Posted by Veronika Kill-O-Matic? on October 22, 2000 at 16:09:45:

When I saw it, I knew I would never find a way out of the Orgasmatron.

I touched the bodies as they rotated, shifted their limbs, gave a shove and watched them bounce gently off the sides. Their heads rose or fell around me like eight giant suns. I could hold them, kiss them. I knew then that the Orgasmatron was the pay off. I knew why there was no getting out of it. But I tried anyway. For six nights. I was Veronika Kill-O-Matic. Never surrender.

Strictly speaking, it was only two or three nights in the Orgasmatron. Even with Richard's notes to help me, it took until the third night to even reach the Orgasmatron.

Before discovering Richard's hobby I had never considered the beauty, the aesthetics of a woman in death, although like everyone else I had felt a tickle from pictures in the paper, when you see a victim and want to look away and it's sad. But I'm not blind. I had noticed that dead women are a big theme in movies and books, like how the dead girl in movies is often made to look very pretty, or how, when a woman is shot, the actress often goes down with a positively sexual grunt.

But it didn't mean anything to me. I was young and straight and strong, and the world was so full of beautiful women waiting to love, and be loved. And, best of all, if anyone in the world had the Casanova Gene, then, baby, it was me. My phone never stopped ringing.

But enough of that.

If it had never been an issue for me before, the sexual allure of death became obvious during Veronika's rampage through the bar. It had a lot to do with seeing and struggling up close with all these different women, each very good looking in her own way. About half of them were these imposing and muscular German girls, the rest a colorful mix. My initial feelings of disgust at the game gave way like a rotten pretense, until I knew what Richard must have felt.

But at first I was too busy just figuring out the controls, and trying not to get killed by the gangsters. Worse, I had to deal with Veronika's demands. There were all these trigger points where you would lose control of the game, and Veronika would do whatever she pleased. I didn't want to throw the MG away after killing Katya. Veronika did. And it was never my idea to feast on Anya's bloody flesh! I almost puked, the first time I went through that.

My first few hours at the game I spent walking into Grauzone and having my head blown off, usually by Tong or Dagmar Black. Once they shot me in the knees, stripped me and started torturing me to death, creatively, using implements from the bar. Veronika didn't scream, she cursed up a blue streak all through it. Anya was doing most of the torturing.

I quit that game, but I wonder how long it would have gone on.

Judging from the dates in his private gaming journal, it had taken Richard thirty days to reach the Orgasmatron for the first time, and he kept complete notes during that time. But these were confusing, incomprehensible when I first read them. He wrote longhand and printed, but his style was cryptic, and his handwriting was a mess. After all, he was writing it for himself.

Very few of his instructions were as clear as this: "On entering Grauzone, evoke Eastwood, and then the 900-foot Jesus. The other male illusions at your disposal are ineffective. Some of the Goddesses work well at first, but later they turn one or all of the women into unstoppable furies."

Or this: "Draw Katya out. She will get you if you go through the arch first, every time. Get up on the bar and put on the Ace of Spades. Then curse her out in German."

Otherwise I rarely knew what his notes meant, until I saw each scene and figured it out. At that point Veronika would be dead again, and there would be a shot, from her perspective, of the killers celebrating. Then you were back in the car, where the game starts. The following words scroll up on the windshield:

MEN ARE HISTORY. WOMEN SURVIVE. THE Y-VIRUS KILLED ALL MALES AND IN THEIR LAST BATTLE THEY DESTROYED THE SPERM BANKS.

TEN YEARS LATER, WOMEN ARE NUTS. THE CRUEL ONES RULE OVER THE REST IN A REGIME OF VIOLENCE, DRUGS AND SEX.

CRUELEST OF ALL IS VERONIKA KILL-O-MATIC, THE TERROR OF THE COLOGNE GANGSTER SCENE. TONIGHT SHE ALONE MUST STRIKE AT HER OWN COMRADES AND LOVERS -- A DOZEN VICIOUS-BABE KILLERS WHO BETRAYED HER AND BROKE HER POISONED HEART.

SHE'S ANGRY, SHE'S ON A POWERFUL PSYCHIC DRUG, SHE PACKS A MAC MG AND A TWO-SHOT CROSSBOW, AND SHE WEARS THE RED LEATHER JACKET GIVEN TO HER ON OLYMPUS BY THE GODDESS ATHENA.

THEY ARE AN ARMY. SHE IS ALONE. THEY HAVE AN ARSENAL. BUT WHEN SHE GETS OUT OF THIS CAR, ALL HELL WILL BREAK LOOSE. WHEN SHE GETS OUT OF THIS CAR, SHE WILL MAKE HER ENEMIES CRY:

CAN ANYTHING STOP VERONIKA KILL-O-MATIC?

Actually, as I discovered, most everything did stop Veronika Kill-O-Matic, and it was a pain keeping her ass alive for more than a few minutes.

As long as she was alive, you could pause the action at any point, even with the bullets flying, and view anything you liked from that position. You could consult the information base about a person or an object, zoom in and center on detailed closeups of everything. I gathered this was why the game was such a success. You could do all this for as long as you liked. You could never see the difference between the scenes that had been shot for real, and the animations of these that the machine was simulating as you made your choices.

But even if you paused, the Thread clock always kept running, and it never went over an hour and fifty minutes, at most. And then Veronika blacks out, and you lose.

You couldn't save the game.

When she was dead, you always started back in the car and the first thing you always had to do was to get out, follow Veronika's urge to go piss, and then make out with Eva in the parking lot. Only then could you walk into Grauzone and take on the other gangsters.

Eva was great, the first time, I had never been in such a machine before. But oh, did I finally get bored of getting her off, as hot as it was! I wanted to kill her, to save time, but Richard's notes stressed that you needed her alive, though I couldn't figure out why. And if you tried to skip the part where you got her off, she would shoot you in the stomach. So every damn time, I had to gather up that ungodly clitoris of hers...

The manual was a real mindfuck. Not this usual kind of half-literate tech shit, like the other manual - the one for the machine, which was incomplete and printed in seven languages. No, the game manual was a huge production, glossy and running to 150 pages, all full of sarcastic hints and teases for how to increase the titillation. But none of it was any good for the game.

The only credit line in the whole book was on the inside back cover: Veronika Kill-O-Matic, copyright and production Demises Unlimited, San Diego, California. Two pages of small print disclaimed responsibility for everything imaginable, and warned that the game would erase itself if anyone tried hacking into it.

At any rate, the manual included skill profiles, mini-bios and hot shots of all the babes, and it was useful for learning the controls. Did I say all the babes? Not Veronika, of course. This was a first-person game. The only way to see her was to look in a mirror, and these were usually crashing apart in a hail of bullets. When I did catch a glimpse, I saw the actress playing her was built high and wide, with a square jaw and thick black eyebrows and long black hair. Straight as a waterfall. She looked proud, and hateful, and sane. I thought I was in love with her. After a while I just wanted to be her.

I ignored the manual and followed Richard's notes, but I kept reminding myself that he had not won.

Finally, at the start of the second night, I shot my away out of the front room.

"Kill Heike by Thread overdose, or else Saskia won't be frightened enough to do stupid things, and she'll shoot you in the leg. And plus --- it's great!!!" This was about the only commentary he had added. Almost everything in his notes described the various ways he had lost the game, fifty pages worth, in small print. He described each fight with the women, blow by blow.

During these first nights I had two advantages over Richard. One was that I had his notes, so I didn't have to repeat his mistakes. The other was, of course, that I made sure not to scum off, so I was not distracted. This was tough sometimes, especially during the Heike scene. But unlike Richard, I wasn't here for the pleasure. My job was to find what had killed him.

Once you got past the shootout in the front room and killed Heike, Richard's notes got scratchy and repetitive. "When you're on Saskia, kill Lisa with the FEAR!" What the fuck did that mean? Over and over, he had written: "Kill her with fear!" Pages of this shit!

The game offers a selection of 15,000 phrases and ideas Veronika can think, which get projected out to everyone in the vicinity while she is on the drug known as Thread. None of these read: "Die from the fear, slut!" Four times I got as far as the bathroom, only to have Lisa shoot me in the head twice. Another time Veronika disarmed her, tied her to a pipe and insisted on torturing her. Lisa's screams and sobs were immediate and unlimited, she started begging long before Veronika caused her any pain. I was frightened at myself. In Veronika's frenzy she kissed Lisa and got the cyanide capsule spat into her mouth. I was hitting Escape the whole time like an idiot.

Then I realized that Richard had started his notebook with a few pages blank at the front. Later, he had written the monologue you needed to scare Lisa to death on the first pages, right under my nose: "I will tie her to the pipes and carve her up a bit as I strangle her. No, I'll crucify her and just watch, slap her until she suffocates from the tension. I'll come while I hold her head down in the toilet bowl with my crotch and flush until she drowns. I'll tie her up and shoot her, one slug at a time. I will slap her and pinch her and rape her with the gun until she dies of the fear..."

That was how his notebook began. When I first read those lines, at this point I don't know how many days before, I had merely thought that my old friend Richard - whom I always admired - was one sick fucker.

But it was the answer I'd been waiting for. I laughed. What a relief. I was really a mess by then, struggling on just a couple of hours of sleep in three or four days, working as usual during the day, and inhaling speed by the cupful to keep going. At least the speed kept my erections down.

Finally Lisa was dead and I got to the kitchen, where I met Eva again. I saw the famous Orgasmatron, but it only looked like some giant lava lamp, with three naked babes floating in it instead of red liquid.

"Poison them," Richard had written. That was clear enough. It was easy to figure out that for this I should use the syringe with the gas crystals, and that I should inject it in the air feed, and watch the women inside die.

Right away I wanted to check out the back lot, but no one was ever there. That was the border of the game world, if you approached it from this end. Before you went any further, Veronika would insist on going back to inspect her "handiwork." A warning informed me that hauling the intact corpses back to the kitchen, cleaning them, and sticking them in the Orgasmatron was an absolute requirement of the game.

That part was easy, actually. I let Veronika do all the work, but it took forty minutes or more, and you had to keep her in motion using the controls, so you couldn't take a break. And in the middle of all this she would always go beserk at the sight of the dead Anya, and start kicking and biting at all the dead ones in the Blood Room, until they were in a pile and she would light them on fire. Then, when I had control again, I had to run her back to the kitchen to look for a fire extinguisher. The first time she burned the dead, she was shot by Dagmar Black, who was pinned to the beer barrel by an arrow but not dead yet. I almost cried then, because I had missed the explicit warning about this in Richard's notes.

I was such a mess, on the third night, thirty hours of play time already, and on my second try, I made it through the whole sequence. I had the corpses washed. I had lugged five or six of them into the Orgasmatron and was itching to power it up. Then my time ran out, at just 1 hour 31 minutes. I was switched to a simulation of being garrotted in my sleep, presumably by this Verena chick, whom I had never seen even once until that point.

Verena, Veronika, I get it, she must be the most dangerous one. I was so angry. I started pounding on the machine and just managed to keep from damaging it. Finally, two hours later, on my third try that night, I had eight corpses in the Orgasmatron, and I powered it up, just before my Thread time ran out. Would this be enough?

Veronika blacked out.

And then she woke up, inside the Orgasmatron, floating with the women she had killed.

I hadn't expected that, not exactly. This wasn't described explicitly in Richard's notes, let alone the manual. In fact, this is where Richard's notes went completely crazy. The last dozen pages were full of love poems dedicated to various characters in the game, most of these about how good it was to kill them and fuck them in the Orgasmatron. He was actually talking to them! "Heike, braveheart Heike, how bravely you died in my embrace..." Jesus. I hadn't understood any of that before. Only now, that I was finally inside the damn thing, did I know I had reached Richard's hell.

It was beautiful. I don't know how they shot this, but with five full-length screens surrounding you - three of them curving to cover everything to the front and along the sides, one overhead, and one at your knees, propped up at an angle - it really felt like you were in there with them, in zero gravity. As you turned your head or moved yourself, the scene would shift to reflect it. The machine always rearranged the various elements perfectly, with zero load time. I got giddy at first, as though I was really tumbling around in there with them. The jolt chair went into a rhythmic, comforting rotation. Veronika's head - which she could still access like a library, although the Thread trip should have been over - offered a number of classical selections to play. I put on Bolero.

Every hair, every round drop of blood followed exactly the trajectory you would expect. What the hell chip were they using?

I guessed Richard had probably spent days in here, maybe with just one or two of the corpses at a time, knowing this would lose the game for him, but loving every moment.

I shot off after about five minutes, in my pants. I didn't touch myself, I barely even noticed it until it happened. After another ten minutes I shot off again, this time after helping with my hands. I couldn't resist. I shot off twice more in the next half-hour. I was at peace. This was the universe.

After sixty minutes, I was holding little Tong, we were upside down and my lips followed hers along their celestial path, when suddenly the music stopped. A brief scene showed the survivors of the Ehrenfeld Furies, a very butch crew by the way, arriving and leering expectantly at me through the bolted door. GAME OVER.

The Orgasmatron went blank. In the next scene, I was being crucified on a public square. Then I was back in the car.

MEN ARE HISTORY. WOMEN SURVIVE. THE Y-VIRUS KILLED ALL MALES AND IN THEIR LAST BATTLE THEY DESTROYED THE SPERM BANKS.

TEN YEARS LATER, WOMEN ARE NUTS...

Two buttons were offered to me: Start, or Quit?

Now I knew why Richard's notes had turned into poetry, once he had reached the Orgasmatron. Perhaps my quest was over. Perhaps he never tried to get out of it. But then I considered the second-to-last thing he wrote:

"How can I get out of the Orgasmatron?"

The message was pretty clear. I fell asleep in the chair. I had been on speed and barely slept, but I dreamed anyway. This was the weirdest part. After the last three nights I would have thought I'd dream of glass crashing and bullets flying, trajectories, endless menus that allowed you to choose Veronika's thoughts, strategies for getting out of the Orgasmatron.

Instead I dreamed I was Veronika and I was carrying Anya on my shoulders, down a mountain path. I dreamed I was trekking across a burning wasteland with Anya, and in the dream I kept telling myself that I must fight to save her, that I would kill anyone for her. I have no idea where this came from. It's not in the game. It's not in the manual. I have no idea. I felt like she was in my head. I felt like I really had become Veronika Kill-O-Matic. Like there was much more to this than I could ever guess.

What was this machine doing to me? Or was it more than the machine? Was some kind of magic channelling me straight to Veronika? Did she really exist, in some alternate universe? Was the machine her vessel for entering this world?

I called in sick that morning, and during a long shower in Richard's bathroom I forced myself to forget the Orgasmatron. I wasn't going to starve in here, like Richard. I thought instead about how to beat the game.

Obviously the Orgasmatron was a trap. You had to find a way to get out of it. Perhaps you could avoid it altogether. Perhaps you could escape it, if you managed, in the time you had on Thread, to kill all of the other characters, without destroying their bodies, and get ALL of them into the Orgasmatron. But this seemed impossible. How could you get out of the front room without shooting the ones there all to ribbons?

Perhaps you could get out of the Orgasmatron, once you were in it, by invoking the female goddess images at your disposal? I saw a vision of resurrection, Heike and Anya and Saskia and Lisa and the rest would live again through the Goddess Eris, or Kali, and they would become Veronika's Army, and they would defeat the Ehrenfeld Furies.

Perhaps you could play dead just before the Ehrenfeld Furies arrived, and escape when they opened up the Orgasmatron?

But the first thing I tried the next morning, after taking the shower, was to kill Eva. I had been itching to finally do it. I snapped her neck while we made out at the beginning. The first time was too soon. She shot me in the belly just as I did it. The second time I waited until Eva slipped the gun into my belt, and then I cracked her, a smooth turning. I felt terrible about this. She really was in love with me.

That time I got as far as killing Saskia, and then the elusive Verena came up from behind and garotted me. At least I had finally got a look at this Verena bitch. I tried killing Eva several more times, and it always ended with Verena surprising me from behind, or falling on me from the ceiling.

Okay, I get the message. If you kill Eva, it gets Verena really angry, and she'll waste you. So instead of killing Eva and taking Grauzone from the front door, I tried leaving Eva alive, and following her after we made out, to see if she would lead me to Verena.

I followed her to the back lot, where she meets Verena. The first couple of times Eva warned her and Verena shot me, but then I finally pegged her, in the heart. Yes! My first Verena kill! I shot Eva to celebrate, and practically jumped out of the unit. I relaxed a bit at the thought that Richard surely got this far, too.

The problem with killing Verena was that the rest of the gang would hear it, and they would storm into the kitchen and blast Veronika to hell if she tried to go in. If she waited for them to come out, they would get her through the window with a rocket launcher. So the next couple of times, after killing Verena, I tried running away from the back yard and back to the front. But they would all chase me and shoot me down by the time I got back to the car, at the latest.

I fell asleep again, inside the unit, wondering if there was a quiet way to kill Verena and sneak into the bar through the kitchen.

I dreamed I was Veronika, and this time I was in the States somewhere, making speeches to large crowds, and getting into some kind of political struggle with a woman called Monica True, who Veronika for some reason kept calling Demetra the Dwarf.

What was this?

I didn't wonder about that, then. I just went back at it. Did I call in sick that day? Was it day, or was it night? When was my last meal? I forget.

I shovelled some more of Richard's speed up my nose and tried entering Grauzone from the front again. This time, during the first shootout, I popped Katya in the head. Yes! I was sure Richard had never managed this.

I rushed through the rest of the carnage, and lugged nine dead ones into the Orgasmatron, managing it after just one hour and twenty minutes. This time I got Lisa and Katya in there, too, but I still couldn't do anything about the remains of Anya, Petra and Dagmar White, except to burn them.

After I blacked out, I landed in the Orgasmatron again. This time I leaned back and played dead, enjoying the show and trying out Goddess evocations, until the sixty minutes were done, and the Ehrenfeld Furies arrived. They turned off the Orgasmatron and let us drop into a pile on the floor. I was going to get out of it!

They lugged the greenish bodies out. The ones who got hold of me noticed right away I was still relatively pink and warm. They slaughtered me like a pig.

Shit! I went back to killing Eva and trying to get Verena silently. Somehow Verena would always know whenever I killed Eva, and she would always show up in places I wasn't expecting her. Then I tried leaving Eva alive and following her to Verena again. I got as far as getting the bolos around Verena's neck from behind, but Eva started screaming and the other girls came in through the kitchen, and in their eagerness to kill Veronika they perforated both Verena and me.

On the sixth morning I got as far as strangling Eva just before she reached the back lot, and then shooting Verena in the heart with the pistol up tight against her back, so that it wasn't loud enough to alert the people inside the bar. Then I slaughtered almost everyone, from the dance floor up to the front room. Except, once I got there, Tong shot me in the knee and Dagmar Black popped me in the head. But this was good. I felt sure I was close, I only needed to get Tong and Dagmar Black somehow, and then do the thread trip with Heike, who was playing dead as usual. Then I would finally have them all dead in the same game. Then we would see.

That is how far I was, when Meat Dispatcher and Cory suddenly showed up at Richard's place and found me in the machine. Luckily they didn't notice that I took the game module and slipped it into my pocket. They yelled at me and Meat Dispatcher took my deputy's star and my official piece, and kicked me out so that they could start packing up the machine to send it off to the FBI in Chicago.

Game Over.

Maybe I should back up a bit here. Right.

My name is Valuta, Nicholas Valuta. I am 31 years old. I am a detective.

At least, I thought I was, until last week.

Veronika Kill-O-Matic does not exist. I hope she doesn't. It's all just a game.

Where should I start?

Personville is an old mining town tucked into a forgotten valley, population 80,000, home to the largest trailer park in Northern California. Of course I should say: well out of sight of that Valley, the famous one, though it is only an hour's drive on a good day! Same state, different planet. I grew up here, my father was a supervisor at the lightbulb factory. After a few years at school and some places around Colorado and Wyoming I came back and got a job I had dreamed about as a child, but that was no dream to me now.

With the Heathcote Detective Agency. Mostly just insurance cases, unpaid debts and alimony, serving papers and trying to make the recipients thereof feel like I might break their kneecaps, but never saying so in so many words. I try to dress dapper, without moving into the cheesy leisure-suit style. It's so much more impressive to the deadbeat to be confronted with a PI, instead of some idiot calling in from a debt agency. It's so boring, if you are the PI. We were lucky to get the occasional guy who wanted us to follow his wife around, or the businessman who wanted to know if he was being ripped off by his partner. There are three of us at the office here, with a manager on the phone in Sacramento.

Things started getting interesting a couple of years ago when the recession hit, and any jobs anyone from here might have had in the other Valley - as good as none - were lost, and the lightbulb factory packed for Mexico, and these Indians who only showed up a few years ago got a permit to open up what is probably the seediest and least profitable casino on God's green earth, right on the outskirts of Personville. Suddenly there was a lot more rough action in town, and even though his budget was raised the chief of police, who we call Meat Dispatcher, added some part-time troops by deputizing the local PIs.

That's just in the way of explaining why nobody suspected me for the things I did when I found Richard. His name had come in on the ticker, a long list of unpaid bills that had been consolidated and commissioned to Heathcote Detective. I was astonished to see it. I hadn't seen Richard in years. Last I heard, he had a slick position as a programmer. It was Cory's turn for the call, but it was late in the day, and he wanted to do it tomorrow. I said I would take the ticket for him.

Turns out Richard now lived in a flatboard one-storey with a yard, in a row of similarly depressing constructions, a neighborhood where all you heard was barking and honking. Right away when I rang the bell I smelled the rot, and I knew everything was fucked. I took the passage between the house and the fence to the back. I had no trouble getting in.

The whole place was stacked high with pizza boxes and old cartons of Chinese, bottles of coke and beer. I found Richard in the bedroom, inside the machine, on the jolt chair, melting into a little patch of skeletized jungle. Just as I got there a rat had climbed onto his face. I screamed, it scurried, and I let go of lunch on the only section of empty floor. I went into the bathroom to clean myself up, put a wet towel over my face, and found a moldy mop to get rid of the puke. It wouldn't do for the other boys to find that.

I had only seen such machines in arcades. Two years ago they still cost what, half a million? But last summer they started selling them for the price of a mean sport utility. It was a lot better than a VR helmet, and only twice as expensive. I didn't recognize this model. There were handsets with buttons on either side, you could operate these as joysticks, or stick your fingers into short rubber tubes. There was a keyboard and other knobs, and sticks I didn't understand at first.

The four upper screens formed a kind of dome that surrounded you in the chair. That was a marvel, the chair, easily the most expensive part of the unit, except for the software. It was on a hydraulic set-up, and it could move or jolt in six directions. It had speakers at the back of the neck, these served as your voice. You could adjust it I don't know how many different ways, from almost lying to almost standing, with your feet in these boot-like controls. Kick your left foot towards the right, and Veronika would run to the right. Kick it straight up, she would kick her leg up in the air. Kick both feet back, she would jump up. The exact direction you controlled with your hands. There were speakers in the glove units, too.

One thing I am avoiding. This machine had an additional feature I had never heard of. A bar that came up between the player's legs, holding what looked like a clamp with two little plastic pillows up at the crotch. It wasn't just plastic though, I found out later this was one of those new "obedient" materials. On contact it starts liquefying somehow and turns warm, but without falling apart. It turns back into plastic when you withdraw. And when you touch it, the clamp pushes the two pillows together like a meat-eating plant, and they start to move slowly up and down. I hadn't seen that then, but already on first sight I knew it was a simulated vagina. It had a little dome at the top that sucked air like a dentist's tool, and a feed that went down into a clear container full of Richard's dried semen.

I calmed down, going from hysteria into a mere daze. For some reason I decided this was the scene of a crime, so I put on my deputy's star and slipped on my white gloves. I admire good style, there's no beating white gloves. The call to the station could wait.

On the floor next to the machine, I found the Veronika Kill-O-Matic manual and the book with Richard's notes. On the first page I read: "I will tie her to the pipes and carve her up a bit as I strangle her. No, I'll crucify her and just watch, slap her until she suffocates from the tension...." Oh Jesus. What the fuck was this? Richard had been a straight-A student, a good looking guy, too. We all thought he went to major in Math at Stanford. Didn't he get married, a few years ago? I still saw his mother sometimes, on the street.

Suddenly, I don't know what I touched, but with a witless fright I realized the machine was powering up. In a moment the inside of a car appeared around Richard's corpse. The words scrolled up on the windshield:

MEN ARE HISTORY. WOMEN SURVIVE. THE Y-VIRUS KILLED ALL MALES AND IN THEIR LAST BATTLE THEY DESTROYED THE SPERM BANKS...

TEN YEARS LATER, WOMEN ARE NUTS...

Two buttons were offered to me: Start, or Quit?

"Oh, fuck," I said. "Oh, fuck."

I forgot myself, during the next hour. I found Richard's shelf of snuff porn, three or four feet long. Another first experience, for me. Richard, so it seemed, got sexually aroused at the thought of dead women. First thing I thought was that he was a serial killer, but then I realized most of this stuff was simulated and readily available. I didn't want to look. I went through it as quickly as I could, just to get the idea.

He had print-outs of thousands of photos. On the left it started with real women who'd been murdered or killed in accidents, and autopsy shots. A lot of these were from newspapers. He had bagged these in clear plastic, and sometimes added labels with names that might fit the face. Then there were all these vidcaps from films, printed at high resolution in widescreen formats. Usually like a dossier that started with a shot of the victim while she was still alive, and went through the highlights of her death in the film.

Then there were hundreds of simulated shots with porn actresses, graphics downloaded from the Internet. The next section consisted of retouches, photos of women that had been manipulated to make them appear dead, with knives sticking out of them or bullet holes, nooses. These mostly looked fake. Finally, shots of digital cartoons, made with a computer drawing program called Poser. Many of these were done up as proper comics. All the women looked like clones.

The polaroids were the next shock. Motel room scenes, babes in leather outfits playing dead on the bed. Each set included at least one of the woman applying fake blood to her face with a smile, just in case a detective was ever going through them and thought they were real. Good foresight. I recognized one of the most popular whores on Personville Boulevard, whom I had seen (passing on the street, that is) the other day.

Below that was a shelf full of trashy videos. Some had titles like Sorority Girl Massacre 6, while others sounded more serious, like Nemesis or Blade Runner. I didn't need to speculate about what all of these films had in common.

The most recent date I saw on any of the pizza boxes was a month old.

I found what looked like a half-pound of speed under the bed, and matchboxes full of colored pills. Obviously he had got very sloppy about hiding his drugs.

Any reasonable man could see that the case was solved. Richard had masturbated himself to death. I'd had enough of the stink. I again mopped up the spot where I had puked, spread some dustballs on it, and knocked an old can of coke over on to it. They wouldn't blame me for that.

I took the mop, the drug stash, Richard's notebook, the machine manual and the Veronika Kill-O-Matic manual out to the car and put them in my trunk. Then I called the station. When the boys arrived I didn't go back in, I just told them what they would find and that I was feeling very upset about my old friend. Meat Dispatcher let me drive home. I spent that evening reading the manual and the notes, and trying to match these to the bright boy I had known. And with whom I twice jacked off together, when we were both thirteen.

This is what he had scrawled on the center of the last page:

"Males, like the rats following the Pied Piper, will be lured by Pussy to their doom, will be overcome and submerged by and will eventually drown in the passive flesh that they are. V.S."

Who the fuck was V.S.? Was this Veronika's real name?

The next afternoon we heard about the report, which I could tell would have been a major source of amusement to Cory and Sam, except they knew I was upset.

Richard had died of a heart attack brought on by thirst and hunger. Traces of amphetamine in his system. Medical history of heart weakness. No prior arrests. Perfect credit record, until six months ago. He had been fired from his job and moved back to Personville eleven months ago, and was described by former co-workers as moody and depressive but very competent, on those days when he bothered to show up to work. His DNA didn't match any ever found at the scene of a crime. Game Over.

I told the other guys I felt rotten and anyway needed to check out the database about some other case, and spent that day at the office while they took calls and went out on cases.

www.leviathanarises.com was password protected. What kind of business site was this? Veronika Kill-O-Matic was not listed on Vistas Unlimited or Fetch Me. I should have checked other search engines, but I went into the FBI instead. She wasn't there, either.

I tried out searches on deaths involving VR helmets or "full-world simulation units," as Richard's type of machine was called. After phrasing the search nine or ten different ways, I had collected 48 hits in the United States and Canada from the last two years. Data on this subject had not been compiled in any fashion; it was raw. I spent a few hours going through death reports, while the other guys went home.

Eleven of the cases turned out to be electrocutions due to defective equipment or faulty set up, and I remembered that one of the VR producers had been shut down after they got sued for shitty design.

The other 37 were scattered in a very interesting fashion. Richard wasn't in the database yet. All of the cases were males. The youngest was 49 years of age, most were in their sixties. Twelve of them were in this region, and five in San Diego. The rest were also in big cities, six just in New York. Several of the identities had been anonymized, which is very unusual. I guessed these were rich folks with families, who didn't want anyone to know how their beloved Poppy had died in a wanking machine.

Well, they must have all been rich folks. Richard was pioneering their movement for the middle class and the young.

At least a dozen of the writeups emphasized that the subject "was making intense use of electronic pornographic materials" when he died. None of them listed any specific programs.

I decided to call one of the case officers in New York. The phone was already ringing when I realized it was night on the East Coast, but as it turned out, Detective Wilkins was in the precinct. I stumbled through an explanation of why I was calling.

He laughed, broad and deep. "Oh, the rich stiffie last year! The one in the Orgasmatron!"

"The WHAT?!"

"Ah, that's just the name we gave it. It was a good story to tell. You know, like orgasm machine. We called it Orgasmatron. That was a sick pup, around sixty, sixty-five. He weighed a ton if he weighed a feather. He had houses scattered like marbles all over the world, but he went nuts anyway. He had spent the last ten years on the Internet! Von Aden, he was called, though I'm not supposed to tell you that. In the end he sent his trophy wife to her boyfriend in Hawaii, and locked himself up in his penthouse with boxes full of port and a high-class porn library and these statues doing the Karma Sootra, that Hindu legend. You know? And the machine. That was where we found him, inside the machine, just like your stiffie, ten days rotten. He had four strokes in there. Ended up too weak to get out of it. Starved. Hilarious."

"I have a question."

"Shoot, skipper, what do you wanna know?" I hated this guy, already.

"Do you remember the program he was using, what was on the machine, when he died?"

"Do I remember?" His laughter roared out at me, coast to coast. "Oh, yeah, that was a hoot! Get this, it was called..." He paused as though doing a drum roll, then announced, in a low and dramatic voice: "Veronika Kill-O-Matic. Oooooooh! Watch out! It was about this girl who kills all these other girls in some bar. We couldn't get over it, what a sick bastard that guy was!"

I thanked Det. Wilkins and started calling down the list. That night I landed three more of the case officers, out of those in my own region. None of them had ever heard of Veronika Kill-O-Matic, but none of them could remember what program had been in the machine.

I stopped myself. Was I crazy? What did it matter? Veronika Kill-O-Matic didn't kill Richard. Why did I care? I went home and fell asleep reading the Veronika manual. I slept for ten hours. Last time.

In the morning I dreamed that a Veronika was waiting for me, and that she would be better than any girl I'd ever had. She was going to teach me how to like sex again, now that I was on my one-hundred-and-twentieth partner, lifetime. Now that rutting was getting kind of monotonous.

As I woke up I said out loud, "It's not monotonous! It's good." I tried to count. I had been a performer, but 120 sounded high. I was pretty sure I went over 100 last year, and in my mind I arbitrarily awarded that honor to Susan, easily the sweetest and least complicated of the current lot. But not stupid, mind you. Just simple, and easy, and pretty, in bed a bit too vanilla and serious about it. But no crying games, no stalker calls, and usually glad to see me. And, of course, a great ass and tits. Maybe I should give her a call.

Instead I called a crime-scene cleaning service, told them I was a cop, and hired them to drive their truck out to Personville and get the pizza boxes and scrub down the chair at Richard's place. I emphasized the importance of getting the chair clean, and being very careful with the machinery.

Later, while out serving papers, I detoured to Richard's to meet the nice Mexican ladies, and told them what they had to do. They didn't seem very disturbed by anything. I saw that the snuff porn shelf and the videos had been confiscated by Meat Dispatcher's boys, but otherwise the place looked very much as I had left it, minus the corpse of course.

That evening I went from work to Richard's place, which was about three times bigger, now that the garbage was gone. It was still dark in there, all the blinds down as Richard had left it. But the chair was looking polished, not a hair on it. Thank God.

The first thing I did was to unscrew the plastic vagina from its base. No way was I going to let that thing get hold of my dick. I left it, still hooked to the wires but lying at my feet. I sat down, determined to beat whatever had killed Richard. I would find this Orgasmatron, I would decipher it and escape it. Then I would find out who was behind Demises Unlimited. And then... THEN, I would meet the actress who played Veronika.

I would never surrender.

In my gut, I had already guessed that the future of the male gender rested squarely on my shoulders.

GAME OVER