Follow Viola
into the Virtual
Reality room
into the Virtual
Reality room
You step inside and close the door gently behind you. Two headsets sit before you. They’re smaller than you thought they would be, a mix between some Matrix-style sunglasses and a chic pair of leather blinders you’d put on a racehorse. Viola’s already putting hers on, but her 90’s up-do is getting in the way so she lets her hair out, it’s longer than you’d expect and it fans over her shoulders in finger waves like a 1940s femme fatale. What era is this woman? Viola’s age is like the number of deceased husbands she seems to have: ambiguous. She puts the VR on and clicks the leather straps into place behind her head. The headset makes a powering up noise and begins to emit a soft blue light over Viola’s face.
The room is dark, like an interrogation room, with two chairs each under a spotlight.
Viola falls back into one of the low-slung leather chairs, and the spotlight dulls and turns off. Her whole body relaxes and she looks up into whatever she can see and smiles blissfully, letting her cigarette fall to the concrete floor. Her smile convinces you it’s an alright place to be, so you place the other headset on and let the calming blue light wash over you. You take your spot in the chair and the second spotlight disappears as you sit. The room is dark now apart from your two faces illuminated blue.
You open your eyes and everything is shades of cream and beige, the luxurious carpet underfoot, the billowing linen curtains, the marble top benches, the excessive amount of throw cushions on every sofa, all sophisticated neutral tones. This must be Viola’s fantasy. Two Weimaraner dogs appear behind you and run down the stately hallway, wearing honey-coloured silk scarves as collars, tied around their necks just so. You follow them.
The room is dark, like an interrogation room, with two chairs each under a spotlight.
Viola falls back into one of the low-slung leather chairs, and the spotlight dulls and turns off. Her whole body relaxes and she looks up into whatever she can see and smiles blissfully, letting her cigarette fall to the concrete floor. Her smile convinces you it’s an alright place to be, so you place the other headset on and let the calming blue light wash over you. You take your spot in the chair and the second spotlight disappears as you sit. The room is dark now apart from your two faces illuminated blue.
You open your eyes and everything is shades of cream and beige, the luxurious carpet underfoot, the billowing linen curtains, the marble top benches, the excessive amount of throw cushions on every sofa, all sophisticated neutral tones. This must be Viola’s fantasy. Two Weimaraner dogs appear behind you and run down the stately hallway, wearing honey-coloured silk scarves as collars, tied around their necks just so. You follow them.
The dogs enter a room that you recognise and they curl up on the sofa. Viola’s clearly redecorated it but it’s unmistakable: you’re in the oval office. Viola sits behind the desk in an impeccably tailored camel pantsuit, the same one she was wearing in the factory, but now she wears bone-coloured pumps on her feet which she props up on a pile of paperwork with a title page that states: ‘How to fix America: IDEAS. By Viola Beverly, the President Since a Long Time.’
You’re pretty sure Viola isn’t an American citizen, her accent is just as ambiguous as her age, but you aren’t here to get in the way of her fantasy, in fact, you’re not even sure if she can see or hear you. A young Bill Clinton walks past the window outside playing the saxophone, he knocks on the window to tell Viola she’s a much better president than he was. Viola smiles contentedly and presses a button which makes the electronic curtains close on Bill outside, and his soft saxophone ramblings grow quieter. The curtains swing shut, and in the darkening room Viola seems to be floating, timeless, and completely in control of everything. A peace comes over her face that you covet, and in that moment, she is truly aspirational to you. Sure, she’s a boomer capitalist with a boner for total world domination, but at least she knows what she wants, and how to get it. You think for a moment, what if the roles were reversed, and you and Viola were inside your fantasy, what would it be? Do you even know?
You don’t get to ponder this very long because Barack Obama and JFK walk in, the two objectively hottest presidents, or maybe the only two that Viola knows as she’s probably from some off-brand English-speaking country or Scandinavia. They’re dressed like detectives, in brown suits and ties. You can’t take your eyes off them, and the combined sexual magnetism of the two takes your breath away. When you look back at Viola she’s had an outfit change — you can do that? She really is in command of the technology. She wears the same bone-coloured pumps but now is in a white turtleneck dress, very short and very sleeveless, her blonde hair back in the 90s up-do, a modern type of beehive. She sits back in her chair and her lanky legs catch the light for the first time. She crosses them languorously over one another.
“Good morning President Beverly,” the men say in unison.
“Gentleman, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Viola asks.
“We’d like to ask you a couple of questions,” Obama says, unbuttoning his suit jacket, “about how you’re so damn good at this job.”
“Yeah,” JFK says. “Suspiciously good, if you ask us.”
“Sure,” Viola says coyly. “I have nothing to hide.”
Viola gestures to two low-slung chairs that are placed on the cream carpet in front of her desk. Obama takes off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves. When JFK removes his jacket he is inexplicably wearing a camel-coloured cashmere knit and smells of the ocean.
The chairs that Viola has provided her guests are so low that the men’s buttocks almost touch the floor, and they have no choice but to gaze up at her legs underneath the desk, and all the way up her legs to her very powerful presidential pussy. But they’re just as impressed with the desk which looms over them, a desk which they both covet, but which she is in control of, as long as she can keep all her constituencies in a row.
President Beverly lights a cigarette and JFK says softly, as if he already knows the impotence of his words, “there’s no smoking in here.”
She cocks her head and smiles, to show that she heard what he said, and exhales. Without breaking eye contact with JFK she offers one to Obama, and as he takes it she produces a lighter and holds the flame out for him, all the while not taking her eyes off the other man. Obama takes a drag and gives her a smile that almost makes her falter.
You’re pretty sure Viola isn’t an American citizen, her accent is just as ambiguous as her age, but you aren’t here to get in the way of her fantasy, in fact, you’re not even sure if she can see or hear you. A young Bill Clinton walks past the window outside playing the saxophone, he knocks on the window to tell Viola she’s a much better president than he was. Viola smiles contentedly and presses a button which makes the electronic curtains close on Bill outside, and his soft saxophone ramblings grow quieter. The curtains swing shut, and in the darkening room Viola seems to be floating, timeless, and completely in control of everything. A peace comes over her face that you covet, and in that moment, she is truly aspirational to you. Sure, she’s a boomer capitalist with a boner for total world domination, but at least she knows what she wants, and how to get it. You think for a moment, what if the roles were reversed, and you and Viola were inside your fantasy, what would it be? Do you even know?
You don’t get to ponder this very long because Barack Obama and JFK walk in, the two objectively hottest presidents, or maybe the only two that Viola knows as she’s probably from some off-brand English-speaking country or Scandinavia. They’re dressed like detectives, in brown suits and ties. You can’t take your eyes off them, and the combined sexual magnetism of the two takes your breath away. When you look back at Viola she’s had an outfit change — you can do that? She really is in command of the technology. She wears the same bone-coloured pumps but now is in a white turtleneck dress, very short and very sleeveless, her blonde hair back in the 90s up-do, a modern type of beehive. She sits back in her chair and her lanky legs catch the light for the first time. She crosses them languorously over one another.
“Good morning President Beverly,” the men say in unison.
“Gentleman, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Viola asks.
“We’d like to ask you a couple of questions,” Obama says, unbuttoning his suit jacket, “about how you’re so damn good at this job.”
“Yeah,” JFK says. “Suspiciously good, if you ask us.”
“Sure,” Viola says coyly. “I have nothing to hide.”
Viola gestures to two low-slung chairs that are placed on the cream carpet in front of her desk. Obama takes off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves. When JFK removes his jacket he is inexplicably wearing a camel-coloured cashmere knit and smells of the ocean.
The chairs that Viola has provided her guests are so low that the men’s buttocks almost touch the floor, and they have no choice but to gaze up at her legs underneath the desk, and all the way up her legs to her very powerful presidential pussy. But they’re just as impressed with the desk which looms over them, a desk which they both covet, but which she is in control of, as long as she can keep all her constituencies in a row.
President Beverly lights a cigarette and JFK says softly, as if he already knows the impotence of his words, “there’s no smoking in here.”
She cocks her head and smiles, to show that she heard what he said, and exhales. Without breaking eye contact with JFK she offers one to Obama, and as he takes it she produces a lighter and holds the flame out for him, all the while not taking her eyes off the other man. Obama takes a drag and gives her a smile that almost makes her falter.
“I guess I know who the bad cop is…” she says, and her and Obama laugh conspiratorially. JFK seems on edge, uncomfortable with the rapport between the pair, and moves on in his line of questioning.
“You’re such a prolific politician President Beverly. It defies belief that you’ve managed to accomplish as much as you have in your 18 years in office. You’ve reached almost inhuman levels of efficiency,” JFK says.
“I don’t make the rules Mr. Kennedy. I just go with the flow,” Viola says.
“Do you use drugs, President Beverly?” Obama asks, bluntly.
“Yes, cocaine”, she answers. She looks over at JFK. “Did you ever fuck on cocaine, John?” A shrill violin starts playing and Viola uncrosses and crosses her legs, excessively slowly, and watches the men register that she is not wearing underwear.
“It’s nice.”
It seems like Viola spent the 90s not only contributing to the dot-com bubble but also watching a lot of erotic thrillers. You realize this is dialogue from Basic Instinct and laugh out loud despite yourself, from your spot on the sofa next to the Weimaraner twins. You’re relieved that nobody hears you, it seems you are invisible here, as you suspected.
Viola gets up slowly from her chair and walks around to sit on the front of her desk. With her buttocks balancing on the edge of the hard wood, she can reach out and place one high-heeled foot in the lap of each man. The men caress her ankles gently with their hands and start to tug her legs slowly open as she reaches back with her hands to clear away the surface of the desk, knocking papers and lipsticks and bottles of white wine spritzers onto the floor, to make way for what comes next. A wine glass spills all over the carpet and you gasp loudly. That’s when the strangest thing happens, they turn to look at you. JFK and Obama rotate slowly in their armchairs, and look at you severely, and then their faces start to glitch in and out.
“And who the hell are you?” Obama asks.
Viola, whose head was thrown back and resting on the desk, sits up slowly, and straightens her gaze on you in robotic slow motion. Fuck. She looks confused and terrified, something has gone wrong. The adrenaline of your fear wakes you up. You come to in the VR room again and the two spotlights are flashing red, bathing you and Viola’s unconscious body in red light: it’s an erotica emergency. Viola is still laid back and drooling in her chair with her legs spread, she must still be back there in the oval office, you think. Then you see that during the course of her fantasy, Viola must have removed a phone from a concealed pocket within her suit jacket. The phone sits in her limp hand and the screen is black, with a big pulsating red dot in the middle. She was trying to record. That must have been what caused the glitch. You remember Slutworth’s offer - what could he possibly have offered Viola that she needed? She seems to have all the money in the world, but you think, looking at her phone: apparently everybody has their price.
“You’re such a prolific politician President Beverly. It defies belief that you’ve managed to accomplish as much as you have in your 18 years in office. You’ve reached almost inhuman levels of efficiency,” JFK says.
“I don’t make the rules Mr. Kennedy. I just go with the flow,” Viola says.
“Do you use drugs, President Beverly?” Obama asks, bluntly.
“Yes, cocaine”, she answers. She looks over at JFK. “Did you ever fuck on cocaine, John?” A shrill violin starts playing and Viola uncrosses and crosses her legs, excessively slowly, and watches the men register that she is not wearing underwear.
“It’s nice.”
It seems like Viola spent the 90s not only contributing to the dot-com bubble but also watching a lot of erotic thrillers. You realize this is dialogue from Basic Instinct and laugh out loud despite yourself, from your spot on the sofa next to the Weimaraner twins. You’re relieved that nobody hears you, it seems you are invisible here, as you suspected.
Viola gets up slowly from her chair and walks around to sit on the front of her desk. With her buttocks balancing on the edge of the hard wood, she can reach out and place one high-heeled foot in the lap of each man. The men caress her ankles gently with their hands and start to tug her legs slowly open as she reaches back with her hands to clear away the surface of the desk, knocking papers and lipsticks and bottles of white wine spritzers onto the floor, to make way for what comes next. A wine glass spills all over the carpet and you gasp loudly. That’s when the strangest thing happens, they turn to look at you. JFK and Obama rotate slowly in their armchairs, and look at you severely, and then their faces start to glitch in and out.
“And who the hell are you?” Obama asks.
Viola, whose head was thrown back and resting on the desk, sits up slowly, and straightens her gaze on you in robotic slow motion. Fuck. She looks confused and terrified, something has gone wrong. The adrenaline of your fear wakes you up. You come to in the VR room again and the two spotlights are flashing red, bathing you and Viola’s unconscious body in red light: it’s an erotica emergency. Viola is still laid back and drooling in her chair with her legs spread, she must still be back there in the oval office, you think. Then you see that during the course of her fantasy, Viola must have removed a phone from a concealed pocket within her suit jacket. The phone sits in her limp hand and the screen is black, with a big pulsating red dot in the middle. She was trying to record. That must have been what caused the glitch. You remember Slutworth’s offer - what could he possibly have offered Viola that she needed? She seems to have all the money in the world, but you think, looking at her phone: apparently everybody has their price.
You feel groggy and still haven’t got control of your body in the present, you try and twitch your fingers but can’t. You need to get this headset off, and you need to get that phone away before anyone sees it, if Viola’s ever going to be allowed out of here. You try to will your body to move. You see two silhouettes at the door through your drooping eyelids, and recognize the silhouettes of the SAMMS, Kisska’s goons. They burst through the door and tear off your headset, and you wriggle your fingers and toes, movement coming back into your body. You look over at Viola tenderly, and you hope the deal she made was worth it. The SAMMs may even erase the footage from her phone before she wakes up. You think back to the warm cocoon of Viola’s fantasy and, still out of it, manage to form your hand into a military two-finger salute. You bring your hand to your brow and puff up your chest, and salute the room stoically.
“President Beverly, you are dismissed.”
