Chapter 14

The messaging account David had set up for Ariel when he signed the marketing deal with Phoenix Rising was flooded. There were even a number of messages forwarded to David’s personal account by the accounting department, reassuringly plastered with a privacy notice:

The person within the Phoenix Rising Organization sending this message is unaware of your personal details, and is only privy to your character information. Be sure not to disclose personal details you wish to keep private when replying.

All the messages boiled down to a letter from Marvin Strawski:

Hey, Ariel. Your channel has really exploded, and we need your help. We need to figure out how you’d like it to run. What sort of comments are okay, what do you consider trash. What image are you going to present?

I’ve been nominated as your account representative. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have this opportunity. I was hoping we could get together and give you a chance to decide if I’m who you are looking for to help out. If so, we could get started.

Yours any time,

–Marv

The game provided a forum where you could chat as your character avatar. For a reasonable fee, you could even buy rights to your avatar, and with some restrictions, use her in non-game contexts. Ariel signed up for the chat service.

The chat service required full experiential immersion. That was a high level of trust for a chat service to demand from its users, although Phoenix Rising had the market credibility to ask for that trust. Officially, full experiential immersion should be safe even if you didn’t trust the environment. Local filters should make sure you walked away with little more than memories and of course any exercise triggered in your muscles. Over the years there had been enough mistakes in that security that people tended to be conservative. David certainly wouldn’t accept full experiential from an unknown environment. Full sensory VR, which is to say leaving out all the complex brain stuff, was a lot safer. Phoenix Rising wouldn’t even let you try and play without full experiential though: for starters, their time compression and magic system depended on the highest level of immersion.

Ariel invited Marv. He joined. He stood in a polo shirt and slacks. His loafers were professional but not a designer label.

Ariel arrived in the skirt and blouse she wore the first night she had Hulda. Not that it could matter in chat, but she did elect to wear underwear, if only so she would feel she was in a professional context. It felt odd to be discussing how to market something so sexual as her time as a whore.

“Hi! I’m Marv.” He stuck out his hand. She shook. His grip was firm but not overpowering.

“So you’re here as your character. Does that mean personal privacy is important to you?” he asked.

“Yes, very.”

“So no in-person appearances or appearances on real-world media?” He frowned slightly.

Ariel shook her head. “Certainly not in-person. Honestly even if I didn’t care about personal privacy, a bit of distance seems important. In the game you can always withdraw consent. That is important.”

Marv nodded. “Yes, sorry I hadn’t thought. I’m just really excited to have an opportunity to work with you. Obviously the game has had adult features since launch. But we don’t do a lot of marketing to that segment, and there weren’t a lot of our staff who were eager to handle adult content like this. So for me, this could be my big break! You have a lot of potential.

“Don’t get me wrong. I think I’m good at what I do, and they wouldn’t have let me volunteer if I wasn’t ready. But I’m eager to make this work because it is a bit of a jump for me.”

Ariel wondered whether she was getting stuck with a junior representative because no one wanted to touch prostitution. Her doubt must have shown. “I hope you give me a try. But I’ve been asked to pass along our interest in making this work—all the way up to the top if you know what I mean. If you want someone more experienced with adult content, the company will find what you need. I just hope you give me a chance.”

“Let’s see if we get along. So, what’s the sudden interest here?”

“Well, your first actual recording as a whore trainee has gone viral. It’s taken the rest of your content with it.” He showed her the chart of views.

“If I’m reading this right, I could easily make more from this channel than I am making from my job.”

“Yeah, this is big. And our research suggests it will only get bigger. The creators are confident in their ability to put together interesting quests for you and others who play whore. It’s not going to be easy, but we think it will appeal, emotionally and erotically.”

“Thanks I guess.” Ariel smiled. “I’ve played enough that I’m a bit nervous when the creators talk about interesting quests and talk about the challenges. But that is what we gamers live for.”

He nodded. “I’ve only played a little bit, but I can appreciate what you mean.”

“So this is great, but it sounds like you need my input?”

“Yes. With all those views, comments and discussion has exploded. Some of it, s ... well can we go through a few examples?”

“Sure.”

He drew a table for us to sit at and produced a folio from thin air. “This contains sorted comments. Some of them are kind of graphic though.”

“Have you watched my stream?”

He blushed. “Yes. I’ve experienced all the recordings. I’m not quite through your scene with Nathan and Xavier.”

“I just finished that.”

“Yes, well, your streams are a priority.

“On to the comments. Normally we’d just throw away all the sexual stuff, but that’s too aggressive of a filter for your channel.”

Ariel nodded.

“But how do you feel about dick pics?”

“Like literal dick pics? Seriously?”

Marv flipped open the folio and pulled out the first page. “Yep.” It was a picture of a penis, alongside a ruler. There was no text.

“Um, no. Why do people do that?”

“I have no idea. Okay, no dick pics. Check.

“What about this one?” The next page was a male nude attached to a message. “I have never done anything like this before. But I figure if you can put yourself out there, I can try too.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m asking you; we’re trying to get a feel for what your channel is like.”

“Any reason that can’t be totally fine?”

“No. Why is it good?”

“Because he’s putting himself out there. And that’s what this ... what whoring is about.”

“Next up.,” Marv said. He slid across a page of short comments. “People who want you.”

Ariel was tempted to throw them all away. But a couple stood out. “I had no idea that this could be so connected. I want to start playing just so I can find you and we can fuck.”

She pointed to the comment. “That one seems okay, although it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Do you want to do something about it? Like tell your fans not to try and pursue you in game?”

“Yeah kind of. But what’s wrong with their characters hiring me?”

“This is about figuring out what you want. I’m sure that if you did meet with fans in game, it would drive things wild.”

“Yeah, I don’t want it to disrupt my game play having a huge mob of fans.”

“There is only so much you can do about that of course. But you could certainly put limits. Don’t forget that you probably don’t want to spend all your time just working in a brothel.”

“True, but at least for now, I’ll spend some time working in a brothel. How about welcoming respectful clients who treat me well and wait their turns without disrupting the ephemerals or other clients.”

“So, a standard response saying you are open to meeting fans as clients when you’re working in a brothel, talking about respect and appropriate behavior?”

With the classes and the channel, Ariel thought she had been approaching the limit of vulnerability and openness that whoring would demand of her. She vowed never to make that assumption again. There was always another level; another dare to offer herself more fully. She was actually going to have a form letter inviting real people around the world to come find her and be intimate with her. She could say no. Most of the people who had commented on this page didn’t seem very imaginative. “Wanna fuck?” or “You’re hot; I’d hire you in a heartbeat.” But then she thought about meeting the man from the previous page: someone who was facing their own challenges in response to her play. Yeah, she’d do that if she could. And as a whore, she would doubtless give unimaginative people a good time. Did it really matter if they were ephemerals, immortals who stumbled on her, or fans? It mattered in terms of her vulnerability, but she could take it. Probably. At least she hoped so.

“Do you have an answer?” Marv asked.

“Oh, yeah. That response sounds good.”

“For all of these?”

“Are there any that stand out?”

Marv gestured at the folio and a few comments were highlighted in yellow. “Wanna have my babies? I’d breed your beautiful body and watch my baby grow in you.”

“Uh.”

“Not really what you’re looking for?”

“Yeah. Also, kind of jumping the gun a bit. I mean all of these are kind of abrupt, but I am playing a whore. Still that’s further than anything else I’ve done.”

“So, a different response?”

“Definitely. That’s over the line simply because it doesn’t acknowledge how far that is beyond what I’ve done and give me a choice. But even if the form wasn’t over the line I don’t want to imply I’m going to just do that if he comes to a brothel I’m working at. I don’t even know if whores have babies when requested by their clients. I know I don’t ... at least not now.”

Marv and Ariel worked through the rest of the comments. Especially for the short comments they ended up adding some text about the importance of showing respect for Ariel and her choices. They decided to err on the line of assuming good intent where possible. There was no salvaging the ones that started “Hey, bitch, I’m gonna make you...”

“So, for most of these, we’ll encourage them to meet you in a brothel, talk about the importance of leaving you alone outside that context. For a lot, we’ll also add the note about how to show better respect next time. And we’ll start to track what people say to see if assuming good intent makes sense,” Marv said.

Ariel nodded. “Yeah, sounds good. Is that all?”

Marv shook his head. “No, sorry. Now we’ve got people who disagree with you.”

That ended up being another complicated discussion. Reading some of the crap people had posted, Ariel was tempted to just delete all the disagreement. It was her channel after all. But healthy discussion was something David supported, and besides, a bit of disagreement might bring people in.

“There’s no way I’m going to find time to respond to all these—not even the ones worth keeping.”

“Actually that brings me to another point. I was pondering how to deal with that. You’re right we’d rather have you playing than responding to comments.

“Would you consider a fan chat segment? You’d get together real time with a group of fans we pick based on stuff like whether they can write coherent respectful comments. Then you could spend a bit of time discussing this together.”

“I bet we could get good views on those segments. I could do that.”

“Oh, yeah, they will be wild.”

“So for the most part I don’t need to deal with the comments; you can handle that and refer the best to the fan chats?”

“That’s the idea. I’ll run some samples by you to make sure you’re happy with what I’m doing.”

Marv looked down. “So, how are you feeling about working with me? Do you think we make a good team?”

“I was nervous at first, but I’m happy with how this conversation ended up. You are very organized. You used my time efficiently.” Ariel paused.

She continued, “What is your confidentiality agreement like? Should I feel safe telling you stuff I really want to keep private?”

Marv winced. “I actually got called into a meeting with the creators just before this. It was Atlanta.Energy and ... well, not just Atlanta.Energy. They reminded me we are on the hook for protecting your personal details and went over my non-disclosure agreement again. They reminded me that the company has a lot of resources if I mess up.

“But look, if there’s something you want to keep private, just keep it private. I certainly won’t pry.”