Rule 34 - Charles Stross [66]
Your march across the polished floor of the lobby comes to an abrupt halt. There’s a well-dressed woman waiting beside the desk, but nobody behind it. You can feel your arousal level rising: You need your bag; your commercial sample is sleeping in it; are they playing with you? The woman is watching you with elaborate inattentiveness, carefully avoiding eye contact. “Do you work here?” you demand.
“No.” Now she looks at you. A wry twist of the lips. “They’re trying to find my parcel. I had it sent poste restante—FedEx say they delivered it this morning, but the hotel know nothing.”
The very idea! Suddenly it strikes you. You shipped your luggage via Yamato, a takuhaibin logistics company, and they simply don’t lose things. But if this woman’s package went missing, and she used FedEx—“My luggage is missing, too,” you confess. “Think they’ve got a problem?”
“I’d say so.” She nods. “Mr. MacAndrews says they’ve been having network trouble all day. That’s usually a euphemism for malware, in my experience.”
An upswing in cybernetic infestation isn’t your problem, but it puts the hospitality manager’s attitude in a different light. Maybe he’s not actually trying to fuck with you—
And here he comes, scurrying back out from a locked door with a box in his hands. He sees you and does a double-take, but goes straight for your companion: “Ms. Straight? We found it! They’ve got the computers working again, and it was sitting in our loading area along with the other inbound consignments.” He looks at you directly. “Mr. . . . Christie? Your luggage was missing, too, wasn’t it?” Cheeky sod. You nod. “I’ll just go see if it’s turned up as well, now we’ve got our logistics working again.”
He turns and rushes off, leaving your companion looking at her box. “Humph. I thought he was supposed to get some proof of identity before handing items over,” she says disapprovingly.
“Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?” you say, and smile at her. You focus on her properly for the first time, taking in: red hair, carefully styled; lips and eyes emphasized, but not heavy on the slap; wearing a green dress with a low neckline that’s kept on the business side of sexy by a black jacket. Mature but rootable, in other words, and if she isn’t on the pull, you’re a cactus.
You haven’t had any action for a couple of weeks now. You don’t know where the local cruising grounds are, and here in the dour puritan anglosphere the hotel front desk doesn’t provide room service. You have certain needs—exacerbated now you’re coming down from your little reality excursion. You posted an ad on a swinger aggregator a couple of days ago, but no joy yet. The idea of her plumped wasp-sting lips wrapped around your cock appeals: You take conscious control of your smile and widen it.
“I suppose so.” She catches your eye and smiles back. “I’ll just have to wait.”
Interested but coy: You’ve met this attitude before, and it bugs the living fuck out of you. Why don’t these sheeple admit that it’s pointless and drop the pretence that they care? Oh, but I’d feel guilty, they say if you ask them why they tipped the waiter/returned the excess change they were given/didn’t pad the insurance claim/turned down the zipless fuck—even though there’s absolutely no chance that anyone would catch them. You smile back at her and nod.
“Are you staying here for long?” you ask.
“Oh, just checking in for a few nights.” She raises an eyebrow. “Yourself?”
“The same,” you say honestly. “Here on business, just checking in, gone tomorrow. At a loose end, really.”
Her pupils dilate slightly, and there are some other cues: You’ve studied this shit, looked into NLP, and you focus on emitting