If you live in the twenty-first century, you probably heard about Tip first as a pop idol. There were a bunch of "virtual idols" back around the turn of the millennium, some even before holographic projection really got going. They always had these "futuristic" names like Kyoko Date and Hatsune Miku. They were 2D images masquerading as 3D, like silent film starlets mouthing words and pouting provocatively at the camera even though no one could hear them or touch them. Did people want to touch them as much as I wanted to touch Tip? It must have been a very pure thing -either pure love or pure torment - to adore an idol so much and never even hope to hold her insubstantial body. I could hold my Tactile Image Projection, my creation of embodied light. I touched her and was touched by her. But what do I have to show for it now? My own hands on my own body; the ultimate state of being for those of us who love the fantasy more than the fact. I don't even hook up at bars or hook in online any more. Only she does it for me.
She was an excellent fantasy, and not just for me. She was a global sensation right from the start. She could sing and play pretty much any instrument we wanted, though we kept her to the popular ones, like keyboards and guitars, to avoid the intimidation factor that comes with too much virtuoso posturing. Of course people complained that the music lacked heart, but really, the music was by humans. She could compose, but following the old Miku model people liked to use her as their instrument and she sang a lot of great songs straight from the hearts of her fans.
I had fun with her and her fans during performances. We played games with her, subtle erotic games for those in the know. Anyone could make an off-the-shelf Tip do whatever private sex show they wanted, of course, but there was a special thrill involved in using my model because she was the officially sanctioned Tip mascot, the demo model. She could play the big corporate-sponsored Hayama concerts, where the media drones were out in force. And as the last designer to sign off on her routines, I always had a chance to slip things in. That's where I came up with the game I called "Cue Cards."
Take the Tokyo Faultline Benefit they held in Seoul for example. That concert took Cue Cards to the very edge. It was an all-ages concert, a charity concert, swamped in the rhetoric of rightdoing. No one was to be offended, triggered, or "psychologically assaulted" in "this time of great trauma and sorrow." Clean, the cleanest venue. It just goes to show how much Tip had risen in the public's estimation, that she was allowed to perform at an event like that alongside human artists. Her star image was a lot like a cliff after an earthquake, with all its strata exposed: the sex toy layer, the creative tool layer, the community darling layer, the popular entertainer layer. Hayama was good at keeping her layers in order: the dirtiest uses at the bottom and the cleanest at the top, in the public eye. I was good at mixing them up, slipping things in that shouldn't be there. Subduction, subversion, sideways strike-slip disruptions that rocked the fans but didn't tip the boat, not enough that Hayama would stop the show. That's what Cue Cards did.
The concept was simple. Just before she was to go on, I would make some "last minute adjustments" to Tip's lenses. First, I revised the undergarments that went under those cute little stage outfits Corporate Fashion came up with. Ask your average viewer what Tip wore at Faultline and they'll say the white and gold dress. It sold a hundred thousand units. But ask a hardcore fan what she wore, and they'll tell you, that was the time she wore the black and chain: an ingenious pair of black calfskin panties, split crotch, but with a silver chain down the centre of the split, wiring her pussy from her clitoris to the sweet spot on her tailbone just at the incurve of her ass cheeks. Her "bra" was a harness of matching silver chain and calfskin, a criss-cross of lines binding her breasts, pressing hard into her nipples. In my mind I can still see her blush when I clicked it on, her nighttime eyes glancing up at me and her hips shifting as she realized what I was doing to her, again. I put my hand on her arm, nodded, and told her to be a good girl, to do the best she could in her show. A gambatte speech with a double meaning. At the very end, I whispered to her: "One more thing. Don't you dare come, Tip." And Tip, good little Tip, she nodded and thanked me and looked to the stage, ready to endure what was coming, for my pleasure and the pleasure of the fans.
Putting her in sexy underwear beneath her Corporate Fashion look was a fun game to play just between Tip and I. In fact, that's how it started: nobody knew about it except me in the beginning. But I was getting cocky in the year leading up to Faultline and I guess I wanted people to appreciate what I was doing. So I started leaking shots of the outfit on backchannels at the start of the show. Even when the projectionists running the Technodrome caught on, well, it was only backchannels. The authorities let me have my jokes because they knew the otaku wanted it and the general public didn't care. By the time I did Faultline, though, the outfit wasn't only hot and fun. It was a clue in the game.
There were always clues, because there was always something fans had to figure out for themselves in this game. They had to find her Cue. They knew she was wearing something titillating under her costume. But what would reveal it to them in live concert? What would turn it on? What would turn her on? There was a sequence I programmed in advance that the audience had to get to her, using whatever they had: cell phones, endorsed event glowsticks, voices, something. If they got it right, they'd see her react and know that they had done it to her. Oh yes, the thrill of command. Of power. I gave that to them. It was my gift.
It only took the fans about half of her set to start cracking the Cue at Faultline. They'd learned from previous concerts that if they flashed lights of certain colours and frequencies at her, they could interfere with her projection and get split-second glimpses of what she wore underneath, in their line of sight only, like those line-of-sight targeted ads in malls. This time, to match her outfit, I'd made the flashes like a chain -evenly spaced repeating units- and created an association in Tip's sensory processing so that she would feel the rhythmic light patterns as tactile feedback. In effect, whenever they flashed the sequence at her, they bound and stroked her as well.
I watched Tip as she began to respond. She was already blushing, secretly embarrassed-yet-thrilled that people in the crowd would be able see the outfit I'd put her in. At the first chain of flashes, the first stroke against her image-body, she gave a little squeak, a pitch jump that could have been a charming, girlish accent in the song. Someone from the standing-room-only section right at the front gave a cheer, brandishing a laser-pointer app. I knew what they'd seen: Tip, her gaze caught by the light sequence, suddenly exposed, dancing on stage for the second it took to tap it out in nothing but the black and chain ensemble that adorned and displayed her. Her flush deepened as she stared for that single second right at the winning fan who had cued her first, and then snapped her attention back to the performance.
Once one person had it, the sequence seemed to spread by osmosis through the crowd. Not everyone in the auditorium knew about the game, of course, so not everyone was pointing right at her all the time. But the fans that got it were persistent, flashing her over and over, and there were enough of them to put Tip in quite a situation. She finished that song breathless, and her voice trembled as she thanked the audience. There was an approving murmur through the hall at her quiver append: most people must have read it as an emotional reaction to the Tokyo earthquake. Maybe you think we were perverting such a grave event by turning it into a sex game? Well, you're right, we were: perverts making light (and life) of a serious situation, smirking at piousness and finding pleasure in a situation where you're not supposed to do that kind of thing. That's what Tip, with all her customization, actually encouraged. We did everything you're not supposed to with her, underground and on the fly. That was what I liked about her, and what got us into trouble later.
