in Fred's world.
She was covered with her own blood. She felt the blood soaking the mattress. Then there was an improbable hardness against her belly, huge and unimaginably cold. Fred couldn't possibly have anything to violate her with. His whole body was rotten. But he slid into position, and invaded her.
He was coldness and power. All strength had left her and she lay passive, unable to move or protest. But she was throbbing, her body surging with feelings. She felt the coldness spread out from her crotch, the coldness of second life. The coldness brought back her strength.
It wasn't exactly the traditional vampire story, but it was good for a few hours' entertainment.
After the coldness came the hunger. Fred pumped something into her that couldn't have possibly been sperm, something searing and vicious. Something that squirmed with unhealthy life. She again found the strength to struggle, and Fred floated off of her, straight up. He began to laugh. At first he just chuckled, then he laughed loud and long and hard, a shrill cry of triumph and mockery as he hovered in the air over her body.
A haze of need seemed to fill her brain. Prime Intellect was a bit picky about messing with peoples' brains, but Fred had spent years practicing his manipulation of hormones and chemical neurotransmitters, which Prime Intellect amazingly did not consider part of the "thought process." Caroline thrashed, still helpless in Fred's chains, with an unspeakable craving. Fred had started with the symptoms of heroin addiction, amplified them, cross-connected the resulting feelings with her sex drive, and made her own spilled blood the only thing that could appease the resulting hunger-lust. The smell of her blood threatened to drive her insane with its tantalizing promise of relief. But even though the whole room seemed to be decorated with it, every precious drop was out of reach, and the feelings burned inside her.
Fred's emission was also still inside her, and she could feel it. Growing. Crawling. The adrenaline rush returned. Fear and need consumed her, competing for control. Something green began to seep from inside her. Her belly distended. Fred touched her and made her orgasm again, and again, and again, as her body was consumed from the inside and the hunger ate at her sanity.
She was no longer screaming just to please Fred.
He had real talent. There were too few people like him, who could regularly make her feel something beyond the ordinary boredom of day-to-day existence. Out of trillions, Caroline could count those she respected enough to think of as lovers on her fingers.
It was over too soon. With flesh yet on her bones (though the worms in Fred's ejaculate had made good headway), he granted her one final burst of ecstasy and released her, returning her body to normal.
They had a party to attend.
In Cyberspace, there was always a party going on.
But there were conventions as to how a party could be conducted. A host could invite the world, or only a limited guest list; Prime Intellect would never allow a party to be crashed. The host decided on the environment. You either agreed to the host's rules or you didn't go. In Cyberspace it was particularly important to establish dress codes; in fact, it was usually necessary to have body codes if you didn't want folks like Fred showing up. The Change had created some very unique etiquette problems.
Convention held that all guests would enter and exit through a common door, with no teleporting around the site. This limited the largest parties to several tens of thousands of people, though half a million had managed to attend the one Lawrence threw ten years after the Change. A party could go on as long as the host wanted. It cost nothing to hold one.
But to be a host, you needed guests. You either needed other guests of renown, or artworks to show off (such as Death exhibitions), or some other attraction to draw guests. Free food and booze were no longer enough. Anybody could have those