I-Blivion

"See what else you can find. I really want to find out who built this. And when he had it implanted. And whether it was voluntary."

The medic found this hard to swallow. "Voluntary? Who would walk around with an unwelcome implant in their arm and not tell anyone?"

Beck cracked his knuckles and said, "someone who didn't know they had an implant".

He went home and tried to sleep but by 3am, Beck had become so tired and frustrated that he took a Snorley, an over-the-counter sleep medication whose only side effects were slightly orange urine. Waking at 8.30, he checked his messages and called the lab. "Anything new?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact. I have an address for you. Keep this quiet. He has friends in places way too high to be messing with."

It was on the University campus about six miles out of town. He hadn't gotten out here much, except for the occasional round of golf at Raymond's Meadows. It was more open here, greener, suddenly very different from the usual urban miasma, the architectural maze, the crime-veneered cesspit of the city. The campus was very deliberately set in unspoiled woodland surrounded by verdant hills, all of which belonged to the University. It was perhaps the fifth richest organization in the state, and it showed. Who here, Beck wondered, would enslave a young man and drive him to his death?

"I'm here to see Dr. Muir. Would you let him know I've arrived?" Beck's credentials prompted a quick response from the University reception desk. He was waved through security to an elevator which took him seven floors up to the research department of the University's bustling, gleamingly metallic and obviously lavishly funded Science Wing. It was a cylindrical building literally full of curiosities, both mechanical and human. Small robot flyers buzzed quietly around an atrium which formed the central feature of the building, with offices and research labs all around. The personnel were notably dressed-down, permitting them to indulge their inner geek in their clothing choices. Beck felt woefully out of place, both cerebrally and in terms of fashion, but shelved his discomfort and hunted assiduously for Dr. Muir.

"How can I help you, Detective?" The voice had actually come from behind him and, for a second, Beck wondered if Muir had simply been following him since the elevator.

"Dr. Muir?" The two shook hands. Beck chuckled inwardly at the thought of where his hands had most recently been. He suspected it had been some time since the graying, tall researcher had touched a woman, let alone done the things Samara liked to let him do. "I wonder if I could trouble you to identify a piece of work?"

The two sat in Muir's office, a small and surprisingly dark place, shadowed from the light of the atrium by hulking blocks of steel which apparently formed a modern sculpture. "I recognize it, of course," Muir confirmed, returning the phone to Beck. "Tommy made a special request. Quite sophisticated."

"A custom design?" Beck asked, glad of the co-operation but wary that Muir had been on such familiar terms with the victim.

"Of a kind, yes. The patient had requested particular help with an aspect of his relationship with technology. We were able to assist." Muir folded his hands. He took an obvious pride in his work, although Beck had not yet told him of his patient's fate.

"Dr. Muir, I'm wondering if this work, this... modification," he said, pausing to allow Muir to confirm his terminology, "have implications for volition?"

The researcher raised an eyebrow. "Volition? Lord, no. I don't understand the question."

Beck made to explain, but his device rang loudly. "Excuse me, sorry," he said, glancing at the number. "I have to take this."

Outside the office, he connected the call. "Beck, we need you back here. They found CCTV footage of your bike collision victim. You're not going to fucking believe this."

Beck sighed. "Don't tell me. He walked out into the road because his arm told him to."

"What?" There was a roomful of chatter on the line; Beck knew the investigation team were hot on some trail or other. "No, man, what are you talking about? What was that about his arm?"

"Never mind. I'm leaving soon."

The Detective quickly closed out his interview with Muir without learning much more. "Some people simply find that their physical responses do not tally with their desires," Muir said carefully. This wasn't news in 2073, when almost everyone had tweaked their 'responses' in some way or another, and when desires were indulged with almost religious zeal.

Beck took the express route back into the city and was soon sitting in front of the CCTV monitors, watching a playback of the incident. No CCTV material was allowed out of the room, so he couldn't simply have called it up on his phone. Privacy protections, enshrined in a comprehensive suite of laws after 2013, ensured against the widespread availability of security imagery. Happily for Beck, the city's police had access to everything it recorded. The Pentagon wished it had such flexibility.

"He walks, he raises his arm to his face, he reads, and he carries on." Beck watched the figure go through this bizarre ritual every thirty seconds or so throughout the last minutes of his life. Six cameras were needed to view the victim's journey from his apartment to a coffee shop, and thence to the junction where he had been hit. The savagery of the impact was too shocking to watch more than once; besides, Beck was focusing on the phone. "He lifts it like he's got a robot arm, you see?" The movement was indeed strangely choreographed, as though the arm had been moved by an invisible force.

"He phone is actually making him check it?" Beck's team had never seen anything like it, but that was a refrain repeated almost weekly around here. Human behavior had become so various and unpredictable -- and had been becoming so, even before the advent of widespread implants -- that its outer extremes and inner nuances were being daily re-drafted.

At a time when more data was available than ever before, Beck found it unhelpfully perverse that it was so hard to get information on people. Firewalls of absolute stubbornness guarded inter-agency data transfer; this prevented, say, the NYPD from delving into someone's Boston medical records, or their Albuquerque gun license. It also prevented past convictions from skewing police opinion; it stopped someone's browsing habits from being used against them; it insisted that private correspondence had remained private. The great 'data-burning' sessions of the early 2020s had restored a degree of public confidence; the sight of exorbitantly expensive but undeniably smashed server and data units being wheeled out of the NSA buildings was one of the key online videos of the century.

Instead, Beck called back into service those old-fashioned, sidewalk-pounding, just-the-facts-ma'am methods which had served his grandfather well in the NYPD of the 1990s. He called the victim's friends, then family, then doctor and dentist, then his childhood sweetheart (who had married and was living in orbit), then his high school guidance counselor and gym instructor. Not one of them mentioned a long-term relationship, or even the name of a girlfriend. Or boyfriend, for that matter.

Then he called the neighbors. "They need to put that biker in fuckin' jail, man. How can someone just get run down in the fuckin' street and nobody does anything, huh? What the fuck is up with that?"

"If a crime was committed, sir, I assure you we will take appropriate action. But I'm actually more concerned with the implant in his arm. Could you tell me anything about that?"

He could, as it turned out, and Beck set up a meeting. Clarence, as he called himself, seemed nervy as he approached Beck's booth at a local coffee shop. He wore a wool hat, overcoat and dark glasses, looking the stereotypical police informer despite never having assisted a cop before. "This is all off the record," Beck lied. "I want to know about the implant."

Clarence sipped his water, then set it down and rolled up his sleeve. "Crazy how cheap this was. We looked at all the options. We even thought about that ocular implant, you know the one that's in court right now?" Beck knew, as everyone did, about the Opti-Net device. It gathered internet data wirelessly and transferred it to a virtual screen set a few inches in front of the face. Initial trials had gone well, leading to spectacular over-production which, even with the low wages and costs at the factory in Zaire, had brought down OPC, perhaps the largest implant business casualty so far. The kicker had been an NIH report which linked Opti-Net use with epilepsy, insomnia, dependency and suicide. Sales had dropped like a rock, and the idea of ocular implants seemed dead.

"There's no way I was putting that shit in my head," Clarence announced. "So, we looked for an alternative and the University was doing these paid studies, you know, $2000 for a few visits."

"Sounds attractive," Beck agreed, instantly irritated that Dr. Muir had kept this from him.

"Oh man they treated us nice. After the surgeries we stayed overnight and there was all this food and a huge TV and booze. Great times, man."

"So what was the implant designed to do?"

Clarence shifted noticeably in his seat. "You know, Tommy had this problem."

"Everyone's got problems, Clarence."

"Yeah, but this was about getting laid, man. This is the top of the tree." Beck sniggered at the elevation of such a base act, just as Clarence had wanted him too. The ice was breaking. "He was a virgin, you know..." Clarence was obviously embarrassed by the very word. Hardly anyone these days made it into adulthood without having had some kind of sexual experience, and not just with themselves. "And he never did any enhancements down there," Clarence added, prompting another encouraging snigger from Beck, "so he reckoned the girls wouldn't be interested."

"He was young, in good shape, had good grades," Beck knew from his calls to Tommy's high school. "I'd think the girls were beating a path to his door."

"Yeah, yeah, but he wasn't connected properly." Beck nodded but inwardly he was interpreting the jargon; words had taken on extra layers of meaning, and none more so than 'connected'. It could mean anything from a physical link to a certain understanding of the zeitgeist, from a close emotional bond (it had come to almost replace the word 'love' in some circles) to a description of one's level of social interaction. Clarence saw the question in Beck's face. "He wasn't getting the deals, man."

This was becoming a linguistic minefield. "Business deals?"

Clarence threw his head back and laughed so loud the whole coffee shop turned to look. So much for the stealthy informant persona, Beck sighed to himself. "No, no man. Pussy deals. Poontang!"

Beck laughed along, making fun of his own anachronism. "Yeah, I got it. Poontang!"

"You need to be connected to get the goodies, you know? He went and missed all kinds o' tail because his phone were always on silent, or switched off, or he just didn't notice. If you ask me, he couldn't even use the fuckin' thing. He weren't connected," Clarence repeated, emphasizing the word as if it were the linchpin of Beck's investigation.

"Hence the implant," Beck offered simply.

"Hells yeah! Never miss another one, right? You gots to get in there quick! If she's horny, she'll take the first good-looking dude who hits her back. Tommy was always way down the list! But now his arm just up and brings the goodies right to his face."

"No Opti-Net, but no missed poontang," Beck summarized. It had been a sexual-technological compromise. Tommy found something impossible, so he enlisted technology to make it inevitable. How desperate must he have been?

"You got it, man. I mean, I'm truly sorry he's dead. I loved him, like you know, not exactly a brother or nuthin', but like a real good neighbor. He just weren't connected, you see?"

Beck saw an image in his mind of Tommy's headstone: 'Here Lies Thomas Burton. He lived life. But he was not connected.' Beck paid the check and rose. "Thanks, Clarence. You've been a big help."

Back at the office, things moved quickly. Dr. Muir, unsurprisingly, was not to be found at his office and hadn't answered his cell. Beck put out an APB, made his report to his boss and called Samara.

"Oh honey, three times in twenty-four hours! Are we setting a record or something?" Beck stifled her pseudo-protestations with a huge erection which eased into her mouth and down to the playfully grasping muscles in her throat.

His morning pills were losing their potency at this late hour, but he still managed to give her a good fucking in all three holes before her gifted hands brought one last outrageous orgasm from his throbbing, insatiable cock.

She cleaned him up with her mouth, then tissues, and dabbed her crotch where seeping wetness threatened to stain the back seat. "Stressful day, huh?"

"I guess. Just a guy who couldn't cope, outsourcing to technology the work his brain and balls should have been doing."

Samara sat upright, straightened her make-up in the car's vanity mirror, then closed her compact and slipped it back into her tiny purse. "Well, you'd know all about that, wouldn't you, Detective?" She smiled and reached over to stroke his remarkable dick, still hard and willing after a day of excess. "Better living through chemistry, isn't that what they say?"

"And through surgery," Beck admitted.

She chuckled. "Ain't that the truth." Samara smiled and once more licked Beck's engorged, salty cock. "But what's a life if you can't enjoy it to its fullest?"

***

Epilogue

In the weeks after Tommy Burton's fatal accident, the legal mechanisms of the city swung into action. First, Tommy's family sued Dr. Muir for medical malpractice and won; he had, in the court's estimation, misled his client as to the 'method of action' of the arm implant device. Muir was also arrested for obstructing the investigation and served three months in jail.

The University was sued by the biker, who had suffered 'untold psychological trauma' over a 'frivolous, damaging and ludicrous' medical concept so poorly designed as to have 'distracted the victim to death.' He won, invested the damages in bike repair, and then got himself a new set of neural implants to make the last two years of his undergraduate career rather more enjoyable. And a whole lot easier.

Samara was arrested by vice squad detectives after giving three of them simultaneous hand- and mouth-jobs on digital video in the back of their police wagon. In a circular and confusing case, the three detectives were then disciplined by their superiors for soliciting a prostitute. The charges against Samara were dropped. She continued seeing Beck for a few weeks, and then returned to Chicago to take care of her sick great-grandmother, investing in a set of life-extending implants which would make the old lady -- at 144 years of age - one of the longest-lived people ever.

Detective Beck continued his career at homicide and was promoted. His work and personal life flourished until he was offered a new metabolic pill by a trusted friend. The pharmacological effects had been poorly studied. Beck wound up with a boxer-busting, 4-day erection which knew no satiation; legions of prostitutes were enlisted and dozens of orgasms coaxed from the stubbornly erect member, but all to no avail. Convinced it was his last chance, Beck visited Muir at home (the researcher having been summarily dismissed for his role in the Tommy Burton scandal) and requested his help.

Two weeks of surgery and therapy defined a new procedure to 'roll back' penile augmentation, and it soon became the third most popular surgery in the United States. The advocacy group ADAM (Authentic Dicks for Authentic Men) lobbied Congress to ban penile prosthetics on safety grounds; the motion was defeated 81-19 in the senate. Commentators remain convinced that the bill never became law because two-thirds of the men in Congress had themselves received the surgery, prompting MSNBC's Paula Tatevossian to excoriate Congress as being full of 'little-dick men in a big-dick world".

Cock size became one of the leading campaign issues in the 2078 midterm elections. The rest is history.