is
a mission of the highest importance and any excuse for not participating might not be viewed with the usual indulgence."
"And what is this mission intended to achieve?"
"Well now, you're asking me a question for which my security clearance isn't nearly high enough for me to answer," admitted Special Officer Fitzwilliam. "However, I am authorised to use my discretion to ensure that you participate whether or not I agree with the decision that you should. I simply hope that you'll agree to embark on the Space Ship Byzantium which has been diverted from its standard course for the express purpose of picking you up."
"I see," said Paul who was slowly getting accustomed to the notion of a future that was at odds with anything he might have planned for himself.
"You mustn't tell anyone why you'll be leaving the colony on the cruiser," said the special officer, "nor, if possible, that you'll be leaving at all. If asked, you should say that you're attending a conference on twenty-seventh century quantum computing at Sucette in the Uranus orbit. This convention is dull enough that your attendance there would be wholly plausible. However, judging from our records, you have so few friends and an even smaller family that it should be fairly easy for you to avoid the need to divulge even this much information."
"I suppose you're right," said Paul, a little sadly.
Nevertheless, ever since his home had been reduced to dust there was little on Godwin to persuade Paul to remain. He was now living in another house equally as well appointed but also a long and tedious shuttle bus ride from the University. It was at the furthest end of the colony, not far from the huge wall that marked its abrupt perimeter. He had all the home comforts he'd always known, but his every step was now being observed and monitored by a coterie of Godwin's voluntary corps of security officers and the rather more officious ones from the Interplanetary Union that had accompanied Special Officer Fitzwilliam to the colony. Paul wasn't comfortable at having his every step monitored nor by the ever-present sight of the sheer wall that separated the colony's furthest end from the emptiness of space beyond.
It was no doubt with the intention of lessening the impact of seeing the internal space so abruptly truncated that Godwin's designers had decided that the inside wall should be a huge mirror that gave the impression of a colony that stretched onwards forever in both directions, but Paul felt distinctly uneasy when he left his home to see his reflection and the reflection of his home only a few hundred metres away. And the constant presence of security officers around his home and in many of the rooms meant that he'd lost all sense of privacy.
It wasn't long until he was actively looking forward to his journey towards the heart of the Solar System; or at least as far as Earth.
Paul still had the opportunity to retreat to Nudeworld and he was comforted by the fact that such virtual worlds crossed the boundaries of time and space and was as equally accessible on Pluto and Earth as it was in Godwin or elsewhere in the Kuiper Belt.
It was sex rather than conversation that was uppermost on Paul's mind the evening after his interview with Special Officer Fitzwilliam. And sex, of course, was readily available when he met Blanche in the living room of his virtual home in Nudeworld. It took as little as no persuasion at all to get his virtual partner to lie on the luxurious carpet while Paul hammered away at her. And despite having set the sex settings for long and leisurely, he released his semen on her face and magnificent bosom well within half an hour. His penis was aching and his body bathed in perspiration, but somehow Paul was still not satisfied.
"Let's go to a night club," he suggested knowing that whatever he wanted to do Blanche would be equally as enthusiastic. Even if he'd suggested some truly perverse sexual activity, Blanche would obey his every whim.
"Which one?" was all she asked.
"The Nightcrawler," suggested Paul. It was one where he had the most opportunity to find potential sexual partners other than Blanche, but jealousy wasn't an attribute Blanche possessed (unless Paul had specified her to be that way).
Paul would never have gone to a night club on Godwin. He wasn't particularly keen on dance music or, indeed, music of any kind. Those few times he'd been to a real life night club he'd felt very much out of place while his companions danced with frenetic disregard to the ferociously loud music. In Nudeworld, however, night clubs were places where Paul could indulge his voyeuristic inclinations and where, should he feel inclined, there was no resistance to any suggestion he made to a dancing partner; unless, of course, he accidentally chose the avatar of a real person who was unlikely to be impressed by Paul's clumsy banter.
It was a woman with incredibly long silky black legs who attracted Paul's attention and while Blanche sat patiently at a table with a glass of fruit juice he was soon stretched out on the dance floor and fucking this woman with even more fervour than he had with Blanche. This woman, whose name Paul never learnt, was a lean and lubricious fuck, who relished pumping her head back and forth on Paul's erect penis. She invited him to spray his semen over her eyes and hair and hardly cared at all for the mess it made of her make-up. While the couple sprawled out on the velvety soft dance floor, the other dancers assiduously avoided trampling on them which was also unlikely to actually happen in real life.
"What was she like, darling?" asked Blanche when Paul eventually returned. "Was she as good a fuck as me?"
Paul was gentleman enough, even though it scarcely mattered to a virtual entity, to suggest that Blanche was by far the better lover. And with no hint of jealousy, she rewarded his gallantry with a kiss and a leisurely handjob.
Paul eventually tired of the flashing nights and throbbing music. He wasn't even sure whether he was listening to the same piece of music now as that he'd heard when the couple arrived, although he knew that with well over fifteen hundred years of electronic dance music at its disposal the likelihood of the same tune being repeated was virtually zero.
Part of the programming that was essential in Nudeworld, as it was in all virtual universes, was that the biological needs of the real person behind the avatar should be addressed. There had been unfortunate incidents in the early days of virtual universes, even before they'd become especially realistic, when people had died from forgetting to eat and, most of all, to relieve themselves.
Paul made his way to the night club's toilets where he was welcomed by a very attentive female attendant and where his normal bodily functions, relieved at exactly the same time in real space, functioned with astonishingly real effect and satisfaction.
When Paul emerged from the toilet he was confronted by rather more doors than he remembered there being on his way in. Slightly tipsy from the wine, whose affect was wholly virtual and would have no echo in the real world, he pushed at a door which he wasn't certain was quite the right one. It led out into a grassy open space, much like a park in Godwin on a gloriously well-lit day. This puzzled Paul because it was the middle of the night. On the other hand, virtual worlds weren't bound by the same laws of physics as the real world so he didn't worry about it as much as he would if the same thing had happened during Godwin's diurnal cycle.
Paul always enjoyed sitting in parks. His most productive thinking had been done in the extensive parkland around the University where a herd of fallow deer wandered about amongst grazing kangaroos and the occasional reanimated diprotodon. The animals grazing in Nudeworld were peculiarly mundane given the designers' opportunity to populate it with anything they liked. Sheep and llama were all the distraction there was for Paul as he sat down on a wooden park bench, not at all conscious of his nudity or the drips of pale liquid from his penis onto the lush lawn.
"How are you, Paul?" asked a kindly voice which Paul identified as belonging to Virgil whom he'd met several times now on the occasion he'd chosen to visit Nudeworld.
Paul was by now totally unsurprised by such encounters, although in real time he sometimes wondered at its oddity. Not only was the gentleman, by being fully clothed, completely out of place in the aptly named Nudeworld, it was peculiar that someone like him should become a regular part of what was essentially Paul's fantasy world. Perhaps the gentleman was the avatar of a real person. If so, then judging by the lack of time dilation, it must be someone who lived very close to Godwin, if not on the colony itself.
