Guru (2)

4.

Two hours after Jake hung up on Hopper, he arrived at the Cupertino headquarters of Nirvanix, a Macroswift subsidiary with a small but well-funded crew devoted to the development of biofeedback-driven video games. Jake’s contact was Jaspar Goldenrod, 28-year-old Chief Technology Officer.
Jake negotiated his way through various layers of security to find Goldenrod in his laboratory on the fifth floor.
“Here,” Goldenrod said, after a perfunctory introduction, “put this on.”
He handed Jake what appeared to be a crown studded with LEDs.
“Now watch the monitor,” Goldenrod said, smiling mischievously and pointing to the huge display in one corner of the room. At first there was nothing, and then a face began to appear. A woman's face, but indistinct.
“Keep watching!”
The face kept changing, modifying the lips here, the eyes there, the hair, the cheekbones. Gradually the face became more and more familiar, until Jake recognized the face of Carmelita.
“Cool, huh?” Goldenrod said. “This is the last woman you had fantasies about, am I right? She's a babe, no question. You know her?”
“Sort of,” Jake said, somewhat unnerved. “How's it work?”
“Intense sexual imagery leaves traces in the brainwave gestalt, sometimes for days. Especially if the imagery is accompanied by, shall we say, a powerful physical release.”
“What will they think of next?”
“The sensors in the crown are tuned to your libidinal frequencies. The software starts constructing a face from a huge database of components, getting feedback from your own subliminal responses, until it reconstructs your own fantasy image.”
“Is there a use for this?” Jake asked, shifting the focus.
“Who knows?” Goldenrod shrugged. “It's cool, though, isn't it?”
Jake took the crown off. The picture of Carmelita remained, looking every bit as tempting as she had on Jake’s living room screen.
“We could build a 3D avatar of her, no problem, and then hook you with a program that—”
“Slow down,” Jake said. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Right, man, sorry,” Goldenrod said. “Remind me again why exactly you are here.”
“What do you know about somebody named Ra?”
“The BlissWave Continuum!” Goldenrod gleamed. His fingers tapped away at the laptop on his desk, and on the overhead display now appeared the website of Master Ra.
The site had the usual come-on advertising, indistinguishable from countless other jerk-off websites but for the quasi-religious motif.
“Ra's got the best wizards in the business,” Goldenrod said. “Full noöotic transmission.”
“Come again?”
“The latest etherospheric technology,” the Nirvanix CTO said, as if speaking to a child. “Noöotic waves are like brainwaves, plus chakra waves. So it's more of a whole body-soul experience. People with noöotic receivers jack in at home, and get broadband chakra resonance. The best reception is when you wear the plasmasuit, of course. We just happen to have one. Want to give it a try?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Jake stripped. The suit itself was made of a silky latex, called plasmaderm according to Goldenrod, which stretched to fit. Very comfortable, Jake thought, even sexy. All he needed was a cape to feel like Batman.
“It's kind of tingly. And it feels like something's moving around on my skin.”
“That's just the software.” Goldenrod said without looking up from his screen. “The suit needs to calibrate your personal biosystem. There's a ton of microcircuitry embedded in the plasma fabric, especially centered on the chakra points, but you don't notice it.”
Goldenrod’s fingers danced on top of his laptop, and an image appeared on the overhead screen. Seven women, all in bodytight plasmasuits of various colors, standing with eyes closed in a circle, in what appeared to be a Hindu temple.
“This is the climax of last Saturday night's BlissWave. Your suit is tuned to the frequency, so you'll begin picking up the signals as soon as the playback starts.”
When Goldenrod hit Enter, Jake was instantly immersed in a warm, slightly viscous fluid, like something between amniotic fluid and quicksand. That was the physical sensation. He also felt encompassed by the closest thing he’d felt to unconditional love, coming from a transcendent, even Divine source.
“Nice, eh?” Goldenrod smiled. “We're still trying to figure out how they do it.”
The women on the screen began to swoon gently. Jake felt their movements in his own limbs, and had the odd feeling that he himself was somehow responsible for their pleasure.
“Those are Ra's wives,” Jaspar said. “All six of them. Pretty cool, huh?”
Jake felt something approaching the women, moving slowly, with impeccable integrity and ominous inevitability, like Moby Dick rising from the deep. It felt like him, but he knew it wasn't really him. It was Master Ra.
Or Bernie Weisberg, as he was known in his advertising account executive days in New York, before his “spiritual awakening.”
He was Ra now, resplendent in a gold plasmasuit, though not imposing otherwise. Ra/Bernie was a dumpy-looking 5'5”, and the suit stretched thin to accommodate his bulging midsection, evidence of a comfortable lifestyle for many years. To be honest, he looked like the Penguin from the old Batman comic, but his energy was awesome—the very incarnation of Shiva. And, as long as Jake wore the plasmasuit, so was Jake.
Ra paused in front of the woman with the red plasmasuit, who opened her eyes and met his firm gaze. Jake felt a powerful current of energy, flowing from the base of his tailbone right into the base of her spine. Ra's eyes never left the woman's face, carefully monitoring her every reaction to the juice he was giving her through the root chakra. The other women must have been networked somehow, because Jake could feel them all responding.
Ra continued around the circle, moving next to the woman in the orange jumpsuit, charging the second chakra, and again Jake felt the current, emanating from just below his navel, entering hers. Then the woman in yellow, the woman in green, the blue, the indigo, and finally the violet, with the current flowing out of the top of Jake’s head, bathing the women with the divine nectar of his (actually Ra's) cosmic consciousness, until all seven swooned, undulating, collapsing into rapturous bliss. Ra stood in the center, unmoving, the steadfast spine of the women's ecstatic surrender.
Goldenrod clicked the screen. The images faded.
“How you doing?” he asked, smiling.
Jake couldn't speak for a few minutes. “I feel like I just fucked seven amazingly beautiful, passionate women into world-shattering orgasms, not with my cock, but with my whole being.”
“Like I said, we're still trying to figure out how he does it.”
Jake took the plasmasuit off, and was surprised to discover that he was not even breathing heavily, sweating, or exhibiting any other sign of having just had a mighty time.
“Ra has his detractors,” Goldenrod said, as Jake dressed. “He's been sued many times by ex-Disciples. Plus there was that girl back in Tennessee that actually died in a plasmasuit. Ra managed to beat that one, but it went a few rounds in court.”
Goldenrod surfed to a website, this one posted by dissidents. Former Disciples of Bliss posted harrowing depictions of life on the island under Ra's rule. He was “a destructive, self-deluded menace to society,” according to one former wife. Other disgruntled ex-devotees testified to drunken parties in which they claimed Ra paired couples on a whim, or shaved yogic symbols into women's pubic hair, or presided over group masturbation. There were even darker tales of people, particularly women, being held on the island against their will by Ra's infamous Bliss Police.
Jake left Cupertino with an itch to find out more. He asked to keep the plasmasuit, but Goldenrod just smiled. “Get your own,” Goldenrod said.
That’s exactly what Jake planned to do.

Who Shot the Guru (1)

1.

Use your breath to arouse and relax your genitals. If you have trouble postponing ejaculation or participating in sex with deep emotional surrender, then allow your exhalations to be long, slow, and fun, really let go of all your breath, as if you were “dying” into bliss.

God Wants Your Sex, Drake Dadu

Jake Rhodes had not yet died into bliss, though he was now blissfully comatose. Had someone been monitoring his vital factors, such as for instance surveillance teams from Macroswift or Vector, or someone more benign, from perhaps Dadu's international customer support, a gradual acceleration in neuro-libidinal integration would have registered as Jake reclined, jacked into Drake Dadu’s latest sex training feelie, oblivious to the rain dripping from the ancient redwoods onto his cabin.

In this state of heightened receptivity and moral anesthesia, Jake's lips moistened, his breathing stilled, his reasoning in deep hibernation as in his bodymind's eye he reveled in the naked splendor of Carmelita, whose glance burned smoldering embers into his limbic netherlands, whose voice, etherospherically enhanced and noootically clarified, raised tremors of excruciating anticipation in the smoky red core of Jake's Inner Teenager.

Carmelita, the Venezuelan chief-of-staff to Macroswift Chief of Internal Security, Roscoe Hopper. Jake’s boss.

The thought of Hopper tempered the arc of Jake’s neuro-libidinal integration, triggering preset compensation routines to gently swerve his concentration back to the matter at hand.

You are on the verge of coming, of real pleasure, and you can feel your attention being corralled by this possibility. You do not feel your partner lying vulnerably beneath you. You do not feel the dying, pain-wracked souls ekeing out an existence at less fortunate places on earth, people whose suffering you can barely imagine. Instead, you are pumping your genitals into your partner’s warm wetness, focusing entirely on your imminent release.

Jake’s body fidgeted, his pelvis jerking in light spasmodic waves, as the custom-fitted earplugs transmitted Drake Dadu’s words and subtle neuro-libidinal wave signatures into Jake’s warm essence. In this lightly-drug induced reverie, Carmelita lay beneath him, her olive skin glistening, awaiting the full magnificence of his expression. Carmelita, in whom the eternal goddess had taken human form to provide Jake Rhodes with this very opportunity, the holy courtesan, the hungry whore, Carmelita the personal secretary of his boss, Roscoe Hopper.

Another auto-compensation routine kicked in. This time the thought of Hopper jerked Jake out.

“Goddamn Hopper!”

Fumbling with the dials of the laptop control unit, resetting the earplugs, listening for the first time to the rain. Cranking up hypno-sensual frequencies past the recommended levels and turning the noootic amplifier up to eleven.

As the energy comes down your front, bounce it off your pelvic floor with an upward intention and muscular contraction of your anus, genitals, and perineal area. Exhaling, shoot the energy back from your genitals and upward along your spine. As the orgasm energy glides up your spine, turn your eyes up and feel the great blisses rushing upward through your body, through your head, and up, up, up as if into a great space of light.

Ahh, Carmelita, Carmelita. Carmelita herself broke into Jake's cyberspace.

“Jake. Jake, are you there? What the hell are you doing?”

It took a few seconds for Jake's bodymind to catch up to the reality of the fact that Carmelita’s very real-time, slightly puzzled face ballooned to cover his visual field.

“Carmelita?" He managed in a rather sleepy, stoned drawl. "How did you....?”

“You're up, Jake. The next job's yours".

Fuck, Jake remembered.

"Besides, it’s 3 o'clock in the afternoon.”

“I was just… I mean, doing research, you know, with this… this…”

Carmelita smiled. She knew what he had been doing, she'd been watching him for the last thirty minutes. It was part of her job to watch, and lurking on Jake and his weird online practices was a nice break from surveilling middle management types with their pathetic plottings and artificial sex lives.

She'd fuck Jake, Carmelita decided while watching him, if it came to that, which was unlikely given the gap in their status levels and station in life. Carmelita was executive courtesan material, while Jake was still technically a recruit, drafted in the 2018 callup when most of the bohemian slackers were caught in the net.

His tours had turned out well, though the outcomes weren't influenced one way or the other by his presence. He was off the wall, sure, a stoner freak, but well intentioned. Hopper laughed openly at him, entertaining Macroswift Chairman Gilliam Bates with ribald versions of Jake's exploits between private demonstrations of new technologies by research supplicants, the last of which involved psychedelic sex magick with dolphins (speaking of Jake, not the supplicants).

Too bad the rogue male roughed him up, Carmelita thought, just when it looked like Jake had figured out how to bring one of the females to orgasm without touching her.

“Never mind," Carmelita replied. "Hopper wants to talk with you. Is now a good time?”

“Does it look like a good time?.” I thought I turned that damned link off. “Give me a minute. Tell him I’ll broadcast from my office.”

Jake rubbed his eyes. He stretched, checked his crotch for spew. Be embarrassing to confess to Dadu the next time they spoke.

Drake would understand, of course, if he ever got a whiff of Carmelita.

2. Jake's Journal #1

In 2018, after a few years on the road fronting the Spirit Medicine Band, doing zen gospel songs that I wrote after smoking some righteous herb, I got drafted by a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Lockheed (M-Loc) , who at the time held the jurisdiction to snatch up all the slacker bohemians like me who were inhabiting state-sponsored educational sanctuaries with no visible means of support other than serial PhDs.

Friends warned me it was coming, and how to deal, and so on, but the first time hit me pretty hard, although not as hard as back in my grandpa’s day where you get taken by the American government to fight some desperate natives who don’t understand why you need to kill so many of them for their own good, asking nothing in return.

No, these global monster companies (globos) don’t send you to Vietnam or Iraq or Greenland anymore, but when I got drafted was right at the height of the whole merger mania between Asian, non-chinese finance capital and American nuts-and-bolts defense manufacturing infrastructure.

By 2016, they’d run out of jobs for people who actually wanted to work and were good at it, much less bohemian slackers like me and my friends, so underemployed bohos were simply drafted to serve a tour of duty with some globo or other, and in the meantime, they received a monthly allowance to pursue their “education”. The whole Morlock-Eloi scenario, played out against a world on fire.

According to GATT Thirteen (the infamous Cancun Rounds), the WTO adjudicated the privatization of the United States Selective Service. Jurisdiction cycled among the partners. Me and the other inductees were drafted to be guinea pigs, as it turned out, in an ongoing battle for global mindshare.

M-Loc had an image problem caused by the fierce resistance to the merging of Japanese and American assets and culture among the many native-born Americans who still had a soul left after the deadening decades of the Corruptions. I myself had no interest in being a globo shill bearing false witness to the latest corporate grab. But when they draft you, you are legally theirs. At least that’s what they told me when I went in to pick up my (last) check.

Training camp was a trip, but that’s a different story. After boot camp and thirty days to settle our affairs stateside, we were sent on nine month tours of duty as extras in the non-stop commercial filming of imperial propaganda, to be fed whole and dripping to the proles every night. Yes, we made the news. We were the ones who pretended to be the happy Americans among the Pakistanis, cheering for Chelsea Bush on her state visit to Lahore.

We lived in special villages, played out whatever sick fantasies the ad councils came up with in their never-ending attempts to fuck with the minds of the Indo-Chinese masses and win the propaganda war in southeast asia by broadcasting pro-neoliberal messages to the masses.

Squeezed out like radioactive toothpaste into the junk-sick prole mind. We were the ones in the Feelies audience, clapping on cue,

One time our squad was instructed to appear at a certain address at a certain time. When we arrived, we were given protest signs and inserted into an ongoing action in front of the Chinese embassy in San Francisco, demanding freedom of religion for Scientosophists. For the next five hours me and my squad had to pretend we didn’t notice people pointing fingers and laughing, or coming up to spit on me personally while I’m trying to muster some passion and holding a sign that says, “Chinese laws off my god!”

Second time I got drafted was by Sony-Halliburton. Served two tours of duty, first in Los Angeles, where I was paid to be seen with people. Sometimes a day in advance, sometimes a few hours, sometimes I’d get an urgent call in the middle of something else to drop everything and report for duty. Lotta times it turns out they just need you to provide cover while Intel pulls a job. Sometimes you get a few lines of instructions, sometimes no instructions at all. One time I was called into the finest Zen restaurant in the Bay Area and instructed to simply take a table and wait.

As I enjoyed my dinner a variety of people came and went, some sat with me for a while, we spoke, laughed, they went on their way. In most cases like this, it’s hard to distinguish between the random behavior on everyone’s part and the actions of operatives. You're never sure what the game is, or who's filming it, or why.

Last time, it was dolphins, they jacked us all up on some hyper-psychedelic cocktail of designer neurospasms, tossed us naked into a lagoon in the pacific with a pod of dolphins amped up on some kind of macroscopic empathogen stabilizers, bombarded by radial symmetry waves tuned to the frequencies of the stars or some bullshit or other. God knows who was behind it or why, but for the next six hours I’ve never seen god so often and in so many rippling surfaces. Until that whole thing with the rogue male.

3.

Jake Rhodes lived alone, in a cabin built mostly by his father, deep in the redwood forests above Santa Cruz, California. The “office” was up a narrow staircase leading to Jake’s command center, where he used to tell people he managed his mid-twenties crisis.

Calm, as composed as he could be now, Jake pumped the interface til the browser revealed the penetrating gaze of Roscoe Hopper. Jake reporting for duty.

Hopper was a rotund beaver of a man. Began at Macroswift as one of Gilliam Bates’ army of security guards. As the wealth had grown to legendary proportions, Bates had been forced to retreat into greater and greater seclusion, until finally in late 2012, after the results of that year’s presidential elections, he’d moved the headquarters of the Macroswift Corporation into Cheyenne Mountain, in the old NORAD facilities. That’s where Hopper was calling from.

“You look good, Jake. Rested. I’m glad, because the Company certainly never intended to put you through so much hell on that dolphin case.”

“I don’t blame you or the Company, Roscoe, you know that.”

“The Old Man appreciates your discretion, believe me, Jake.”

“Let's cut to the chase, here. Why the break in, Roscoe?”

“A mission, Jake, naturally. You’ve heard, of course, about what happened to Agent Bailey?” Bailey was Hopper’s top agent.

“I’ve been offline for a few days.”

“Nasty business, Jake. I won’t go into the details now, but the bottom line is that Bailey is out of action now for an indeterminate period of time. And he was about to embark on a very sensitive assignment. The Old Man wants you to take his place.”

“Jeez, Roscoe, I’ve only been home a week.”

“I know it’s rushed, Jake, but we’re all scrambling here. There’s a promotion involved, of course. If you pull this off, you’ll jump a pay grade. You'll get your pick of assignments.”

Bailey must be hurt pretty bad, Jake thought. “What about the others? Simpkins, or Vanzetti?”

“Everyone’s tied up, Jake. You’ll need to be in LA by tonight. Tomorrow you leave for the island. Can you move that quickly?”

Island? Jake wanted to ask Hopper to put Carmelita back on, but...he wasn't in the driver's seat on this one.

“Ever heard of a guy named Master Ra?” Hopper continued.

“Name rings a bell.”

“Ra founded the Disciples of Bliss. They broadcast from an island called Fajiti in the South Seas. They do a show called the BlissWave Continuum, live group tantra session where people jack in remotely wearing plasmaderm fucksuits..."

“What’s the Macroswift angle?”

“It’s just getting off the ground, Jake, but the market for this is going to be huge, even bigger than porn. This is the Holy Grail, the interface of the future. Ten years from now you’ll be wearing your computer.”

“And fucking it too, sounds like.”

“People are people, Jake, technology doesn’t change the basic patterns. The Old Man’s had a special, highly-classified team working on fullbody telesensation for years, with only limited success. Now it looks as if Ra’s team has made a breakthrough.”

Rumor was that Gilliam Bates himself was already operating more on digital rather than muscular power.

Bringing up the interesting question of how much of your original, human material did you still need to own to be considered a human with synthetic parts rather than a machine with human parts? How much original bio material did "Gilliam Bates" need to retain to still be legally Gilliam Bates and not just some digital instance?

Jake figured the Old Man, what was left of him, needed the plasmasuit these days just to get off anymore.

“What’s the mission, Roscoe?”

“Our people are already in negotiation with Ra’s people concerning patent and licensing rights. We need someone on the ground, to get inside Ra’s organization. Find out what you can, anything that might give us an edge.”

“You want dirt on Ra?”

“Anything, Jake. We’re up against some very stiff competition from Vector, among others. We need as much leverage as possible to swing the deal our way.”

“How’s the weather this time of year in the South Pacific?”

“That’s the spirit, Jake. This Old Man will remember this, you can count on that.”

Should score a few points with Carmelita, as well, Jake thought.

“So, how do we do this?”

“Ra’s organization currently makes most of its money by offering two-week stays on the island. Executive retreats, he calls them. Mostly senior management, blowing off steam outside any national jurisdiction. Bailey was signed up to go on the next one, which leaves tomorrow.”

“You think maybe Vector didn’t want Bailey on the island?”

“We can’t rule that out. There’s an orientation session tonight in LA, 7:30 in Malibu. You can make it there in just under three hours on the hover train. The reservation’s been made. We’ve arranged a stopover in Cupertino, where you’ll receive a technical briefing. Once on the island, you’ll communicate through the usual secure channels. I’ll send you Bailey’s dossier for all the details.”

Hopper’s face softened. “Good luck, Jake. This one should be a vacation after that dolphin. Whatever happened with that, by the way. They put him down afterwards?”

“No, too valuable for their research, they said. They let him go with a slap on the fin.”