AFK, Awaiting

AFK, AWAITING

Also by Huckleberry Hax: AFK (2007) AFK, Again (2013) AFK, Indefinitely (2014) AFK, in Pursuit of Avengement (2015) Be right back (2008) My Avatars and I (2009) Your clothing is still downloading (2012) Amazing Metaverse (short stories) (2016)

by Huckleberry H. Hax: Beside an Open Window (2014) The Day is Full of Birds (2008) The Introspection of Imogen Card (2011) SIM (2016) Old friend, learn to look behind you in the coffee queue (poetry) (2010) Second Life is a Place We Visit (collected articles) (2015)

www.huckleberryhax.wordpress.com

AFK, AWAITING HUCKLEBERRY HAX

Copyright Š 2016 by Huckleberry Hax. All rights reserved This paperback edition published in 2017 Huckleberry Hax is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Published by www.lulu.com Cover design: Huckleberry Hax and Canary Beck Cover photography: Huckleberry Hax Cover model: Ylva S. (SoulfulLife) 'Second Life' and 'Linden' are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. Neither this novel nor its author are affiliated with or sponsored by Linden Research.

For MW, who deserves more.

Prologue I am a murderer. I killed a man in cold blood. I planned it, I tracked him down and I carried it out. I pushed a pillow into his face and held it there until his legs stopped kicking. You never forget a sight like that. You never forget the indescribable intimacy of it. Once upon a time this man was a child who went to school, who watched cartoons on TV, who ate up his dinner like a good boy, who told all his friends what he wanted to be when he grew up. Once upon a time he touched a girl’s hand for the very first time and thought about what kissing her on the lips might be like. Once upon a time he was a student, an intern, a lover, a bridegroom, a new father, a colleague, a husband, a widower. Once upon a time he was a man who bought groceries at a supermarket and washed the dishes and took his car in for its annual service at a place that knew its history. He was a name, a person, a connection, a node in the vast web of human society. He solved problems. He worked hard. He supported a football team. He outlived his parents. He held his little girl’s hand on her first day at school and, for the space of a few brief years, he was the person she most wanted to marry. Once

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upon a time this man was a person full of hopes and aspirations, a collection of thoughts about the world and how it worked; a scrapbook of happy, unhappy and happenstance memories. And then I came along and wiped out every last one of them.

I killed him because he stole from me the woman I was in love with, a woman I met in Second Life, a woman who thought I was a man, a woman called Inch Sideways. I don’t know what I was thinking any more, it’s all so long ago. My mind was blurred and messed-up. When you fall that deeply for someone you think about her all the time. Your brain becomes rewired to accommodate it; it’s as if she moves in inside your head. And when someone takes her from you all those new neural connections have nothing to chew on any more, except your hatred of this thief makes an acceptable substitute somehow. The love of her and the hatred of him become a single thing, a fused entity. Thinking about killing him leaves that permanent itch that is her feeling both scratched and unscratched, like saccharine feeds your sweet taste buds but leaves them wanting more, like masturbating makes another twenty-four hours of no sex bearable but does nothing ultimately to dull that need to be touched and made love to. Plotting the murder of John-Paul Barnaby, the man I knew in Second Life as Step Stransky - or, to put it more correctly, the first man I knew in Second Life as Step Stransky - felt like an act of saccharine love. It kept me going. It helped me to cope. It made me feel like I 10

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was doing something meaningful, like holding Inch’s hand or opening the door for her or wiping away her tears. Logic, rationality and sense had nothing to do with it.

When I thought about what it would be like to kill him, I never realised quite how beautiful a thing it would be. I never realised what it would be like to watch a man going through the process of fighting for his life and losing, to feel it through my hands and the knee I’d pushed into his chest, to hear the noises he made and the rattle of the bed springs as he fought against me. I couldn’t, of course, see his face, but the emotions were as clear to read as if I’d been looking straight into his eyes. The surprise. The irritation.

The anger. The panic. The desperation. And then the fade as his oxygen-starved brain got lost, confused, pulled into its last ever dream.

And when I thought about what it would be like to kill him, I never realised just how empty I would feel once the act was done and the adrenaline had left my system. The fantasy I had of winning Inch back in Barnaby’s absence of course never came to pass. It wasn’t much later that she left Second Life. So there I was, still by myself; it had all been for nothing, except that now I didn’t even get to see her like I had before.

And also I was a murderer. I had done something which could never, ever be undone. I had taken another person’s life. I had ended someone.

I was a murderer. I had crossed that line. As time went by, the memories of Inch, the memories of the 11

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love, the memories of the hatred all started to turn into distant things I felt less and less connected to.

But the knowledge that I was a murderer remained.

It was the first thing I thought about when I woke in the morning. It was the last thing I thought of at night. It followed me around wherever I went. It stalked me. It haunted me. From time to time I would forget, and then, whenever whatever the thing was that was occupying my thoughts was done, it would be waiting for me, like the spouse who waits up and is sitting in the chair when you get in and turn the light on. Remember me?

What does one do with such dissonance? How does one live with such a thing? It was an ache. It was a pain that I couldn’t adjust to. It was a noise like something endlessly buzzing, like someone shouting non-stop in my ear. I started to fantasise about turning myself in, just turning up at a police station one day and telling them who I was. I bet they get people doing that. I bet it happens all the time. I bet they know the look of someone who’s come to confess from the moment they walk through the door. I knew that this wouldn’t make me not a murderer, but at least then the freedom I would eventually get after doing my time - after paying my price - wouldn’t feel constantly like something I wasn’t entitled to. I would get ten years, maybe. Perhaps fifteen. Perhaps twenty. It didn’t really matter to me, even if I ended up spending the rest of my life in prison, because then I would be where I was supposed to be. Then things 12

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would be right.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It would have been like holding my own head under the water.

And then important work came my way; things I wanted to do; things I had to do; things that saved people’s lives; things that brought justice to others.

And then I was able to rationalise my continued freedom by reasoning that it wasn’t really a freedom at all, that I was serving my time in my own way, that I was more use to society outside than I could possibly be in a cell, only they just didn’t know it. I was a murderer, I reasoned, but I was a reformed murderer. It wasn’t in my nature to kill. That thing that had happened wasn’t really me. It was an act of madness. It was an act of insanity. It was a blip in my life that I regretted and that I would continue paying back until my energy to do so ran out. One life taken, but a hundred, a thousand, maybe ten thousand saved. I had learned from it. I had grown from it. I was a better person in the end than I had ever been before. Society had a net gain. If you tell yourself something enough times then eventually it begins to stick. The buzzing became quieter. The pain became something I could bear. Life continued.

I got on with it.

But all that changed the day that Mica Borsec put a bullet through the head of my best friend and left him sitting in his armchair with his brain sprayed across the wall behind him.

In that moment, I knew I was destined to kill 13

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again.

By the way, my name is Thursday.

14

THE DEATH OF THURSDAY

1 His name was - had been - Christopher Peeking. To me, he was the second man I’d known as Step Stransky, Second Life detective. He’d been my business partner in metaverse investigations into virtual infidelity, back when I was unaware that he and John-Paul Barnaby were secretly sharing that account. More lately, he was the guy who’d recruited me to track down men who posted online explicit photographs and videos of the women they’d met and seduced in the virtual world. Somebody, as he said to me, had to do this. During the two years that we’d worked together in this way, we’d made accountable a total of sixteen different men for their actions, making sure they experienced at least some of the sense of violation and humiliation they had brought upon their victims.

Now one of those men had taken his revenge on us.

Still shaking, I went over to his body. I looked at his face, searched for a last thought or message frozen there. But there was nothing to see. It was blank and empty, the muscles had all relaxed. The thing that had controlled them was gone, torn into pieces, burst 17

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apart like a balloon. The face was like a piece of dead hardware. It was unplugged. It was disconnected.

They’d had to shoot him in his god-damned head.

They’d had to destroy the thing that made him him.

It wasn’t enough to take his life, they’d had to destroy his very essence, rip his brain into little pieces and piss and shit all over them. If it was possible to go one step more brutal than shooting a person dead then this had to be it. This was desecration.

“Step,” I whispered, my fingers hovering over the hole in his head, so neat and precise. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

What was it Fred had said? “One of these days, someone’s going to be waiting for you with a firearm.

I don’t think you really have any idea just how dangerous what you do is.” In fact, the night he’d said that to me in the Black Vulture bar was the very same evening I’d earlier delivered justice to Mica Borsec, Thursday style. I’d knocked on the young man’s door, my Taser at the ready, and when he’d answered (because they always answered the door to me) I’d pushed it below his rib cage and sent him to the ground via 50,000 volts. I’d handcuffed him to his radiator and relieved his laptop of the burden of its hard drive. When he was awake, I’d hooked open his dressing gown with my heel so that I could see him and unbelted my greatcoat so that he could see me. I captured his every move on my camera, as he knew I would. Like many before him, Mica simply couldn’t help himself.

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“I’m so, so sorry.”

A car went past in the street outside and sounded its horn at someone. It reminded me that there was an outside world which would be discovering this crime scene at some point in the not-too-distant future. It reminded me that I’d left the front door of Peeking’s flat open. There was no sound of activity from the apartment across the corridor, no movement above or below in the stairwell. Mica had perhaps used a silencer to mask the sound of the gunshot. Noone yet knew what had happened here.

Which meant I had some time, but not much time.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks. I took three slow, steady breaths, counting five seconds in and five seconds out. I forced my thinking brain to re-engage.

The first thing I had to do was figure out what immediate danger I was in from Mica myself.

I had quite purposefully avoided telling Stransky my address when I’d moved out from this place after a few months of cohabitation. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t subsequently have found it out somehow.

He was, after all, a detective. Would he have given Borsec my details if he’d had them? I tried to think it through. He’d phoned to warn me, that was why I was here; but it wasn’t only a warning. Borsec had instructed him to tell me to do something: “The extra set of pictures you took of Mica,” he’d said, “the unpublished ones: I want you to destroy them. Erase them completely.” If it was Borsec’s intention to come after me once he was done with Stransky, why 19

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would he have insisted on Step making that call when he could have just ordered me directly himself to delete the data?

Why kill Stransky other than to punish me?

Stransky wasn’t the one who’d assaulted him on his own doorstep. Stransky wasn’t the one who’d chained him up and taken pictures of his arousal and posted them online. Stransky wasn’t the one who’d stood over him and teased him with her just-out-ofreach proximity. I was the one he wanted. From Borsec’s point of view, Stransky was just a link, there was no point in killing him other than to hurt me; and for me to hurt over Stransky’s death then I had to be alive.

The likelihood was, I decided, that Mica Borsec was right now on his way to the Channel Tunnel.

He’d done what he’d come here to do.

The second thing I had to do was figure out if this meant my new identity was fucked. Stransky had arranged a new passport for me in the name of Rebecca Styles. Styles was pure and clean, but the moment the police had cause to take her fingerprints she’d be linked in an instant to me, to Emma Kline, the on-the-run suspect they wanted for the murder of John-Paul Barnaby. But what in this apartment would take the police to Styles in the first place? It was conceivable I’d left fingerprints here at some point in the past, but those would only point to Emma Kline. I wasn’t especially happy that she might end up wanted for two murders instead of one, 20

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but protecting her reputation wasn’t my primary concern.

Rebecca was technically Stransky’s employee, but he paid her in cash so there wouldn’t be any bank link. Had he written her name down anywhere, and if so would that, in and of itself, constitute reason toThe phone call.

Stransky had phoned me, no doubt Borsec’s gun at his head. He’d phoned a mobile registered to Styles, the very same phone which, right now, was in my pocket and broadcasting my location. The police would later enquire if any mobiles registered to people other than Step’s neighbours had been in this vicinity, and they would have me. Actually, it was worse than that: my phone had the password for his wireless in its memory, so it would have connected the moment I came in range.

That was it, then. The short life of Rebecca Styles was over. I was back on the run again. The realisation made me start to sob for a second time.

And then I badly wanted to scream. I paced up and down in front of Stransky’s corpse for a few moments taking loud, jagged breaths. Every moment that I remained there like that with the apartment door open I risked someone walking in on the scene, but my mind had emptied and rage had poured in. I clenched my fists. I cursed Borsec a hundred times over. Tears streamed down my face. In the end, I pulled a cushion from the couch onto the floor and crouched over it, and punched it repeatedly until the 21

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fabric split at the seam and the stuffing started to spill out of it.

Eventually I was calm again and I knew that I had to leave. My identity was blown, but it wasn’t blown just yet. First, someone had to discover the body.

Then the police had to get here, record the details of the crime and take initial statements. It would take them a few hours at least to start following the digital breadcrumbs that led to me. I had a minimum in all probability of at least twelve hours and potentially twice that or more. At some stage, I supposed, his girlfriend would come looking for him, wondering why he’d stopped answering his phone. There was no-one else, as far as I knew, who might have the keys to his flat. Whilst I’d been living with him, the only person I could remember ever coming to the door was the pizza delivery guy.

Before I left, I took his wallet out of his coat pocket, looking for a memento. What I wanted was a sample of his handwriting to remember him by. Stransky and I had never really been lovers, but he’d ended up becoming probably the closest friend I’ve ever had in my life. And it wasn’t like we hadn’t fucked. The last time we’d done that was on the day I’d moved out, a Sunday morning which I’d started as usual with a brisk, two mile run. Fifteen minutes. When I got back and did my stretching, I’d caught him looking at me and smiling.

“What?” I said.

“Oh nothing really,” he replied, looking away. “I 22

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was just thinking how this is the last time I’ll see you coming through the door all red-faced and sweaty like that. It just made me realise how much I’ve gotten used to having you around.”

“Red-faced?” I looked at myself in the mirror next to the coat hooks. “How red-faced?”

“That’s… somewhat tangential to the sentiment behind that comment, but ok.”

I went to shower, calling back to him, “Coming up is the last time you’ll ever see me soaping myself in your bathroom.” I left the door a good foot open. He was with me under the water in less than two minutes, and inside me in less than five. I left the shower running, but actually we did it on the bathroom floor. Water dries me. It was perhaps the sixth or seventh time we’d had sex and every time up to that point it had been nothing more than two friends casually fucking. It was definitely different that time: definitely more intimate; definitely more intense; definitely more emotional. Our foreheads touched and we kissed each other. I was just a day out of my period and decided to take the risk. “Cum inside me,” I told him. So he did.

I wanted a sample of his handwriting, but I discovered something else that made me gasp: the bottom two pictures of a photobooth strip; Stransky and his girlfriend. I stared at it for a moment, feeling confused and surprised and then incredibly sad, and then surprised that sadness was the concluding emotion, and then a strange sort of gratitude that it 23

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was. I thought back, processing this possibility. Yes; it fit. In fact, it did explain a few things. No wonder he hadn’t wanted me to meet her.

On the back of that, on a sudden impulse, I decided to take his laptop. It was in its usual place on the desk in the corner by the kitchen. We’d conferred many times in that spot, one of us on the computer and the other leaning on the back of the chair or pacing up and down behind. It surprised me that Borsec hadn’t taken it, given that he’d instructed Stransky to tell me to wipe my own files of him.

There didn’t seem to be much clarity to his objective.

I found a sample of Step’s handwriting in the kitchen, pinned to the corkboard by a brass thumbtack. It was a telephone number and a name.

At the doorway to his flat, I paused and took a last look round. I avoided looking at the corpse until the end. When my eyes finally took in its deactivated face once more, I tried to remember how Stransky had sounded when he came with me that time on the bathroom floor. If somewhere there’s a dial that shows how much you’re living at any given moment, the needle must be twitching pretty high up the scale when you orgasm with someone like that. I was glad I’d witnessed him being alive in that way.

On the walk home, I phoned Fred. I called him on my emergency mobile, an old Nokia I keep on me at all times, turned off. I charge it once a week and I run it 24

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from a pay-as-you-go SIM. “Who is this?”

“Fred, it’s Thursday.”

“I don’t recognise this number.”

“It’s a spare SIM. Fred, I’m fucked. Peeking’s been murdered.”

“What are you talking about? You and I were only talking just over an hour ago.”

“Mica Borsec did it. He was one of the guys I hit in eastern Europe. He must have tracked Stransky down. No wait.” I thought it all through aloud.

“Stransky met up with someone from Eastern Europe in London yesterday. A potential client, he said. That must have been how they set it up. There was two of them that did the shooting, Fred - Borsec and some other guy. He got his friend to pose as a client and then they followed him back to his place after.”

Fred sighed. “What have I been saying to you about this work you do, Thursday?”

“Fred, my new identity will be blown as soon as the police link me to this. They’ll connect me through his phone logs. Is there anything you can do?”

“Has the body- has Christopher been discovered yet?”

“No.” “Alright, I’ll see if I can get someone to you. Keep this phone turned on so you can be contacted.”

“You know where I live?”

“Of course I know where you live, Thursday.” The line went dead.

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Keeping the phone turned on meant the SIM would be useless to me in under twelve hours.

Mobile phone data for the period following the estimated time of Stransky’s death would show it moving in a direction away from his flat and then becoming stationary at the location of mine. It didn’t matter. I carry five more unopened SIMs in my purse for just such an eventuality.

26

2 The first thing I did when I got back was take a shower. I wanted to give myself an ordinary hour before starting upon the business of closing down this latest chapter of my life. I figured I could spare at least that. I stood beneath the scalding water for a full twenty minutes. I shampooed and conditioned as though I was going out for the evening. I shaved.

When I stepped out, I pulled on my dressing gown and towel-dried my hair, then I shovelled coffee into the basket of my moka pot and put the thing on the stove to brew. I dried my hair properly whilst I waited for it.

I got dressed. I wore my leather pants and a white linen shirt. I needed to feel powerful. I smoked a cigarette in silence at my kitchen table as I drank my first cup of coffee. Slowly, I reintroduced myself to this new reality. I was on the run again. I no longer had a home. My best friend - my only friend - was dead. Everything which had been over the last two years was over.

I told myself not to panic. I’d been thinking of moving on anyway. I’d told Fred just a couple of hours earlier that I was ready to accept his offer of a 27

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new life in the States. I’d resisted it until now because it felt too much like handing over control of my life, but the truth was I liked the work I did for him. It saved lives. It made me feel good. So I’d be starting out on this new path more quickly than I’d expected, then: it didn’t matter. I was used now to walking out on everything. This occasion, in fact, was the most time I’d ever had to do it in. I’d actually have time to pack.

And the sooner we got started the better. The sooner I was sorted out and settled, the sooner I’d be able to track down Mica Borsec and put a bullet in his head. I was going to do that. I was going to kill him.

I got up and went into my bedroom. I pulled my rucksack down from the top of my wardrobe.

An hour later, I was done. I hauled my full backpack into the hallway and, just at that moment, Fred rang me back. “Ten to fifteen minutes, Thursday,” he told me. “Make sure you’re ready.” Enough time for another cigarette and the last of the cold coffee. I went back into the kitchen. I actually felt calm.

I went over the things yet to do in my head. If it was possible, I’d try to get to a bank first thing in the morning and take out everything except enough to cover a month’s worth of direct debits. I had about twelve hundred pounds on me in cash - my ‘contingency grand’ I kept quite literally in a box under my bed plus two hundred I’d taken out earlier 28

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in the week for a grocery spend I hadn’t gotten around to. I supposed that Fred would probably be able to look after my immediate needs in the short term, but as far as I was concerned the more independence I could create for myself from the start the better.

I looked around the kitchen. This was the last time I would see it. It wasn’t much, but I’d personalised it in a few little ways during the time of my occupancy.

I apologised to the spider plant for its upcoming abandonment. I remembered a photo I’d tucked into the corner of my cork board and retrieved it. On the grounds that this place would likely become a source of new information for whatever profile the police had created on me, I’d removed as many personal items as possible and they were currently occupying a carrier bag stuffed into the bottom of my rucksack. I would far rather have taken with me another sweater; less than ten per cent of that stuff was actually important to me to the extent that I didn’t want to part with it.

There was a quiet knock at the door. Time to go. I crushed out the cigarette. I went to the door and pulled it open whilst I took hold of my rucksack and started to heave it onto my back. I didn’t want this guy to invite himself in and spin this whole thing out any longer than was absolutely necessary. I wanted to leave and get it over with.

“Hello Thursday,” he said.

I looked round, recognising the voice from somewhere. Mica Borsec 29

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entered my hallway, pushed a Taser beneath my ribcage and sent 50,000 volts into me.

I don’t know how long exactly I was out for. I think it was probably only two or three minutes. He didn’t waste any time. When I came round I found myself bound to a chair by cable ties at my wrists and ankles.

It was a foldable metal deck chair: since I didn’t own any chairs with armrests, Mica had come prepared with his own furniture. That did not bode well.

I was still in my flat. I’d been taken to the bedroom. The bed had been upturned and leaned against the bathroom-side wall. There were two men in the room with me. One was setting up a video camera where the head of the bed had been. The other was pulling tight the last of the ties around my left ankle. They both now wore balaclavas.

“Which one of you dickheads is Mica?” My mouth was dry and my voice sticky. The man doing the cable ties stood. Without hesitation, he hit me hard across the cheek. The shock of the blow stunned me.

It felt like my head was cracked open on that side.

The whole world seemed to jolt to the left and a needle pain shot into my eye. I gasped. I had never been hit like that before. I felt my skin split above the cheekbone. I felt the blood start to run and the whole of my cheek go burning hot.

I would have expected Mica to make some sort of speech once he knew he had my attention - he struck 30

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me as that type - but neither of them said a word. The man who hit me unzipped what sounded like a bag just out of sight to my left. When I tried to turn my head in that direction I felt spikes like flashes of electricity surge into my eye and across my shoulder.

I gasped loudly. The camera guy started setting up a laptop. He connected it to my own wireless network with zero effort because I’m one of those idiots who keeps the card with the password on it in that slot at the back of the hub. I expect I would probably have given it to him anyway if he’d asked me for it, but the interaction would have at least bought me a few extra seconds. It was suddenly very clear that this was what I had to do now: play for as much time as I possibly could. These men were here to kill me.

He logged in to something; I couldn’t see what.

The screen divided into three areas: two square boxes side-by-side and a thin, rectangular bar across the bottom of the screen. Straight away, text started scrolling up inside the right hand box. I thought it might be code at first, but it was too small to see for certain. Then I noticed that some of the lines of text were different colours. Then I noticed different fonts and emoticons and capital letters and multiple exclamation marks, and I realised he had just entered a chat room.

He clicked somewhere and a tiny red light blinked on beside the lens of the video camera. In the left hand square on the screen, I saw the image from the camera appear. I saw myself.

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A video chat room, then. My appearance on the screen appeared to provoke a frenzy of comments and sound effects and animations. They practically flew up the right-hand side of the screen. The sound of applause burst out of the laptop’s tiny speaker over and over again. These assholes had been waiting for me. This was a pre-arranged event.

I was about to be executed live on the Internet.

Satisfied with the picture, the cameraman brought the laptop over to my desk and sat in my office chair.

Now I could see the screen more clearly. He sat back to let me look at the comments. trash the bitch cmon ABOUT FUCKIN TIME she’s fucking fit there she is! she doesnt know yet whats gonna go HAHAHA youre going to DIE bitch!!! lookat her face LMFAO she’s reading us now wave hello to the slut NOT SUCH A SUPERHERO NOW, HUH? thats right bitch, we’re going to watch you get your throat slit fucking hell is this for real is this really her?

OMFG Ive waited for this for so long yes yes yes bleed her like a stuck pig look how she’s breathing so hard omg I tried to look away but I couldn’t. They could see 32

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everything. They could see right into me. My breathing became faster still. I tried to clear my mind but I couldn’t focus on anything other than the endless stream of vitriol. They all wanted me dead.

They all wanted me dead and they all wanted to watch it happen. she is gonna actually shit herself LOL THIS IS MAKIN ME SO HARD No more fucking Thursday you bithch jesus she’s so beautiful with that sweat on makes me want to cry I was sweating so hard my shirt was drenched through. The guy who hit me took a long knife out of his bag. He pulled my chin up and ran the blunt edge of it slowly along my neck. I managed to keep control of my bowels, but my bladder emptied itself.

Then, in a sudden movement, he dropped the knife. He wound a cord twice round my neck instead, and pulled back on it hard. He caught me just after an inhale, but it hardly made a difference; I was breathing so hard and fast that even a second’s loss of air was traumatic. My muscles tightened and the whole chair creaked as my joints fought desperately against their bonds. I felt the metal arm rests actually start to bend, but none of this registered properly as my mind emptied of all rational thought.

And then my bowels did open.

I wish I could say that in that moment I thought 33

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about doing to John-Paul Barnaby exactly what was being done to me, but the truth is I wasn’t capable of thought at that particular moment.

Everything started to turn white. I both knew and didn’t know that it was over. I had died.

But then, suddenly, the pressure was released. The chord went slack and I actually did get to take that breath my body had been fighting for, only it wasn’t enough and I had to take another and another, breathing faster than I ever had before, shaking and trembling and coughing, and still I couldn’t keep up with the oxygen demand of my racing heart. It felt like my chest would explode.

It was probably four or five minutes before I was able to start thinking again. My eyes were open the whole time but what I could see was meaningless to my mind. As I took in my surroundings again I saw that nothing had changed. I could still hear the man behind me and ‘cameraman’ was still sitting in my office chair and monitoring the laptop. They had taken me right to the edge just to see what me dying in panic looked like. And now I thought about JohnPaul. Now I remembered how his body had jerked and bucked, and how incredibly beautiful it had all seemed to me at the time to see such raw emotion sparking across his entire body like electricity. My eyes welled up as I absorbed what that had felt like for him and I hated myself more in that moment for having done it than I had ever hated myself for the act before. But, more than anything, I hated myself for 34

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seeing my own loss of control through the eyes of these distant bastards, and understanding how it was probably the most amazing thing any of them had ever witnessed.

‘Cameraman’ got up. He lifted the mirrored door of my wardrobe off its hinges and walked it carefully across the room. He leaned it facing me against the wall behind the camera. They wanted me to see myself.

The man behind me picked up the knife he’d played with earlier and I realised that this, now, really was the end, that he was going to hold my head back and cut my throat exactly how the chat room had wanted him to. Then they’d all watch me watching my blood spilling from my body in the reflection of the mirror. My body went at once cold and weak.

The man took a fistful of my hair and pulled my head backwards in a jerk.

I couldn’t see the laptop screen, but I could hear it.

I could hear the countless audio gestures that signified their pathetic anticipation: the cheering sound effects, the explosion sound effects, the trumpet fanfares, the drum rolls, the pig squealing noise, the fake fart sounds, the twanging ruler, the cockadoodledoo, the death bell, the car backfiring, the wolf howling, Scoobie Doo saying ‘Scoobie-doobiedooo’. This was to be the soundtrack to my death.

These sick fucks were going to jeer me out, probably with their hands on their cocks ready for the moment the cut actually happened. My fists clenched. I felt 35

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the slight kink in the armrest from where I’d bent it earlier. And I realised suddenly that I’d been using all the wrong muscles.

Without waiting for another moment to pass, I screamed and I clenched everything as though I was fighting for air once again, only this time I directed all the power into standing. I gave it every fucking ounce of energy that I had, and I found that level of power that people always say they never knew existed. Forced against its angles, the deck chair cracked open into a flat object and both of the armrests sheared away at their joins. My feet remained connected by the front bar and I fell forward, but my hands and arms were free enough to break the fall and I twisted onto my back. Each hand took hold of the other’s armrest and pulled them free from their ties, and I thrust them, jagged ends upwards into the body of the man with the knife as he descended upon me to finish his job. I think they only penetrated a half centimetre or so, but the shock was enough that he let go of his blade. And then it was my blade. And then it was my blade buried in his throat. The spray of blood glanced across my cheek. I pushed him to once side as he clutched at his throat and gurgled.

All of this took about five seconds to happen.

‘Cameraman’ stood in alarm. He went for the bag by the door. I got to my feet - which were still tied to the chair - and jumped two thirds of the distance, then threw myself across the remainder onto him. We 36

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clattered to the floor together. He twisted round to face me and I hit the palm of my hand into his nose with all the strength I could muster, and felt something break loose and drive upwards. He stopped moving instantly.

I crawled back to the first man and pulled the balaclava from his head. Mica Borsec looked at me with vague, confused eyes. His slippery fingers were trying to squeeze shut his wound against the blade. I pushed the hand away and gripped the hilt of the knife, and I kissed him long on the lips as I opened his throat all the rest of the way and let the remainder of his blood spill over us.

When he was dead, I pulled the knife out and used it to cut the ties around my ankles.

I picked up the video camera and pointed it in turn at each of the two men.

On the laptop screen, viewers were exiting the chatroom rapidly. I sat down in my office chair, my hands shaking wildly, and typed a message for those who remained.

My name is Thursday.

This is my laptop now.

You’d better believe that I am coming for each and every one of you.

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About twenty minutes later, Fred’s contact finally showed up. He was tall and dark haired, he held himself confidently and without trying. He looked like he could handle himself; of course he did. He was exactly what I could have done with half an hour earlier.

“You’re late,” I told him at the door. I was changed. I’d spent quarter of an hour under the shower, looking at the tiles and forcing all other thinking from my mind. I’d put on jeans, a white tshirt and the sweater my friend Theo had bought for me on the Isle of Wight. My hair was still wet when I went to answer the door.

In response to my statement, the man pulled suddenly from behind his back a brown paper bag.

The movement made me jump back in alarm.

“Bagels!” he said, and pushed the bag even closer to me. “Never make a new acquaintance without food that’s what my mother always said.”

“You stopped off,” I said breathlessly, “for bagels?”

He nodded. “Fred said you’d had a bad evening.”

Then he appeared to notice the bruise spreading across my cheek. “Ouch!”

“You should see the other guys,” I said dryly. It seemed to me suddenly that this was possibly the funniest thing I’d ever said and I chuckled at all the IFs that had to be met for the joke to be understood completely. This man wouldn’t get it yet: he’d still be seeing it as a cultural cliché I’d resorted to in the 38

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absence of anything original to say; his polite grin right now was nothing more than an acknowledgement that he understood that I thought I’d been funny, a real life equivalent of the word ‘heh’ in Second Life, a formal recognition - and absolutely nothing more - that an attempt at humour had been made. No: he’d have to see the two corpses in my bedroom before he could realise just how clever I had been. My chuckle turned into a giggle. I imagined showing him into the bedroom and watching his face as he took in the two bodies, still leaking blood everywhere in exactly the spots where they’d fallen; absorbing the situation; turning everything over quietly in his mind. I imagined him roaring suddenly with laughter as he linked what was in front of him to my earlier comment. My giggle turned into a loud laugh. That’s right: he’d see the two dead bodies and the first thing he’d do was see the funny side of it. It would be impolite to not acknowledge my earlier witticism once all had become clear - and if this was a guy who was prepared to travel God knew how far in the middle of the night just to pick up bagels on the basis of his mother’s social instruction, then it was a fair bet that politeness was important to him. I started to shriek with laughter. He stood there all concerned, still holding his bag of fucking bagels and looking nervously up and down the corridor. It was hilarious. I had to hold my sides. The shrieks turned into sobs. He stepped forward into the hall and put his arms around me. He closed the door quietly 39

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behind us and rocked me gently left and right as I cried and cried and cried into his jacket.

40

3 “Fuck,” he said when he stepped out of my bedroom a few minutes later.

“What should we do?” I asked quietly.

“Is there any point in doing anything?” he replied.

“We know the police are going to end up here anyway.”

Out in the hallway, everything looked normal. The kitchen looked normal. The bathroom looked normal.

A single shut door divided the normal world from the domain of the unthinkable.

“They tried to kill me live on the internet,” I stated.

It was about the fourth time I’d told him this.

“I really don’t know what to say to that,” he replied.

“It was like I was... a game show contestant.”

“Not any game show that I’ve ever seen.” He led me through to the kitchen. He banged empty into the bin the moka pot basket and refilled it, then put the pot on the hob. “People are still coming in and out of that chat room, by the way.”

I lit a cigarette. I stared at its tip for a moment, marvelling at how steady it was. “We should try to get some information out of them before the 41

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opportunity’s gone. Is there some way in which we can log in and appear to be a visitor just like them?”

He picked the cigarette from between my fingers and took a long drag himself, wagging his other finger at me when I offered him one from the pack.

He returned it to me whilst he exhaled. “They all seem to have usernames. So there must be a signup process somewhere. But the site appears to be isolated - it’s not part of some bigger webcam outfit.

It looks like they’ve installed on some random server an off-the-shelf chat room and linked it at the last minute to a URL they pre-distributed. But where did people register? There appear to have been far too many of them for it to have been a manual process.”

“Why did they need them to register in the first place?” I asked.

“Really?” he replied. “You haven’t worked that out yet?”

“But what’s the point? It’s not like they were…”

My voice trailed off. “Selling tickets,” I said finally.

“They were selling tickets, weren’t they?”

He nodded. “That would be my guess.”

“Fuck.”

“Well look,” he said, “one way of looking at it is you must have been amazingly good at doing whatever it was that pissed them off.”

“They’re women haters,” I told him. “They get off on the humiliation and public degradation of women.

Most of them I suppose are passive consumers that play by the rules out in public but swap dirty stories 42

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when they think they’re amongst friends. But some of them are producers. They actively seek out women to seduce and exploit, and put the whole thing on the internet when they’re done with them. Step and me went after them. When we took any one of them down we made sure everyone in their pathetic little community knew all about it.”

“You mean revenge porn,” the man said. I sighed.

“It’s not a revenge against one specific person for one specific act. These guys just hate all women.

They don’t care who they degrade, though the more powerful, the more threatening, the more out-of-theirleague they consider them to be then the more they want to destroy her - and I mean literally destroy her.

Nothing would have given them more pleasure to have seen me bleed to death tonight.” A thought occurred to me. “If they were selling tickets then there must be bank card details somewhere for all of them.”

He blew out air. “Somewhere, I guess. It would still help if we knew where and how registration happened.”

“Are you sure we can’t fake a guest identity somehow? Even for a few minutes?”

“You mean enter text from the host account and pretend it’s coming from another guest?” I nodded.

“Well I don’t know.” He looked at his watch. It was getting close to five in the morning. “Whatever we do, we should do it quickly. Perhaps we should should just take the laptop and go.”

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I shook my head. “Once we’re out of range of my wireless signal we’ll get logged off whatever server they’re using. We don’t have the password to get back on and we don’t have time to crack the password before the last of these shits leaves chat.

Get the laptop and bring it here. I’m not going back into that room.”

He nodded and stood up. He paused. “My name’s Jesse, by the way. I’m really sorry about getting here so late.”

I wasn’t in the mood to satisfy his need to be forgiven. “Go and get the laptop, Jesse.”

I heard the bedroom door open. It made me feel sick to think of the air in that room mixing with the air outside it. I badly wanted to leave, but I wasn’t going to pass up on this opportunity. It had to be done. I knew that the moment I stepped outside of the flat then all the evil in that room would immediately spread in my mind to the whole of the apartment and I’d be unable to enter it ever again. It had to be done now. My ability to function depended on maintaining an artificial bubble of normality in the kitchen and bathroom and hall. I had to think of my bedroom as though it was hundreds of miles away. It was a tremendous act of willpower.

Jesse came back into the kitchen and shut the door behind him. He pulled the other chair round so he could sit next to me. He set the laptop, open, on the table. There were nine people left in the room.

Scrolling up through the previous comments, it 44

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looked like they had all entered within the last twenty minutes.

The video window still showed a picture of a now empty spot in front of my bedroom door. “Jesus,” I said, my stomach twisting, even though nothing else could actually be seen from this angle. “Couldn’t you have turned off the camera?”

“The live feed’s probably the main thing that’s keeping these guys here,” he replied.

“They’ll have seen you entering and exiting.”

“That’s why God gave me a hoodie.”

I went into settings and started looking through the various options. “Can you see where the external URL is indicated?”

“Why don’t we just make out we’re the men?” he asked. “The men in that room, I mean.”

I said to him, “They’re not men. But let’s leave that conversation for another time. If we can’t figure out a way of logging in as audience within ten minutes then we’ll give that idea a go.”

“What I mean is,” he continued, “there might be some advantages to it. You know what happened and they don’t. That will authenticate you. They’ll be less likely to question any gaps in your knowledge elsewhere.”

“Ok fine.” He had a point. I didn’t especially like what this was likely to require of me, though. I pulled the laptop closer to me and started typing into the long thin box across the bottom of the screen.

45

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OWNER: You guys are still here? no_more_thursday: I got held up I’m so fuckin pissed I missed it. no_more_thursday: I was hoping I might be able to get a look at the body.

OWNER: We just got back from getting rid of it.

OWNER: She was pretty messy.

BigBob: you got nothing? not even some photos? nicknick: you did do it then?

OWNER: We’ll post a video BigBob. Yes nicknick, we did. no_more_thursday: How did you do her?

KillBitchez: I was fucking here at the original time.

OWNER: We slit her throat, nmt.

OWNER: Sorry you missed the show, killbitch.

KillBitchez: I want a fucking refund.

OWNER: No refunds. nicknick: omfg how I wish I could have seen that!

OWNER: Wait for the video and you will.

KillBitchez: I paid $1000 to watch that bitch die LIVE. KillBitchez: I’d have seen it if you’d kept to the original time.

OWNER: She wasn’t here when we got here… what do you expect us to do?

KillBitchez: I expect you to give me my money back.

OWNER: No refunds.

KillBitchez: This is a fucking outrage.

OWNER: Where did you register, kb?

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KillBitchez: What do you mean?

OWNER: Where did you pay? For the show?

OWNER: What URL did you go to?

KillBitchez: I paid on the system. Where do you think I went?

OWNER: Where exactly in the system?

KillBitchez: What are you talking about?

KillBitchez: I paid in the system like everyone else.

I lit another cigarette. “What’s he talking about?

What does he mean by ‘the system’?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse replied.

I thought.

“Your hypothesis was that they registered on some one-off website somewhere - they go there, create a login and pay their fee; the system records their login details and sends it forward to the temporary event site, which is what we’re on now.

Since the payment details are taken elsewhere and only the logins are received, that means anyone coming across the event site can’t get access to any personal details because they’re not held here. Is that right?”

“That’s about it, I guess.”

“But how did they come across the registration site in the first place?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps it got linked to in some forum?”

“But that doesn’t follow. The reason for hosting the event site someplace random is to protect the data held at the registration site - according to your logic.

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But if you’ve linked to the registration site in a public forum then you’ve already exposed it fatally. Those forums are watched all the time. Why go to so much trouble in one respect to protect data and be so slack in another? I think it’s something else. I think the registration site is something much bigger and more permanent than just a temporary registration site, and I think one of the rules of its membership is you never link to it from anywhere under any circumstances.”

“Something on the dark web.”

I nodded. “We have to get more details about it.”

He glanced at his watch. He was starting to get fidgety about the time. “He’s not going to just tell you.”

“I know. Dammit. Maybe one of these other assholes?”

I looked back at the screen. no_more_thursday: If you’re gonna refund this loser then I want my money back too.

KillBitchez: Excuse me? What makes you think I give a shit what you want, nmt?

KillBitchez: And fuck you, by the way.

KillBitchez: You think I have the free time to just hang around all night waiting for you to come on air?

KillBitchez: If you say you’re going to do it at twelve then fucking do it at twelve.

KillBitchez: Otherwise don’t say you’re going to do it at twelve.

48

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“How would anyone ever find their way onto this hidden site?” Jesse asked me.

“I suppose once you’re a member you get given the details on how to find it.”

“So how do you become a member?”

“Isn’t it like any other fraternity shit? You come across someone on a website with the right sort of views, you strike up a conversation in IMs or emails, you sound them out over time; when you think you have someone worthwhile you invite them along to a meeting, and so on.”

“The meeting would be on the hidden website?”

“How should I know? It would be safer if it wasn’t. Their meetings could be anywhere. The hidden site might just be the hub where notices get posted and payments made.”

KillBitchez: Where did Owner go?

OWNER: Still here.

KillBitchez: So did you get me my money back yet?

OWNER: Even if I wanted to refund you, it’s against the rules.

OWNER: You know that as well as I do.

KillBitchez: You are talking bullshit, my friend.

KillBitchez: If you don’t advertise the event accurately in the first place then there are no fuckin rules to hide behind.

OWNER: What I mean is I can’t authorise anything.

KillBitchez: Listen to me, dumbass.

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KillBitchez: You go to the purser and you tell him you fucked up. And he then refunds me my money.

BigBob: Jesus. Sounds like you really need that money, KB. KillBitchez: Actually, BigDick, it’s the principle of the thing.

KillBitchez: I’d rather give my grand to some orphan fund than have it fill the pockets of some asshole in return for absolutely nothing. no_more_thursday: The money was payment for doing her, kb. no_more_thursday: Seeing it happen live was an added bonus.

KillBitchez: Once again, assholes, I refer you to the wording on the original post.

KillBitchez: This wasn’t some sort of kickstarter campaign.

OWNER: It’s not like it’s any sort of legally binding contract, either.

KillBitchez: Who the fuck are you anyway?

KillBitchez: Because you’re really starting to piss me off.

KillBitchez: What’s your Mars username?

“Good!” said Jesse. Now we knew the name of ‘the system,’ or a part of it, at least. He rubbed my back.

It made me flinch.

“Don’t do that,” I told him. “Don’t touch me.”

The bubble wobbled for a moment. I took a breath.

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nicknick: its either Mica or his initiate KillBitchez: An initiate? Are you fucking kidding me?

KillBitchez: This job was trusted to a non-member?

OWNER: Mica is my sponsor.

OWNER: I’ve worked with him for years.

KillBitchez: I don’t care if you’ve fucked him up the ass.

KillBitchez: Well I guess that at least explains how clueless you are.

OWNER: When do I get my membership?

KillBitchez: What do I care?

KillBitchez: Take it up with Mica.

OWNER: He’s gone out.

KillBitchez: So take it up with him when he gets back.

OWNER: He said he’d organise it for me tonight as soon as the job was done.

KillBitchez: It doesn’t work like that, dumbass.

Mica should have told you that.

KillBitchez: You go to a sub-meeting first. You have to be approved by a vote.

OWNER: Wait a minute.

I typed furiously to get what I wanted to say in before he had a chance to comment further.

OWNER: I just helped Mica cut the throat live on the internet of someone you all paid thousands of dollars to see killed…

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OWNER: ...and you’re telling me that’s not enough to get me approved?

KillBitchez: On the contrary, it will almost certainly be enough to get you approved.

KillBitchez: Just not tonight.

OWNER: So when’s the next sub-meeting?

KillBitchez: I don’t know. They happen every month.

OWNER: Every MONTH?!

KillBitchez: I don’t make the rules.

OWNER: Now it’s you that’s talking bullshit.

OWNER: What the fuck is anyone going to be able to tell about me at a sub-meeting that wasn’t selfevident from what I already did tonight?

OWNER: You guys are just stringing me along.

KillBitchez: Buddy, you’re getting worked up over a point of policy.

KillBitchez: Have this conversation with Mica when he gets back from wherever the fuck it is he’s gone.

“You realise,” said Jesse, “that it’s probably already all over the hidden site by now that the operation was a failure. It’s only a matter of time before word makes it back into this chat room. It’ll only take one person to log in here or one of these guys already in the chat room to log in there.”

“Thank you for pointing out the blindingly obvious,” I told him. “I’m well aware there’s not much time. And thanks for referring to me not dying 52

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as ‘a failure’.”

OWNER: Wait wait.

OWNER: I get it. I see what this is about.

OWNER: This is a setup, right?

KillBitchez: What are you talking about?

OWNER: That’s why you won’t give me the details.

OWNER: You want me to take the fall for this.

KillBitchez: I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

OWNER: Sure.

OWNER: We get rid of the body and then Mica fucks off and tells me to clean up this place.

OWNER: I guess he’s tipping off the police right now.

OWNER: I’m such a fucking idiot.

KillBitchez: No-one’s tipping off the police about anything.

OWNER: That’s why he insisted we wear the same clothes.

OWNER: Oh fucking hell of course.

OWNER: He told me to stay out of shot.

OWNER: One person on the video - one person here for the police to find.

OWNER You bastards.

KillBitchez: Will someone back me up here for fuck’s sake? nicknick: kb’s right BigBob: Calm down dude 53

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no_more_thursday: Well you never know he might be onto something. no_more_thursday: I mean, I don’t know Mica KillBitchez: He is not fucking onto something.

OWNER: I know what he’s doing - of course.

OWNER: He’s establishing his alibi.

OWNER: Cleaning himself up so there’s not one scrap of that bitch’s DNA on him.

OWNER: Won’t he be surprised when the cops walk in on him.

KillBitchez: Enough of this!

OWNER: After all I did for that fuck over the years he goes and does this to me.

OWNER: I will take that fucking bastard down.

KillBitchez: Jesus H Christ will you calm down?

KillBitchez: If I gave you the Mars login page it’d do you no good. Don’t you understand?

KillBitchez: You have to chose your ID at the submeeting once the administrator has approved you.

KillBitchez: You can’t just sign up like you’re creating a fucking Facebook profile.

“Oh my God,” breathed Jesse, “I think he might just be about to give it to you.”

“Get ready to call Fred,” I told him. “I want that site broken before they realise what’s happened.”

OWNER: No. OWNER: You don’t want me to have that information because you don’t want me to give it to 54

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the police when they pick me up.

OWNER: But I can still make life hard for you if I phone them before Mica does.

A private message window appeared suddenly on the screen KillBitchez: If I give you the address of the login screen will that shut you up?

KillBitchez: You’re not going to be able to sign in until they’ve set you up an ID, but at least you’ll see the entrance.

OWNER: How will I know it’s not just some fake login page?

KillBitchez: This isn’t some website you can get to from Google.

KillBitchez: You have to use a specific proxy.

KillBitchez: The Mars gateway will only accept traffic from that IP. KillBitchez: I’ll paste you the proxy login and password, and the URL for the gateway.

KillBitchez: That’s it, though. That’s the extent of what I can do.

KillBitchez: No-one can sort you out an account there accept the administrator.

KillBitchez: I’m telling you, that’s ALL I can do and it’s more than I should be doing.

I waited for a full thirty seconds.

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OWNER: Ok fine.

The information appeared in the message box. Jesse leaned forward and photographed the screen with his smartphone. Then he stood and put the phone to his ear and said, “Call Fred.”

On the laptop, the conversation moved back into main chat.

KillBitchez: I just had a private conversation with our friend.

KillBitchez: I believe we’re good now.

KillBitchez: Am I right?

OWNER: I still don’t appreciate having to wait.

KillBitchez: But you don’t think anyone here is trying to rat on you, right?

OWNER: No. nicknick: well thank fuck for that OWNER: I want to get out of here, though.

KillBitchez: Buddy, I don’t rightly understand what you’re still doing there in the first place.

OWNER: Right.

OWNER: Ok, then I’m shutting down this room.

KillBitchez: Please do so, before any other assholes like me come along and light your fuse again.

I noticed someone new enter the chat room.

Open_Wide: WTF are you idiots still doing here?

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I ejected them all from the room and shut the thing down before that conversation could go any further.

Just before it all disappeared, I thought a saw a small movement in the video window.

Jesse finished his conversation and hung up. “He’s on it. He wants a full debrief when we get back to my place. He wants us to move right now.”

“You know that thing where you punch a guy’s nose bone into his brain?” I said to him. “That’s lethal, right?”

“There’s no such move,” he replied. “For one thing the nose bone is too soft; for another, it’s not long enough to-” At exactly that moment the kitchen door burst open. Cameraman stood on the other side of the threshold, raising a gun, but the door bounced back off the table and the rebound distracted him. I felt everything drain out of me and I collapsed back against the sink. But Jesse hardly blinked. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand - a coffee mug - and threw it. Instinctively, cameraman put his hands up in front of his face. Jesse stepped forward. He grabbed the man’s raised elbow and pushed him off balance, back into the hall and out of my sight. I heard a brief struggle and then a sound like knuckles cracking. A few seconds passed and then Jesse came back into the room.

“A broken neck, on the other hand,” he said, “now that’s lethal.”

I stared up at him. He held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “It’s ok. It’s safe.” He pulled me back 57

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up to my feet. I threw up over his shirt.

I don’t remember much about the walk to his car. He told me he was parked five minutes away, but it seemed like we were walking forever. I recall only darkness and every car that passed us was a dazzling light that seemed to pierce my head. I couldn’t talk any more. That last trauma had broken the thin shell I’d managed to erect temporarily around everything that had happened.

“I’m sorry,” I said weakly when he opened the passenger door and eased me into the seat.

“Listen to me: you’re safe now. You’re safe.” He shut the door and walked around to the driver’s side, and got in beside me. He unscrewed a bottle of water and gave it to me. “Drink.” I took a sip. “More.” I sipped again. “More.” When I’d drunk a third of the bottle he took it from me and put my seatbelt on.

“You need to shut down now.”

“I’m cold.”

He reached onto the back seat and pulled a blanket through, and wrapped it around me. “Try to get some sleep. It’s an hour’s drive.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

58

4 I awoke in a double bed, light streaming through a large window. I sat up, blinking. It was a highceilinged room. The walls were a slightly dirty beige, an aged emulsion over woodchip. The cream carpet looked similarly worn, but reasonably clean. The furnishings were a mishmash of flatpacked bits and pieces, a tour of the last thirty years in economy bedroom fittings. It all reminded me instantly of my student digs when I was at university.

Jesse was sitting at a desk on the other side of the room, typing. He stopped and turned around when he heard me move.

He smiled. “Good morning!”

My head was pounding. “What time is it?” I asked. My mouth was dry and sticky.

He looked at his watch. “Nearly ten thirty, which means you’ve been asleep in that bed for almost twenty-seven hours.”

“I slept a whole day?”

“Not fitfully.” He got up and came over, and sat on the side of the bed. “How do you feel?”

“My head is killing me.”

He produced another bottle of water. “Drink some 59

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of this,” he told me. “And by ‘some’ I mean ‘lots’.

You’re seriously dehydrated.”

I took the bottle and swigged at it, tipping my head back. Immediately, I winced in pain. “My neck,” I said. I touched the skin there tenderly.

“It’s looked better.” He opened a draw in the bedside cabinet and pulled out a small mirror. I took it. My neck was a mass of purple blotches. “And it’ll look better again.”

“I’m going to need a scarf.” I made a brief appraisal of my hair. “And a shower.” I gave the mirror back. “Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For saving my life.”

He smiled, but only a little. “It’s nice of you to say that. I only wish Fred saw it that way too.”

“Oh?” He nodded back toward the laptop he’d been typing on. “My response to a formal reprimand.”

“Why?” “First of all, my unnecessary delay in getting to you. Second, my failure to check that that guy was actually dead.”

“Ah.” He shrugged. “It’s no less than I deserve.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. We got away. Did they manage to get anything from that website?”

“They sure did. Credit card details of over a hundred paid-up members, including the ring administrators. Arrests have been made in twelve 60

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countries. It’s all over the news this morning.”

“Good.”

“You did a great job in that chat room.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t think for a moment that you’d actually get anything out of those guys. I don’t know how you managed to keep it together like that and still think so clearly.”

“Well it was either that or go insane.” I told him.

“Exactly how much of it is in the news?”

“So far it’s just about the arrests. But you can tell they know this is something big, just from the billing.

Fred says most of the details are likely to come out.

You can’t have that many law enforcement officers involved in that many countries and maintain control over official information.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I expect least one of those hundred plus members made a recording of the whole thing.”

He paused a moment, then nodded. “Yeah.”

“And then the link will be made to the three mysterious Medway murders.”

“Oh yes, they’re in the news too.”

“And?” “And at the moment it’s just three bodies discovered at two locations in Chatham and Rochester. The events are being treated as connected.

No names. Certainly no link made yet to Emma Kline.”

“Well it won’t take long for that to happen.” He 61

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had just communicated to me that he knew all about my own criminal history. I decided to leave that elephant alone for the time being.

“I hope you realise,” he said, “that this is going to turn you into some sort of celebrity once all those dots get joined up.”

“Well I’ve always wanted to be famous in a vague and undefinable manner.”

“You should probably think about changing your look.”

I sighed. “I’m starting to lose track of the hair colourings I’ve already been through.”

“I think you should go ultra-short.

Maybe something vivid.”

“I might just do that,” I said. “Short, I mean. But I might try out ginger. My skin’s just pale enough for that to work.”

“Just,” he said.

“I’ll have to keep recolouring if I cut it very short, though.” I grimaced.

“Whatever you decide,” he told me, “you’ll need to do it before you leave this room.”

“What?” I asked. “Why?” “The people I share with have no idea about my intelligence role.”

“You share this place?”

He nodded. “This is my room.”

“So where have you been sleeping the last two nights?”

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bed. A green sleeping bag was rolled out on the carpet.

“Oh.” “It does wonders for your back.”

“Are you trying to recommend it to me?”

He grinned. “Not really. I just don’t want you feeling bad about it.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t,” I told him. “There has to be some payback for those bagels.”

He chuckled and looked back at his laptop again.

“I vastly prefer your system of consequences.”

I was wearing a white t-shirt and black shorts. I pushed the duvet off and got up to look out of the window beside the bed. Through a worn net curtain I looked out on a residential street of terraced houses.

“Where are we?”

“Vauxhall.”

“Isn’t that where-” “Yes.” “Is that why you’re here?”

“Not really. It’s more of a hiding in plain sight sort of thing. In any case, it’s not really MI6 you and I have to worry about.” He put emphasis on the six.

“And you live here with how many other people?”

“Four.”

“What do they think you do?”

“Well it’s not so much a case of what they think I do as what I do do. I run a small web-design business.”

“A spy on the side.”

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“Something like that. I don’t have very many clients.”

“Just enough to keep up the rent on this room.”

“Exactly.”

There were two doors in the wall opposite the window, one of them slightly ajar. I saw a small strip of blue linoleum. An en suite bathroom. At least I’d be able to pee without having to leave the room.

“What do the others in the house do?”

“Well we have Jason downstairs. He works in insurance by day and is the singer in a pub band several evenings a week. Jade is also downstairs: she’s an art student at UCL. Her rent’s paid by her parents, but she works in a bar most weekends.

Chloe to our right works in an estate agency and spends much of her free time blogging about architecture. Harmony outside and to the left is the daughter of the guy who owns the place. She works in a charity shop in Lambeth. And I strongly suspect that the four of us are effectively paying her rent.”

“That’s a very succinct summary,” I said. “It sounds like one you’ve had to rattle off several times before.”

“A few,” he admitted. “I have endlessly curious employers.”

“And how are you going to pass me off to these people?”

“I’ve already told them you’re my cousin.”

“Your cousin?”

“Yes.” 64

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“And your cousin has spent the last 24 hours in your bedroom because…?”

“Because she’s ill,” he said. “My uncle phoned a couple of nights ago and asked me if I’d go pick her up and bring her back to the house so I could keep an eye on her. On you.”

“What a good nephew you must be.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘favourite’.”

“And what am ill with?”

“Flu. I wanted something serious enough that none of them volunteered to check up on you, but not so serious that they started ringing government serious infection lines.”

“Why didn’t you just tell them I’m your girlfriend?”

“Because they wouldn’t have believed that.”

“Because you already have one?”

He smiled. “Because I’m gay.”

“Oh. Right. Yes.” “Of course, once we’re past a week or so and it’s starting to look odd that you’re still here given that you’ve clearly made a complete recovery, then you’re going to tell them that the flu story’s a lie.”

“And what lie will I be replacing it with?”

“You’ll tell them your husband beats you and I came to rescue you.”

“Will I still be your cousin then?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, we wouldn’t want to overcomplicate things.”

“Perish the thought. So my twenty-four hours plus 65

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in isolation initially explained by flu recovery time will, subsequent to the new story, be re-explained how?”

“As wanting to make the flu story stick, of course.

When you came here you were too embarrassed to tell people what you were enduring.”

“But I suppose by then I’ll have bonded with them.”

Jesse gave me a warning look. “They are nice people.”

“I’m sure. Incidentally, why will I still be here after a week?”

“Impatient to start your new life?”

“Actually no, not really. But I would like to have some idea of what sorts of thing lie ahead of me.”

“Fred’s a little worried about flying you out of the UK when there’s a strong possibility that your face might be on the front cover of all major newspapers within the next forty-eight hours. It would of course be incredibly embarrassing to the US Government if it was discovered that we were helping a suspected UK felon evade capture, not to mention that the only possible outcome of such a discovery would be handing you over to the UK authorities at the earliest possible moment. In any case, from what I gather it’s not like you and he have had even the most basic of planning conversations about your future identity yet. There’s no point in rushing that. In the meantime, you’re perfectly safe here.”

“Is it inevitable that I’ll be moved to the States?” I 66

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asked.

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” he replied. “Not given your area of specialism. But I don’t really know. You’ll have to discuss that with him.”

“How? When?”

“Soon. He’ll probably come here. He’s a bit tied up right now though; he’s just managed to prevent some German terrorist group from blowing up an airport.”

“Oh!” I said. “He didn’t tell you it was me that got him that information?”

He raised then quickly lowered his eyebrows. “He didn’t, but then why would he?”

“He seemed perfectly happy to tell you about my criminal past.”

“That was something I needed to know about you.

If he hadn’t told me, I’d probably have learned it from the TV.” “I guess.”

“So what was your involvement in that case?”

“The guy in charge of the operation was using Second Life as a way of communicating with others.

That’s where I do most of my work.”

Jesse nodded. “Fred did tell me that.”

“He created a device in there which enabled him to send and receive lengthy messages which were almost impossible to intercept. Do you work only for Fred?”

He shook his head. “I’m an asset that he’s entitled to request access to. Fred’s everyday resources are 67

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actually quite limited.”

“But larger than they used to be, right?”

“Considerably.”

“Again, thanks to me.”

“In that case I understand why you’re so important to him and why he tore me a new one yesterday.”

“It’s good to hear he does actually care.”

“I get the impression he does actually care quite a bit,” Jesse said. “The problem with this line of work is that all too often you find yourself suddenly having to stop caring. This could potentially be one of those moments.”

I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a question of those dots, Emma. You joined a couple the night before last which shouldn’t really have been connected.”

“I did?”

“Think about it. Start with your presence at Peeking’s flat. They know he called a phone number and that that phone then came straight to his place, more or less at the time that he died. They find out that that number belongs to Rebecca Styles at your address. They go to your address, but there’s nobody home. They get a warrant. They break down the door. They find two dead bodies and in the hand of one of them is the gun that was used to kill Peeking.

But there’s no Rebecca Styles here. And who is it that killed these men? But there is a cornucopia of fingerprints and DNA belonging to someone other than the corpses. They take their samples, they run 68

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the checks: look who pops up on their screens; it’s their old pal Emma Kline. The first picture is formed: Rebecca Styles is Emma Kline.”

“I am perfectly aware of all of this,” I told him.

“Bear with me. Those are the dots that have to be joined; they can’t not be. What happens next all depends on what questions they ask and what answers they get.

But they’re pretty obvious questions. Who are these men in your apartment?

What’s their connection to Peeking? What’s your connection to Peeking? You’re the one person out of all four who might still be alive, so that’s where they start. They place Rebecca's bank account and mobile phone under immediate surveillance and they start combing through the records of each. The first thing they find is lots of phone calls between you and Peeking.

What’s particularly interesting is you haven’t only called him from within the UK, but from other locations around Europe - am I right that you used the same phone?” I nodded. “Well why wouldn’t you? The average person travels abroad maybe once or twice a year if we’re talking holidays, but they see that you’ve been several times over the last couple of years - and always calling him when you do. The most likely explanation is you travel abroad for your job and you’re romantically involved with Peeking so you phone him when you’re away.

But what is your job? They check your tax records and they find… nothing. You’re not registered PAYE, nor are you self-employed. Have you been claiming 69

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any benefits? No. So where is your money coming from? How did Peeking pay you?”

“Cash,” I said.

“Okay. So they note cash payments into your account. Who is giving you this money? Is it Peeking? They look at his accounts. They see cash withdrawals of roughly the amount you’re depositing, but they notice something else: he’s receiving deposits at more or less the same time as you are, separated by a space of a few days. In other words, he only seems to pay you anything after he’s just been paid. Now they entertain a new hypothesis: your relationship with Peeking is a business one. It’s him you work for. It’s him you’re travelling abroad for. But that doesn’t add up. When they look into Peeking’s business they can’t make links between what he does and the trips you’re making. What’s the most likely explanation for that? That what Peeking said he did in his business wasn’t what he actually did - or, at least, it wasn’t the only thing he actually did.

They realise they’ve stumbled across a hidden business - probably, they decide, something illegal.

“Can they go from this understanding to discovering that you’re the mysterious ’Thursday’ who has been delivering revenge to Second Life women haters over the last couple of years? Possibly not, but probably yes. They’re going to want to speak to all of his clients. Perhaps his practice was to only accept cash payments, just like you; well it only takes one of his clients to have paid him electronically or by 70

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cheque to provide the police with someone to interview. Failing that, they can just publish a picture of him on TV and ask for anyone who did business with him to come forward - they can even specify the dates since they know when he received the payments, if not from whom. Once they’ve spoken to just one client, they’re going to understand what the pair of you were about. So my guess is yes: they will discover that Emma Kline is Rebecca Styles and is also the mysterious Thursday. They’ll track your exploits. They’ll build the picture. Peeking was the guy who made contact with the clients; you were the woman who delivered retribution on their behalf.

Why was Peeking killed? Revenge, pure and simple.

Once they find out that one of the bodies is Micu Borsec, who just happened to be your most recent target, that theory will be underlined in triplicate.”

“You’re still not telling me anything I don’t already know and which wasn’t implicit in your earlier statement that I’m about to become a celebrity.”

“We haven’t joined up all the dots yet,” Jesse replied. “There’s still the issue of what happened in your flat. We took with us their laptop and the video camera, but there was plenty left behind for forensic analysis. The tripod, for example, and its position where the bed would normally be. The broken deck chair, practically soaked in your DNA. The cut cable ties. If we’d had more time we could have done a better clean up, but what we wouldn’t have been able to remove is the record held by your internet provider 71

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of a lengthy video upstream at more or less the exact time that these men are thought to have died. Most likely conclusion: you were being filmed. What’s more, you were being filmed being tortured.

“Of course, if someone did make a recording of that stream and that makes its way into the hands of the police or even the general public then none of that analysis will be necessary. What happens next will depend on who gets hold of what and how widely it’s censored and distributed. The media might celebrate you as the victim who fought back or they might vilify you as the wanted criminal who should be behind bars. One question they are not going to not ask if they do see that video, however, is this: who the fuck was watching that stream? Who was it filmed for?

“At this point, we’re as much in the hands of investigative journalism as we are official police business. But how hard is it really to draw a line between this story and the one which broke yesterday about the broken ring? Those are the two dots that we join at our peril. What conclusions will be drawn?

How far will they dig? In how much detail will they want to know exactly how it was that event A triggered event B? Did the ‘intelligence agency’ that brought the ring down just happen to come across the live stream? Had they infiltrated its membership and if so then why did someone not come to your aid? Or was it the one woman left standing at the end who forwarded the information? Who did she 72

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forward it to? How did she know them? Those questions only have to be asked in a public forum, Emma, for the UK government to start wondering suddenly if their transatlantic cousins have some sort of a working relationship with a suspect they want for murder. The moment they start making enquiries on the basis of this suspicion is more or less the moment that Fred will be told he has to turn his back on you.

“And, however much he feels gratitude to you, Emma, he will turn his back on you if he’s told to.

That’s the way all this works. We’re all expendable.”

He lapsed into a half-guilty silence. “Drink some more water,” he told me, sounding like he was reminding himself that he was meant to be looking after me.

“Fred said all this to you?” I asked him.

“Of course not. Not in so many words. It doesn’t need to be said.”

“But that’s why he’s so mad.”

“Exactly.”

“So, just to be clear on this; if I’d walked away from the apartment last night without going into the chat room and getting the information out of that guy then we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now?”

Jesse nodded. “Then why did Fred act on the information we gave him if he knew it had the potential to unravel everything?”

“Because you asked him to. Because you mean something to him. Because he knew what this would mean to you. Would you chose not to go into that 73

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chat room now if you did it over again?”

“No,” I replied. “Breaking the ring is the only thing that makes sense of that whole evening. Step lost his life and I came within an inch of losing mine, but we took out something huge in the process. It’s probably the greatest thing we achieved together and he’d be proud of it.”

“Well there you go.”

I sighed. “So this place here is my holding cell whilst we wait and see how this all plays out.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that. All that thinking and planning does still need to be done. Let’s just say Fred’s introduced a ‘buffer’.

“A buffer,” I repeated. “Okay. However you want it.”

“No-one’s holding you anywhere.”

“I understand.” I went over to the bathroom door and pushed it open so I could examine the interior. It was a little bit grotty, but it would do. Cleaning it would become my first priority. “What am I called, by the way?”

He came over before answering, I expect to discourage raised voices. “We had to get some ID sorted out for you so I made a decision. I hope you don’t mind.”

“That all depends on what you decided.”

“Joy,” he said. “Joy Fielding.”

“Why Joy?” “Something I read the other day. Joy is Romanian for Thursday.”

74

THE CITY OF BOXES

5 Two weeks passed. A whole two weeks passed and all I did was live in the house at Sydney Street in Vauxhall. A whole two weeks passed and all I did was rebuild my buffer between life and the edge of life’s ending.

On that first day, I’d taken my shower and sent Jesse out with precise instructions for hair colouring.

We did the job as soon as he got back. I let him cut my hair first and then I talked him through using the applicator brush. He brought me back from the shops a couple of large silk scarves too and a black, highnecked sweater, all to cover my strangulation marks.

That evening, I went downstairs to the kitchen and met two of the housemates. They asked me how I was feeling and I told them much better now. Jason offered to make me tea and Jade insisted I eat some toast. The kitchen was at the back of the house, directly underneath Harmony’s room. It had a table for four - five, if you included the end spot, though there wasn’t a chair for it - pushed up against the wall on the left-hand side as you entered. That whole wall was covered floor to ceiling in vertical pine panelling stained almost as dark as mahogany. A serving hatch 77

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in the middle of it, which presumably opened into Jason’s bedroom, had a cork noticeboard resting against the doors and an assortment of takeaway menus pinned to it.

The table was directly underneath. It was a slightly sticky table in places; another thing to add to my cleaning list. I tried not to touch it too much.

Jesse sat on the far side from the kitchen door with his back to the panelling. He pulled me onto his lap.

You two seem very close, Jade said. I’ll let you in on a secret, Jesse told her, I came out to Joy even before I told my parents. I squeezed his cheeks affectionately.

He broke my heart, I told them. I was hoping he’d be my toy boy. Everyone laughed. Monosexuality is such a drag, I commented. I couldn’t agree more, Jade responded, a sparkle in her eyes.

There was a bathroom opposite the pine-panelled wall; the en-suite in Jesse’s room, it turned out, was the only such convenience in the house and everyone else had to use the downstairs facilities. Harmony was showering when I was introduced to Jason and Jade, and presently she emerged in a rather loosely tied gown, though it did ultimately do its job. Chloe was out for the evening with her boyfriend. We ended up in Jade’s room watching TV for at least an hour, and it reminded me of the days when I’d lived with Stransky and we’d watched TV together in the evenings. The television was an old analogue CRT set from the eighties positioned on top of a chest of drawers facing Jade’s bed; it was fed a digital signal 78

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via some arrangement using a set-top box and a VHS video recorder underneath it. We sat on her bed together, me, Jesse and Jade, with Harmony lying across the foot and Jason in a wicker chair pulled close. The room was part bedroom, part art studio and part library. Jade had blocked out the large bay window with four identical black bookcases, each populated to full capacity. She told me she hated being on the ground floor and seeing the shadows of people passing during the day, and that this arrangement gave her greater control over the light when she was painting. I had no idea how someone so young could have amassed so many books.

We watched ‘The Great British Bakeoff.’ Amateur bakers gathered under a huge marquee set in the gardens of some English country house to compete against each other in the business of making cakes. It was hard to fathom that I’d been strangled live on the internet to over a hundred watching men less than forty-eight hours earlier. Life is bizarre. Jesse put his arm around me. Under the guise of cousinly affection he kept me connected to the room and its occupants and our elected activity. I watched the show and it was good. I felt safe. I felt eight years old, watching the evening TV with my parents after tea. I felt drowsy. By the time the bakers were halfway through the technical challenge I had nodded off, my head on Jesse’s shoulder. I dreamt about Step at his desk in his apartment and us ordering in pizza. It was all so comfortable. It was all so warm. It was all 79

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so unquestionably and unfathomably good.

The next day, Jesse got up at six to clear some website work. I slept until eight, then went downstairs for toast. That was when I met Chloe, though it wasn’t exactly my first experience of her. I’d woken during the night to the sound of her and her boyfriend fucking in the room next door; loud, urgent, uninhibited, sex. She was searching for something in the fridge when I entered and holding a conversation on her phone at the same time, holding it tucked between her ear and her shoulder. So I smiled and she did a wave hello whilst she listened and then made a comment about surveyance fees, and meanwhile she located and pulled out a half-full pot of natural yoghurt from behind some cheddar cheese and a packet of washed rocket. I put the kettle on.

Jesse had explained that the La Mère Poulard biscuit tin on the counter contained tea bags bought by the whole house and the instant coffee next to it was also a shared item. I found out in the following days, however, that the coffee jar was in fact a source of friction in the house. Both Harmony and Jade objected to it on the grounds that it wasn’t Fair Trade.

And who in their right minds, they added, still drunk instant coffee anyway? So the jar was funded by Jesse, Jason and Chloe; this in itself was not a cause for conflict, except those three insisted it was a house purchase and that Jade and Harmony’s guests were 80

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welcome to use it. It was an unceasing battle for the moral highground, each side constantly on the lookout for a way to out-sanctimonious the other.

I was shaking the toaster clean of a good year’s worth of crumbs over the sink when Chloe’s phone call came to an abrupt end. It seemed to me that it took her less than a second to transition from the one conversation to the next. “Hi! You must be Joy!” We did a rather formal and slightly odd handshake, her with her mobile in her other hand and me for a moment holding the toaster to one side like a waiter holds a tray. “You’re feeling better now?” I was.

“You had a rough few days, I hear?” I did. “It’s such a nasty bug going around at the moment, I understand.” It is. Totally. What would I do without Jesse? “I’m surprised he’s never mentioned you before!” It was a completely innocent remark, but the first thing said by anyone in the house about our apparently lifelong relationship that no-one had ever heard of previously, and it had to be responded to carefully. It brought sharply into focus just how little I knew about him or the detail of the story he’d cooked up. I had no idea how long he’d lived in this house, for example. And I had no idea exactly how nearby it was that I was meant to have lived. Luckily, the reveal of my big secret in a few days’ time would explain retrospectively most reluctances and inaccuracies now, at least so far as my own details were concerned.

I told Chloe that I was mortified to hear that Jesse 81

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had neglected to mention me on anything less frequent than a daily basis. She was a tall woman, perhaps five foot ten or eleven. She wore a dark business suit over a cream blouse. She had long, incredibly straight brown hair. She laughed and made a rolled-eyed comment about men and what information they were capable of maintaining in their working memories. She sat to eat her yoghurt. With one hand she spooned it into her mouth whilst with the other she started composing an email on her Android phone. The conversation was over. I went back to shaking out the toaster. Jesse later told me that Chloe was a person who could only really have a conversation about a topic. Most times she said Hi to you it felt in some small way like it was the first time she’d ever met you; there was a formality to her - or rather, a lack of informality - that was socially incongruous, only she pulled it off on most occasions through the complete self-confidence that she projected.

I ventured out at ten. It was the first time I’d stepped outside the house since getting there. I found a supermarket a couple of streets away and bought cleaning products. The newspapers were still mostly running the internet ring on their front pages, though a couple were leading with some new information about the German terrorism plot. It occurred to me suddenly that the degree of danger I was in from an interfering media was probably most likely going to be influenced by what other news stories broke over 82

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the next few weeks. I was effectively at the mercy of a slow news day.

When I got back, I started with the ensuite bathroom. Jesse, working at the desk in his/our room complained about the smell of the bleach and opened the window, but when he saw the end result two hours later he retracted these grumbled remarks instantly. I got that grouting as white as new paper and the tiles I reintroduced to the notion of ‘shiny,’ courtesy of my spray-on limescale remover. It’s not that I’m obsessed with cleaning or anything, but I do know how to do it and I needed something to keep myself busy. And I needed something that worked my muscles and which just looked fucking awesome when it was done.

And cleaning lets your mind wander. The burn in my arms revived memories first of all of working at Mrs Stuman’s in West Cowes, and further back than that of cleaning the walls behind the fittings in the kitchen at Pizza Castle. And thinking back to that revived memories of my very first days in Second Life. I’d work the dishwasher almost non-stop on weekend evenings back then, scraping off people’s leftovers into the food bin, stacking the plates in the large, plastic dishwasher racks, spraying them with water to remove any sauce; by then the three minute cycle would usually be complete and I’d lift the lever, pull the clean crate out onto the unstacking side, push the dirty crate in, pull the shield back down and the cycle would begin automatically. The plates were so 83

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hot when you took them out you could only hold them for a second or so and your fingertips would smart after stacking a whole rack’s worth on the shelf above the run. Then you’d turn around one hundred and eighty degrees to the hatch, where waiters and waitresses had been delivering dirty plates the whole time you were doing all that, and get started on the next batch. And that was how my Friday and Saturday evenings disappeared; and it was fine, because - just as it was drifting as I cleaned the tiles in Jesse’s bathroom - my mind would float away from the tedium of the task and settle on other things. In those days, it settled on SL. I didn’t smoke back then but I still insisted on taking the five minute breaks all the smokers took under the fire escape outside the back door, and I would think about SL then too. That spot had other associations. When I started at Pizza Castle, I wasn’t long out of university and I was seeing one of the waiters there. He got me the job.

We used to make out under that fire escape; he would press me against the red brick wall at the side and I would feel for his bulge through his uniform trousers.

But the relationship only lasted an extra couple of months and then he broke it off to move back to his parents in Rotherham so he could start looking for a ‘proper job’. I would have gone with him if he’d asked me to; my foster parents had made it clear to me in so many words that they’d done their bit now I’d graduated and I was on my own from this point on. I had no place to go to other than wherever I 84

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happened to be. He was an engineer. He told me his parents would be unhappy about him being in a relationship at such a sensitive point in his career. I told him that he hadn’t seemed to mind the distraction in the run-up to his finals, but I didn’t really put up all that much of a fight to be honest. I just didn’t see the point. When Adrian left, it created a vacuum in my life and I would stand outside in the first few nights in that spot where he had kissed me just to feel the rough brick against my shoulders again. But the vacuum in the end didn’t actually hang around all that long. Within a week I was feeling a sense of calm numbness. ‘Numb’ sounds lonely and hurt and depressed, but I didn’t feel any of those things. I just felt that I didn’t really care that I was no longer in love and I didn’t really care if I never was again. There was no anger, there was no self-pity. I just felt detached from emotion and completely unbothered by this detachment. Perhaps that absence of affect played a role in it completely overwhelming me when it did later return, when I fell in love with Inch Sideways on the basis of one night of lustful interaction. When I fell in love with Inch it was as though I’d never been in love before; it was as though everything before her had been some sort of half-hearted role play for the sake of doing the things that I supposed I was obliged to do. Up until that point I did my shifts and I cleaned my plates and I ignored more advances than I can remember from customers and colleagues alike because I just didn’t 85

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care. Well, I indulged occasionally, but I made it crystal clear that relationships were not something I did. It was no effort whatsoever to do this. I felt nothing beyond a short-term desire to be fucked by someone. Much as I do now regret ever having met Inch for all the bad that it triggered, I do sometimes wonder what would have become of me emotionally if I hadn’t. Surely a person can’t go all the way through their life in the way that I was navigating it back then without some sort of consequence? Would I have become depressed? Would I have become bitter? Would I have remained at Pizza Castle indefinitely? Or was that numbness just a balloon waiting to be burst? It was her words that popped my numbness. They broke into me. They took me by surprise. Perhaps I would have met someone else who had the same effect.

I should have claimed you as my cousin years ago, Jesse said, looking at the sparkling tiles in amazement. I told him I badly wanted to do the kitchen and bathroom downstairs next, but I didn’t want anyone to think I was judging them. He laughed. Chloe, Harmony and Jason were out, but Jade had got back in at the same time that I’d returned from the supermarket. He took me down to her room to ask her whether or not she would feel judged if I did some cleaning and I stood behind him, embarrassed, not knowing what I was going to say if she said that she would. She called us in cheerfully when he knocked on her door, and when we entered I 86

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saw that she was on Second Life.

She was lying across her bed with her back to the door, so her laptop screen was facing us and I got a clear view of it when we entered. What I assumed to be her avatar - a female humanoid wearing army boots, camouflage combats, a tank top and a neon green mohican - was standing on a builder’s platform.

A line of orange particles connected her outstretched hand to an assortment of pine cubes.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at us.

“What’s up?”

“Joy’s angsting,” Jesse said. “She’d like to clean our kitchen and bathroom for absolutely no money and she’s worried we might take offence.”

She laughed. “You bloody house guests… coming over here and doing all our cleaning.”

Jesse turned to me. “Satisfied?”

I punched him on the arm. “Satisfied.”

“Then my work here is done.” He turned and went back upstairs, taking them two at a time in a sudden sprint which I realised I’d already started to recognise as his style.

I peered at Jade’s screen. “What are you playing?”

“Playing?” she repeated. Then she followed my gaze. “Oh, it’s not a game. It’s Second Life. I’m building.”

“Second Life!” I declared. “I remember that. Is that thing still going? I’d assumed they folded years 87

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ago.” I wasn’t playing dumb for the sake of it. My picture would probably be on the front pages within the next few days and in all likelihood the term ‘Second Life’ would be liberally scattered throughout the accompanying text. Thinking about it, I was quite possibly Linden’s greatest ever advertising asset.

“Nope,” she replied. “Still there. Just not in the news so much.”

“What are you doing with those wooden blocks?”

“Believe it or not,” she told me, “this is actually part of my coursework. We have to create a digital sculpture that wouldn’t be possible in real life.”

“What are you going to create?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m just playing right now.

Something big, though.” She held her arms out wide.

“Something... building-sized.”

“Right. You’re getting to know the system.”

“Oh, I’m quite familiar with the system,” she said.

“I’ve been doing SL for years. I used to have a shop where I sold 1960s furniture. Most of my cohort at uni intend to use Blender for their projects, but I want to create both the sculpture and the space in which it’s situated.”

“Right.”

I nodded, trying to appear to be pretending to have a clue what she was talking about.

“You sold furniture.”

“By which I mean, of course, virtual furniture.

Yes.” “Virtual furniture.”

“One day, half of everything that gets sold will be 88

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virtual,” she told me. “Maybe more!”

“I’ll take your word for it on that.”

“Maybe,” she mused, gazing momentarily up at the ceiling, “it already is.”

“Hmm? You mean like music?”

“I mean like flat-packed bookshelves made to look like they’re made out of oak,” she said. “I mean like ‘distressing’ paintwork to make something look artificially old. I mean that we buy things according to how they look rather than according to what they actually are.”

“Hmm,” I said again, not really sure how else to comment. “Those blocks look a bit like packing boxes.”

She looked back at the arrangement herself and for a moment fell silent. “You know,” she said, after a while, “you just might be onto something there.

Packing boxes. Hmm...”

She sat up, pushed the laptop forward and patted the space beside her. I perched there. “See look,” she said, pointing at the pine cubes. “These things here are ‘prims’. They’re the most basic building block for if you want to create something in Second Life.

Watch how easy it is to create: right click on the ground, click on create and there you go: a prim cube is born. Now see that I can select the cube and I can make it big or small, or stretch it this way or that. I can cut slices out of it; I can make it hollow, and so on. So when Second Life was new, just about everything there was in it was made by manipulating 89

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these cubes like i’m doing now. And combining them. Are you with me?”

“I think so. Can you make it look like it’s not made from wood?”

“Oh sure. That’s just the texture - a picture, like a jpeg - you can change that to whatever you want.”

She demonstrated: the pine cube became a marble cube became a leopard-skin cube. “See?” “Nice,” I said, pretending to be lying.

“Well it was reasonable back in 2004. But now there’s a whole new system for building stuff in SL called mesh, and you can make much more complex stuff using that. Except mesh is way more difficult to learn than the old system was, plus you have to do it away from SL in a separate application.”

“Ah,” I said. I nodded.

She chuckled. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Sure I do,” I said. “It’s VHS video tapes versus online streaming: old system crude, but easy to learn; new system whizzy, but you have to be, well…”

“A nerd?”

“Young.”

She hit my leg. “Oh please!”

I grinned. “But I do really want to hear about your packing boxes idea.”

“Then look at the cubes. Look at them as they are right here: unmodified, unjoined, simple; the smallest unit of virtual creativity; the starting point of all constructions, once upon a time; the original common 90

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denominator. I knew from the start that I wanted to create something out of them rather than mesh.

They’re like pixels.”

“Big pixels,” I commented.

“Big pixels,” she repeated. “Big pixels: I like that.

Ok - now we have the title of the piece!”

“Seriously? Perhaps I should stop talking.”

“Perhaps you should talk some more! The title should augment the piece, right? What are we saying with ‘Big Pixels’? We’re saying that a pixel more loosely is the smallest division of something we create; something man-made, like a brick is the smallest division of a wall. In nature there is the atom; in human society there is the pixel. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is or what it’s made out of.”

“And the boxes?”

She looked at me. “Imagine I make a whole building, a whole street of buildings, a whole city of buildings made from nothing but cardboard boxes: that would be something that couldn’t exist in real life, right?”

“I guess not.”

“Think about what the box symbolises,” she said.

“First of all, It’s a symbol of childhood innocence, of uncorrupted purity. We all used to love playing in boxes once upon a time. When I was a little girl, I’d see those boxes the homeless live in and I’d think to myself that if I ever ended up living in a box, I’d make it an amazing box, a box with a full sized bed 91

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and chairs and a small wardrobe, and there would be other rooms including a kitchen and a bathroom.

“And so secondly, the box is a symbol of poverty, the thing the homeless live in; the cheapest material we turn to for some tiny amount of warmth and shelter when we have absolutely nothing else to protect us. And poverty is itself a symbol of fear.

We’re scared of it. We’re scared of ending up that way, alone and with nothing. It’s that fear that gets us out of bed and into work in the morning. We tell ourselves that we’re doing it all because we love our job, but fear of unemployment and poverty is the bottom line. The box is a token of that fear.

“And finally, the box is a symbol of wealth, of modern capitalism, of internet shopping. It is the ‘Big Pixel’ of our all-important, global economy; the thing that contains the product; the thing that holds in stasis the object that was bought with someone’s credit card. What’s actually inside it is neither here nor there. It could contain a dog turd for all we know; the only thing that’s important is the exchange of money that took place which led to the transit. The only thing that’s important is that the thing inside is desired. Our economy is based on material desire.

The box is a token of desire.”

“A city made from boxes,” I said. “That would be quite a sight.”

“Like one of those optical illusions where you see either one thing or another,” she replied, “only this will work three ways instead of two: it’ll be either a 92

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child’s dream or a picture of poverty or a portrait of capitalist utopia.”

“I like it.”

“And I’ll make every box different.”

I blew out air. “That will be some work.”

She looked at me. “Yes it will. Would you help me with it?”

“Yes,” I said.

We started the next day. We ventured out into London to find boxes to photograph. My city of boxes will be made from boxes of the city, Jade declared. She gave me her DSLR to use when she discovered I was currently without a smartphone.

She used her iPhone.

We started on the South Bank and were surprised by our initial lack of success; I suppose I’d assumed that boxes were like rats and all we’d have to do is switch off the filters that caused us to ignore them and then notice them suddenly all around us, everywhere. Before long, however, we’d made our way up to Waterloo Station and its rapid turnover outlets, where boxes of product could be found on the floor behind counters and tills, stepped over constantly by busy staff. Jade had a way with these various employees, many of whom spoke English as an additional language. She’d point to the box and hold up her camera. Can I photograph the box? I’m an art student. Most of them would say something 93

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like, sure sure sure and wave her through. Where she could, she’d photograph all six faces of each box, standing directly over the face she was photographing so that it was square-on in her screen.

We photographed boxes in a newsagent, a tie shop, a bakery, a bookshop and three coffee shops. I have no idea what they contained. Jade was adamant she didn’t want to know, and when a box was open or in some other way revealing of its contents, she rejected it. Our best find was at the ticket office, where she spotted through the window a whole stack of different sized boxes against the far wall next to a filing cabinet. It took longer this time for her to convince the staff to let us through, but she managed it in the end. She just wasn’t afraid to ask for anything, and she did so in a friendly way that suggested she had no idea why anyone might turn her down. It felt like we were entering into the secret guts of the station. I saw extra corridors from inside that office leading off to other places hidden from the view of the hundreds of thousands of passengers passing through each day. I would have loved to have gone exploring further. But then we were done and Jade had the bit well and truely between her teeth. She was in the mood for getting through doors, she told me. That was where we were headed for the rest of the day: behind the artificial curtains erected between customers and the people who took their money, across the dividing line separating the world of the seller from the world of the consumer. We 94

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would see the South Bank from the inside looking out. Even more explanation was required to get across that line at the London Eye - her university ID was carefully photocopied - but then we were through to photograph several white boxes of varying dimensions in an office visible again from the ticketbooking windows. And that was the hardest we had it. After that, the doors just opened: getting behind the curtain in the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall were easy by comparison; then again, as an art project I supposed one might imagine such institutions be be the most sympathetic to Jade’s ambition. It doesn’t really feel to me like I’m paddling around yet in the muddy waters of capitalism, I told her. But you are, she replied; that’s exactly what you’re doing. Don’t expect paddling to feel like drowning. We’ll do plenty of that tomorrow when we cross the river.

So the next day we went over the Thames, crossing at Vauxhall Bridge.

We journeyed towards Westminster, though we didn’t quite make it as far as the beating heart that day. We stopped off at perhaps thirty different places: shops, a couple of museums, the Tate, more coffee shops, a restaurant that knew her from some waitressing she’d done during the summer. We must have photographed perhaps a hundred or more boxes that day, and I started to wonder what value I was adding since what I spent most of my time doing was photographing the exact same boxes that she was. But it didn’t bother me that 95

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I might be along purely for my value as a travelling companion.

It was a useful distraction from essentially sitting in the house and doing nothing.

Jesse had appeared delighted that Jade and I had created a connection so quickly and were spending so much time together. The newspapers had gone quiet on both the ‘Medway Murders’ and the ‘Internet Violence Ring’ for the time being, but Fred had yet to make any sort of personal contact with me, and in the States the bombing plan my work had prevented was still attracting media attention and praise for the intelligence agencies. If I hadn’t had Jade’s project to occupy my time, I don’t know what I would have done instead, and worrying about what might come of the various threads I’d left dangling in my trail could have eaten away at me if I’d had the time to stop and think about it.

But instead I spent the time with Jade. On the third day of our mission, we went up to Trafalgar Square, and whilst we stood smoking with our backs against one of the lion plinths, a new idea came to her. We’re going about this the wrong way, she said.

Boxes are meant to move. Instead of finding them at their destinations, we should be capturing and examining them in transit. There are probably a thousand boxes criss-crossing this square right now in people’s bags. What we need is a virtual border control. A virtual border control? Yes, she said, a gateway where people can declare their boxes for photographing. A stall. We could call it something 96

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like, ‘Boxport.’ Perhaps that’s also what we should call my city when it’s done.

Wait, I said, I thought that was going to be ‘Big Pixels.’ She blew smoke at me. That’s the name of the overall work, silly, she replied. The city of Boxport will be just one element within it. The other elements will be the sky above it and the hills beyond and the sea at its edge. And we mustn’t forget the people. I want there to be lots of people. I’m going to see if I can find a sim owner who’ll let me exhibit the finished thing so I can advertise it. I’d like at least a week, maybe as much as a month.

For my assessment, I’ll project the installation onto a wall at the university and set the time to midday. Strong sunlight, harsh shadows; just like it is here right now.

I want it to be seen with people in it; real people just wandering around and doing their thing. I’ll connect up an Oculus Rift so that they can then go into the city at street level. That’s why I want all these boxes to be different. From above, it’ll look pretty uniform, like each building’s been made out of one huge piece of folded cardboard, but when they go down into the streets they’ll see the definition of the individual bricks. They’ll go right up close to the walls and see that every single one of them is different.

In the evenings, I sat with her whilst she uploaded the photographs onto her laptop and set about the painstaking business of editing and cataloguing them all. First she saved the raw pictures of all of the faces of a particular box into an editing folder. Then she 97

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loaded all of these into an online graphics editor I didn’t recognise, where she cropped each face precisely and then applied some sort of filter that normalised the light on all six pictures. The result was that the brown or white of one face of the box more or less matched the brown or white of every other face. That made the pictures ready for upload into Second Life, and at this point I realised that the ten Linden per texture upload fee was going to make this an expensive project. At 250 Lindens to the dollar and a buck and a half to the pound, my rough calculation was that every six or so boxes she created was going to cost her a pound’s worth of real money.

I raised this issue and she shrugged. That made it a little over fifteen pounds per hundred boxes, she said.

A thousand boxes would cost less than two hundred quid. It wasn’t an unreasonable spend for one of her projects. And for that expenditure she was getting glimpses of the insides of the heads of a thousand Londoners. It was cheap at four times the price.

In SL, once she’d uploaded the textures, she recreated each box by applying these to the six faces of a cuboid prim. In the first instance, she made every box more or less faithful to its original dimensions.

From day two of our mission, she’d taken out with us a tape measure so she could record these and included for every box photographed three pictures showing its height, width and depth measurements.

These photos weren’t uploaded or edited, but when she came to reconstruct the box in SL she used them 98

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to get the dimensions right. Once the box was created, however, she resized it substantially, keeping the ratio of dimensions the same but making it much bigger than it was in real life. As she pointed out, if she were to make a city out of boxes at a scale of oneto-one then she’d need far more than a thousand of them.

Once the box was created, she laid it out carefully on her builder’s platform so that its size could be quickly gauged from the measurement lines. She linked every piece in, one by one, and the whole collection grew and grew and grew. Over the weeks, the collection became a vast, sprawling, sim-sized construction in its own right. Every evening at the start she’d find a sandbox region that wasn’t too crowded and had a clean rate of no less than six hours, and she’d rez her platform carefully at a height of about two thousand metres; every night at the end, she’d check and double check that every box was linked and then take the whole thing back into inventory. I watched from her bed, or rather I sat in her room and kept her company whilst she worked.

Occasionally, she’d ask me a question about a particular box we’d encountered, like what way up it had been, and I’d do my best to remember. But most of the time in those first few days I lay out on her bed or sat in the wicker chair and pulled out books to read from her amazing collection of fiction. She kept a large vinyl records collection on the other side of her bed and played LPs nonstop through the evening. It 99

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was an eclectic music library, though when she was working on a project like this then nothing too challenging got put on. She tended to resort to country rock from the 1970s, a guilty pleasure, she told me, which had its origins in the music her grandfather liked to listen to in his car. Eagles LPs got played a lot, and one night we listened to three or four Dan Fogelberg records one after the other.

If you were to create a Second Life account, she told me after the fourth or fifth evening like this, then you could hang around with me inworld. I already get to hang around with you, I replied, and then I wondered suddenly if this was her way of communicating that she was tired of having me constantly physically near her. I think she sensed this worry because the next thing she told me was it would be helpful to have some help inworld; if she taught me how to move textures around on prim faces and gave me editing rights to her stuff then once she’d uploaded the textures and dumped them on a prim I’d be able to finish the job off whilst she worked on sorting out the next set of photographs. If, of course, I didn’t mind. I didn’t. I proved to be a surprisingly able student, in her opinion. Once I’d registered a brand new avatar, she teleported me straight from the welcome island to her building platform and started talking me through how to move a texture. I used my laptop. I faked a few ignorances here and there, but under the guise of being in possession of a steep learning curve, I soon got the 100

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gist of it. So that was how the system worked from that point on. We’d sit or lie on the bed together whilst the LPs played, and she would get the textures edited and into Second Life and I would get them properly lined up and the prim boxes properly dimensioned, then upsized to the same scale range used by the other boxes and stored on the platform in an appropriate section. We called my new avatar ‘Boxie Cardboard’.

It’s no good, she said after a couple of days of this, I have to get you some better outfits, I just can’t bear looking at you like that. I know it’s shallow but I can’t help myself. Secretly, I’d been waiting for some sort of excuse to come along that would get me out of the godawful mesh creations Linden seemed determined to enforce upon new residents, but I was unable to appear too knowledgeable about how things worked in the metaverse and I remembered all too well the initial period in SL of one to two weeks where you think your avatar looks good. Dutifully, then, I expressed the expected surprise over learning that there were ways in which my appearance might be improved. Jade took me virtual shopping. I can’t say her taste is what I might have gone for myself, but you can’t really go wrong with the Maitreya body and the selection of actual clothing was basically fine.

And it included underwear. She insisted I buy white.

It was a new thing to be with someone in RL and in SL at the same time in this way. I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I had on many occasions been in 101

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SL with Step whilst he looked over my shoulder in his flat, but those had been business arrangements and there had never been any of the carefree, affectionate chatter that we shared now. I started to want Jade. It began as a small thing, no more than a crush on her for how she looked into the sky when she was thinking about something imagined. And then it grew, but only by a tiny amount. It was when we started exchanging silly IMs whilst sitting on the bed next to each other that everything suddenly kicked into another gear for me. I suppose it activated an old neural pathway, perhaps one that hadn’t really fired properly since the day that Inch Sideways had told me she was leaving Second Life.

The problem was that by then we’d pretty much established a BFF sort of relationship that was all laughs and storytelling, and it didn’t look like it would be going anywhere intimate anytime soon. I sat in my bed at the end of my first week in Sydney Street wondering what to do about it all. In the end, I logged in and found that she was still online. She shot me an IM almost immediately, an action that immediately placed a big smile on my face.

Jayde Bluecolour: Hey! Jayde Bluecolour: Is this the first time you’ve logged in without me being in the same room as you?

I think it is, right?

Boxie Cardboard: I think so, yes.

Jayde Bluecolour: Everything ok? Can’t sleep?

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Boxie Cardboard: Isn’t this strange?

Boxie Cardboard: You and I are physically in the same building, but miles apart in this virtual world.

Jayde Bluecolour: Are you at home? I got invited to a party. It’s really dull.

Jade had let me use her house as my home spot. It was a small patch of land floating in the sky, a 512 square metres plot that consisted of a garden and a dwelling that wasn’t much more than a bedroom and a conservatory. She didn’t go in much for fake kitchens and bathrooms, she told me. What possible function could they serve? What possible function could a bedroom serve? I asked in reply, hoping for a conversation that led somewhere interesting, but she laughed at that and told me I was right, but only insofar as actual sleeping was concerned. And then she changed the subject.

But whilst the house was small, that didn’t mean it was simple. Jade’s disdain for mesh builds, it appeared, did not extend to her home and its decoration. When I originally entered SL, a 512m plot came with 117 prims, a figure that remains to this day except now that number refers to ‘land impact’ to reflect the more-ways-than-one in which mesh creations use up sim resources. Except they don’t use up sim resources in anything like the way that prims did. For your 117 prims back then you might have managed to squeeze in a skybox made from concrete, a bed that looked like it might be made from concrete, 103

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a sofa that looked like it might be made from concrete painted blue and a dining table set with more right angles than a de Havilland Comet and usually taking up almost as many prims as the building itself. How things had changed. Jade’s 512m contained a loft apartment of bare floorboards and white, painted brick, and a wall-to-wall ceiling of long glass panels held in place by an aluminium frame. The bed had an iron frame and five pillows arranged in a fan, and a gold and green throw over the duvet. The cupboards appeared to be oak, and they were a mixture of closed spaces and open boxes, and Jade had arranged upon all of these surfaces various trinkets and collected items: books, records, ornaments, pictures in gilt frames, potted plants, vases, jewelry boxes, a box of condoms, candle holders, a bowl of fruit, a tennis ball, ticket stubs, ashtrays, playing cards, perfume and face cream. Perhaps the most intriguing item was a home pregnancy test showing positive, which had been positioned on the floor in the corner of the room.

Boxie Cardboard: I’m at home, yes.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’ll come back.

Boxie Cardboard: Oh don’t, it’s ok if you’re busy.

Jayde Bluecolour: Seriously, it’s boring here.

Jayde Bluecolour: I keep thinking of my boxes.

Jayde Bluecolour: Am I sad or what? hahaha Boxie Cardboard: hahaha Jayde Bluecolour: Oh, unless of course you were wanting to do a bit of exploring without me?

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Boxie Cardboard: No no.

Boxie Cardboard: I’d prefer it if you were around.

Boxie Cardboard: I don’t really know why I came on, actually.

Jayde Bluecolour grins.

Jayde Bluecolour: Yeah. It can get like that.

An orange cloud appeared in front of me, and in the middle of it Jayde materialised in grey. She dropped gracefully to the floor and stood up straight. It took her a few seconds to colour in.

Jayde Bluecolour: Hey :) Boxie Cardboard: Hey there :-) Jayde Bluecolour: Actually, I’m kind of glad you logged on.

Boxie Cardboard: Oh yes?

Jayde Bluecolour: Yeah.

Jayde Bluecolour: There’s something I’d quite like to talk to you about.

Jayde Bluecolour: Only I’m not really certain how to approach the subject when I’m with you.

Jayde Bluecolour: You’ll find in here it’s a lot easier sometimes to talk about something difficult in text than it is to talk about it face-to-face.

My heart didn’t quite know whether to leap or to sink at that comment.

Boxie Cardboard: Oh dear - this sounds serious!

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Jayde Bluecolour: I think maybe it’s sort of an elephant in the room?

Had I made it too obvious that I was interested in her? Was she uncomfortable with me? Was I intruding too much on her personal space? Had I become overly-familiar?

Boxie Cardboard: Go on...

Jayde Bluecolour: Joy, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.

Jayde Bluecolour: But I’ve noticed the bruises on your neck.

Jayde Bluecolour: That scarf doesn’t really cover them when you’re as close as I’ve been to you these last few days.

Jayde Bluecolour: You didn’t really have the flu, did you?

Ah. That elephant in the room. And the requirement for lie number two had arrived at more or less exactly the moment that Jesse had said it would.

Though I did wonder, as I started typing it out, about the role of Second Life in enabling the conversation to take place. If we hadn’t been in SL, would Jade or anyone else have actually mentioned anything at all?

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6 We made the stand from two fold-up tables which we covered with tablecloths. Jade stuck velcro patches to the underside of the cloths and the table surfaces so they wouldn’t get blown away. We made a sign that went between two poles and which read, “Boxes to declare” in black, airport Helvetica on a yellow background. We made a trip to the supermarket where I’d obtained my cleaning products and charmed our way through that public-private curtain again, obtaining a good twenty sets of pictures over a morning’s work plus we got our hands on ten empty boxes for the stand. It was something quite special, I realised, to experience the thrill of acquisition ordinarily associated with something bought or saved up for with something completely free; to view something so ordinary as a cardboard box as exquisite and rare because of some aspect of its markings or condition. Any print that revealed the place of manufacture of the box, any stamp that indicated where it had come from, any handwritten note in thick black marker that instructed future handlers excited Jade. So long as none of these things revealed the actual contents, she treasured them all.

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We took the boxes back to Sydney Street five each, stacked on top of each other in our arms. The slightest breeze or stumble sent them falling to the ground, which we decided to find hilarious. At home, we created a column of five and a column of three, sticking them together with double-sided tape, to be positioned together on one of the tables. Jade cut a flap in the side of the bottom box for each column, into which she could then slide in and out a couple of her big, hardback art books to weigh it down.

The finished thing was a reasonable weight to transport, but doable between us. We erected it in the kitchen and Chloe told us she felt it lacked signage.

Jesse advised us to leave a gap of several inches between the bottom of the cloth and the ground or the police might think we were trying to hide something under there, and Jade queried when he’d become such an expert on security and in any case what was preventing terrorists from taping guns and shit to the underside of the table with duct tape? She did make up some signs, though. She took a number of closeup photographs of details from the boxes we’d brought back from the supermarket: an edge, a crease, a piece of packing tape, a tear. She arranged these in a grid on an A4 sheet, which she then printed out and laminated. Finally, she created a poster: The Boxport project. She produced a five minute sketch in pencil of a city viewed from above and pasted it below the title, and appended a shortened URL underneath.

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The URL pointed to a Wordpress website, where she’d started posting daily pictures of the boxes converted. She decided that every box she created from a visitor to the stall would be coded so that the ‘donor’ could get a copy of it in Second Life: she would give them their code once the box had been photographed and when it had been created in SL she’d put it onto the marketplace as a freebie item named ‘Box’ followed by the code, and put a link to the item page in a blog update. It was a ridiculous amount of trouble to go to, but that was what made Jade glorious.

We set up on the first day in Trafalgar Square, where the idea had first come to Jade. Within fifteen minutes, however, the police had moved us on.

Undeterred, she decided we’d relocate to Russell Square, which was just around the corner from her university. It was a hard walk with all the stuff, but we made it in less than thirty minutes and set up along the left-side edge of the diagonal that ran from Montague Street to Woburn Place. Jade went straight to work, calling out to the passers-by, “Any boxes to declare, madam? Are you carrying any cardboard today, Sir?” She knew just how to reach out to them, to connect to them, to flatter their need to be noticed and liked. “May I just take a look at your boxers, Sir? Did I say ‘boxers’? I do apologise most profusely!”

I’d worried that we might not attract the slightest bit of attention and struggle to make even five or six boxes a day; I needn’t have been concerned: before 109

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even the first half hour was up we had a crowd of ten or eleven people gathered around. “It’s a random cardboard box check, Madam. Could you place your box on the designated spot on the table for photographing, please? No no - we’re not concerned with contents here: we’re the Ministry of Things Boxes and Containers, not the Ministry of Things Boxed and Contained - they’re on a different floor of our HQ altogether.” She kept them entertained and I took the photographs and gave the donors their codes. The performance was all part of the artwork to her. She insisted that I play it straight to contrast against her extravagance.

We set up the next day on the South Bank, locating near the second hand book market under Waterloo Bridge. The day after that we tried our luck on one of the Golden Jubilee bridges, but got moved on after about an hour and a half. The day after that we set up under a tree on the mall; we didn’t get moved on from that location but Jade decided to call it a day by lunch: “It’s pure tourists here,” she said. “We don’t want tourists. Tourists don’t get it. We need people who live and work here.” Rather than look for another place, she decided to go back home there and then.

“I’m glad you’re a part of this,” she told me as we walked towards the river. “Is it helping?”

“It’s helping a lot,” I replied and squeezed her hand.

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suddenly in my life and become so immediately and deeply a part of it. Oh look! That’s what I’ve been looking for!”

She pulled me over to a souvenir shop.

Ornamental telephone boxes and Big Bens and post boxes and double decker buses; teapots; black cab keychains; Queen’s Guard teddy bears; Buckingham Palace and Westminster snowglobes; street sign fridge magnets; Union Jack tank tops and boxer shorts and bottle openers; Royal Family thimbles; London Underground flip-flops. Jade ignored all of that stuff and reached up for something hanging from a large hook. It had a large teddy bear sitting on it that was wearing a bow tie, a waistcoat and a bowler hat. It was a Union Jack foldable deck chair. “I want two of these,” she said to the owner. She turned to me. “We’re on our feet all day; we need something to sit on.”

All of my skin went suddenly cold. I felt dizzy.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

She looked at me sharply. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t want it,” I repeated, staring at the chair.

“Please, Jade. Please don’t make me.”

She nodded. She took my hand and led me away.

“You’re making yourself very visible,” Jesse murmured to me across the kitchen table that evening, once plates had been cleared away and we were alone.

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“Too visible?”

“I have no idea. I will say it’s making me uncomfortable.”

“But there hasn’t been anything about me in the news.”

“You and I both know that’s only a matter of time.”

“Jesse,” I said, “I really like Jade. It means so much to me to be a part of what she’s doing like this.”

“I know that,” he replied, “and I’m really glad - for both of you. But it’s not up to me whether someone recognises you or not.”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. I do think Jade attracts most of the attention, though.”

“Just try to keep it as low key as possible.”

I nodded. “Did you hear anything from Fred recently?”

“Fred’s been promoted,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said. “To what?”

“I can’t remember the exact title. Higher than he was, but he retains the same manager. He gets to focus solely on virtual worlds and gaming now. He’ll be able to recruit a small staff.”

“Gaming. Wow.” “Apparently, someone’s been using Minecraft to plan an attack on Buckingham Palace.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Yes I am,” he replied. I kicked him hard.

“So it’s another expansion of his role and office, then?”

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“And it’s all down to you.”

“I’m a little hurt, actually, that he hasn’t contacted me.”

“You’re at arm’s length right now, remember?

Once this all blows over he’ll have plenty to say to you.”

“I hope so,” I said. “This isn’t quite what I had in mind when I decided to accept his offer of a new life, much as I adore you all here.” I’d built a huge fantasy dream of a life in leafy New England, packed with stereotypes and clichés. Wooden facia houses and churches. Dog walking. Sidewalks that kept at least a metre from the road. Autumn colours.

Neighbours that greeted each other in the morning.

Community meetings. Covered bridges. Big garages with self-opening doors and stationwagons on the driveway. Pumpkin-lit Halloweens. Fairy light-lit Christmases. School plays. School buses. Schools.

Children.

“And what about you?” I asked him. “Are you… active right now?”

“I have a job this evening,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you now.”

“What do you mean by that?!” I exclaimed. “Is it dangerous?”

He shushed me. “I don’t know. I never really know. Well, I thought picking you up was going to be straightforward, remember? I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“Where are you going?” I asked and he looked at 113

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me sternly, as though astonished that I might even think to ask such a question. “You’re not going to kill someone, are you?” I whispered.

“I’m not going to kill someone,” he confirmed.

“This isn’t a Bourne movie.”

“Don’t joke about with me, Jesse, I’m serious! I care very much about you.”

His face softened, but only a little. “I have to pick up some information someone’s dropping off, that’s all.”

“You mean like a dead drop?”

He sighed. “Yes, Thursday, exactly like that.”

“Can I come?”

“No.” “Why not?”

“Because you’ll endanger me.”

“I could sit in the car.”

“I’m not going in the car.”

“Well how long will you be gone?”

He looked at his watch. “I’m leaving at nine. I should be back by midnight.”

“I’ll wait up for you.”

“Please don’t. I’ll be fine. I wish I hadn’t told you about it now.”

“You could have just said, ‘I’m going out tonight’.”

- no-one forced you to add in the line about getting in this conversation with me while you were still alive.”

He chuckled.

“Sorry about that.

Seriously, though, keep an eye on your profile.”

“I promise to think about it once I know you’re 114

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home safe and sound.”

“Duly noted.” He got up. “I’m going to shower.

Haven’t you got boxes or something to be making?”

That evening, because we hadn’t taken on many new boxes that day, we finished early. I sat on Jade’s bed with my laptop; she sat with her back to me at her desk by the doorway. We often sat like this. Jade needed to scribble from time-to-time. Sending each other brief IMs from these positions, even though we were in the same room, even though we were about five feet away from each other, had become a strange but amusing little habit between us. Perhaps it was just that through this novelty we knew we’d created something uniquely ‘us’ that would always remain, an in-joke that was a landmark on the scenery of our shared culture, something we each knew would not be forgotten by the other and which, when referred to during any future reunion, would unlock a hundred other more subtle memories to relive. But I also felt we’d created a new dynamic between us the night that I’d told Jade about my ‘abusive partner,’ something close and intimate, and different from what we had in real life somehow; whilst our inworld conversations since that night had remained light and work-focused, I liked to think that one purpose for these continued pieces of occasional IM banter was to keep that door open, just a crack.

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Boxie Cardboard: I’m sorry about today at the souvenir shop.

I heard the ding as the message arrived on her laptop.

She was using a wireless mouse; I heard her click it.

I heard her type out a reply.

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t be silly. You’ve nothing to apologise for.

Boxie Cardboard: Thank you for just accepting it without questioning me.

Jayde Bluecolour: I could see you were very distressed.

Jayde Bluecolour: No question was worth not relieving you from that as soon as possible.

I wanted to make a verbal comment about that, but I held it back. I wondered how far open the door might be pushed.

Boxie Cardboard: You’re so sweet.

Her head turned, just a fraction. She was taking me into her peripheral vision, watching my movement, gauging if I was looking in her direction and waiting for her to turn around and move the conversation out of SL. I remained still, my eyes fixed on the monitor.

She waited like that for maybe five or six seconds.

Then she turned back those few degrees and typed.

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Jayde Bluecolour: How strange, this moment.

Jayde Bluecolour: How inexplicably odd; how indescribably appealing.

Boxie Cardboard: You like this?

Jayde Bluecolour: ‘Like’ it?

Her head turned slightly. I saw it in the corner of my eye.

Jayde Bluecolour: I have goosebumps running all the way up my arm.

Jayde Bluecolour: I have never done anything quite like this.

Jayde Bluecolour: In all of my Second Life experimentations - and, believe me, there have been many - I have never felt quite so excited as I feel right this moment.

Jayde Bluecolour: It is quite exquisite.

Jayde Bluecolour: But why?

Boxie Cardboard: Do we need to understand it?

Jayde Bluecolour: I need to understand it enough that I don’t accidentally break it.

Jayde Bluecolour: I need to understand it enough that I can extend and deepen it.

Jayde Bluecolour: We are just at the edge, I think.

Jayde Bluecolour: We are paddling around something deep and dark and massive.

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t try to look at it directly, Boxie.

Jayde Bluecolour: It must not know that we are 117

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hunting it.

Without moving my head, I looked at her back. She was wearing an orange tank over a green bra. I looked at her shoulders as she typed.

Jayde Bluecolour: I can feel you looking at me.

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t do it. At least don’t do it now.

Jayde Bluecolour: Not until we’ve figured this out.

Jayde Bluecolour: Keep your eyes on the screen, change nothing.

Boxie Cardboard: Okay.

Boxie Cardboard: When you think about it, it’s not all that different from a hypothetical scenario where you discover that the person you’re communicating with just happens to live next door.

Boxie Cardboard: Same amount of distance, more or less, just no wall between us.

Jayde Bluecolour: No no no it’s not the same as that at all. I’m sorry but it’s not.

Jayde Bluecolour: One thing’s an extremely unlikely coincidence, the other’s a chosen activity between two people; any two people could do it.

Jayde Bluecolour: A psychological phenomenon can’t be defined purely by the distance in metres between two people.

She stiffened suddenly.

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Jayde Bluecolour: OMG I felt that!!

Boxie Cardboard: What? You felt what?

Jayde Bluecolour: I felt you recoil as I became critical.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m so sorry darling. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

Boxie Cardboard: You didn’t hurt me!

Jayde Bluecolour: But I did, just a little; nothing more than a prickle, but I felt it.

Jayde Bluecolour: And I felt something else too.

Jayde Bluecolour: As I thought out and typed my riposte, I felt my goosebumps fade.

Jayde Bluecolour: And now too! Fuck!

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m ruining it.

Jayde Bluecolour: The more I try to examine it, the less there is to examine.

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s fading away!

Boxie Cardboard: Ok, stop talking.

Boxie Cardboard: Let’s just sit for a minute in silence.

Jayde Bluecolour: Yes yes.

We sat. I tried not to look at her again. I tried not to listen to her breathing. Instead, I focused on her avatar on the screen. I zoomed in on it. We had each chosen a box to sit on. There were maybe three hundred of them now. Earlier, we’d shared our secret favourites to each other and she’d installed a sit pose in each of them. Hers was a box from India with maybe thirty stamps on it. Mine was a box that 119

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looked completely ordinary from a distance, but when you got closer you could see that is was a reused box, and the postmark on it from its original trip was 1976.

A minute passed. I broke the silence.

Boxie Cardboard: Better?

Jayde Bluecolour: I think so yes.

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s not fading so fast, but still I’ve drifted from that intense feeling at the start.

Boxie Cardboard: You were saying how you’ve never done anything like this before.

Boxie Cardboard: You were saying how this excites you more than anything.

Jayde Bluecolour: Yes. Jayde Bluecolour: It does.

Jayde Bluecolour: It makes me wonder just how completely the mind can be separated from the body.

Jayde Bluecolour: You know all these people who put “SL is SL and RL is RL” in their profile?

Jayde Bluecolour: Of course you don’t you’re still a newb.

Jayde Bluecolour: Well loads of people stick that in there. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough.

Jayde Bluecolour: I want so much for it to be true.

Boxie Cardboard: Well why shouldn’t it be?

Jayde Bluecolour: Because people are too concrete.

Jayde Bluecolour: Because people are too weak.

Jayde Bluecolour: When they say “SL is SL and RL is RL” they mean something else.

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Jayde Bluecolour: It’s one thing to say it when your SL partner is halfway around the planet - you don’t have a choice. But what if he or she is a co-worker where you work?

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s one thing to say it when you and your SL partner are both married, but what if you’re both single?

Jayde Bluecolour: What if you know each other in RL *and* you’re both single?

Jayde Bluecolour: What’s stopping you then?

Jayde Bluecolour: When most people say “SL is SL and RL is RL,” what they really mean is “it’s not convenient or comfortable for me for you to be in my RL.” Jayde Bluecolour: What they really mean is that they’re scared.

Jayde Bluecolour: But what if two single coworkers did have a relationship in Second Life - and they each knew who the other was in RL, no secrets or surprises.

Jayde Bluecolour: They know from the start.

Jayde Bluecolour: And they create a loving, sexual relationship in the metaverse.

Jayde Bluecolour: But in the office in real life they talk to each other exactly as they always have done.

Jayde Bluecolour: They don’t kiss or sleep with each other in real life, in fact they don’t so much as touch each other and they never discuss their relationship when they’re not inworld.

Jayde Bluecolour: They don’t even acknowledge to 121

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each other or anyone else that they are even in a relationship.

Jayde Bluecolour: Could such a thing be possible?

Jayde Bluecolour: Could such a thing be sustainable?

Jayde Bluecolour: Is the human spirit strong enough to be able to manage such an abstraction long-term?

Jayde Bluecolour: Could they sit in the same room together on their computers and make love to each other in SL without so much as touching each other in real life?

Jayde Bluecolour: I mean really fuck each other so that they come… not just some sort of role-play.

Jayde Bluecolour: Could their need to be physically touched evolve to be satisfied by that?

Jayde Bluecolour: Satisfied forever?

Jayde Bluecolour: Not just a stopgap until they can be together, not just a compromise because they can’t.

Jayde Bluecolour: Something instead that actually becomes how they love.

Jayde Bluecolour: Are our brains up to that?

Jayde Bluecolour: Could they adapt?

Jayde Bluecolour: I really want the answer to be yes.

Jayde Bluecolour: Much as I’m almost certain that it’s no.

Boxie Cardboard: Why do you want it to be yes?

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m not sure.

Jayde Bluecolour: Perhaps because then I could 122

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believe - even if it were only one person capable of it right now - that human beings really are destined to become beings of thought and love.

Jayde Bluecolour: To grow beyond the purely physical.

Jayde Bluecolour: Perhaps because then I could believe that there is actually hope for us.

She stopped typing. It had been a flurry of tapping sounds coming from my right-hand-side. It had taken all of my willpower to prevent myself from looking at her and watching the small movements of the muscles in her arms and shoulders. A few seconds of silence passed. I shut my eyes for a movement and tried to locate her smell in the room.

It was like standing in Trafalgar Square and trying to isolate just the sound of a particular bus. I found it in the end, mixed in with everything else in there: the smell of her cotton sheets, the smell of her books, my own perfume, the smell of her oil paintings stacked against the wall next to her desk, the smell of the talcum powder on the glass shelf over her washbasin, the smell of the toothpaste tube in the glass jar next to the talcum powder, the smell of our dinner still coming from the kitchen, a slight smell of sweat, a slight smell of cigarette smoke.

Speaking of which‌ Boxie Cardboard: I need a cig.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh God, so do I. 123

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Boxie Cardboard: What should we do?

Jayde Bluecolour: If we were that couple from the office, then we would have to do whatever we would ordinarily do. I suppose that would be to go into the yard and talk about the Boxport project whilst we smoke.

Boxie Cardboard: Ok, then let’s do that.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh I don’t think we should.

Boxie Cardboard: You don’t?

Jayde Bluecolour: No. They are much stronger than we are.

Jayde Bluecolour: When I hold them up as an example, I don’t suppose for one moment that I could be their equal.

Jayde Bluecolour: If we tried to do a normal conversation then we’d probably end up giggling hysterically, and that would well and truly burst the bubble.

Boxie Cardboard: Good point.

Boxie Cardboard: So what do you suggest we do instead?

Jayde Bluecolour: The safest thing to do would be to take it in turns to go out.

Jayde Bluecolour: Or one of us take the yard and the other outside the front door.

Boxie Cardboard: Ok, then let’s do that.

Jayde Bluecolour: I don’t want to.

Jayde Bluecolour: It might take our minds to other places.

Jayde Bluecolour: Some issue with the boxes might 124

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occur to one of us and then as soon as we were back in here we’d be saying, ‘Oh, before I forget, we really should blah bla-blah blah blah.’

I giggled. Intentionally amusing punctuation gets me every time.

Boxie Cardboard giggles.

Jayde Bluecolour: Shhhh Jayde Bluecolour: That’s not the real reason, though.

Boxie Cardboard: What is the real reason?

Jayde Bluecolour: The real reason is I just don’t want to be apart from you.

Boxie Cardboard: Oh. Boxie Cardboard: Good :-) Boxie Cardboard: So what, then, *are* we going to do?

Jayde Bluecolour: We go out together.

Jayde Bluecolour: We smoke together in silence.

Jayde Bluecolour: Then we come back in.

Boxie Cardboard: Ok. Boxie Cardboard: Then let’s do that.

Jayde Bluecolour: Let’s.

Jayde Bluecolour: BRB Boxie Cardboard: Me too.

She stood and pushed back her chair. She didn’t wait for me. I put my laptop on the floor next to the bed, standing it on its side so that the fan vents could get 125

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some air. The back door was next to the kitchen and the yard outside it was a tiny little place, big enough for a rotary washing line (that so far I’d seen no-one use) and an old, abandoned barbecue on breeze blocks in front of the back wall. It was the house smoking spot, though we had to keep to the side wall on the right because above and to the left was Harmony’s bedroom.

We stood with our backs to the wall and lit up. We avoided looking at each other. We didn’t say a word.

We stood and smoked, and I think we consciously avoided inhaling at the same moment so we could listen to the other doing so. I became aware of her body next to mine, about two feet away. I became aware of where she held her cigarette when it wasn’t between her lips (in her right hand, down at her side) and how she raised it and how she placed it, and how long her inhale was, and how long she waited before exhaling, and where she then blew her smoke (upwards). It was too early for the night to be anything approaching ‘quiet’ and the background sounds of London made it hard to pick out anything in that yard other than our alternating exhales, but then I heard her suddenly sniff, and it was the unmistakable sniff that gets made when someone is quietly weeping. For a moment, I didn’t know whether I should break the pact of silence and ask if she was ok. She sniffed again. I caught a movement from the corner of my eye that might have been her wiping her cheek. Then she dropped her cigarette 126

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and crushed it out under her boot. She went indoors.

I remained for a moment, wondering about those tears. And that’s when Jason came out.

“Is Jade ok?” he asked. He lit up with his Zippo lighter and stood in front of me.

“Um, yeah. I think so.”

“How’s the old box project coming on?”

“Good,” I said. “We’re making good progress.”

“I read the other day,” he commented casually, “that the humble cardboard box is just three years off its two hundredth birthday.”

“That’s… interesting.”

“But,” he continued, “that was just made from flat card. Corrugated cardboard wasn’t introduced to boxes until fifty-five years later.”

“A long time.”

“A very long time.” He held his cigarette between his thumb and fingertip when he put it to his lips, inhaled with an exaggerated hiss. “When you think about the pace of change these days... Fifty-five years between ‘the cardboard box’ and ‘the new and improved cardboard box’.” He did the quotes in the air thing, his cigarette forming one of the quotation marks, and he combined the waggle there with a deft ash-tap. The movement said, “look how efficient I am; look how co-ordinated I am; look how I flow; look how I do things automatically.”

Shit, I thought. He has a crush on me.

“The world must have been very excited!” I said and laughed, and rubbed out my cigarette against the 127

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wall.

He chuckled. “What I find most amazing is they actually invented corrugated cardboard fifteen years earlier, but it never occurred to them to use it in boxes.”

I stopped halfway to the back door. I hate dangles.

I have to know. “So what did they use it in?” I asked.

“Hats!” he declared. I smiled and turned back to the door. “Oh, Joy?” I stopped again. “Yes?” “My band’s playing at the Broken Barrel just down the road tomorrow night. Do you fancy coming?”

“Oh, that sounds lovely,” I said. “I guess it’ll depend on how late Jade and I work. I’ll ask her though.”

“Cool! We’ll only be doing an hour set, I think. A few crowd pleasers for the punters plus a couple of more highbrow numbers to raise the tone a little.

Kick-off’s at eight-thirty.”

“Sounds great!”

“I was thinking, actually,” he said quickly, “about throwing in one of my own songs. Landlords only really like it if we do covers of stuff people know, but every now and then it’s possible to sneak in one or two original compos.”

“Cunning!”

“I even had someone come up to me once and ask me who one of my songs was by.” He waved his cigarette hand dismissively. “But yeah.”

“Well, if we manage to make it, I’ll look forward to 128

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hearing it.” Again, I turned for the door.

“Well just so you know,” he said, “it’s about domestic violence.” Again, I turned back.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“If you’d prefer I didn’t do it…” he said.

“No no of course not. Your song; your set.”

“I think it’s quite good. The chorus goes, ‘Why do you hit? Why do you hit? Is it because you’re a shit?

Is that it?’” He sang the lyrics in a hushed tone, his cigarette hand keeping the beat in left-right flicks.

“It’s sort of a… light rock and metal fusion.”

“Great,” I said.

“You like it?”

“I think I’d have to hear the whole thing.”

“I have a recording if you’d like to listen to it.”

“The thing is,” I told him, “it’s quite a difficult topic for me.”

“Yes of course,” he said quickly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t include it. Insensitive of me. I’m just... so opposed to violence against women.”

“Good to know,” I told him and pointed to the back door. “I need to get back to Jade.”

“Yep,” he said. “Won’t keep you.” He dropped his cigarette and promptly lit another.

“Good chatting.”

I crept back into Jade’s room and crawled onto the bed. She was typing furiously.

Boxie Cardboard: Back 129

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Boxie Cardboard: Sorry, I got waylaid.

Jayde Bluecolour: wb Jayde Bluecolour: Yeah, I passed Jason on his way out.

Jayde Bluecolour: I think he likes you.

Boxie Cardboard: I think you’re right.

Jayde Bluecolour: Sorry, I’m in an IM with a friend.

Jayde Bluecolour: An SL friend.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’ve been neglecting my usual group over the last couple of weeks whilst I’ve been working on this.

Jayde Bluecolour: He wants to come over and see what I’ve done so far.

A different tone. I frowned slightly at the screen.

Jayde Bluecolour: Do you mind?

Boxie Cardboard: If your friend comes over?

Jayde Bluecolour: Yeah.

Boxie Cardboard: Ok, I guess.

Boxie Cardboard: I mean no, of course not.

It would be a five minute thing, I told myself. Then he’d be gone and we could recreate that bubble of strange intensity around us. He appeared almost immediately, an orange cloud in the space between our two avatars that resolved quickly to a grey humanoid shape. As he touched the ground, Jade switched from IM to public chat.

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Jayde Bluecolour: Hi Groove.

Groove Dazy: Hey Jayde.

Jayde Bluecolour: Groove, this is my friend, Boxie.

Groove Dazy: Pleased to meet you, Boxie.

Boxie Cardboard: Hi Groove.

Jayde Bluecolour: Boxie’s been helping me out on the project.

Groove Dazy: So is this it?

Groove Dazy: Doesn't look much like a city.

Jayde Bluecolour: Well that’s because it isn’t.

Jayde Bluecolour: We’re still creating the boxes for it.

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s going to be at least a couple of weeks before it’s time for construction.

Groove Dazy: And these are all different, you say?

Jayde Bluecolour: Yep. Groove Dazy: Wow. Groove Dazy: That’s a lot of boxes.

Jayde Bluecolour: You bet your ass it is.

Groove Dazy: Created from RL pictures you took yourself?

Jayde Bluecolour: Mhm. Groove Dazy: Wow. Groove Dazy: You *have* been busy.

Jayde Bluecolour: I have indeed.

Groove Dazy: Isn’t there some way you could source the pictures online?

Groove Dazy: I mean, get people to send you pictures of their boxes or something?

Groove Dazy: Then your boxes really would be 131

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from all over the world, instead of just those arriving in London.

Jayde Bluecolour: Hmm. Jayde Bluecolour: You might be onto something there.

Boxie Cardboard: Don’t forget, though - you wanted your city of boxes to be made out of boxes from a city.

Groove Dazy: A city isn’t made from bits of another city.

Groove Dazy: A city’s made from raw materials pulled from all over the world.

Jayde Bluecolour: Right.

Jayde Bluecolour: But I’m going to need hundreds of boxes still.

Jayde Bluecolour: What makes you so sure I’ll get what I need from an online approach?

Groove Dazy: Come on.

Groove Dazy: This is the internet we’re talking about.

Boxie Cardboard: People aren’t going to take the time to send us six perfectly formatted pictures for their box.

Groove Dazy: Who cares if a few hundred people send you stuff you can’t use if a few thousand people send you stuff you can?

Jayde Bluecolour: That’s true.

Groove Dazy: All you need to do is create a catchy graphic explaining the task and containing a link to your blog. You could do that in under an hour.

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Jayde Bluecolour: Oh, you looked at my blog?

Groove Dazy: Of course!

Groove Dazy: Great work!

Jayde Bluecolour: Thanks :D Groove Dazy: Tweet the graphic and post it on Facebook with a share request, then I’ll pick it up and share it, and ask all my followers to share too.

Groove Dazy: So that’ll be 500 views plus whatever followers you have. I’ll share it on my site too.

Exactly who the hell was this prick? I flicked up his profile. Some self-proclaimed SL expert, inworld since 2005. He had a blog. He had a book out. I followed the link to the blog: “Welcome to the website of the Metaverse Muser”. Across the top was a picture of his avatar rubbing its chin thoughtfully.

He was exceptionally well-dressed. He wore a white shirt and a yellow tie, and a charcoal grey, single breasted suit. His head appeared to be mesh.

Groove Dazy: Once that’s done, there’s nothing more to do.

Groove Dazy: Carry on pounding the streets of London canvassing the masses if you really feel the urge to.

Groove Dazy: Entirely up to you Jayde Bluecolour: Well, we’ve got a few over three hundred already.

Jayde Bluecolour: I was aiming for a thousand, but probably 500 would be fine.

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Jayde Bluecolour: If I used every box twice - maybe even three times - no-one’s really going to notice.

That was that, I realised. The box project was over.

Somehow, Groove had managed to kill it. Somehow, he’d managed to turn it from an inspired mission of discovery to nothing more than unnecessary labour.

He’d soured it. He’d taken away the magic and introduced pistons and a workflow system. And he’d done precisely the same to the mood between Jade and me.

I got up from the bed and snapped shut my laptop.

“I’m going to bed,” I said to Jade. I didn’t wait for a reply.

Jesse, at least would be pleased, I thought. Though that made me think about Jesse. As I crawled into bed upstairs I noted that it was half past midnight.

He wasn’t back yet.

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7 I tried to sleep. I gave up after 20 minutes and lay for a while on my belly looking over the edge of the bed at Jesse’s spot. His sleeping bag was zipped up, his pillow perfectly placed on top. Next to it was his music player, an old phone with its sim card removed, I think; his headphones were wound neatly around it. Beside that was the novel he was currently reading: The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster. He’d pulled a bedside lamp down onto the floor so he could read at night without disturbing me.

As I looked at it, I wondered why he was still sleeping on the floor. Perhaps that was the way he preferred it, but I hadn’t yet offered him the opportunity to turn down half of the double bed, I felt immediately guilty.

I sighed and sat up. I wondered if I should phone him. My Nokia was on the bedside table. I pulled up his number and hovered my finger over the call button for a couple of minutes. What if I endangered him in some way? What if he was hiding somewhere and the ringtone gave him away?

My laptop was on the floor next to the bed. I opened it up. The battery warning notification was 135

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flashing urgently, so I pulled the cable over and plugged it in. Groove Dazy’s web site greeted me for the second time that evening. I grunted, but because I was in need of some distraction I started scrolling through some of the blog post headings. ‘What will we be wearing in Second Life 2?’ was the first of these. The picture at the top suggested he thought the answer to be denim. ‘Burning Life set fire to my PC’ was his protest against lag and other general performance issues in crowded sims, the latest in a series of articles on the subject, it appeared, connected by the slogan, “Stream SL Now!” ‘Is making mesh avatars more complicated to manage than flying the space shuttle the way to go in attracting new users to SL?’ was an article that caught my attention (and, I must admit, had me nodding). Then there was, ‘Anyone who tells you SL is not a game you should avoid at all costs.’ Funnily enough, I held the polar opposite view. ‘No, I won’t be joining The Queue anytime soon’ concerned the creation (kind of) of Peter, a friend of mine (sort of).

Apparently, the queue was nearly up to three hundred people. Awesome.

And then this: ‘The mysterious ‘Thursday’: Is this the same person the police are after for murder?’ I sat up.

Articles about me came in waves and these days I generally avoided reading them unless I thought there was something new there that I needed to know. This I needed to know: no-one had so far made a connection between Emma Kline and the dark knight of internet revenge porn that Stransky and I 136

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had created.

It’s a strange world we live in, the article began. I can create a video that goes viral around the planet and get taken to court for theft of intellectual property because I used a minute’s worth of some song in it as part of the soundtrack - even though my viral video delivered effectively free advertising for both the song and the artist.

On the other hand, I can film my girlfriend of the moment naked and upload it to a revenge porn website for other guys to make comments on and masturbate over, and what penalty can I expect for this? None. Yes, you heard me right: none.

The government intends to change the law about that next year, but even then it will only make certain prosecutions easier. If I publish pictures of my ex online then I’ll be in trouble, but what if they’re pictures of someone I haven’t actually been with in real life? What law should I fear if they’re pictures of a girl I was with in Second Life and who I convinced to send me naked selfies?

If you’ve already heard of the mysterious ‘Thursday,’ you’ll know that there might not be a law to fear, but there is a person.

She tracks perpetrators down in real life and visits upon them the same sort of humiliation they brought to their victims. Thursday’s revenge has made headlines - and no small number of supporters - for delivering the justice that the law just doesn’t seem able to. Nobody except the men she has punished has actually laid eyes on this person. Noone claiming to be her has ever been encountered in SL (to the best of my knowledge). But the Second Life connection 137

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is there in every one of the men to have been visited by this dark angel. Whoever she is, she only goes after people who have abused SL residents.

Here’s a thought: what if this Thursday is the same ‘Definitely Thursday’ known also as Emma Kline, the suspected murderer who has been on the run for the past two years and who has twice now slipped right through the fingers of the police? We know plenty about Emma Kline and what she’s done, but very little is known about her SL alter ego, a detective in the metaverse from 2005 until her near capture in 2012; one half of the ‘Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency.’ Incidentally, the other half - Step Stransky himself - was Kline’s murder victim in 2007.

If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I’m fascinated by the Stransky story. I make regular trips to the agency office, which is still in exactly the same location that it used to be in a mainland sim, untouched by the passage of time except for a sign with a UK telephone number asking anyone who has any information about the whereabouts of Emma Kline to ring it. I’ve asked Linden who it is who’s paying for the office to stay like that, but so far they’ve not been forthcoming. I’m glad it’s still there, though. For one thing, I’ve run into a number of the agency’s former clients there, people who haven’t heard the news and are hoping to re-acquire the services of who many I’ve spoken to say were SL’s finest private investigators.

Through them (and through their IM logs - Kline is welcome to lodge a complaint with Linden if she feels I’ve breached terms and conditions), I’ve started to piece together a picture of this organisation. What sort of people 138

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Step Stransky and Definitely Thursday were remains frustratingly opaque, however I’m starting to get a feel for the range of casework approaches they undertook. You might think scripted listening devices for catching out cheating partners are about as clever as it’s possible for a detective in SL to get, but Stransky and Thursday went way beyond this, even catching out residents on several occasions who were using alternative accounts for their affairs, not to mention account sharers.

What I haven’t yet been able to do is speak to anyone who might claim to have been a friend of either of these people. But I have conversed with one of their competitors.

Percy Paulsgrove works for himself as an SLPI now, but he spent a few months in 2012 working for Spencer Huckleberry Investigations, a firm which remains active in Second Life to this day and who’ve not replied to any of my requests for information. Huckleberry, Paulsgrove told me, claimed back then to have known Stransky well, but said they had a key ideological difference: where Stransky considered his zone of operation to be Second Life only, Huckleberry viewed real life investigations to be an occasionally necessary aspect of this work. What’s more, this exact difference of opinion also existed between Stransky and Thursday.

No case highlighted this disagreement more than the case of the ‘Notecard Guy,’ a man (or woman) who used disposable alts to work his way into the confidences of guys whose virtual partners he had targeted. Getting to know both his target and her partner this way, the Notecard Guy would then hack the partner’s account, have sex with the target and post IM logs of the 139

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encounter online. As a final touch, he’d then delete the entire contents of the partner’s inventory, leaving only a notecard (hence the name).

Many of us metaverse old-timers will have heard of the Notecard Guy, but what none of us knew was just how badly Definitely Thursday wanted to take him down. The problem was, the Notecard Guy appeared to have no permanent SL avatar: he moved from new account to new account and could not, therefore be hurt. To do that, real life had to be entered: if they could find out who he was in RL, Thursday argued, then they would have some leverage over him. Stransky, however, was not prepared to drop the ‘no RL’ rule for anyone. Eventually, they abandoned the case.

How did Paulsgrove know all this? In the short time he was working for Spencer Huckleberry, his duties included following up a number of leads on the Notecard Guy case: Huckleberry, it turned out, was still working on this case more than five years later. And this is where it becomes especially interesting: within a couple of weeks of Emma Kline’s second escape from the police (this time on the Isle of Wight), Paulsgrove was told by Huckleberry that his services were no longer required. And, within a couple of weeks of that, came the famous Notecard Guy apology letter and the first mention of ‘Thursday’.

How exactly does one go about acquiring the services of Thursday? The problem with choosing a name that’s the same as a day of the week is that a Google search returns over a billion results.

Combining this with every conceivable possibly relevant word has so far gotten me 140

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nowhere, other than to show me forums where Thursday’s work is being discussed (usually in extremely derogatory terms); certainly nothing in terms of how one goes about hiring her. But, of course, this is the wrong way of going about it. The name ‘Thursday’ might cause a ripple of fear amongst cyber-rapists, but it’s not exactly a household name elsewhere. Searching instead on terms such as ‘Second Life’ and ‘revenge porn’ and ‘justice’ returned much smaller number of results, with one name in particular topping the list: Spencer Huckleberry.

What does all this suggest? Possibly nothing. Probably nothing. Probably I’m putting two and two together and coming up with ten. On the other hand, might Definitely Thursday, Emma Kline, Spencer Huckleberry and ‘Thursday’ be one and the same person? My line of reasoning here is entirely circumstantial, nothing much more, really, than a hunch. Spencer Huckleberry, however, might just wish now that he (or possibly she) had replied to my IMs when he (or she) had the chance: it might not be only me who wants to speak to him now - it might also be the British police.

Wow. Investigative journalism in Second Life. I was impressed. And, frankly, scared. In thinking I was Spencer Huckleberry (which was actually Christopher Peeking’s alt in SL), Groove Dazy had indeed come up with a ten, but as tens went, this one really wasn’t all that far away from a four. Why had I never heard of this guy? Why had Stransky never mentioned him to me?

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Whenever I had read anything in the mainstream press about me, it had been shallow, superficial, a level of analysis that actually comforted me in its complete inability to go beyond what it considered to be the concrete in terms of what its readership understood. I was a ‘cyber-criminal,’ an ‘internet murderer,’ a ‘virtual world fugitive.’ I was spoken about in the same breath as hackers and viruses and phishing scams. No-one had actually bothered to enter into Second Life to look for me from within.

No-one had really tried to understand or to explain that world; it was just an oddity, a weird thing, a nerd haven that now turned geeks into murderers. It was yet more evidence that society was falling to pieces. It was yet more evidence that the internet should be controlled, monitored and restricted. It was yet more evidence that the country needed to return to its traditional values, that parents should stop pandering to their children, that schools should get tough on discipline, that corporal punishment should be brought back in. It was yet more cause to wag fingers in the direction of the future and point at the past and tell everyone that nothing there had ever done anyone any harm. Even though it had.

Of course that’s not to say that people weren’t interested in who I was. Absolutely, they were interested. But they wanted me to be explained in the terms that they understood. My foster parents had been interviewed, my schoolmates and teachers had been talked to; psychologists specialist in gaming and 142

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addiction and obsession had been contacted for comment. There was definitely no shortage of comment. But, to most commentators, the virtual reality element appeared to play no more of a role in what had happened than alcohol or prostitutes or crack cocaine; it was a prop, a story element, a plot device; the whole thing in their opinion was actually ultimately very simple: girl 1 meets girl 2, girl 1 falls for girl 2, girl 2 falls for boy 1, girl 1 kills boy 1; the end.

The murder of John-Paul Barnaby was ultimately the death of a single man and a retired, single man at that. No children, no service personnel, no front-line services staff or white, middle-class families had died. It was only of so much importance.

So no-one had gone more than a few sentences into looking at what it was that Emma Kline actually did inworld before she took a man’s life. No-one had actually considered beyond quoting a comment in passing made by some computer scientist or science fiction writer that your identity changed when you were in a different body, however artificial it happened to be. Nobody had stopped to consider that life below the surface of the sea was more complex than a few different types of fish and the occasional piece of seaweed.

Until now.

Of course, it made sense that the first person to actually offer some sort of analysis would be a Second Life resident. In fact, it was surprising that no-one from that community had really made any sort of stab 143

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at it until now. My story had been in the public domain for just over two years. It had received attention from the Second Life community during that time, of course, but hardly in any detail worth worrying about. I was part of SL’s dirty secrets, the stuff that no-one who was in SL really wanted to talk about publicly. I mean for fuck’s sake: it was embarrassing enough to talk about being a resident of the metaverse when people suspected that most of what happened in there was sex; the last thing anyone needed was for murder to be associated with the habit too. I had been swept under the virtual carpet.

What official comment there had been pointed out that it was hardly the first time that people had met on the internet and a murder had taken place. Second Life was a medium, a connection, a way of finding people, and there would always (sadly) be people who abused that. That was why the standard advice was never to give out your personal details on the internet. To anyone. Ever. Except, of course, big companies. They could always be trusted.

In any case, where would commentary on my story any more detailed than that appear? With a few notable exceptions, the vast, vast majority of Second Life blogs were only really interested in fashion, because that’s what SL was, ultimately, to many, many people: dressing up and playing with dolls.

Over the years, I’d seen a few SL newspapers that had been and gone, attempts at metaverse tabloids which had sought to seek out and sensationalise the merest 144

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of virtual world whimsies in a weekly PDF crammed at least 50% full with advertisements for clothing and furniture. The ‘Metaverse Messenger’ had felt to me the closest thing there was to a Second Life quality paper, and I missed it. Then there were the fashion and lifestyle magazines, the monthly periodicals of SL photography with a few interviews with content creators thrown in: beautiful things to look at, but they kept as far away from anything even remotely controversial as possible, ultimately only reinforcing the notion that beauty comes at the cost of dullness.

They came and went, those magazines, even the longest running and most successful eventually closing down when the owner lost interest. It didn’t matter; for every magazine that shut down another usually sprang up in its place.

No; it had to be within the niche edges of the SL blogosphere in which any consideration of my online life took place. It made sense. And here it was. And it wasn’t just one article either. The article was tagged at the bottom, ‘definitely thursday’ and a click on that link revealed no fewer that ten additional articles written over the last two years about my activity: ‘Second Life love triangle results in murder,’ ‘Real life murder suspect was a Second Life private investigator,’ ‘Just who was Definitely Thursday?’ ‘Emma Kline evades the real life police for a second time,’ ‘Just who were Step Stransky and Inch Sideways?’ ‘Where is Definitely Thursday now?’ ‘The Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency: Visit the workplace of SL’s most notorious PI,’ 145

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‘What do former clients of Definitely Thursday say about their hired detective?’ ‘More comments from former clients of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency’ and ‘Alt hunting is a thing: more insights into the work of Definitely Thursday.’ Over the next hour, I read them all. In total, it came to nearly twenty thousand words that Groove Dazy had written about me over the last couple of years. Almost a book. Someone had written almost a book about me. Me. Discovering all this was one of the strangest and most conflicted hours I’ve ever spent. I wasn’t sure whether to feel very flattered or extremely threatened by it all. The level of detail he’d gone into was in some respects creepy; I felt as though I’d come across a wall in someone’s apartment plastered with pictures and news clippings and random pieces of information about me, all connected up with bits of string and questions on sticky notes. But this was an analysis entirely out in the open. The detail was entirely consistent with the writing form he’d chosen. What was more, it wasn’t as though he didn’t write about other topics.

Perhaps the most interesting player in all of this, Dazy wrote in one of his articles, is the character of Inch Sideways. What was it about her that turned the rational, logical, clear-headed Thursday into a woman who killed for love? Did the two have a relationship together before Stransky and Sideways became partnered? How long were they lovers for and what led to them breaking up? Or was Stransky the third person in a triad Thursday didn’t want?

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If only you knew, I thought. If only you knew that it was all just the intoxication of one night. One night in a busy bar, all started by one IM that she sent to me: Inch Sideways has been watching Definitely Thursday from across the dance floor for several minutes now. She's wondering if he's always so still and so silent. She's wondering if he's here to watch or to wish. She's wondering what it is that happens on a Thursday, and what it is that makes it so... definite.

If only you knew how completely that rational, logical, clear-headed mind had been scuttled that night, and how totally it had fallen to pieces on the knowledge that Step Stransky had swept in and stolen Inch Sideways from me. If only you knew, Groove Dazy, how Stransky the avatar was not one man in RL, but two: John-Paul Barnaby, the manager and the thinker; and Christopher Peeking, the hard-nosed detective. If only you knew how completely we were fooled by them. If only you knew what it was like to feel a naked man fight for his life beneath your arms and legs and lose because you were stronger than him. If you only knew what it was like to have no breath left in your body and no means of drawing another. If only you knew what it was like to have your head pulled back and your neck exposed so that an audience of men can watch it get cut open and applaud as you exsanguinate and die in front of them.

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If only you knew even a half of all that had happened, Groove Dazy, I thought, then you would have a story to write.

And that was the moment when Jesse finally got back in. No, he said, there hadn’t been any trouble.

He hadn’t been in any danger. But the drop had been the underside of a park bench and the park bench had been occupied by a couple making out. So he’d had to wait. He’d had to wait in a bush opposite for nearly two hours and he was stiff as all hell as a result. When I told him I’d decided it was time we shared the bed, I got no argument from him and he undressed to his boxers unashamedly in front of me before going into the bathroom to wash his face and clean his teeth. I hugged him hard when he climbed in and he told me I was silly for worrying, but he hugged me back. Within a couple of minutes of relaxing out of the hug, he was sound asleep. I kissed his forehead and quietly cursed his sexuality.

But he was ok. He was alive. I felt a wonderful sense of warmth and gratitude and connectedness come over me. The residual anger I had towards Jade for her sudden shift in mood earlier slid away completely. After all, she had introduced me to this extraordinary man, Groove Dazy.

More than anything, I wanted to spend time with him and to find out more about how he thought. If Jesse hadn’t walked in at that moment, perhaps I might have ended up remaining predominantly scared and cautious rather than predominantly flattered and 148

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intrigued in my contemplation of Dazy’s curiosity and systematic persistence. The removal of my acute anxiety over Jesse left me feeling joyful and lightheaded and excited about my new life in London, and Dazy’s interest made me wonder why I was so keen ultimately to leave it. Who needed New England?

Who needed putting on a face for life in the suburbs?

Who needed buried secrets? Wasn’t my story an amazing one? Wasn’t my life one worth celebrating?

Wasn’t my mistake only one of a trillion trillion mistakes that had been made in the story of human beings?

Hadn’t I learned from it?

Hadn’t it ultimately made me a better person? Wasn’t it time for me to stop running from who I was? And so on.

The more and more I thought about Jade, the less and less what had happened felt like some sort of personal betrayal and the more and more it felt like something odd that perhaps I should have been interested in. Quietly, so as not to disturb Jesse - not that it looked like that was in any way possible - I sat up in bed and opened my laptop again. I logged back in on Second Life. I materialised in the spot I’d logged out from, the sandbox sim where Jade had rezzed her sky platform with its growing inventory of boxes. Of course, the platform was no longer there and I went straight into free-fall, plunging towards the ground from a good thousand metres up. I hit the home button on the map and returned to my spot in the garden just outside Jade’s house. Almost straight away, I saw them. Dazy was stretched out on Jade’s 149

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bed, his legs over the edge; he was still wearing his shirt and tie, but he was naked from the waist down.

Jade was wearing black lingerie and kneeling in front of him, and giving him a slow blow-job.

I contemplated giving them back their privacy and either logging out or teleporting off to some other region, but then I decided to do absolutely nothing and see what - if anything - happened. Staying rooted to the spot on log-in was an old favourite strategy of mine: up to a minute and people assumed you were just waiting for the world to rez around you; up to three minutes and they usually thought you must be caught up working your way through IMs stored since your last log-in or greetings issued the very instant you were seen to be inworld; up to five minutes, however, and people assumed that you’d logged in whilst doing something else and had gone AFK on other business. What they generally didn’t tend to assume was you were standing there and watching them. I wondered who would IM me first out of Jade and Dazy, or if either would IM me at all. I wondered if they would ask me to leave or to join in. I sat back with my arms folded and watched.

They changed animation. Dazy sat up and took Jade’s head in his hands so that he could control how she took him into her, changing it from a blow-job to a mouth fuck. I wondered what Jade was doing downstairs. I contemplated going to see. Then the silence got broken by a soft ding-ding and an IM from her appeared in the top-right corner.

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Jayde Bluecolour smiles.

Jayde Bluecolour: You came back :) Boxie Cardboard: Jesse just got back in and woke me up.

I looked down at Jesse and mouthed, “Sorry” to him for the lie.

Boxie Cardboard: You look occupied :) Boxie Cardboard: Want me to leave you be?

Jayde Bluecolour: No, I like you watching.

Jayde Bluecolour: You are watching, right?

Boxie Cardboard smiles.

Boxie Cardboard: I am.

Jayde Bluecolour: Though I should check with Groove.

A short pause.

Jayde Bluecolour: He’s okay with it.

Jayde Bluecolour: But he wants you to stay outside the house.

Jayde Bluecolour: Actually, so do I. Jayde Bluecolour: I like the idea of you creeping around out there.

Jayde Bluecolour: Secretly looking through the window.

Jayde Bluecolour: Watching us without us knowing.

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Jayde Bluecolour: I like the idea of fucking with the windows open, knowing anyone could look in on me.

Boxie Cardboard: That’s an interesting statement coming from someone who has blocked up her window with bookcases.

Jayde Bluecolour laughs.

Jayde Bluecolour: That’s very true.

Jayde Bluecolour: Very good, yes.

Jayde Bluecolour: Are you in bed?

Boxie Cardboard: Yes. Jayde Bluecolour: What are you wearing?

Boxie Cardboard: Panties and t-shirt.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m naked.

Jayde Bluecolour: Sitting on top of my duvet.

Boxie Cardboard: mmm Boxie Cardboard: I wish I was there to see that.

Jayde Bluecolour: I wish you were here too.

Jayde Bluecolour: But I fear we’d give in to temptation.

Boxie Cardboard: Does he mind you talking to me like this?

Jayde Bluecolour: Who? Boxie Cardboard: Groove.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh right. I don’t think so.

Jayde Bluecolour: He likes taking photos whilst we fuck.

Jayde Bluecolour: It turns him on.

Jayde Bluecolour: Spends an age finding the right angle or lighting.

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pictures.

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s just that it provides me with a lot of down-time.

Boxie Cardboard: Have you known him long?

Jayde Bluecolour: Groove? Hmm… I suppose a year now.

Boxie Cardboard: He’s your boyfriend in SL? Jayde Bluecolour: Good God, no. I have no boyfriend or girlfriend.

Boxie Cardboard: Aha. A friend with benefits, then?

Jayde Bluecolour: I suppose in a manner of speaking.

Boxie Cardboard: I had a look at his blog earlier.

It’s very interesting.

Jayde Bluecolour: Yes, I look at it from time to time.

Jayde Bluecolour: He’s very active in SL. Jayde Bluecolour: Knows all that’s going on.

Jayde Bluecolour: Friends with a whole load of SL top brass.

Jayde Bluecolour: Mostly content creators, but also bloggers, photographers, sim owners, landscapers, event organisers, proprietors…

Jayde Bluecolour: Actually, the list is endless.

Jayde Bluecolour: One sec They changed again, swapping position so that Jade was on her back on the bed with her legs hanging over, and Groove was on his knees between her legs.

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It was a good animation. Instead of the pair just switching instantly to a full-swing, edge of bed, missionary fuck, Groove spent a while teasing and prepping her pussy with his cock head first, rubbing it lightly up and down between her labia, feeling his way in through the first inch slowly, getting himself positioned and ready, and then easing himself all the rest of the way in.

Boxie Cardboard: Wow. Boxie Cardboard: That’s a hot animation.

Jayde Bluecolour: Mhm. Jayde Bluecolour: I only buy the best anims.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m glad you liked that, because you’re probably now going to see it repeated several times.

Jayde Bluecolour: Groove is likely to want to capture the moment.

Sure enough, the animation reset suddenly, and he was outside of her again and holding himself once more and getting ready for his second entrance.

Boxie Cardboard: What if I came downstairs and lay next to you on your bed, and we continue this conversation there?

Boxie Cardboard: I promise I won’t look at you. :p Jayde Bluecolour: I would love that.

Jayde Bluecolour: But no.

Jayde Bluecolour: I just don’t trust myself.

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Jayde Bluecolour: But I do want you to take off your panties.

Boxie Cardboard: I can’t really. Jesse’s in bed with me.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh?! Don’t tell me you turned him?!

Boxie Cardboard: No! Boxie Cardboard: In any case: cousins, remember?

Jayde Bluecolour: Cousins can do it, can’t they?

Boxie Cardboard: It’s just some platonic, cousinly bed-sharing.

Jayde Bluecolour: Ah. So is he reading this?

Boxie Cardboard: No no. He’s asleep.

Jayde Bluecolour: I wouldn’t have minded if he was, you know.

Jayde Bluecolour: So if he’s asleep then what’s stopping you from taking your panties off?

Boxie Cardboard: The possibility he might wake up.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh well, suit yourself.

During this exchange, the animation repeated maybe three of four times. Finally, Groove settled into a regular missionary motion. Absently, I moved my avatar to stand outside a window so that it looked more like it was peeking in. I stood her right on the edge so it looked like she might be peering cautiously round the window frame. I wondered if it was possible to buy a pose ball for that.

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Jayde Bluecolour: Yesss Jayde Bluecolour: Looking in on us.

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh, he likes that.

Boxie Cardboard: And do you?

Jayde Bluecolour: Mhm. Boxie Cardboard: Do you see Groove often?

Jayde Bluecolour: Not really.

Jayde Bluecolour: In any case, it’s more a question of him seeing me than the other way round.

I didn’t understand that.

Boxie Cardboard: What do you mean?

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh nothing.

Jayde Bluecolour: It doesn’t matter.

Jayde Bluecolour: Well, he’s starting to get excited now.

Jayde Bluecolour: I think he’s typing with one hand.

Boxie Cardboard: I’m coming downstairs.

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t.

Jayde Bluecolour: I won’t open my door to you.

Boxie Cardboard: Then I’ll sit in the kitchen.

Jayde Bluecolour: Without panties?

Boxie Cardboard: Without panties.

Jayde Bluecolour: What if Jason hears and comes to see what you’re up to?

Boxie Cardboard: Then maybe I’ll let him fuck me on the kitchen table.

Jayde Bluecolour: That would be a mistake.

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Boxie Cardboard: Then prevent me from making it.

Jayde Bluecolour sighs.

Jayde Bluecolour: Okay, you win.

Jayde Bluecolour: You may come down and enter my room BUT the following conditions apply…

Jayde Bluecolour: 1) You take off your panties and t-shirt before you leave your room and come downstairs completely naked. Don’t bring anything except your laptop; I want you to have to go back upstairs naked later also.

Jayde Bluecolour: 2) You do not look at me when you enter my room (and I will not look at you).

Jayde Bluecolour: 3) You come in, you do not say anything, you sit next to me on the bed with your laptop open.

Jayde Bluecolour: Understood?

Boxie Cardboard: Understood.

Jayde Bluecolour: Alright then.

I slipped quietly out of bed and out of my panties. I pulled my t-shirt off over my head. I picked up the laptop and held it open as I tip-toed out of the room and down the stairs, the screen illuminating my breasts and neck and shoulders in a faint, blue-white, up-lit glow. Jade’s room was in darkness. I eased open the door a foot and slid in through the gap.

I saw her in the edge of my vision, sitting silently on one side of her bed, her upper body bathed in its own liquid crystal glow. I sat next to her, our shoulders briefly touching.

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Jayde Bluecolour: Hello.

Boxie Cardboard: Hi :) On both of our laptop screens I saw that Groove had turned Jade’s avatar around so that she was from the waist lying face-down on her bed. Groove was on his knees and entering her from behind.

Boxie Cardboard: That looks painful on the knees for both of you.

Jayde Bluecolour: More so for him than for me.

Jayde Bluecolour: Except he likes to thumb my anus from that position, so don’t feel too badly for him.

Boxie Cardboard: He must get a pretty good view from there.

Jayde Bluecolour: Precisely.

The room was silent, punctuated only by the tapping out of our messages to each other. I couldn’t tell if Jade was looking at my screen and watching the formation of my messages as I wrote them. It gave me a slight thrill to think that she might be; it made me feel even more naked, that something else which was usually hidden could now be seen by her. I glanced across at her screen and noticed something interesting. Her communication panel was open, but only with my conversation in it. There was no tab there for Groove. Did that mean that she and he were 158

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not actually messaging each other? No. I saw at the bottom-right of her viewer window a thin black bar with his name on it: she had popped his conversation out of the communications panel into its own window and then moved it off screen so that only its title bar could be seen. Obviously, she didn’t want me to be able to read it. She might just have been protecting his privacy according to the SL terms and conditions, though.

I felt hot, flushed; my skin felt prickly. I felt myself becoming wet. I took a breath, knowing that she would hear it. Lust pulled at my hand, wanting me to follow. My eyes wanted badly to explore her. My tongue wanted badly to explore her. I closed my eyes for a moment. I felt the warmth from her body all the way down my left side. I opened my eyes and looked for something in the room to focus on, but everything around us was black. There was only us and the bed and the laptops.

Jayde Bluecolour: I can feel your struggle.

Jayde Bluecolour: My God, it turns me on.

Jayde Bluecolour: You want so badly to look at me, to touch me, to taste me.

Boxie Cardboard: Yes. Jayde Bluecolour: And this - me talking to you about it - it only makes it worse, right?

Boxie Cardboard: Yes. Jayde Bluecolour: But darling, as I deprive your senses of all that they want, am I not also stimulating 159

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them?

Boxie Cardboard: Yes you are.

Jayde Bluecolour: Like blindfolding you and teasing with the touch of a feather.

Jayde Bluecolour: Driving you wild just by blowing across your skin.

Involuntarily, I rubbed my feet together and clenched my toes. I leaned back my head for a moment and took another long, low breath. I let it out slowly through my mouth. My right hand strayed from the keyboard to my hip. I ran my thumb along the bone.

I heard her typing again and looked back down at my screen, but this time the message wasn’t for me.

She had pulled Groove’s window back onto the screen, and was typing into his box. The distraction reeled my thinking mind back in for a moment.

Boxie Cardboard: Why did your mood change so suddenly earlier when you started talking to Groove?

Jayde Bluecolour: Oh, I just didn’t know what he wanted.

Jayde Bluecolour: I wish he’d just told me from the start it was only sex.

That raised more questions than it answered.

Boxie Cardboard: ‘Only’ sex?

Jayde Bluecolour: Darling, you must have faked orgasms in your life.

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Jayde Bluecolour: It really can’t come as a surprise to you that that’s so much easier in SL, can it?

Boxie Cardboard: It doesn’t come as a surprise, I suppose…

Boxie Cardboard: But if you don’t want it, why have sex in the first place?

Boxie Cardboard: It’s easier to fake an orgasm, but it’s also easier to just say no, surely?

Boxie Cardboard: Or failing that fake a power cut or a dropped connection or say that your RL lover has just announced that he wants to fuck you.

Jayde Bluecolour: All of those things are true.

Jayde Bluecolour: But you can’t do that forever without patterns being noticed.

Jayde Bluecolour: And some people in SL you just want to keep on side if you can.

I supposed that answered the first question. The second, of course, was to ask what it was he might have wanted if it wasn’t ‘only sex’.

But that, I decided, could wait.

Boxie Cardboard: So do you always get naked in real life when you want to fake a virtual orgasm?

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t get turned on by him a little.

Jayde Bluecolour: It’s a perfectly good way to spend an evening if I have nothing better to do.

Jayde Bluecolour: I like his photographs.

Jayde Bluecolour: I like his avatar.

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Jayde Bluecolour: I like watching my avatar being fucked by his.

Jayde Bluecolour: I like knowing he’s turned on.

Jayde Bluecolour: I like knowing he’s about to cum.

Jayde Bluecolour: Incidentally, he’s about to cum.

I couldn’t help myself; my eyes slid to her screen and the separate IM window. She typed to him. I had noticed that her nail varnish was black before, but I hadn’t noticed just how perfect it was. It was hypnotic to watch her fingers moving. She typed, “Come on baby, let it go,” and “fill me with your cum,” and “I want it baby, all of it,” and “That’s right, baby, yesssss,” and “Oooooh God mmmmm,” and “Holy fuck I’m shaking,” and “Me too baby, me too,” and “Yeah it’s late for me as well,” and “I’m gonna sleep well with your cum warming my belly,” and “Goodnight baby mwuh!”

Boxie Cardboard: You are a machine.

Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t be too hard on me.

Jayde Bluecolour: I just gave him a great ejaculation and thereby reduced his blood pressure, improved the quality of his sleep, increased his stress resilience and reduced the likelihood of him getting prostate cancer. And made him feel happy.

Jayde Bluecolour: If I was a drug made by a pharmaceutical company I’d cost a fucking fortune.

Boxie Cardboard laughs.

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Groove had stood up and put his clothes back on.

Before he left, he came to his side of the window I was standing at. He spoke to me in chat so Jade could hear.

Groove Dazy: Enjoy the show?

Boxie Cardboard: Mhm Yes I did.

Groove Dazy: Good. Next time perhaps I’ll do you and let Bluecolour watch.

Boxie Cardboard: That sounds like fun.

Groove Dazy: It will be.

And then he was gone, vanished in a swirl of orange particles. I decided what I was going to do with Groove Dazy; it would probably, I reflected, excite him far more than anything I’d seen happening in Jade’s skybox that night.

Jayde Bluecolour: Now then.

Jayde Bluecolour: Come inside.

Jayde Bluecolour: You and I have unfinished business.

It didn’t last for long because the idea of it was what most turned me on and whenever my mind turned back upon that idea it had an immediate effect on my body. I could reproduce the things we said to each other, except they’d be just words in isolation, but not the sort of isolation that existed in that room, not the 163

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isolation of minds physically together but forbidden from touching. We did not say a word to each other.

We did not touch each other. We did not look at each other’s bodies or into each other’s eyes. I could list the things our avatars did, but these things were just animations, just illustrations, just shared viewing if you weren’t in that physical proximity we had that was both close and impossibly distant. In one respect, nothing very extraordinary happened: two women lay next to each other and masturbated; but I tell you, no-one has ever quite been in my head like that.

Jayde Bluecolour: Good.

Jayde Bluecolour: I’m so glad we resisted each other.

Boxie Cardboard: But did we, though?

Boxie Cardboard: I’m not entirely sure what it is we’ve just done.

Boxie Cardboard: I can’t get my head around it.

Boxie Cardboard: Have we just done something that no-one’s ever done before?

Jayde Bluecolour: Of course not.

Jayde Bluecolour: Nothing is truly new.

Jayde Bluecolour: And human beings have been discovering new ways of having sex with each other ever since communication was invented.

Boxie Cardboard: You’re deep.

Jayde Bluecolour: You’re deeper Jayde Bluecolour: Don’t think you have me fooled, Boxie Cardboard.

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Jayde Bluecolour: Your knowledge of Second Life conventions way exceeds the few days you’ve been in here.

Jayde Bluecolour: And what I find most curious about your attempt to hide your previous SL existence, is that you could clearly have done that a great deal more competently that you’ve chosen to.

I realised she was right. I really hadn’t tried very hard to disguise my SL knowledge.

Boxie Cardboard: Oh how disappointing.

Jayde Bluecolour: That I’ve found you out?

Boxie Cardboard: That you can’t work out why I let you.

Jayde Bluecolour: Ah. Interesting.

Boxie Cardboard: FYI you haven’t found me out.

Boxie Cardboard: You haven’t found me out even one per cent.

I bid her goodnight and slipped out of the room, then crept upstairs to Jesse’s room, where I put back on my bedclothes. Before I logged out, I noticed that she had written more for me.

Jayde Bluecolour: A shame you left.

Jayde Bluecolour: I wanted you to sleep with me.

Jayde Bluecolour: I liked the idea of you having to make it back upstairs naked in the morning.

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have touched each other in our sleep.

Jayde Bluecolour: And? Boxie Cardboard: Isn’t that against the rules?

Jayde Bluecolour: Rules?

Jayde Bluecolour: What rules?

Jesse was sleeping soundly in the middle of the bed, taking up the space I had vacated. I did think about going back downstairs for a moment, but my brain had had enough and I wanted space to sleep in. I climbed into the sleeping bag and zipped myself up.

I shut the laptop down.

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THE STORY OF ARLENE CARPENTER

8 “You want to do what?” Jesse asked me.

I spun the laptop around to face him. He scrolled through the list of Groove Dazy’s articles on me.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“They’re all about me.”

“I can see that.”

“He’s trying to piece everything together.”

“And that’s a good thing because…?”

“Jesse, this isn’t about my intelligence work. I’m not about to start blabbing about all the jobs I’ve been doing for Fred.”

He chewed his toast and examined me carefully.

“So what is it about?”

“A chance to tell my story. A chance to have it documented what it was I did and why, and what I did with Step over the last two years.”

“With Peeking,” he corrected. “I still don’t get how you can call that guy by the same name as the guy you killed.”

“That was who he was to me.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “then you went from killing the guy to him being your best friend. That’s a hell of a change of attitude.”

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“They were two sides of what to me was the same person, and you’re deliberately dragging me away from the subject of the conversation.”

“I am, yes.”

“My story isn’t out there, Jesse; not accurately, it’s not. There are fragments of it here and there, but noone really knows. Don’t I have a right to have my say?”

He got up slowly and went to the toaster. He unspun the bread bag and pulled out two white slices. “Forgive me for sounding harsh,” he said, as he dropped them in and pressed down the lever with a screech, “but I can’t really think of a nicer way of putting this: so what that nobody knows? Who cares that nobody knows? A hundred and fifty thousand people die on the planet every day and most of their stories will never be known: what makes yours so special?”

“Nobody has to read it if they don’t want to,” I told him. “And I’m not saying mine is ‘special.’ But it is a story that people do write about, and when they do they get it wrong.”

“So your objective is education?”

“Possibly.”

“About?”

“About… Second Life addiction.”

He leaned against the counter and folded his arms.

“If that means so much to you,” he said, “why not turn yourself in and tell your story in court?”

“You’re being a pig.”

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“I’m trying to understand why you want to put yourself at risk like this. You’re talking about this like you’re some notorious serial killer that films have been made on and books written about.”

“It’s not just about me, it’s about all those guys that Step and I took down.”

“It sounds to me like someone’s after some hero worship.”

“I don’t care what people think of me, Jesse,” I told him. “I just want the story to be accurate.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but the instant I hear someone say that they don’t care what people think about them I automatically assume the exact opposite.”

“Fuck you!”

“And again, I say - so what?”

“Well then I guess what makes my story special is I have a guy who happens to want to write it.”

“And his motives for this are?”

“Probably to achieve fame and recognition for himself, of course. I’m not an idiot. It just so happens that that objective doesn’t run counter to mine.”

He sighed. “Joy,” he said, “you start helping people to join up some of these dots and you don’t know where it’ll lead. It might not be something you can control as well as you think you can.”

“These dots are going to get joined up anyway you said it yourself, it’s only a matter of time.”

“We know they’ll link you to the crime scene in Medway,” he said. “We don’t yet know that they’ll 171

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link the two Thursdays.”

“You outlined for me the exact process they’ll inevitably follow to do that!”

“But why give them a helping hand? Can’t you just take a day to reconsider this?”

The toast popped up. I waited for him to butter it.

“You make it sound like I’m trying to sell my story to the highest bidder,” I said quietly, when he sat down.

“I just want to set a few facts straight.”

“You’re risking everything. I don’t understand what the rush is, You could do this in a week’s time or a month or a year. Any of those would be preferable to now.”

“But I want to do it now.”

He sighed. “Didn’t you tell me that when you went to Portsmouth that time to meet up with what’sher-name that you had a nagging doubt you wish you’d listened to?”

“Her name is Inch. And so what?”

“So maybe you should learn from that experience to stop and think things over before rushing into something.”

“I’m not meeting anyone in person. Of course, I’m taking precautions. I’m going to log on some place well away from here.”

“Where?”

“I’ll head out of the city and find a wireless network somewhere. Maybe a motorway service station to make them think I have a car. I’ll access it via the service road.”

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“So you’re assuming that he’s going to report you?

Well that’s something, at least. But motorway service stations are crawling with CCTV cameras. They won’t assume you’re in a car if they don’t see you getting into or out of one.”

“Perhaps just a country pub somewhere, then.”

“That’s a better idea, but how are you going to get there? If you get the bus to some village you’ll be spotted on the bus station footage. They’ll trace it all back.”

“How many bus stations is that?” I asked, “over how many hours?”

“You’re about to hit the news for the third time, and none of those times have been about you getting arrested. It’s going to be a major embarrassment for the police. They’re going to start spending serious money on tracking you.”

“Then I’ll stay within the city,” I said. “I’ll keep within the crowds.”

“If I had to do it,” he said, “that’s what I’d do.

Tube it, but don’t take a direct line; make at least two changes. Keep your head down. Take at least one change of headwear.”

A fugitive can walk around London more or less as much as he or she wants so long as they don’t get spotted. By that I mean that there are cameras everywhere, but a camera by itself can’t recognise you. Not yet. Facial recognition technology is getting 173

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so good that one day in the not-too-distant future our movements will be tracked live by computer systems, not because we use our credit cards or because our phones identify us, but just by watching us walk on by; but that day is not here yet. For the moment, a camera can see but not know you. You can walk right past it and nothing will happen unless a human being specifically looking for you just happens to see you doing that; with over four million CCTV cameras in the UK, it’s unlikely a human being that knows you will be watching the specific camera you walk past.

But if you do get spotted - even once - then everything can unravel. I realised when I was standing in Christopher Peeking’s flat that I had effectively been spotted, or rather that I would be once the dead body had been found and they looked at mobile phone data: it would be worked out that that Emma Kline had stood in that spot; the instant that this happened, my new identity would be over.

To evade capture, you have to think about where you can be seen and where you can’t be seen, and you have to keep in mind at all times how it is that you that we all - leak information. Once a spotting takes place, all your pursuers have to do is locate you on a nearby camera. They don’t even have to see you live.

They might spend hours trawling through all that footage, but once they’ve found you on one camera then they’ll be able to track you as you move from the view of one to the view of the next. Outside of London, it’s often straightforward enough to find no174

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coverage spots between cameras, though it’s by no means easy (when was the last time you stood still and turned through three hundred and sixty degrees and noted down all the cameras you can see within a hundred metres of you?). Inside the M25, however, there are close on half a million surveillance cameras watching an area of land just over six hundred square miles in size; to put it another way, over 800 cameras on average watching every square mile of Greater London. Once the invisible eye sees you, it will follow you wherever you go. You cannot afford to be seen by it. Not once.

Any phone associated with you, therefore, has to be ditched. When I was running from the police in Portsmouth I hid on a train in the station, out of sight of the cameras though I knew they would have spotted me getting on. I changed my appearance whilst on the train - nothing more than a change of clothes and a hat, but enough to look different from a camera view - and got off from a different door into a crowd of waiting passengers; crucially, I left my phone turned on and tucked down the back of a seat, and sure enough the press reported that the police thought I’d taken the train north out of the city (rather than got on a hovercraft to take me across the Solent to the Isle of Wight). Your phone will betray you the instant it gets given the chance and you get a new one the instant you find yourself on the run. Don’t even use a different sim card in the handset, because the hardware on smartphones will give you away. If 175

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you’re going to do that then use an old presmartphone handset like I do. But be careful who you call. One of the first things surveillance officers will do is draw up a network of known contacts you might phone and monitor all their numbers. When they see that someone they’re keeping an eye on has received a call from you then they have your new number and they can triangulate its position, and pretty soon they’ll have narrowed down the number of cameras they need to look at the footage from to a much more manageable number. And once the invisible eye sees you, it will follow you wherever you go.

So here was the problem. Assuming that Dazy would report me, I was about to get myself spotted.

As soon as I got seen, my movements to that location and from it would be tracked. I had to find a way of breaking the path that went from camera to camera so that when they followed my footsteps back they’d find that I’d just magically appeared and when they followed them forward they’d find that I was there one moment and gone the next. I left the house, my Nokia turned off and resting next to the laptop in my rucksack. Jesse wanted me to stay in London, but I wasn’t comfortable with that. I walked to Waterloo in full view of all the CCTV cameras and got on the next train to Basingstoke. I needed a swell of people and I found it in a bus queue outside the station. I slipped between the front of one bus and the back of the other, and in one movement pulled off my head the 176

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hijab I’d created from one of the scarves Jesse had bought me.

I also took off my white blouse; underneath, I was wearing a black top that had a high neck but no sleeves. Blouse and scarf got stuffed into the rucksack, which I had been wearing beneath the blouse. And thus, a new person appeared.

Even so, I found a route to walk that didn’t look like it had any cameras looking at it, though you never can be absolutely certain. I ended up in a coffee shop, where I bought a large cappuccino and sat in the corner with my laptop. I created a new SL account and logged in.

I pulled up Groove Dazy’s profile and opened an IM box with him. I hoped he was online. If he wasn’t, I’d have to do this by notecard and repeat this whole thing on another day.

But, as it happened, I got lucky.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Hello Groove Groove Dazy: Sorry, I’m busy right now doing, well, stuff I guess. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Probably.

TheDayAfterWednesday: That’s a shame.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I thought you might like to speak to me.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I read all your articles about me.

A short pause. Then:

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Groove Dazy: Ah, right, I see.

Groove Dazy: ‘The day after Wednesday’ Thursday.

Groove Dazy: I’m supposed to think you’re Thursday.

Groove Dazy: As in Definitely Thursday.

Groove Dazy: As in Emma Kline.

Groove Dazy: Is that right?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I’m guessing from that you’re going to assume that I’m not.

Groove Dazy: You guess correctly. Goodbye.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You really want to make that your default response?

TheDayAfterWednesday: You’re one hundred percent certain that I wouldn’t contact you?

TheDayAfterWednesday: So certain that you’re prepared to close down immediately a conversation without doing any checking whatsoever that you’re right in your assumption?

Groove Dazy: One more line from you and I mute you, ok?

Arrogant prick. I typed my final line into notepad first and then pasted it in so that he wouldn’t see ‘TheDayAfterWednesday is typing’ in the chat window and mute me before I had the chance to finish writing it out.

TheDayAfterWednesday: In the next few days I will be on the news in connection with another 178

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murder. You may send me your apology as an IM and *if* I come back in on this account and receive your message, you might have a second chance. You might like to ask yourself why this account is one day old. Goodbye.

I sat back. I drank from my coffee. A minute went by. I took out of my bag the electronic cigarette Jesse had bought me and fiddled with it. He wanted me to quit. These things were meant to be indistinguishable from smoking, he told me. I found the experience about as similar to smoking as was drinking earl grey tea, but I’d promised him I’d persevere.

I started thinking about how and when I’d head back to London. If Groove never reported this incident to the police, there was no need to worry about changing my appearance, but it didn’t matter if he didn’t do it this moment; the footage from inside the coffee shop would probably be kept for a week at least, and even if it wasn’t there were probably cameras outside pointing up and down the precinct with a view of the café, and the footage from those would definitely be kept for a month or more. They’d start from the date stamp of my first IM to Groove.

They would know I’d been in that particular coffee shop, I should add, because they likely had an agreement with Linden that whenever someone they thought was me went online then Linden would provide them with the IP address of that account.

That would lead them to the coffee shop and the best 179

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camera to look at, and they would start from the time of the message and gradually work their way backwards until they saw someone who looked like me entering. If I could have been certain that there was no camera in the shop, I wouldn’t have bothered to remove the hijab. I definitely couldn’t see any, but how was it ever possible to be certain of that beyond a doubt, in an age where a camera could be concealed in a hole that looked from three feet away to be a screwhead?

Groove Dazy: Ok. Groove Dazy: You have my attention.

Groove Dazy: Though not yet my belief.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Well that’s something.

Groove Dazy: Where are you?

TheDayAfterWednesday: On the latest version of the beginners’ island.

Groove Dazy: Alright, then.

Groove Dazy: I’ll teleport you.

Groove Dazy: Give me a moment.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Ok. Of course, there was an additional risk. Dazy could be on the phone right now. He could be talking to the police and telling them he was in communication right this moment with someone claiming to be suspected murderer Emma Kline. “I’ve no idea if she or he’s for real, but I thought I ought to ring it in.”

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us a favour? Can you keep her talking for as long as possible? The more time we have, the easier it’ll be to pinpoint her location and get someone out to her.”

How long would that process take? If I was to assume that exactly this was going on, how much time could I let pass before I had to leave? It was just gone eleven forty in the morning, making it just gone three forty in the morning in San Francisco, where Linden HQ was located. Would they have someone on duty during the night? Of course they would.

Would it be someone with the authority to give the police what they wanted? I had to assume so. I reasoned fifteen minutes for the person taking Dazy’s call to get the information to the officers working on the case, ten minutes for phoning Linden and getting the IP. Resolving that to an internet provider would take - what? - one minute? Then they’d contact the provider and resolve it further to an address - this coffee shop. The time it took them to do that would depend on the efficiency of the provider’s system, and if my experience of talking to internet providers was anything to go by, that was a twenty minute job at least - but let’s say they bypassed somehow all of the being passed from person to person and having to repeat the same story every god-damned time and did it in five. That all came to thirty-one minutes.

Half an hour before they had an address to get to the nearest police car. I decided to assume they would do it even faster and reduced this estimate to twenty minutes. And the clock was already ticking. Four 181

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minutes had already gone by since the moment I’d sent the long IM that had clearly convinced him to continue the conversation. Fifteen minutes, then, before I had to leave. I set a countdown timer on my phone. Once it got to fifteen minutes, I’d make a decision as to whether I was going to stay and talk or whether I was going to cut my losses and get the hell out of there.

The teleport request arrived and I took it.

I materialised in the office of the Step Stransky, Second Life Detective Agency.

Groove Dazy: Welcome.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Hello.

Groove Dazy: Recognise this place?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Of course I do.

TheDayAfterWednesday: This is my old office.

Groove Dazy: Well, this is the office of the late Step Stransky and his partner Definitely Thursday.

Groove Dazy: A going concern up until a couple of years ago.

Groove Dazy: Now deserted.

Groove Dazy: When was the last time you visited?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I don’t visit.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I assume it’s under some sort of observation.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I don’t want any avatar of mine to be on a list of people for the police to check out.

Groove Dazy: Well, you’re here now.

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TheDayAfterWednesday: But you must surely understand that I’m not talking to you now from my home in RL. Groove Dazy: Hence the one day old avatar.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Exactly.

He was sitting at the desk that Stransky always used to sit at. It was also the seat I had adopted as mine once Stransky was gone and I was the sole remaining proprietor of the agency. In fact, I had more experience of me sitting in that seat than I did of it belonging to him. Even so, it was still ‘his spot’.

I looked around the rooms. I hadn’t changed them a great deal in the years between Stransky’s death and my involuntary departure from the business, so it was still the same mix of blocky prim furniture with a few sculptie embellishments here and there.

We’d designed the place to look as close as possible to what one imagined a PI office would look like. Filing cabinets. Blinds over the windows. A waiting area with black and white tiles and a hatstand, and a secretary’s desk that, once or twice, Inch had sat at. A frosted glass window.

Groove Dazy: Nice place.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Thanks.

Groove Dazy: You put it together?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I helped.

Groove Dazy: From what I can make out, everything here belongs - belonged - to Stransky.

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TheDayAfterWednesday: He bought the stuff; I arranged it.

TheDayAfterWednesday: He gave me editing rights.

TheDayAfterWednesday: And, actually, the filing cabinet is something I made.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You’ll see him listed as the owner, but me listed as the creator.

Groove Dazy smiles.

Groove Dazy: Yes I do.

Groove Dazy: That’s why I made that comment.

Groove Dazy: Though that doesn’t prove to me that you are who you say you are, only that you’re able to right-click on stuff.

Groove Dazy: You mentioned earlier something about you about to be back in the news…

Groove Dazy: In connection with another murder.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Yes. Groove Dazy: Well would you care to elaborate?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Not especially.

TheDayAfterWednesday: The murder has already been reported on.

TheDayAfterWednesday: My connection has not yet been mentioned.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I don’t know why.

Groove Dazy: You’ll forgive me for asking, but…

Groove Dazy: Are you the person who committed the murder?

TheDayAfterWednesday: No. Groove Dazy: You witnessed it?

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TheDayAfterWednesday: No. TheDayAfterWednesday: I got there a few minutes after it had taken place.

Groove Dazy: So who was the victim?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Step Stransky.

Groove Dazy: I mean of this new murder.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I know who you mean.

TheDayAfterWednesday: It was Step Stransky.

Groove Dazy: I don’t understand.

Groove Dazy: Step Stransky was murdered seven years ago.

Groove Dazy: By, well, you.

Groove Dazy: If you are who you say you are.

TheDayAfterWednesday: There were two people sharing the Step Stransky account.

TheDayAfterWednesday: John-Paul Barnaby was only one of them.

Groove Dazy: What?!

Groove Dazy: Ok, now you have my attention.

My phone started beeping. The alarm. The fifteen minutes were up already. Time flies in the metaverse.

I sighed. I looked out of the window. Everything seemed ordinary and calm, but what if that was exactly as it was supposed to appear? What if police officers right this moment were standing pressed against the walls on either side of the coffee shop front, speaking quietly into their radios and urging passing shoppers to keep behaving normally. I looked into the eyes of some of the passers by, 185

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checking for nervous quickened steps.

backward

glances

and

TheDayAfterWednesday: Well now.

TheDayAfterWednesday: My ‘safe time’ is up.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You have one minute to convince me you haven’t been in contact with the police during this conversation.

Groove Dazy: Listen, don’t be mad at me for dismissing you earlier.

Groove Dazy: I was wrong to do that, I accept that.

TheDayAfterWednesday: This has nothing to do with that.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I need to know that you haven’t contacted the police.

TheDayAfterWednesday: If you have, then the time I can safely remain where I am has expired and it’s time for me to log out and leave.

Groove Dazy: Ok ok.

Groove Dazy: I understand.

Groove Dazy: I haven’t contacted them, I promise.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Seriously? That’s what you consider ‘convincing’?

Groove Dazy: Look, why would I? Groove Dazy: I didn’t think you were the real deal; why would I contact them if I thought you were a fake?

TheDayAfterWednesday: So you’re saying you would contact them once you’re convinced I am who I say I am?

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Groove Dazy: Wait wait.

Groove Dazy: I didn’t say that.

Groove Dazy: You’re putting words in my mouth.

TheDayAfterWednesday: And you’re stalling for time.

Groove Dazy: I’m not! I promise!

Groove Dazy: I want to know what you came here to tell me.

TheDayAfterWednesday: But you have to understand.

TheDayAfterWednesday: If you DON’T tell the police and they discover that you’ve been in communication with me…

TheDayAfterWednesday: That then makes you an accessory.

Groove Dazy: Are you saying I *should* call it in?

TheDayAfterWednesday: If you decide to write something about this conversation then you’ll be advertising that you had a communication with me.

Groove Dazy: So I call it in once we’re done talking?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Listen, we probably won’t get all this done in one conversation.

TheDayAfterWednesday: If you’re up for it, I’ll meet you as many times as it takes.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I’ll use a different avatar each time, I’ll find a different place to log on from.

TheDayAfterWednesday: We can even vary the time of day, if you want.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Then, when we’re 187

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finished, you can report just the last contact.

TheDayAfterWednesday: When they do their checking, they’ll see only one interaction.

TheDayAfterWednesday: They’ll conclude that you informed them as soon as you were able to.

Groove Dazy: Ok. Groove Dazy: That sounds reasonable.

Again I looked out of the window and wondered if things were going on beyond my field of view.

Everything he was saying could easily be a ploy just to get me to stay online for as long as possible, to buy the police those extra few minutes they needed to get their pieces into place. Believing that his primary motivation would be to get his story was a huge act of faith on my part. These might be my last few minutes of freedom. Any moment now, officers might appear in a blur of black, streaming from left and right and into the building. Well, it probably wouldn’t be that dramatic. They knew that firearms weren’t my style.

All they’d have to do would be to enter the café calmly, Taser at the ready just in case there was any trouble: two of them through the main entrance and probably a couple more officers entering through the kitchen at the back in case I decided to try and make a run for it. They were right, though; I would go quietly. I didn’t see any point in running. I knew there would be no hope for me to outwit them once they had their eyes on me, and the last thing I wanted was for any officers or customers or café staff to get 188

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hurt. They’d approach, I’d make eye contact, they’d ask if I was Emma Kline, I’d nod and hold out my wrists, they’d read me my rights and ask if I understood and I would say, “Yes”. They’d cuff me.

They’d lead me out of the café, and on the way I’d make eye contact with as many of the other customers pretending not to watch as possible, so that when they went home to their families and told them the story of their day, they’d have an extra slice of drama to add to the end of their tale: “She looked directly at me as they took her out to the car. Looked at me, I tell you. She stared right into my eyes. It was like looking into the very soul of evil.” People should have exciting stories to tell. Once upon a time, telling stories got you noticed and secured you your position in the group. Once upon a time, telling stories helped you to belong.

Did I really want to trust this guy? What choice, though, did I have if I wanted to go through with this? The risks had been clear to me from the onset.

Perhaps Jesse had been right. Perhaps I should have listened to my fears.

Groove Dazy: Are we good, then?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I’m taking a huge risk in talking to you.

Groove Dazy: Yes, you are.

Groove Dazy: But there’s nothing really that I can say definitively that would convince you I can be trusted, is there?

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TheDayAfterWednesday: Not really, no.

Groove Dazy: If there are more days of talking ahead, then perhaps I should invest a little time right now in telling you about me.

Groove Dazy: Potentially, that might ease some of your concerns.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Fair enough.

Groove Dazy: You know, I often come to this place.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I know. You said in your articles.

Groove Dazy: It’s strange, though, isn’t it?

Groove Dazy: To think of this as a physical place.

Groove Dazy: To come here as though making tactile contact in some way brings you closer to the events that took place here, like going to a historic building in real life or a museum.

Groove Dazy: As though tactile contact is something that happens at all.

Groove Dazy: It’s all an illusion, and yet it isn’t.

Groove Dazy: It isn’t because it really does inspire in just the way that I want it to.

Groove Dazy: It achieves the exact effect.

Groove Dazy: I *feel* closer to what once happened here.

Groove Dazy: And that makes it easier for me to think about it and to write about it.

Groove Dazy: The crazy thing is, if this was an exact copy of your office located somewhere else in Second Life then it wouldn’t have the same effect at all.

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Groove Dazy: I really mean that.

Groove Dazy: It makes no sense whatsoever if you consider that being able to see or touch or smell something really are the triggers that unlock thoughts.

Groove Dazy: The only sense you can make of it is that *belief* creates new thinking.

Groove Dazy: Well anyway, most of the articles I’ve written about you I’ve done whilst sitting at this exact spot.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Perhaps this is now your office more than it ever was mine.

Groove Dazy: Perhaps so.

Groove Dazy: But you’re not the only story I’m interested in.

Groove Dazy: I research other people. I visit other places.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Including other Second Life murderers?

Groove Dazy: Of course!

Groove Dazy: Surely you didn’t think you were the only one?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I must admit, I never really thought all that much about it.

TheDayAfterWednesday: And I’ll be honest, the only stories on your site that I read in depth were your articles about me.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I only discovered your site very recently.

Groove Dazy nods.

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Groove Dazy: Writing about SL rather than just dressing up in a pretty outfit and taking some selfies is something of a niche area.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Anything these days that requires more effort than looking at a picture or a six second video is niche.

Groove Dazy: Yes, indeed.

Groove Dazy: Well, it won’t always be that way.

Groove Dazy: Virtual reality and virtual worlds will continue in the periphery of mainstream entertainment for a while yet, and then one day it’ll suddenly be the thing that everyone’s talking about.

Groove Dazy: And *then* knowledge about it all will be a commodity.

TheDayAfterWednesday: But if VR does become mainstream, it’s unlikely to be through SL. Groove Dazy: I agree.

TheDayAfterWednesday: So what value will knowledge about SL stuff have when SL isn’t the thing that everyone’s talking about?

Groove Dazy: The value will come from the fact that the SL ‘stuff’ that I know about is actually SL *people*.

Groove Dazy: When these new worlds happen, when they launch, when they start upon the business of attracting people to them, who do you think will be the people who get things going in them?

Groove Dazy: I mean, who will be the power users? Who will be the residents who start straight away opening stores and creating venues and 192

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experiences?

Groove Dazy: It won’t be the people who’ve been ignoring and dismissing SL all these years, and who now so suddenly are pulled into it all.

Groove Dazy: What do they know about the creation of immersive experience?

Groove Dazy: No. It will be the pioneers of Second Life who become the pioneers of the next generation of virtual worlds.

Groove Dazy: You need to think about SL as less a testing bed for future technology and more a training ground for future virtual entrepreneurs.

Groove Dazy: Know who the movers are here and you know who the first movers will be when it all starts properly kicking off.

Groove Dazy: But we can talk more about that later.

Groove Dazy: Second life murderers: yes there are a few.

Groove Dazy: None of them were SL detectives.

Groove Dazy: But each of them are interesting in their own way.

Groove Dazy: I collect their stories.

Groove Dazy: Some of them are complex, some of them less so.

Groove Dazy: Some of them have preserved locations just like this place.

Groove Dazy: Would you like to see some of them?

TheDayAfterWednesday: I would, yes.

Groove Dazy: Excellent.

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Groove Dazy: A brief murder tour of SL. Groove Dazy: Let’s see now… where to begin.

Groove Dazy: Well, I’d say Arlene Carpenter, but you must have already heard about her.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Nope.

Groove Dazy: Seriously?

TheDayAfterWednesday: The name doesn’t even ring a bell.

Groove Dazy: Then stay right here.

Groove Dazy: I’ll send you a tp.

He stood up from behind Step’s/my/his desk and promptly disappeared in a twirl of orange sparkles. I looked at the old chair. It was a swivel chair, metal and leather, the highest prim object in the premises as I recalled. I sat in the chair and thought about all the conversations I’d had in it with prospective clients on the other side of the desk. I’d had sex in it four times, each one of them as a man, each one of them with a client. To access those options, you had to click one of the wheels at the bottom. It was a modification I made almost as soon as he’d given me those editing rights. I never told him about it.

The teleport offer came through. I stood up from that desk of a thousand memories and took it, materialising in a very old house.

194

9 When I say old, I mean Second Life old; I mean that everything was made from prims and everything was textured with one of the standard textures you could pick up in the pack at Harbinger’s Haven back in 2006. Architecturally, it was a postmodern structure of white walls and right-angles and glass. The floor was tiled in huge squares that you could sit down on cross-legged and still not touch the sides. That was something I hated about old SL: the scale of everything was always wrong. The buildings were huge; the furniture was enormous, but still looked shrunken next to the height of the ceilings and the distance between any two walls; the avatars were ridiculously large and repeating textures were enormous. Why? because the floors and walls were so big that if you made the tiles or the bricks or the floorboards the right size relative to your avatar then you got way too many instances of the repetition and the overall pattern looked inorganic. Large floor tiles were to early SL as linoleum and woodchip wallpaper were to 1970s interior design.

I materialised in the middle of the living room.

Dazy was sitting at the left end of a red sofa that was 195

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so large his shoes only just made it over the edge.

Groove Dazy: Welcome.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Thanks.

Groove Dazy: Have a seat.

I sat at the other end of the sofa.

Groove Dazy: So this is the home of the first ever SL murderer, Sheizher Redgrave/Phoenix.

Groove Dazy: Well, I’m pretty sure she was the first.

Groove Dazy: June 2005.

Groove Dazy: It’s always possible there were others before her that didn’t get found out.

Groove Dazy: In real life, she was Arlene Carpenter. She was forty-one at the time.

Groove Dazy: When her avatar was here, her physical self was in a house on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Who did she kill?

Groove Dazy: Her husband.

Groove Dazy: Arlene’s tale is a tragic one, really.

Groove Dazy: She was a thirty-five stone woman at the time, mostly stuck indoors at home.

Groove Dazy: It wasn’t that she was unable to go outside the house; she could walk for a good ten minutes or more so long as she did so at a sensible pace.

Groove Dazy: But she’d become paranoid that 196

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people were looking at her, judging her, condemning her obesity in their minds.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t work. Her last job had been in a fast food outlet nearly ten years earlier when she’d been in her early thirties.

Groove Dazy: Back then she’d been over 150 pounds lighter and in the habit of getting up and driving herself into work. She was even considering applying for one of the duty manager positions that had just opened up.

Groove Dazy: But one day she was just coming out of the bathroom there and she became dizzy and stumbled, and broke her ankle under her own body weight and then her arm too as she hit the ground.

Groove Dazy: It took months for the ankle fracture to heal, during which time she fell out of the routine of work and became dependent on her carer, a guy called Frank Eastman.

Groove Dazy: The two of them married about nine months after the accident.

Groove Dazy: It was less a whirlwind romance and more Frank spotting an opportunity.

Groove Dazy: Arlene had taken her employer to court for damages over the accident and won a few hundred thousand dollars in compensation.

Groove Dazy: The accident happened when she was coming out of the staff toilet, where a faulty starter motor on a fluorescent tube had made the light flicker.

Groove Dazy: Just a few days earlier, a different 197

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member of staff had fainted as she came out, claiming that the flicker was the reason.

Groove Dazy: Someone had been there to catch her. Arlene, frankly - even then - was not such an easy catch.

Groove Dazy: But the employees had asked the store manager to get that light sorted out and he’d ignored it - or, at least, he hadn’t done anything about it by the time Arlene had her fall.

Groove Dazy: So Arlene claimed in court that it was the flicker that had made her dizzy and that was why she had fallen.

Groove Dazy: She burned her bridges with her employer well and truly - and probably many other firms in the area by word of mouth and references but she won the case. Arlene came into money, and plenty of it.

Groove Dazy: Suddenly, she had male suitors.

Groove Dazy: But what she lost as a result of the accident was arguably a great deal more valuable than anything she gained.

Groove Dazy: She lost her independence.

Groove Dazy: Over the next few years, Frank Eastman made his new wife completely reliant on him.

Groove Dazy: He washed her, he washed her clothing, he prepared her meals, he kept the house clean. Well, reasonably clean.

Groove Dazy: Instead of encouraging her to reduce her calorie intake and get exercise, he fed her more 198

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and more candy, more and more fat.

Groove Dazy: And when they went out for a walk he’d tut at comments he claimed to hear other people make about Arlene’s weight, tell her they had no right to speak about her like that, as though she was a pig in a sty.

Groove Dazy: Comments that Arlene herself never heard.

Groove Dazy: Make no mistake, Ms Thursday, Frank Eastman knew exactly what he was doing.

Groove Dazy: It was him who had encouraged Arlene to sue her employers in the first place, once he learned how she’d had her accident.

Groove Dazy: He was a care support assistant on minimum wage.

Groove Dazy: Once he and Arlene got married, he registered as her full-time carer.

Groove Dazy: Now before the accident, Arlene had been single and lonely, but she’d had a routine, she was self-sufficient, she’d had colleagues who she sometimes went out with to the movies or for a meal.

Groove Dazy: Basically, she’d been ok.

Groove Dazy: Both her parents had died by the time she was working at Marty’s Burger Bar, both from heart attacks. Both were overweight themselves.

Groove Dazy: Her mother when she was Twentyfive, just from getting into a hot bath at home during the day; her father on her thirtieth birthday because he got drunk at her party and decided he could dance 199

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for ten minutes flat.

Groove Dazy: They’d been loving parents in that they adored their daughter and liked her being around.

Groove Dazy: But they never pushed her as a child, never set aspirations for her, never expected anything of her other than that she would get a job somewhere local and contribute to the bills. And even that was a stretch for them to conceive of.

Groove Dazy: She was basically their daughter and that’s all they ever wanted her to be. They never imagined her as an employee, as a lover, as a wife, as a mother.

Groove Dazy: She was a well-behaved, overweight, underachieving kid at school.

Groove Dazy: She got mediocre grades that could have been great grades if she’d only had some pressure put on her to study and think of herself as someone of academic worth - especially in math, which she had a natural aptitude for and privately (though never publicly, because it just wasn’t the sort if thing an already unpopular female would admit to) quite enjoyed.

Groove Dazy: But all the Carpenter family liked to do in the evenings as a family was stay at home and watch TV together. They preferred their daughter snuggled up between them than in her room away from them and studying.

Groove Dazy: So from high school she just got a job at a local supermarket stacking shelves.

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Groove Dazy: And she drifted from low-paid position to low-paid position from that point on, year after year after year, never thinking for a moment that she might be worth more than that, never thinking that anything else was possible.

Groove Dazy: That’s the thing that grabs my gut whenever I think about this: the sheer and utter lack of imagination. She didn’t even *dream* of things being any different.

Groove Dazy: Each day was no different from all the others before it; each day started with eggs and bacon and each day ended with a journey home to mom and dad and an evening of nachos and cable.

Groove Dazy: Her father, Tony, was an electrician; her mother, Eleanor, was a stay-at-home mom who’d worked in the accounts department for a legal company in Dallas before she got pregnant with Arlene.

Groove Dazy: She had a good head for figures.

That’s probably where her daughter got her own aptitude for number from.

Groove Dazy: But, just like her daughter, Eleanor had no idea that this meant something.

Groove Dazy: Her job at Whitworth and Hicks was just something she did to get her away from home for as many hours as possible per day until marriage and childbirth came along to secure her a new life away from her place of upbringing.

Groove Dazy: Back then, she was a skinny little thing. It was her marriage to Tony that more than 201

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doubled her weight.

Groove Dazy: As a child, she’d walk six miles to school and back each day and had a strict rota of cleaning chores to complete when she got home.

Groove Dazy: Eleanor’s mother died giving birth to her and her father was killed five years later at Okinawa, so she was brought up by her grandparents.

Groove Dazy: They weren’t exactly cruel to her not by the standards of the time, at least - but they lived by strict Christian standards.

Groove Dazy: They practiced thrift and frugality, and indulgence of any kind was remedied with the belt.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t have reason to question any of it as a small child. It was just the world that she knew.

Groove Dazy: But she entered adolescence in the early 1950s to a soundtrack of Bill Hailey and his Comets, and then Elvis Presley, and then Buddy Holly.

Groove Dazy: And the teenage culture she was just about part of broke away from the world of its elders more spectacularly, perhaps, than had done any previous generation.

Groove Dazy: By the time she was eighteen, all she wanted was to be a part of it and away from her grandparents. But her strict upbringing hadn’t made that world an easy one for her to penetrate.

Groove Dazy: About all she could do was to watch 202

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from the edges, learn to hum the tunes even if she never would be able to sing the words.

Groove Dazy: And yet she didn’t give up hope that one day someone would come along and sweep her away from everything. She clung on by her fingertips. She refused to let go.

Groove Dazy: Work at the legal firm became one escape, but then she met Anthony Carpenter.

Groove Dazy: Frankly, he was no high-grade catch.

Eleanor might have been stick thin, but he was a stocky youngster from as far back as photos of him went.

Groove Dazy: But his easy-come, easy-go attitude, his enjoyment of rock and roll, his gleaming red and white 54 Chevy and, most importantly of all, his fulltime job with Texas Power and Light was the open door she’d been waiting for.

Groove Dazy: And she bolted through it without a backward glance.

Groove Dazy: When I think about what Eleanor did, how she broke with everything she’d known so completely, I sometimes catch myself wondering how it was that she then settled into a life so conventional and unchallenging by today’s standards.

Groove Dazy: How can someone reject so energetically the set of limitations that’s framed their outlook their entire life and then fall so utterly into another? It strikes me that there are a couple of approaches to this question.

Groove Dazy: First of all, the life that she adopted 203

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must have felt to her so much more relaxed in its perspectives than the first that it must have been difficult to imagine the existence of even more progressive ways of thinking. She was standing on her very own horizon.

Groove Dazy: The Women’s Liberation Movement was still several years away, so it’s not like those discussions had started to make any sort of impact on the mainstream.

Groove Dazy: Second, it’s not in our nature to keep up the fight when it’s not needed. We relax when things get safer. We become soft and sleepy.

Groove Dazy: Eleanor just relaxed.

Groove Dazy: And then along came Arlene, and that became her life.

Groove Dazy: And for those years whilst both Eleanor and Tony were still alive, I think Arlene’s life was probably a reasonably happy one overall.

Groove Dazy: Sure, she wanted boyfriends, but food and family did a good enough job of filling that void until bedtime each day.

Groove Dazy: And she enjoyed TV. And she enjoyed something else too.

Groove Dazy: Tony had an interest in computers, and the family bought an Atari 2600 in 1978 to plug into their TV. Eleanor wasn’t keen on the thing interfering with the evening viewing schedule, but it became a favourite Saturday morning activity for Arlene and her dad to play ‘Breakout’ and ‘Adventure’ and later ‘Pac Man’.

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Groove Dazy: In the early eighties they got a Commodore 64. In the late eighties a Sega Genesis.

Groove Dazy: In 1993, Tony got hold of a second hand 486 PC which would just about run DOOM and his birthday gift to her the following year - the day that he died - was a 486 DX4 processor chip that would triple the speed of the machine.

Groove Dazy: Arlene was devastated by her father’s death, and playing some of the old games they’d enjoyed together became her way of feeling close to him once he was gone.

Groove Dazy: By the time of her accident at Marty’s a couple of years later, she’d bought for herself a Pentium desktop and was a dedicated Quake player. She also owned a Sony Playstation.

Groove Dazy: When she found herself unable to walk, video games were the perfect distraction. From Frank’s point of view when he came along, this was a great way of keeping her indoors and inactive, so she got no complaints from him.

Groove Dazy: And so she grew and grew.

Groove Dazy: Even when she was able to walk again, she spent most of her day in bed on a console or on the PC playing first person shooters.

Groove Dazy: And then the internet happened, something that few of us really foresaw.

Groove Dazy: For Arlene, the exciting thing about it was that she could go into a multi-player mode on a PC game and be playing against actual people.

Groove Dazy: It’s something we all take utterly for 205

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granted today, but at the time it was something incredible, and for Arlene - who had so little social contact with others - it was nothing short of mindblowing.

Groove Dazy: She’d been so used to computer controlled characters.

Groove Dazy: Back in the days before online gaming, one of the ways in which you managed to get through different levels was to learn the scripted movements of the computer characters.

Groove Dazy: If the German officer that shot you dead in Medal of Honor was hiding behind the tree the first time you played that level, he’d be hiding behind it the next time as well - so you’d be ready for him.

Groove Dazy: But, suddenly, all of that was gone.

In an online game, the other players were completely unpredictable. Not only would they not repeat their behaviours, but they would learn from their mistakes just as you did.

Groove Dazy: The first time she tried it, her heart was pounding with anxiety over it.

Groove Dazy: She knew it was ridiculous to feel this way. She knew that she was anonymous to all these people and she could log out of it at any time, but Arlene just wasn’t accustomed to being around others socially - particularly since the accident.

Groove Dazy: As a child, she’d had a couple of friends; nothing really special so far as friendships went, but enough to provide a buffer to her self206

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esteem from the teasing and occasional bullying she suffered from others because of her weight.

Groove Dazy: She was never anything approaching ‘popular.’

Groove Dazy: Her greatest social acceptance had been in her various jobs, where she was considered to be a good worker who picked up new skills very quickly.

Groove Dazy: People liked her there because she could be depended on. She was quiet. She was shy.

But she got the job done.

Groove Dazy: When evenings out were organised, it was unthinkable from her colleagues’ point of view that Arlene wouldn’t be included.

Groove Dazy: She always, always went along. She knew they were good for her. She appreciated these events as opportunities she’d been largely denied as a child.

Groove Dazy: Secretly, however, she dreaded them.

Groove Dazy: They were exhausting for her. They drained her utterly.

Groove Dazy: When she got home at night, she felt as though she’d worked a double shift.

Groove Dazy: She’d often then be unable to sleep properly, turning over in her mind all the things that had been said during the evening.

Groove Dazy: It’s not that she didn’t sometimes enjoy these occasions. By and large, she liked all her colleagues. She thought they were nice people. A 207

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couple of sales guys at a car dealership she worked in for a few months back in 2001 used to call her ‘The spare station wagon,’ but they were the exception rather than the rule.

Groove Dazy: The problem was that she just didn’t know what to say or do at social events.

Groove Dazy: And she was highly conscious of how she looked.

Groove Dazy: When she was at work, it was straightforward. There were jobs to be done and you got on with them. There was structure. Conversation tended to be work-related, and if it wasn’t there was only so far that it could drift.

Groove Dazy: But an evening out had no such safety net. Anyone could say anything, plus there were all those other people around - all those strangers in the public places - and there was absolutely no telling what any of them might say or do.

Groove Dazy: She dreaded, for example, any passer by calling her a name.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t dread it because it would be a hurtful comment that might upset her - she was used to dealing with those, it was fine; she dreaded it because then the people she was with might feel obliged to make some sort of response on her behalf.

Groove Dazy: And then she would have to offer some sort of response to this response, otherwise she might appear ungrateful.

Groove Dazy: But what to say? What to do? Did 208

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one hug a guy who stepped in to tell someone to fuck off on your behalf or was a ‘thank you’ sufficient? If you hugged them, might that be misconstrued as romantic interest? Would they then start avoiding you for the rest of the week?

Groove Dazy: What if that romantic interest wasn’t actually misconstrued at all? Arlene had plenty of secret crushes on some of her male colleagues, though she hid all of these with remarkable efficiency.

Groove Dazy: Her absolutely worst nightmare was to let it slip that she was interested in someone and to see him struggle to keep the revulsion from his eyes.

Groove Dazy: So the upshot of all of this was that a midweek evening out with her workmates could throw her energy levels out of sync for the rest of the week. In fact, the day that she fell at work was a day following one of these very nights out.

Groove Dazy: So then this person discovers online gaming.

Groove Dazy: At first, it feels threatening.

Groove Dazy: At first, she worries that people will criticise her for getting something wrong.

Groove Dazy: But Arlene Carpenter was actually a pretty damned skilled first person player.

Groove Dazy: And she realised that this was more or less the only personal quality that mattered in the games she played, so far as the other players were concerned.

Groove Dazy: In fact, if she stuck to the same game and the same server over a few consecutive nights, 209

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people would actually start looking for her, would actually start teaming with her.

Groove Dazy: In fact, people would actually start wanting her.

Groove Dazy: People would actually start *wanting* *her*.

Groove Dazy: Realising that, Ms Thursday, was nothing short of a moment of religious experience for Arlene.

Groove Dazy: It changed everything.

Groove Dazy: In her head, the entire world and what it represented to her became a completely different place.

Groove Dazy: She’d written it all off, before. She’d seen herself alone in her head forever. That was just the way it was going to be in her opinion and there was no point wasting time in getting distracted by this truth.

Groove Dazy: She’d loved playing games but she saw these as one sort of thing, and a sort of thing that would never do anything about this loneliness she felt and accepted.

Groove Dazy: Suddenly, that was all turned on its head.

Groove Dazy: People wouldn’t be able to see her when she appeared to them as a computer game character.

Groove Dazy: They would treat her no differently than they would anything else.

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profound a moment of revelation this was to her.

Groove Dazy: Up until that point, socialising had been about survival. Her only objective when exposure to other people became necessary was not to mess up and for them to not become angry or dismissive or rude. She had no idea how to deal with these behaviours.

Groove Dazy: The idea that one day people might *desire* her company in any way just wasn’t one that had ever occurred to her.

Groove Dazy: And, suddenly, there it was: it had happened. Just like that. No warning, no build-up; the impossible had simply become true. It was like aliens landing in her back garden, except in Arlene’s world, *that* was a more possible thing than people wanting her company.

Groove Dazy: The possibilities of all of this made her dizzy.

Groove Dazy: Almost straight away, online gaming became her thing. She’d spent a good couple of months beforehand thinking about it and psyching herself up, and by a week after she’d finally plucked up the courage to do it for the first time it had become the only thing that she did.

Groove Dazy: At first, she played anonymously, but then she started using a player name. ‘Carpy’ (the name her father had always entered into high score tables) became ‘Carpe diem’ - seize the day became ‘Seizer’ became ‘Sheizer’ became ‘Sheizher’ ‘she is her’.

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Groove Dazy: She found that it was strongly in her interests to emphasise every which way that she was female. Female gamers were a rarity and the guy gamers got incredibly excited to know they were playing with a girl.

Groove Dazy: She loved this sort of attention.

She’d never received anything like it in her life.

Groove Dazy: Like so many others, she’d looked on in envy at the pretty girls at school who so effortlessly attracted the attention of boys. Like so many others, she’d ended up rationalising this to herself as the vacuous egotism of superficial beauty.

Groove Dazy: Though she didn’t put it in quite those terms.

Groove Dazy: When she was little she called these girls dollies.

Groove Dazy: When she was a teenager she called them bimbos.

Groove Dazy: When she was an adult she called them sluts.

Groove Dazy: Privately.

Groove Dazy: But all of a sudden, boys wanted to be friends with her, for no other reason than that she was skilled and she was female.

Groove Dazy: And all this happened, you understand, whilst she was running around game environments as a *male* character. At this stage, there was no element of virtual appearance to any of this.

Groove Dazy: She was simply a female gamer.

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Groove Dazy: She was simply female.

Groove Dazy: The root; the seed; the starting point of a whole new identity.

Groove Dazy: She was somebody brand spanking new. Every issue she had had, every element of her that had held her back was suddenly no longer relevant.

Groove Dazy: And, slowly, she started to expand on this new person, to take her to new places, to expose her to new forms of interaction.

Groove Dazy: She exported this user name to other games.

Groove Dazy: She took it to discussion forums on the web.

Groove Dazy: Sheizher became a regular in these places, a gamer chick “with breasts and everything.”

She discovered that she had a knack for sharp sarcasm so long as she had some thinking space to come up with a response.

Groove Dazy: Relieved from the pressure of having to worry about what someone might be thinking about the sight of her, that thinking space requirement became smaller and smaller, and she started to realise just how much of her mental capacity all that anxiety had been taking up; she started to realise what her true ability was when released from these burdens.

Groove Dazy: This was yet another revelation to her, one she was barely able to believe: it wasn’t just that she was able to conceal her ‘true self’ as she saw 213

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it when she was online, but rather that she actually appeared to *become* the very person she was inventing.

Groove Dazy: When she was thinking as Sheizher, words and ideas and phrases, and quips and criticisms and knowing winks and explosive vulgarities would jump into her mind and from there to her fingers; things it would never have occurred to her to say ordinarily she rattled off as though it was second nature for her to comment in such a way.

Groove Dazy: The next step was to start hanging out in chat rooms.

Groove Dazy: She found that more scary, because there you had to respond in real time. On web forums, you got to compose your entire post before hitting the publish button; in chat rooms you only got until the end of the sentence you were typing to think about whether you wanted to commit to it or not.

Groove Dazy: Plus there was pressure to respond more quickly - though of course it was always possible to blame a thinking-time delay on a phone call or other real life distraction.

Groove Dazy: The thing is, it wasn’t like Arlene had never been in a live chat environment before: she had whenever she’d been playing online first person shooters.

Groove Dazy: But then the comments were the one liners you hammered in on the keyboard between a death and a respawn: ten words of trash talk at the most.

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Groove Dazy: Hardly a conversation. Hardly the holding and development of an idea over ten, twenty or even thirty minutes of conversation.

Groove Dazy: Chat room conversation was a significant personal challenge.

Groove Dazy: But by this stage the normal fear she felt over such excursions out of her comfort zone was accompanied by the thrill of anticipation. She was excited by all of this in a way she had simply never felt excitement before.

Groove Dazy: It was the birth of a new person, and a person hungry for all the experiences that had been denied to her predecessor.

Groove Dazy: That’s how Arlene came to view it: not so much that she was Arlene Carpenter *and* Sheizher - two personalities living comfortably sideby-side with each other - but that the latter personality was slowly replacing the former.

Groove Dazy: It couldn’t happen fast enough, so far as she was concerned.

Groove Dazy: Every time *Arlene* had to do some interacting with someone, like conversations with Frank or phone calls from her social worker, she became resentful of the fact that Arlene still had all her old hang-ups.

Groove Dazy: So she jumped into live chat head first, believing all things possible now; fearful of the social danger, yes, but expectant that her new skills would step up to the mark and save her.

Groove Dazy: She was like the first-time bungee 215

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jumper, terrified of what she was about to do but at the same time trusting in the rope and expecting her bravado to be paid back several times over in sheer thrill.

Groove Dazy: And she was right to feel that way, because that’s exactly what happened.

Groove Dazy: The time to the end of the sentence was enough for her, just enough for Sheizher to break through and take control.

Groove Dazy: Just enough for Sheizher to continue to exist and to continue to become bigger than she was and to continue to flourish.

Groove Dazy: In her mind, she started to become Sheizher first and Arlene second.

Groove Dazy: The wit, the beauty, the brains; the darling of the gaming community.

Groove Dazy: Little did she realise just how much further she could take things.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t know, after all, what she didn’t know.

Groove Dazy: But then, Second Life came along.

Groove Dazy: Up until SL, her identity had been all about her words, her style, her way of saying things, her way of seeing things. It was about her gaming skill as well in the early days, but the more that Sheizher took over, the less actual gaming she did and the more socialising she engaged in.

Groove Dazy: What it hadn’t been about at any point was physical appearance.

Groove Dazy: Sure, there had been occasional 216

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references. In some of the more informal discussion areas, the boys would call her the babe of the board.

Pictures of scantily clad amazon warriors or beach volleyball players got posted in her honour.

Groove Dazy: Arlene, naturally, took no steps to correct the accuracy of these fantasies.

Groove Dazy: She saw no need to. She never intended to meet any of these people in real life.

What was the harm in letting them enjoy these visions of her loveliness and what was the harm in letting her enjoy their enjoyment of them?

Groove Dazy: Over time, of course, female gamers started to become a little less rare on the forums.

Sheizher had company, and the company also appeared to enjoy all the male attention.

Groove Dazy: But, much as Arlene might frown from time-to-time at an overt piece of flirtation something she had yet to develop any skill in, not that there had really been any call for it - there was plenty of space for all in the discussion groups.

Groove Dazy: Falling-outs over differences of opinion as to which version of a game or which modification pack or which console or version of a console or release of a console was the most superior were far more frequent disputes to worry about.

Groove Dazy: Competition between females was no issue.

Groove Dazy: But then, Second Life came along.

And Second Life changed everything.

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her away. No first-person-shooter gamer really had any difficulty absorbing the essential concept of a virtual world. They all knew what virtual spaces were like: they ran around in them shooting at stuff all the time.

Groove Dazy: It had often crossed Arlene’s mind that it might be nice for a 3D space to be educational or just plain social, a place to hang around and chat in rather than a place where only killing took place.

Groove Dazy: And there is no first person gamer in existence who has not had the total virtual reality fantasy, the dream of direct mental manipulation such that real and virtual are completely indistinguishable. And Arlene Carpenter was no exception to that rule.

Groove Dazy: No, Second Life was not a conceptually difficult thing for seasoned gamers to understand. And when they had a look at it, they typically wrinkled their noses at it and left more or less as soon as they’d entered.

Groove Dazy: It completely failed to meet their expectations.

Groove Dazy: Shit graphics, they said. Terrible lag, they said. *Really* shit graphics, they said.

Laughable animation. Appalling, non-realistic avatars. Everything took an age to move. Control was shockingly bad. Did they mention the graphics?

Groove Dazy: But Arlene’s ears perked up, just the same.

Groove Dazy: All of those issues were important to 218

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her too, but she supposed that if Second Life was a going concern with people signing up to it - and she had heard that they were - then there had to be some additional layer or element to it that was creating this appeal, which perhaps was not apparent to the average gamer.

Groove Dazy: She predicted that this invisible dimension was a social one.

Groove Dazy: So she signed up.

Groove Dazy: At first it was just technically difficult for her, but she soon picked up the controls and the various systems. Then it became difficult in a different way.

Groove Dazy: Because she thought like a gamer and because the first hour experience was kind of organised as a series of tasks - exactly like the tutorial you went through at the start of any new game - she got lulled into a false sense of security and then found her subsequent existence as a newbie at her designated telehub confusing and disorienting.

Groove Dazy: Where was the objective? What was one supposed to do? Nothing, they told her. There were no objectives. One did what one wanted.

Groove Dazy: Now this was in the time of old SL. You know this period, Ms Thursday. Pre-mesh, presculpties, pre-marketplace purchases, pre-windlight, pre-voice, pre-ultra-graphics. It was even preteleportation as we know it today: you could only teleport from telehub to telehub and the rest of the journey had to be done by foot or vehicle.

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Groove Dazy: All of this is one thing when you think about buildings, about furniture, about outdoor scenes of nature. We know, of course, just how much of an impact all the updates since then have had on those things.

Groove Dazy: But however profound an impact they had on the scenery and props of SL, the impact they’ve had on avatar appearance has been another thing altogether.

Groove Dazy: I’m saying this to emphasise that the avatars of early 2005 were hardly attractive things to behold.

Groove Dazy: But when what there was was the only thing that there was, avatar beauty was an extremely relative thing.

Groove Dazy: To Arlene, who of course signed up under the name Sheizher - her full name was Sheizher Redgrave - this was the first time that she’d had any sort of control over what her on-screen character looked like.

Groove Dazy: Quite apart from anything else, she could be female.

Groove Dazy: In fact, she soon discovered, there appeared to be a distinct advantage to being female because the vast majority of clothing to be bought seemed to be aimed at females.

Groove Dazy: Very quickly, she started transferring money into her SL account so that she could buy new clothes for her avatar. Her period of ‘free play’ lasted only a couple of days or so.

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Groove Dazy: Within a month, she had discovered all there was to know about the best clothing creators and the best skin and hair makers. She had bought up most of their products.

Groove Dazy: Body shapes she took a more handson approach to, teaching herself the system and conducting her own study of women’s measurements so that she could start creating her own shapes.

Groove Dazy: It can’t be hard to understand why shape was something she enjoyed having such control over.

Groove Dazy: The long and short of it was, though, that after just a few weeks, she had one of the best looking avatars in SL. Groove Dazy: By today’s standards it would probably look terrible, but for the time her avie was a total head turner.

Groove Dazy: And all over again, Arlene was overwhelmed by the experience of this.

Groove Dazy: Being a female was no longer enough by itself when you came into Second Life.

Groove Dazy: Unlike the gaming forums, they were not at all in short supply. They were plentiful.

Groove Dazy: No, it wasn’t enough to be a female any more; you had to be an *attractive* female; just like in real life.

Groove Dazy: But where real life attractiveness required workouts and dieting and getting the right nutrients for your skin and anti-aging cream and fruit, and no small measure whatsoever of pure 221

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genetic luck, Second Life attractiveness was a simple matter of knowing the right products and having the money to buy them with.

Groove Dazy: It astonished Arlene that others weren’t able to construct avatars to the same standard that she did.

Groove Dazy: But that astonishment, Ms Thursday, was tiny, was insignificant, was miniscule compared to the astonishment she experienced over the attention she got from men.

Groove Dazy: On the first person shooter battlefields she had just been the chick gamer that every guy wanted to be friends with. ‘Just’. That alone had been something to her then.

Groove Dazy: On the internet forums she’d become the cool gamer girl who made sarcastic jokes that all the guys laughed at.

Groove Dazy: Occasional lewd comments and awkward flirts aside, however, there had never been anything sexual in those places. How could there be?

Where could it possibly go?

Groove Dazy: Create a beautiful avatar in Second Life, however, and it was a different matter altogether. In fact, even a beautiful avatar wasn’t necessary. Arlene had her first sexual experience in SL within a week of joining up.

Groove Dazy: It left her breathless and flushed and unable to comprehend what had happened.

Groove Dazy: She had come across a sex hall where naked men with huge misshapen and badly 222

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coloured cocks - about as realistic a penis as a melted plastic strap-on, she later commented - had been standing around doing nothing. One of them had directed her onto a pink pose ball that positioned her on all fours in the middle of a table, and then he’d climbed on top of her and started fucking her from behind. Just like that.

Groove Dazy: It was comic. It was atrociously animated - his cock head kept appearing out of the middle of her back. There was no passion. There was no intimacy. He just fucked her until he came. And she absolutely loved it.

Groove Dazy: She had no idea why she loved it. It was like that first ever accidental masturbation orgasm, when you suddenly came and you lacked the words to describe what the hell had just happened because you didn’t yet have any sort of reference point; all you knew was you wanted to experience it again.

Groove Dazy: That was the moment when she decided she was going to create the most attractive avatar that she could. She realised very quickly that she could probably go on walking into places like this and getting laid looking exactly the way that she looked, but she wanted to be more than just an easy fuck.

Groove Dazy: She wanted to stand out.

Groove Dazy: She wanted to be desired.

Groove Dazy: She wanted to be wanted.

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she was certain of. By this stage, though, she didn’t much want him either. They hadn’t made love in over three years and before that it had hardly been a regular feature of their marriage.

Groove Dazy: She’d never really loved him in the first place. Frank was as far as she was concerned her way out of complete loneliness. When he’d come into her life it had been at a point where she had convinced herself she would never find a husband.

Groove Dazy: She had never had a boyfriend before him and the only sex she had experienced were a couple of one night stands she’d had: once at the end of her final year at high school which had hurt so bad she’d cried about it secretly for days; once a few weeks after her father had died at the end of a work social with a guy she got talking to at the bar they all visited.

Groove Dazy: She’d taken him back to her place and lied to him that she was on the pill in the hope he might make her pregnant. She didn’t want him as a husband, she just wanted a child. She wanted someone to love and share her life with, just as her parents had loved and shared their life with her.

Groove Dazy: Although in fact he insisted on using a condom anyway, so it was all in vain. He told her, “No offence, but you’re far too easy for me to have any confidence that you’re clean.”

Groove Dazy: So, by the time Frank came along, Arlene was convinced that she’d be spending her life by herself. She’d made peace with that fact. She 224

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didn’t really know what it was that she was going to do until she died - other than work and play video games - but she supposed, going by her parents’ short lives, that she at least wouldn’t be kept waiting all that long for that to happen.

Groove Dazy: And then she met Frank; cheerful Frank Eastman, who greeted her every morning at the hospital with a tuneful, “Good morning beautiful!”; attractive Frank Eastman, who was about the right weight for his height and who wore dark sideburns down to his jaw; streetwise Frank Eastman, who smoked and had a ‘mom’ tattoo on the inside of his left forearm.

Groove Dazy: That juxtapositioning of cheerful and friendly with tough and streetwise in particular held a strong attraction for her. She found him easy to talk to when he chatted to her. He asked her about her injury and she told him about the restaurant and the fall and the flickering light that had made her feel dizzy.

Groove Dazy: Frank was outraged by this. Why you should take them to court for that, he told her.

All this pain and inconvenience and time off work recuperatin’ - and that ain’t gonna happen overnight why shouldn’t you receive some fair compensation for all of that?

Groove Dazy: When Arlene replied meekly that she was sure that the job of fixing the light in the toilets had only slipped the manager’s mind, when she pointed out just what a busy man he was, Frank 225

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became her defender, her advocate, her angry knight in shining armour.

Groove Dazy: That’s bosses these days: putting profit above the needs of their employees and makin’ out they’re too busy to do a little thang like changin’ a bulb. Soooo busy. It’sa wonder they have the time to wipe the shit from their asses, if you’ll pardon my French. Just who do they think it is what puts all that money in their pockets in the first place?

Groove Dazy: No no no, Arlene insisted, Mr Rivers wasn’t the owner of the store, he was just the branch manager. And it wasn’t just a matter of changing a bulb, the electrician had to be called out to change the starter motor- Frank held out his hand to silence her.

Groove Dazy: You’re a lady and I don’t mean no disrespect, but guys like *mister* Rivers speak a whole lot of bullshit just to pick their way out of a hole. He might know how to say all the right thangs, but I’ll bet you any money he’s all hat and no cattle, no diffrent from all the rest of them.

Groove Dazy: It ain’t our decision whether what they come up with is right or not - that’s the job of the lawyers, they know BS when they smell it. You take my advice, ma’am and don’t make no decisions one way or another until you spoke to one of them.

Groove Dazy: So that’s what Arlene did, because ultimately she was flattered by how much Frank appeared to care. And it really wasn’t bad advice, she supposed, to just go and ask for an opinion.

Groove Dazy: She decided to go to her mother’s 226

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old firm, Whitworth and Hicks.

Groove Dazy: Of course, once the lawyers there had heard her story, they wouldn’t let her leave the building until she’d signed them to act as her attorney.

Groove Dazy: The day she won her case, Frank Eastman proposed to her. You might think that a fairly transparent motivation, but he claimed that the event made him so happy for her that the words more or less sprang out of him completely spontaneously.

Groove Dazy: And the bottom line was, so far as Arlene was concerned: so what if he was attracted by her money? So what if neither of them felt a thing when they held the other’s hand?

Groove Dazy: He wanted a permanent roof over his head and she wanted a man who might provide her with a child to raise. And Frank was funny. And Frank was kind.

Groove Dazy: And Frank, it turned out, was sterile.

He was also, so far as Arlene was concerned, impotent. Viagra was a solution to the latter problem for as long as they both cared about this being an issue.

Groove Dazy: But, by the time that Arlene had her first sexual experience in Second Life, that period had long ago ended.

Groove Dazy: So Arlene had sex in SL. For the first couple of weeks after that first encounter, she had sex in SL more or less whenever she could. When Frank went out she’d have sex. When Frank went to bed 227

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she’d have sex.

Groove Dazy: Sometimes she’d risk sex whilst he was still in the house. Sometimes she’d even risk it whilst he was in the same room, him watching sports on the TV with a beer and her in the corner at the PC, her IM box filling the screen because she knew he’d have no interest in reading it.

Groove Dazy: Pretty soon, she decided she needed a laptop. They’d slept in different bedrooms since day one, so a laptop in her bedroom was all the freedom she needed, and Frank was probably delighted about this, because it meant that Arlene got even less exercise and became even more dependent on him.

Groove Dazy: And in the meantime as the weeks and then months passed, in those moments between the hours long sex sessions, Sheizher got herself a wardrobe in SL and she got herself a house - the very house that we’re sitting in right now, Ms Thursday and she got herself some brand new social circles.

She opened up a small shop selling her shapes and from there became interested in clothes design.

Groove Dazy: For an all-too-brief period, ‘Sheizher Redgrave’ was a respected clothing line selling a wide range of ladies’ apparel. These were the template bitmapped, ‘painted on’ clothes of the time, you understand; nothing like the clothing we have today.

Groove Dazy: But, for the time, they were a decent product range. And they also had the virtue that they were transferable from avatar to avatar. I’ve spent 228

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the last few years acquiring from various people as many pieces of her clothing range as I can.

Groove Dazy: T-shirts, pants, blouses, dresses, swimming costumes, lingerie; she even had a go at some skins, though these were arguably the least desirable items from her catalogue. In her last couple of months in SL, she started selling shoes: black and red stiletto heels that blinged like a New England lighthouse.

Groove Dazy: The only major avatar appearance item she didn’t sell was hair.

At that moment, a message box descended from the top-right corner of the screen: “Groove Dazy has offered you ‘Sheizher outfits’. Click ‘yes’ to accept.” I clicked yes. The inventory window opened up with a huge folder of clothing. Dazy had organised some of these into subfolders titled ‘Outfit 1,’ ‘Outfit 2,’ ‘Outfit 3’ and so on.

Groove Dazy: I‘d like that folder back later.

Groove Dazy: Those are my doubles.

Groove Dazy: Put on ‘Outfit 1’ for me.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Excuse me?

Groove Dazy laughs.

Groove Dazy: Just checking you’re still awake.

Groove Dazy: Seriously, though; put it on.

Groove Dazy: You’re a one day old avatar, what do you care what you look like?

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I sighed and put it on. My avatar became a touch skinnier and a touch more angular, her breasts almost doubled in size and her skin went light beige in colour. Full bright, copper red, shoulder-length hair appeared on my head and blurred black panties and a bra appeared on my body, which resolved into something that looked like it had been sketched out on me in charcoal and which I supposed was meant to represent lace.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Charming.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You really know how to make a girl feel beautiful.

Groove Dazy: As far as I can make out, this was the outfit Sheizher was wearing when Frank walked in on Arlene and realised she was having cybersex.

Groove Dazy: She was naked on her bed. That, in and of itself, was no big issue; dressing her by then was a serious business and it was often just easier when she was staying in bed for her to cover herself with a sheet.

Groove Dazy: Frank kind of liked her being naked like that, not because it turned him on, but because it was another way that emphasised to him her vulnerability and dependence on him.

Groove Dazy: By this stage, I should add, Arlene had started to work a lot of this out.

Groove Dazy: Or, to put it more accurately, Sheizher had.

Groove Dazy: Her interactions with her growing 230

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group of SL friends and associates had became far, far more than just sexual experimentation.

Groove Dazy: In those seven months between her signing up and Frank walking in on her, her new identity had grown into something almost unrecogniseable to the Arlene who once played videogames with her dad.

Groove Dazy: The ‘gamer chick’ stereotype by then had been almost completely overwritten by a more socially mature, more rounded personality, someone who was interested in conversation for conversation’s sake rather than only as a source of compliments and attention.

Groove Dazy: Prior to SL, it was the attention of males and how that made her feel that had excited and motivated most of all her online activity, and whilst the full-on sex that SL enabled was still a huge aspect of her time online, the sheer sense of satisfaction that it gave her enabled the growth and pursuit of other interests.

Groove Dazy: For example, she formed female friendships. A couple of these and one in particular shocked her insofar as the depth and quality of the bond that grew between them went well beyond what she had ever before experienced as friendship.

Groove Dazy: This friendship, she later asserted, was more important to her than any of her male romantic partners by the time of her arrest.

Groove Dazy: Sheizher and ‘Flutterbye’ became virtual ‘sisters,’ hanging out most nights in their 231

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underwear right here on the couch we’re sitting on, swapping stories and virtual boyfriend issues and just generally putting the world to rights.

Groove Dazy: Flutterbye went through a virtual break-up and Sheizher put on hold *everything* that was going on in her SL for several days in a row to support her friend through this pain.

Groove Dazy: What she gave up in time she got back a hundred times over in gratitude and closeness and sense of belonging.

Groove Dazy: I just can’t express how profound a change this all was for Arlene.

Groove Dazy: I’m not talking about a religious conversion or anything like that (as it happens, that would take place later).

Groove Dazy: Though in a way something like that might not have been so big as this was for her, potentially.

Groove Dazy: This sense of connection was a link with the wider world, to thoughts and ideas beyond her usual horizons.

Groove Dazy: They say ‘travel broadens the mind,’ but we know that that’s bullshit, right?

Groove Dazy: Intelligence and wisdom have nothing to do with the simple business of moving from one point on the planet to another.

Groove Dazy: It’s exposure to new ideas and different ways of thinking that do the heavy lifting.

Groove Dazy: That’s exactly what Arlene encountered in SL. 232

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Groove Dazy: And, along with it, a rediscovery of her sense of purpose, her sense of self-respect, her sense of dignity.

Groove Dazy: Arlene would find herself looking around her bedroom in moments between conversations as though in a daze, as though just waking up and wondering how it was she had become a virtual prisoner in this place.

Groove Dazy: She’d look at her window and examine how the light came through it and made it halfway across her bed. She’d push her foot into that patch of light and see how her skin changed in it.

She’d think about what distant places lay beyond the neighbourhood outside that window.

Groove Dazy: She’d think about all the places her friends were in and how amazing it was that they were all connected.

Groove Dazy: She’d regret her disability.

Groove Dazy: And then, one day, it occurred to her to wonder when it was she had started using that word - disabled - in her thinking about herself.

Groove Dazy: And she realised all of a sudden that it was Frank who had introduced it into their shared lexicon.

Groove Dazy: To begin with when she was still recovering from the fall, and then only to describe the injury as ‘disabling’ rather than her as ‘disabled’.

Groove Dazy: Somewhere along the way, the one had become the other. She couldn’t think when the change had happened.

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Groove Dazy: Bit by bit, he had taken away any sense that she might ever be able to do things for herself; bit by bit, he had built a new set of traits for her to internalise: dependent, helpless, incapable, feeble, disabled.

Groove Dazy: But always with a smile on his face, never with a cross word, never appearing anything other than wanting to find new ways of helping.

Groove Dazy: “Let me do that for you, babe.”

“Easy now darlin’, don’t you go getting yerself outta breath.” “That stubborn pride of yours, babe - always pushin’ you to do the things you can’t.”

Groove Dazy: He made the erasure of her selfcompetence a sequence of compliments, almost; an unending commentary of praise for her willingness to keep trying in the face of certain failure. He told her she was special for her fighting spirit. He praised her pluck.

Groove Dazy: What he was *actually* saying - over and over and over again - was, “your attempts at dignity are hopeless.” To the onlooker, however, it looked like Frank went way beyond ‘glass half full’ in his perspective on life, that he was genuinely proud of and took pleasure in his wife’s engagement in The Struggle.

Groove Dazy: What a nice guy, they’d say. What they privately thought was that it was something else already that he put up with someone as enormous as Arlene; to have this positive outlook on her life, to actively enjoy her achievements, as he claimed to see 234

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them: now that was nothing short of sainthood.

Groove Dazy: It was such a subtle campaign, and even as Arlene started to see it, like a dot-to-dot drawing in the stars, she realised that even Frank himself wasn’t aware that this was what he was doing. Not consciously.

Groove Dazy: He really did think of himself as the hero that others considered him to be.

Groove Dazy: But she knew without any doubt that he had incapacitated her just as much as that flickering light in the toilets, and perhaps even more so.

Groove Dazy: And, once that truth crystalised, Sheizher Redgrave started the last phase of her takeover of Arlene Carpenter.

Groove Dazy: She started refusing things from Frank. She started snapping at him when he made those comments, those demeaning remarks that she started thinking of as ‘nasty niceties’.

Groove Dazy: She became sarcastic, she became sullen, she started asking him to leave her alone when she wanted him out of the bedroom.

Groove Dazy: The feeling all this brashness gave Arlene was one of immense empowerment. Frank was caught off guard by it and it was clear that he didn’t know quite what to do. For the moment, the power dynamic shifted suddenly in her favour.

Groove Dazy: But Frank wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t long before he realised something was going on.

Groove Dazy: And Arlene failed completely to 235

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think beyond the boldness of her new attitude; she never once considered what impact her remarks might have on him and the limits of his ability to tolerate them.

Groove Dazy: Frank thought about it and he thought about it, and he thought about it some more.

Groove Dazy: In the end, he decided that Arlene’s attitude change had to have something to do with the amount of time she was spending on the internet typing instead of playing games like she used to.

Groove Dazy: So one day, when Arlene told him to get out, he left her bedroom and waited twenty minutes, and then he went right back in and snatched the laptop out of her hands.

Groove Dazy: He saw her avatar on the bed upstairs, wearing that outfit you have on.

Groove Dazy: She was riding the big pink freenis of a guy underneath her.

Groove Dazy: And the IM box was open on the screen with the last few lines of their conversation in it, all pussies and cocks and clichés.

Groove Dazy: In an instant, he worked it out. He’d read something about this sort of thing in his paper a few weeks back.

Groove Dazy: He took the laptop into the lounge whilst Arlene shouted after him and struggled to get to her feet by herself. He spent the next ten minutes absorbing what he could see of SL, and then he noticed that she’d left a web browser open underneath her viewer window, logged into her SL 236

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account.

Groove Dazy: Arlene might have been the gamer out of the two of them, but that didn’t make Frank a computer idiot. He knew all about online accounts and passwords and IDs. There and then he changed her SL password on the website and logged her out, and then he shut down the viewer.

Groove Dazy: So by the time Arlene made it to the lounge, all panicked and out of breath, Sheizher was no longer her avatar.

Groove Dazy: When she realised what he’d done, her embarrassment and shame at having been discovered turned at once to outrage and she demanded the new password from him. When he refused to give it to her, she broke down in tears and begged him for it.

Groove Dazy: But Frank wasn’t done not sparing the rod. The next thing he did was drive to the nearest internet café he could find and log back into SL on her account, whereupon he uploaded into her profile a photograph he’d taken of her a couple of weeks earlier.

Groove Dazy: ‘In real life, my name is Arlene Carpenter,’ he wrote there. ‘I weigh nearly 500 pounds and I have to rely on my husband to do everything for me, including getting dressed in the morning and wiping my ass after I take a shit.’

Groove Dazy: Then he drove back home and returned the laptop to her.

Groove Dazy: He never did give her the password, 237

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and Sheizher Redgrave’s profile still carries that picture and text to this very day; which is amazing, considering what happened.

Groove Dazy: Arlene was devastated by the loss of her avatar; for days she remained in bed, too depressed to do anything other than sleep and eat and sob.

Groove Dazy: It wasn’t the avatar she grieved so much as it was the network of friends she’d built up and that identity that had flourished within it.

Ironically, the sex that Frank was punishing her for was the one thing she was unconcerned about; she knew she could create a new avatar for that any time she wanted to.

Groove Dazy: For that matter, she could have created a new avatar with the same name, moreorless, and reintroduced herself back into her group to take off where she’d left off. She could have explained that she’d had her account hacked; it was more or less accurate.

Groove Dazy: Except it wasn’t just any old account; quite apart from anything else all her clothing products were associated with that account.

Then there was the land she paid tier on - this very land we’re sitting on now. Then there was the shop she rented.

Groove Dazy: All the clothes and posessions she had were in Sheizher’s inventory.

Groove Dazy: And then there was the humiliating picture and text that Frank had uploaded. How could 238

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she possibly go back to her friends when they had that there as a constant reminder of what she looked like in real life?

Groove Dazy: At first, she treated Sheizher as dead forever. She decided her only hope for a continued existence in SL was to create a brand new avatar and start afresh: new friends, new clothes, new activities, new skin and hair; new everything.

Groove Dazy: She kept at it for a week, taking her newbie avatar - history, sadly, has not recorded its name - to all the right shops as she built up her new person. Sheizher had been brunette, this avatar was blonde; Sheizher had worn a tanned skin, this avatar was pale; Sheizher had walked with a powerful stride, this avatar adopted a sexy wiggle.

Groove Dazy: She took the new avatar to a couple of clubs and decided she was going to learn the banter of pole dancing, because every type of interaction in SL is just another way of writing.

Groove Dazy: But her heart wasn’t in it.

Groove Dazy: All that excitement about encountering new things was nowhere to be found.

In its place was an ache, a longing, a yearning to be with her ‘old’ friends - remember, mind, that she had only actually know them for a few weeks - and doing the things she used to do with them.

Groove Dazy: And then there was Flutterbye.

Groove Dazy: Her absence was more than an ache, more than a longing; it was physical: Arlene felt it in her heart. When she thought about what she’d lost 239

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her chest became tight and her breathing heavy, and the only way she could relieve this pressure was to wail like a child into her pillow.

Groove Dazy: She tried to deal with this by not thinking about Flutterbye, but when she did that then the ache spread across her body and became a pain like pins sticking into her.

Groove Dazy: In the end, she just couldn’t take it any more, and she found herself coming back to this spot right here one day, her old home, where she discovered Flutterbye sitting on this couch and keeping up some sort of a vigil for her friend.

Groove Dazy: She kept up the act of being a stranger for about five minutes, but when Flutterbye started talking about how she thought she might be in love with Sheizher, Arlene crumbled.

Groove Dazy: The truth broke out of her, and they wept together. Then they made love. It was Arlene’s first time with a woman, the first time she had ever really given herself permission to even think about being with a woman.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t really know what it meant, but she did know that yet another of the old walls around her thinking had fallen to the ground. It wasn’t even a wall that she had recognised previously as having existed, but it had tumbled just the same.

Groove Dazy: That was the thing with Second Life and social learning, she realised: so much of what you learned at first was just that there was stuff you didn’t know; you went from a state of unconscious 240

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incompetence to being slightly more conscious of it; you moved from being blissfully ignorant to being aware that your understanding of what it was to be human was far, far from complete.

Groove Dazy: But it was growth all the same, and Arlene liked the feeling that growing in this way gave her.

Groove Dazy: She wanted more than anything for that growth to continue.

Groove Dazy: And it seemed to her that there was one key obstacle to that happening: Frank.

Groove Dazy: Now Frank, once he’d carried out his Avacide, had just gone back to normal. He’d carried on looking after Arlene, and after a couple of days had passed, he’d even started up all those ‘nasty niceties’ once more.

Groove Dazy: You see, the balance of power was restored.

Groove Dazy: Arlene always maintained that it was her who first came up with the idea of killing him, but her insistence on that point has often caused me to wonder if it was actually Flutterbye. Arlene’s logs didn’t bear that out, but it might have been a conversation they had in voice.

Groove Dazy: Whichever of them it was, the plan was more or less fully formed within a week of their reunion.

Groove Dazy: Within a *day* of their reunion, Arlene had dumped her newbie avatar and created Sheizher *Phoenix*; which she made the exact 241

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duplicate of the original Sheizher: the same hair, the same skin, the same shape, the same walk.

Groove Dazy: Within two days, she had reacquainted with most of her old friends. She told them her account had been hacked and she had no idea by whom. But to Flutterbye she said it had indeed been her husband, and that the picture he’d uploaded to her profile was one he’d found on the internet of an obese woman.

Groove Dazy: The distinction is important: it was used by the prosecution to show that Arlene was working to reduce amongst her friends any knowledge or suspicion of motive, that she was thinking from the moment of Sheizher Phoenix’s creation that she would kill her husband.

Groove Dazy: The biggest problem she had in committing that act was her own mobility.

Groove Dazy: She knew she’d have very little opportunity to physically overpower Frank. He was stronger than her, lighter than her, faster than her.

Groove Dazy: Other aspects of the job were more straightforward. To the best of her knowledge, for example, Frank had no life insurance that might look like a motive for killing him.

Groove Dazy: But physically doing it - and in a way that didn’t incriminate her - that was going to be a problem.

Groove Dazy: She hit upon the idea of poisoning him fairly early on in her considerations, mainly because it would require little physical exertion on 242

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her part.

Groove Dazy: But since she wasn’t the one who prepared food in the house, that also didn’t offer many natural opportunities. And what did she know about poisons and how to get hold of them anyway?

And even if she had one and worked out how to use it, wasn’t that the sort of thing that post-mortems discovered easily? Wouldn’t it be better if it appeared to have been an accident?

Groove Dazy: And then, as if by magic, the answer was supplied to her.

Groove Dazy: Frank had been experimenting with the new ‘e-cigarettes’ over the past couple of months in an effort to give up smoking. He’d arrived home one day with a whole load of bottles of chemicals in the car, and when Arlene asked him what they were, he explained that he was going to start making his own vaping liquid.

Groove Dazy: By coincidence, one of Sheizher’s friends had been talking about this to her and Flutterbye only the night before, explaining how eliquids were made. There were four basic ingredients, he had told them: vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, whatever your flavorings were and then liquid nicotine.

Groove Dazy: And liquid nicotine in concentrated form is extremely toxic.

Groove Dazy: She looked it all up on the web.

Once she knew the concentration he’d bought, it was just a question of doing the math: at 500mg per 243

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millilitre, a 10ml dose would deliver 5,000mg of nicotine - five to ten times the minimum thought necessary to kill a man.

Groove Dazy: Nicotine has a taste, so she knew she’d have to add it to something strong tasting.

Luckily, Frank drank copious amounts of very strong black coffee.

Groove Dazy: And he drank it almost nonstop in his workshop in the garage - he even had a filter machine out there - where he fiddled with old electronics and occasionally repaired TVs and turntables and eight bit computers and cassette recorders.

Groove Dazy: If Frank had made it to today, he’d probably have become a vlogger on fixing stuff like that. His interest in all of this was one of the things that had made marrying him the right thing to do in Arlene’s view: it reminded her of her father.

Groove Dazy: So she needed 10ml of Frank’s liquid nicotine to be added to his coffee not long after he had brewed it - preferably his first cup of the day, because he’d gup that one down in no time.

Groove Dazy: Once he was dead, she’d empty out most of the nicotine bottle and put it on its side hanging over one of the shelves above his desk; then she’d place Frank’s coffee mug nearby on the desk below, offering up the explanation that the bottle had tipped over and dripped its contents into the mug below when it still had coffee in it.

Groove Dazy: All well and good, except for one 244

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small problem: it was impossible for her to do it.

Groove Dazy: For starters, there was too much reliance on speed and stealth. She’d have to know when he’d brewed the coffee, then create some sort of distraction that took him into the house, then sneak into the garage and add the nicotine, then sneak back into the house. Arlene simply wasn’t capable of that sort of sneaking.

Groove Dazy: Then there was the anxiety. Just thinking about carrying out the task made her breathless. Arlene wasn’t quite so sure that actually doing it wouldn’t give her the very heart attack she wanted Frank to have.

Groove Dazy: No. It was a great plan, but it just wasn’t doable by herself. Arlene realised that she needed help.

Groove Dazy: So she found herself someone to do the job for her.

Groove Dazy: And, as it happens, she had a very willing person: Flutterbye.

Groove Dazy: She didn’t even have to ask her. We know this from her logs. Arlene was outlining her perfect plan and its fatal flaw to Flutterbye, and she volunteered, just like that.

Groove Dazy: As far as Flutterbye was concerned, Frank was a wife abuser. She had no moral qualms about killing him and Arlene’s outline of the plan had convinced her there was very little likelihood they’d be caught.

Groove Dazy: She lived five states away in South 245

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Carolina, but she was on a plane to Texas six days after the birth of Sheizher Phoenix. Arlene and her agreed they would not meet - this worked well for Arlene, since she didn’t want her lover to see that the photo Frank had posted was indeed of her.

Flutterbye booked herself into a nearby hotel.

Groove Dazy: She brought with her her Sony Walkman from her childhood - which hadn’t worked for over ten years - and turned up at the house asking for Frank, telling him someone in a shop nearby had mentioned him to her as someone who fixed up old stuff like that.

Groove Dazy: Frank was enormously flattered that he had a reputation, and took her straight into the garage to get working on it - telling her it was probably the belt, and it might be fixable in just a few minutes. And, at that point, Flutterbye sent Arlene the text to create her distraction.

Groove Dazy: Arlene rang the house landline with her cell phone, something she did when Frank went outside without his cell and she needed to get his attention. When he answered, she called him upstairs to help her get out of bed.

Groove Dazy: It was a five minute job for Frank more than enough for Flutterby to do what needed to be done. In fact, she poured him a fresh cup whilst he was gone and one for her, and chinked mugs with him when he got back, and told him cheekily that there was no way he was a thirstier coffee drinker than she was.

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Groove Dazy: Frank took the bait and downed it in one.

Groove Dazy: Twelve minutes later, he was dead.

Groove Dazy: It started with a difficulty breathing and nausea. As soon as Frank excused himself to go to the bathroom, Flutterbye arranged the nicotine bottle on the shelf and placed Frank’s mug.

Groove Dazy: And then she left before things started getting noisy.

Groove Dazy: Arlene responded to Frank’s distress in the most natural way possible. As soon as she heard him start vomiting, she called out to him.

Then, as quickly as she was able to, she got up and made for the bathroom.

Groove Dazy: By the time she got there, he had about six minutes left to live. She asked him if he was ok. By then, he felt appalling. His heart was pounding in his chest and he was breathing as though he’d just run for an hour. He shouted at her to call an ambulance, and she did so straight away, and right in front of him.

Groove Dazy: The paramedics got to the house seven minutes later, two minutes after he’d stopped breathing following a massive heart attack brought on by his own panic at his symptoms.

Groove Dazy: Arlene’s ideal world scenario was that Frank’s death would be put down to a heart attack without any further investigation. That didn’t happen. An autopsy was carried out and the elevated levels of nicotine discovered.

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Groove Dazy: The house and garage were searched and photographed by the police. To cut a long story short, the story presented by Arlene and Flutterbye through the bottle and the coffee mug fooled the police for all of five minutes and ended up signposting rather than obfuscating the murder. They would probably have fared better if they had done nothing at all in the garage.

Groove Dazy: To begin with, there was the positioning of the bottle with its base close to the wall: a standing bottle simply couldn’t have fallen into that position; it could only have been placed there.

Groove Dazy: Secondly, the amount of nicotine left in the bottle was less than it should have been had it actually tipped over and drained in the manner suggested. The liquid remaining was lower than the entrance inside to the neck.

Groove Dazy: Third, there was a thin layer of dust on the surface where the mug had been placed, and it was unbroken in the spot right underneath the bottle opening above, suggesting that even if the bottle had magically tipped over and even if the liquid nicotine had climbed uphill inside it to the neck and dripped out, no mug had been underneath it.

Groove Dazy: It was still possible that Frank had accidentally poisoned himself in some other way, of course, but the suggestive positioning of these items convinced the police to look into it further.

Groove Dazy: Before long, they were looking at telephone records, and they spotted the text sent to 248

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Arlene’s phone from Flutterbye when she was in Frank’s workshop.

Groove Dazy: And from there it all very rapidly unravelled. What was thought by the two women to have been a foolproof plan turned out to be anything but.

Groove Dazy: Flutterbye had worn gloves for her visit, but she hadn’t thought to wipe clean her Walkman, which was still in the garage and covered in her prints. That plus the telephone call and the location data strongly suggested she had been present at the scene of the crime.

Groove Dazy: They found records of a couple of other phone calls made, so then they looked at both women’s computers, and before long they’d found the IM logs detailing all their planning.

Groove Dazy: Today it might seem remarkable that they never thought to at least delete their logs, but ten years ago the average Joe just wasn’t yet fully awake to how completely our technology could betray us.

Groove Dazy: The media were all over the arrest when it was made. “Obese woman charged with the murder of her carer” was how the New York Times headlined it.

Groove Dazy: The trial took over a week; the jury returned their guilty verdict in under two hours.

Groove Dazy: And thus ended permanently the Second Life of Arlene Carpenter.

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A short silence passed. I say ‘silence,’ but the noises around me - canned music, chatter, the coffee grinder, the steam wand, the vocalisations of pre-verbal infants - had continued undiminished for the duration of Dazy’s storytelling; only now, however, did I become aware of it. I looked up and blinked, and realised I’d probably used way more internet in the eyes of the owners than the cost of my single coffee likely justified. I contemplated buying another, but it was time to think about going rather than committing to staying for more time.

But the story of Arlene Carpenter had had me transfixed on the screen. Not since the early days of my work as an SL private investigator had such a tale held my attention for so long.

TheDayAfterWednesday: How do you know all this?

Groove Dazy: I collect metaverse stories. In any case, it’s public knowledge if you know where to look for it.

Groove Dazy: Some of it came out at the trial, some in an interview Arlene did for a documentary from death row a few years later.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Wait - what?

TheDayAfterWednesday: From death row?

Groove Dazy: She effectively hired someone to poison her husband.

Groove Dazy: A contract killing. That’s a capital offence in the United States.

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Groove Dazy: And Texas takes capital offences very seriously.

TheDayAfterWednesday: She’s there now?

Groove Dazy: I’m really surprised that you haven’t heard about this.

Groove Dazy: She was executed by lethal injection last year.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Jesus Christ.

Groove Dazy: Yes, as a matter of fact: the documentary was all about her conversion to Christianity.

TheDayAfterWednesday: And it made no difference how he’d disabled her?

Groove Dazy: That, at the end of the day, is only a subjective interpretation of what happened.

Groove Dazy: And even Arlene had to admit that it wasn’t something Frank consciously did.

Groove Dazy: Though actually, I’m not entirely sure I agree with her; I doubt that he’d have been able to articulate clearly what he was doing, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t know at some level exactly what he was doing.

TheDayAfterWednesday: What about Flutterbye?

Groove Dazy: She got 20 years.

Groove Dazy: It’s been less easy to piece together her story - she’s not been nearly as forthcoming as Arlene was - but I’m making progress.

Groove Dazy: She was a single mother of two little girls. I’ll tell you what I have so far if you like one day. But not today.

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TheDayAfterWednesday: No, not today.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I will have to go in a moment, but I would definitely like to hear it soon.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You’re a good storyteller.

Groove Dazy: Thank you.

Groove Dazy: And would you like me to tell your story?

TheDayAfterWednesday: We’ll talk about that next time.

Groove Dazy: Which will be when?

TheDayAfterWednesday: About the same time tomorrow?

Groove Dazy: Okay.

Groove Dazy: Just one thing before you go.

Groove Dazy: You read my latest article on you, right?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Yes. Groove Dazy: You don’t have to answer, of course.

Groove Dazy: But I would really like to know.

Groove Dazy: *Is* Definitely Thursday also the ‘Thursday’ who hunts down in real life the revenge porn artists?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Okay fine.

TheDayAfterWednesday: But first of all - not that it actually makes any sort of difference and not that it in any way legitimizes behaviour in instances where it *can* be said to be true - none of those women had done anything to any of those men that in any way merited any sort of ‘revenge’.

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TheDayAfterWednesday: They were out to humiliate and hurt women. Any women.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Second, your use of the word ‘artists’ is wholly inappropriate and, frankly, offensive. Nothing those men did was in any way artistic.

TheDayAfterWednesday: And finally, yes.

TheDayAfterWednesday: My name is Thursday.

When I walked back to the station, I saw my face plastered all over the evening editions; the same picture they always used; the one taken by Inch when we were sitting outside near the Spinnaker Tower.

VIGILANTE KLINE IN MEDWAY SLAUGHTER. An inset at the bottom of the page showed a still from the video they had obviously managed to get hold of. It showed me sitting in the deck chair about to be strangled and ran the caption, “Murder suspect led second life as revenge porn hunter.”

They had it. They had it all. They’d joined up all the dots.

253

10 Groove Dazy: You weren’t joking when you said you were about to hit the news.

The next day’s café was a Starbucks in Luton. I’d left first thing in the morning to avoid having to talk to Jesse about the news, though I’d kissed his sleeping head before going. I also didn’t want to be seen in the house by people who were in the process of learning my face at a time when a picture of it was all over the newspapers, internet and television. The previous night I’d stayed away from the house until gone midnight and then crept in and went straight to bed.

I knew Jesse was awake - I could tell from his breathing - but I said nothing and he didn’t break the silence.

I kept my appointment with Groove because I had no idea what else to do, because I could feel all my options shutting down, because I knew the net was about to start closing around me, because time was running out if I wanted to get my story written.

Probably I would never hear from Fred again. I wondered how that would play out with Jesse.

Would I go back to the house in Sydney Street to find 254

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him gone? Would I ever see him again? That was why I had kissed him.

I knew that Groove was the right guy to tell my story. I knew it would be safe in his hands. I knew I had to tell it to him as soon as possible. This was probably the only chance I’d get.

TheDayAfterWednesday: No I wasn’t.

Groove Dazy: I watched the video…

TheDayAfterWednesday: I wish you hadn’t.

Groove Dazy: So do I. TheDayAfterWednesday: Did it give you a thrill?

Groove Dazy: No, of course not.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Did it make you hard?

Groove Dazy: *Obviously* it didn’t.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Why obviously?

TheDayAfterWednesday: What do I know about you that suggests I should intuitively know by now that you’re somehow different?

Groove Dazy: You seem to be suggesting that misogyny is the norm.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You seem to be suggesting that it’s not.

Groove Dazy: I’m really sorry you think that.

TheDayAfterWednesday: You know there are sims in SL that are themed around rape and brutality to women, right?

Groove Dazy: Yes of course.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Totally legal. Totally legit. Smack a woman down and pull off her jeans, 255

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and do her right there on the asphalt.

TheDayAfterWednesday: If the bitch makes a fuss, just hit her on the back of her head and give her a bloody nose.

Groove Dazy: Women choose to go there.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I know.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I really wish it might one day turn out that all of them were actually men in real life, but I know that can’t be the case.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I know what they say.

TheDayAfterWednesday: ‘Rape fantasy’.

TheDayAfterWednesday: It makes me sick to even type it out.

TheDayAfterWednesday: As though the word ‘fantasy’ could possibly legitimise it.

Groove Dazy: It’s consenting adults, though, isn’t it?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Consenting adults fantasising about something illegal.

TheDayAfterWednesday: People are banned from child sex role play…

TheDayAfterWednesday: Why should it be any different for rape role play?

Groove Dazy: I’m happy to have this discussion with you if that’s what you want to do today.

Groove Dazy: But I was kind of hoping you might start sharing with me your story.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Sure.

Groove Dazy: I mean I get that the whole misogyny thing is why you started your ‘Thursday’ 256

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campaign.

TheDayAfterWednesday: ‘Misogyny thing.’

TheDayAfterWednesday: ‘Thursday campaign.’

TheDayAfterWednesday: You make it sound like I planned it as some sort of publicity stunt.

Groove Dazy: I’m sorry. Bad choice of words.

Groove Dazy: How did you plan it?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Actually, it was Step’s idea.

Groove Dazy: Which Step are we talking about?

TheDayAfterWednesday: The second.

TheDayAfterWednesday: The guy who was murdered in Medway.

TheDayAfterWednesday: The first Step - John-Paul - was against taking investigations into RL. Groove Dazy: Did you know there were two people operating that account when you killed JohnPaul?

TheDayAfterWednesday: No. TheDayAfterWednesday: I only found out a couple of years ago.

TheDayAfterWednesday: That was just after I was nearly caught on the Isle of Wight.

Groove Dazy: Please…

Groove Dazy: Start from the beginning.

Groove Dazy: I want to hear the whole story.

Groove Dazy: If you’re willing to tell.

I sat back for a moment and looked around the café.

A plane flew over. A baby somewhere started to cry.

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Perhaps this was the beginning of a whole new story.

Perhaps this was my last day of freedom, if ‘freedom’ was what you could call the life I’d been living. All stories must eventually end. At least I could say I’d done something meaningful with my time.

TheDayAfterWednesday: I’ll do my best.

TheDayAfterWednesday: But I might not have much time.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Now that the news has broken, I’m going to be hunted like never before.

“You might have more time than you realise.” The comment was made by a man sitting at the table behind me. He’d leaned back in his chair to make it.

It creaked. I jumped and hit my knee on the table.

Coffee slopped out of my cup.

It was Fred.

“Jesus Christ, you scared half the crap out of me!

What are you doing here?”

“Good morning, Thursday. Oh wait. Was I supposed to use the code? Thursday is a… what was it? Step sideways?”

“Sideways step.”

He wagged his finger at my screen “I think you should tell your contact there you’ll be AFK for a few minutes.”

No shit. My hands shaking, I typed in the comment.

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TheDayAfterWednesday: Sorry… something’s come up… I need to go AFK for a bit.

Groove Dazy: Okay, no worries. HB I took a deep breath and turned in my seat. “Should I log out?” I asked the American.

“Not just yet.” He got up and moved his open laptop to the table next to mine. On the screen there was a line-by-line live transcript of my conversation with Dazy. He didn’t bother closing it. “First thing’s first,” he said as he transferred his coffee over and sat down again, “I haven’t yet had a chance to say properly just how sorry I am about Peeking. I know he meant a lot to you.”

“Thanks,” I said, slightly stunned by the nicety.

“And I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you directly until now. Certain pieces had to be arranged in certain places.”

“Jesse told me you were getting ready to cut me loose.”

“Jesse told you what I told him to tell you,” Fred replied.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that my situation has changed. It means that I’m finally being given some of the resources I need to set up something sustainable rather than these odd jobs here and there. We’re at the beginning of something significant, Thursday, and it’s mostly thanks to your work. The airport bombing your information prevented would have been huge.

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Intelligence agencies like mine need those sorts of successes badly.

Every time a bomb goes off somewhere it’s our fault for not having spotted it.

The public think we know everything going on everywhere, which is mostly a useful illusion but it does mean that when we miss something there is no limit to the level of criticism we face. Well, we’ve had these conversations before.”

“We have.”

“So it would seem that the potential for virtual worlds as a tool for terrorism is not only now accepted in my agency, but seen also as an area for headline-grabbing victories. There are additional benefits. The number of agents required to work in the metaverse is nowhere near as large as that required of real world places, largely because those agents can be used over and over, using different online identities so that there’s a very low risk of them ever being recognised.”

My breathing had just about returned to normal. I said to Fred, “I thought you were worried that the UK services would work out I was getting help from the US.” “Thursday,” he replied, “they’ve known that for ages. Oh, we haven’t formally told them. These are the details that security services allow to be leaked to their trusted partners. It’s basically benign. Don’t look now but there’s a guy in the corner reading The Mail who works for MI5. Not only does he know exactly who you are and who I am, but he very likely 260

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knows that I know exactly who he is too. His presence here is their way of telling me, ‘We know what you’re up to.’ And I am currently replying, ‘We know that you know.’ They’re also saying, ‘We expect you to tell us anything that we need to know.’

And, of course, we will. And, for that reason, you don’t have to worry all that much about any arrest any time soon.” “‘All that much?’”

“Well, there’s always the risk of some overzealous police officer going maverick on your case, but in a world where police funding is stretched to breaking point, few officers are going to question the directive to prioritise resources elsewhere. It’s not like you’re a serial killer.”

“Well gee,” I said, “now I feel like a has-been.”

“You clearly haven’t been paying attention to your own headlines.”

“The headlines I’ve noted, but I try to avoid reading the detail of my reviews.”

“It’s not like you have a fanbase or anything,” he told me, “but there are voices out there saying you and Peeking were doing what needed to be done.”

“I doubt that John-Paul’s daughter feels that way.”

“She doesn’t. Incidentally, did you know that Peeking was seeing-” “No,” I told him. “He kept that from me. What about the press?”

“What about them?”

“Jesse said you were worried that some journalist 261

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might question how it was that Emma Kline, a wanted criminal, was able to communicate with the authorities in order to get the hate ring busted. He said there was a chance someone might work out I had intelligence connections.”

“Thursday,” he said, “the web is awash with conspiracy theories.

They come and go like manufactured pop songs. Don’t worry about it.”

He shut his laptop. “It’s time for you to move on, Emma. Start afresh. You’ve repaid your debt to society.”

“I doubt that society takes that view.”

“Well the way I see it, you’re no use to anyone in prison. Out here, you can do some good by working for me. It doesn’t make sense to lock up an asset.

You know, we’ve pardoned people in the US for much worse in exchange for far less than you’ve given us.”

“I don’t suppose you could influence your ‘trusted partners’ here in the UK to do that for me?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

I looked at him. “So what are your plans for me?”

“I want to set up a virtual worlds counterterrorism unit,” he said. “It’ll be a salaried position, we’ll set you up with a new identity. Instead of me coming to you with random leads I got lucky on, you and the other agents will be developing an intelligence map of groups operating in SL and other platforms, and a knowledge-base of virtual surveillance and counter-surveillance technologies.”

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“Other agents?”

“There will be five of you. Two of your four colleagues you already know.”

“Jesse?”

“And Jade.”

I sat up straight. “Jade works for you?”

“You’re not the only Second Life asset I’ve been nurturing over the last couple of years.”

“Fred!” I exclaimed. “All these secrets!”

He grunted. “I’ve also been working with an extremely gifted young man on the Autism spectrum.

He’ll be your third colleague. I’m afraid he’s going to require no small degree of micromanagement. For that reason, my ideal scenario is that the four of you will be co-located.”

“You want us to live together?”

“That’s a big ask? You’ve been living with two of them for the past few weeks anyway.”

“What if I meet someone and want to settle down with them?”

“Then you meet someone and settle down with them. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“So who,” I asked, “is the fifth member of the group?”

“He’s not been recruited yet. In fact, that’s your first job.”

He looked at my screen. “We need someone who’s really plugged in to the people of the metaverse,” he explained. “Someone with a limitless enthusiasm and capacity for knowledge about human activity in the 263

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virtual world. We’ve been trying to get a hook in him for a while, actually, but no-one has quite the same appeal to a collector of SL stories as you do.” I followed his gaze. It rested upon the avatar of Groove Dazy.

And then it dawned on me.

“You bastards,” I said. “You’ve been manipulating me all along.”

“Sorry,” he replied, not sounding sorry at all. “It seemed like the straightest distance between two points.”

He hung around for another ten minutes or so, filling in a few of the details. Then he left. A minute or so later, the guy in the corner closed his newspaper and got up, and tossed the paper onto my table as he passed. “I’m done with this if you want it,” he told me. My face stared out from the front page. A post-it note stuck to page two had written on it above a London number: “If you’d ever like to talk to a British contact.” I peeled it off and folded it up and put it in my pocket.

I was... free?

I looked around the cafe and shut my eyes, and listened to the business of coffee. I thought about what Fred had said to me about my usefulness and reflected that these were amongst the very justifications I had previously told myself as rationalisation for my ongoing non-incarceration. It 264

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did sound better when it came from someone else, but in the end it changed nothing. I am a murderer. I killed a man in cold blood. I planned it, I tracked him down and I carried it out. This fact will never change. I will live with it for the rest of my life, and perhaps one day it will catch up with me and justice will be carried out.

But not yet.

I opened my eyes. Freedom, then. I turned my attention back to my laptop screen, took a big, satisfied breath, and typed a new message into the IM box.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Still there?

A pause of about ten seconds, then: Groove Dazy: I hope you realise that you’re about the only person in the metaverse that I would wait around for like this.

TheDayAfterWednesday: Then we’d better get started.

Groove Dazy: From the beginning.

TheDayAfterWednesday: From the beginning.

Where exactly, I wondered, was that?

TheDayAfterWednesday: Do you know how to make a listening device in SL?

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