Cybergasm.
 
 
          He left the Audi in the multi-storey and ground his way up through the grim bleakness of the stairwell, the smell of piss and the crunch of spent hypos, discarded like spent shotgun shells to be obliterated beneath his boots. The ambient stench of degradation clung to his Armani three-piece like some foul, invisible smog and, holding a silken handkerchief to his nose and mouth he quickened his ascent, desperate to get back to the luxury and safety of his government penthouse.
          He pressed his ID chip against the plate and the section of wall slid away revealing the opulent lobby. He strode like the powerful man that he was across to the lifts and the phalanx of motion, heat, infra red sensors craned their spindly necks to track his progress. Another presentation of the chip which contained nearly every tiny detail of his life and the lift doors hissed smoothly open.
          “Penthouse seven.”
          He entered the lift and took a seat. He hated this part. Even with the super-fast modern lifts it still took a full five minutes to travel the hundred and thirty floors and the shitty R & B-electro-dub that was continually squeezed from the speakers was enough to give him a mind lock.
          It had been a long night. The latest post-modernist narcotics were still firing like a trillion pistons across the whole of his cortex and though he was totally wired he was a hundred percent in control. If anything untoward were to happen his focus and concentration would hit that of a pulse laser; yet he was utterly warm and anti-gravitational, flirting with an entirely new conceptual plane and sensing colours and sounds in non-corporeal swirls. All the time firmly anchored to his present reality.
          The lift doors finally opened and he entered the penthouse. He clacked noisily across the ocean of Egyptian tile and flung his jacket over the back of the vermillion ultra-suede five-piece that it had taken them seven months to deliver.
          “Music on. The Beatles. White Album.” He told the apartment and the music began. He had taken to listening to classical music lately, probably just a pretense of his high office but he didn’t care; it was so much better than all this modern shite
          He poured himself a scotch and sat down in the middle of the five-piece, relaxing back into the plush ultra-suede that seemed to absorb him like some sort of organism.
          “Window. Project. New York. Night time.” The lasers and giant LEDs of Time Square shimmered into life on the huge plate of Plexiglas in front of him and he watched the explosions of colour and the giant scrolling adverts as they lit up the mega-city.
          Taking another belt of scotch he thought about the day’s negotiations for the finalisation of the infra-structure for the New European Hegemony, but the unbelievably complex machinations of high political posturing was too much to go over again so he reached instead for his Simulated Reality trodes and placed them wearily over his head.
          He switched the trodes on with the handset and they locked into place. He scrolled through the options and decided on one of his favourite sex programs. Touching the ‘enable’ icon, his apartment imploded into a billion non-colour atoms and his new surroundings formed gradually from the particulate mist.
 
          Sebastian Arnold knocked three times on the badly painted steel door and waited for a reply.