Author : Michael Bagen

Hobbes lowered the Polaroid, blinded Carla giving him the finger.

“I just woke up and I’m hung over. Please die and leave me that picture to dispose of.

He ignored her, turned, and dealt the image like a playing card onto the scanner.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Carla, not his lady or even his friend, slid on tight jeans and buckled her belt. Hobbes ignored her, tantalizing though it was. She leaned over him, loose tank top billowing over her cleavage as she looked down.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He was scanning in her photo, point of fact. Blue dots appeared on the image. He was doing something else too. The computer made a buzzing noise, sifting through massive amounts of data. The fan vainly fought to dispel the heat.

“What’s it working on,” she asked.

“Sifting data and repelling viruses, mainly.” He looked up at her. He kissed her on the cheek, an act that had made her recoil in horror.

“I didn’t fuck you last night and I’m sure as fuck not going to now that I’m sober.”

“I know,” he said, turning his attention to the screen, “Have you ever heard of Rule 34?”

Rule 34—If it exists, there is porn of it.

“No.”

“Good.” He took a deep breath, lighting a bracing cigarette. “Little known fact. Did you know that there are a limited number of facial casts recognizably unique to the human eye.”

“So?”

“As of the year 2025 with its omnipresent cameras, be they in cars, banks, toilets or phones, we have been able to record an estimated 10 percent of the human population engaging in sexual acts that are now publicly available for download. One in every 10 people on earth. So mathematically, after we reached the point where 10% of the population is equal to or less than the number of facial casts, we get what?

“I don’t know,” she growled, sensing that she would not like it, whatever it was.

Hobbes’s computer struck gold and sang. Hardcore pornography erupted vile, raw and creative on screen, the face of Carla ecstatic at the efforts of some well-hung professional.

“Son of a bitch, you stole my face and–”

“Guess again,” he sang, “Rule 34. If it exists, there is porn of it.”

Carla braced herself against the sides of his chair, hissing spit and tobacco juice in his eyes.

“Explain!”

“If there are more pornographic actors actual or incidental in the world than there are facial casts, then it becomes a mathematical certainty that…”

She stumbled backward.

“Yep. If you exist, there is porn of you. For every face, there is at least ten other identical faces in the world. And at least one of them, like this girl here my dear Carla, got fucked six ways to Sunday on…what do they call those things, anyway?”

“It’s a sedan chair you unbelievable fuck!”

Hobbes, pimpled, fat, having spent $100 on vodka just to get a woman into his basement abode, smiled serenely as she rose, dead but for the hate and jabbed a lacquered black nail in his direction.

“I–”

“Every 5th man on Earth has seen that video. He has seen an image of himself fucking an image of a woman he is statistically ensured to be in eyeshot of.” Hobbes gently laid a kiss upon angry Carla’s knuckles. “Peace be with you.”

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