just remembered an ‘80s-90s sci-fi story I read (maybe in Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology, tbh)

where some kid was just discovering the VR frontier and one day he went out to some simulated pleasure pier on the nice not-destroyed-by-industrialization shore

and met some nice fresh young girl in a sundress or something, I’m really trying not to picture Asuka here and it’s hilarious how much I’m failing

and there’s textual scenery and disquisition about what computer-mediated living is like when you can just order up perfection but also it’s a boy-meets-girl thing and he holds her hand and it’s written well and you feel it

and there’s some sort of emotional/revelatory climax as they’re holding hands at the end of the pier watching the sun set over the simulated perfect California horizon and he’s squeezing her hand

and the detournment is somehow he realizes she’s an old perv who had that hand mapped to the dick in his haptic suit or something and just tricked this noob into jerking him off and everyone’s laughing at him for being so naive as to fall for that old trick