History Porn
by Jeffrey Somers
It was an open secret. Everyone in the Q Lab knew what Edna and Ansi were up to. Rumor was they had plans to adapt the technology in order to launch a porn service. But no one knew how they would ever get out from under the NDAs and the non-compete. Even if they did, the company would sue them until it was serving subpoenas backward into the past, erasing them from existence. So for the time being, it remained an underground operation.
####
Magnusen tried to pull himself out of the quagmire, but it sucked at his heels. He’d never experienced anything like this. He’d thought he was clear-eyed about his flaws and weak points, but he’d always generally liked himself and enjoyed a baseline confidence. But Alice had thrown him for a loop.
She didn’t know of course. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t consciously aware of the wound, of the look of exasperated boredom he’d glimpsed, of the name she’d moaned in her sleep.
####
The Q Lab prided itself on its unconventional and casual culture. So much so that the unconventional became protocol, and the casual became rigidly required. The dress code of hoodie and jeans and tennis shoes was enforced with hardcore enthusiasm.
Edna was the radical trying to push this attitude to ever greater extremes. She was a short, broad-shouldered woman who wore enormous glasses, her hair cut in a bowl shape over her face. Ansi was her dragon, implementing her ideas. He was perpetually grinning, always dressed for the mall. When Edna decreed that the lab needed a wet bar hidden in a supply closet, Ansi oversaw its creation, and then acted as administrator, keeping a list of Edna-approved members and playing bouncer.
When the entanglement parser went online, it was Edna who suggested X-rated night.
####
Magnusen found himself hating Alice . He’d always been intimidated by her—she was tall and tattooed and brash, beautiful and worldly. When they met she had gently mocked his lack of experience—in drugs, in threesomes, in foreign languages. But she’d loved him anyway.
He’d known about Roger, too, of course. Roger the rich, Roger the well-endowed. He’d always known that Alice’s bratty friends compared him to Roger and couldn’t understand why she considered Magnusen an upgrade. But he and Alice were happy, so he didn’t think about it too hard.
Until one night, when he’d woken up to Alice talking in her sleep. About Roger. And it seemed obvious she was reliving an extremely satisfying sexual escapade.
####
Edna was in love with the grossness of the concept: Using a multi-billion dollar quantum system to watch historical figures having sex. There was something punk rock about it. She and Ansi only had one rule: No one still living. Privacy, Edna had decided, ended at death.
There was some question, of course, as to whether they were viewing the actual historical figures, as opposed to versions of them lingering in alternate universes, versions of the brand but not precisely theirs. It was impossible to tell, and most people didn’t care. When Cleopatra straddled Marc Anthony and made him see God, when Martha Washington inserted a finger into George’s anus, when Louis XIV penetrated a teenage boy, no one cared if it was entirely accurate or entirely real. The charm was in the power to make anyone appear, to glance into any bedchamber your faded curiosity allowed.
####
Magnusen was haunted by Roger. Roger came and lived with him, his constant companion. He saw evidence of Roger in everything as if the man had left behind spores. When he woke up, he wondered if Roger had chosen the alarm clock on his nightstand. He wondered if Roger had purchased the coffeemaker. The flannel robe Alice had given him to wear during his first sleepover seemed like it would fit a Roger. The books on her shelves that she never read seemed like books that Roger would have read.
In his head, Roger was the greatest lover of all time. Hearing Alice groan his name in her sleep was all the convincing he needed. He imagined Roger as a swollen, big-cocked, many-tentacled thing of suckers and phalluses and extensible digits that expertly flicked and effortlessly positioned her in various contortions proven to be conducive to the discovery and manipulation of the G spot.
Impaled, Alice came and came. With Roger.
####
The question of accuracy having been dealt with, Edna and Ansi argued profit. Ansi was skittish. Abusing the quantum computer and the Q Lab for harmless pornographic fun was one thing, monetizing it seemed to drift over the line into illegality. This normally would not have bothered Ansi, who had a liquid moral center, but he shied from any hint of actual consequences.
Edna was adamant: They would be fired for misusing the lab no matter what they did, so making a profit was a necessity to offset the risk.
They did nothing that would eat into the profit margin. They provided no comforts—no seats, no snacks. They offered no refunds in the unlikely event that they requested intimacies could not be produced. Their audience accepted these humiliations without comment.
####
Magnusen was not used to self-pity. Having tasted it, he quickly turned to action. He imagined himself a man of action. Others might wallow and simper. Not him.
He set out to be the best lover Alice had ever known.
He saw himself in battle with Roger, dueling cocksmen. If the memory of Roger’s immense talent made Alice moan his name in her sleep years later, it would be his goal to burn the memory out.
He consulted pornographies, he watched instructional videos. He concentrated on her pleasure to the exclusion of his own, which he found only in the medicinal masturbatory sessions he engaged in to ensure his staying power. He exercised his tongue, his fingers, his pelvis. He charted her erogenous zones and sought to become the battering ram of her dreams.
And then, coming up for air during a particularly lengthy attempt, he glanced up hoping to see her sweat-drenched, ecstatic, head swimming and eyes clenched.
Instead, he was frozen in horror. Her expression was one of tedium, of boredom. She appeared to be wiling away the hour by doing sums in her head, or possibly composing some pressing correspondence.
####
People are always wanting to use the Q Lab to see people they knew fucking. Ex-girlfriends, the hot guy at the gym who always wore the most fabulous workout clothes, cousins and brothers and CEOs.
Ansi, who found the human condition hilarious, was amenable. After all, once you offered glimpses of Rasputin’s bare ass or Joan of Arc jilling off in a hayloft, how could you believably step onto the high road?
Edna rejected this. She argued that you had to have rules. Everything needed a shape. If you shrugged and decided that there were no limits, you were no longer in charge. Edna would make this argument and push her glasses up on her nose and say that she liked being in charge.
Personal requests were rare, in part because people knew they were doomed due to Edna’s attitude and in part because being able to view an actual orgy attended by Elagabalus was generally enough for most people. But it was general knowledge that if you ever hoped to pitch something personal, Ansi was the smart play.
####
After seeing that expression, Magnusen was unsurprisingly impotent. He covered for a time by pretending to be ill, but he knew this would only work for a short time. Alice could never know that he’d seen what he’d seen, that he knew. He was determined to blot out the memory of that failure, and to do so he needed data.
He needed to know Roger’s secrets. Was the man merely anatomically gifted? Did he possess secret knowledge of the female body, had he been trained in exotic techniques, imbued with ancient talents?
Briefly, he considered going straight at it, just looking Roger up and bracing him, putting the question to him. Or just asking Alice what she wanted, how she liked things, what he was doing wrong. The direct approach might be seen as a form of bravery, after all.
But he doubted it. And he wanted to amaze. To dumbfound. He wanted to suddenly and unexpectedly change how Alice saw him. He wanted it to be dazzling, puzzling, a miracle.
He set a meeting with Ansi Davis.
####
Ansi took a lot of meetings. He enjoyed meetings. He liked being asked for things, having conversations, debating points. He liked seeing his calendar full, it made him feel productive.
He knew he was dead weight in the Q Lab. Well-liked dead weight, but unnecessary. Edna and the rest of the team did all the real work, his contributions were in the past and his current position was emeritus in nature. He was at peace with this, but enjoyed playing the role of CEO, taking meetings.
It was well known that to get anywhere with Ansi, you had to chat. You had to come armed with stories and jokes and gossip. But when Magnusen walked into the coffee shop, he found he had none.
“Maggers!” Ansi said, flashing his white teeth. “Good to hear from you. What’s the old group up to? Still trying to perfect a zero-calorie food that doesn’t taste like garbage?”
Magnusen knew what was expected of him, but hadn’t been to work in days. His hair was stiff from lack of washing and his skin itched.
“I need a viewing,” he blurted. “A private one.”
Ansi frowned, aggrieved at this breach of polite protocol. The margins—the small talk and polite gestures—were more important to him than the meat of a meeting. “Well,” he said, shifting his weight, “we don’t—”
Magnusen tasted panic in the depths of his throat, so he threw caution to the wind. He told an increasingly disturbed Ansi the whole humiliating story.
For his part, Ansi was initially intrigued, then repulsed, and finally sympathetic. He knew in his heart that he had seen that expression of boredom himself. He knew its cold, dark power.
“I’ll talk to Edna,” he said, unable to look at Magnusen.
####
Edna flatly refused. “It would be too slippery a slope,” she asserted. “A carve-out like that would soon have us peeking into a lot of bedrooms.”
Ansi shrugged, trying the old argument one more time. “We’re already peeking into bedrooms,” he said.
“But with Magnusen the bed would still be warm,” Edna said. She shook her head. “No one living.”
####
Magnusen feigned illness and was discouraged at how easily Alice accepted this and left him to his own devices. He lay in bed and asked himself if he was willing to murder Roger. He doesn’t know what Edna’s policy is on how fresh and recent the death is. If he showed up covered in blood, police radio describing Roger’s body, would she immediately relent, admitting her rule was vague and capricious?
He didn’t see how he could find out without an awkward and potentially dangerous conversation.
Then he asked himself if Roger would be enough. If he wanted to specifically see the man’s successes with Alice, would she have to be dead as well? It occurred to him that this might make the whole venture pointless.
The alternative, he realized, would be to murder someone else. Some previous lover of Roger’s, someone he didn’t know. Easier, he reasoned, than slicing into someone you knew, someone whose every wince and scream would be tinged with the familiar. But to kill Roger? That would be easy enough. And some complete stranger? Easier still.
But then he imagined it. He wireframed the murders and saw all the ways they would go wrong, all the blood, the noise, the ruinous failures. He saw Edna and Ansi’s faces when he told the names of the people he wanted to observe, the inevitable comeuppance.
Easier, he thought, to bribe Ansi.
####
Ansi viewed bribery as a legitimate business. He’d never understood. In a capitalist society, it was just paying for a service. If pressed, he might have squirmed, pushed his thin glasses further up his nose, and admitted that in certain cases an element of public trust might require an avoidance of the act. But in most private transactions, he was amenable.
Fear of Edna’s furious anger made him hesitant, however. It was one thing to have a well-organized defense of your actions. It was quite another to be verbally eviscerated by a woman who was less than five feet tall and fond of heavy rings.
Magnusen bid recklessly until he discovered a number Ansi found irresistible. He waited in the lobby, wearing dark glasses, until Edna left for the evening. Then he waited by the elevators until one disgorged Ansi.
“You brought everything?”
Magnusen nodded, handing over an envelope full of paper.
####
The process wasn’t dissimilar to watching television. Once Ansi had seeded the server with enough specific data about the subjects, there was a delay while the computer performed the incredibly complex calculations to identify and extrapolate the quantum signatures. Then, once a visual was produced, you had to scan for the precise moments you wished to observe.
Edna called this ‘making the sausage,’ and usually did it before people arrived, enjoying the sense of magic when she simply clicked a link on her screen and the vignette automatically began.
Magnusen waited nervously. He’d brought a pen and paper to take notes—no amount of money would convince Ansi to allow a recording.
When the screen came to life, it showed a confusing crowd scene. Magnusen managed to pick out Roger. The man’s tall, athletic build instantly made Magnusen jealous. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see just how masterful the man was.
He kept watching.
The video stabilized. It followed Roger as he loped through an evening a few years in the past with insulting ease. When Alice appeared—fresh and young, smiling—Magnusen felt his anxiety rise up, his whole body tightening.
He hated how nice their date was. He’d enjoyed imagining Roger as an oaf, a hunk of meat, a semen delivery system who grunted and drooled his way through rough sex that was more bestial than human. Watching him be charming and civilized was triggering.
When Roger and Alice moved towards the bedroom, Ansi abruptly stood and left. He thought that Edna’s prohibition against living people—people you might actually meet in real life, unexpectedly without warning—was probably wise.
Back in the room, Magnusen learned nothing.
####
It was unromantic and robotic and it was over in just a few minutes. Magnusen watched in horror, pen poised. There was nothing to note—no trick, no move, no moments of white-hot molten passion.
And then at the end, he saw it: The same bored, disappointed look he’d seen up close. Alice sat in bed afterward and appeared to be doing sums in her head.
####
As Ansi counted his money, Magnusen rode the subway home, growing angry.
He began the journey feeling numb, but as he sat being rocked gently back and forth as the train drilled through the tunnel, he felt an unfamiliar rage welling up from within. Who was she, after all, to be bored? Why did she get to judge him? Why did she have such power? He’d worried so much over his failure. Now he realized that it was her failure.
By the time he got home his rage was quite hot. He stormed down the street fumbling for his keys, determined to let her know he’d seen through her, that he knew her secret—
At the front door, key poised, he froze.
####
He remembered the conversation, a few months prior. The empty bottle of wine, their clothes in a pile on the floor.
“So, that was Roger,” she’d said. “Your turn.”
“I’m actually out of lovers,” he’d said. “I’ve told you about them all.” He nudged bare hip playfully. “Whore.”
She’d punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Now we’re into ancient history,” she’d said. Her face grew sly. “There was a ... phase I went through. And that phase was named Erin.”
He’d laughed. “Oh, this sounds interesting!”
####
Erin. He stood for a moment holding the key in his hand. Then he spun and walked off, digging for his phone to see if Ansi was still up in the lab, and to check his bank account.