Episode 1 - The Beam

woes. Someone who could make the world vanish for a few hours at an exorbitant price — or sometimes longer than a few hours, if she was feeling generous.
    “Canvas,” Nicolai said to his empty apartment.
    A single chirp answered him.
    “Get me Kai Dreyfus.”

The trick to being a good escort, Kai knew, was to make the man she was with feel like he was the only person in the world she’d ever care about. That meant she couldn’t discuss other clients, leave remnants or mementos of other clients around, half-ass her affection, or talk business. For the time she was booked, Kai became her client’s girlfriend, wife, confidant — whatever he wanted. She kept extensive records of each client’s background in a characteristics file in her canvas. Subtle cameras in her apartment and embedded in her retinas recorded every second of their every interaction, and a sophisticated AI algorithm stripped the footage for relevant details.
    Client A had three kids. His oldest knew about his dalliances, but didn’t care.
    Client B had a cluster of moles on his arm that Kai had once said looked like the constellation Orion, and he’d thought that was delightfully clever.
    Client C had insecurities surrounding his manner of dress; she’d once innocently commented on his shoes and incited a mopey incident that it had taken her hours to rescue him from.
    Client D liked to fuck her from behind every single time, because he wanted to pretend that she was his wife, who he was desperately attracted to but who’d turned icy after their only child.
    When a night with Kai ended, it was like she and the client pressed a giant pause button on their relationship. When the client booked her again, their relationship resumed. They always picked up exactly where they’d left off. An intuitive program in Kai’s canvas even told a ‘bot, through her Beam connection, to arrange the apartment exactly as it had been when the client had last left. A man could leave a half-eaten pizza in Kai’s fridge, then wander back a month later and pull a piece from the fridge as if it were the same pizza. If he’d left crusts in the box, the same number of crusts would still be there, just as his memory told him they would be.
    Being a great escort was only half about the sex. Men didn’t just need sex from her. If all they wanted was physical release, they could beat off. Kai knew her clients didn’t come simply to insert tab A into slot B. They came to feel wanted, to feel desired, to feel understood and comfortable. So yes, she had to move as they wanted and do the things that pleased them. But she also had to stock her racks with the towels they liked, have their preferred sheets on the bed (in both thread count and color), and set her walls to project the art most pleasing to their eye. Each client wasn’t just a man. He was a project.
    So when Nicolai’s call came through, his identity rang into a small cochlear implant in Kai’s ear, too quiet for her current client — a new man who liked it a little rough — to hear. And because she was busy smacking her new client around, she couldn’t take Nicolai’s call even though she very much wanted to. Nicolai was her favorite… but right now, this man was her boyfriend. And because Kai was her new client’s girlfriend at the moment, she wouldn’t get calls from other men because she was his and his alone. So as Kai’s petite frame sat atop her man’s back in red lingerie with her black hair swinging in her face, she sighed internally as she subtly cocked her head to decline the call.
    Her current boyfriend, she thought as she slapped him across the back with a small black crop, was an asshole. And playing coy.
    First of all, his name clearly wasn’t Ralph McGuinness, as he’d told her it was. Kai’s AI software had already filtered that name through the Beam servers and found nobody close to his description. Second, the AI had already analyzed the timber of his voice and determined (quite redundantly, in Kai’s opinion) that he was probably lying. None of this was really unusual. All of Kai’s clients were wealthy, and hence were more often than not people of significant standing. Many of them were high-ranking officials within either Enterprise or Directorate. Those kinds of men didn’t want people to know they visited an escort, but it usually didn’t matter because Kai always found them out no matter what bullshit story they fed her. It was her business to know. The more she