Hi, my name is Jim Ryder.
At least, that’s the name on the last few paychecks I’ve gotten. You might not know me if you saw me, but you’re probably aware of my work. I’m a simsense star.
Rider, Rider’s Run, Return of Rider. I’ve done a lot of work in the industry, and I’ve been cut loose. My last gig, ‘Return of Rider,’ was supposed to be a big deal, and it’s made pretty decent returns. Megas like Horizon demand a 3000% return on investments before they declare anything a success, and since Rider’s Run had only made them a 2940% return, they decided to end the series- or, at least my part in it.
Making simsense is odd. I got my implant at nineteen when they offered me my contract. You could do a full-body rig, but they wanted lower prep time and better production value, so my agent told me if I really wanted to be a part of this business, I should play ball, sign the contract, and get the tech implanted. Who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to be a big nova-hot star? So I signed up, spent a few weeks in rehab making sure they hadn’t damaged my brain at all in the procedure, and then I got to work.
Simsense work is all artificial. It only records chemical drives, not active thinking, so if my job was to eat a real bacon cheeseburger, I would need to starve myself for a couple days, and take hunger suppressants before the recording began, so that this food would be the best that I had ever eaten. Before every one of those porn shoots? A week without sex, closely monitored eating and excersize, followed by drugs to heighten the sensations, and then a few hours rolling in the sheets with the most gorgeous woman imaginable. Or a few dwarves, or an orc; I only ever did one troll shoot- cracked a vertebrae, spent a few weeks in a bed while nanobots fixed it.
Although the rush of emotions is real, the entire thing is a setup. When I’m “filming,” a term that carried over from outdated 20th century producers in Hollywood, I’m wearing the best possible clothes, smelling like heaven on earth, scrubbed clean by an army of joygirls, manicure/pedicure, anything to remove distractions from the sim. I’m wearing tailored underwear in most of my sims, just so they don’t ride up or distract uncomfortably from the scene. I’m wearing the best new clothes, using the best vehicles and locations that money can buy, and it’s designed that way on purpose. I don’t know how many shoots I’ve been on where they made me do it again and again, until I was holding a can or bottle I had never heard of the right way, only to discover that it was the hot new thing on the market a few months later. It’s all about the bottom line, and that means product placement.
I guess a few of my recordings have been turned into beetles- I know one of the porn ones I did early on was- blowjob while taking a dump. I know the poor slitch they got to do it kept throwing up between takes because that combination of smells was disgusting, but it’s been a best seller going on twenty years now. Lots of guys wonder what it would feel like; can’t say I blame them.
Twenty years; that’s a long time to last in the industry. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my time came and went. There’s only so much that a company like Horizon is willing to do, before they write you off and replace you with the new model. Yeah, I’ve been replaced. The next time you see a ‘Rider’ chip, it’ll be some kid named Trevor Steele.
So in my last sim, I slid between two cars, trying to get away from pursuit. The vehicle following me slammed into the car, crunching into the back of my bike, pushing me out into cross-traffic. And then the sim cuts out. It was all over the papers- the cliffhanger at ‘Return of Rider.’ It wasn’t much of a cliffhanger- the mega set me up. They had leaked some information about me to a few other corporations, how this was my big comeback and I was going straight to the top of the A-list. Enough chum in the waters, and some fraggers are going to get et by sharks.
The reality of it is not as much fun as you would have imagined. I was all jacked up on stimulants, so I got to stay awake while the truck ran over me. There’s no way a rig that big could have stopped in time to avoid me, so I ended up under the front axle, my bike giving me enough mass to dig a trench in the ferrocrete and cause all sorts of damage to me. ‘An accident,’ the headlines said, but by the time my head cleared in the hospital, my agent had already signed a new actor for the role, emptied my accounts to pay for the ‘bills’ accrued from the downtime in production, and dropped me as a client. The mega was a little more forgiving, all things considered- they at least paid for my hospital stay, and the fresh batch of skin to cover all the road rash.
I have a few new bones, and a state of the art cybereye. But I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement- I’m not allowed to state to anyone that they’re replaced me, because that would be bad publicity. People don’t want to age with their stars- they want the newest, the youngest, the hottest fuck. They’ll pay top dollar for it, but they’ll leave you broken down, almost fourty, no work, no savings.
The simsense stars union? Worthless. I can’t get a job in this town, even though I’ve worked with every ‘retired star’ on the boards. No one is willing to cross Horizon, because they make the sims that keep everyone paid and powerful. Technically, I haven’t been replaced, I’m just ‘better than new’ after my surgery; peddling some new gadget. Whores.
