chapter two
The geologist, from Maine, was an eighty-three percenter, the most promising compat coefficient in weeks, and Sesha immediately asked for a pic.
Cute, somewhat cute. But too thick-necked for her taste; she didn't even bother to check his Korsch-Wrightson mental stability score. To her lovelead criteria pool she appended Neck Girth. As with so many other criterial elements, she cited Janko Brauch as her template. Janko's neck had been gorg. How old, she wondered, would Janko Brauch have been now, had he lived? Mid-forties? Still a rock god, a viable shigshag?
Sesha winced at her crassness. Poor Janko. The manner of his death had never failed to bring a shudder. Murdered at a gig by a fan of fifteen, a warped little girl with a bowie knife.
A couple of months ago she'd seen a synthesp Janko 'acting' in a Wuthering Heights remake. It may have looked just like Janko, with the voice and all the cool moves present and correct, but a computer-assisted guess as to the performance Janko might have given was no real reincarnation of Janko Brauch. They were enormously talented, these Hollywood pixelpuppeteers, but you could always tell a synthesp from a real, live, breathing actor. Always. If you couldn't, you were a stupe. And in any case, the whole idea was gross. She wouldn't normally be caught watching synthpics. She had only looked at that one out of morbid curiosity.
Sipping transorganic red grape juice, Sesha had a quick glance through her idiopape. The big stark headline sent a shiver through her. SICK NICK STRIKES AGAIN. This time Sick Nick had infiltrated the latest in the interminable series of Simon Bermuda spy flicks and, after raping and maiming the suave secret agent, had spent the remainder of the film subjecting the female lead to a particularly unspeakable variety of sexual torture which, mercifully–annoyingly–the 'pape didn't detail. (Sesha could have got more inf, but she disowned that dark little part of herself.)
As always, when hearing or reading about Sick Nick, Sesha felt nauseated and repelled. And yet, every time she saw a film she found herself half-dreading but half-hoping for Sick Nick to outwit the shitfilters and gatecrash the story and get to work, carving up the characters. (With the exception of anything starring Janko Brauch. She couldn't bear the thought of Sick Nick attacking poor Janko, even his inadequate synthesp.)
Naturally, Hollywood was in two minds about the Sick Nick problem. On the one hand, directors were up in arms about having their work intruded upon, vandalized by this malicious cyberspook, and, as secure quantencryption was still some way off, had begun to insist on a return to the pre-digital age, to shooting films on celluloid and sending them out in cans, and fruck economics. On the other hand, though, boxoffice takings were no longer in so steep a decline. And it was the same with NeTV: viewing figures had held steady now for months. Inevitably, it was widely suspected that the whole thing was a desperate corporate ploy to woo back punters from their Dreamboxes. Not just Sick Nick, but also all those other schoolboy-prank pirate programs, like the roving erotoroutines that hypersexualized every image in their path.