I had a slightly unusual session yesterday. Not so much in the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, but in the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ (the ‘why’ is left as an exercise for my therapist). It featured Mistress Yuki playing in Lady Lydia’s space. I’ve played with Mistress Yuki in the past down in San Francisco (see here and here), and was happy to hear she’d be in Seattle for a few days this month. It was a lot of fun to get together, if a little disconcerting to play with someone new and different in a space I know so well.
It was a fairly intense session, with lots of corporal play, and we finished with some piercing. I was pretty zoned by that point. Time and space were askew, and my brain really didn’t care. As Mistress Yuki moved around the table I was suddenly struck by a tremendous sense of her physicality. Attractive women in exciting undergarments always have a pretty powerful presence, but this was more than that. Her body had a three dimensional solidity that felt more real than anything else in the room, including myself.
I’ve experienced this kind of reality distortion before in subspace and, as I pondered it afterwards, it reminded me of passage from one of my favorite books – Neuromancer. The quote features a mysterious man named Armitage telling the protagonist (Case) that his lost hacking abilities could be miraculously restored to him.
“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?” Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was over.
That description of a character and a moment in time has always stuck with me. I read it long before I did a BDSM scene, but that sense of sudden physicality coupled with unreality, fits beautifully with what I experienced last night in subspace. That’s perhaps appropriate for the book that popularized the term cyberspace.
The above images were taken from Mistress Yuki’s tumblr. If you’re in the San Francisco area and would like to session with her, check out her main site.
As for Neuromancer, if you’ve never read it and aren’t violently opposed to the cyberpunk genre, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. It’s an incredibly influential novel, and an archetype in its genre. It’s amazing to read it now and realize it was written in the early 80’s on a 1927 Hermes model portable manual typewriter.
Man, I haven’t read that in years – I’ll have to go back and re-read it now.
A bit OT, but if you liked that, you might like Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and “Diamond Age.”
I’ve read almost all of Neil Stephenson’s books. Love those two earlier novels, particularly Snow Crash. Cryptonomicon was also great, but I was less and less thrilled by the Baroque cycle the further I got into it.
I pull Neuromancer out every 2 or 3 years for a re-read. The others in that trilogy were also good, but that was the standout for me.
-paltego
Yeah, Cryptonomicon just wasn’t what I was expecting.
Glad to see that I’m not the only one who goes back to re-read old favorites.