My clients tend to come in with bullet holes in their heads. Blood drips from the slowly cauterizing wounds with every thrust thrust thrust of their cocks into me, scarlet splattering on my face. Sometimes the rhythm of a session is disrupted by a particularly raucous shout from the floor below, gunfire echoing off the steel walls of the game room. The flow of clients from game to bed and back to game is the one perk to living above a constant game of Russian Roulette. Those resurrected from meta-death tend to crave either food or sex upon that first blink of consciousness, and at least I have something to listen to during off hours. 

The simulacrum of a man above me finishes the job, glitching when he does. That’s my favorite part: the glitching. Every few weeks a new server patch comes through, fixing and smoothing over any issues which detract from the reality of Effis City. One of the few lingering bugs they can’t seem to squash is the inherent fizzing, popping, and glitching of a virtual body experiencing the peaks of reality: sex and death. Even utopia cannot be perfected. 

“Shit, we went a little over,” says the man. The clock on the ceiling is blinking a quarter past the hour, bathing the room in flashes of neon red light. Clocks are for pay rate rather than actual time; Effis is always night. 

“No problem,” I say, ordering a cigarette from the touchpad beside the bed. “Your card automatically covers the extra time.” The customer nods, focused on his reflection in the mirrored walls. He smoothes his raven hair down repeatedly and prods at a wrinkle bugged into otherwise pristine skin. The entire session I caught his eyes glancing to the mirrors, angling and arching his body for no one’s benefit but his own ego. I see many customers like this. They want to look good for a woman they do not think about while they fuck me.

My cigarette arrives, already lit, on the bedside table with a soft fizzle. The touchpad asks if I want to tip my server. I have been told by previous customers this is supposed to be funny, an inside joke for the virtual faces whose flesh bodies are waiting for them beyond the firewall of Effis City. They never offer to tip me.

My customer leaves after cleaning his teeth, his tongue worrying at a dark spot near the gumline. The clock on the ceiling goes dark. Green and purple neon blink into my room from the window; I do not know what signs they are attached to nor what products they are hawking to the virtual residents of Effis City. To me, and only me, they can just be lights. 

From below, gunshots are chased by the cheers of a crowd. I count the seconds, a skill I learned from watching the ceiling during the thrust thrust thrust. 

I get to 72 before the door opens, a simulacrum stumbling inside halfway through his reload. His cybernetic structure glows, pixelated colors growing over the exposed nerves like the digital moss that grows on my windowsill. I am told moss, real moss, is soft. I’m not sure what soft is supposed to feel like. 

“I want an hour and a half,” the new customer says. He waves his wrist in front of the scanner on the wall, then more aggressively when the light continues to blink red. 

I finish my cigarette. “It’s an eye scanner, not a wrist scanner.” 

The man scoffs since his face is in the process of reloading. “I should write a complaint about how long this takes,” he says. “For how much a subscription to your stupid service costs, this respawn bullshit should be instantaneous.”

He looks at me more closely now, one eye blinking into existence on his face. It’s green and red-rimmed, microscopic lines of code embedded into the veins. Streaks of blood from his fatal wound flicker against the smooth new skin. “You can use the eye scanner now,” I say. 

“There’s a much prettier hooker-bot at that cocktail bar on Cyan Street,” he says instead. He’s still looking me up and down, one green and red eye scanning for all the inhuman qualities he knows I possess. “She’s a brunette with these big blue eyes. Real freaky looking things. There’s clearly nothing going on behind them.” 

I nod. I motion to the eye scanner as the rest of his face pixelates. 

He touches the wet splotches of blood now tangible against his skin. “What does it feel like?” he asks, looking from his bloody fingers to where my legs are positioned. 

“I don’t have the vocabulary to describe feeling” is my practiced answer. 

“Have you asked the other hooker-bots? Couple of them are pretty fucking chatty; I’m sure some substance exists in all that babble.” 

I point to the eye scanner and he finally gets the message. “No,” I say, “I do not talk to my colleagues.”

He scans his eye. The room lights up green as his credit card approves the transaction. “Colleagues,” he scoffs. “You hooker-bots are so cute. Be sure to send a tip to whichever nerd programmed y’all.” 

I lock eyes on the ceiling as the clock lights up and begins ticking. “I sure will.”