Rule 34 - Charles Stross [92]
“Was that all you wanted?” you ask him, trying to keep your voice from wobbling.
“I have to work now.” He turns to look at you irritably. “Don’t you have a room to go to?”
“Fish,” you say. Then, uncertainly: “Safeword.”
“Go away.” He turns back to the screen.
Next.
You’re standing with your back to the closing door, in the corridor. You slide your feet into your heels and shudder with an emotion you can’t name: Then you turn and walk with exaggerated self-control towards the lifts. Bastard. Try not to think about him. What might have happened in there. The afterglow is shredded and faded to rancid rags that smear a greasy patina across the memory of pleasure. You have a nauseating awareness that you’ve been used: But you went in there meaning to use him for your own ends in turn. It’s not as if you’re a stranger to ass-play. So why do you feel so wrong? As you go back to your room and deadbolt the door behind you and run a long, hot bath, you’re haunted by a simple question.
If you’d used the safeword on him, would he have stopped?
TOYMAKER: Abused
After you get rid of the bitch, you take half an hour to catch up on some admin work. You left the pad in here just in case: You pull your VM down from the cloud and write up a brief summary of your thoughts about what’s going on and your revised business plan, and send it back to the Operation’s servers. Doubtless next time you check in, there’ll be some helpful notes from Control.
Factory-wiping the pad, you shove it back in the hotel safe and pull your clothes on again. You weren’t planning to stay the night here anyway, and the Straight woman’s presence makes it all the more important to move out. So you leave the room, walk to the fire stairs, and descend to the ground floor.
It’s still daylight outside—the sun never seems to set on this fucking city—but you feel drained. It’s some combination of the dour stone architecture, the weird Scottish people, a smidgen of your own paranoia, and the fact that a fucking murderer is stalking your start-up: It’s getting you down. Perhaps you should’ve hit the meow-meow and taken the bitch clubbing first, taken the time to relax: But you’re not planning on hanging around, and anyway, she was tedious. You’ve met her type before, needy thirtysomething singles: Thinks she’s a swinger, but if you take the effort to keep her hot, the next thing you know she’ll be making cow eyes at you and expecting an engagement ring. They get desperately serious when all you want is a fuck (and why are all these Anglo hotels so uptight about room service?). The hell with that.
You walk across the plaza in front of the hotel—a barren flagstoned plinth—towards the round theatre on the other side of the road. There are some bars clustered behind it: In your Rough Guide overlay, they’re helpfully tagged as “the pubic triangle.” Maybe you should have gone there instead of scouring the hotel for desperate would-be housewives.
Five minutes’ walking brings you to a corner where yet more of the desperately grey stone shit looms over you—they have houses with fucking battlements here, stone cannons carved into the eaves—haven’t these people heard of earthquakes? You’re still a bit nervy-scratchy from the day’s events, so rather than piss around outside, you nod amiably at the bouncer and duck through a brass-trimmed door into a venue that promises two hundred kinds of whisky and beer besides.
You order an Irish and Coke, then look around for the darkest corner you can see and go hide in it. There’s a secure note-pad app on your skullphone, works with your shades. You fingertwitch under the table, working out your priorities:
• Get your DNA off the police incident database. It’s not vital, but if you can’t manage it, you’re going to have to go to extremes—find someone who’s died and get the records corrupted—do-able, but very costly.
• Find out who’s after your