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.
