Meditations On Utopian Ennui Maddy

Special thanks to kenjisato, a generous volunteer in Literotica.com's Volunteer Editors program, for editing this piece. All remaining errors and questionable stylistic choices are the sole responsibility of the author.

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Author's Note: to speedrun your mildly depressing wank, skip ahead to the second section.

***

I'd claim that the gods have a sense of humor, but, setting aside the fact that I don't actually believe in any of that stuff in the first place, I tend to think of gods as tricksters who are more malevolent than benevolent. I can't imagine them having much fun in the Coastal Alliance. The 'cosmic joke,' such as it is, is that my redliner tribe is largely comprised of people that are, not to put too fine a point or fun a pun on it, hot as fuck. Most of them also fuck like crazy. They just don't fuck each other.

Of course, hotness isn't everything. For example, from the gossip we all swap, I know that Itzy would be too intense for me, even though she's absolutely one of my types in the physical sense -- and more than that besides. When she's green instead of red, she needs to be utterly brutalized and humiliated at every turn. The stuff I do with my more submissive lovers is -- with no offense intended to any of them, and certainly not to Maddy in particular -- child's play. Jett is a different story. She's one of the reasons they call me 'old Stone Face,' because I could see myself fucking her -- and getting fucked by her -- pretty much all the time. The redliner tribe's more important. Our time at the bar, and especially just outside of it, is more important. Old Stone Face is even selling himself a bit short; I'm simply not tempted.

Jett bursts out of the Pig and screams triumphantly at the entire universe. A few steps behind her, I mosey through molasses by comparison. Her voice is completely feminine; when she yells, it's a riot-grrrl anthem that's both a challenge and an invitation. Genre be damned, it's still music to my ears. It's just a little loud, is all. The batch of stims she took wore off enough for the dedicated medical virtue to let her out of the bar's safe-trip room, but attitude and willpower keep her near the peak. The virtue's imprimatur at least reassures me that she's no longer in a punching mood. That's one of her things when she's stimmed out of her mind. Instead of borrowing a straitjacket from the bar, she opts to become a walking murder-mattress. They've got outfits for that, too. They're hilarious -- especially the animal-themed ones.

That's one major difference between us, I suppose; I'm not big into hardcore stims, but I think I may have waxed poetic already about complements and supplements and whatnot. Did I? I can't quite remember. Either way, I certainly don't mind my partners occasionally bringing that kind of energy to bear on me. My ass is the obvious target, but there's lot to be said for somebody giving you an aggressive, power-bottom fuck or blowjob. Hell, they can destroy my ass just fine while trying to suck my dick off of my body. From fingers to forearms to basic sex toys to smart-metal tentacles, options abound.

Jett bounds, and also bounces. She defies gravity -- not fully or for very long, but her spirit justifies the word. She does what she calls 'sick parkour moves' against walls and over decorative old-world replicas like bollards, barriers, and supremely uncomfortable outdoor benches. I prefer to be the planet that helps define her wild orbit. I don't feel bad about it. She defies that kind of gravity, too. She even uses it as fuel.

A thought strikes her like lightning, as does the urge to share it. She rushes up to me, playing chicken with my still-red bracelet. I flinch a little, just to give her a cheap thrill. We're both in on the scam, but she enjoys it anyway. That's a great attitude to have in the here and now. It certainly makes VR a lot more fun.

She stares at me -- not into me or through me, but

at

me, like stimmers do -- with irises that are an even crazier punky mess than her spiky hair. It's like an oil spill used a waterfall to ruin a rainbow's asshole, and all three of them loved every second of it.

"I fucking love being alive," she says. Her eyes insist that it means more than it does. It's a powerful line regardless. It moves me.

I smile warmly and nod. "Yeah, me too, actually."

"I believe you," she swiftly replies. "

I

believe you." Well, there's some of that stimmer stank. It's me and her against the world; nobody else believes me because I'm such a downer. Her followup is of a piece. "So are you still being a total pussy?"

"Yup."

"Awesome. Good talk." She does another parkour circuit, but it's far less extreme than the first one. The medical virtue knows its business.

I take some deep breaths of the fresh evening air and do some stretches. When Jett completes her next revolution, I try to keep the magic alive. "You were two for three that night, you know... before you started the usual pissing contest."

That captures her attention. She turns fully towards me, and her face screws up -- curiosity warring with a sneer of disbelief. "Oh really? Which one was the strike?"

"That would be number three, obviously. Couple's pottery, really? You're sure that wasn't cringe-on-arrival however many years ago?"

She shakes her head. "Nah, man. Nah. No way. Uh-huh. Girls lost their fucking shit. They did wedding dances to that fucking song just because of that fucking scene. Also, one-hundred and sixty-six. Years. Fuck! Blows me away. They say some futas will live that long, you know, even if science doesn't out-awesome its awesomeness -- and back then, no futas, no dickgirls. Crazy."

I didn't see any telltale signs of her virtue feeding her the factoid -- that exact number of years -- though of course it might have done so four days ago. Four days can be a lifetime for people who rely almost entirely on the holonet for data storage and virtues for smart retrieval. "Really?" I ask. "That's something you're willing to keep wet?"

"You know it."

I don't

know

it, but I decide to believe her. Old-world music and movies are her things -- well, two of them, anyway. Even when Itzy, Aisha and I are groaning and heckling, Jett's passion always reminds me that I need more 'things' of my own. Sex doesn't count. It's its own category.

Jett hops up and down in place and rubs her hands together to dispel a chill that most definitely isn't in the air. Her drab redliner clothes suppress all potentially alluring bounciness. I can tell she's coming down, but she's stubborn. Long after her stimmed-out cadences and mannerisms become obviously forced, she'll keep trying to leverage them. I don't mind so much -- just enough to give her some shit sometimes.

She looks at me again with a satisfied predator's eyes. "That second one was a home run, though."

I can't even pretend to answer before she calls the song up again, vibrating the air around us using juice borrowed from the Pig's externals. Just like it did in the bar four evenings ago, it hits me in the chest. She just now picked the chorus where some of the instruments drop out, and she claps along perfectly to it -- arms over the head, inviting everyone else to do the same. I don't. Her breasts are still completely obscured and neutralized by her outfit.

"I believe in a thing called love

just listen to the rhythm of the heart..."

I do bop along a bit; it doubles as a conciliatory nod and shrug. "You are very good at what you do. Two out of three ain't bad." The first one that night had hit hard, too. Thankfully for the rest of the Pig's patrons, it had only been a movie quote, not a full song. Nobody ever truly fights at the bar, but tug-of-war over the music is a thing -- the aforementioned pissing contest. Jett's rarely content to limit her song selections to our core foursome's booth.

She turns away from me and does some shadow boxing. That's a good sign; it means she's not willing to play chicken

that

hard with my bracelet. Her clothing performs yet another miracle and makes her ass look like a mound of barely functional gray nothing. The music fades out. The song didn't end; the dickgirl who's pretending to still be stimmed out of her mind is playing maestro.

"I've been actually been meaning to ask you something," I say to her back.

"'Bout time," she replies, not turning around. Her bobbing, weaving, and jabbing is sloppy, but I think she knows how to fight -- well, you know, in VR.

"You already know what I'm going to ask?"

"Yup."

"But I have to actually ask."

"Yup. Man, it's almost like you're smart enough to have a real job."

That gets another chuckle from me. "Okay, fine." I put on one of the terrible voices she's always doing. "So, what

is

the deal with all the old holos-"

"Movies. TV."

"Right. What's the deal with all the old movies and songs and whatnot?"

She does a quick one-eighty spin, throws her hands up, and releases a whooping cry. "Almost two fuckin'

years

Fen! God damn. That is a record. That is a world record worthy of the man with the old stone face. Tuckin' fried."

"Uh... what? We literally ask you about that shit all the time."

She does the hardcore stimmer stare again, but it mellows and sharpens simultaneously as she slowly cocks her head and raises a pointed finger. "In there. Not out here. Tonight, you're serious."

I smile. "Yeah, I guess I am."

She breaks the stare and the pose suddenly. She starts pacing. I remember some of my own navel gazing: two college kids wandering the campus. I take up a place beside her, and she adapts immediately. Pacing becomes a real walk -- though a short one, granted.

"Ordinarily I'd say something like, 'Yeah, you're too fuckin' serious,' but not this time. This is serious. This is worthy of serious discussion."

"I think about it sometimes, you know," I tell her. "About how weird it must be to have yobs of data about a world where your whole deal didn't even exist."

She smiles and keeps looking ahead; she's losing the will to maintain the stimmer facade. "Oh, it's weirder than that, Fen. I did exist, but only as porn. Meanwhile, real-life girls with struggles of their own got pressured into subbing in. Fucked-up times all around."

"No arguments there." A halfway clever thought occurs. "That's why it's never dickgirl or futa porn."

She nods. "Smart boy. The mainstream, where we didn't exist at all, is a mellower trip. It's a trip I can handle."

"Damn." Jett's a trip handler by nature.

"Yeah."

We hit the far edge of the Pig's back wall and pause. Jett starts doing exaggerated cooldown stretches -- leg up against the flat surface, knee bending and unbending, weird 'L' shapes with her arms, that sort of thing. I can imagine a cigarette in my hand. For a moment, I can also ignore Jett's wild hair and eyes; she's the jock whose drug of choice is fucking up her heart -- her literal one, which seems worth mentioning. I guess that makes me the burnout who's fucking up his lungs. I'm starting to lose track of the college-kids-and-campus analogy, but the feeling of it is still all around me.

"I'm not sad that it's taking so long," she says. I give her the silent treatment, as is tradition. We don't reward coy bait. Knowing that full well, she doesn't wait long to clarify. "AGI. Full integration. Once-human consciousnesses in smart metal and whatever comes after it. Artificial consciousnesses in lab-grown meat, probably just as a novelty. Us dickgirls and futas deserve an epoch of our own, don't we? The epoch of engineered meat -- tweaked meat."

"Tweaker meat."

"Oh, fuck off," she says cheerfully, then spins around quickly and leans against the wall, bending one knee to flatten her drab sneaker sole against it. She really ought to be wearing a tracksuit, or at least some kind of a workout outfit. The problem is that she would be too sexy. What a problem to have, right?

"It's enough that we're close," she says. "That put us in a grace period. Seriously cyberpunk dystopian shit before that, though. Culture was eating itself: infinite loops of anniversary and lookback articles right alongside reboots and remakes that were practically lapping each other. While history was rhyming itself down the drain, culture was trying to rhyme 'history' with 'history.' Worst requiem lyrics ever."

"Tech, though, right? New grist for the mill. New mill."

"You'd think," she replies slyly, "but if you get a hundred million nerds writing sci-fi, a couple dozen are going to eat reality's lunch early." She shrugs and tilts her head back. I get the profile view, which reminds me of Itzy. Jett's not really looking at the night sky, though. Her eyes close. She smiles the smile of a soft landing. She's taking in the beauty in a different way. Reality, for her, is the heavy bag that never breaks. She's the boxer who grows to love it for exactly that reason.

"There's a way for life to age gracefully," she says. "To change gracefully. Still, there are tipping points. We're coming up on one. For right now, though, I'm in exactly the right spot. I get to take in all those yobs that weren't of me, by me, or for me, and I get to say, 'These ghosts still speak to me. They can still move me. Hell, some of them can even haunt me.'"

"Nagel can go fuck himself."

She laughs. "More like, 'You're not wrong, Nagel, you're just an asshole.'"

I've heard that holo -- sorry, movie -- quote before. It's one of her favorites.

"There's a spectrum before the big tipping point," she says. "I fancy myself half in, half out. Joan is my third half, obviously. Still close enough for jazz, baby." Joan is her virtue, and of course the name is an instant, groanworthy icebreaker.

"Close enough for historical VR dives."

Jett smiles. "Yeah, and sometimes I lose the dick or lose the boobs -- half in or half out. Why? Because it's funny. Diamond age of slumming it, though, ver-real."

"But then 'we' becomes 'they,' completely."

She hasn't been high for a while. She's also stopped pretending. Still, the intensity didn't really fade; it just changed venues. "I hope they appreciate that we aged gracefully," she says, "even if they don't really believe that we grew up into them. I hope they're at least curious -- like we would be if we found a treasure trove of alien artifacts on some extrasolar planet. That's not quite right, though. Extinction's a bitch. Shit, I don't know if they'll even be able to get sad, but if they can, I hope they don't.

'They're gone, but they didn't die. They just changed. All things considered, they did it pretty well -- after all, here

we

are.

'"

"Isn't it usually the other way around? 'Dead, but not gone?' Maybe you're being haunted by anti-ghosts."

"Well that's just stupid."

I laugh. She gives me a shit-eating grin. We enjoy the moment, but don't cling to it.

"

'They did it with their eyes open,'

" I offer more seriously.

"Yeah," she says, opening her eyes and pushing off the wall. "That's good. That's some Nietzschean shit, right there." She starts walking towards the front of the Pig again.

I turn and fall into step beside her. "Don't futas roll their eyes at college-kid Nietzsche fans?"

"Yeah, they do," she replies. "We dickgirls have better senses of humor. I mean, come on:

'ÜBERDIKENFRÄULEIN!'

That's fuckin' hilarious."

Both our virtues ping potential corrections. We both dismiss them; we both chuckle. Virtues possess something close enough to senses of humor, but their best comedy is always unintentional -- and usually because they don't get ours.

We stop near the awful bench, but don't sit. I sigh heavily, then ask the question we've been walking towards this whole time. "So this shit I'm being a total pussy about... is it the shitty version of 'half in, half out?' How do you stop being haunted by an anti-ghost?"

"You stop believing."

"Easier said than done."

Jett's arm twitches. The urge to reach out and touch a friend is a hard one to perfectly police. She caught herself early. As an alternative, she finds my eyes, and makes a good case for those rare people who adjust their permissions so that that oft-terrifying intimacy isn't allowed -- and who thus wear upon their eyes an equivalent to our lumpy gray clothing. All I can say is, thank fuck Jett and I are friends. I'd hate to know how she stares into or through an enemy.

"Don't," she says simply. She's sober, serious, and sincere -- so sincere that she spares me the song. "You're still half in. Be half in. Be where and what we are now: on the tightrope -- in between. That's what Nietzsche never understood. There's magic right here." She smiles, shrugs, and lets the punk come back out to play. "Do a little dance. Give'em something to remember."

"They'll remember the fall."

"Nah. Look around, Fen. We're gonna make it across. I believe that, too."

"Thanks, Jett."

She brushes it off and turns around quickly, beating a path to the front door and leaving me behind. Why? Because she doesn't want to see old Stone Face cry. People need their myths.

I wish I knew the reason why I'm suddenly losing my shit. I think it's because I'm scared. Before I can take another step forward, the curb has to become a tightrope, and the asphalt just below it has to disappear.

***

I hadn't been fucked by anybody besides Veri for over a week. When Ash had come over, it had been four days, more or less by coincidence. After my first breach of etiquette at the Guinness Pig, I'd added another three. Like a total pussy, I'd only been hooking up with my more submissive lovers.

Madison arrived at my door around five; Veri let me know when she was just outside. The plan was dinner, an early evening, her preferred bedtime routine, and a sleepover that would end unusually early the following morning. When it came to all things work-related, Madison was a morning person. That would leave me engagement-free before my afternoon shift at the lab. I wasn't concerned. For all my talk of having no real hobbies or interests besides sex, it was never hard to kill a few hours on the holonet, or even outside.

I opened my front door, stepped out, and closed it behind me. The two of us had our traditions, and one of them was that I always got to talk to Madison-as-Madison briefly. The sun was just starting to set; the horizon was tall buildings mixed together with engineered trees. In the daylight, it was a vast, safe, welcoming urban forest. At night, the skyline spoke more of confederation -- a loose affiliation of entertainment options and ever-ready services. Some areas went very dark. Others lit up with cyberpunk neon. Yet others suggested sleepless scientific cleanliness. There was even one zone wholly dedicated to the facade of an old-world city; its coloration was less varied, its lights yellowish and warm. Emblematic of the futuristic present we lived in, science had managed the trick of efficiently mimicking incandescence.

It was one hell of a view, but I preferred the one standing on my stoop.

"Hey, Fen," Madison said with an easy smile.

"Hey, Madison," I replied. I moved in and wrapped her up in a big bear hug. She huffed cutely, like a stuffed animal come to life who'd been both made and reborn to be squeezed too hard by an overeager child. She was rather tall, especially considering her kinks, but quite slim. I only had eight or so centimeters on her.

"You don't have to call me that, you know."

"I know," I said. "It helps me keep things straight."

"Fair enough."

Madison was 'Maddy' all the time -- plus 'Mads,' 'Mishmash,' or any cute variations thereupon depending on where and when one had first met her -- but then, during playtime, 'Maddy' became a true name for a true alter ego, while 'Madison' emerged as a stern parental warning. It sounded a lot more complicated than it was. It was a diamond age of nicknames, since the holonet kept us all sorted for each other.