Jupiter Project

Chapter 3

Zak called me just before I went off shift. He and Ishi were fooling around with nothing much to do. “C’mon over to my place and we’ll goof off,” Zak said. I had some time free, so I went.

Zak and Ishi were back in Zak’s tiny bunkroom, wedged in like sardines. Zak’s parents weren’t home yet and Zak was messing around with the computer terminal he had installed next to his bunk. “Hey, close the door,” Ishi called to me.

“You kidding?” I replied. “The three of us packed in here’ll bring on claustrophobia fits.”

“We want some privacy, Matt old man,” Zak said mysteriously.

So I closed the door and perched on the edge of Zak’s bunk. “For what?”

“This,” Ishi said, with his usual eloquence. He flicked on the big display flatscreen on the wall. A black and white picture formed out of a pearly background fog. A woman. Pretty, with long legs. She was peering off to the left. She wore a flowing robe.

“Who’s she?” I asked.

“A creation of mine.” Zak said.

“A snip from Earthside 3D?” I asked.

“Well, that’s how she got started, yeah. You remember me telling you about those new Simulife codes I got?”

“Sure. For taking a mechanical system and studying the stresses. You start off with a new design for a grappling arm, say, and the computer draws a picture of it for you. Then you give it jobs to do and the computer studies how the thing will move and what strains it will take. You can see the grappler making awkward motions, and redesign it to avoid that. It’s—” I noticed the two of them grinning at me. “Hey…” I said, thinking.

“You are a quick student,” Ishi said wryly. “Show him, Zak.”

Zak punched a read-in code. The woman began to move. She stood up. She smiled right at us and I guessed she was about twenty, maybe twenty-five. She had a nice smile. She was still staring toward me as she reached up and her fingers found a clasp at her throat. The robe fell. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. She was, well, spectacular.

“Damn,” was all I could say.

“I can tap in for color,” Zak said, and her skin became a rosy tan. Green eyes. Dark black hair, so black it seemed to have traces of blue in it. She began to turn slowly. A little mechanically, I thought. But then I, ah, got more interested in the general effect, and she didn’t seem so awkward anymore.

“And 3D.” Ishi prompted.

“Check.” Zak’s fingers talked to the central computer some more and the woman changed from a flat image to one with perspective. Fully rounded, yeah. She had a special luxuriant look about her that…well, bigger and better than life, is the way to put it, I guess. She was certainly better than anything I’d ever seen in the Can. It suddenly struck me that the images of women I’d been seeing on 3D for years were always more spectacular than the women and girls I saw in everyday life. False advertising, sort of.

“Zak, you’ve got a good thing here,” I said. “You’ve surpassed yourself.”

Ishi grinned broadly. “Matt, you lack imagination.”

Zak typed in for a routine he’d obviously set up beforehand. “I call her Rebecca.” he said mildly.

Rebecca began to dance. She was good. She jiggled in all the right places and I followed her movements intently. It was hard to believe a program designed to test out how machines would function, before they were ever built, could do this. Zak had taken Rebecca off some 3D show and fed her specs into the programming, and here she was, sexy as hell.

Then a man walked on stage.

He was naked. And he was visibly interested in Rebecca. Very visibly.

Zak snickered when he saw the expression on my face. “Here we go, boys.”

Zak had imagination, that was for sure. He’d named the guy Isaac. Isaac was big and burly and had been around the world. Rebecca was entranced by him. Anything Isaac wanted, he got. They did it in the regular old Missionary Position, and then in a chair, and then standing up. We three sat there and watched. Nobody said anything, even though I knew this wasn’t new to Zak or Ishi. They were still too interested, though, to make any wise-cracks. Some things you don’t get tired of so fast, I guess. And me…well, for me a lot of it was new. Sure. I’d seen the manuals, and gone to the Becoming An Adult 3D courses they imported from Earth, and all that stuff. But to see it…that was something else.

“What’ll you have next, gents?” Zak asked. Isaac and Rebecca were still going at it in the middle of the screen. Each of them was staring at the other with fixed smiles. I wondered if it was the mechanical programming or whether people were really like that when they, well. Did It. I had no way of knowing, of course. “Uh…” I began, and stopped. I knew my face was turning red again, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it. Rebecca and Isaac went on with their relentless energy. I knew there was a certain rhythm you were supposed to hit; the books all talked about it that way. The books had spoken about techniques and methods…

“Geez, Matt,” Zak said, “you look like you’re doing your homework.”

Ishi chuckled. I realized I’d been dodging the whole thing by concentrating on the technical points. “Well, maybe that’s the way I am,” I growled.

“C’mon. relax,” Zak said. He tapped his console. Rebecca and Isaac jerked and moved. They got into a new position. Then they were at it again. Bam, bam, bam.

“Kind of repetitious, isn’t it?” I murmured.

“You should’ve been here, a couple of hours ago,” Ishi said. “Ol’ Zak here had them going at it like rabbits. Double the speed, Zak.”

He did. We all burst out laughing.

“Not a very dignified act, is it?” I commented.

“Dignified, schmignified,” Zak said. “It’s the real stuff.”

“No, it’s just a sim.”

“I didn’t notice you falling asleep.”

“Okay, okay, it’s pretty good, in fact, damned good.”

Ishi asked idly. “I wonder if that’s what those porno movies are like?”

Zak nodded. “That’s what gave me the idea.”

“To duplicate pornos?”

“Sure. Commander Aarons isn’t going to let that kind of thing come in over the 3D tightbeam. But if we can make them here…”

I started to see it. “Ah. You’re going to sell tapes of your talented Rebecca?”

“I don‘t see why not.”

I slapped my brow. “Zak the flak. Geez, you’ll do anything for money.”

Zak said airily, “ideas have a momentum of their own, Matt-o. That’s one of the lessons of history.”

“They’ll nail you. They’ll uncover it in the memory files.”

He arched his eyebrows. “You imagine I would overlook such a vital facet of the problem? I see you have inadequate respect for the jewellike clarity of my mind.”

“Okay, okay, what’s your out?”

“I have a storage place they’ll never find. Absolutely safe.”

“Where?” Ishi asked.

“Come now. Professional secret.”

“So you work out a whole set of pornos,” I said, “and then sell the index code, so kids can tap into it?”

“There will be a random resorting of the index, of course, from time to time. To keep the customers from giving the information away. Only I will know the basic location.”

Ishi said, “Free enterprise, he calls it.”

“Look, somebody’s got to do something to liven it up around here.”

I smiled. “So you think there’ll be a big market for your machine-made porno movies?”

“Why not? The stuff we get from Earthside is all oatmeal puree. Entertainment for all the family. Boring.”

“So you figure to sell them to everybody?”

Zak shook his head. “Why would adults want them? Hell, they’ve got all the sex they need.”

Ishi laughed. “I think you’re a little naive about your marketing strategy. Zak.”

“Oh. yeah? Wouldn’t you lay out some coin of the realm to see ol’ Rebecca doing her thing?”

Ishi nodded. “Maybe. But it would have to be really good.”

“Look, you guys,” Zak said energetically, “let’s cut the crap. We all know the Can is a tightly run ship, in more ways than one. Here we are, nearly eighteen years old, and not a single one of us has gotten laid. Right?”

“Right.” I said sourly.

“That means there’s a lot of repressed impulses floating around.”

“Which you’ll make a buck out of.”

“Well…maybe. I’ll tell you one thing, this move of mine has made me think about our tight little tribe here. They give us all these up-to-date courses and we have social mixers and all that, sure. But the plain fact is that we live in each other’s hip pockets. There’s no privacy. Your family is always just around the corner.”

Ishi said, “Like some incredibly small town.”

“Check. You know how in schools back Earthside. they give you an essay to write on what you did on your summer vacation?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what everybody knows is that if you’re older than fourteen, you spend your summer vacation trying to get laid. And if you’re lucky, you make it.

“You score,” Ishi said.

“You mean,” I said, “by the time kids Earthside are our age, they’re…”

“Right, they’re men of the world, compared to us.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Novels and movies are all about that. For Chrissake, it’s a major theme!”

Ishi chuckled, “You’ve got a point.”

“I think I know why, too. I mean, why we’re so stifled up here.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “We’re busy. It’s dangerous out here. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

“That’s a piece of it. yeah.” Zak said. “I did a little researching, though, and turned up a study. Sexual Suppression in Closed Communities, it was called. It turns out that in places like the Israeli kibbutzim, nobody gets laid either, unless they’re married. There’s a thing called ‘outgroup bonding’ that forms. Like an incest taboo, almost. You get to feeling you can’t have sex or romance with a member of the group you grew up with. The pressure is always on you to defend against some threat, so you get in the habit of thinking about girls as if they’re allies. Not, y’know, potential lovers.”

“You think that explains it?” Ishi asked.

“Sure. Hell, the author of the study gave the Can as an example. She said we’ll probably work out the same way as the kibbutzim. I think that’s why the study was done in the first place—to find out what to expect out here.”

“Ummm,” I murmured. “I dunno…”

“Say, Ishi. I just remembered something.”

“Oh?”

“When I mentioned that nobody got laid around here, you kept quiet.”

“So I did.”

“You mean…”

Ishi smiled faintly. “I cannot lie to you. But I will give no details.”

Zak and I glanced at each other. For Chrissakes. Ishi, of all people! He seemed so reserved, so quiet, so—“You never gave any sign,” I said. “Y’know. I used to notice that when Zak here would be swapping dirty jokes with me, you never said anything. I thought you were shy.”

“Maybe he had a more direct approach to the problem.” Zak said.

“Ummm…” I studied Ishi’s mysterious smile. Suddenly I felt like a punk kid. And back Earthside, all of us kids would probably look like social throwbacks. Sex was a big part of growing up and we hadn’t even started on it yet. But Ishi had.

I said. “How’d you find a girl who would… you know…?”

Zak said, “In that magic phrase. Do It?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Ishi pursed his lips. “It is the way you ask the question which tells the true story. Matt.”

“Huh?”

“Here in the Can, we are vary careful to keep orderly behavior. So the society tends to use the social forms that were current when our parents were growing up. There has been a tradition of seeing the relationships of boys and girls as a contest.”

“Yeah,” Zak agreed. “They’re supposed to hold out on you, and you try to talk ’em into it.”

“Come on, it’s not that bad.” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Zak said sarcastically.

Ishi said mildly. “There is some truth in Zak’s words. But as well, our parents wish to protect us. Without thinking of it in so many words, they try to keep us children. It is difficult for them to see us as nearly adults.”

“Yeah, so to keep from dealing with our sex lives, they arrange it so we don’t have any,” Zak said.

“Let us say it is easier for them if they do not have to handle such delicate matters.”

Zak said. “Technical types are kind of shy anyway. They sweep the subject under the rug.”

“We don’t have any rugs in the Can.” I said. “But look, you guys make it sound like some kind of conspiracy.”

“Quite so, it is not,” Ishi murmured. “We are speaking here of an unconscious pattern. There are Marxist economic theories for this separation and anger between the sexes, of course. I have read them. But I do not think they truly explain matters.”

“The fact remains, Ishi, that you know a girl who is reachable,” Zak put in.

“Yeah.” I said, eyeing Ishi. He only smiled. The unspoken point was that a girl who would Do It for Ishi might Do It for one of us, too. I mean, it’s not a pretty idea, but that’s what I was thinking. I was pretty sure Zak was, too. In fact, Zak might have stage-managed this whole conversation to find out if Ishi or I knew any good candidates. He’s shrewd, ol’ Zak is. Not shrewd enough to solve the Getting Laid Problem, though. And even I could see we were thinking about this the same old way, with girls as half-enemy, half-ally, but, well, that’s the way the world was.

Zak insisted, “You know a girl that we know, too. who—”

“Correct,” Ishi said, grinning.

“C’mon, who is she?”

“I’ll say no more, Zak.”

“Look, we won’t tell. We just want to know—”

“I’m not going to say.”

“Geez, at least you could tell us what it was like. I mean, is it—”

“I have told enough.” Ishi said it in a soft, even voice, and I could tell he meant it.

After that, nothing much more happened. Ishi put up with our grousing. He wouldn’t give away any more information about the mysterious Lady X who’d lifted the burden of virginity from his shoulders. Zak told a seemingly endless series of dirty jokes. I wondered if adults spent this much time on the subject and decided no, that was impossible. When you can do, you don’t talk.

Zak’s mother came in from her job in Physical Chem. She peered in at us, all scrunched together, and gave us a curious look. Zak hurried to erase the encoding for energetic Rebecca’s program. After that we joked around a little, the way you do, and then when there wasn’t anything more to say, I went home.