Fiction

Chapter 5 - Brave New World

"Hi Porjy, howsya doin?"

What had started as a taunt, 'Porjy' was now her pet-name for her Uncle Charles.  

'Uncle' had a different meaning for them. 

As soon as she realised that she was two months older than her uncle, Alexandra started to call him 'child Charlie', along with 'Uncle Charlie' or just 'Charlie' as the mood took her. This varied, according to the immediate state of their relationship, that could be: combative or manipulative or cooperative.  All in the space of an hour or so. 

About the time they became teenagers she heard about Byron's Childe Harold.  As in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.  Byron's alter ego.

Intelligent and resourceful, but tired of a life of dissipation, the character seemed to have been written for Charlie.  Charles became the archetypal 'Byronic Hero' like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. 

Emily Bronte the author of Wuthering Heights was another of Alex's precocious young role models, along with Mary Shelly, Byron's friend, who wrote her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus at the age of 19.  Emily died at 30 and Byron at 36. 

Byron's given name was George and initially she called Charles: 'Georgie' but four years ago little cousin George got that name - hence Porjy for uncle Charles. 

It seemed serendipitous that one of Byron's daughters, Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace was a maths geek, who had both a programming language and a computer named after her last century because she had written the first ever algorithm coded to be processed by a machine. 

"Hi, Candi" Charles replied. 

This was his retaliatory joke for the day.  Alexandra, his niece, had recently launched the NYGirls Sexperience reality show, based on a 20th century soapy, in turn based on a salacious book by Candace Bushnell.  Of course, they've never met the actual girls.  It's all done by bots and other code they write while babysitting and then unleash through The Cloud.

"Have you sent the girls to Seraglio", he asked.

Seraglio, is a real 'bricks and mortar' nightclub in downtown Urban.  It's based on Byron's description of the harem in Don Juan.

Don Juan the eponymous hero of the epic poem, is smuggled into a Seraglio (harem) disguised as a girl, Juanna, by several of the wives who use him for their pleasure until he is able to escape to further amorous adventures.  He goes on to become one of the many lovers of Catherine the Great of Russia.

Neither Alex nor Charles have actually been to Seraglio.  Obviously fifteen-year-olds are not admitted.  But they created it as an homage to their hero.  And they know every inch of it. 

They had difficulty remembering a time when they did not know how to write code. And they'd started their activities in The Cloud almost as soon as they could talk.  They did this competitively, learning to hack and crack security software, using the quantum computing cores at the deepest layer that can crack or bypass any password or encryption.   Since becoming experts in security they have both written their own security routines, initially to protect their own systems, and then to be sold commercially.  Some of these are now used widely across the Web and have 'back doors' that only they know about. 

There are now very few Cloud-connected-devices that they can't use for their own purposes.  This includes everything from the ubiquitous security cameras, access passes, and door locks to lighting and climate control in buildings, vehicle systems of all kinds: planes (particularly planes); ships; trains; busses and cars.

It's many years since people first installed security cameras around their own homes and had a camera and microphone in every device, to record images and chat to their friends.  And with modern automation, virtually all manufacturing and construction processes, utilities, public health and education are Cloud connected and managed. They literally have at least one spy in every manufactured device and every room on the planet.

So, there's nothing about their nightclub that they don't know about or can't easily find out, including what the staff had for breakfast and if they had marital or extramarital relations last night. 

But spying on one person, let alone two billion, wastes a lot of time and they don't actually bother with all that boring stuff.  They have intelligent virtual agents, or bots, that monitor all the data that can answer and question they have about anyone and immediately report anything significant. 

Otherwise, it is just a great game, like playing the 'Sims', that kids and teens played last century, except with real people. 

When they decided on a nightclub to amuse their 'Sims' they had great fun designing the buildings and fitting them out.  Byron's descriptions in the poem are too sketchy so to house Seraglio they built an exotic Oriental palace modelled on the Alhambra in Andalusia.  They have access to more or less unlimited virtual credit tokens and simply employ companies to do the actual property acquisitions, demolitions and construction.

For Seraglio's location they demolished some crappy old buildings in the middle of town and took over some adjacent 'green-space'.  In their place they've constructed several Moorish pavilions set in semi-formal gardens with fountains.

They had started this gambit one day on the big MV at Miranda and Ferdinand's, just for something to do while babysitting.  But now they play with it and make changes whenever they get together.   

Their virtual agents, hosted in The Cloud, keep things going whenever they are doing something else.  And once they decide to do something it usually just runs itself, in the background.

Alex has always liked classic 20th century film and television. A TV is an early type of MV with only sound and vision.  

She also loves animals.  So they hacked into the ECRP (extinct creatures recovery program) GM Labs and engineered real, biological, lions and tigers and bears.  Referencing The Wizard of Oz. 'Oh my!'

With genetic manipulation, including innate behavioural modification, they are really cool!  They live on a diet of dried kibble and use a human toilet.  The bears are huge and still seem fearsome but are really quite affectionate, like dogs. The lions and tigers are like very big house cats, very amenable to being petted, and they are non-allergenic. 

They both like to conjure up totally new living things like this, just because they can.  They recently tried to a use horse embryo with selected narwhal DNA to make the first living Unicorn. Alex thought a unicorn would be nice for the gardens but the stud owner who found it among her foals killed it, thinking it an aberration. 

They have tweaked the code so that the 'bot', that manages the delivery of blastocysts for implantation, will also guard the foal, anticipating and preventing any harmful human intervention by arranging an 'accident' should the person attempt a repeat of last time.

"And this time I want it to glow in the dark too, like a glow mouse", said Alex.

Their already modified beasts now roam Seraglio and are a major attraction, padding between luxurious cushions and chaise-longue, on which patrons can recline smoking Hookahs, spiced with the latest in synthetic psychedelics.  

These are cooked-up in automated molecular assemblers in various University labs that they have hijacked, unbeknown, of course, to the host institutions.  A small band of cooperative students supplement their meagre student allowance, smuggling simple chemicals, mostly sugar and some vitamin and mineral supplements, in and the products out, for their anonymous employer in The Cloud.

For the purposes of employing flesh and blood people they have each created a thirty-year-old Avatar to act as a go-between.  The Avatars look entirely real, when viewed in two or three dimensions, in everyday communications devices.  Their human agents simply get a call though their VPA from the Avatar with their duties and the desired outcomes.  Employment conditions are very generous and become more so if legality becomes less clear-cut.  Credit for their services goes into to their account in the normal way.  But no one has been able to pin down a single source, as the paying account seems to change with every pay-period.

All their agents both living and virtual believe the Avatars are actually them.  Alex's Avatar is a dashing swashbuckler based on one of her old movie stars, Errol Flynn.   The Chair of the central planning committee is desperately in love with him/her and keeps requesting an audience.  Alex has been having fun feeding her lines from Errol's movies; and, of course, from Twelfth Night.

Seraglio is now the leading up-market nightclub and casino, with the top rating star entertainers and celebrities. 

Initially all the 'Celebs' VPA's were directed to accept offers of gigs at Seraglio.  But now the credit transfers are unrivalled and there is great competition among the best paid and most famous in the world to appear.

Alex wanted gaming rooms too, because Ada Byron had attempted to develop a gambling system, after she became the countess of Lovelace.  The gaming rooms are located in the AA Byron Casino Pavilion.  The alcohol shots are free for gamblers.  How cool is that joke!

Her name also resonated with the name of the first ever truly famous porn-star, Linda Lovelace.  And Ada had almost as bad a reputation as her father, who was said to be 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know', by one of his lovers: Lady Caroline Lamb, novelist and wife of Lord Melbourne, after whom Melbourne, Australia was named.   So a porn angle was needed, particularly as Charles is the 'brains' behind PornMV, that since he and she wrote the code, has become the largest porn MV site in the world and put most of the others out of business.

In addition to discreet alcoves off the lounge, dining and recreation areas for patrons to who wish to engage in amorous activities, the luxurious mirrored bedrooms in the Lovelace pavilion provide for every need, as described in the classic porn movies.  But retaining the Moorish theme and the ambiance of Byron's poem:

Charles and Alex decided to recruit a range of suitably upper-class women and men, selected from their social media profiles, as 'hostesses', Seracocotte, and 'hosts', Seragigoló, for the club.  They had great fun screening them and then applying a range of changes to their lives to encourage them to 'take up the positions' and have them cooperate willingly.  The fifteen-year-olds giggled at the pun. 

They found plenty of potential candidates.  At the top of the list were the bored wives and househusbands of the wealthy, having affairs and sharing fantasy images and tactile data with their lovers using social media in The Cloud.  It was the easiest thing to hack these communications then to have their spouse find out in the most lurid way. The next step was to shut down the finances of, or hospitalise, anyone they turned to for help.  That left them to accept a completely unheralded offer of employment at Seraglio, that came to their rescue with a promise of very generous conditions just to keep doing for credit what they had previously done for fun; and board/bored.  Another teen pun!

They'd quickly found some candidates who fitted the Byronic poem:

But that's as far as it went.  They obviously needed more descriptions so they cast about for other references.

Alex had some great ideas from her old movies.  "Why don't we see if we can make them re-enact scenarios from the movies?  There are some great ones like: 'Belle de Jour', 'The Story of O' and several of the tales from the Decameron and the Emmanuelle series."

Each woman would still need to embrace the Byronic sentiment:

They had an amusing argument.  Was there a deliberate double entendre the final line of that stanza or have meanings changed since Byronic times?

"You two are sex obsessed" Samantha had told them recently.

"She ought to know", Alex had said as soon as she was out of earshot. 

Charles hit her upper arm for insulting his mother but not hard, because that was the general opinion in the family.  And both statements were probably true. Both were aware that their recent heightened interest in sex was partly due to the growing excitement induced by the other.  Alex wasn't too sure if the half-brother of one's mother, who is younger than you, is off limits.  Is he a half uncle?  But when she 'became a woman' then Charles's 'voice dropped' three months later, they each demanded new privacy.   Now the bathroom door was sometimes slammed shut, instead of remaining open as it had usually been when they were kids, particularly when they had been engaged in some interesting technical discussion.  Once it was normal to touch hands or drop off to sleep in the same bed but now, they generally kept their distance.  A psychiatrist would say that their forbidden sexual desire was being sublimated: that they were giving expression to this through the lives of the people they were manipulating.

The recruitment turned out to be a great exercise in the subtle manipulation of life paths.  An 'accident' here; a delayed train; misinformation there; an opportunity; a stroke of luck; a chance encounter.  Soon they perfected their virtual agents to have someone follow a script almost exactly.