Film Studies # 1: The Blue Movie * “My employer,” she said, “is willing to pay a generous fee.” “Your employer can hire a professional,” Oleg said, as coldly as he could and with (he hoped) the right note of casual detachment. He’d been approached, before, by secretaries with offers and with the same promise of generous pay. They all worked for a singular breed of Employer...corporate types...mafia types in need of a particular commodity but wrapped in the same need for discretion and anonymity. He knew others who’d taken such commissions and he knew what nightmares came to them when they slept, alone, dreaming of what blood colored the money now nested into their accounts. Art, he thought, and prostitution were too much of the same thing where certain employers were concerned. He didn’t need their money. “Professionals,” the Secretary said, “lack a certain sense of improvisation.” “Then you employer can hire a street boy.” “Smut isn’t a part of the equation. My employer requires an experience: a meticulous balance of emotional, sensual, and observational factors. In short, my employer needs a distillation, not a simple recording.” Her smile was tight and graceful: practiced. It didn’t reach her eyes. It was a Public Relations smile, or that of a flight attendant: defense against crow’s feet. He’d seen women flashing that smile at 40,000 feet above the Atlantic, and the high-altitude smirk was bad news at Broadway Avenue street level. She allowed the expression to fade and toyed with the rim of her drink: Bombay and tonic with a green wedge of GMO-lime, gene-stamped with a Leydon Bioteque trademark. It had been her idea to come here to talk and to pay the kind of price Leydon Bioteque limes commanded. “A sense of improvisation?” “Authenticity.” “There are a dozen architects in this bar alone, a few meme-jockeys and image doctors. What about them? They’re hungrier than I am. They’re local. Or has your employer cultivated a fetish for Eastern Bloc nostalgia?” A shrug. A casual sip of Bombay Gin and noontropyl-infused tonic. Oleg caught the faint scent of real Vermont lime, its designer mutation spreading a note of mass-market elegance through local bar-space. Most of the votive-lit tables were occupied by big money in crisp, Egyptian cotton shirts, buttoned down over neat measures of masculine ease or hints of detached, feminine élan. They had swizzle sticks carved from real ebony here: proof that Leydon Bioteque had controlling interest in what one drank (and how one drank) in this particular bar. “My employer is a collector of your work: has been since your Moscow Period. Did you know that you even had a Moscow Period?” He remembered cold, damp nights in a cramped flat on Arbatskaya Street and sullen walks around the tourist-friendly perimeter of Red Square: in rain, in snow, and in displaced UK fog. He shrugged. “At any rate, my employer has quite a number of your works from that period. Amazing synaptic overlay maps...whole moods compressed into the memories of a crow, the lid to a jar, the crumble of toast blackened with fish eggs. My employer—if I may be so bold—has fallen in love with you. Not in some swooning, socially-unacceptable way, but as any possible patron might, when struck with the brilliance of a prodigy, an iconoclast, an individual. They’re imitating you in Tokyo. London had a black market in your abandoned rough drafts; until my employer acquired them all. That was thanks to a former associate of yours: one I need not name. You know how big you are, how influential, but none of that has bearing on what my employer seeks.” “Smut,” Oleg said. “It’s more complicated than that,” the Secretary deadpanned. “Is it?” “What my employer needs is a composition...a collaboration: a prolonged moment of your near-autistic focus on the most obscure minutiae of the sensual human experience. If you’ll accept the commission. And whether you accept it or not, my employer will pay you $20,000 for simply talking to me now.” A chill rand down his spine; the hair on the nape of his neck stood on end: at attention, he thought, like the sand-blond quills of some backwoods animal. Fear had always been like that for him: an animal presence at home between his thoughts. It was there. Now: —warm in contrast to the manner in which his spine colored itself with a chill, as if bathed in a mentholated, differential anesthetic. —warm in contrast to this Secretary’s air-hostess grin, as she sat beside him at the main bar, occasionally gauging his reflection in the bar-back mirror, trapped behind the tiered arrangement of bottles. He’d watched her since the beginning of their complicated and combative little chat, and in glancing at her reflection now, he noted the cast of her dark features and the lines of her body. There was something Somali in the shape of her face, something brooding and Kenyan locked deep within her seldom-blinking eyes. Smoke scratched within her voice, evidence—maybe—of something artificial woven in to the nucleotide sequence of her genetic narrative. She was, he thought, something of a rare and carnivorous orchid, and he couldn’t escape the bone-deep awareness that he was tonight’s challenging (and inevitable) prey. “I don’t know,” he said, sipping his Belgian beer. “Drink your beer,” the Secretary said, reaching the left-inside pocket of her sleek, black blazer: something custom-designed and, as expected for a night in this bar, expensive. She withdrew a flattened rectangle of black, gilt-edged plastic, embedded with a stamp-sized square of non-standard circuitry. “Think.” She lid the card across the bar face, a demand to take it and pocket it, discretely and elegantly. Your pay for tonight; all other pertinent information is here, too. Look it over. Think it over. Contact me when you have an answer. Yes or no. That’s all it’ll take.” She smiled, and for the first time, there was movement in her gaze, a twinkle: something predatory, playful, and all-too-knowing. * * * Three days of rain washed the color from Oleg’s mood. He distracted himself with work: editing, mostly; though he’d put in a good fifteen hours of writing synaptic-overlay code. He thought it would help. He thought it would be easy to lose himself in the Zen-process of shaping a synaptic map to the exact specifications of a repeat client’s latent neurosis profile, but the demanding complexity of neural cartography simply left him tired and anxious. Lifestyle design was little more than a sideline but it was the source of his bread and butter. It maintained his roof, his kitchen, and the warmth (and only-occasional loneliness) of his bed, in a space 80 floors above Wabash Avenue. Rain had started falling when he left the neo-riche confines of Vēta, with the Employer’s Secretary clinging to his arm like the most improbable (though statuesque and intimidating) of blind dates. She’d paused with him in the onset of a drizzle, and simply extended her palm in order to catch drizzle-drops before smearing them between her fingers. “It’s so easy to forget,” she’d said. “Forget?” “Rain. What it feels like when I’m walking in it. What it feels like when I stop to feel it.” She smiled, and the expression was something small, private, and withdrawn: a veil, Oleg imagined. “It’s never the same thing...never the same rain. You can feel the difference. I can.” At a loss, Oleg simply nodded, slipping into the familiar role of the detached, professional observer. “You’re rare,” he said. “Most people can’t define the differences between one rain and another.” “I can,” she said. “And so can you. I have one of your early compositions: a first-person sensory narrative. You’re walking, barefoot, through puddles on some gritty street. I can’t read Cyrillic, and so I don’t know what street it is, but it’s damp with rain, and you’re careful to avoid even the slightest glimpse of your reflection...you don’t look down at either your hands or your feet, but you feel so incredibly aware of drizzle as it falls and touches your skin. It’s as if you know where each drop touches. There’s only your phenomenal sense body-awareness, but no identity to attach to it. It’s a disturbing experience to be you, but never see, to never know what you look like. I paid $1000 for that experience. It’s worth so much more than that.” “Rusalka,” he said. The name of that particular composition. He’d just broken up with Yuri. He’d been young, tortured, stupid. He’d wanted to drown. “Rusalka,” the Secretary said, closing her hand on smeared drizzle drops. For a moment, there was silence. “Oleg,” she said. “Think about my Employer’s offer. Think about it, honestly.” And it rained the next day. It rained the next night. And the day after that, but it was during the second night that he’d swiped the shiny black card through the slot of his personal laptop and accessed the information embedded in the magnetic strip. It took him an hour to read through it all, and another hour to absorb the basics of it. It didn’t take much to make him say yes, and it he dared not think about what that implied. He’d simply locked eyes with the little webcam lens like the eye of some crystalline animal. “Yes,” he said, when the Secretary answered the call, looking as if she’d just stepped out of a high-level business meeting. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it.” And he broke the connection before she could respond. And now Nate was back home, and it was still raining. They sat, facing one another in the kitchen area, an expanse of black marble table-top between them. Gray light filtered in through the window-wall. It had been Nate’s idea to brew tea: the black, astringent stuff he favored: strong enough to grow hair on your teeth, as he’d always liked to say. And now Oleg sat across from him, focused on the diaphanous waft of steam rising from the sand-colored Japanese teacup. “No doubt about it,” Nate said, his voice low and confident. “It’s a porn gig. Once upon a time, porn was something else: no less complicated, but partitioned from the rest of mundane life. We had it all, back then, when we had old-style porn. It was as sacred as The Madonna, but as naughty as the whore. It came in a wide range of flavors from vanilla to extreme, deep-niche kink—which covered a lot of territory. But now. Now, everything’s changed. We ourselves are different: we’ve got humans, baselines like you and me and your oh-so-charming Secretary, whoever she might be. But we’ve got post-humans too, post-human consociates, and consociate corporations. They’ve changed the game, and now porn is...well...now, porn is mundane, and so we need something else to serve that odd, binary, Madonna/Whore niche. “So,” Oleg said. “I was right?” “Yeah. A little bit. That woman’s employer is after porn...at least in the sense of a vicarious, sensual experience: something physical and with a distinct, emotional component. That woman’s employer is probably nothing less than a consociate corporation feeling the twinges of its vestigial humanity. It needs you, or someone like you to mollify the ghost of something it lost.” “I said yes,” Oleg said, an errant tickle of hair brushing the crest of his left ear. He brushed it away and drew a deep breath before stealing a sip of astringent, black tea. Nate smiled and chuckled, as if to himself. “Smart man,” he said. “I’d kill you if you said no.” “You wouldn’t.” And for the first time in days, Oleg smiled. “No. I wouldn’t. Not literally, anyway.” “I’m afraid.” “Smart man.” Rain thumped against the kitchen-space window-wall, distorting the cityscape beyond. Oleg glanced out into the gray, near-misty expanse, picking out the silver spire of the Leydon Tower in the north-easterly distance. Nate’s words echoed: Smart man. He felt like an idiot. “Durak,” he said, to himself. Fool. * * * It had been so simple to say yes, to commit: simple, as well, to meet with the Secretary, once more and work out the finer points of the arrangement. He’d seen low-end hustles, the un-licensed deal in the back rooms and cellars of Moscow and Minsk, in the nova-glare of Tokyo or New York, or the languid sleaze of Miami. He knew the rules and the moves and how to stay as far as possible from the twin maws of desperation and self-loathing burning in the eyes of nearly every buyer. He’d sold a few times, in violation of his license, and did better than most because he’d taken the necessary steps...the ones a license demanded as defense against induced autism, radical somatosensory overload, or simple, dirty code. He’d put his buyers under the hat and mapped their brainwaves. He’d acquired their neuro-chemical fingerprints, and used all of that to give them what they wanted: all of their fantasies tailored to the specifications of their own neurochemical balances, their own ion-potentials and metabolic rates. His sideline-hustle and his art were one-in-the-same: shaped by the forces of narrative and theme. He told stories as visceral as anything by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Poe, or Melville. He sold to rich clients, most of whom were post-human and post-mortal and exceedingly hungry (as Nate had said) for just one last corporeal experience. It had always been the same: just one more moment of sunlight on remembered skin, one more kiss from a boy/girl, one more taste of water or milk, or the bittersweet melt of dark chocolate on the tongue. One more splinter. One more hangover. One more orgasm, as damp and as messy as anything shared between animals. “Porn,” Nate said, once, “in the post-human realm is anything biological.” It had always been Nate’s business to know such things. And now, alone and with an echo of the Secretary’s voice in his head, Oleg considered the warmth of sunlight slanting in through the living-room window. “It’s simple,” the Secretary had said: her angular, dark features centered (precisely) on the wall-sized chat screen. The conversation, Oleg knew, wore whole compacted layers of corporate-memo encryption. He was at home, more alone with the Secretary than he cared to contemplate. “My employer wants simplicity,” she said. “A shower. The scent of soap. The warmth of water.” Though he’d accepted the commission, he balked. “Anyone can do that!” The Secretary simply cocked the perfect arch of her left eyebrow. “And?” “I’ll need a map, at least.” “Use a general template. Like you did with Rusalka.” “General template’s messy. Amateur.” “Raw feed is what my Employer seeks. Your own, unedited tactile awareness.” The Secretary smiled. “Amateur is the most profound experience, after all...because amateurs are often too specific, too spontaneous for calculated mass consumption. As I said, my employer seeks authenticity, and that includes the sorts of flaws native to an amateur production.” Oleg nodded. And now, hours after the conversation and the necessary rituals of preparation, Oleg drew a deep breath. Rusalka taught him how to waterproof a recording rig, and for an instant, he felt the old pangs of angry isolation: a replay of that singular mood to walk in the rain and to walk with naked feet through city streets, through puddles rife with the promise of broken glass, errant lumps of jagged gravel, and the squish of things he dared not contemplate. But things were different now, Yury was a lifetime distant, rich in his way, but gone...forgotten for the most part. Oleg had learned things from him and those things remained: —how to touch the skin with site-specific anesthetics. —how to seal a recording rig against the threat of sweat, sex, or a headlong dive into the murky Moscow River. —how to look, and where to look so that any half-wit buyer might insert himself (herself) into the narrative crafted in the collaboration of your own afferential nerves and the customized afferent recorder, its headgear like the articulated limbs of a rubberized crab. —how to slip into the one Zen-state, the one Yoga-state that people with enough money were always willing to buy. And in that state, he entered the most intimate of rooms, undressed, and spun the shower taps until steam billowed out from a sound like rain in some Siberian grassland. Naked, he slipped the recording cap into place, grimacing at the need for a haircut, and adjusting the flexible cap-sensors for maximum contact with scalp and temple, and the patch of gene-tweaked skin centered on the nape of his neck. The tingle of feedback from the recorder told him that the afferent-patch was in place and ready to capture his experience. He closed his eyes, drew a deep and calming breath, stepped into the shower, and sub-vocalized the command to record. Within an hour, he was finished. * * * The Secretary smiled, as if from whole kilometers away. Oleg considered the expanse of table-space between them, his hands pale in the light of a single candle, waving its flame in the pit of a neat cylinder of opaque, white glass. Candle-light caught in the deeper amber of his beer, picking out the shapes of bubbles, like stars scattered in the smallest and strangest of constellations. The Secretary raised her drink. “As of today, you’re the richest man in the city. How does it feel?” Oleg shrugged; it would take a while—he knew—for things to sink in, for things to hit him, as they invariably would. “I don’t know,” he said. The Secretary smiled. “Try buying something. Try going somewhere. Anywhere.” “I’m tired,” he said. “Home is as far as I can make it, today.” “Were you this tired after Rusalka.” “I’m always tired after a project. The work is harder than it looks.” “I figured as much,” the Secretary said; after a while, she considered the clear depths of her drink. “You’ve crafted a pure somatosensory poem. I haven’t experienced it, but my employer speaks gushing praise. “And who is your employer?” Oleg asked. He’d met with the Secretary, a team of lawyers and official witnesses to sign the appropriate documents, to swear to non-disclosure in the appropriate areas and appropriate times. He’d been made aware of a vast and complicated presence at the other end of it all: a massive conglomerate of post-mortal, post-human beings…a troubling co-mingling of the post-human and evolved AI, but no one named the Employer or the complicated network of interests to which the Employer was but a facet; now, seated across from the Secretary, he pondered that singular question of identity, and in a moment of subjective telepathy, the Secretary smiled and raised her drink to here lips. “My employer,” she said. “Is intimate with the highest levels of all human endeavor, but it would be impossible to describe just what or who my employer is. Suffice it to say that parts of my employer were once like your or me. Mortal. Meat. But over time, things changed, and now….” “Now,” Oleg said. “The human is now outmoded, but nostalgia demands an occasional look back…an occasional recorded shower.” “Yes.” “And there will be more, won’t there?” The Secretary nodded. “Most likely.” “You’ll find me again…or someone else…” “You, most likely.” “And you’ll pay. Just like now.” “Just like now.” “With what I’ve just received, I doubt that I’ll ever need to be paid for anything, ever a gain.” The Secretary smiled, and now the expression was sharp and terrifying. “Things change,” she said, raising her drink. “But before they do that, perhaps we should finish our drinks here, and you should return home and spend some quiet time with your companion. Things are going to change…for the both of you, and I’d like to think that such changes will be good. But as you said, you’re tired. So drink up. Enjoy the night, and then go home.” “Just like that, eh? Just like this is any ordinary day?” “Just like that,” the Secretary said. “Because it is like any other day. Ordinary.” “No. I’m a millionaire now; I can afford to drink in places I’ll always refuse to visit.” “Yes,” the Secretary said. “And you’ll be one for the rest of your life. Today—first day or not—is an ordinary one. You’ll see.” Oleg closed his eyes and stole a sip of beer. * THE END * Leydon Bioteque has been with me since the early 1990s, back when magazines had names like: Mondo 2000, bOING bOING before its all digital conversion, or Access, with its glossy spreads of shirts that looked, disturbingly, like rubber. I’d written a number of stories in a disturbingly hyper-commercialized near-ish future, involving…well…hackers, culture jammers, multinational corporations. This story oozed out of my pores after looking through vintage men’s magazines: the kind that can only be owned by one’s best friend’s roommate. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.