The Cyberkink Sideshow Read Online Free PDF Page B

circuit of plain beige tents. Sylvia glanced from one to the other as they took her money. She’d come in plain clothes, but there was no disguising Max. Someone bringing a German shepherd to the sideshow might jog the bouncers’ memories back to the previous night’s admittance. She hurried the dog past once they’d handed her the ticket, trying to keep his nose away from them. He picked up the usual unpleasant miasma of sweaty gussets and armpits and feet, but no drugs and no suspicious signals.
    Ranks of biometric lockers filled the first tent. People were stripping off coats and outer clothing to reveal outlandish and indecent outfits: bondage harnesses and bizarre underwear. Others had opened their bags and begun to dress in equally strange costumes. Buttocks and breasts and bare skin were on display throughout the room.
    Sylvia hurried through, arms pressed to her sides and trying hard not to brush against anyone and to keep Max’s nose out of people’s crotches. The gap at the opposite side of the tent led to an annex crowded with people. A gap on the left led back into the open, to the space the square of tents surrounded. In the middle of the enclosed area a hole had been dug in the ground and set up like a Roman arena with seats and gaudy flags on a fake aged coliseum around its rim. In the ring below, a chariot race took place, only the chariots were pulled not by horses, but by women in revealing harnesses and with colored plumes on their heads. People seated around the rim cheered and waved, and a man in a ticket office took bets on the race.
    A fear took hold of her that someone might recognize her. Most of the people wore masks, making them conveniently anonymous, no matter how exposed they might be otherwise. She pulled away from the gap and moved through to the next tent. Sylvia noticed people staring at her. She’d come wearing jeans and a spaghetti-strap top, and now it had become apparent she was horribly overdressed. Everyone here must realize by now she was a plain-clothes copper. Embarrassment at being fully clothed in a room full of near-naked people didn’t make sense somehow, but she still felt it.
    This tent was opulently outfitted in deep-colored silks and cushions, making it look like a Western man’s fantasy of an Eastern harem. The people’s attention was focused on a fat lady who stood speaking beside a curtain. She had long, black hair and was dressed in horizontal stripes.
    At first Sylvia assumed it was a costume, but as she went closer she realized with a sense of unease curdling in her stomach that the woman wasn’t wearing anything at all, and that her skin was in fact decorated with a tattooed zebra-stripe pattern. As she spoke, a ropy length dangling behind her legs, covered at its tip with the same black hair as on her head, caught Sylvia’s attention. Some sort of prosthetic tail?
    The woman turned to address another section of the audience, and her tail switched across the back of her knees as though whisking away flies. It wasn’t prosthetic. It was a genuine living limb, fused to her spinal cord and wired in to her nervous system. It came as an uneasy revelation that this woman must live full time as what she was here. If she needed to go to the supermarket and buy food or do some other everyday act, she’d still have the tail and the pattern on her skin in full view, for everyone to stare at and disapprove of. Sylvia couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that.
    Beside the curtain the woman stood before was a window in the thin wood panel that partitioned off the side of the tent. It looked in on a booth with a luxuriant patterned carpet and silk cushions and colorful gauze veils. Five people reclined on the cushions around a central object that resembled a large hookah decorated with elaborate figures. Wires snaked from the top of the hookah, connecting to the neural shunts on the foreheads of the participants, whereas more wires from the base connected to