Kit stares at the account executive, but he’s not going to say anything. The silence goes on and on. The hopeful smile the adman is wearing begins to vanish. He looks at his associate, who is still no help whatsoever.

“On the phone, I think we discussed the kids’ market,” says Kit wearily. He purses his lips and turns to Honey, who is sipping Campari and soda through a straw. “She doesn’t like it. I don’t like it. Come back with something else.”

The adman lays his sweating hands on the beautiful, glossy tabletop. “Miss Pilar?” he says hopelessly.

“Kit like doing business,” she says, and shrugs. When she smiles, both account executives are inspired with possible new approaches. The sound of her voice, they tell themselves, is enough reward for their failed labor. The opportunity to meet with her again will motivate them to find just the pitch she and Kit are looking for. “You have nice flight,” she says.

Kit is in the control room watching his wife on the bed with a seventeen-year-old Italian boy. Kit watches them through the grimy glass, wishing he’d worn a shirt because he is sweating heavily in the hot, stale air of the studio, and his naked back is sticking to the black vinyl padding of the chair. He peels himself away and leans forward, checking meters and digital readouts that don’t really need checking. Honey is a consummate performer. It’s as if she has an accurate internal clock ticking behind her forehead, cuing her: 00:00 initiate encounter, 00:30 initiate foreplay with passionate kiss, 00:45 experience preliminary arousal…. They are seven minutes, ten seconds into the thirty-minute recording. By the outline on Kit’s clipboard, Honey is supposed to begin oral stimulation at 07:15, and goddamn if she isn’t already sliding down the boy’s tanned body. No cue cards, she doesn’t even need hand signals. Kit pretends to check the levels again, then turns away from the big glass window.

Kit had his own brain wired long before he met Honey Pilar. If he wanted, he could jack into a socket on the board and feel just what the Italian boy is feeling, or he could jack into another socket and eavesdrop on Honey. Kit doesn’t need to peek on the boy’s responses because he’s been married to Honey for five years, and she’s every bit as good live-in-person as she is on a module. Honey Pilar is still, at the age of forty-five, the most desired woman in the world. One out of every eight moddies — of all kinds — sold through the big modshop chains is a Honey Pilar sex moddy. Kit has never been her partner on any of them.

At 14:20, Honey and the boy curl together on their sides. Honey’s eyes are closed, her face flushed. She is only wearing some kind of white cotton peasant-looking blouse and rope sandals. The boy is naked except for a pair of black matte-finish sunglasses. Drops of sweat glisten on his hairless chest. Kit stands up and turns away again. He leaves the control room, sure that nothing out of the ordinary will happen. He wanders down the long hall. He kicks off his deck shoes and feels the pile carpet warm on the soles of his feet. There is the strong odor of stale beer in the hall, as if several cans had soaked the floor recently and no one had cared to do anything about it. None of the windows are open, and it is even hotter in the hall than in the control room. Kit pushes open the scarred blond wood door at the end of the hall. He is in another control room. He chases a green lizard the size of his hand from the padded chair and sits behind the board. He stares at meters and digital readouts. They are all flickering at safe levels.

Beyond the glass, a young woman in a torn T-shirt and a bikini bottom sits at a microphone, clutching a sheaf of printed pages. Kit knows that she works for some revolutionary organization, but there are too many even to begin to guess which one. She reads the pages in a slow, husky voice. Kit thinks her voice is pretty damn sexy. He likes everything about this girl, what little he knows. He likes her bikini bottom, her torn shirt, her rumpled black hair, and the way she talks. After a moment, Kit hears what she is reading. “Achtung, Achtung,” she says. Her voice has no accent, neither German nor otherwise. She herself has brown skin, pale full lips, and Oriental eyes. “Achtung, drei hundert neun-und-siebzig. Fiinf-und-zwanzig.” Then she begins reading a list of five-digit numbers. “39502, 95372, 01814, 66589.” She reads twenty-five groups of digits, meaningful only to the certain audience listening to her frequency, reading the key to her code. “Ende,” she says. A moment later, after shifting to another frequency, she begins again in Spanish. “Atencion, atencion.” More numbers, more signals. Kit would like to buy the brown-skinned girl a drink, look into her black eyes, ask her if she herself knows who might be listening to her broadcast.

Kit leaves her control room. She has never looked up, never known for an instant that he was there. Kit walks back down the stifling hallway. As he enters the small room, he sees Honey Pilar astride the Italian boy. Kit checks the clock on the board, checks the script. The recording is still precisely on schedule. He hasn’t been missed. Just as the girl at the microphone did not know he was there, Honey does not know he has been gone.

Kit sits in the black vinyl chair. He takes a moddy from a stack on the control board. He doesn’t care which moddy it is. He reaches up and chips it in. There is a moment of disorientation, and then Kit’s vision clears. He is Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, suave, well-dressed, and certainly in command of his feelings. He allows himself a moment of sadness for Honey Pilar, whose life could never be as interesting as his. After all, he is Cary Grant. His future will be better than good: It will be amusing.

“Twenty-six years ago, I was a young feature reporter for EuroUrban Holo on my first assignment, to interview Honey Pilar. I was sitting cross-legged on the rough wooden pier down the hill and across the beach from her walled estate. The sparkling Mediterranean waves lapped rhythmically at the pilings. I remember the bright morning sun making me squint a little into the camera. The ragged cries of sea birds punctuated my lead-in. ‘Here in her palatial estate,’ I said, ‘Honey Pilar reigns as the superstar of the sex moddies. In five years she has risen from talented newcomer to both critical acclaim and commercial supremacy. Let’s take a quick look behind the scenes and find out what Honey Pilar is like in her unguarded moments.’ My cameraman and I went to the main gate but we were not allowed in, although my news service had confirmed our appointment for that morning. Honey had changed her mind.

“Fifteen years later I was working for Visions/Rumelia, and once again I stood by the high, gilded gate. ‘What secrets does this young beauty know,’ I said on that occasion, ‘that maintain her position as the world’s premier moddy star?’ My story didn’t go on to reveal any actual secrets, of course. Honey Pilar never tells her secrets. But she did make a rare personal appearance and answered some mild questions about her favorite foods and her thoughts on the world situation. She was tanned and smiling and, well, perfect. A week before that interview, a poll had announced that sixty-eight percent of the seven billion people on earth could identify her face. Eighteen percent could identify her naked, unaugmented breasts.

“Today, Rio Home Data has asked me to begin this series it calls Honey Pilar: A Quarter Century of Fascination. Never in the history of the personality module industry has one performer so dominated the charts. Since her now-classic first moddy, A Life in Lace, she has turned out thirty-eight full-length recordings and nine of the ‘quickies’ that ABT experimented with and then abandoned. Her total sales top one hundred and twenty million units, and every one of her recordings remains in print. As of last week, she has eight titles on the Brainwaves Hot 100 Chart, with two in the Top Ten.