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.