Not Alone Ch. 04

"I guess so," said Kayleigh. "I'd rather we stayed on Earth, though."

Caroline shrugged. She had an almost sedated smile on her face. "Everything happens for a reason -- or at least that's what I like to think. I was pretty scared when it happened to me, but if it hadn't I would have never met Esh. So, things work out."

"And I'm sure there's some human man on Earth you would have liked to meet too," Kayleigh countered. "You can't just look at your life as it is and say that things had to happen a specific way to make it like this, and therefore destiny."

"I never said dest--"

Kayleigh was on a roll. "You said the boring, banal translation of it. Things happen because things happened in the past to make them happen. That doesn't mean that there was some divine hand making sure everything worked out all right for your love life. I mean, how would you even disprove that idea?"

Caroline just blinked repeatedly. "Um... you're probably right. Sorry, I didn't mean to..." She trailed off, evidently uncertain of her offence. Kayleigh had a steely look in her eyes, but Tom knew there was some happiness behind that. For a moment she had snapped back to her old self, or at least a fraction of it -- the rigidly rationalist debate-clubber who good go on a thirty-minute rant about religion at the drop of the hat. It wasn't his favourite side of her, but it stemmed from that enthusiasm that she had seemed to lose during the trip.

Tom stepped in. "Okay guys, this isn't a debate. Let's just sit down and have a -- wait, what do you people drink around here."

"I have a case of AirSynth in the fridge," said Caroline. "Beloved by hundreds of species verse-wide. At least that's what the marketing says."

Esh squawked.

"Oh, come on. You love it too."

More of his strange, flowing language.

"You do not prefer LightningSynth. When I buy it, you never drink it." She turned back to Tom and Kayleigh. "Esh likes to pretend he's a lot more unconventional than he really is. Anyway, let's head over to my place. You can fill me in on Earth news, and I'll show you how to work an XP station."

There were some people that were so determined to be your friend that there really wasn't anything you could do about it. Still, even socializing with a pair of overly-peppy girls and a weird bird alien was, after two weeks on a tiny ship, a bit like that first lungful of air after almost drowning.

--

"So, what do you say this thing does again?"

Quinn adjusted the dials on the strange metal cylinder that looked to Richard like the world's most sophisticated trash can. "What does it do? It does everything. And yet it does nothing, not really."

"Enough with the koans, wise guy."

"The what?"

"Koans. They're a Zen thing. They're like riddles, except you solve them by realizing how or why they're unsolvable. Or something like that. I was never a fan."

Quinn sniffed the air and apparently found it unpleasant. "There are so many weird Earth things that none of us know about. They bring us broadcasts from Earth, but it's always educational stuff -- presidential debates and science programs and such. And of course, that doesn't tell you a thing about the world itself."

"Well, what do you want?"

"Porn. You people have porn down there, don't you?"

Quinn was, Richard thought, the most alien human he had ever seen -- moreso than the cybernetic Mona, or the effortlessly flying Xanon, or even the expressionless human form of Wing. His face was scrunched up like a rat's, and what's more he huddled up like one, a single sweaty ball. He was middle-aged and not ageing gracefully, and when he talked there was an aroma of tobacco mixed with something Richard couldn't recognize that came along with his speech. His skin was unusually gray, the only sign that there might be something non-human in his genetics. If that was even possible, if across the galaxy the whims of fate had made another race close enough to humans to reproduce with them. (Said whims of fate had certainly produced creatures that humans could fuck, as Richard knew full well, so it might not be as outlandish as it seemed.) In truth, he didn't look that different from any of his home planet's skeevy guys smoking outside porno theatres. But Richard really didn't want to admit that he and Quinn could belong to the same species.

As soon as he separated from the others, he had made his way to his new bedroom and stripped out of the makeshift clothes Wing had fashioned out of itself. They had promptly started slithering away from him and out of the house, looking less like clothes and more like strange fast-moving giant slugs. Richard had tried and mostly succeeded at not being disturbed by that. Instead he had sat down on his bed and revelled in being finally, even momentarily, alone.

And then, of course, there was the knock at the door, and he was scrambling to stuff himself into one of the (eerily precisely-sized) generic dark clothes that he had been provided with. And who should be at the door but a somewhat creepy-seeming neighbour who pressed his way into the house and declared that he must demonstrate how the XP station worked or else Richard's life would be hopelessly impoverished.

"Let me explain," said Quinn, after a bit more tinkering. "The XP immerses you in an imaginary world. Nothing you see or hear is real -- so, in that sense, it doesn't do anything. But in that world, anything that you want could happen, and it looks and feels just like the real thing. So it does everything. The XP is short for 'experience', and that's what it does -- it gives you an experience. If you catch my drift."

"You know," said Richard. "You could have just said 'virtual reality' and saved us a lot of time."

"Virtual reality? Is that another one of your koans?"

Richard decided to ignore the terminology barrier and inspect the device a bit more. It had precious few external parts or displays, being mainly a smooth cylinder, with a couple unmarked buttons and a slot on top. Quinn produced a nondescript grey card from his pocket and let the machine slurp it up. "There," he said. "That should get you some actually fun stuff."

"Um, what is that?"

"Let's call it an alternate set of programs. Most of the government VR offerings are awfully tame -- you need to dig a bit for the good stuff." There was an air of skeeviness hanging over the whole thing, but Richard tried to withhold judgement. "Now, it looks like you're all ready."

"Do I need a headset or something?"

"Do you have a human brain?"

"I like to think so."

Quinn snickered. "Then you should be good. Just stay close to the machine and I'll rock your little savvie world."

"What did you just say? Savvy?"

Quinn looked more and more amused at Richard's ignorance. "Savvie. It means someone who's from a non-League world, someone that hasn't made it out into space yet. Stems from savage. No offense or anything."

Richard spread out his arms in a too-large gesture of acceptance. "How could I possibly take offense to that? Hey, what are you unscrewing there?"

A small rectangle of whatever chrome material the XP device was made out of came off in Quinn's hand. "Typical League design. They want to keep you from all the nasty stuff, but they're so accommodating that the whole machine just undresses itself for you and lets itself get hacked." Quinn fiddled around a bit behind the device. "There. Now it should be a bit more receptive to the good stuff."

"So what next?" said Richard.

"Next? We enjoy." Quinn slithered his tongue across the top pair of his lips. He hit a small white button, and instantaneously the world around Richard fell away.

He was floating in a blue abyss, soaked in low-level comfort. It was how he had felt as an undergrad stretched out with a book on the quad lawns, amazed at the warmth of early spring. Or those late nights at the pub in grad school, arguing string theory with his friends. It was the kind of happiness you were only aware of when it was about to end, and you got up with heavy legs.

Quinn was next to him, and he suddenly seemed much less repulsive. In fact, it seemed cruel to have judged him so harshly to begin with. He was just a neighbour, trying to help a new arrival. Richard waved lightly to Quinn. "You were right. This is great."

Quinn snickered. "This? This is the lobby."

"Oh." Richard frowned. He felt like a yokel visiting the big city for the first time, neck craning up to see where the buildings met the sky. "Well, how to we get to the main event."

"First off, we shift over to our pirate module." Quinn had a pedagogically smug look on his face. He muttered a word that Richard couldn't make sense of, some strange amalgamation of overlapping consonants. The world around them shifted to an offensive, bright-red void. Richard was still strangely happy, but now it was a happiness tinged with a bit of anger and a bit of fear. Maybe a bit like running an experiment, he thought.

Quinn smacked his lips. "Load XBrothel."

There was no fading, no gradual descent. Before Richard's mind could process it, they were in a cozy room with low lighting, sitting on an old-fashioned couch with only one arm. The whole room was covered in exotic-looking rugs and tapestries. The only exit he could see was throw a silk curtain, although shadows hung in the corners and obscured much of the room. Sitting across from them, on a similar couch, was a mature-looking woman dressed in an elegant black gown. She had a gray streak in her hair and a knowing smile that made her in equal measure frightening and desirable.

"Um... hello," said Richard. He really hated being amazed. "I'm Richard."

The woman's knowing grin grew deeper. "You can call me Madame... shall we say Lucille? I've always liked the sound of that."

"Hi, Lucille. Uh, where are we?"

Quinn elbowed him in the side. "No need to be chatty. She's a program."

Lucille expounded with a faint Eastern European flair, like the last in a line of debauched aristocrats. "This is my own personal house of iniquity. We can fulfil any desire you have, and introduce you to ones you never knew. Any fetish, any species, anything you want. If you just want to murder someone, we can accommodate you. In fact, we can do the reverse. But even if your interests don't run towards the exotic, we can offer you depths of pleasure you've never known before."

It was a rousing speech, and Richard found himself entranced by the cadence of Lucille's syllables. Quinn leaned in and whispered in his ear. "This is an old program, but this guy I know updated it and refitted it for humans. Not that we have to stick to human..."

"So," said Madame Lucille. "What do you want?"

"What I want," said Quinn with obvious relish. "Is for you to suck my dick."

Even knowing that this was a world of virtual wish-fulfilment, Richard expected Quinn to get slapped and the two of them to be thrown out onto the streets of some virtual slum. But Madame Lucille simply got up, hiking her skirt as she walked around the table, and in as classy and as ladylike a manner as possible, descended to her knees and fished Quinn's dick out of his pants.

Quinn's cock had the same grayish tone as the rest of his skin, but the length was what really got to Richard. It was like a piece of oversized sausage, and it wasn't even hard yet. Lucille burrowed herself into his crotch, kissing his heavy balls and rubbing the length of his cock against her cheek. She turned to Richard and said, in a sultry voice, "And for you?"

"I, uh... a girl. I want a girl."

"Coming right up." There was a momentary instability in the room, and a girl did indeed pop into existence. Specifically, it was a nervous-looking preteen girl, dressed in bright clothes that would have been adorable in any other context.

Richard rapidly stood up, shifting away from the girl. "Not like that! I mean, not a girl girl. That's just wrong."

Quinn leaned back and groaned as Madame Lucille took his cockhead into her mouth. "Hey man, it's all virtual. Nobody gets hurt. If that's what you want..."

Richard was still in a panic, one that Quinn seemed to find most amusing. "It is not what I want. I want a woman. An adult human woman. Like, in her 20s or something."

Lucille mumbled something affirmative around Quinn's cock. When Richard turned around, the girl seemed to have grown into a woman, and a quite fetching one at that. She also was wearing substantially fewer clothes. The blonde bombshell was contained in only a silky white set of tiny undergarments from which her milky flesh sprung joyfully. She appeared to have just walked out of a pin-up calendar.

Richard's throat was dry, so he didn't speak. The blonde walked over towards him. Her gait was like one of those optical illusions -- at one moment it was a controlled, seductive saunter, and at another it was a hesitant, innocent but still drawn by some strange power of attraction. She stopped a few feet from him, her coral pink lips upturned with just the hint of a smile. He did the only thing that seemed natural and kissed her.

It was like kissing an electric fence. He pulled away from her abruptly, afraid of burning up in sensation. The blonde virtual girl just stood staring as he slowly tried to piece apart the raw roar of feeling still echoing within him. The kiss had been, upon consideration, the perfect kiss -- soft and hot and needful without being needy, that mixture of innocence and whorish desire -- no, not a mixture, both things existing simultaneously and twisted together into a delicious double helix. And it was the perfect kiss, but each aspect of that kiss was magnified a hundredfold. Her lips were as soft as wet clay, as hot as the sun, as innocent as the Virgin Mary and as wanton as the Whore of Babylon. It sent an erotic burst through him greater than his strongest orgasm. His cock was hard as a steel bar within his pants.

"What... how..."

He turned to Quinn, who now had a dark-skinned human girl slurping on his balls, fighting for space alongside Madame Lucille. His head was thrown back in full-throated moans of pleasure, the dual fellatio apparently rendering him almost invertebrate. He turned one half-lidded eye to Richard and his expression of shock. "Like I said, man. It's better than life. Otherwise there wouldn't be much point."

Richard turned to the digital ingénue again. At first the kiss had felt like too much, but as its sensations slowly faded they left a void within him. He wanted to feel that again. Or maybe he needed it. The line between the two seemed very thin.

So he kissed the blonde again, and it was just as good as the first one, but he held on a little longer. A moment later, he went in for another kiss, and the tip of her tongue snuck through to gently pry at the underside of his lips. That knocked him down, like he had been shot.

Richard sat there on the ground. There were spots dancing before his eyes and a ringing in his ears, not that he would call it a ringing, because analogy was beyond his brainstate at this point.

Quinn was standing over him, and Richard wasn't sure when he had got there. His two women followed after him on all fours. "Maybe I should start you off on a lower setting. Most people work their way up." Richard felt himself nodding faintly. "Okay, Settings:XIntensity:2, limitation Personal:Richard." The strange words seemed to format themselves in his mind, supplying their own syntax.

Instantly Richard's senses were back to normal, and the whole brothel felt quite a bit less dreamlike to him. The floor beneath him felt hard for the first time. He couldn't help but cast an eye towards Quinn, and notice that the madame and the dark-skinned girl, who were now each slurping up and down one side of his cock, looked faintly blurry to him.

The blonde leaned forward and kissed him again, and it was still a magnificent kiss, the kind you saw in the movies but with so much more eroticism, but it was a shadow of what he had just experienced. A part of him felt empty and disappointed, but this kiss was more palatable-- he could not just stand it but return it.

He ran his hand through the blonde's silky hair, hair that felt finer and more luxurious than any could be but was at the same time real enough to fool him, to force his mind to concede that there really was a woman this perfect and he was really going to fuck her.

They shifted around the room in a strange dance, lips locked all the time. The blonde's tongue was sweet and her saliva was intoxicating. Their movements travelled up into the thrust of their tongues, so that they were kissing with their whole bodies. She pulled him gently, and they both tumbled down to the strangely soft floor. The blonde giggled, her hair spread messily across the ground, and her expression conveying a sense of playful abandon that sent another jolt to his already-hard cock.

Her bra, or whatever it could be called, came apart easily in his hands. Richard wasn't quite prepared for her breasts. They were flawless small peaks of flesh, as full and round and pert as he could imagine, and covered by delicious soft pink nipples. He leaned down and took one in his mouth. It was every bit as sweet and addictive as her lips had been.

A naughty idea, from the recently-reactivated juvenile part of his brain came to him. "Quinn?"

Richard turned his to see that Quinn was currently fucking Madame Lucille from behind as the black girl he had seen earlier and a strange scaly blue woman licked his balls. He wasn't sweating or panting with the exertion -- rather he was the image of virile masculine sexuality expressing its power. He looked up at Richard and answered without missing a stroke. "What is it, man?"

"Can I get another one?"

Madame Lucille, on the other hand, was only barely able to talk through her gasps of pleasure. "One of my... l-ladies... coming right up."

There was a tap on his shoulder, and Richard turned to see a vivacious and voluptuous redhead in black lingerie giving him a smouldering look. He muttered something about being good in a past life,and brought her into their tangle of flesh.

The redhead's lips were just as addicts the blonde's, but different -- a bit spicier, a bit mintier. It was, he thought in a moment of what he thought was wit, sex and candy, just like that song that always used to get stuck in his head. The redhead lay down under him, snuggling in close to the blonde, and pulled one of his hands with her to caress her voluminous tits.

And then there was the blonde, still patiently beneath him. She looked at him with doe eyes and began gently writhing against him. It suddenly struck Richard how impossibly rude he was being -- not only breaking off in the middle of unclothing a girl in order to chat with another man, as if she wasn't there. And not just talk about anything, but about getting another girl to join them, with all the sympathy of ordering another shot at the bar. He would never have behaved like this before -- in real life, he had to remind himself. Of course, in real life he would have learned the girls' names first. But this wasn't real, and they probably didn't even have names.

The touch of the redhead's tongue on his cheek ended all philosophical wanderings. He kissed her, and then kissed the blonde, revelling in the difference between their tastes. He began responding to her writhing with steady movement of his own, practically dry humping her on the brothel floor. The redhead mounted his back and began aggressively removing (practically tearing off) his clothes. Forget about what he had thought earlier -- Richard was now sure that this was heaven.

The blonde burrowed into his newly-exposed chest, giggling and licking his muscles (which, much like Quinn's, were distinctly better than their real-life equivalents). The redhead leaned in and licked his neck as she continued to undress him with her nimble hands. He shuddered at the sensation of their warm tongues exploring his body like curious and fearless travellers.