She was vaguely opaque and most definitely bad tempered. Alfred felt he should say something. Sitting in the centre of a sigil chalked roughly onto the cerement floor he felt he was losing control of the pattern.
"You... ah.... go all see-through when you pace."
At the sound of his voice the vision shot him a dark glance. All the books said her eyes were full of promise. And, sure enough, a guarantee was written across her gaze, it was just 'death in full dose' was not what Alfred had had in mind. He decided there would letters of complaint for misleading implication sent to all the authors come Monday.
"All the writers are dead, dupe," she said, finally cheering up.
"Thank you for the reality check. Respectfully, can you please refrain from reading my data stream."
"You're naked," she pointed out. "If I get to see all of your outside, why not the inside too?"
Alfred struggled for composure. "Those who have come before said the chalk would protect me. My thoughts should be private." The pattern was slipping.
"Shouldn't believe everything you read," she said.
Or see, he thought. All the pornography must have unhinged him. Why didn't he take an easier path to enlightenment? Get himself a god or take up Blood Ritual? Nothing wrong with a bit of blood
"You wouldn't like all the scaring," she said, skimming it off the top, "and the Blood Rituals aren't much better."
The cold concrete was the cellar floor of the old house Alfred had bought with the collapse of the local property market. Nailed to the walls were expensive one-off fractals the previous owner had imported from Sweden. After all his experimentation with trigonometry, chaos, and chemicals he still had no idea why the prints had been confined in the dark of the below ground room.
The vision abandoned the bad humour and pacing of a few minutes before. The prints seemed to have caught her attention. She walked over to the nearest and laid hands on glass slightly more transparent. She studied the encased fractal with the same fascination Alfred had experienced when he had stumbled into the cellar for the first time.
"They were smothered in melted sand, left in the dark, almost like they were pot plants he had taken a disliking to," she said idly. The fabric she had wrapped loosely around her body had slipped to reveal the gentle curve of a spine, and the wall behind. Alfred clenched his teeth. Where had it gone so wrong?
She turned back to look at him, considering for moment, then reaching a conclusion she appeared happy with.
She pulled the cloth back over her shoulders and sat herself opposite Alfred, mirroring his mediation pose. Their knees touched and he felt the shock of actual contact. She looked barely there, yet felt real enough. The vision placed a corpse cold hand, most certainly real, on Alfred's thigh, then moved it slowly, running her fingers over his hips, extending the pressure of the stroke until she arrived at his chest. Her hand was resting just over the hairless skin that stood between her and a heartbeat.
"The information you got was bad. Sex magic is about conservation of energies, not anything to do with actually getting any.
She bit the side of her lips, again considering.
"I assure you sir, this won't hurt a bit," she said, and unplugged his backup.
Alfred looked down in horror. The place the DriverPropertyInfo had sat above his right nipple since he was five was now a hole. She had disconnected him.
"I have disconnected you," she said and handed him back the drive. "You think a bunch of horny old magicians spending all day 'initiating' the fresh flesh had any time or inclination to seek out real power?"
"You've killed me."
"It's not like athletics, where practice builds you up so you preform better in competition. Unless, you know, you just wanted really good sex."
"My existence... ended by a lower dimensional being."
"Orgasm: pure wasted potential in my opinion. That power needs to be re-directed if you ever want to get anywhere. And I've not killed you. So your memories won't get injected into a robot when you actually die, big bloody deal. Buck up big boy, now you're not going to data stream, I can't read your thoughts. "
"I'll live out my hundred years, and then, 'poof', no more me." Alfred mourned."
"Foolish boy. Look, you called me away from what I was doing to this cellar, and trust me I'm still rather pissed off about that, and so you define the pattern. I may only be a jumped up fractal from a dimension under this one, but I can give you the enlightenment you couldn't find in "Betty Goes to Jail, Tape 7." She waved her hands in front of Alfred's face. "I'm stuck in 3D until you die, so you'd better provide some entertainment, you sad, twisted, little fuck."