Free Strange Flesh by Michael Olson

hands one to me.
    “ Gan bei, James.” We clink glasses. “So here you have GAME in all its degenerate glory.”
    She gestures to a group way out on the thrash end of the spectrum who have imported a bottle of Everclear and some powdery substance and are lighting their sneezes on fire.
    Xan downs the better part of her drink and then grabs the elbow of someone behind her. “Looks like I’ll need another cocktail. Be right back, but in the meantime, meet Andrew Garriott.”
    Garriott is a diminutive Brit with short hair and dancing eyes that give him a sprightly quality. He shows the well-wrought smile of someone groomed to be a child star. After a warm handshake and some preliminaries, he asks me what I do.
    “Video, mostly. What’s your game of choice?”
    “Game? Oh, I’m complete crap at games. More of a gearhead, really. I was making robots at Cambridge . . . I suffer to think how I ended up here. Good parties though. I guess you could say I—”
    Garriott is nearly carried off his feet by the ardent embrace of a strikingly tall blonde. Her back to me, she puts him into a precarious dip while whispering into his ear. Garriott’s initial frown at being mauled smooths into an expression approaching bliss. She sets him back on balance, grabs his hair, and gives him a violent kiss on the forehead. I begin to turn away, as it seems clear they have something important to discuss, but Xan reappears by my side and taps her shoulder, saying, “Olya, how beastly! You’re alienating our new man here.”
    She turns, and I have to strain to keep my mouth closed and my eyes from wandering along uncivil trajectories. Olya puts one in mind ofmythology. With cascades of nearly white hair, eyes a color of blue Icelandic geneticists are no doubt struggling to patent, and a radiant complexion, she has all the unnatural perfection of the Valkyrie one might find painted on the side of a van at Comic-Con. This impression is not hindered by her wearing a metallic corset that, while possibly providing some protection in battle, seems more contrived to bring confusion to her enemies by what it does for her tremendous décolletage. Her voice is the low Slavic purr of a Bond villain:
    “Ah. Hello. I am Olya Zhavinskaya.”
    I start to offer my hand, but she envelops me in a Russian triple kiss. The last one lingering enough to make me fumble my own name. Olya seems to ignore it anyway and says, “Now, zaichik, we welcome you here, and I’m sure we’ll be great friends. It is very rude of me, but I must take away the little ones. We have business.”
    She puts her arms around the shoulders of Garriott and Xan and marches them off toward a dimly lit corner by the DJ booth. Xan puts up a mollifying finger for me, but something Olya says makes her head snap around as they disappear into the crowd.
     
    After some time spent making small talk with other GAMErs, I notice, across the crowded main gallery, Olya stepping up onto the DJ’s stage.
    “Shitfire,” observes a guy standing nearby.
    The DJ shakes his head at whatever she’s asking. But with her lips at his ear, he finally nods reluctantly, earning a brisk pat on the ass. The DJ abandons his abstract composition of low-fi bleeps and segues into an up-tempo version of the Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” but with Morrissey’s bleak baritone artfully mixed with a James Brown classic:
     
Girlfriend in a coma I know I know it’s serious—Get up! Get on up!
     
    Olya then steps back to Xan and Garriott, who are wrestling with a bottle of champagne. There’s a barely audible squeal of delight as the cork goes and foam explodes all over them.
    I feel a strong impulse to slip over and play cabana boy with my cocktail napkin. But I make it only a few steps in their direction when I’mthwarted by a girl turning away in disgust from losing at some handheld game. This hefty cyber-goth with Muppet hair and a pincushion face slams into me, and my drink spills all over the most