CASTLECOM

“Do you really think that? What you just said to me right there…do you think that in your heart of hearts?”

“What are you talking about, Jeff? Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

“What you said to me here in the grass.”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well, yes, of course I do—I said it, why wouldn’t I think it? My goodness, Jefferson, I thought you knew me better than that.”

“Ok, well, I just wanted to know for sure…After all, you remember the business with the you-know-what and, quite frankly, we don’t want to go down that road again.”

“Excuse me? Oh, you really didn’t have to say that, Jeff. Please stop doing that. Why, you’re the devil—unadulterated evil, pure and simple. That’s you in a nutshell.”

“Do you really think that? What you just said to me right there…do you think that in your heart of hearts?”

“What are you talking about, Jeff? Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

“What you said to me here in the grass.”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well, yes, of course I do—I said it, why wouldn’t I think it? My goodness, Jefferson, I thought you knew me better than that.”

“Ok, well, I just wanted to know for sure…After all, you remember the business with the you-know-what and, quite frankly, we don’t want to go down that road again.”

“Excuse me? Oh, you really didn’t have to say that, Jeff. Please stop doing that. Why, you’re the devil—unadulterated evil, pure and simple. That’s you in a nutshell.”

“Do you really think that? What you just said to me right there…do you think that in your heart of hearts?”

“What are you talking about, Jeff? Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

“What you said to me here in the grass.”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well, yes, of course I do—I said it, why wouldn’t I think it? My goodness, Jefferson, I thought you knew me better than that.”

“Ok, well, I just wanted to know…”

And on and on the businessperson vurts looped their insane conversation. Vurts: virtuals. For all you could tell, they were real human beings—blue flannel business suits fluttering in the wind vurt and bright eye vurts winking at one another to keep things light. But they were software just like everything else in the Vurt World. All around, through the sidewalk system and the fields of grass, thousands of these businessperson vurts looped in place—their posture impeccable and their suits crisply pressed. Over there—at that sidewalk, at about 1:30—the businessperson vurts looped something about death, and the ones there—at that sidewalk, about 6:00 sharp—their conversation consisted of strings of numbers. Statistics. And near the ruby red orb in the middle of the Vurt World, the vurts looped about the sidewalk system. One vurt says it’s endless, the other says words like "endless" are meaningless when describing the vastness of the system.

And around and around the grass swayed and swayed and the ruby red orb reflected it all like a giant crystal ball.

“What are you talking about, Jeff? Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

“What you said to me here in the grass.”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well, yes, of course I do—I said it, why wouldn’t I think it? My goodness, Jefferson…”

This particular dialogue, where the businesswoman accuses the businessman of being the devil, was easily one of Castle’s favorites.

Castle fell from the sky, landing nearby, and yelled “OrgyFuck!” His tanned avatar form pulsated softly and his large gold penis vurt stuck out like a glimmering royal scepter. His penis vurt was modeled to appear erect, but, even to Castle, it seemed particularly stiff and shiny that day. In fact, when he sat down in a lotus position to listen to the businessperson vurts loop, he had to be careful not to get it caught up in his leg vurts, it was so massive.

Without a doubt, the best part of this loop for Castle was when the female businessperson would call the male “the devil.” “You’re the devil,” she’d say and Castle’s mouth would open and he’d rub his knee on the nearest sidewalk. The pleasure he felt didn’t derive from the rhythmic catharsis of anticipating that word and hearing it spoken; on the contrary, Castle’s mind wasn’t nearly sharp enough to perceive a logical pattern. He was stupid—he never saw it coming, never once. It was just that word: “devil.” He’d hear it and shout out, “OrgyCum! OrgyFuck!”

He rose from the lotus position and began to touch the businessperson vurts’ genitals with his mouth and hands. Because he lived in a pre-literate state of simulated nature—he hadn’t been out of the Vurt World in…how long was it?—that’s all there was for him to do—get off and cum, so he poked and prodded at the businessperson vurts and did what he could to insert his finger and tongue into the crevices around their genitals. But that was just to get warmed up. Then, when he felt ready, he smacked them with his penis in each of their faces. “OrgyCum! OrgyFuck!” he yelled out and rubbed his knee on the nearest sidewalk. Of course, none of it—pleasure or pain— engendered a response on the part of the businessperson vurts. He laid into them with everything he had in his penis, but there was nothing under their businessperson suits. It was all just spongey texture vurt, no different than the grass or the sidewalks or the ruby red orb. The vurts just looped and looped and bobbed to the left and bobbed to the right, all the while absorbing the pressure of his tongue on their groins and his penis on their faces.

After several day cycles of this, Castle paused thoughtfully and looked to the sky vurt. What’s up there, beyond the sky, he wondered. And then almost instantaneously, less than a second later, he lost interest in the question.

Castle scratched at the surface of his avatar body form and leapt a few feet off the ground, hovering and picking his nose vurt. Then he flew up higher into the sky vurt and shot off like a superhero. A moment later, he landed in front of the ruby red orb and peered into his own reflection. “OrgyFuck, OrgyCum…” he whispered. He looked at himself. His reflection was distorted. He stepped back and jizzed on the reflection. “OrgyCum.”

He hopped up and flew back to his favorite businessperson vurt loop—the one where the woman says “devil.” When he landed, he looked at the female longingly and suckled his mouth to her breast, hoping to feel some warmth. Something was there, something warm, and he was thankful for that because it gave him courage. And then, when the intuition struck him, he entered the Homesmind operating system. On a visual level, entering Homesmind was like pressing pause in a video game to see the menu options. Graphics appeared in the foreground of his vision. When he went in, he was determined to achieve something new and he let Homesmind know it. He slid options around and pressed buttons at a furious pace. None of it had any logic behind it, but it signaled to Homesmind that he was trying to do something big. Homesmind acknowledged his request and cued him. And with that, the Vurt world began to blur and he closed his eyes. His body began to float. He was totally listless other than his rigidly erect gold penis extending out from his languidly flexing groin. The next moment Castle was conscious, he found himself standing in front of a domed warehouse made of fading yellow stones—the yellow was the color of a feeble sun. Nothing else was around, just the warehouse and fields of brown dirt. A gray sky above the warehouse threatened rain. It looked like a good downpour would have peeled off what remained of the yellow paint on the surface of the stones. You could even hear a slight pattering of precipitation, despite the fact that there wasn’t visual evidence for it. But the rain never did come; it just threatened. Against the sky, at the entrance to the warehouse, an arch reached up and out, coming to a point, on top of which stood two wrinkly old men, squatting, endlessly moving their bowels, watching as brown fecal matter slid down the side of the building, interacting with the yellow paint, and coating the surface with greasy stains. If the rain would have come, it would have been a serious mess on the ground, but for the time being, the feces just piled up at the base of the warehouse and stank up the air. Below the arch, in front of the warehouse, a crowd of about two hundred leather and vinyl-clad motorcyclists and tech-fetishists watched the old men and laughed, spitting mouthfuls of alcohol from their lips. Others were hanging out, shouting obscenities at one another, or groping each other’s genitals. Blood trickled from all of their mouths, semen dripped from the cocks of the males, staining their leather pants, and the females stuck their hands in the vestments around their groins and touched themselves roughly. The only thing louder than the constant revving of the motorcycles was the occasional guttural scream of someone being stabbed or choked to death. Howls of laughter would follow and several of the techies would smash their helmets against the warehouse, grinning toothy grins, as chips of yellow paint stuck to their helmets.

Through the crowd, Castle approached, intending to enter the warehouse. At first, several of the largest of the motorcyclists eyed him up suspiciously. They put themselves in his way and he raked out the eyeballs from the face of one their numbers. The viciousness of the gesture made the rest of the crowd back off. Around him, a path formed, allowing him entry inside. He didn’t look back.

Once in the warehouse, the raucousness of the outside world dissipated and the gloomy sound of slow, deep bass beats filled his ears while an ever-so-slight light beckoned him forward. He walked and felt his body lifted up in violent jerking motions, accompanied by a Complex 10 pain, making itself palatable in his pre-simulation body. That never happens—being aware of his real body, the body pre-simulation. But that time it did. Back in the reality of the simulation, spikes drove into Castle’s shoulders and ankles and he was pinned to a brown cork panel, itself placed on a slowly-moving conveyor belt. The pain was so deep and so raw that Castle hardly noticed that the conveyor belt had reached a more illuminated area of the warehouse in which the bodies of other men were hanging limply from cork panels coated with dried blood.

“Do you really think that? What you just said to me right there…do you think that in your heart of hearts?”

“What are you talking about, Jeff? Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

The businessperson vurts were there too, but they were moving around freely, not looping their bodies in place as they were in the Vurt World. They also looked different: their business suits were gone; instead they were depicted as cliché red devils. They had long tails, each of which came armed with a sharp, spaded point. On each of their heads, a pair of horns with scarred ridges spiraling down from the sharp tip to the base popped out.

Around the devils, a crew of cameramen and women wearing nothing but leather thongs held out video cameras, lights, and large flatscreen monitors. They were documenting everything, zooming-in luridly as the devils jumped up onto the sleek black metal that had grown around Castle’s aching body.

“Oh, you really didn’t have to say that, Jeff. Please stop. You’re the devil…”

They grew their tails longer and longer and directed them to intertwine as one and penetrate Castle’s anus. With their clawed hands, they tore at his chest, penis, and testicles. With their forked tongues, they penetrated inside his unwilling mouth.

“Did I say something controversial? My memory is going…sorry…”

In the flatscreen monitors that circled around, Castle watched as the devils mauled him. Separate heads grew out of their stomachs and each of the heads sucked at his penis, by now so enlarged that it felt like the weight of it might cause the whole apparatus to snap off. While this was all happening, the devils ravished one another over the web of metal that had formed around Castle’s body. He could feel the interwoven tails burrowing deeper and deeper, breaking through his rectum, entering into his stomach, and then up and up until it reached the pineal gland in the back of his brain, where it paused, stopping to deposit a small black ball. Everything grew quiet and the female devil looked Castle in the eye and said with a surprising, sweet serenity, “Come, Castle, come…” It made him feel calmer and, if he had the wherewithal to thank her, he would have. Once the black ball was deposited in his pineal gland, the interwoven tails shot out through the center of his forehead. And then he felt it—he was about to cum. He was going to cum. The female devil looked him in the eye lovingly, jerking off his penis, and said, “Come, Castle, come” and he was cumming. And he didn’t stop. It was the most intense thing he had ever experienced. It sprayed everywhere. His vision blinkered and in its place, the hole in his forehead acted like a third eye, allowing him to see the greater reality around him: infinite lines—infinitely smooth and infinitely jagged—of simultaneously infinite thinness and thickness, representing an infinite spectrum of infinitely changing colors, pulsating at rates he thought he could perceive, but when he tried to keep track, seemed to pass by at infinite velocity.

Woosh.

Castle shot-up from a small metal hospital bed.

Bright white light blinded his eyes. He wanted to immediately leave wherever he was, but he couldn’t. He was constricted by a complex tangle of wires, themselves attached to a small computer on the outer face of the bed.

This place was different.

Not different in the way that the inside of the warehouse was different from the outside, or the outside of the warehouse was different from the world of the business person vurts and red orb, but radically different. It seemed as though the reality of the air here was of a much richer quality, as if it all intersected with everything else in ways that went beyond simulation. Almost instantaneously, Castle knew: it was the world before the Vurt, the world of the body and of hardware. He somehow knew this existed, but never thought he’d see it.

The bed in which he found himself was situated in a large open space of similar dimension to the warehouse he had come from, but whereas the inside of the warehouse was dark and dingy, this was immaculately clean, white, and bright. Around him, he saw row after row of similar hospital beds. In each bed, the wizened body of a naked old man lay motionless, apparently unconscious, a complex helmet with blinking lights and electronic paraphernalia connecting him to the bedside computer. From each man’s penis, a clear tube coated with semen reached to the ceiling where it became tangled with a garden of all of the other semen-coated tubes belonging to all of the other old men. Where the tubes went or what happened to the semen beyond that was a mystery.

Castle looked down to his own body. It was the same as the others: shriveled-up and, although obscured by the tube, he could see that his penis was small and fleshy, not nearly as magnificent as the golden rod he played with every day in the Vurt World. Beyond these initial observations, the only thing he could concentrate on was how cold he felt and, more generally, how intense the experience of the air on the surface of his body was.

“Oh, my goodness!” he heard a voice yell out. A woman wearing a white lab coat rushed over to him. She called via headset for others to join her and eventually she was surrounded by a dozen women, all looking down at Castle.

He tried to yell “OrgyFuck” at them, but didn’t know how to work his vocal cords. All that came out was a terrible guttural noise. Phlegm stuck to the roof of his mouth and he could hardly deal with how slimy everything was. Not just slimy—slimy and hard and soft and every other descriptive term you could think of. It was simply intense for him and he was overwhelmed.

“Well, how did you manage to join us today, Castle?” one of the women asked him. She looked up to her colleagues, grinning a slight grin. He didn’t even try to respond. He just looked up at them with a full-bodied hatred and, if he could have, he would have spit at them. But then he noticed something—the symbols woven into the breast pocket on each of their lab coats: they read, “C-A-S-T-L-E-C-O-M.” He’d seen those symbols somewhere before. And then, for the first time in his life, Castle had a memory that stretched back before his time in the Vurt World. He was here—right here, in this exact same room, as a pre-pubescent child. He was naked, standing in a row with other boys of a similar age. A woman was walking up and down the row, measuring each of their penises, recording the results in a tablet computer that bore those same symbols “C-A-S-T-L-E-C-O-M.” When she finally reached his place in line, she measured him, just as she had the others, and then looked up, saying dryly, “Well, aren’t you a little devil…” and winking. Just at that moment, Castle remembered, he saw a little girl in a pale yellow dress peeking out from behind a white wall. She too was looking at his little boy’s penis, but not scientifically like the older woman. Castle and the little girl made eye contact and a drop of urine fell from the tip of his penis to a linoleum tile on the floor. The little girl touched her pale yellow dress.   But before anything else could happen, the woman who was measuring his penis shooed the little girl away.

He tried to remember what happened after that, but the memory dissolved and fell apart. He looked up at the crowd of women. All of them were still staring down at him with a mixture of curiosity and scientific objectivity. One of them said, “Well, we’ll run tests on his Homesmind. That’s all we can do. No use speculating without data.” The others agreed. She looked to the woman who had first noticed Castle wake up. “Have any of the other Castles behaved abnormally?” she asked.

“No, it was just this one.”