How can I describe the thrill when your incoming call notice pops up and says you’re about to get a personal call from your childhood hero?
My real hero was Captain Cobalt, of course, but Sonny Mao was a different kind of hero. Sonny Mao was a movie star, one of a small number of heroes who mixed in doing movies with doing hero stuff. Really bad movies.
Sonny was the star of the Angel of Death movies, ten of the worst movies ever made, and me and my buddies loved every one. In junior high, we would sit around and work on hacking tools while those movies played in the background.
My older, smarter friends seemed to love them ironically, while my 15-year-old brain loved them for real. I didn’t see any irony in this unstoppable angel of vengeance killing evildoers with a glowing golden sword, and later a glowing golden pistol, a glowing golden battle axe, a glowing golden assault rifle, and ultimately, a glowing golden M60, firing a stream of glowing golden bullets that cheerfully ripped apart demons, dragons, orcs, and drug dealers.
Presumably they did double damage to demon drug dealers, but I can’t remember if that was canon or not.
We watched all of them and remembered every line, including his signature, “God forgives you,” that he said every time he killed somebody in a spectacular or memorable way.
He didn’t have wings in the movies because God had taken them to punish him for killing an innocent person by mistake in the first one. Then God told him he had to kill ten thousand evil people to get them back.
Movie No. 10, Angel of Death and the Throne of Heaven, had him killing the Devil and taking over Hell so he could punish the damned for eternity. And by the standards of Sonny Mao movies, that was considered a twist.
Minerva was the strongest person in the world, but Sonny was still regarded as the strongest man, now that Captain Cobalt was dead. Invulnerable and super strong, with weirdly strong legs that could launch him fifty feet in the air.
He was a great hero who had defeated hundreds of monsters and saved thousands of people in his life, but he was also a notorious drunk who liked to call in to and talk shit about people.
He had a custom-made flying motorcycle that he liked to drive drunk, and a collection of vintage automobiles that he also liked to drive drunk. He had hit and injured a few people in those ground cars, but had never killed anyone, as far as I knew.
He was a high-profile bad boy that the world couldn’t live without, so when his name and glamor shot came up on my phone, I answered immediately and smiled a little, as the thirty-something version of Sonny’s face was replaced by the old gray and wrinkled one.
Sonny’s body was a series of square shapes, starting with the big square block of his head, now sporting a gray moustache and beard to go with his astounding caveman unibrow.
His chest was another giant square. In his prime, he had been cut like a movie star. Now he was kind of lumpy and stout like a 1940s strongman, in contrast to the 2040s version he used to be. Sonny didn’t really take his shirt off anymore.
He never really wore a costume. He wore jeans and a black t-shirt, even when he was playing the Angel of Death. He wore a Bluestar blue jacket over it when he was working, making him the coolest guy on planet Earth when I was fifteen.
And I must admit, I couldn’t speak for a minute, when that big square head appeared in my HUD.
“Hey kid, Harry gave me your number. Nice work with those pods and saving those people in the car. I can’t find video of you, but Harry says you’re kicking ass and making a difference, and even fucking Randy likes you, which is not easy to do."
“I got invited to a party at Pink Sensation this weekend and I want you to come. I’m guessing you’re so new you haven’t even seen it yet. It’s my favorite place in Chicago, I’ll drop you a pin. Meet me on the lawn around nine and bring something to wrap your dick with, it gets pretty wild.”
Sonny didn’t wait for my answer. He just hung up and dropped a location pin.
Jade and Randy were in his office when I walked in. “Hey, can I have Saturday night off? Sonny Mao just invited me to some pink house in Chicago. It sounds like a superhero hot spot; you guys want to come with me?”
Randall shook his head and wagged his wedding ring.
“I’m not allowed in there anymore,” Jade said, “but you could have a lot of fun if you got that stick out of your ass. I can’t wait to see what’s left of you when you get back.”
* * *
I had never heard of Pink Sensation before, so I had to look it up. Pink Sensation was an ultra-modern house built in 2023, an ugly, blocky structure with too many windows that might have passed for classy thirty years ago.
It used to have some dignity, back when it was white or gray, but then a pornographer named Herman Paige painted it pink and started trying to turn it into the new Playboy Mansion.
But this place made the Playboy Mansion look classy; a bunch of porn stars getting wasted on designer drugs and overpriced champagne. I had to adjust my porn filter to do the search, as Herman liked to show off his girls in every video and still shot.
This invitation would have been a dream come true a couple years ago, but after you’ve had sex with Lydia and swapped magic with a celebrity witch, it was kind of like, “You don’t need to fly to Chicago for sex, we have sex at home.”
I didn’t want to wear my Bluestar gear to a freaky porn party, and my fancy suit seemed like too much, so I changed into the sweater and slacks I got for Brian’s play.
I was grabbing my keys when I saw Lydia on the wall and realized I should probably run this by her first. “Umm… Lydia, I’ve been invited to a sex party at a pornographer’s house, but if it bothers you, I won’t go.”
Lydia raised both eyebrows at me. “Are you asking permission?”
“Yeah, I guess I am. You deserve that, right? I think you deserve that.”
Lydia lowered her head and smiled to herself. “They always ask permission. No matter how much they hate the contract, no matter how much they hate me, they always ask permission. If you need it, you have it.”
That felt a little too easy, so I teased her. “Even if I end up having sex with a bunch of human women tonight?”
“That would probably be good for you, but you won’t.”
“Because I’m shy?”
“Because you’re loyal to me, even when you shouldn’t be. Even when it hurts. Of course, I would be jealous if you let some human girl into your heart tonight, and I would have to intervene if you brought a prostitute home, but I think you’re too smart for that, and if you were vulnerable to simple temptation, I would have had you the night we met.
“Have fun at your party, but please be careful not to ingest anything. There could be far worse things than drugs and alcohol at a party like this, and I don’t want you leaving bodily fluids around, even if it’s just on the rim of a glass.”
“You’re not gonna warn me to wear a condom?”
“You won’t be having sex with anyone at this party, Timothy, but I’ll make sure I’m ready when you get home.”
* * *
At first glance, Pink Sensation was everything the videos made it out to be.
What do you call six naked girls with neon skin mods playing in a fountain? Frolicking? Cavorting? Watching them just confirmed that I really had been desensitized to this shit, even more than a normal guy who grew up with porn.
Something about them made me remember what Lydia said about seeing people exactly as they are, outside yourself, like a demon or a god.
I stepped outside myself for a moment and saw a touch of innocence in this ridiculous staged display. The girls had been told to have fun, but now they really were having fun. You could tell they liked each other, and you could tell they enjoyed their fountain. Apparently, it was warm, but not too warm. Strategically warm.
A sharp-looking woman in a hostess outfit walked up to me, flanked by two giant security guards and said, “Can I help you, sir?”
I whipped out my Bluestar badge and her whole attitude changed, like I had just hit her with a shotgun full of dopamine.
Stolen story; please report.
“So sorry, Mister Kovak, I didn’t recognize you! Please, come on in and meet Herman!”
“I’m supposed to wait for Sonny.”
“People who wait for Sonny usually end up waiting a long time. Come on in!”
Herman Paige was a small, skinny man in an immaculate pink suit. He had an old face and jet-black hair, like he was using old-fashioned hair dye to cover up his gray. I could not imagine why a porn billionaire would let himself look so cheap. Had fashion gone so far past post-irony we had ended up back at irony again?
“Tim Kovak, Bluestar 7!” Herman said. “The new face on Bluestar 7, and I’m seeing it for the first time. I don’t know who you pissed off at HDI, but I want the story!”
“I beat a guy with a chair.”
Herman perked up. “Did they get it on video?”
“Oh, I really hope not. This was a couple years ago. I only hit monsters now.”
Herman nodded. “Thank you for your—”
“No,” I stopped him. “Please don’t say that. Please don’t ever say that to someone like me. It’s like Captain Cobalt said, it’s not fair to give medals to a bulletproof soldier, and I’m not a soldier at all. I’m like a glorified traffic cop who gets to punch monsters on the side.”
“Brave and humble,” Herman said, transparently kissing my ass. “Come on over and meet the girls!”
And then I met the girls, who were mostly too old to be called girls now. Would you believe me if I said this was more anthropology than lust? A wide mix of builds and complexions, all with that bored faux-humble body language you get when everybody knows who you are, and you’ve heard the same empty flattery a million times.
I learned later that most of these women were interface templates, porn stars who had their brains scanned so their doppelgangers could be used as an interactive computer interface. Probably a lot more human than Jeeves, but a pale shadow of the self-aware pornbot who had saved my ass in the Baalphezar fight.
These ladies did not look self-aware in any sense, as they fended off waves of admirers – mostly rich but not famous corporate guys in their 60s and 70s who were clearly infatuated with one or more of them.
Herman dragged me around the party and blitzed through a dozen names, each preceded by a silent “of course you know,” as if I was supposed to know who they were.
It got real creepy real fast, as it started to feel like he was taking me shopping, and I would be expected to take one of these women home at the end of the tour.
But I did enjoy seeing the same reaction twelve times. Bored disinterest as they scanned my face and body, suddenly changing to gushing full attention as soon as they saw my badge. I have to give extra points to one girl who at least cared enough to ask, “What show are you on?” before she saw the badge.
The porn stars were still dressed like porn stars, I suppose, but they looked a little older than the models in Herman’s promotional videos, like they had been scanned and captured in their prime, and were now honored guests, even as their physical bodies aged out of traditional porn.
These older corporate guys clearly didn’t care that their fantasy girls had a few extra years on them. They looked absolutely starstruck. A couple of them got grabby enough that I was tempted to intervene, but these women had decades of practice fending off bigger wolves than this, and clearly did not need my help.
Mingling with actors and porn stars was nice, but this party was just getting started. Herman pointed to a set of double doors on the east side of the main room, and the six girls who had been playing in the fountain came in to thunderous applause.
Well, all the old corporate guys applauded, as they turned their backs on their legacy counterparts, shifting their attention to these new, younger girls literally dressed up like party favors.
The new girls all had multicolor glowing tattoos, selected to match their skin tones and hair colors – hair lit up with outrageous neon highlights by filament LEDs.
These garish digital display outfits had been out-dated since before I was born, but this party had a kind of retro feel to it, and I had to admit the tattoos were doing something for me, even if I knew these girls were still just people underneath.
Herman finally settled on an ultra-modern white couch that looked luxurious but sank almost to the floor when he sat down. Two of the legacy porn stars immediately took places to either side of him, while I sat across from him, on a contrasting black couch that smelled strongly of cleaning fluid and booze.
Somebody came by for my drink order and I said, “Can I just get bottled water? A sealed bottle of water, still in the bottle? I’m kind of a germophobe.”
This was apparently not a strange request, so I sat there and watched Herman chat with a few other guests, including a very young couple who were obviously movie stars - super young movie stars who looked way too young to be here; but apparently, I was the only one who thought that.
I had all kinds of Bluestar cop shit in my optics now, so I quickly pulled up profiles on both of them and was relieved to see they were both eighteen, recently eighteen, and had apparently been corrupted by the world long before Herman got to them.
The guy had like ten public intoxication charges, and the girl had been sent to arb a couple times for shoplifting. They were apparently in some kind of teen superhero drama together, although neither one had real powers. I tried to imagine what Herman was planning to do with them and decided I would be better off not asking too many questions.
There was an amazing variety of beautiful people around the room, with an amazing set of criminal records, but nobody had active warrants, and the party girls in neon were suspiciously clean. Like, scrubbed by a DMA censor clean. They were blank slates with obvious pseudonyms, like they had been conjured out of a vat and were actually only six weeks old.
Herman saw me staring at the girls and pointed at one of them, a devastating brunette with neon green highlights on her hair and skin.
“How much do you think that one goes for?” Herman said.
“Pardon me?” I asked, really hoping I had misheard that.
“How much would you pay to spend a night with her?”
“I think I’m the wrong guy to answer that question.”
“Relax, Tim. You won’t need your badge tonight. Everything we do here is legal. All the old laws are gone, and nobody here is hurting anybody. Everybody in here is acting of their own free will, and everybody in here signed papers. I keep registered files on all my regulars, and you’ll have to check off a few boxes yourself, if you want to have any real fun on your first time here.”
“So,” Herman repeated. “How much would you pay to take Green to a room right now?”
“Uh… I’ve never really paid for sex. I mean, I kind of have, but not cash.”
“A night with Green costs $150,000 dollars.” He pointed at a girl next to her. “Orange is $200,000. Blue is new, so she’s only charging $75,000 tonight. We’ll bump her up once we see how she does.”
“But don’t worry,” he laughed, totally misreading my apprehension. “These prices are for whales and retail customers. Bluestar badges don’t pay in my house.”
“Thanks? Thanks, I guess, but I didn’t really come here for this part. I just… I guess I just wanted to hang out with a movie star.”
Herman gave a warm little laugh. “Of course you do! That’s the whole reason I bought this house! You can get sex anywhere, but this house is called Pink Sensation, because you’re here for this feeling, this thing in the air that comes when you’re surrounded by beautiful people, and you feel like anything could happen.”
Like so many things in this house, his blatant salesmanship had a ring of sincerity to it, like this wasn’t just marketing copy, and Herman really was a grown-up fanboy using his money to get a seat at the cool table. And as distasteful as this man was, there was something sincere about the way he said it.
“Herman, can I ask you about your business?”
Herman melted at this question, like he had waited his entire life for a young man to ask.
“My childhood was kind of sheltered, and I don’t understand how all this works. How do you make money if porn is free now?”
He nodded. “I get this a lot, and the answer is really important to understanding human nature in the twenty-first century. Here’s the sentence that made me rich. Ready? Porn is free, but men will pay anything for love.”
“So, you’re selling love?”
“Yes, sir! I am not in the porn business. I sell love: 2D love, 3D love, full stereo interactive love, and yes, good old fashioned physical love with your dream girl, whatever your dream might be. But when you buy a girl from me, whether she’s a neutered AI, a full immersive simulation, or just a flat image on a 2D screen, you’re not just buying a digital sex toy. You are buying an experience. You are buying a sensation, and you are buying a friend.
“My sims don’t just fuck people. They tell jokes and play games and answer email, and yeah, you can jack them into the back of your head and have the best sex of your life sitting in your office chair.
“But that part is easy. We’ve had interactive and full sensory porn for decades, but what changed, what my customers demand, is one on one personal attention. Not just bots you have sex with, but bots that can ask about your day, hear about all your problems, and solve them! I don’t just sell bots here; I sell Loneliness Life Solutions.
“It started around 2016 and took off in the 2020s. Porn stopped being a generic 2D experience and became a kind of relationship, a one-to-many relationship where one performer could become the surrogate girlfriend for hundreds or thousands of men.
“Guys weren’t just masturbating to these girls. Pretty soon they were writing letters and buying custom videos and paying premiums for all kinds of personal attention, a whole spectrum of personal attention from birthday wishes to customized fetish shows.
“Old school 2D porn seems dull and empty now because there’s no emotional connection. You’re just watching a bunch of parts move around. But when you turn on one of my sims, she knows your name. She remembers what you had for breakfast. She remembers when your favorite streamer is on, and she knows exactly what to say to cheer you up, when your boss is on your ass all day.
“And when you crawl into bed and plug into that neural jack or pressure cuff, she says she loves you, and she means it. That’s what I sell.”
“I don’t have a family of my own,” Herman said, squeezing the knee of the woman on his right. “But when I rip a girl’s brain and put her in a new bot, when I do a product launch and send her out into the world for the first time, I like to think that’s how it feels to be a father.”
“This place,” he gestured to the grand room filled with clinking glasses and beautiful people. “This isn’t my business, this is just something I do for fun, something I built so I can hang out with movie stars and heroes just like you. I make a little money off the old-school escort stuff, but that’s really just a VIP perk. I give away more than I’ll ever sell, because it keeps the celebrities coming in.”
Herman waved an arm in the air and summoned a stunning woman in an elegant white dress. It’s difficult to be elegant and inviting at the same time but she managed it. I have to be honest, guys. She looked a lot like Lydia.
“Donna, meet my friend, Tim. New face on Bluestar 7. Tim’s a country mouse getting his first taste of the big city. I was hoping you could show him around.”
Donna shook my hand, proving that she wasn’t a demon or a witch, probably, and sat down right beside me. Like, right beside me, until our hips were touching.
But I still felt like I had to defend myself. “Come on, Herman. I am not a country mouse. I live in Boston.”
“Boston’s not a city anymore, Tim. Boston is a graveyard next to a monster theme park. Hasn’t been a real city since ‘23. But I’m not talking down to you.”
He gestured to the neon girls dancing around a group of older men in fancy bathrobes, the men all trying to look cool and relaxed when they were obviously overwhelmed, like they had come here specifically to be overwhelmed, but had not been prepared to turn into teenage boys again.
“Not everybody likes my floor show,” Herman said. “You ask good questions, so take Donna somewhere quiet and ask her some questions. Donna used to paint herself up just like that, now she’s running shit for me. Hell, she knows this business better than I do. I just know how to throw parties and raise money. Donna can tell you how shit really works.”
Donna was about to drag me off to the basement and show me her Lydia impression when I was saved by the timely arrival of Sonny Mao.