gave a strangled groan, and his hips started to jerk suggestively on the chair, his arms held tightly around the emptiness in front of him. It looked like he’d decided to pay the extra ten creds.
The sight bothered me, somehow. How, I wondered, was what he was doing any different from Private Howell’s o-looping? I mean, obviously Howell had been risking serious physical injury with his stunt, and he’d taken things to the point of cataleptic rigidity. He’d lost control on several levels, in fact. The compulsion that led him to risk medical intervention, court martial, and an end to his military career—to say nothing of death from a stroke or a heart attack—suggested that he was addicted.
But addicted to what, exactly? The dopamine and the feel-good endorphins associated with sex, obviously, but the technologies being used to generate those feelings were different in Howell than in Dubois and McKean. Howell had used nanobots programmed to manipulate dopamine levels directly in order to trigger a succession of closely looped orgasms. My two companions were letting music sidebands feed their in-head hardware with the virtual reality illusion of a gene-altered woman having sex with them.
Howell’s experience had been more intense, sure, and thanks to the aspirin he’d managed to get his switch stuck in the on position, but in terms of the outcome it was damned hard to see the line between one set of behaviors and the other.
“Hey, sailor,” a sultry voice said behind me. “You switched off your sensies. Don’t you like the music?”
I turned to face one of the Earthview’s waitresses. She was short and cute and her upper chassis didn’t look like it was going to pull her over. She wore a sweet smile and a wispy nimbus of blue-white light that didn’t do a whole lot to cover what was underneath. The ID projected by her personal circuitry said “Masha,” but there wasn’t any other information in the broadcast.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I was kind of hoping for some real action, maybe later.”
She laughed, an entrancing sound, and moved just a little closer. “You seen anything around here that you like?”
I gave her a stereotypically lecherous up and down. “Absolutely. What time do you get off?”
She leaned even closer. “Me getting off kind of depends on you, doesn’t it?”
“I’m Elliot,” I told her. I thoughtclicked my personal ID, which broadcast my name, where I was from, the fact that I was U.S. Navy, all the basic, introductory stuff.
“Hi, Elliot. I’m Masha.”
She didn’t transmit anything from her ID except her name. “Masha” suggested that she likely was from Russia, Ukraine, or the Yakutsk Republic. Her English was perfect, though, so for all I knew she could have been North American, maybe from a Russian immigrant family. It was hard to know these days, with basic language downloads as good as they were.
So why didn’t I ask her? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that she hadn’t sent more of her own personal data was putting me off. It suggested that she was keeping this on a strictly waitress-customer basis, and I felt as though asking her where she was from would come across as a really lame attempt to chat her up. I was feeling awkward and embarrassed and somewhat torn. Part of me wanted to talk her into bed, but as we bantered more, a larger part of me became convinced that she was more interested in my e-cred balance than in me.
And what was so wrong with that? The flesh-and-blood waitstaff in places like the Earthview aren’t paid all that well, even when you add in their tips, and the cost of workers’ quarters at Starport can eat up your e-cred balance real fast. What they do with their off hours is their business, so why not?
I was tempted, I really was. Masha looked like fun, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a long-term relationship. After Paula? Hell, no. I was through with long-term hearts-and-flowers, long romantic interludes, and deeply intimate relationships.
But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that what I wanted was something more than the clinical workings of a commercial transaction.
We talked a few more moments, and then she left to get me another drink—a zero-G floater this time. The trajectory had blasted me pretty heavily; was that why I suddenly wasn’t interested in sex? Anyway, I was pretty sure another trajectory was going to set me hard on my ass. The floater was milder, would be easier on my system, with a lower percentage of C2H6O and less of a kick.
I looked across at Doob and Machine. They both were totally off planet—approaching the inevitable climax of their links in perfect time with the ménage up on the furry stage.
Masha returned with my drink a moment later, then wandered off to check on her other customers. I looked past the writhing ménage on stage at the image of Earth suspended against the stars. Maybe a part of my inability to join in had to do with how unsettled I was feeling just then. Until recently, I’d thought I’d known exactly what I was and where I was going. If I didn’t make FMF, though, all of that was called into question.
Oh, the next seven years would be spent in the Navy, there was no question about that; I couldn’t shout “I changed my mind!” and take back my signature on my re-up agreement. But holding sick call for service personnel and their dependents at some naval base Earthside, or maybe getting to work at an outpost off planet somewhere, holding sick call, running lab tests, performing medscans.
The alert went off inside my skull.
It started as a long, piercing, two-pitch whistle, like the old-fashioned boatswain’s whistles of the old-time surface Navy.
“Attention, Clymer personnel,” a voice said in my head after the whistle died away. “Attention Clymer personnel. Now recall, recall, recall. All hands report back aboard ship immediately. This is an embarkation order. Repeat …”
I gulped down the remaining half of my floater, hesitated, then put an extra-big tip on the table account for Masha. Across the table, Doob and Machine were blinking their eyes, looking around in a somewhat dazed manner. Recall alerts came through whether your channels were switched off, like mine, or even if they were fully engaged in other activities. I was suddenly delighted that I’d decided not to take the music’s genie up on her offer to take things further.
Talk about rude interruptions!
Somehow, they managed to pay their tabs, and we made our way out of the Earthview.
A lot of other men and women were doing the same thing.
Chapter Five
WE EMBARKED FROM STARPORT A FEW HOURS AFTER OUR RETURN to the Clymer.
All three of us hit the sober-up in sick bay, a heavy dose of nanobots programmed to break down the ethanol and release oxygen into the blood. The effect is kind of like going from pleasant free-fall sensations to slamming face-first into the deck, but you’re thinking more clearly when the shock wears off, and there’s no hangover.
Much of the conversation in the squad bay was centered on our precipitous recall. “Damn,” Doob said, shaking his head. “I was just about to make it with that genie, too!”
“You do know it was all in your head, right?” I asked him.
“What’s
