Dreams of a Red Horizon

2 - Kristina

A little girl plays a game. She wears a dress, a crown, a smile. She places a box on the floor of her room. She presses a button and a boy appears. 'Hello my love, can I be your prince today?' he asks. They have pretend adventures: they storm castles, slay dragons, play kingdom. But when play time is over, he goes back in his little box. She wonders to herself, where did my prince go? Where is he? She starts to cry. The little girl grows up, and though the box has long since been forgotten, she still wonders, where is he?

I was 15 when I started to sell my body on the net. I met a boy in a chat. He told me the same things the little prince did, the same things my father did. That he thought I was beautiful. That he loved me. I gave him my heart, but he wanted more. It's alright, I thought to myself, it's not my real body, it's not real sex. But the synthetic electrons firing through my nervous system on their way to my brain miscommunicated their man-made nature, and it still hurt just as much when he crushed my love and sold the video of it online.

But by the then it was too late. I had already run away to be with him. So that after I escaped him, bruised and ruined, I couldn't go home. My mother had never been willing to take me, and I'd have rather died than go back to my father. I had to prove to them that I didn't need them. I had to find a way to take care of myself. As I watched the views of the violent dissolution of my innocence grow, I knew I had found that way.

There was nothing wrong with it, I had told myself, because there were no princes. There never were. They had disappeared at the end of the autumn of my youth; gone into a box I had abandoned with my dolls and story books. That's how, behind a locked door and connected to virtual world, I became a digital prostitute. That's how I got into this line of work.

But that was not the story I could tell the man sitting across from me. "Why do you ask?"

"You just seem like a really smart girl," he said coolly before taking a sip of his drink as ice cubes clinked together.

I laugh and say thank-you, but not really. I had heard the line and every imaginable variation of it before. "Even smart girls have bills to pay," I said staring bored into my cloudy reflection on the surface of my own untouched drink. "This pays the bills."

The man reached across the table and placed his hand on mine. I didn't feel it. I had long since rewritten the firmware code on the cybernetic implants surgically placed throughout my real body's nervous system so I wouldn't have to. With Sensee you can see, touch and feel the net. At least that was the advertising slogan they used to sell the neural enhancements that created a lifelike virtual reality. But I didn't want to feel, not anymore. So I turned off all tactile sensory input from the net during my business dealings.

"So, Sean. What do you do?" I asked as I thought about pulling my hand away from his.

"Well, Kirsten," the man responded with the pseudonym I used online, "I work in the corporate government."

Liar, liar, I thought before saying, "Wow, I'm honored to have been chosen by such an important man."

"Why thank you. I'm the one who should be honored though. You're so beautiful." He reached out and stroked my face.

I smiled in the app. I shuddered in the real world. Even though I couldn't feel his hand on my face, the gesture was still too intimate.

But his comment tempered the discomfort. After all the effort I had put into touching up my avatar, hearing those words made me feel good. I had spent countless hours making the virtual me perfect in every way. Removing blemishes. Making features more symmetrical. Increasing and decreasing the size of certain areas. Him calling me beautiful made me feel like all my work was worth it.