“You’re a pussy! This has loser written all over it!”

Captain Stellon was taking a lot of flak from Felquick over the choice of venue.

“Why not the Crow’s Nest, or dinner at the place on Sheer Face, you know the one… Landing Bay 3. You're taking a woman out on a date, for fuck’s sake! Snakes n Ladders?! Who you trying to kid?”

Snakes n Ladders was just the kind of place Captain Stellon was after. Yes, the view was fairly crap, but a cocktail or two would bring out the aesthetic of the gaseous capture units obscuring the setting Selt, and the gimmicky slides and ladders meant that the pressure of romantic associations would be lifted from the evening.

In the event, there were even a few young families – the sound of children playing on the slides. Felquick didn’t get it. Not this time. It wasn’t a date. Kaitar was already significant. Maybe that’s what was annoying Felquick. But what did she signify? That was the question.

They were on the second cocktail and the enormous grey globe of the Selt was half-submerged by the time he plucked up the courage to come clean.

“You’re probably wondering what my game is, Kaitar…”

She gave him a puzzled look.

“…truth is, you kind of got to me right back when we were in class together.”

She froze comically now, as if he were telling a joke, building up to a punch line.

“I’ve always been on this one track, you see. Competing – always another hoop to jump through, the career path and all that. I think you were the first person who made that whole world seem… I don’t know… a bit childish, I suppose.”

She rolled her head to one side, an uncomfortable expression on her face.

“No, I’m serious,” persisted Captain Stellon. “Remember when I came round to your pod that day. I left there feeling like a little boy who should have known better – like you were the adult one.”

“Ah, come on!” she protested.

“It was a good thing though. I’ve always had this hunger for independence, freedom… always wanted to be my own man I guess. I thought flying was the answer. That feeling of power and freedom that you get. But on another level you were right. I’d just be following someone else’s orders. ‘Cannon Fodder’ as you so neatly put it.”

Kaitar winced. She was beginning to feel the weight of responsibility for his dropping out of college.

“Anyway, it’s no big deal. I think you helped me actually and I just wanted you to know that. Oh and I have a confession to make… That game trial… It wasn’t really a coincidence… I looked you up… seemed like a good way of getting back in touch.” He gave her a searching look, hoping he hadn’t gone too far.

“I’d kind of worked that out, to be honest,” she said. “All our other volunteers were either gamers or design students.”

Captain Stellon was getting used to being put in his place.

“Don’t worry about it,” she went on, “I’m flattered.” She paused, then seemed to decide that she owed him more than that. “You know, we’re not so different Richard. We all have to make compromises. I probably come across as more sure of myself than I really am.”

“How d’you mean?” he encouraged her.

“We’re still working on the settings of Earth II. It’s been driving me a bit mental. I must have played it more than 10 times now.” She began massaging her temples with her left hand, as if it would erase the memories of being immersed. “We’re experimenting with excitation and inhibition in different regions of the brain at different stages of the narrative arc, tweaking the Retinal Implant and other sensory inputs, altering the cortical streaming and the pharmaceutical ratios accordingly. The tricky thing is to create an experience that feels spontaneous but at the same time determined by your own decisions, your own free will. The more you play, the less nervous or inhibited you become. I quickly got bored with the basic settings because I knew that the experience was ring-fenced: brain activity, heart rate, breathing, temperature, they’re all monitored and regulated by the machine, which ultimately affects the narrative – limits what can happen in Earth II. It’s difficult to put your finger on the problem exactly, because those are the same biological limits we spend nearly all of our waking lives within. Somehow you need to know that there is at least the potential to go beyond them… for it to feel real. So we don’t even know how to communicate the problem to AS. Something about the embodied mind we still don’t get. And it might be something that AS doesn’t get either. Because of course, it’s not embodied like we are. I’m probably not making much sense…” She paused thoughtfully. “Did you hear about that child who killed his playmate in the sharepod on K Sector?”

“Oh that, yeah, that was appalling.”

“So terrible, but you know what my first thought was? ‘That could never happen in Earth II’. Each day in the real world you can wake up and decide to become a saint or a mass murderer. Anything seems possible. We’re so radically free. Reality is on a crazy setting – that’s its buzz. The game doesn’t feel real when those possibilities are taken away.”

“Isn’t that what Autonomous Society does for us? Keeps us in check? Disables the crazy setting? That’s what the Estonian High Command would have us believe anyway.”

“Up to a point, yes. But it still feels less free in Earth II… and it shouldn’t really, especially given the game takes place on Earth. I mean, life on Earth itself was much freer than anything we’ve known under AS. For the unregistered it probably still is.”

“Yeah, and you can be sure their lives are nasty, brutish and short.”

“Hobbes,” she added knowingly.

“Hobbes?”

“The quote… Thomas Hobbes?” She paused in vain. “Anyway, history shows that it was difficult for humans to keep themselves in check for long before the advent of Autonomous Society: The Battles of Exodus, World War, genocide, the list of crazy stuff goes on and on. These days, your AFZ is probably the closes thing to freedom we have here.”

“Yeah, I reckon flying a mission in the AFZ would give you that buzz. Oh I see, that’s what’s missing in the game. Yes, I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“Gaming’s all about keeping people plugged in. AS must understand that. It knows it has to keep us occupied with something approximating the freedoms we once had. People get bored with predictability, you see. What we really want is the simulation where absolutely anything goes. That’s the interesting one to watch. No safety net. No metaphysics. No Deus ex Machina. Just total freedom to fuck it up. How the hell is a universe like that going to play out?”

Captain Stellon nodded slowly in response to her rhetorical question. Kaitar put her hand on his knee for a second, almost accidentally, as she stood up to go to the toilet. He watched her walk away, then realised that Felquick was perched on the edge of her recliner. He looked pissed off.

“Bail! Bail! She’s psychotic! I can’t believe you’re not seeing red flags here!”

“Take it easy, Felquick. You wanna watch your blood pressure you know.”

“She’s a fucking lunatic! How much longer are you going to sit there listening to her unhinged bullshit?”

“She’s trying to make sense of life. It’s not a crime you know.”

“Yeah, but chopping someone’s balls off is, so don’t come crying to me when she’s got a knife to yours!”

“What is it with you? One minute you’re telling me to book a restaurant, the next it’s DEFCON 1. This was all your doing from the get-go. Don’t you remember? You more or less introduced me to her.”

“Don’t try and psycho-analyse me, son. I’m responsible for everything here. You’re just another aspect, that’s all.”

“Well you seem to be getting very worked up about something. You’re not jealous, are you?” Captain Stellon smirked. The days of trying to reach understanding or make peace with Felquick were long gone. All that remained was to play him at his own game – get in as many kicks below the belt as you could.

“Think of it as frustration with my own handiwork,” replied Felquick in a calmer tone. He seemed more at home when their conversations turned combative. “They say character is destiny, Captain Stellon. I always knew you were on a strange trajectory.” With that he rose to his feet, adding as he walked away, “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you, that’s all.”

Captain Stellon wanted to change the subject when Kaitar got back. “By the way, do you still hope to get to Earth one day?”

Kaitar’s face suddenly lit up as she beamed across at him. “I got clearance back in Seltane. I’m leaving in a week. I’m going to stay with my parents tomorrow – spend some time with them before I go.

“Wow! Seriously?” He was genuinely shocked – sometimes our hopes build up without our knowledge and his face betrayed that cliff edge of disappointment.

“Come on,” she said, picking up her cocktail, “Let’s down these and go to Terralab.” You can never be sure, but it seemed like that was the moment when she made her decision. The fact that Felquick remained silent on the walk to the club was also a sign that things were probably going in his favour.

They could hear the pulse of Terralab’s tectonic funk in the air long before they got to the club’s entrance. A love of dancing was not something you broadcast about yourself at cadet college, but in private, tuned into a cortical stream, Captain Stellon would sometimes dance till he was bathed in sweat. And though he couldn’t even name the genre, tectonic funk was already sending irresistible waves through his body.

The bouncer had greeted Kaitar with a kiss and they’d been ushered in free of charge. Under other circumstances Captain Stellon might have been put on the back foot by this sudden immersion in a social scene so obviously her own, but the sonic authority of the bassline from the rubberized floor had him captive to the heavy jolts and smooth returns of the music. Cortical stream was all well and good, but this was the real deal: actual sound vibrations in air – visceral, shared. Much to their delight, they were dancing together almost immediately, their bodies in automatic accord.

Foreplay was well and truly underway before they’d left Terralab and on the way back to her pod she leant her sweaty head on his sweaty shoulder. They swayed in silence to the motion of the shuttle, then she lifted her head and scrutinized him with a puzzled expression: “I never really put military discipline and tectonic funk together.”

This made Captain Stellon laugh. It seemed to distil the absurdity of his life. “Maybe that’s why I dropped out.” It was a lame response, serving only to wipe the smile off his own face. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” she went on, “all the different kinds of music, and how we associate them with different types of people.”

“I suppose so,” said Captain Stellon, warming to these tangential conversations.

“I’ve always thought the real division in music is between dance and all the rest. The most fundamental difference. People usually argue about cortical vs tectonic, hardcore vs popular, I don’t know… lyrical vs instrumental… but I think they miss the point. The two most basic functions of music are to light up the mind or to possess the body. D’you know what I mean? It’s like, when you’re listening to Rival Stanvox with a tear in your eye, you’re doing something very different from what we were just doing.”

“I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.” Captain Stellon chuckled.

“I’m just saying. A lot of people out there can only really muster a foot tap or a nodding head. They just don’t have it in them. I don’t tend to date people like that.”

“Blimey! Well, I’m glad I passed the test then!”

Kaitar gave him a playful slap.

Back at her pod, they stumbled through the living room straight to her bedroom.

“Woooow!” exclaimed Captain Stellon, confronted by a huge resinite printed eagle on top of her chest of drawers. “I don’t remember that one from last time!” His words slurring a little from the drinks.

“No. Not many people get to see the eagle, Richard.” She gave him a sly look that confused the hell out of him while massively turning him on. Suddenly they were pulling each other’s clothes off. Neither of them thought to activate their OurEyes. It never entered their minds.

Earlier that evening Captain Stellon had run through various possibilities of how things might go (none of them as good as how it was actually going) and he had surmised that Kaitar, being the non-conformist that she was, had probably refused retinal implants on principle. He was wrong. The decision had been made for her by her parents when she was sixteen. Sync Screens were still being used in the schools at the time but retinal implants were increasingly useful for homework and college education. Her parents weren’t to know how important retinal implants would become for sexual activity. Once OurEyes Inc. had cornered the R.I. market, the rest was history. These days it was something of a standard joke among women on a night out that the only time you really need OurEyes is the time you forget to activate it – in the heat of passion.

With predictably high usage among the single, there was also a huge market for OurEyes in the routine sex lives of millions of long-term partners. Being able to replay sexual encounters with your partner had spiced up relationships while also reducing the pressure for actual sex, even as it increased the realism and jealousy surrounding the viewing of other people’s sex acts. Either way, OurEyes Inc. was winning. It was their RIs and their implant delivery procedure that provided the platform for an estimated 92% of pornography experienced in the Near Interstellar. All of it monitored and logged by AS.

The invention of the Internet on planet Earth had opened the floodgates for pornography. At that point in history, humanity was still in denial of its pornographic tendency. People spent nearly as much time viewing pornography then – on impractical screens of various shapes and sizes – as they did now, but they kept it to themselves and lied about it in public. There has been some historical debate as to why, as late as the beginning of the second millennium CE there was such confidence that personal privacy would remain sacrosanct while a growing majority of the population were already uploading their every move onto the primitive internet. Records suggest that local anonymity through encryption, along with the sheer scale of data (which though minuscule in comparison with the Interplanetary Era was still exponentially greater than anything that had come before) gave the use of private information by commercial companies an abstract character which the average citizen was happy to consider compatible with their personal freedom. Few seemed to grasp that it was merely a matter of time before all was revealed. To be precise, it was November 14th, 2025 CE, a Friday: the day that private sexual fantasy became public.

Sakura Yamamoto and her friends were not crusading feminists or revolutionaries so much as free-thinkers. Apparently they would meet for knitting sessions as a way of relaxing after their working week as data analysts in the advertisement sector. It’s now clear that their knitting conversations were wide-ranging. Exactly ten years earlier the women had spent many long afternoons discussing the fallout from a scandal involving the release of personal data from a Canadian internet dating site that specialised in extra-marital affairs. However, their motives were quite different from the hackers who had tried to shame the adulterers and the dating agency that facilitated them. In the decade that followed, Yamamoto and her team had become increasingly aware of the gulf between the outrage expressed in public debate (on things like sexuality, politics, gender and morality) and the reality of the customer databases they dealt with on a daily basis. These revealed a much more complex picture of human behaviour and one that was not restricted to marital status at all, but involved all manner of complicated denial. So their guerrilla tactics were not in the service of conservative family values so much as a reaction against mass hypocrisy. In her subsequent trial, Sakura Yamamoto had given the now famous speech: “Sexuality is the great stumbling block of human reason. When you pass judgement on us, we ask you to bear in mind that we acted out of a desire for social enlightenment.”

They had, of course, broken the law by developing data-tagging software enabling privately-owned data sets to be cross-referenced against public records and social media activity – an encryption-dodging reversal of the process by which individual online activity was converted into the anonymous trends of Big Data at the time. People were in for a massive shock that Friday morning.

Planet Earth awoke to find its Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Ratchat feeds were full of pornography. Each citizen’s homepages and newsfeeds were showing the last pornographic film they had viewed along with a list of their most regularly visited porn sites.

The initial reaction was, predictably, more denial. Millions of emails and group messages were sent out all over the world claiming cyber-attacks or malicious hackers and warning of viruses. But the videos could not be easily deleted or removed. By the end of that Thursday, there were increasingly vocal groups (libertarians, exhibitionists, nihilists, libertines and those who had suddenly realised they had relatively middle-of-the-road sexual desires) who pointed out that the information was actually a very accurate summary of individual pornographic browsing history. Indeed, this was a verifiable fact.

Accounts were shut down, desperate attempts were made to erase online activity, and there was a sudden spike in suicides. The news agencies had remained uncharacteristically silent throughout November 14th, staffed as they were by journalists, technicians and directors who were suffering the same stultifying sense of guilt and denial that was affecting the rest of the population.

By the end of the following week, the courts were full of people accused of viewing illegal material and there had been several lynchings of suspected paedophiles. Noone was spared, but for people in the public eye, having unusual sexual predilections often spelt disaster. It became more difficult to sympathise with the righteous indignation of an avuncular socialist politician once you knew he spent his evenings watching the relentless pounding of machine sex; or to take champions of law and order quite so seriously once you had been given a mental image of them being breastfed wearing only an oversized nappy; likewise, the fact that a famous feminist had a penchant for restraint and punishment scenarios was something of a gift to her critics, no matter how cogently she had always presented the arguments for the clear distinction between fantasy and reality.

Many people saw the writing on the wall and immediately resigned, like the much-loved political commentator, James Seldon. He had correctly conjectured that a fetish for cooking scenarios which culminated in the penetration of pies and cakes would be an invitation for the kind of public mockery that does not sit well with discussion of serious political and social issues for a television audience. On the brighter side, many of the homosexuals who were outed in the process later claimed that it was good timing because everyone else was in such panic over their own sexual proclivities.

It did of course scar a generation of children who happened to be online that Friday, and Sakura Yamamoto and her friends ended up with a long custodial sentence for their troubles. This small group of Japanese women would have to pay the price for turning over the polished stone of social facades to expose the blind slitherings and poisonous scurryings of countless repellent organisms. And yet, for a while at least, it looked as though they really had ushered in an age of Sexual Enlightenment.

There was a massive surge in NoFap groups that advocated abstinence from masturbation, and on the flip side there was a proliferation of niche fetish groups with a more open and transparent approach to membership. Marketing strategists soon turned fads like Zero Gravity, Cement Head, and Three Feathers into profitable industries. The term ‘Post-Porn’ began to crop up in lifestyle articles.

What at first looks like a liberation can all too often merely mark the beginning of a paradigm shift in social control. Work on virtual reality had been concentrating on suits and cumbersome headsets, and was not really delivering its promise until Elon Musk’s Neuralink chips paved the way for cortical streaming and retinal implants. This was not so much a virtual reality as an augmented reality, the union of human intelligence with that of artificial systems.

It took OurEyes Inc. to really crack the market though. Just as the invention of the video camcorder in the twentieth century CE had democratized film-making and made everyone a potential pornographer, the Retinal Implants of OurEyes Inc. had internalized pornography. You could now experience a credible simulacrum of other people’s sexual intercourse through your own eyes and body.

And the people were ready for it. In fact, they had been rehearsing. As far back as the beginning of the Second Millennium CE, with the invention of the seemingly insignificant ‘Selfie Stick’, billions of normal people had become skilled actors within their own daily lives, able to play the sparkling Hollywood star at the drop of a hat, and apply a detached professional judgement regarding the dissemination of their own image. Now it was second nature, and the average person was also pretty good at calculating optimum angles and pacing for the visual narrative.

And yet, miraculously, the magic had survived. That’s the thing about magic – it doesn’t obey physical laws. It’s just a way people have of thinking about each other. Not only had Kaitar and Captain Stellon forgotten to activate their OurEyes, but as the dopamine of their exertions subsided, they drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms on a sweet breeze of gentle oxytocin.

Next morning they said goodbye without discussing when or if they would see each other again, even though Kaitar had definitely registered his look of dismay at her packed bag by the door. And for a long time afterwards it wasn’t the sex that he kept recalling, but a brief moment as they were getting dressed. He’d begun voicing worries about his uncertain future and then rebuked himself for whining so pathetically, in the way Felquick would have done, and Kaitar had nuzzled up to his neck from behind and kissed his throat without a word.