computer-generated. Her face. He sighs, relaxes into the chair and, head tilted to one side, considers her. Her hair is short, carbon-black, and when she leans forward, it hangs over her eyes in a way he considers provocative. Her eyes, oh yeah ... her eyes are large (he's measured them, and while they aren't excessively so, they are noticeably larger than human normal), and at this resolution he can't tell what colour they are. The lashes are just right. Her nose is straight, unobtrusive nostrils. She used to have a tiny mole just above her lip and to the left, but popular opinion merited its removal from the model. Her mouth is small, upper lip sharply defined, no lipstick. Underneath the hair her general appearance is pale, perhaps unhealthily so, but that's what the public wanted, and that's what they get. She speaks, a clear, husky voice with more than a hint of a lisp: "User Assistance. How can I help you?" He's played this game before. The object is to keep her on screen as long as possible. "Kelp." She smiles the briefest possible of smiles, the screen blanks and her image is replaced by an advertisement for some French skin-care product called Algologie which is, apparently, made from kelp. "Damn!" his fingers scrabble at the keyboard and within moments, her face is back on the screen. "User Assistance. How can I help you?" This time, he says nothing. He knows that he has twenty seconds of inactivity before he's presumed asleep, and he uses every millisecond to absorb her image. Just before it times out, he says, "I want you." Her image freezes for a second as the User Assistance system realises it's run into something it can't deal with, and passes it to NAPAI. It thinks about the problem briefly and decides to play with the guy for a while. He's only a human, after all. No-one of worth. It retains the original image, struggles into the parameters, texture maps, orientation profiles like a human putting on a large jumper, and he knows something out of the ordinary is going on when she smiles seductively at him, her eyes half-closing, that carbon hair falling over her forehead. She leans forward and her hands, which up to now have never been seen, reach up and grab the edges of the screen, pushing it back, revealing the upper third of her body. She's wearing a force-field of fluffy white, no details visible, a blurry pale something that clings to her imaginary body. His eyes widen in shock as her smile broadens; she reaches up to her left shoulder, undoes a catch and the fluffy whiteness unfolds, revealing her bare shoulder and neck, perfect skin, tendons. She strokes her collarbone, her long fingers tracing curves, pushing her clothing aside, revealing one pale breast, fingers pinching a nipple that is only just darker than the rest of her skin. Her eyes narrow sensually, one side of her smile crooks up and the screen blanks. |
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