Author: contingit_stercore

Ballerina Occidental

By Cleopatra Alexandria

*Based on a true story.

The Holo-TV produced photons which travelled through space coming to rest on a digital retina. Alexandria spread across an old couch watching. Being that she was a hyper sophisticated synthetic creation when she watched Holo it was the electronic equivalent of a dog communicating with a human. The Holo unit had a brain as well as all things did now, at least in The City, but it was a primitive processor/motherboard setup more similar to ancient computers than to Alex’s mental schematics.

Her mind was the result of over 200 years of computer science combined with relatively new innovations in nanotechnology. Being that scientists could now recreate hypercomplex structures at the atomic level, a level of complexity had been reached in electronic (positronic) minds that was similar to that of the human brain. The debate still raged as to whether the human mind could be perfectly duplicated in electronic form, but Androids like Alex were as close as the tech had come. Read more »

Olivia

By Bella Moretti Alexandria (Here’s lookin at you kid;)

Vi was bored that night. The ancient looking gentlemen’s club had existed since the days of slavery, though any racist portraiture had long since been taken down from the walls. She sat in a long room panelled with tropical hardwood and carpeted in dark green. Finely carved chairs and tables were placed about the room but no one was talking.

Vi sat in a group of infinitely uninteresting men and smiled and nodded while she did her mental accounting. In truth she owned the club and did not have to hang out with these dullards. It was also true that she was the main reason these rich and stupid men kept on coming to the club and paying their high membership fees. Whiskey and luxurious privacy were universal but a well educated and proportioned geisha like Vi was hard to find. Read more »

Black is the new Black

By Anna Foxx Alexandria
(Ded. to a special someone you know who you are)

Regina Campbell felt like she was on top of the world. She had just graduated from high school the week before and was on the way to her new job. She walked through the slums to get to the bus stop. The red dirt caking slightly on the sides of her shoes. Tin roofs flapping in the wind.

She had gotten the job at Pandora Holdings Ltd. After a stressful interview with a good looking woman in a gray hound’s-tooth suit dress. The woman had introduced herself as Ms. Jackson. The woman, although she was young, screamed refinement and Regina had been rattled as she tried to use her best English and most fluent business speech. Debits. Credits. Accounts owing, she prattled through accounting 101 and seemed to impress the seriously suited woman.

It turned out that her Grade 12 accounting classes were useless however as the job seemed to mainly consist of her organizing heavy boxes of files in the back rooms of the office or briefly filling in at the front desk. Ms. Jackson insisted that Regina dress up nicely despite her lowly tasks and gave her money to buy new work clothes. Regina was happy about this as well the offices were located within an expensive part of Kingston and she got to smile at the young men on the way to their own offices in freshly pressed suits. Read more »

The Cam Girl Pt. 4 (finale)

The VR had changed everything of course. Whereas before he had spent his nights gawking in front of a thin and luminous square he now felt almost as though he lived with Olivia at night and on the weekends.

He went to work during the day and spent his nights blissfully strapped to a VR rig, acting out the fantasy of being in a real relationship. Before he had been squarely pinned in the gravity well of sensory reminders of his dingy Newark apartment.

Now his consciousness hung in space and followed wherever she took him. They went to the gym, they hung out on the street and in Cafes. Harold’s body would have wasted away had she not insisted on a multi-directional treadmill for him to walk on while they travelled. She also continued bullying him into weight lifting sessions but he did not mind as much any more. He actually had a body now too, or at least the start of one. He was getting longer looks, albeit from strange older ladies on the train. He had been seeing Olivia for six months now and was actually starting to look like a grizzled, and possibly handsome, 28ish year old, rather than a pudgy young man who was about to die. Read more »

The Cam Girl Pt. 3

This routine continued for some time. No mention of money, troubles or any business whatsoever, just daily sessions where Olivia verbally beat Harold into shape, urging him onward with all of her considerable resources. Where a kind voice didn’t work, cam sex usually did. When that got old Olivia became mean and made Harold beg for forgiveness. Harold didn’t exactly like this but felt more and more powerless to change their relationship. It seemed that Olivia had taken control and she was just getting started.
Harold was particularly vulnerable to this type of thing because as mentioned he didn’t have a lot of irons in the fire. He didn’t have any irons in fact, and Olivia was his only fire. This fire warmed him at night and did not leave him completely during the day. He began to feel as though life were something he could finally handle. He began to feel as though he had a girlfriend or at least a girl who was a friend. Olivia did not discourage this.

Wake up. Food. Work. Home. Cam.

“Hello Olivia, you look lovely today.”

Her genteel charm had washed off on him and he was always very polite when he spoke to her now. Read more »

The Cam Girl Pt. 2

Harold fairly sang through the next day. He had tried to help someone. He felt like Olivia’s hero yet slightly dirty because of the circumstances of their meeting. The only other valiant effort he made in life lately was to try and lift the crushing existential horror at work by telling people jokes and acting crazy. Work crazy, not crazy crazy. Luckily he had memorized jokes in the major categories that humans found humerous and was always ready with a zinger about work, sex, or farting, when the time came.

“How are you doing Harold?” The question came from Peter the Dwarf. Of course no one called him this but he was in fact very short in stature, and named Peter, so the name fit in Harold’s mind.

“Oh fine thanks, just finishing up this work.”

“Coming to the party this weekend Harold? All the boys will be there.”

If by, “the boys,” Peter meant the psychopathic group of probable date-rapists that comprised the database sales division, then he would have liked to miss it.

“Yes, Sir, of course I am coming. I will bring a ham.” Read more »

“HELP ME!” or “The Cam Girl”

By Jada Fire

Part 1

Harold Sidlowski lived a dull life. Almost every waking moment was engaged in some sort of commerce or electronic entertainment. He shared the pasty pallor of the invalid, the pedophile and the jailbird, despite being mostly harmless.

His daylight hours were spent shifting fields of data from one theoretical container to another in an endless litany of database migrations. He dealt with systems that were too convoluted and old even for the Artificial Intelligences to figure out and often spent hours simply retyping information from ancient systems. He was a button pusher, a computer monkey. George Jetson with an anxiety complex and no family.

His job was so fundamentally uninteresting, that even when friends and relatives that were tempted to ask what he did, he couldn’t tell them. If he did, they soon regretted it as they were bored into submission by the minutia of data migration. Given this clear cut feedback, Harold took to inventing job titles for himself like, “Compu Knave” and “DSL Mage”, when queried about his occupation. At least then he could tell them interesting stories. Read more »