Virtual Virgin

Chapter Eight




IT COST RIC a hundred bucks just to take an elevator down to the Seven Deadly Sins Dream-theme Park on the Nine Circles of Hell Limbo level.

He was the only passenger at this late-morning hangover hour. The reflective stainless steel walls of the bullet-shaped car hosted silhouettes of writhing nude women, which made him feel he was starring in the opening credits to a James Bond movie. He even had the concealed weapon.

A sudden turn, and he thought he saw . . . Delilah, like a swimmer viewed through a giant aquarium window, floating, brushing against the smeary glass, her lips almost touching the cold steel sides of the elevator capsule . . . car.

Ric shook off the hallucinogenic vision. Who knew what delusions modern technology could hurl at suggestible tourists in Vegas these days . . . ?

His forefinger hovered over seven different destination buttons, one for every deadly sin. Ric was crazy-curious how anyone could make Sloth entertaining, much less sinful, but pressed “Lust.”

That was the most personal of sins. Employing chipped CinSims as exotic sex trade workers was as degrading as anything Ric could imagine, and he’d seen the worst results of human trafficking in women and children during his work in the Mexican-US Border Wars.

Here, he imagined the reality of involuntary prostitution would be prettied up.

Ironic that he was down here to settle a question of morality.

The doors sliced open without sound, framing a shapely woman with long brunet hair wearing a really short sarong. Flowers bedecked her neck, hair, and the print of the sarong. Everything was in shades of gray accented by black, with a luminous brightness putting the, uh, subtleties of her figure into sharp focus.

“Welcome, Ric” she crooned, lifting a lei over his head and picking up his left hand to lay her right-hand fingers on his. Her eyes closed. “The elevator scans reveal that I am your favored gender and physical type, but you need not choose me.”

“How do you know my name?” he demanded. A credit card would record it but . . . he’d paid cash, not wanting to leave a record.

She pressed his palm to her fulsome cleavage. “My heart tells me you find me comely.”

Her skin felt warm, soft, moisturized. He jerked his hand away. He’d never touched a CinSim before.

People tended not to, even in Las Vegas casinos, but he was in touchy-feely land now, a place of costly carnal knowledge, and it felt . . . creepy, not sexy. That probably was only because he knew a zombie underlay the Hollywood beauty queen’s likeness. She was the sarong film queen of the thirties and forties, Dorothy Lamour, who turned to lust object and comedy with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on their popular “Road” pictures. Ric had seen enough old TV to glimpse those.

“Come with me,” she said, turning and swaying away. “You can tell me your preferences while we approach our private getaway. Lagoon?” she asked, gazing over her naked shoulder.

He didn’t know whether she meant an assignation site or another new blue cocktail.

When she’d turned back he recognized a different face, more like Mexico, like home. Maria Montez, the name came to him. Must be a mental prod program active down here, so the customer knew what he was getting.

Ric swallowed. Both CinSims were about Delilah’s height and build, curvier than today’s gaunt movie queens. How had the . . . program running this black-and-white bordello sucked his personal preferences out of him during the elevator ride? Maybe those shadowy female figures in the wall had been succubae gauging his subconscious sexual reaction to their various types.

The woman’s figure walking before him lost her sarong. A millisecond of total nudity was covered by a slinky long silver gown with back bared to her waist, a favorite Delilah dress-up look. This outfit coyly offered long sleeves and wide, sequined shoulder pads. An elaborate updo bared her neck, definitely a personal turn-on of his. When she turned her head to look over that glittering shoulder she had the face of Gene Tierney from Laura.

“Penthouse?” she asked.

Ric felt like the infatuated detective in that classic film, who fell in love with the portrait of a dead woman. He almost stumbled over his feet in confusion. He’d have to be brain dead not to react to this parade of beautiful women changing over and over again before his eyes into everything his teen self had fixated on. “Laura” led him on a few steps, then stopped and turned to face him.

“Will it be just us?” she asked.

She had become Hedy Lamarr, the most exotic brunet beauty of all. He recognized her from late-night films because she was a favorite of Delilah’s for a bunch of reasons.

First, she was the rare woman who’d rejected Howard Hughes. Delilah took glee in that. Second, she was the rare Hollywood glamour queen with mathematical gifts. She’d helped invent an early version of frequency hopping with a piano roll to change between eighty-eight frequencies. That musical-mathematical duet had helped crack codes in WWII and had led to Wi-Fi, among other modern marvels. Delilah loved her digital-everything. It didn’t hurt that Lamarr’s title role in the sexy Biblical epic made Samson and Delilah the biggest-grossing film of its year.

Brains and beauty, just like his Delilah.

“Just us?” Hedy repeated. The most beautiful woman in the world in her day was even more exquisite in person.

“Dios, sí.” He was feeling confused and . . . unfaithful. “Nothing kinky,” he added hoarsely, as if he was actually contemplating . . .

She had stopped walking. Gliding, you’d really describe it. “A one-woman man. How refreshing for level L. My hair is caught in my necklace clasp.” She lifted it to bare her neck.

He reached to touch it, experimentally. Warm. He fumbled with the clasp, tantalized by a virgin neck as white as Delilah’s, or was hers as white as the Hedy Lamarr CinSim’s? He wanted . . . needed to press a kiss on it, more than a kiss. He reached for the gown’s shimmering side . . . and it changed into black satin brocade in his palm, a slightly raised pattern over a shape a blind man would lust for.

Ric stumbled back. Had the elevator pumped an aphrodisiac or drug invisibly into the air? This woman’s black hair was coiled like a satin snake into a luxuriant sort of bun, her figure as willowy as the long narrow satin gown she wore, which was slit to the top of a white thigh.

That’s what Chinese dragon ladies had worn for decades up to now. Ric recognized the gown, called a cheongsam. Law enforcement nowadays was attuned to global customs, but Delilah would know style . . . and Delilah would kill him if she knew what he’d walked into like any horny postadolescent guy.

“Don’t stop now,” the CinSim whispered, her head turning over her shoulder. Her eyebrows and eye makeup were dark winged slashes on her white face. “Opium bed?”

Ric’s dazed enchantment ended as he recognized the nose, chin, and cheekbones under the cinematic makeup.

He stepped back, horrified.

This was Myrna Loy in one of her Asian femme fatale roles.

He’d been programmed to lust after Nick Charles’s film wife, Nora.

That felt even creepier. No way could he tell himself she was Delilah in some other guise. He wasn’t a home-breaker, not even a CinSim home-breaker.

“I . . . know you,” he said. “You’re about as Asian as I am.”

Recognizing her seemed to disrupt the programming.

The Myrna Loy CinSim blinked. “You haven’t been here before.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t anything I said or did?”

“I found ‘opium bed’ highly inciting. Trust me.”

“And you don’t want to . . . ?”

“I won’t,” he answered honestly.

“I’ve never had to entertain a . . . won’t.”

“I’m . . . unentertainable.”

Her original poise and film person were returning like gangbusters.

“You look perfectly functional. In fact, you look perfect. A tasty Anglo adventurer in a world of opium, yellow peril, and sin.”

“You’re charming, but politically incorrect down to your . . . metal fingernails.”

“You’d be surprised what these can do in an opium bed.”

“No, I wouldn’t be. Delilah would know who you’re playing—”

“I am not ‘playing’ you. I deliver.”

“Isn’t there something inside you that longs for a . . . kinder, gentler life than ‘entertaining’ any man who happens along?”

The black lipsticked CinSim lips paused, then pursed. “Fu Manchu is something of a bore.”

“He is . . . ?”

“My . . . enforcer, I suppose you’d say. I have been schooled in current expressions.”

“That’s ugly to hear. Do you have any choice about what you do here?”

“Of course not. It’s a role.”

“Don’t you long for a different one?”

She considered. “I do it very well. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. I don’t often get customers who ask questions, as you do.”

“Wouldn’t you give anything to escape this artificial atmosphere? To be a witty and devoted wife, for example?”

“I am Fa Lo See, I take much personal . . . satisfaction in tormenting the helpless white man.”

“I’m Latino.”

She shrugged. “I do not care what language you scream in.” Her long metal nails extended toward his chest.

Ric caught her wrists in an imprisoning grip. Delilah would know what breed of movie villainess this was, Myrna Loy underneath it or not.

“Is this an S&M level? Why on earth would I end up here?” He looked around, encountering the same vague fog that had greeted him outside the elevator. “Why am I here?”

“Perhaps merely because I require . . . customers.”

Her exotic features had turned satanic. Did customers get what they wanted, or did they “serve” the CinSim characters? That was not what he’d come here to find out.

One thing he’d learned: There was no Myrna/Nora here to save. Only his own skin.

If he’d stuck with the other women’s images, he’d have been channeled into an island-girl or city-sophisticate setting. Recognizing and “picking” the Loy CinSim from a cheesy racist bent–sex film manifestation was going to get him pulp-fiction treatment. He knew what he should do, where he should be next.

Outta here.

Nick Charles wouldn’t put up with playing pin cushion for a sexual sadist, even if she was enacted by the same actress who was his smart and sexy wife. Celebrity CinSims were a more morally confusing construction than he’d ever guessed.