In a remote region of the gamma quadrant of the Milky Way Galaxy is a star called La Verde. It’s name, which, loosely translated, means "The Green One" derives from the fact that from a very long distance the star appears to be a hazy green color. Actually the color is the result of the illumination, from within, of a huge envelope of gas surrounding the start, in combination with the complete lack of illumination from without by other stars. This latter fact is the result of the extreme isolation of La Verde from other starts. La Verde is at the center of a vast space desert.
Orbiting La Verde is a gigantic space station called Deep Space 14. Originally built by a motly collection of political refugees, misfits, petty criminals, and non-conformists of all sorts, Deep Space 14 has always had a very strong tradition of extreme tolerance for unusual points of view, non-traditional behavior, and eccentricities of all kinds. The place is intolerant of and rough on those who do things that harm others, but, other than that, anything goes. In recent times, Deep Space 14 has grown enormously in size and economic strength by becoming a galactic focal point for travel and entertainment. It is THE place to go for any form of entertainment – especially those not readily available in other places. Deep Space 14 has it all. Deep Space 14 is to the 24th century what Las Vegas and Sun City were on Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The center of the entertainment industry on Deep Space 14 is an area called "The Wedge." The Wedge occupies nearly a third of each of the three concentric rings of the station, all the way from the zero-gravity core to the outer ring five miles out from the core. Here you can find all manner of gambling, stage productions, rides, you name it.
Far away from the Wedge, on the opposite side of the center ring, just off Avenue A (one of five parallel walkways that runs down the core of the center ring, is a small (by Deep Space 14 standards) establishment known as Symphony Hall. Symphony Hall does have a variety of musical entertainment from time to time but the name has little to do with anything that anyone knows about. It has just been called Symphony Hall for as long as anyone can remember. Symphony Hall is a combination casino, bar and grill, night club, movie theater, and pool hall. There are a hundred others like it on Deep Space 14. Like most of the others, Symphony Hall is a family-run business, in this case run by entrepreneurs Joy and Melissa with frequent assistance from various family members.
Down a lengthy corridor off the main casino floor, however, there is an unmarked doorway with a pass-card reader. Pass-cards can be obtained and paid for at the main casino cashier, but there is no advertising about their use anywhere in the facility. Once through the doorway, a customer is in another large foyer and encounters eight similar doorways. For privacy, only one customer (or group entering together) can be in the foyer at a time.
The eight inner rooms at Symphony Hall are Holosuites, theatrical combinations of space, reality, holographic-solid projections, and computer programming. Each Holosuite is a unique island of adventure, ranging in size from a few thousand square feet to more than an acre. Each contains a variety of specific sets of environmental features that are real. These consist of real matter arranged into a specific set of "props" such as furniture, trees, or waterfalls. Every time a Holosuite is activated, however, a different set of features may be selected and the props of the feature set are re-arranged. Each Holosuite also contains a large set of available holographic-solid projections that can be programmed to appear when the Holosuite is active. These include extremely lifelike (touchable, for example) characters and events, all of which can interact seemlessly with all props and customers. For example, a client can have a fist fight with a holographic-solid opponent and will actually suffer a bruise if struck effectively by the projection. A client can even interact sub-consciously to some extent with the holographic system and, though it, with projected characters and events. There are almost no limits to the kind or extent of interaction that can take place, except that the system is very carefully programmed to terminate prior to the occurrence of any serious injury or fatality to a client. The Holosuite programming also provides for a great deal of client input concerning evnts that may occur or characters who may be encountered. For example, a client could select an environment of the Senate of Ancient Rome but populate the scene with political leaders from other historical periods.
Each Holosuite at Symphony Hall can be set up with a dozen or more different environments. Among the most popular are a Roman villa (usually with an orgy as the major event and a variety of well-built actors and actresses as characters) the Federation War Room, the bridge of a star-ship, and a nude beach. According to Joy and Melissa, however, there is one environment that is selected more often, and especially by more repeat customers, than any other. That environment is available only in Holosuite 6, the only one that is over a full acre in size, and is unofficially known as "The Swamp." The Swamp has a different selection and arrangement of props every time it is activated, but typically includes an astonishingly dense array of horrors including poisonous and constricting snakes, crocodiles, giant spiders, nests of bees or fire ants, deranged pirates or hermits, hostile natives, and quicksand bogs. It is not unuisual for a swamp arrangement to pack more than a dozen quicksand bogs into the acre of space available.
Cheryl is one of Joy and Melissa’s most long-term customers. About once a month Cheryl flies into Deep Space 14 with a delivery of Silurian brandy for the really big casinos and clubs in the Wedge. Silurian brandy is very expensive but is given away by the big casinos as an enticement to their ‘high roller’ customers. She generally leaves with a cargo of rare elements extracted from the thin gases around the station. She generally arrives on a Friday and departs late Sunday, giving her two days on the station, a major part of which is always spent in the swamp. Typically, Cheryl selects a program with no other characters and no special events, just the environments and its props. As soon as she enters Holosuite 6 she strips naked and immediately seeks out one of the regular ‘horrors.’ Usually Cheryl will walk straight into whatever horror she has decided to enjoy. Sometimes that will be a snake pit and sometimes it might be an ant nest, but most of the time it is a quicksand bog. She will walk right into it as if she didn’t see it and make herself sink as quickly as possible to at least her chest. Then she will begin to struggle valiantly to keep from sinking further for as long as possible. For half an hour or more she will thrash around in the mire, twisting and turning, trying to more across the mire in one direction or another as if indecisive about how to save herself, and sometimes screaming for help, but never doing anything that might actually help her escape. She will gradually sink deeper and deeper as she tires. She will begin to act more intelligently as she reaches the very brink of submergence, with her head tilted back and her face framed in a narrowing ring of mud, thereby postponing the inevitable by fifteen minutes or more. Eventually the mire closes over her face. For the next half to a full minute Cheryl’s air hunger will grow and grow until she eventually loses control, exhales, and reflexively sucks in mud. As she chokes the Holosuite’s safety programming will kick in. It will remove her from the mire and eliminate all traces of mud from her mouth or throat. Usually her allotted time in the Holosuite will be about over by this time and Cheryl will leave. If enough time remains she will spend it by stepping back into the mire or in an encounter with another swamp horror.
Two more regular customers are Ann and Sybil. Both come about every three weeks and both have about the same preference in programs. One might think they were twins based on their preferred holosuite experiences. Actually, however, Ann and Sybil are unrelated and have never met each other, and they are different in as many ways as they are alike. Ann is five feet six inches tall with long, blond hair, blue eyes, and an athletic, very lean frame. Sybil is just five feet tall, with short, black hair, hazel eyes, and a much more delicate frame. Both girls come into Dep Space 14 on business, Ann as a stewardess on a shuttlecraft and Sybil as a private courier. Ann always uses the Holsuite on a Saturday night; Sybil always comes on a weekday, usually very early in the morning. Both girls are, apparently, very much into old-fashioned melodrama. Their usual program involves large numbers of hostile natives, pirates, or some other form of evil-doer. Ann, or Sybil, is chased and quickly captured very shortly after entering the Holosuite and is then subjected to a series of hair-raising situations, such as being tied to an ant hill, made to move a bee hive, being set out as bait for a spider, or nearly being thrown into a snake pit. As a rule she escapes each situation at the last minute, only to be immediately captured and finding herself in another emergency. Eventually she ends up falling, being pushed, or jumping into a quicksand pit. Ann always likes to be pushed into the mire, whereas Sybil likes to jump in once in a while. Once in the mire, both girls enjoy a prolonged struggle, always ending with a very slow, gasping submergence. Both like to go under with their heads tipped back, but they never tip their heads back so far that their eyes go under before their mouths. Both girls also like to scream as their mouths go under, but with Sybil the scream may be one of unbriddled delight, whereas Ann’s scream is always one of mock terror.
Fred and Dawn are two semi-regular clients who really ought to meet each other. Fred always sets the program to include exactly one female character whom he pursues until she falls into the quicksand. He then offers to rescue her if the will have sex with him, to which she responds by inviting him to enjoy sex with her while they both sink in the quicksand. She has various appearances but is always model-like except for having extremely large breasts. She always seems to enjoy the sex and some rough breast play even more than he does. Dawn is essentially the girl of Fred’s desires. She isn’t a professional model but could be and her breasts are strikingly large and firm. In her Holosuite program she is pursued into the quicksand – usually within the first minute of her adventure – and then offered rescue in exchange for sex. Sometimes she invites the man into the mud for sex. Sometimes she accepts the rescue offer, only to have both of them roll back into the mire in the heat of passion. Both Fred and Dawn like to enjoy prolonged, neck depth and deeper struggles. Dawn’s favorite final struggle game is to repeatedly allow the mud to cover her face and then be pulled back above the surface by her sex partner projection. Fred, on the other hand likes to repeatedly dunk his partner and then pull her back up until he can no longer do it without submerging himself.
Joy and Melissa themselves enjoy their own Holosuite from time to time. Joy uses it three or four times a week with pretty much the same fantasy every time. Melissa enters the swamp much less frequently. She is particularly interested in developing advanced capabilities for the Holosuite system itself, so her fantasies generally involve new programming ideas. Joy’s usual adventure goes something like this:
As Joy steps though the Holosuite door she is dressed in her usual casual, though slightly flashy, style. She has on a button-down, white dress shirt, a navy blue skirt cut 6 inches above the knee, and blue pumps. However, the top two buttons of the shirt are open and it is quite obvious she has no bra underneath. Once inside, the shirt comes off instantly, followed in close order by the skirt and pumps, and then by her panties. She is completely naked as the swamp environment assembles around her and stabilizes. All around her is a very poorly illuminated swamp at night. There are trees here and there, heavily draped with vines, impenetrably thick patches of undergrowth interspersed with wet, open spaces forming a maze of pathways leading nowhere in particular. There is a moon overhead that provides lighting but it is partially obscured periodically by clouds and the single-source lighting serves as much to create deep shadows in which next to nothing can be seen (until it is too late) as to provide illumination. The only sounds are of various swamp creatures from frogs to crocodiles, plus a variety of very subtle background sounds such as might be made by a snake catching a frog or the frog splashing in water after a narrow escape. In the far distance a signal drum starts up, announcing her intrusion and serving as warning that she will have roughly an hour before dozens of angry warriors will arrive to rid their territory of a trespasser. Directly in front of her on the ground is a warning to stay away consisting of a large X carved in the ground, behind which is an effigy of a head and torso chest deep in quicksand and screaming.
Joy has built into her program the presence of a gold icon, hidden somewhere in the swamp. It could be anywhere. As an object to her adventure she has set herself the task of finding and stealing the icon. To escape with the icon before the warriors arrive she must search quickly. In doing so she must deal with all of the hazards of the swamp – snakes, crocodiles, spiders, and, of course, the ever-present quicksand – but she must also move so quickly that practical caution must be abandoned. The is, in a sense, caught between a quicksand pit and a quagmire – if she goes to fast she will probably get into the quicksand; if she goes too slow she will get caught and thrown into the quagmire.
Joy ignores the warning, of course, and boldly goes into the maze of pathways, looking all around for the icon and trying to avoid whatever horrors might be present. In the first minute she carefully steps around the edge of a bubbling quagmire and catches herself in mid fall into a pit filled with very hungry-looking crocodiles. In the next minute a gigantic constrictor snakes drops out of a tree just inches away. She jumps away and lands with one leg on solid ground and one plunged thigh deep in mud. This goes on and on; snakes, spiders, crocodiles, quicksand, pitfalls, snares, etc., one right after the other. Eventually she will fail to escape one of these horrors. It could be anything that eventually gets her, but most of the time it is the quicksand. Mostly, that is because the will struggle intelligently to escape any horror except the quicksand, but in the quicksand she will just struggle. Typically, Joy will get into the quicksand gradually, through a hasty step or stumble while slogging through a patch of knee deep muck or by stepping on a fallen log that turns out to be loose or rotten. One leg will plunge down into soft mud a little too far, throwing her off balance. Then, while attempting to extract that leg she will become more deeply mired. At some point she will break through a subsurface layer and plunge down into deeper mud, often to her chest or even her shoulders all at once. Then she will begin to thrash and struggle, stirring the mire up into a soupy mixture offering no hope of support. Gradually she will sink deeper and deeper. She will work very hard to escape from the mire and continue her search for the icon. Sometimes she will encounter a vine or root in her struggles and somehow manage to pull herself out of the mud, for awhile, but most often she will eventually go under. As the moment of submergence comes close, she will tip her head back and struggle valiantly, often prolonging her time in this position for ten minutes or more. On those few occasions when she has managed to get out of the quicksand it is never for long. If she does not fall back into the mire on her own within a few minutes, the angry warriors will soon arrive and she will be captured and promptly thrown in. In the last two years, Joy has been running her adventure fantasy three to four times a week. In that time she has found the icon twenty-one times. She has yet to escape.
Melissa has an advanced degree in Holosuite technology and likes to tinker with the programming. Her adventures are usually very simple and designed to test new twists to the kinds of functions the Holosuite can provide.
Shortly after she and her sister took over management of Symphony Hall, Melissa acquired and installed state of the art sensors capable of continuous monitoring of the state of arousal of up to six clients at a time. These monitors can even isolate arousal due to fear, anger, uncertainty, pleasure, pain, and sexual desire. Melissa then created a program to correlate levels of arousal with details of events taking place in the Holosuite. After a client has visited a Holosuite several times the system begins to build up a useful database of the kinds of situations that produce high levels of arousal in the client, often to the extent of revealing factors the client is unaware of. With enough data and enough variation in the situations experienced, the system could even determine that a client is especially turned on by certain features of projected characters or even by a particular consistency of quicksand. In theory, this information can then be used by the Holosuite system to produce events, characters, or props that will have an amplified effect on the client.
Melissa tried out her system enhancement with herself as the client. After five experiences in the swamp, the system determined that quicksand composed of smooth clay or silt and just thick enough to make swimming impossible was highly stimulating to her in a sexual way, but a bog of the same material but with a thicker, almost pasty consistency produced a reaction of intense claustrophobic fear. She then added to the Holosuite programming system the ability to allow clients to elect to use information in their file to produce an enhanced experience. With file access permission from the owner it was even possible to have an experience amplified according to the reactions of another client. Melissa tested her enhancement feature on herself as usual, turning up the amplification for sexual arousal to its maximum.
As Melissa stepped into the Holosuite the scene formed pretty much as it always did for her sister Joy, except there were no warning symbols or ominous drums. She stripped and entered the maze, simply exploring and not looking for her sister’s ‘icon.’ It did not take long, but events did not develop as she expected. Picking hr way across a clearing she was suddenly calf deep in thick, very sticky clay. Even though she was well aware she was in her own Holosuite, she instantly felt a wave of apprehension. Something was wrong with the programming! She tried to pull one leg free but the other sank slightly deeper in the process. She was trapped! Very slowly, but inexorably, she slipped deeper and deeper. She felt a distinct claustrophobia by the time she was up to her waist, and that feeling grew to frantic desperation as the mud climbed up her torso. After nearly two hours she was up to her tipped-back face in the thick, encasing mud. There was nothing she could do except wait to go under and hope the safety protection features of the Holosuite program was functioning correctly. She had never heard of it’s failure but the feeling of entrapment was so intense she could not shake off the feeling of intense foreboding. She had never made such a major programming mistake before and could not imagine what she could have done wrong. Soon the mire closed in over her face, totally shutting out all light and sound. Half a minute later the program ended. Quickly she washed off and returned to the program-control room to find and fix her mistake. She laughed out loud when she discovered no programming mistake at all had been made. She had simply turned up the amplification for fear instead of sexual arousal. Realizing she had just serendipitously invented a new, interactive form of horror movie, she quickly designed and added a programming option to allow a client to select enhancement of random arousal level.
Melissa also enhanced the Holosuite programming capabilities by adding the ability to save and resume an adventure at any point, including at its termination. This enhancement was originally intended to accommodate clients whose adventures had to be interrupted by emergencies, but soon became more widely in another way. In addition to being saved and re-started at a later time, clients soon discovered that it was possible to modify the events slightly while the adventure was in storage. This was perfect for clients who were attracted to serial melodrama.
Consistent with her usual pattern, Melissa first tried this feature on herself. Entering the swamp using her sister Joy’s icon-quest program she stripped and began exploring, not really caring much if she found the icon or not. Before long she was in a quagmire up to her knees and sinking fast. Playing the scene to its fullest she struggled and fought desperately but before long was up to her neck. Then tilting back her head she began kicking to lift herself up momentarily only to sink back inexorably. The kept this up until the mire closed over her face, then thrust her hands up to the surface – pushing her head deeper in the process – as if grasping for a rope or vine, and held her breath as long as possible. Eventually her air hunger became too much and she suddenly exhaled uncontrollably and attempted to inhale, choking herself on mud and ending the program in a few more seconds. With her adventure completed but saved in memory Melissa then returned to the program selection to initiate a modified replay. She programmed a new adventure to begin with her up to her face in the mire and to continue exactly as before, with the one exception that a vine would fall into her outstretched hand about ten seconds before she lost control of her breath. Grasping and pulling on the vine, Melissa was able to lift her mouth clear of the mire just a second or two before it was too late, and then haul herself out of the mire, gasping, wheezing, and coughing violently. After several minutes she recovered and was able to continue the adventure. Her new adventure lasted approximately an hour and a half, the last hour and ten minutes of which was spent struggling in another quicksand pit.
The archive files of Holosuite 6 contain transcripts of many, many more adventures; that of every client who has been served. At the request of the clients some of these are in locked files even through personal identities are entirely in the form of personal identity codes, but most are available for inspection. Look for some of these stories in future episodes of Holosuite 6.