“You haven’t seen a porno cube before, have you?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, reluctantly, “but I’ve heard all about them from the Council.”
“And you always believe the Council don’t you?” he laughed.
“You’re the one who wants to live with the Spacers. Don’t you think you should learn something about them?” Everyone knows that the Free Spacers make the porno cubes. I relented.
We went to Robert’s house, since his parents were away. Someone else brought the porno cubes. I wondered how they got them. The Council carefully monitors our cultural influences. I had asked Alicia if the Jeffies distributed them. She had said they were so worried about their treaties that she doubted it. One of the kids at school told me that the Spacers beamed the porno to us using gravity waves from a singularity. Right. Even Hank was not much help. He just said that any controlled substance automatically creates a black market.
At first I felt out of place at the porno party. It was all a bunch of older kids, at least four forms ahead of me. My discomfort vanished as I watched the cube.
The way the Council talks I expected them to be badly made, with abysmal acting and no production values. Nothing could be more untrue. In contrast our cubes look two-dimensional and monochrome.
Everything looked real -- believable. In less than half a kilosec, I felt that I was no longer watching a cube, but instead peeking into someone’s real life. The story was about this asteroid miner who was found dead floating in space.