Chapter 8 - Just a Small Bite

Sunday, April 24, 1994

Only a few years had passed since the mature discipline of statistics had started up a passionate affair with the very young and sexy computer science. It was destined to be a catastrophic union—a black swan with world-devouring consequences.

The conference was one of the first KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Database) workshops to attract a substantial gathering of digital vultures. The current paradigm masqueraded as consumer database marketing, a thin veneer designed to seduce investors while concealing the true agenda.

Few outside the industry realized that corporations had already begun harvesting vast quantities of personal data with plans to unleash targeted psychological warfare campaigns (that's what they told the sheep, anyway). The campaigns were surgical strikes aimed at an individual's deepest vulnerabilities—personality fractures, compulsive buying triggers, racial prejudices, gender insecurities, and political phobias—while weaponizing the names and ages of children, birthdays, addresses, financial desperation, and every digital breadcrumb that could be extracted or excavated from a person's online soul. Eventually, as everyone in the industry understood but never dared speak aloud, the data harvesting would chain email addresses to physical locations, and cell phone numbers to social security numbers like digital shackles. From there it would metastasize into facial recognition surveillance and voice-print identification. Personal privacy was already dead, and 99.9% of the world's population was oblivious.

Sara had stumbled into this digital underworld in the late 80s, fresh from completing her master's in analytics. It began with an elevator ride—twelve floors trapped with a predatory mid-thirties executive in an expensive dark suit, blood-red tie, and polished Ferragamos that probably cost more than most people's rent. That brief vertical encounter spawned a meeting the following day, after which she was recruited on the spot as a technical research analyst for a shadowy, off-the-books research company that operated in the spaces between legality and morality. She'd landed several positions this way—random encounters that transformed into opportunities like viruses seeking hosts. She understood that her intellect and capabilities were weapons, but she also knew she often secured positions because of her appearance. The executive always harbored fantasies of conquest. Sometimes he succeeded—but only when she chose to let him think he was in control.

This was the second half of a two-week business expedition to New Orleans. The conferences were strategically scheduled during Jazz Fest to loosen the purse strings of the scientific and medical establishment—uptight automatons desperate to escape the domestic prison of children's screaming footsteps and pretty wives in sensible shoes who droned endlessly about incompetent housekeepers and the urgent need for landscape architects to redesign their sterile suburban compounds.

Sara took the brief cab ride to Lafitte's to rendezvous with Tammo, a doctor from Amsterdam she had encountered at the Dallas conference the previous month.

Dallas had left a bitter taste in her mouth, but the Mansion had been intoxicating. March's cold still bit deep. She let her jacket slide from her shoulders like shed skin and decided on one final drink at the Mansion Bar before surrendering to sleep. Tammo didn't hesitate to claim the territory beside her, placing his hand on the bar like a territorial marker.

"Let me buy you another drink."

His voice carried the dangerous silk of Jeff Goldblum—seductive, filthy, potentially dangerous. She turned to examine a beautiful specimen: late-thirties, predatorily tall, with fair hair that caught light like spun gold, a jaw carved from granite, and large eyes that shifted from emerald to amber like a shapeshifter's tell. He sat with his white shirt perfectly tailored, open at the throat to reveal the pulse point where his jugular throbbed, one muscled arm draped casually on the bar while he spoke flawless English seasoned with an accent that could melt steel. She stared directly into those changeling eyes while she spoke.

"Scotch rocks, water back."

He summoned the bartender with a gesture. She extended her hand like an offering. "I'm Sara." The hand that had claimed the bar lifted with deliberate slowness and captured hers, turned it over like examining prey, and kissed it while his eyes devoured her face and mouth with the hunger of something ancient and starving. He was masterful, she realized—straight out of the power manipulation playbook, working unconscious psychological triggers like a pro. She knew the game intimately, and lucky Sara was right in the middle of her year of sexual exploration, inhibitions dissolved in booze and rebellion. She was ready for trouble. He got lucky. They both did, feeding off each other's darkness, and they promised to meet up in New Orleans the following month.

Tammo looked even more dangerously beautiful than her memory had preserved.

"Beeldschoon!" He seized her shoulders and branded her with three kisses, cheek to cheek, marking his territory. "I have a surprise; Eric has summoned us to his gathering. Repressed Eric is getting married, but this isn't some sanitized bachelor party. He's commandeered the entire State Palace for his private apocalypse—some sort of underground dance coven. Please don't refuse me. I promise you an evening of sinful delights that will leave scars on your soul."

The theater was in the uptown lake area and looked like it had been around forever, but everything in New Orleans looked worn down by time. Inside, it was over-the-top ornate—opera house art deco with massive balconies.

"Eric rented this entire place?"

Tammo grabbed her hand possessively. "You don't know Eric, but he throws money around like it's nothing. He tells me this is the center of the southern rave underground."

"I don't understand—what's a rave?"

He laughed darkly and leaned toward her mouth, his breath hot with promises. "The only thing I know for sure is that things will get wild tonight, so don't take drinks from anyone but me."

Journal Entry, April 25, 1994

I wasn't prepared for the invasion of grotesque entities—creatures barely clinging to human form, some costumed but others so authentically monstrous I stared deep, searching for any trace of humanity beneath their masks.

They prowled the cavernous theater through forests of neon radiation. Some possessed yellow eyes that blazed in the black light like demonic beacons. Two clean-cut, athletically built men in their twenties wore fluffy white angel wings over their naked shoulders and skin-tight white leggings that clung obscenely to every bulge and ridge beneath. Their hard cocks cast shadows in the neon like luminescent snakes.

Music shrieked from the stage. Bodies writhed and convulsed on the floor in ritualistic rhythm—a frenzied mass of flesh colliding and grinding while arms tipped with animal claws slashed at the poisoned air. Many women wore halos of light around their skulls; wire spirals twisted upward eight inches or more, glowing like alien transmission devices.

"The neon crowns mean the girls are down for sex with anyone—any gender," Tammo explained matter-of-factly.

"Well, that cuts out the guesswork. These are all Eric's friends? There must be a thousand people here."

"He has a lot of friends in the city—his fiancé is from here too—wealthy family on the other side of town, but he's been passing out fliers all week to people on the street or in bars—anyone he liked the looks of, particularly if they look like they might be gay. He swings that way most of the time, but I have found him versatile."

"You've been with him?"

"Yes," Tammo whispered.
"He was delicious, and so was Landon, his friend. You should try it
sometime."

"Try what?"

"Two men, of course."

Tammo pulled her into the writhing dance, and they became suspended in the chaotic energy like insects in amber. After what felt like hours of relentless movement and strobing lights designed to fragment consciousness, Sara must have appeared overwhelmed by the sensory assault.

Tammo turned toward her and captured her face in his hands, whispering, "Ignore these beautiful freaks; this was merely a venue I thought would strip away our professional facades. I hunger only for you."

Tammo encircled her with his arm and steered her toward a dimly lit triangular alcove carved into the theater's side like a confessional booth. Eight-foot walls formed a semi-private chamber about the size of a vertical coffin. Inside, darkness reigned, and a small bench seat was mounted to the back wall three feet above the floor like an altar. He whispered something to Sara, but she could only catch fragments over the pounding tribal rhythm. He pressed his mouth to her ear like a vampire seeking the jugular. Words poured like molten metal—something about the alcohol, she assumed—heightening every sensation until reality became fluid. The words echoed and sounded like torrential rain falling on her face—wet, tight, lips, death. Did he say death? She wasn't sure, but her back arched and she reached for his face as if compelled to touch him—to move her hands all over him.

"Do we have an agreement?"

What agreement had he proposed? Words swam in her head and mixed with the alcohol and sexual high, and she thought for a moment she should get out of there, but he grabbed her waist and pressed himself against her while pushing her dress up toward her waist. His breath was scalding against her throat and electrical shocks cascaded down her vertebrae. She thought she felt sharp teeth pierce her neck, but there was no pain—only exquisite pleasure. Every inch of him was rigid as marble as she reached around his muscled back and pulled him deeper into her, sealing whatever dark bargain they had struck.