Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 20:28:07 -0700
From: snakeboy@-
To: gashgirl@-
Subject: fix

gash

a million souls inhabit these spaces

outside, the ruined earth sighs

the city collapses

lives are needlessly squandered

our words have met somewhere between space and time

disembodied from the physical world.

like a junkie on a nod, i reach out to you,

for another

fix

When you 'talk' to me, I've heard a few voices. In our e-mail exchanges do you find yourself moving between your RL voice and your VL voice? Or something in-between? Is our e-mail something between VL and RL for you? My guess is that your VL persona is so finely and expertly constructed that you feel as home there - perhaps more (?) at home there than IRL. Plus, it's so powerful and seductive. I heard it in the letter you wrote. It made me respond. That wasn't an accident.

What happened to Your Puppet - do you miss him? What about the 'wolf'? Am I disturbing you by asking about characters whom you sent me data on? Did you think I would not be curious? Is the picture on the Web 'you'? If we met at LambdaMoo, would you recognize me? Are you a 'cyber serial killer'? Would I be a willing victim? What if I refused- then what would you do? Have you ever been the victim? Would you like to be?

I went to a chat site on the Web yesterday for the first time. I read the chats - they were like bad pornography written by people raised on a steady diet of junk food, bad T.V. and cheap flesh mags. I chatted with "kitty" perhaps hoping to find a gashgirl - about as likely as finding a picasso at the local bodega. I was embarrassingly disappointed. Like trying to discuss Sartre with a tree stump.

I ran tonight. In the cool spring air. Music in my ears. Heart pounding blood flowing legs pumping skin glistening and tried to imagine where you were what you were doing in your "small town of lies and whispers" in the dark, under the stars, in the black, black, night.

Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 23:02:17 -0700
From: gashgirl@-
To: snakeboy@-
Subject: Re: fix

You wanted to know more about me. What could I tell you that would make any sense?

The room. Pale blossom branded by a dawn which always comes too early. It is empty apart from a bed. Three candles illuminate the space. Outside the cars become the steady roll of a wave which never quite breaks, under stars which hold their promise of morning for hours.

It is in this room that I utter a thousand promises of tender infamies. It is here that I captivate the minds of strangers who readily surrender to the capricious will of the Mistress of Detestable Pleasures. Only the serious may play my games.

I enter the computer, I connect, I am.
It's like breathing. But shared with a million million others.
I die again and again, and each time I remake myself.
With a multiple of incandescent morphs one is never alone.

Even when I have disconnected, leaving my sleeping agents alone in their rooms, I sense myself continuing to exist in the imaginations of others, perpetrating a hundred elegant crimes upon their beings, touching secret yearnings with my whispering strokes, inciting them to action in their other worlds which I cannot, must not, visit.

I am most at home in the zones of the interior, exploring the planes of madness, eluding those who would censure me. Like a vampyre I feed off the dark slick imaginings of my victims. My conspirators rather, for there are no true victims here, only those for whom torture and humiliation have become rapturous pasttimes.

For myself, I have no interest in adopting postures of vulnerability and submission. I can see no point. Only once have I wittingly sacrificed myself at love's altar. You can still see the scars of the wolf's bite.

And the puppet? I cannot say that I miss him, as that story ended months ago. The memories of the Puppet Mistress are not my memories, and all that remains are some pages ripped from her journal. Some games are quickly outgrown during the search for the unfamiliar.

Which brings me to you.

I want you.

Always.