Mind Candy

Here is the story that disappeared entirely without a trace from my computer the night before the Boston Marathon last year. It was originally called 'Solo Midnight Running,' and I've had to re-write it from memory. The two pieces of music referred to in the text are: 'Discover' by Nigel Good (original mix), and 'Fuck You Lady' by Macaco Bong (live studio).

*

Some Sanskrit scholars say the mind is just a bundle of thoughts bubbling up; numerous thoughts always coming to the surface of your consciousness.

Some very clever person makes their own mind clear and transparent to the vision of an intimate friend, and then you can see and enjoy the beading Champagne bubbles of their mind, appreciate the pale golden glow of illumination from within, drink the wine of their beautiful natures.

When all is clear to such an intimate friend... Then all the more interesting, complex inner dimensions of both parties start to be revealed.

For me it all started this time from reading a Craigslist ad sent to my private e-mailbox: "Midnight hi-tech free running chase partner + no-strings sex."

You are kidding, I thought to myself. You have to be kidding...

But then again I was an athlete afterall. Not sure I could make the standards of the kids these days though, spinning and twisting and somersaulting through and over stuff in parks...

Must be worth a phone call to hear what was on the other end.

"Hello..."

"Hello." Ooh what a creamy voice.

*

In two days I received in the mail a large box. Inside were: Dark blue Ion-X compression full-bodysuit, pair of ReconJet augmented reality glasses with night-vision capability, Mizuno running shoes (my size), N10N True Skin lucite and polycarbonate-with-lume cheekplate device, a kid's toy SpyGear watch on an adult-sized neoprene band with dead-drop message capsules attached.

Nothing else. I waited all day and nothing happened.

That evening I went down to the private gym as usual; stuck the ReconJet's on to use the amazing audio they were equipped with and flick through the pre-loaded program. Get familiar with how it worked... Afterawhile I just had to sit down slacking off on one of the padded benches, sweating a little, huge soft thick towel around my shoulders, kicking back and listening to the relaxing E.D.M. stuff that was pre-loaded.

And then later that evening when I took my car out to get some takeaway, as I glided into the drive-through lane, lowering my window to place an order, a girl of not more than twenty-something in a dark cashmere elastane hoody flicked a small message capsule -- same as the one from the kid's toy thingy - right into my lap from at least ten feet away and then turned and took off into the darkness and then around a corner into an alleyway. Did I get a glimpse of her face? Blue eyes, but bright. Can't explain it; somehow very bright. And hair dirty blonde from the eyebrows.

I opened the message capsule. The small slip of paper inside read: '11.50 exactly. Tomorrow. Luke's All Night Chemist. Park outside. Nigel Good, Discover, Original Mix.'

I knew of Nigel Good - he was a music producer, but I'd never heard the song 'Discover.' Must have been something new. But my car had internet though. Pretty soon I had it up there on the central console screen. Hmn. Decent tune. Amazing chicks in Daisy Dukes too in the video clip. Okay.

Wonder what it meant.

Takeout was good. Home was just me. No wife (LT girlfriend actually). She was in Afghanistan doing a gig for troops. Sara's a world famous DJ if you have to know.

What a good tune this 'Discover' was. Must have listened to it maybe ten times at least on the big stack. Just got better every time you listened to it.

*

Luke's Chemist was empty of customers this evening. There was only the afterhours pharmacist himself -- salt-and-pepper haired middle-aged and introverted, scion of rich parents, with potentially unresolved issues of self-worth and confidence - and his much younger, also male, but highly over-confident, assistant.

"Jeff d'you think guys with expensive Italian sportscars get laid more often?"

It started to spitter spatter a few light and windblown tiny little raindroplets outside against the glass window. Jeff the pharmacist looked up from his counter where he had laid open another glossy 'pitch' from a medical goods supplier. "You mean like the guy who owns the Maserati?" He nodded towards the gunmetal Gran Cabrio with its burnt cinnamon roof and natural tan and black piped leather interior, parked directly across the road from their large plate glass window frontage.

'Do you know him?"

"Yeah sure. He runs a hedge fund in the Metric One building up the road. Comes in here for aspirin and eyedrops and that's about it. Thoroughly nice guy."

"Probably gets laid a lot."

Jeff muttered and half-nodded.

"Why don't you get yourself a car like that, Jeff?"

"Maybe I will Vincent, one day soon. After I buy your uncle out and kick you outta here."

Vincent just laughed.

Jeff buried his head back in the junk mail.

"Won't ever happen, Jeff. It'll be: 'Lucas and Vincent Karas -- All-Nite Chemist.' But I'll still keep you on Jeff. I promise."

Jeff the pharmacist sniffed a response, never raising his head, pretending to be interested in the potential free trip to some island resort.

The front door opened.

"Pizza delivery," Vincent announced aloud cheekily. There was due to be a pizza delivery, since they had ordered one, but this wasn't it right now.

She stood at least six foot, head-to-toe in tight dark blue compression running gear, Mizuno Prophecy runners, ReconJet night-vision glasses, the muscles of her thighs and legs cutting long vicious curves where normal soft feminine limb lines should have been. A shock of blonde thick and tousled hair fell around her angular, high cheekboned face. As she walked, her specialised neoprene-soled runners padded stealthily and decisively with very regular footsteps across the high-traffic carpet-tiled floor, bringing her directly, firstly, to the section of shelving where the condoms were.

*

Outside the chemist shop, with the two males inside still standing, their mouths pretty much unmindfully agape, she tore open the outer packaging of one of the two items she had just purchased: the new graphene condoms -- and extracted just one and stuffed it inside the dead-drop capsule that she had popped out from its holding bracket on her watch. And threw the rest of the condom packet insouciantly onto the pavement.

Next, twisting the top off a small spray bottle of EDT she sprayed a burst of mist into the air and threw the black-light fluourescing dead-drop capsule into a looping trajectory up in the dark night through the perfumed air.

*

Before I could work out what was really going on she had taken off down the road, and the watch and the ReconJet glasses she had sent me in the mail and which I had brought with me both went off, their electronic alarms sounding together in loud unison. I put the glasses securely on, took out the key from my car's ignition, stuffing it into my own velcro-tabbed waist pocket and got out of the Maserati. The ReconJets flashed an auto-ultraviolet sweep and so I went over to the responding glow of the drop capsule and picked it up. The night air was cold and moist, with the obvious fragrance of some kind of branded, bottled, classic fougere still lingering detectably all around - and this other thing too I remembered from somewhere else, oh yeah, 'the modern rich person's smell' I call it - expensive private gym or spa shower area hospital-ly lemon antibacterial trace.

I took off down the road after the figure running now far ahead of me.

I couldn't see her up ahead. She was gone.

*

I was just about to start feeling a little at a loss, although perhaps more questioning in my mind though rather than genuinely being at a loss.

And then the ReconJet's audio hummed warmly into life, the music seeming to give, as it were, an indication of hope...

All kinds of hi-tech HUD elements appeared next, swimming, floating, right there in empty space in front of my eyes: Beats Per Minute counter, digital negative count-down timer, a compass pointer and directional navigator.

A scrolling marquee line appeared. "F. i. n. d... m. e." And then: "Left 45 degrees. You are five minutes away."

I looked back at my beloved car; could I take the risk?

I went inside the chemist's.

"Here guys." I tossed the keys to the younger one there. "Look after it for me. Just don't crash it or scratch it if you can manage..."

*

Discover. Nigel Good.

Just what was it about that song...?

'Exotic Matter' -- wasn't that what the latest augmented reality Google mobile phone game was supposed to be about? 'XM...' Something that had mysterious effects on people and things...

Percy Wells Cerutty. 'The greatest running coach in the history of the human race.'

'With successful people, it usually all begins with having a dream.' Arsene Wenger.

Lines of aphorisms were scrolling across empty space in front of my eyes.

Brrrppzzzzttt.

Now what the fuck was that!

All of a sudden the side of my head had been lit up, and it was glowing too, it seemed like, from within. The cheekplate attachment had become activated. Oh fuck: now I could see things. Things that weren't there... I could see like a whispy, ethereal ghost-trail of where she had run on ahead of me. And it was so much easier to follow that.

Without really having to think about it the pace of my running went up to the beat pattern of the music surging through the earpieces.

"On pace now."

Words in space.

"Visual contact available... in... 10... 9... 8..."

No no no! What the fuck is this now? I knew my feet were still running but it seemed that I was no longer actually making contact with the pavement. Okay this is definitely not real...

I could see her now up ahead. She was there all right. Floating, actually floating in the air about ten feet off the ground.

But then again, hey, so was I about at least three foot off it too.

This was not right.

I was getting closer, and I could see her face clearly now. It was totally totally not human. Those eyes, for sure. Not human. There was fire in there. Deadly fire.

I had the thought that maybe if I pulled the ReconJet glasses off and the attachments and pulled out the earpieces - then maybe, everything would suddenly just evaporate and resolve back into the reality I was used to. But then I immediately thought too, deliriously - but would I fall back to the ground? What if I fell back to the ground? And hit it, hard.

Maybe I could ask her what was going on?

"What's going on?" I heard myself say to the woman floating there in empty space right in front of me.

"What's going on?!" she repeated, in a sinister, insinuating, loud laughing voice. Her hands came up and beckoned lewdly and sensuously. "Do you want me...?"

She came much closer to me, right up to me, her face about an arm's length away from my face. I could sense this amazing energy, all dynamic, curled up tight, ready to explode.

She moved around and slipped an arm under one of mine and suddenly I felt swung around and just taken along in a rush of speed and power. There was nothing much I could do about it.

And then up, up up. Really high, too high for my liking, and swiftly down again like a falling hawk. I could feel it all, all the g-forces, the rising and the rushing, in my stomach and bladder.

But now I could see where she was aiming for. Down below us, immediately below us was my car, being driven fairly sedately along the main highway near from where the chemist was.

Still held firmly in her almost impossibly strong clutches, she flew with me in tow to a position in front of the car and half-turned backwards with one hand up to the driver of the car -- whose jaw went back to its gaping wide position that it had not long ago back in the shop just come from being stuck in.

The big brakes pulled the car to a complete standstill and she went around to the passenger's side and opened the door there.

"Move the chair forward, sonny-boy. We're getting in the back with y'all."

Dumfounded, Vincent the twenty-something year-old moved his seat forward also tilting the vertical bolster forward with the electronic mechanism controls under under his left leg.

I let the woman get in first and happily watched her curved ass with the Ion-X compression fabric tightening around it as she bent over to go across to the farside rear seat.

I followed her in; it was afterall my car, even though I did not know what the fuck was going on.

After I was in and seated, she leant forward across me and tapped the driver on the shoulder. I could smell her underarms combined with the new fabric slightly antiseptic odour of the Ion-X material of her compression-wear.

"Your name is Jeff, isn't it." She said matter of factly.

He nodded.

"Well drive off now please Jeff. I'll let you know where to drive to in a minute."

She turned to me: "Nice car, Johnny. I hope we don't mess it up too much inside for you. Because what we're gonna be doing -" She leant forward again and this time grabbed the young dude's neck from behind. "Is a whole lot of fucking in here. Except not you, Vincent. You, are going to be going down on me and licking pussy like you never have before."

*

The penthouse I live in has a private car elevator. It was probably the actual reason I leased the place at all at the beginning of the year. I only had the penthouse until the end of the year though. By then my 'silly things' budget was about due to run very dry.

It's true I'm far too organised; I actually have interest-earning designated funds set aside for Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power razors and my Taylor's of Old Bond Street Bay Rum aftershave for at least a few years ahead... Oh, and not to mention Sara's favourite indulgence, the Zeolite bead chlorine barrier/vitamin-C gel filters inside the shower heads. Even nowadays not all that many people have these things in their home showers and bathrooms, even in the up-scale social or corporate circles. I was always able to notice who did from this quite light if very particular skin scent. I call it the modern rich people smell.

With my eyelids heavy I could sense there were night-time city lights out there all around me as the car travelled upwards in the all glass surrounded private elevator shaft. I knew that I was semi-conscious in the passenger seat, head slumped forward onto my chest. Slowly I became better aware of more things -- the saliva patch under my chin where my open mouth had been resting; head sideways on my chest. And the toes in my socks being able to stretch out and reach forward deep into the lambs wool floor-well rug, feet obviously shoeless.

The woman with the dirty blonde hair was in the driver's seat. There was no one else in the car.

"Where -" I said, struggling to get the words out through a slightly stupified set of mouth muscles. "Where are the other two?"

She turned to look at me directly, smiling patronizingly. "There hasn't been anyone else here. It was a kind of a dream that you were having. Kind of a dream..."

The elevator slowed and stopped. She turned the car's engine on and gently rolled the vehicle forward out of the elevator space and into the large open lounge area.

I saw she was wearing glossy black, tight filoselle gloves. And I felt relieved. All the 'high-jewelled' brightwork on the car's dash and steering wheel paddles was still as gleamingly shiny as it had always been. God was I that ocd...? Must have been, I guess.

She got out of the Maserati first and took the starter key unit with her. She clearly knew all the functions on it pretty well because she popped my passenger door side wide open with the wireless switch on the key.

She appeared to know the insides of my penthouse rather well too: managed to get the low-lighting on -- not even I knew how to do that without a lot of frustrating fiddling with the so-called 'intelligent house' system controls. And then she found my whiskey glasses and my Grant's 35 year old. I stumbled out of the car and located a deeply padded chair to lower myself into cautiously. She handed me one of the Glencairns. I didn't think I was going to drink whiskey right away, at least not right now... I just stared at the glass. Watched her through the amber liquid.

She put her glass down and took off her gloves, and then pulled off her compression-wear top in one smooth cross-handed lift off. Her sports bra did nothing to disguise her generous, womanly, symmetrically rounded breasts. And I could see that I was looking at something fairly extraordinary in terms in of abdominal musculature too. She kick-stepped out of her runners efficiently and then stuck thumbs into the waist band of her skin tight running pants, about to take these down when she checked herself.

"Ah wait -"

She even knew where the controls to my sound system were. The small tell-tale red lights on the library shelf came on and the warm soft hiss-hum presaging something usually fairly noisy from the suite of Harman/Kardon speakers positioned everywhere around the lounge, filled the whole of the room's airspace.

"You might like this. Sex music that you would like. It's called 'Fuck You Lady.' Heard of it?"

I shook my head; I hadn't.

"By a power trio from Brazil."

The music came on. Yeah okay it was pretty attention grabbing stuff... The bass and drumming was so hard, so tight. She began to sway her hips and breasts and shoulders slowly - like Kim Basinger did in 9 and ½ Weeks. It was insanely good rock music. And this woman was an insanely good mover.

"Sound is a mass media form, do you know," she said, half-smiling. "People broadly understand sound more or less all equivalently at the same time as a group... Unlike smell, for instance, which has a much more personal way of being understood. Don't mind me, though; it's something to do with my tradecraft. I'm always thinking about Diffie-Hellman-Merkle avenues. D'you think you can handle it later when I will want to be DP'd? That was the point of your implanted dream by the way."

My mind felt like it was having to race. "You mean like with the chemist and his offsider?"

She pouted at me with full lips and and still that patronizing smile. She shook her head in time to hard tight rimshots from the drummer. "That was a dream."

"How do you know what was in my dream?"

"Because these devices can put it in there. The wonders of modern technology, you see. It's called synthetic memory. Google it."

God there was more than just something to the music being played right now though. Maybe the effects of the electronic wearable technology I had had on before were still buzzing my brain around. The heavy rock guitar music was dizzyingly loud but then again also sometimes delicate too -- this piece had a lot of dynamics to it. It was quite attractive though, in its own brutal way. But it was making me feel, I dunno -- different. Was there some kind of hypnogogic digital timing signal underlying the music...?

Her hand was down her pants now and moving around in there with her fingers definitely looking as if they were penetrating deep up into her cunt and not just only touching the outside of her cunt lips.

The music was really really loud. I could barely hear her when she spoke. She took her hand back out and held her fingers up to my face right underneath my nose. "Smell is much more of a personal thing, compared to sound though. Don't you agree."

Suddenly she was squatting and taking my dick out of my pants. I think it was the way she had been smiling very patronizingly all the while that really got me going without me realising I was getting hard. She was definitely cute in the face, even if it was a somewhat long and angular face, and with that typical look of someone who was both ego-powerful and possibly aggressive too beyond just being self-confident. Her personality and demeanour went along exactly with the music, at least it seemed so to me.