"Painted Ponies" by Cobalt Jade (cobaltjade@aol.com). Guest review by Kim.

Celeste tells me she keeps trying to find me stories to review that I'll enjoy. Problem with that is, that whilst I might be happy, you'll all get bored as I review the same type of story over and over again. Thankfully she's come up with yet another extraordinary story that I probably would never have read otherwise.

This story is firmly planted in the virtual world, explored by such films as The Lawnmower Man, Strange Days and Brainstorm.

A female virtual world sculpture, Trish, has a thing for imaging carousels. At the same time she's busy trying to ignore the advances of a fellow programmer, the odious Alec. Working late one night, on her latest creation, she is mentally taken over by Alec. As she points out to him, this is an outrageous act in the field of virtualising.

Having wrested control from her, he proceeds to force his twisted sexual appetites on our hapless heroine. First she is morphed into a female half horse half human and then bondaged into her own carousel. Alec beats, humiliates and finally rapes her senseless. At one point Alec is seated in a saddle on horse Trish's back, at the same time as he's screwing her. Now I'm not a horse rider myself, but I'm not at all sure this is technically possible.

So how does Trish react to this? Well, what do ya know, she LOVES it. Hmmmm... I can't help but feel that Trish would think nothing of the sort. What we have wondered into here, I fear, is not so much the virtual world of Trish and Alec, but the rather more stagnant backwaters of Cobalt Jade's mind.

It's not even a moral piece; when Trish is given back mental control and has the opportunity to either leave and blow the whistle on Alec, or to wreak revenge in some appropriate manner, she isn't even allowed to do that. A glitch in the program keeps them both prisoner and relentlessly rapes them both all night long. They are eventually unhooked the following morning by fellow workers, as they both make something of a spectacle of themselves on the carpet.

After all that, what does Trish do? It's obvious really, she forms a company to create virtual sex worlds with new found partner Alec, and they both go off, hand in hand, into a millionaire's sunset. Aw, I love a happy romantic ending.

What's a reviewer to say about such a story? Well, for one, it's extremely well written. Parts of it a genuinely arousing, and it all hangs together well. But... why does such a talented author stoop to such a dissolute premise, that all a guy has to do to succeed with a woman is to rape her into submission? There is the mildest of hints that Trish might actually appreciate this behavior, when Alec tells her he's read her intimate e-mails, but that's it as far as reasoned behavior goes. Not good enough in my book. Now I don't quite share Anne's flat-out horror at the use of rape in a story, but I do think it's beholden upon the author to put it in some sort of perspective, other than the old cliche of "well, women love it really, don't they?".