(DJ Syncope 1) Lesser Addictions

September 4, 2007 by Deightine.

The Young Starlet™ danced a close grind with her elder date, a “From Russia” edition Connery™. Her clothing was immaculate and all of her grooming was straight out of the box. She obviously had little skill on the Grid and was probably attending the DRave on her father’s work console. She couldn’t be a day over 18, if 16 and it showed. She looked the part of a spoiled brat dancer and it fit her better than the automagically painted chinese fingernails. The Connery™ on the other hand kept up like a fellow teenager, belying his obvious lack of maturity under the guise of an older man. She was bound to be disappointed later in the evening when his G-Cred account was significantly lower than the sugar daddies she was used to on the Grid. The DJ was unimpressed, but they were the most immediate crowd below her and had gotten her attention on a downbeat in the show. She put them out of her thoughts.

Things were starting to heat up in Open Space, a Gridlined rave club and broadcasting point that currently featured the highest popularity rating. This was important, because it also meant that the DJ must have one of the highest popularity rates going. But one wouldn’t want to ask her, between keeping busy and her icy yet seductive demeanor, she would shut you down in a heartbeat. Few had ever gotten through her fourteen programmed layers of Gridline defense far enough to so much as speak to her while she was working, and all of them were the types of people you didn’t turn away. High on a floating dais and hunched over what would look to the uninitiated as a mixing board and old fashioned record player, she was clad entirely in oil slicked black glitter from toe to crown. Whenever the light would hit her, it absorbed per the in-world shadow simulators and through an old hack that had never been corrected, it did not bounce off. In effect, one couldn’t see anything but her outline, glimmering skin, pale blue eyes and long blond hair pulled up severely. Stunning, yet unapproachable… just how she liked it. Staring at her too long would hurt even your digital eyes.

Her hips ground in pace with the beat of a remixed 90s tune she once sampled horn work from in her most famous track, “The Light of My eyes burning down Your Life”. Her spine arched back, and she examined the myriad switches that moved of their own accord in time with her meticulously pre-planned playlist. Anyone from below or over the Airline would assume she was actively tweaking the music running, just like any other remixer. Her dirty little secret was that everything was planned ahead. She could tweak it, she just didn’t want to. This way she would arrange the compilation days ahead, rest until the club date, run the playlist and enjoy it like all of the other people in the club. In effect, she didn’t even know what her own music would sound like until she danced to it with the masses. One mix was ending and the next had yet to be set. DJ Syncope snapped out of the trance watching the crowd had brought on, she reached over and motioned for the large black vinyl record to flip. A small heads up menu popped above the menu to show it was loading: 1tb, 2tb, 3tb, finished. The music started again an 8th of a second later and nobody even missed a beat. She glanced down at another user interface, it read ‘2 hours : 14 minutes’ in unsympathetic white against semi-transparent black. This was going to be a long session.

The DJ reached out with her right hand and picked up a decadently resolutioned martini glass and lifted it from the surface of her play table. The glass flickered its acknowledgment and she lifted it to her lips and she knew that less than half a second later her physical body would be doing the same, and the taste washed over her lips and down into her throat with practiced ease. She caught the toothpick in her teeth and squeezed down on the olive, popping it and feeling the bitterness take over her mouth. In Open Space, she sat the glass down and it flickered into an empty state, the olive and pick remaining attached to the glass, eye candy only. In reality, she ground on the pick between her teeth, a contented sigh leaving her lips.

Up beat, up beat, up beat, down beat, up beat… She tapped her foot to rhythm in her avatar form, whole body still slowly moving and shifting, making slow love to the music in a way that would agonize a lover. She imagined the touch of the music notes and in the quasi-reality of the NeuriaLink on her Aeos, she could almost make out the hallucinatory form of a lover reaching out to her from beyond the dais and inviting her to the dance floor. Syn’ shook it away, trying to keep her concentration off of the distractions of liquor and sex. The heat building in her, liquor flowing through her veins and the sex stirring her insides, rolled around and echoed off of reality.

Eyes clearing of the fog, she was startled by a note she disliked and struck it from the music before it would roll out over the ‘line to her live audience. In the third instrumental chorus, the synthesizer running the malign saloon piano suddenly switched out a C note for a D note and nobody would ever know it was any way other than she had meant it. Perfection was as much her addiction as the music. The haze retook her and she went back to grinding, holding back the building climax that was echoed in her music.

Two hours passed by and it came into the final stretch, the audience slowing down despite that their real bodies were comfortably resting in a chair right now feeling the phantom dance fatigue their memories created. Syn’ grinned a devil’s death wish and unloaded on the floor full of manicured angels, turning up the pace on the last half of her final piece. Cellos played like heavy metal guitar to a dance beat she discovered in a cultural notation from the old Middle East. The crowd went nearly into riot, all at once trying to keep up and cheering for the odd twist in the music.

DJ Syncope closed her eyes and rested her hands on the edge of her play table, body grinding hard and fast to the music like the rats that now danced to her piping below, the sensation of sweat running down her brow and her pulse quickening in her body. One hand raised in the real world to feel her chest, judging her heartbeat while she bounced up and down, legs aching and muscles beginning to cramp. In Open Space, a beatific smile carved itself into her lips and she lost herself in the waves of the orgiastic climax. All of the Neuria mechanisms buried in her back down the length of her spine and throughout her muscles were fired a million messages a second, a blood rush filled her ears and her whole body shook imperceptibly with the tension. After the longest — and most fulfilling — ten seconds of her day, she began to relax on her digital legs. A final cheer from the floor rose as the final beats stopped and two full seconds passed to prove there would be no encore. In the real world, a crowd of this nature would tear a place apart but here on the Grid, customers just began putting back up personal blocks that darkened out their avatar bodies and others headed for the doors to try to beat the bandwidth lag to come during mass exodus.

With a gesture, eyes still closed, the DJ pulled a digital curtain around the dais and fell back against the flesh occupying her chair. The sensation was like falling down a deep well into cold water, as neurons realigned from the Neuria back to normal function and took over her full range of motor skills. Her arms, legs and hips hurt. She groaned despite the pleasant glow that came over her. Naked but for the makeup she put on out of habit that afternoon, she rested back against the chest of her latest conquest. From the sound of it, she had utterly destroyed both his will and his stamina, yet he was groaning in frustration. She didn’t so much as look at the man as she got up (against his sudden protests) and left him frustrated in his own lap. Pulling on a robe she had set aside for such occasions, she walked toward the bar with her empty martini glass. “You can go now, you didn’t do very well and to be honest, it’s too large… -ly uninspired. For being a professional cage fighter, I would think a man of your physique should have a bit more stamina.”

Rejected, sexually frustrated and pumped to the moon with artificial hormones, he got to his feet in a way that sounded threatening to the lady DJ. He moved toward her blind back, feet crushing down the fibers of her 1 chit/square foot carpet and every sound reached her artificially enhanced ears like a bull busting down a rattan hut. Her response was to pick up an old-era cattle prod from next to the bar that had previously rested in shadow. She sat it on the bar once he stopped moving and went back to making her drink. Two olives on a toothpick landed in the imported French vodka, the grains harvested in Winter and distilled more times than Syn’ cared to think about. A dash of dry white vermuth to set it off and an olive popped into the mouth completed the drink. She cherished the bitterness like a childhood memory, amused highly when she heard the heavy footfalls travel down the hall and out of her front door. A slight buzz began in her head from the booze and she turned down her hearing with a thought right before the door slammed shut.

Shortly after she spoke in the direction of her Aeos, “Play ‘Die For Me’.” the music began pouring from all of the walls of her apartment. Smooth soul singer lyrics played in stark contrast to the heavy bass line, thud thud thudding away. She wondered if perhaps she shouldn’t treat men so poorly, especially after he had been trying to get her to climax for almost three hours. As quick as it came, the thought faded with the new beats that her favorite song was inspiring for her next show. Her lesser addictions could wait, the music wanted her now.

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