Virtual Reality Ch. 02

He gave her another kiss, then left before he needed to explain further.

He walked around the neighborhood for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes. Where was Chamberlinne? Wasn't there a way to go back prior to the three hours having elapsed? He toyed with the idea of having fun with another housewife on the block, but decided against it. He—

A feeling of splitting up, of being scattered into disparate atoms overtook him, and he knew. Chamberlinne was taking him back, back to his world, back to reality. There was that disturbing feeling of weightlessness again, of separation. But it didn't last long. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Jon Chamberlinne was sitting there in front of him, his fingetips joined together in a hand-tent.

"So . . . how did it go, Mr. Cooper?"

Mike took a moment to gather himself. "Great," he said. "Incredible. June Cleaver is amazing, above and beyond anything I ever would have thought. But . . ." He felt around in his pocket. Shit. The razor. He'd left it behind! It was ironic, really. Last night, he had brought back June's bra, infusing the real with the virtual. Now he had left something in her world. Tit for tat.

"Interesting," Chamberlinne said when Mike explained. "Of course, the only way for you to know whether the razor remained behind, and did not vanish out of existence when you came back here, would be to go back for a third visit. Is that in the cards, Mr. Cooper?"

"I think the razor's there still," Mike said. "If the bra came back with me . . . Makes you wonder, doesn't it? What's real? What the hell is really real?"

Chamberlinne nodded. But pressed on, "So, will you be going back?"

"I don't know," Mike said. "It was weird. I mean, the whole thing just felt so real, so fucking real. Don't get me wrong, man. You're a damned genius. This application of yours is unbelievable. But it's pretty freaked out, too."

Chamberlinne smiled. "That's one way of putting it," he said. "Of course, as, how shall we say . . . amenable . . . as Mrs. Cleaver was, you could use my device to try your hand at virtually anybody. As willing as Mrs. Cleaver was, why limit yourself?"

"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, when she asked me if I'd come back for another round." He remembered the sensation of her lips on his, her tongue doing a sensual probe of his mouth. He'd love to go back to her. He'd love to take a shot at a hundred others, too. A mental image of Julie James lying, so young, so pristine, on a bed, waiting for him to deflower her, rose up in his mind, and he smiled. Still, the entire thing, great as it was, gave him the creeps. It all just seemed too real, somehow, too much like playing with fire, fucking with karma.

"Indeed, Mr. Cooper," Chamberlinne said. "But then, what is real? When you look at the universe, our experiences, our thoughts, our fantasies, our memories, our potential, our future. What, Mr. Cooper, is real? And what is simply a dream? Or a dream within a dream? Or nothing at all?"

Mike didn't want to answer that, didn't even want to consider it for a second. He wasn't sure if he wanted to go back to Mayfield for a third time, explore some other fictional world, and fictional vagina, or simply quit while he was ahead.

He'd need to ponder it more later, in bed, while he stroked himself to a full erection, thinking of June Cleaver, her panties removed, her cream-yellow skirt hiked up to her hips, bending over her kitchen sink, begging for him to take her. . . .