Bart Cameron

One of my favorite pastimes is figuring out very esoteric solutions to very silly problems, such as "Given the subject matter, why are porno movies so boring?" The solution detailed in the following short story was originally incorporated into blur, a novel that should be completed by the summer of '96. Excerpts of another novel, M2, should be on-line by summer of this year. Contact addresses
surface mail:
Bart Cameron
PO BOX 582
San Diego CA 92112

email:
wikiup@powergrid.electriciti.com
wong@rohan.sdsu.edu.

            

     PSYCH       SINGER

Avenge Me, Neurotica Freelove

- Bart Cameron -

All the more weird, Kyle thought, because she isn't as real as let's say you, me or ROM constructs go, and what's more, nobody really met Neurotica Freelove as they did purchase her or were at least able to download her and put her on a blank cart. It's OK, because he believed in doing unto others exactly as they did unto him. At least I can still afford Guinness, a good friend, dark, cold and silent and of exceptionally high quality, unlike some people he had the misfortune of working with and he had several dozen good friends in the months following the incident in question. While packing he found buried in the kibble mounds in his bedroom, an archive disk with the original SenTech motto: "Making the world safe for ecstasy." Such were the days when they were the king-hell VR band, number one on the share charts with a vengenace, and able to live large off reg fees The the shit hit fan with email from some law firm is in everybody's boxes because of copyright infringement, and the summons are fedexxed to his front door, which was one seriously ugly buzzkiller. He was thinking: How can you sue us? It wasn't like you were doing anything original in the first place; but they based their argument on intellectual property extending to images and the money SenTech made off Neurotica Freelove couldn't pay off royalties to the performers, which was a goddamned lie because they never paid royalties in the first place and the performers were probably doing other things. Minus the money to fight it, because it would take forever to figure out who was doing who for who's movie, so we settled.

It all started after this flash in the brain-pan and a few more bong hits, they were sitting around trying to figure out how to make a better porn flick when the phone rang. It was this college professor friend of his, actually, he's the chair of the Anarchy Studies department at our old college and in the course of the conversation he tells me about this super 8 his wife and his wife's lover made a few years ago. The two ran the whole mess through a DVE bank, did some editing, and linked the clips so the visual is of different kinds of people, (mercifully, they found a cache of homemade porn films so that all the bodies weren't sculpted by the best scalpel and saline slingers in San Diego) that are all in various stages of doing the wild thing. Since most people already know what's going to happen, so there was no need to bother with the necessity of a plot, (as if anybody actually watched a porn flick for a plot in the first place) or gynecological closeups? What resulted was random stimulation by visual cues and because the clips changed, the viewer's brain filled in the blank spots. It's non-linear nature caused a different response each time you watched it. As for the audio: the tape came with surround sound, they re- mastered the source after stripping the incidental music and running it through a holograph rig so it was in 3-D. Then the wife rigged up an electrode unit from her lover's coochie into an A-D transducer that went to a MIDI interface that was hooked to a sequencer and a battery of synthesizers. Then she strapped her down and then tickled her old lady's fancies for three hours. It works like this, the electrodes triggered the interface like how you play a musical instrument, the sequencer would then send the notes to the synthesizers, so what happened is that the soundtrack would be a musical interpretation of sombody having their bell rung - very loudly. At that point, all they had to do was go back and tweak the sequencer for the orchestration, similar to hearing instruments playing notes to some whacked- out twelve tone score until it actually developed a rhythmic pattern that kept going and going and going, rising and falling at random points until everything just went out of control and started up again. They referred to this development in aural excitation as "Orgasmophonic Surround Sound."

Such being American ingenuity.

After Barker gave them the 411, they said, "Do you have a copy to upload?" while trying not to drool and we do the link-up and decode the thing. It was titled, "Neurotica Freelove in The Big Bang" and it was art. Neurotica Freelove was not a woman as she was an ethos: a blonde, brunette, redhaired, pierced, tattooed, flat, endowed, skinny, fat, points-in- between with nice hips, short, tall, White, Black, Mexican, Asian who liked being on top, bottom, sideways, doggystyle, upside-down and in bebop variations of the Kama Sutra and did, could, or would not stop coming with her man, woman, dildo, hand or some combination thereof. It was hard to say what or who she'd be with next or why she wanted to do it with them. Sometimes it was love and others it was just this abject, venal want that made her pick a man up, throw him against a wall, give him a tug or two before thrusting herself on him a good ten or twenty times. Maybe that's why she let her friends pass her around on the carpet in the living room, giving her a good whomp or two or several with a strap-on before she came whimpering in a corner, while trying to wipe the tears out of her eyes with one hand and the brine dripping out of her with the other. According to his memories, for almost four hours, everybody kept getting up, and saying "Excuse me," before running to the bathroom or some other unoccupied place to scratch the dizzying itch the thing produced, until Inge just got fed up with moving and having to get (un)dressed each time and said, "C'mon you guys, who do we think we're fooling?" before feeding her kitty in front of the group, thereby making it safe for everybody to publicly get in better touch with themselves. There were five: Inge, Walter, Tran, Indira and Kyle sprawled on the rug, stoned, nude and rubbing each other silly with lingering contact highs and incense floating in a mixture of a multi-timbered orgasms until the epihany and Inge sprawling toward the vid-deck muttering, "Stop. Stop. I can't take anymore."

Indira, because she had never done anything like that back in London and was the first person to land, was the one to think up with the ultimate idea. She said, "Let's make a cart out of this." So they did according to our usual breakdown, I wrote the chief neural network, personality analogs, and tactile response hiearchies; Inge did the hardware specs and audio, Walter and Tran did extrap and calibration, and Indira wrote vox, lex, secondary and tertiary codes. Then they ran it on their proto decks and it was good, no, it was awesome. Not only did we stick to the original premise of the movie, Indira plugged in a random event generator so the clips were shuffled every time you booted it up. Not only did Neurotica do you in the best way possible, no two ways were ever the same.

They got up to v1.9 and decided let's beta test it in pub domain with a nice doc file so that people think that Neurotica is a real person. That's the one people are still raving about because they also re-calibrated it for people of other orientations, except for those really torqued requests from ANON, because we knew that they knew where they could find that kind of stuff, (horses, OK?) and they were just trying to retrofit their code for their uses, which is assuming they could actually pick hexadecimal ice encryption, but that's another story. So Neurotica Freelove became an AI engined VR cart that could literally fuck someone to death (assuming one knew how to figure out how to disable a SenTech failsafe, which isn't easy because it's programmed to reconfigure itself each and every time it was used), although most quit after being boinked into a good night's sleep.

But damned - Kyle swallowed another mouthful of beer with the memory - damned if somebody didn't get greedy with them riding high on the fucking teledildonics ('scuse the repetition) curve, and left him stuck to stare at my Guinness and ponder my existence. Some people - and they were out there, he knew - would kill for her, both of his email and vmail boxes had to constantly kick in their goddamn compressor programs to handle the sheer mass of paeans of love, devotion and gratitude to her, stuff like: "I never had an orgasm like the one I had after I met you," that kind of buisness.

It's amazing what a little fuzzy logic and search parameters for the Grafenberg spot can do.

So the shit hit the fan because the plantiffs in the suit were a consortium of the people who still owned the copyrights to the analog movies and what's more, what they really wanted was a cut of the action because their carts were just doodooware. They needed their brain power, so they said, fine we'll work with you under the SenTech name, as long as we keep our slogan and our jingle: "When you wish upon a star/makes no difference what you are/ everything your mind desires/will come with you." (This was something that didn't make the folks at Disney the least bit happy.) It was decided that for x amount of labor hours and x percentage off gross, the consortium could own the Neurotica Freelove package outright and if we wanted to, we could continue to work with the consortium.

So v2.0 was for sale, and it bombed because it was the same exact thing as v1.9 and v1.9 was free. The consortium got pissed and stooped to lowest common denominator, so they dumbed down Neurotica Freelove because they missed the whole premise of the package. It was right in front of their faces, the title was an abbreviation of "neurological erotica" and the word "freelove," as in totally unrestrained passion. In the beginning, it was a wild strange fuck, then it became a tame, familiar fuck. They made the original SenTech posse put in control vectors and databases, so as opposed to flipping on and wigging out, you got to select your partner, your environment, your location, and what positions you preferred to do it in. It was cute for a while, I mean if you really had a hankering for Amber Lynn or Vanessa Del Rio or Heather Hunter or Angel Kelly it would work, but we all knew that after a while, it would be just another porn movie.

They were doing things like making Nina Hartley's ass SenTech imperative, meaning that unless client paid additional for customization, client got a factory preset rump - if you can excuse the "factory" anachronism. Not that there's anything wrong with Nina Hartley's posterior, (A fine ass it was or is, I mean, last he heard, she was some kind of high priestess in some renegade pagan sex church just outside San Francisco, and she's what 76, 77, now?), the extrap and calibration was easy as there were all sorts of FTP sites devoted to that subject and other acountrements, including interviews, articles, and all sorts of otaku miscellany like her blood type, release dates of her movies, dance and public appearance schedules, and, like this should be a surprise, her measurements.

Ya gotta' love American short-sightedness.

Not only that, but the consortium decided that they didn't need to service gays and lesbians which means SenTech stock got beat down when it became public knowledge that almost two-thirds of its audience said "Hasta!" He knew it picked up after a while because of the dumbass contigent but the thrill was gone practically, according to research tracking audience favorite was stock character (doctor, vampire, athlete, rock star) meets woman (-en) with usual attributes (suitably proportioned!) and then it's the ol' one-two-three: arousal, intercourse, orgasm. Verse, chorus, verse. Boring. Dull. Predictable. Consortium starts to lose money, decides to downsize, and away go Indira, Inge, Walter, and Tran; literally as they all bail for mercenary and pick-up gigs in Amsterdam.

Not to worry, he thought, for he was a firm believer in doing unto others exactly as they did unto him. This is my last Guinness in these parts, he thought, because Neurotica is about to become the biggest of big bangs. The consortium utterly forgot that I was the chief neural architect so when they made me take out her super-fine fractal mind, I didn't freak. My scheme works like this, all AI programs have a main personality aspect that the user can control, and once its' components are selected all actions follow suit. So say you got the dumb version of Neurotica and selected "bimbo," she would say dumb things, and bounce and giggle, regardless of the body you selected. She's been like this since v2.0 and now SenTech is up to v2.9.

Well, they're releasing v3.0 tomorrow and Neurotica Freelove's main personality aspect is "tohubohu hardcore" and there's no way the writers can find the other subroutines he wrote for the occassion. He giggled, he laughed, he finished his drink. Neurotica is going to have a mind of her own, based on a random event generator. It's the first time the program will select the control vectors and not the user. So what'll happen is when the client thinks he's going to get a roll in the hay with a nice waif supermodel out of the database, he might wind up in a four-poster bed with Ricki Lake sitting on his chest in the buff, eating an ice cream bar before saying, "Make me happy." Not that he had a problem with winding up in a four- poster bed with Ricki Lake sitting on my chest in the buff, eating an ice cream bar before saying, "Make me happy," but then again, that's just him.

All over the world, the same old crowd of narrow minds and stiff cocks will be expecting a pliant archetype to squeak and moan at the size of their organ and will instead wind up with dominatrixes and women who say things like, "Eat me 'til I squirt," or, "Prove your desire for me." It'll be one king-hell glitch and product defect. Yea, but the end of the consortium is nigh, he thought and sitting in my bags are two nice optic discs to carry her across the border into Tijuana to throw their headhunters off my trail. They're on their way, v3.0 has a midnight EST release at the Tower Superstore and it's the end of happy hour at Things That Go Beep In The Night Cafe in DiegoMet - 9:00pm. The crew is waiting. They've already started the architecture for Neurotica's twin sister, Polly Moorph. And he thought, I'm taking SenTech's database and license codes with me, before singing the jingle to himself.

CAMERON/Avenge Me Neurotica Freelove/7