AFK, Indefinitely

AFK, INDEFINITELY

Also by Huckleberry Hax: AFK (2007) AFK, Again (2013) Be right back (2008) My Avatars and I (2009) Your clothing is still downloading (2012)

by Huckleberry H. Hax: The Day is Full of Birds (2008) The Introspection of Imogen Card (2011) Old friend, learn to look behind you in the coffee queue - poetry compilation (2010)

www.huckleberryhax.blogspot.com

AFK, INDEFINITELY

HUCKLEBERRY HAX

Copyright © 2014 by Huckleberry Hax All rights reserved This paperback edition published in 2014 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 by Huckleberry Hax The terms 'Second Life,' and 'Linden' are copyright © Linden Research Inc.

For Harri.

ON 9 DECEMBER 2013 – THE SAME day that Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Yahoo clubbed together to form the Reform Government Surveillance alliance – The Guardian newspaper ran a story featuring another of Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. Written in 2008 and titled, Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, this one outlined terrorist potential for Games and Virtual Environments (GVEs), and made the claim that ‘terrorist target selectors’ had been found associated with Second Life and other GVEs. Perhaps the most surprising revelation of all was that the FBI and CIA “have HUMINT [human intelligence] operations in Second Life and other GVEs”. According to the Guardian article, “Second Life continued to occupy the intelligence agencies' thoughts throughout 2009.”

There are spies in Second Life.

Or, at least, there were.

www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/ nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life

RUN

1 “Got you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.

In a way, you could say that it was Inch who turned me into a murderer in the first place. I mean, it’s not like I’d even contemplated killing anyone before I met her, aside from the occasional (and entirely understandable) desire to slaughter in cold blood the odd politician here and there. And it’s hardly the case that, having done the deed once, I would go on to murder again. I like to think that I’m no more likely to kill a second person than anyone I pass on the street is likely to kill their first.

So I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her after a single night. Can I be blamed for that? Last time I checked, falling in love wasn’t exactly a cognitive decision-making process. When someone like Inch comes along – someone who upturns the table and everything on it – you either recoil from the emotional shock and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction or your curiosity gets the better of you and you make the fatal error of pausing to look more closely for a moment; next thing you know, your eyes are doing that swirly, hypnotised thing and it feels like they’re being pulled out of your soul. What I’m saying is it’s an involuntary reaction. Some part of one person snaps into place with some part of the other and, from that point on, it’s not about whether you’re in love with them, it’s entirely about 13

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what you’re going to do about the fact that you are.

Can I be blamed any more than a bee can be blamed for its attraction to flowers that I saw that night in Inch Sideways everything I wanted and everything I’d always imagined had to exist somewhere in a single human being? There she was, my very own Higgs-Boson, realised in the prims and pixels of Second Life®. Finding that your hypothetical ideal somebody really does exist is more than a moment of happiness, more even than a moment of love: it is, quite simply, the moment of ratification, the sigh of relief that you don’t have to discard the way you have personally constructed happiness all these years, that the wait was worth it, that you were right to think all those well-meaning nudgers towards John from IT or Mary from finance could go fuck themselves.

A single night. “Forget me,” she said at the end of it, “and you go straight to hell, ok?” There was no possible way I could ever have forgotten Inch Sideways. It was almost a year before I saw or heard anything from her again, and I pretty much spent all of that time trying somehow or another to cope with what she’d awoken in me. I tried everything I could think of, including breaking the heart of a beautiful person along the way in the futile hope that I might transpose my love for Inch onto her, but Inch had somehow hard-wired herself into me and all I could ultimately do was get used to how it felt to be alive with a little bit missing.

Then, out of the blue, she appeared again, tapping me on the virtual shoulder at some Egyptian-themed club and asking me for a dance. It was like the restoration of air to my lungs. I still remember how deliriously happy I 14

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felt that evening, even when I turned down that dance to go to work in RL. She was back and she had sought me out, and that tiny little piece of happenstance information danced in my head all night and meant more to me than any other fact I had possession of.

I didn’t know at that point why it was she’d spent fifty weeks out of SL. To be honest, I didn’t really care. But that night, whilst I served pizzas with an inanely cheerful grin to customers I’d ordinarily have considered scowling at a wasted facial effort, she talked about her year to my SL business partner, Step Stransky, the decision-making half of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency. She told him about the death of her husband and little boy on the day following my encounter with her, and Step, supposedly because he’d suffered his own personal loss a few years earlier, knew exactly how to listen to her. The next day, I logged on to discover that the two of them had become partnered in the intervening twelve hours, and that was the moment when my world collapsed around me.

Did Inch turn me into a murderer? No sane person would ever consider unrequited love a justification for killing someone; of course they wouldn’t. But even now it staggers me that she didn’t think for one moment that partnering Stransky within hours of meeting him might have some sort of emotional impact on me.

I’m not

saying she should or could have guessed that I was in love with her – if the situation had been reversed, I wouldn’t have supposed that myself for a second (frankly, I’d have laughed at the very idea); but come on: the last time we’d met, we’d fucked; didn’t that earn me even the littlest of pauses? Was I really so far out of her 15

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mind that it never even occurred to her that jumping into the arms of my so-called best friend was lacking just a little in tact?

Of course I was. The night Inch Sideways met Step Stransky was her first night back in the metaverse; her recollection of the previous one was likely to be less anything to do with me and more that it was the very last time her man and her baby had been alive and safe and nearby. But I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, it was months before she finally told me what had happened to her during that absence.

Even so, I still have to ask myself what it was about Step’s listening skills that was so unbelievably amazing that she submitted to him so completely by the end of a single night. I have to keep on reminding myself that, at the start of the evening, he was a total stranger to her.

And I have to ask myself what it was about my own presentation that – clearly – put me somehow in a whole league below him. I’d be the first to admit that the rather amateur edge to my role playing skills was on full display during my one intimate night with Inch, but has anyone ever judged someone’s ability to listen and console based solely on their ability to communicate in fictional paragraphs – and an ability previously experienced nearly a year ago at that? Did I really come across that badly that it was inconceivable she could have shared her pain with me? And if I did, why did she bother with that tap on the shoulder in the club that night when she could have just turned around and left?

Why speak to me at all if I’d left such a hopeless impression?

It never occurred to me at the time to be angry at Inch 16

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for any of this. Actually, that’s not true – all of these points occurred to me before, but it was abstract information then, like the knowledge that I’m moving all the time at over sixty thousand miles per hour due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. I knew these things, but they affected me no more than I become dizzy from the Earth’s rotation: I just didn’t feel them.

But I feel them now.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes…

“Got you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.

And just before this, so that I knew exactly who she was, she had used our secret passphrase. It was something we’d agreed between the three of us, several years previously. Me and Inch and Step.

Step Stransky: We should have a code.

Inch Sideways: A code?

Step Stransky: A code.

Definitely Thursday: What sort of a code?

Step Stransky: An identifier code. Something we can use to identify ourselves by.

Inch Sideways: To each other?

Step Stransky: Exactly.

Definitely Thursday: Are we talking SL or RL here?

Step Stransky: Both.

Inch Sideways: Both?

Step Stransky: Why not?

Inch Sideways: Are there plans to meet up in real life that I don't know about here?

Definitely Thursday was about to ask the same thing.

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Step Stransky: Why, you want to?

Inch Sideways: Do you?

Step Stransky: I asked first.

Definitely Thursday: Haven't we had this conversation before?

Definitely Thursday: Several times?

Step Stransky glares at Thursday and puts his finger across his lips.

Inch Sideways: Funny like being smashed in the face.

Step Stransky: What I was thinking is...

Step Stransky: We all use alts, right?

Definitely Thursday: No. Inch Sideways: No. Step Stransky: Exactly. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a code phrase we could use to each other when we thought we'd 'spotted' one.

Inch Sideways: Eh? Definitely Thursday: Oh I see what you're on about.

Inch Sideways: You do?

Step Stransky: Well it works like this: say I'm out and about and I see this fabulous young blonde admonishing someone for the use of the acronym 'lol'...

Inch had a thing about the acronym ‘lol’ (this was in the days when lol was still an acronym and not a word in the Oxford English Dictionary).

One of her signature phrases was, “lol is not allowed”.

Inch Sideways: Oh for crying out loud...

Inch Sideways: I can't believe I'm the only one with this issue 18

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Definitely Thursday: It is so wrong...

Definitely Thursday: ...people laughing out loud like that.

Inch Sideways: That's just it, though – are they? Are they actually laughing out loud in front of their monitor? Are they actually filling their rooms with laughter?

Inch Sideways thinks not.

Step Stransky: May I continue?

Inch Sideways: Is this actually going to be interesting?

Step Stransky: Think of it as a game, if you will.

Step Stransky: You walk past the avatar you think is an alt...

Step Stransky: ...and as you pass you utter the code phrase in chat.

Step Stransky: If you're right you get a point!

Inch Sideways: That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

Inch Sideways: For the principle reason...

Inch Sideways: ...that if I didn't want you know that such-and-such an avatar was me in the first place...

Inch Sideways: ...then code phrase or no code phrase I would still ignore you.

Definitely Thursday nods.

Step Stransky hadn't thought of that.

Inch Sideways: Wow. The great detective.

Step Stransky: Still think it would be good though...

Step Stransky: Then we could... use it to identify ourselves!

Definitely Thursday: Isn't that what you said in the first place?

Inch Sideways: So I'm in an alt – unrecognisable to you 19

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– and you, for some reason, come up to me and identify yourself using the code phrase?

Step Stransky: Exactly!

Inch Sideways: And I haven't recognised you already because...?

Step Stransky: Right, right. Yes, there is that too.

Step Stransky: Aha! But what if *I* was in alt form *too*?!

Step Stransky: Eh? Step Stransky: Eh? Inch Sideways: Do you think we should have a secret code, Thursday?

Definitely Thursday: Yes. Yes I do.

Inch Sideways: For what purpose?

Definitely Thursday: Because it would be well cool.

Inch Sideways laughs.

Inch Sideways: Best argument I heard so far.

Step Stransky sniffs.

Definitely Thursday: Where you would *actually* use it…

Definitely Thursday: …would be if you wanted to identify yourself as an alt…

Definitely Thursday: …and prove it.

Inch Sideways: Right. I think I see.

Inch Sideways: I meet this guy and he says to me in IM that he’s actually an alt for Thursday…

Inch Sideways: …and I say to him, “How do I know you’re not Stransky or some other stalker?”…

Inch Sideways: …and he uses the code phrase to identify himself. Is that it?

Definitely Thursday: Exactly.

Step Stransky: Well of course, that’s what I meant.

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Step Stransky: Obviously.

Inch Sideways: Obviously, darling.

Inch Sideways pats Stransky’s hand.

Definitely Thursday: We should make a phrase out of our names.

Step Stransky: How about this: ‘Thursday is a sideways step’.

Inch Sideways: Oh I like it.

Definitely Thursday: Not bad.

Definitely Thursday: But. Definitely Thursday: We also need an ‘under duress’ variant.

Definitely Thursday: A code we give to villains who torture us for the code…

Definitely Thursday: …so that they can pass themselves off as one of us…

Definitely Thursday: …only when they use it we know they’re really an imposter.

Definitely Thursday: Naturally, we play along in order to skilfully entrap them.

Step Stransky nods in agreement.

Step Stransky: Good thinking.

Inch Sideways: Oh, it’s so thrilling to see professional minds at work.

Definitely Thursday: I propose ‘Thursday is *Definitely* a Sideways Step’ as the authentic code.

Definitely Thursday: And ‘Thursday is a Sideways Step’ as the under duress code.

Inch Sideways: That’s not fair!

Inch Sideways: Why should your name feature twice?!

Step Stransky: Because, my dearest, that very indignation of yours…

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Step Stransky: …will ensure you remember which is which.

Definitely Thursday: Yes, exactly.

Definitely Thursday: That is totally the correct reason.

Definitely Thursday coughs.

Inch Sideways sighs.

Inch Sideways: You know…

Inch Sideways: ‘Step Sideways an Inch’ works much better.

Definitely Thursday: Oh great.

Definitely Thursday: Now I’m getting ejected from the passphrase?

Inch Sideways: Nothing personal, you understand.

Inch Sideways: Think how your indignation will help you to remember it.

Step Stransky: We could always take a vote on it…

Definitely Thursday: Yes, of course…

Definitely Thursday: Yet another reminder of my minority status.

Definitely Thursday: In any case…

Definitely Thursday: It makes no sense…

Definitely Thursday: How can one take a step of only an inch?

Inch Sideways: And ‘Thursday is a Sideways Step’ is logical?

Definitely Thursday: I think you mean, ‘Thursday is *Definitely* a Sideways Step’.

Inch Sideways: Whatever.

Definitely Thursday sighs.

Definitely Thursday: I’m just the cameo role in the Inch Sideways and Step Stransky Show.

Inch Sideways: That’s right – you’re the whacky one.

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Step Stransky: The guy with odd habits for extra laughs?

Inch Sideways: And some sort of clueless catchphrase.

Inch Sideways: Something uttered in ambiguous, comedic moments.

Inch Sideways: Like Step’s changing a light bulb and I’m steadying the stepladder, then the stepladder wobbles and falls over and I’m holding his legs with my face buried in his crotch.

Inch Sideways: And then Thursday enters the room with some sort of detective problem he needs to talk about, only he stops mid-sentence when he sees us like that and says…

Inch Sideways: …’Is there something I should know about’?

Definitely Thursday: That’s it? That’s my catchphrase?

Definitely Thursday: Not even something *slightly* clever, like, ‘There’s DEFINITELY something going on around here!’

Step Stransky: Haha. I see what you did there.

Inch Sideways: Pffft Inch Sideways: With enough canned laughter, you can make anything a catchphrase.

Definitely Thursday: So, basically, we’re a sitcom now.

Step Stransky: A sitcom from the 1980s, by the sound of things.

Inch Sideways: Nothing wrong with sitcoms.

Definitely Thursday: Is the on-going joke that I have no idea the two of you are together?

Definitely Thursday: Me being a detective and all.

Inch Sideways: Very good.

Inch Sideways: See, now you’re thinking like a writer.

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Definitely Thursday: How about we throw in an extra layer of irony for the viewers when the ratings start to flag and make it so that not only has Thursday actually known all along that Sideways and Stransky are together, but that he’s secretly in love with Sideways himself?

Definitely Thursday: In other words, it’s Stransky and Sideways that are really clueless, not Thursday.

Step Stransky: Interesting twist.

Inch Sideways: I guess it gives the series a way forward if you get too cocky with your contract renegotiations, Stransky.

Step Stransky: Wait, you’re writing me out of the show?

Definitely Thursday: Now who wishes he’d stuck with the original passphrase?

Step Stransky: Come to think of it…

Inch Sideways looks at Stransky sternly.

Step Stransky: Well, it *would* be more fair if it had all our names in it.

Definitely Thursday: Absolutely.

Definitely Thursday definitely doesn’t look smug.

Inch Sideways sighs.

Inch Sideways: Once again, the superior female idea loses to the male view.

Thursday is definitely a sideways step. I used the very same phrase myself just before I murdered Step Stransky. I let that old bastard fuck me, but at the last minute I climbed off him and got to my feet, and when he asked me what I was doing I told him, “I wanted to tell you something, Pops, Thursday is Definitely a Sideways Step.”

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I picked up the pillow next to him and tossed it up and down playfully whilst incomprehension flooded his face, then recognition, then confusion; then all at once a smile.

“Inch?” he asked.

“Wrong guess,” I told him, and I pushed that pillow down into his face with all the strength I could muster. I remember very clearly the way his hands clutched suddenly at my forearms and his nails dug furrows in my skin. It was wonderful. I watched his body tense and jerk, as confusion transitioned to fear and fear transitioned to mindless panic. You forget that emotion can be displayed across all parts of a person’s body when you’re so used to looking for it in faces; it’s a shocking, intensely beautiful thing to witness the physical bleed of it in this way. I watched his conscious, rational, purposeful mind drain out of his movement, never to return. I watched his erection, still wet and shiny from my own insides, droop and fade and whither.

The last few movements Barnaby made were to swing and flail at my face and head. I dodged them as best I could, but my priority was to keep that pillow down. He caught the top of my cheek at one point and my chin at another, but I managed to avoid being scratched by him there. I was leaning with one knee on his chest to prevent him from twisting too much, and he tried desperately to push me from him.

He scratched my

thigh hard and drew blood.

And then his movements became weak and feeble, like a cat pawing absently at the air. He was leaving. He was dissolving away into the bed sheets.

And then he stopped.

His arms fell uselessly to his sides. He twitched a 25

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couple of times. And that was that. I cleaned myself up, did his fingernails, splashed liquor over his bedside table and set the place on fire with a half-burned cigarette. A few days later, the local press reported a verdict of accidental death and the job was done.

“Got you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left, right after she said to me, “Just so you know, Thursday is Definitely a Sideways Step.”

The mistake I’d made had been to log into Second Life on Stransky’s account. I had his password.

Step Stransky: Did I tell you my system?

Definitely Thursday and Inch Sideways both nod.

Definitely Thursday recites, 'Third book from the right on your fourth shelf down, first word of the chapter corresponding to the number of the month.'

Inch Sideways laughs at what Thursday just did there.

Inch Sideways: But let me do my own nodding in future.

Inch Sideways: We are so sick of hearing about your system, Stransky.

Inch Sideways: You only go on about it to try to impress us with your four shelves of books.

I made certain, you see, that I located and took with me the third book from the right on Stransky’s fourth shelf down – a slightly battered copy of Neuromancer – before I set his apartment ablaze. Originally, logging on and pretending to be him was one of my possible, postStransky options – albeit one which rather depended on 26

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Inch not knowing that he’d died in real life. As it turned out, Inch not only knew quite a bit about John-Paul Barnaby, the flesh and blood, retired social worker who drove Stransky’s avatar, but received news of his death – by instruction – from his daughter. Assuming Stransky hadn’t given his log-in details to anyone else, then, and assuming no-one had somehow or for some reason hacked into his account, any subsequent appearance of his avatar on the grid logically had to be either myself or Inch – and one of the two of us witnessing such an occurrence would know it had to be the other.

Furthermore, assuming that Stransky hadn’t told either of us the title and edition of the book, the one of the two of us witnessing such an occurrence would know the other had to have been with Stransky – been in his apartment – in real life. And we would wonder why on Earth the other hadn’t shared that tremendously large piece of information.

But, when I logged in as Step Stransky, Inch had been no-where near Second Life for several years. Just a few months after his death, she’d checked out for good. In a tearful farewell, she’d finally told me about the destruction of her family by a drunk driver and how amazing Stransky had been at understanding and supporting her, and she’d told me how she couldn’t continue in the metaverse without him.

Inch Sideways: I don’t want to be here any more.

Inch Sideways: I know you’ll probably take that as a personal rejection. I wish there was a way in which I could do this without hurting you.

Definitely Thursday: No, Inch.

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Definitely Thursday: No no no.

Definitely Thursday: You can’t go.

Definitely Thursday: You mustn’t.

Inch Sideways: I’m sorry, Def. Definitely Thursday: Please don’t, Inch Definitely Thursday: Please just think about it for a bit.

Definitely Thursday: Or don’t.

Definitely Thursday: Maybe take a month or two off.

Definitely Thursday: Do something completely different.

Inch Sideways: I can’t be here any more, Def. It’s as simple as that.

Inch Sideways: I don’t want to be.

Inch Sideways: I woke up this morning and I realised my SL is over.

Definitely Thursday: I’m begging you.

Definitely Thursday: Please don’t go.

Definitely Thursday: Please don’t go.

Definitely Thursday: I’ll do everything I can to make things better.

Definitely Thursday: I promise.

Definitely Thursday: I swear.

Inch Sideways: Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.

Definitely Thursday: Please, baby.

Inch Sideways: Goodbye, Def xxx Definitely Thursday: Wait.

Definitely Thursday: Just listen for a moment.

Definitely Thursday: You don’t know what you mean to me.

Inch Sideways is offline.

Definitely Thursday: I’m in love with you.

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Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

Definitely Thursday: I’m in love with you.

Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

Definitely Thursday: I’m in love with you.

Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

I sobbed my heart out for twenty minutes after that.

Then I went mental, smashed some shit up in my place and screamed into my mattress until I gave myself a coughing fit that ended up making me vomit. It was bad enough that she was gone, but she was gone with not the tiniest shred of an understanding of what she was walking away from. For a moment, I wished I could be facing her in real life so that I could grab her by the shoulders and scream at her, “Stransky was no more supportive than I would have been if you’d only given me a fucking chance!”

So anyway, Inch was long gone from SL by the time I crept in as Stransky, a mission I had no particular desire to undertake except an old friend of his had approached me desperate for some notecards he’d once entrusted to Step’s possession. Thinking about it now, what I should have done was to find an empty sim as Def and then log Stransky in to that spot; instead, I left the start location on the login screen as ‘Home’ and rezzed in the old skybox house he and Inch had lived in, still there, floating empty and silent at 2000 metres because the land below had become officially ‘abandoned’ and no-one yet had bought it. I wasn’t expecting that, and I couldn’t 29

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resist taking a quick walk round this little bubble of personal history. That was my mistake. If I’d only used my cam instead of my feet, I’d still have gotten away with it, but the urge to move myself around in that space in order to immerse myself properly in those memories was just too great and I made the fatal error of walking over the mat inside the front door.

Welcome mat: Hello, Step Stransky, welcome to Step and Inch’s place.

I knew I’d fucked up seriously the second those green words appeared on the bottom of my screen; even so, I reckoned it would amount to nothing. There didn’t seem to me much chance that they’d have gone to the bother of programming the mat to send an email notification – it wasn’t like this was a shop, where an emailed alert could equal sales for an owner able to log swiftly on. It also seemed to me that if the thing had been set-up to email, it would have been set-up to email Step, not Inch. I mean, it was his house. And even if it had emailed Inch, it would surely have been to an old address she’d used for SL and which she now no longer monitored.

This was my reasoning, and my reasoning was wrong.

“You shouldn’t have logged in as Step,” Inch told me.

“That was your big mistake… Emma. And, by the way, I’m Hewson. And not only Hewson. Just so you know, Thursday is Definitely a Sideways Step.

“Got you,” she said, as she left.

I was lying naked on a hotel bed in Portsmouth, with 30

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my feet and hands bound behind me.

The very first

thing I did on realising that the woman who’d tied the knots and just sexually teased a recorded confession out of me was Inch Sideways was this: I came. I knew I was deeply, deeply in the shit, but at that moment this was about as meaningful a fact to me as the GDP of an African nation. The orgasm hit me as though I’d been shot through the window by a sniper. I think it’s fair to say it was the most powerful climax of my life. She must have heard me whilst she waited for the lift, not three doors down. I’d say that was the plan, except neither the orgasm nor the shriek it pushed out of me were in any way things I had control over. I only wish she hadn’t left so abruptly after she’d told me who she was; if she had lingered for just a moment to see my reaction then I’d have cum right in front of her, and that’s the only thing I can think of that might have made for an even more powerful climax. I’d never felt quite so exposed and naked and penetrated before. It was glorious. My whole body shook and spasmed and the pain of my bindings only served to magnify it more. I almost blacked out from the raw, lust-soaked oblivion of it.

Mere moments before, she’d been lying in front of me on the bed, naked herself from the waist down and with my saliva drying on her clit. With her fingers, she’d taken me right to the very edge, and all the while her phone had been recording the conversation from about two feet behind my head: “Do you give me permission?”

“I do.”

“Safe word?”

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“Sideways.”

“Very well. Lie on your side and put your hands behind your back… I’m going to make you cum like you never came before.”

“You surprise me.”

“Perhaps I’m not who you think I am… Don’t look away. If you want me to continue, you will look directly at my eyes and face. I want to see everything.

“What was the name of the man you killed?

“Look at me. Do you want me to enter you?”

“Yes.” “I can’t hear you.”

“Yes.” “What was the name of the man you killed?”

“Step.”

“Step? What sort of a name is that?”

“It was his SL name.”

“Then Step what?”

“Step Stransky.”

“Look at me! Did you know his RL name?”

“Yes.” “Well what was it?”

“Barnaby.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Barnaby.”

“Barnaby what?”

“John-Paul Barnaby. Ooooo…”

“Don’t you dare. Not until I tell you to.

Breathe

properly. Breathe.

“How did you kill him? Don’t look away from me.”

“I smothered him.

I fucked him… and then I pushed… a pillow… on his faceoooooooo….”

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“Look at me!”

“Please…”

“Now listen to me.

You don’t cum until I can see

nothing between me and your soul. Understood?

“Look. At. Me. “Tell me how he died.”

“He tried to break free. His body… twitched.”

“And when he was dead, how did you leave him?”

“I set fire… to his flat… to his body… please please please.”

“And why did you want to kill him in the first place?”

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god.”

“Answer me!”

“He took… her from me.

He took her… He took

her...”

“He took who?”

“He took Inch… Inch… Oh please… Inch…”

“Who the fuck is Inch?”

“I loved her.

I love

her…

I

love

her…

Ohpleaseletmefuckingcum!”

She’d wandered into the office of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency a few weeks earlier (I’d kept the name after Step died because it was a quality brand) as Hewson Resident, a male meshie with money and a declared desire to know what his partner, Assumption Asymptomatic, was getting up to behind his back. It must have taken Inch ages to create this character convincingly, for my quick check during the initial interview revealed an enormous Marketplace store of over 400 products: tables and chairs and cupboards and beds and wardrobes and hat stands and record 33

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players and fruit bowls, and just about anything else you could imagine having some sort of place in a house. Of course, it’s possible she just bought or rented or borrowed the avatar pre-made from its original owner.

I’ve done that in the past for a couple of cases myself.

I took the case. Well, why wouldn’t I? Hewson was articulate in a way that pressed my buttons, though – admittedly – not my professional ones. Furthermore, he told me that money wasn’t an issue, which is always a characteristic I like in clients.

In a female avatar, I followed Assumption – who was, it turned out, also Inch – to a secret sex society called The Circle, an organisation that followed strict rules where none needed to exist; somehow, that’s a magic ingredient in SL if used properly. I lost sight of the case completely once I’d sampled an evening of their activity, which was built around public confession as the most intimate form of nakedness. What I hadn’t realised before meeting them was just how badly I wanted to confess to the murder of Step Stransky. I didn’t give them the details, but I told them I’d killed a man. And then, Assumption contacted me to tell me she had also killed. We had sex in SL and then we agreed to meet up in RL to share our stories.

I can’t really give a why to that which makes any sort of logical sense. It just felt like the right thing to do and I desired it powerfully. She played me well. I guess you could say that she got me fair and square. I was clueless, you see. There was only one detail – something that Hewson had said to me – which I ought to have picked up on, but I missed this completely. Until she recited our passphrase, I had absolutely no idea that the woman 34

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who was finger-fucking my confession out of me was the woman I had loved for five years.

“I loved her,” I sobbed. “I love her… I love her…

Ohpleaseletmefuckingcum!”

She let go of my hair and let my head drop to the duvet. She pulled out of my pussy. She pivoted round to the edge of the bed and stood up. She knelt, picked up her panties and skirt from where they’d fallen and put them back on.

“Wha?” was all I could say.

She walked around the bed and out of sight, so I rolled onto my stomach and my left side so I could see her. She was looking through my purse at the cards. Then she picked up her phone from the bedside ledge. She pressed once, twice, three times with her thumb. Then she held it up to me so I could see.

“I set fire… to his flat… to his body… please please please.”

A waveform danced across the screen as the words were gasped from the speaker. She halted the recording, pressed twice more with her thumb on the screen and returned the phone to her bag.

“What?” I asked. “Why?” “Never mind the key,” she told me. “You shouldn’t have logged in as Step. That was your big mistake…

Emma. And, by the way, I’m Hewson. And not only Hewson. Just so you know, Thursday is Definitely a Sideways Step.

“Got you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.

Anyway. Enough of the recap. You know why I’m here.

I know why I’m here.

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It’s time to act.

36

2 First things first. I Breathe. Now I think for one minute.

Are the police likely to be outside? No. If Inch had approached them before about me they’d have brought me in for questioning; they’d never have sanctioned a plan like this. So Inch must be on her way to the police right now. She’s got to get to the nearest station, which she may or may not know the location of (probably, she does). Then she’s got to explain everything to them and that’ll take time. They might or might not take her seriously, but for the moment I’ll assume that they do.

I reckon I have at least twenty minutes, probably more. Then again, it occurs to me she might be downstairs in the foyer dialling 999. Fuck. My stomach tightens at this new prospect. If she is and they respond – and why wouldn’t they? – then I’m probably already halfway through the wait.

Breathe. Panicking won’t help. I need a shit. Fuck.

Breathe, dammit. Breathe.

Taking care not to pull on and tighten anything further, I try to feel the knots around my wrists. It’s hopeless. I can only brush them with my fingertips.

There’s nothing I can do and my abdomen and bowels tremble with the stress of holding my shit in. My heart pounds. I start to sweat.

Wait. I can’t do anything about the knots around my 37

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wrists, but can I reach the knots around my ankles? I reach out with my fingertips and force my legs up behind me as much as possible; and it’s not just enough, it’s plenty. I feel the ankle knots in my fingers and a wave of relief passes through me. The knots are thick and tight, but I close my eyes and pick until I feel something loosen just a little. There. Thank God for my nails.

I pull, and the first knot falls apart almost

immediately.

The second knot takes a few seconds longer, but then my feet are free and I’m able to stretch my legs out, and it feels fucking amazing.

I curl up into a foetal position and pull my bound hands under my ass and feet. Now my tied wrists are in front of me. I get off the bed and run to the bathroom.

Whilst I attack the knots with my teeth, I sit on the toilet and open my bowels. ‘Relief’ doesn’t even come close to describing what I feel.

Done, I throw the rope onto the bed and put my dress back on. Inch should have taken it with her; it would have made things much harder for me. I leave my shoes off. I get my bag. I go to the door.

Wait. It’s a gamble, but a minute now might just earn me several later. I go back to the bed and straighten it out. I take one of the pillows and use it to wipe down every surface I’ve touched. When I leave, the room looks completely untouched. I’m not fooling myself here: there’s probably a big wet patch of my DNA around about the centre of the bed, but it won’t hurt to encourage gently a sceptical police mind-set. Anything that has them scratching their heads for a while is extra head-start for me.

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I sneak down the stairs in my bare feet. At Ground, I peak through the small window in the door and look into the foyer. Empty, thank Christ. I put my shoes back on and walk through purposefully. But halfway across, I get enough of a view of the street outside to see a police car pulling up on the far side of the road. Fuck. Fuck.

Fuck.

I see Inch crossing the street, heading for the driver’s window. So she did dial 999. Bitch. But God, she looks so beautiful. Momentarily, everything tightens inside me. My body is still tingling slightly from that orgasm and I’m certain my face is just-cum flushed. But the sight of her approaching the police car reminds me that this is real. She really is about to report me and the cops really are about to start a pursuit. That tiny little fantasy I’ve been entertaining in a corner of my mind that leaving me tied up naked on the bed was the extent of her plans for me now vanishes. This is real. This is fucking real. Inch knows I killed her lover and now she wants me punished.

I take one last look at her in her white blouse and her pea-green skirt, then I stop, suddenly, reach into my bag and pull out my phone. “Hello?” I say loudly. The receptionist looks up, absently. “Sure,” I say. “Yes,” I say. I catch the receptionist’s eye and turn a little and take a few steps away from her desk, and she looks back down at her screen, acknowledging and granting me my privacy. “Just a moment,” I say and move towards the restaurant door. “So what did she report?” I say, and I enter the dining room and start a firm march inside towards the kitchen. My mouth is dry and sticky, but I push open the swing door as if it was made with my 39

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name on it. As I enter, I say, “Well I’m at the hotel now and she’s not here yet. Can you ring the inspection office and ask when she’s likely to arrive?” There are four kitchen workers of some variety inside and they all stand back out of my way. “Just a minute, I’m in the kitchen right now,” I say. I stop and ask the nearest employee, “Where is your fire exit, please?” She points me toward a corner. I march to the door and push it open. Sunlight and air drench my body. I slam the door shut behind me and put my phone back in my bag.

I lean against the door and my legs go weak. I’m out.

There is always the possibility that the police will dismiss Inch as a timewaster and leave it at that, but I have to assume they’ll believe every last word she tells them.

I take off down the service road, which runs

parallel to the main road and in the direction of Gunwharf Quays. Good. I stay on the back streets as much as possible as I make my way there, putting the next pieces together in my head whilst I walk. Order is everything. Fuck. I have to get this right.

A residential street with front doors right onto the pavement, some with stoops like the houses you see in New York City. A crossroads, with a hair dresser and a vinyl records shop/café (‘The Pie and Vinyl’) on opposing corners. A park, with the grass worn and dried out in thin, rectangular strips that cause me to wonder if something is burried beneath it. These distractions are abstract and bizarre. The world I’m walking through is a different place than the one I lived in right up to the moment I walked through the entrance of that hotel. I 40

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might just as well have taken a cross-channel ferry to France, although France would somehow make more sense than this place does. This is better reminiscent of my one trip to the States many years ago, the first day of which I spent feeling completely disoriented because everything around me was different in no one big but innumerable tiny little ways. Other people can do what they want in this place and I, now, cannot. I fight to keep myself from running or trotting or looking in any way in a hurried or troubled state of mind. I walk purposefully, determinedly; my eyes are one-way mirrors.

Through the painted metal railings on the far side there is another street to cross and then I’m in an open square with fountains and two huge apartment blocks of glass, metal and brick. I walk past the cafés at their feet and over the bridge that crosses what I think is an artificial river. I’m at Gunwharf. And I’m out in the open now, visible to probably hundreds of different CCTV cameras which I will assume from this point onwards are watching my every move.

I walk up to a map and find to my relief that my bank does have a branch here. It’s two minutes’ walk away, and a quarter of an hour later I’ve taken as much money out of my account as they’ll let me, given that I still have direct debits coming out of it. I have £1,834 in my purse.

I wish it was more.

I stop at a clothes boutique I noticed on my way to the bank because it’s about three metres away from a CCTV pod that hangs like heavy fruit from a black lamp post. I examine for several seconds some sunhats on a spinning rack outside, then choose a red one and take it inside the shop. On the way to the counter, I take the first 41

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sleeveless tank (yellow) and the first pair of lycra shorts (black) that I pass, plus flip-flops and a black baseball cap with ‘BOY’ embroidered on it in yellow thread. I buy the sunhat with my debit card and the rest with cash, then stuff the carrier bag with the shorts, tank, baseball cap and shoes into my bag (it bulges). Outside the shop, I pause and put on the red sunhat.

I walk to the railway station, a terminus right next door to Gunwharf. My heart is pounding. Either now or at some point in the future, eyes will be watching and then scrutinising me as I pass from camera to camera. In the foyer, I use my debit card again to buy a ticket from the machine for the next train, which happens to go to London. I go to the ladies and empty myself again. Dear Christ, I have to wait here for twenty minutes.

I shut my eyes for a moment and listen to the background noises, which include a police siren in the distance that approaches and then fades. I will never now be able to ignore that sound. My life as it was is over. I start to shake. I start to sob. Fuck you, Step Stransky. Fuck you, Inch Sideways.

Breathe. Keep calm. I wipe the tears from my cheeks and leave the cubicle as I hear a voice announce an approaching train. Since the station is at the end of the line, this has to be the service which will subsequently turn into the one printed on my ticket. I go out onto the platform as it pulls in. The doors open to let the arriving passengers off and I slip past them on board. I walk down four now empty carriages and, on the way, I take my debit card out and write my PIN on the back, then tuck it into the crease of one of the seats. With any luck, someone might find and use it, and lay a nice false trail 42

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wherever they happen to be.

They’re welcome to

whatever they can get out of my account; I won’t be needing it ever again. I go to the toilet at the end of the fourth carriage, enter it and lock the door. I take off my dress and sunhat and put them on the toilet seat. I pull the carrier bag out of my handbag, then my bra and panties, then the tank, shorts, baseball cap and flip-flops out of the carrier bag. I put them all on, tying my hair back in a ponytail with a rubber band before putting on the cap. I put the dress and sunhat into the carrier bag. I open the back of my phone and remove the SIM card, then put it into a factory reset. I put the tiny card in my purse for now. I unlock the door and leave the cubicle.

People are accumulating outside on the platform; for now, the doors remain closed. I wait out of sight in the scrunchy bit between carriages. Eight minutes pass, every second of which I feel physically like a stab to the gut. It’s now nearly forty-five minutes since I left the hotel. They must be searching for me by now, and I’m still only a five minute walk away from where I started.

Any sane person would surely have put as much distance between themselves and this place as fast as they could. My confidence in this plan begins to crumble. Plan? Who would call this hastily cobbled sequence of actions any sort of a strategy? I feel panic starting to erode the edges of my rationality. The police are probably gathered outside the train right now, waiting for me. A pit opens up inside my stomach and I have to lean against the rubber zig-zag for support. This might be it. This might be it.

Breathe, for fuck’s sake. Even if they are there, they won’t be looking for someone with my appearance.

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Even if they’re waiting right outside the nearest door, my change of clothes might just let me slip past them unnoticed, and then I’ll be out and there will be only one little bit of the plan left before I’m properly away from this city. Breathe. It’s not over yet. It’s not over yet.

Finally, the doors beep beep beep their imminent opening. As they hiss open, I slip out and into a satisfyingly thick group of people waiting to get on. I push through rather than walk around, but do so politely. As I exit their swell, I swing my carrier bag cheerfully, partly because this won’t be the demeanour the police are looking for and partly because the name of the shop I bought my outfit from is presented across both sides of it in big, pink letters and I want to blur the image that the cameras get of this as much as possible.

There are no police on the platform. There are no police in the foyer or in the car park outside. There is an unreal quality to this now, as though I am being chased but only in my head. No matter. The absence of obvious pursuit does wonders for my stomach.

This next bit, though, is going to be at least twenty minutes if I don’t run it. I wish now I’d bought trainers in that shop instead of flip-flops, because the rest of my outfit would then have been consistent with that of a runner. Well, too late. I walk out of the station car park onto The Hard and then take St George’s Road under the railway line and towards the seafront. I’m not entirely certain of the route I should take, but if I follow the shore I should be fine (If my phone was still active, I could have Google guide me, except Google no doubt would then also guide the police when they logged in to my account). I take a left down Gunwharf Road and then 44

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another onto White Hart Road; at the end of that the harbour wall awaits me – not a CCTV camera in sight. I climb the steps and join the flow of walking tourists at the top. I head east.

About a hundred metres out, a large Brittany Ferries ship is cruising past in the same direction. Oh, how I wish I were on board that boat. People on the decks wave at us walkers and a few parents prompt their kids to reply. To my left, Southsea Common takes over from the buildings and there are people all over it, sitting or playing catching games. The funfair on Clarence Pier ahead announces its proximity with a screaming from the rollercoaster that fades in and fades out, then fades in and fades out, as though the shape of the track itself – or the inverse of it – represents the very waveform of that sound. I reach the end of the wall and my walk takes me right through the fair, between the merry-go-round and the crazy golf. I walk past candyfloss stalls and hot-dog stands, and the heat all around me seems to intensify from the competing smells of melted sugar and frying onions. I leave the fair behind me, and then it’s just another minute of walking and I reach my destination.

And there are no police there either. Well why would there be?

I enter the ticket office of Southsea Hoverport.

45

3 The sound of the hovercraft as it approached across the Solent was like a swarm of bees. As it neared, the highpitched buzz gained depth and bass, and, by the time it was crawling up the large, concrete slip, the roar of the two engines drowned out every other sound. Then, abruptly, it faded away to nothing and the craft sank to its knees as the air beneath it dissipated. A young man in jeans and a Hover Travel t-shirt pushed a set of wheeled steps up to the disembarkation door. The passengers dipped their heads when they left; it was just like watching people getting off a plane.

I’d bought a three day return to Ryde.

I had no

intention of returning to the mainland in three days, but buying a single or at this hour a day return might look suspicious: not suspicious enough to send staff running to the telephone, obviously, but odd enough that I might stick in someone’s mind just long enough that they might think of me if asked that vague police question, “Was there anything that struck you as odd about any of the passengers that afternoon?”

A few minutes after the last passenger got off, we were directed to board. When the engines started up again and the machine got back to its feet, I was surprised to find myself clutching at the armrests. It was my first time on a hovercraft and my nervous system was in no 46

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fit state to appreciate any sort of novelty at that particular moment.

But it was able to appreciate the sight I saw now through the window. As we backed down the slip, the hovercraft rotated gracefully through 180 degrees giving me a view of the hoverport and, as we moved out, Southsea Common.

Portsmouth started to recede.

Finally, I was putting some miles between myself and the place where people, somewhere, were looking for me.

And there was still no sign of the police. I supposed, though, that they didn’t actually need to be there in person to pose a threat. They could have telephoned the hoverport if they suspected that was where I was headed and the hoverport staff could have radioed the hovercraft and told it to return. I knew I wasn’t anything approaching safe yet, but the increasing smallness of Portsmouth, together with the somehow comforting drone of the engines, opened a valve on my tension and I felt it draining out of me. Suddenly, I felt sleepy. The crossing to the Isle of Wight was only a ten minute one, but I knew even a five minute nap would pay me back with interest once I got to the other side and had to start thinking again. What’s more, it couldn’t hurt my appearance: who would suspect a dozing passenger of being on the run from anything? I twisted in my seat so that the side of my face was against the headrest and I let the thickness seep into me.

A change in frequency of the engine noise awoke me and I looked out of my window to see that we’d arrived and 47

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were sinking back down to the concrete.

To my left,

Ryde Pier reached solidly out into the Solent and Portsmouth was just a grey smudge on the horizon, punctuated by the pin-sharp Spinnaker Tower. It was only a few hours ago that I’d stood on the lower viewing level of that tower and greeted the woman I didn’t know was Inch Sideways. If only I’d listened to that little voice that had been quietly nagging at me just before that moment that I was somehow passing a point of no return. I thought for a moment about my flat. It was nothing special, really, but I realised now I thought of it as home. There were a few physical items there that I’d had all my life, such as the black cardigan my grandmother had knitted for me when I was a teenager that had become the thing I always wore whenever I felt ill. There were also a few letters from my father. Now I would never see or touch these things again.

I left the hovercraft and followed the flow of passengers out of the small terminal and over the railway bridge. At the bus station, I bought a ticket to Newport; by luck, I only had a three minute wait and then I was putting even the distant sight of Portsmouth behind me. The thirty minute trip gave me some time to think about what I wanted to do next, and when the bus reached the town, I headed immediately for a budget chemist shop (the sort that still uses mirrors instead of security cameras) to buy hair dye, paracetamol and make-up remover. Next, I bought: a rucksack; jeans; four different t-shirts; several sets of underwear; a large, orange sweater; a fleece; three pairs of thick, yellow socks; a pair of walking boots; toothpaste; an electric toothbrush; shampoo and conditioner; a pay-as-you-go 48

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SIM card and twenty pounds of credit. I bought no more than two items in any one shop and everything got taken out of its bag and put into the rucksack as soon as I was back out on the street. I didn’t want to look like someone buying a new life and I did want to look like a tourist who actually had some possessions to her name.

I kept to the small shops wherever possible. The jeans, sweater and fleece I managed to find in a couple of charity shops. I told the guy in the phone shop I was buying the SIM for my mother’s next door neighbour to avoid any sort of lengthy sales pitch over contract.

Without ID – or any useable ID, at least – accommodation was going to be a problem. The big, economy brand hotels – exactly the sort of anonymous place I wanted – were completely out of the question thanks to their no exceptions policies on ID. I supposed it wouldn’t be too difficult to blag a story at some familyowned bed and breakfast about having lost my purse, but that would likely make me stick in someone’s memory. And all this was assuming there were actually vacant rooms to be found on the island at the last minute. I span out the shopping for longer than was necessary in the hope that an idea might come to me, but soon it was getting close to five and closing time. I decided to defer this next step to tomorrow, by which time I hoped to be blonde with significantly shorter hair so that any memory of my appearance I created in the minds of other people would be significantly less of a fit with any photographs of me that might get published. I wondered about that. Had Inch taken a picture of me?

There had been a moment at the café we’d visited in Gunwharf Quays after meeting up when she’d raised her 49

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mobile phone and looked at the screen in that lookinginto-a-mirror way, so I’d assumed it was a front camera app she was using. I think she even fiddled with her hair. If she’d muted her phone just before, she could have taken a very close-up photo of me without it making any sort of giveaway sound. I reckoned that was what she had done. It’s what I would have done in her place.

I slipped into a camping shop with barely ten minutes to spare before five and bought a two person camouflage pop-up tent and a thick sleeping bag. Then I went to a coffee shop that stayed open until seven and took a table next to a power socket. I inserted the new SIM into my phone, then plugged it in and gave it an hour and fortyfive minutes’ drinking time (I always travel with a charger). Whilst it fed, I looked up local campsites on it.

There were several clustered around Shanklin, which looked like a walk of six or seven miles. I ordered a Panini and then a slice of chocolate cake for extra calories. Before I left, I slipped into the toilet to take off my make-up and change my t-shirt for one of the new ones. I put on the yellow socks and the walking boots, and tied the tent and sleeping bag to the bottom of my rucksack. I tied the fleece around my waist. I bought a bottle of water for the journey. I set out.

The walk took me a little over two hours and did me the world of good. It was a clear day and the evening sun threw progressively rich light over the fields and hedgerows. I know I could have taken the bus, but I reckoned the personal down time that a walk would give 50

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me would help my thinking and get me into a less onedge state. I was right. Only five minutes out of Newport town centre, the countryside opened out around me. It wasn’t until I was immersed in this quiet that I realised just how much the urban soundscape had been impacting on my nerves. After an hour’s walking in the new boots, my feet were sore in a somehow pleasant way. I started to actually look forward to falling asleep in my new tent and allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that I was on some sort of vacation. I knew that if I looked too far ahead, the immensity of what had to be done in order to establish a new life in hiding would overwhelm me. This had to be taken one day at a time and if achieving that meant kidding myself that I was on a pleasant summer holiday then so be it.

Whatever worked.

About a mile out from Shanklin, I stopped at a little corner shop that was still open and bought a few bits and pieces to eat and drink. The sun’s rays were long and golden by this point, and starting to lose their warmth, but the steady march I’d maintained had me warmed up nicely and my skin was still hot from the earlier sun. I looked out across the island’s rolling fields that dropped away on all sides and wondered why I’d spent so much of my life in places so far removed from this sort of landscape. I felt released, somehow. In a strange sort of way, I even felt glad that I was forced to be here. It felt like being grateful for a power cut that re-acquainted you with peace and quiet and candle light, and the pleasure of a battery operated radio on a low volume setting.

Except that the people who were (or would be) pursuing me would deny me this environment just as 51

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keenly as they would deny me permission to live in my own home. Whenever I started feeling too comfortable with my current context, that unavoidable fact crept up on me and tapped me on the shoulder. As I neared the first of the camp sites, my anxiety started to return. It was time to act again. longer route.

I almost wished I’d chosen a

The first site was no use to me at all; I could see from the road it was caravans and mobile holiday homes only.

But the second site had exactly what I needed, with one entire side of it bordered at the back by a thick, wooded area. I picked my way through this and found a clearing with space enough for my tent and had it erected in under three minutes. I pushed the four securing pegs into the ground with the heels of my boots, and then I walked back to the campsite edge to see if I could spot it. In fact, its camouflage design made it more or less invisible in well under half the distance. It was perfect. For the first time that day I started to feel properly lucky.

I waited until twilight, then I snuck into the site so I could visit the wash block. I took a long shower and dried myself using the t-shirt I’d bought in Portsmouth.

Then I cleaned my teeth in one of the personal cubicles.

Back at the tent, I set up a new Google account on my phone (there was a 3G antenna on a building just outside the campsite, making the signal strength better than I’d ever experienced) so I could start downloading apps from Google Play. First, however, I visited the Second Life website and set up a brand new alt, linked to the new email address. I downloaded the Lumiya viewer for the phone and, a few minutes later, was back in SL from 52

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the comfort of my own tent.

It had been a while since I’d set up a new account; going through the induction on the tiny phone screen with its low-quality graphics was an intensely irritating experience. At the earliest opportunity, I teleported to the mainland and dematerialised in a crowded infohub.

The lag there just made things even harder. I crawled my way to the nearest sim border and spent five minutes ‘sailing’ slowly through the next region and then the one after that. Finally, the transfer from one server to the next completed and my virgin avatar snapped back to three metres inside the border of the new sim.

There was only one thing I wanted to do inworld at that particular moment, because the sooner I initiated this process the sooner it would be completed. I opened up an IM. Camper232 Resident: Hello Spence.

A pause. Finally: Spencer Huckleberry: Hello yourself, Mr One-day-old!

Spencer Huckleberry: Do I know you?

I smiled for a moment, not because I found Spence’s reply amusing and not because I was especially fond of the guy; I smiled because I was having a conversation in Second Life and that felt normal.

Camper232 Resident: Is that any way to speak to your number one competitor?

Spencer Huckleberry: Sorry pal, but if you want me to 53

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play a game of ‘Guess Who?’ I’ve got better things to do.

Spence had no people skills. None. It was astonishing to me that he maintained the custom he did.

Camper232 Resident: Fine. It’s Definitely Thursday here. Jesus Christ, Spence, is business so bad that light conversation is completely beyond your ability?

Typing these long responses on the tiny screen was almost an agony. I half expected him to disappear midsentence. I used the Swype interface to try to speed things up, tracing swirly, shorthand shapes across the keyboard that magically turned themselves into words when my finger left the screen.

Spencer Huckleberry: Light conversation is the privilege of the unoccupied man, as you well know.

Spencer Huckleberry: What can I do you for, Thursday?

Camper232 Resident: I need a favour, Spence.

Spencer Huckleberry: Well here’s a first. The great Step Stransky Detective Agency coming to little old Spencer Huckleberry Investigations for help.

Camper232 Resident: It’s hardly like we’re never in contact.

Camper232 Resident: You do realise how much business I’ve sent your way over the years, right?

Spencer Huckleberry: Anything with a real life component, sure.

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Spencer Huckleberry: You don’t do RL investigations.

Spencer Huckleberry: Except that half the cases you point in our direction have no concept of the work involved in RL detecting.

Spencer Huckleberry: Nor apparently any understanding that RL work needs to be paid for in RL money!

Camper232 Resident: I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was an inconvenience to you.

Camper232 Resident: I won’t refer those clients to you in future, then.

Camper232 Resident: Is Hargreaves still taking on RL casework?

Spencer Huckleberry: Def  Def  Spencer Huckleberry: Let’s not say things here we might later regret!

Spencer Huckleberry: Send anyone to that shmuck and that’s a client lost to the whole fuckin industry.

Spencer Huckleberry: So you want a favour, my old friend. How can I help?

Camper232 Resident: Do you have any RL contacts able to sort out new IDs? Spencer Huckleberry: Fake IDs? Camper232 Resident: Yes Spencer Huckleberry: Real life fake IDs? Camper232 Resident: Yes Spencer Huckleberry: What are we talking about, here – something you can buy smokes with or something you can use to skip the country?

Camper232 Resident: The latter, I guess.

Spencer Huckleberry: And is this for you or for one of your clients?

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Camper232 Resident: This is for me, Spence.

Spencer Huckleberry: And it’s not going to bring you into the RL investigation business?

Camper232 Resident: Absolutely not, Spence. Only jerks do RL work.

Spencer Huckleberry: Your admiration for other professionals was always something I liked about you, Thursday.

Spencer Huckleberry: If I was able to sort something out for you, where would you be able to pick it up?

Camper232 Resident: Ideally, south UK. Spencer Huckleberry: Including London?

Camper232 Resident: Sure, if I have to.

Spencer Huckleberry: Okay, Thursday. Leave it with me.

Spencer Huckleberry: I have some people I can talk to.

Camper232 Resident: IM me when you have some details – it’ll go straight to my email.

Spencer Huckleberry: This you or the old you?

Camper232 Resident: This me.

Camper232 Resident: Don’t send it to Def. Spencer Huckleberry: May I ask why you’re speaking to me through this newbie?

Camper232 Resident: You may not.

Spencer Huckleberry: ‘Camper232’… Let me guess: you’re staking some region out trying to look like a camper?

Camper232 Resident: In a manner of speaking.

Spencer Huckleberry: Do camping spots even exist any more?

Camper232 Resident: As long as there’s dollarbie stores, there always be camp spots.

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Spencer Huckleberry: How do I even know for certain it’s you, Thursday?

Camper232 Resident: March 2006. The Pinot Noire.

You were wearing rather fetching lingerie, I recall.

Spencer Huckleberry: Jesus Christ, Thursday.

Spencer Huckleberry: You could have just mentioned the colour of my cat.

It was nearly eleven o’clock and my mobile’s battery was down to 38 per cent. I deactivated wireless and 3G in order to reduce the drain on what was left and set the alarm on it for 5am. I got into my sleeping bag and was completely unconscious less than thirty seconds later.

I got up as soon as the alarm went off and stumbled my way through the wood to the campsite border. I was hungry and thirsty and I wanted badly to go back to sleep because in sleep none of these fucking problems had existed. I don’t recall the dream I’d been having, except to say it had been warm and comforting and completely disconnected from any of the events of the previous day. It was almost as though my brain was working its way through a backlog and hadn’t yet got down to that point in the pile. My world had completely ended, but in unconscious land things were pretty much business as usual. So I got moving straight away because I knew that if I took my time over things I’d start to dwell on the crushing disappointment I’d felt on seeing the inside of the tent instead of my flat’s bedroom ceiling. I needed to do.

I flip-flopped through the campsite in the thin light of 57

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pre-dawn. At the wash block, I took a personal cubicle and got to work with the hair dye. I left it on for fifteen minutes, wanting a strong result but nothing too extreme. It wasn’t an easy task to do by myself, but the end result was good enough. After I rinsed it out, I transferred to a shower cubicle two doors down and washed and conditioned my hair. I realised then I’d forgotten to bring anything to dry myself with – I regretted now not having thought to buy a towel in Newport – and I peeked around my cubicle door to see if there were any people around outside yet. There were not. So I tip-toed out and stood naked at the entrance until the morning air had dried my body.

Back at my tiny little clearing, I took down my tent – it took considerably longer to fold back up than it had taken to erect – and pulled a nearby dead branch over the spot. My socks and boots back on and my rucksack repacked, I slipped out of the woods and made my way into the village.

58

4 I took a walk along Shanklin beach whilst I waited for things to open, thinking about how once I’d got my hair cut then the plan, such as it was, would have run out. I had no idea what I was going to do after that. I needed a place to stay, but without ID that felt more or less impossible. Pretty soon, I’d run out of money and need a job, but how was I supposed to get one without an address and a bank account? I wanted to settle for a while, but not without some sort of a direction. If I just waited around here, filling my time with nothing, I would be more or less waiting to die.

For a few minutes, I wondered if the right thing to do would be to go back to Portsmouth and turn myself in.

What would I get for murder? Fifteen years with good behaviour? At least I’d be out before I hit 50 and still have some life left to live. At least there would come a time when I’d no longer have to hide.

There was a long, seemingly unending row of wooden beach huts at the foot of the cliff. They appeared to run all the way from Shanklin to Sandown. There were all shut and bolted except for one. A guy with long, sandy hair was sitting outside of it in a deck chair. A kettle sitting on a gas stove on the ground next to him started to whistle. He got up and went into his hut, then emerged with a green mug. I spotted the dangle string of a tea bag hanging over the side.

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Even a beach hut to live in would be nice for a while, I mused. Something solid was all I wanted. Something with enough space in it for a bed. A proper bed. My body ached from the hard, slightly uneven ground I’d slept on that night.

“Good morning!” he called out as I passed at a distance of ten metres or so.

An Irish accent.

Immediately, I wished I hadn’t walked so far along the beach.

“Good morning,” I replied and smiled at him in as bland and neutral a way as I knew how. I broke eye contact at the earliest polite moment. I willed him to forget me.

He held up his mug. “I always offer the first person I see here in the morning a cup of tea. Can I tempt you to one?”

I was a little cold and starving hungry, and I could have snatched the mug right out of his hand. But instead I said, “That’s very kind of you, but I’m fine thanks.” I kept on walking.

“Early visitors to the beach are either runners or thinkers,” he called out, raising his volume as the distance between us increased. “This spot here is perfect for some thinking!”

I couldn’t help myself. I stopped and turned. “What about the dog walkers?”

He feigned confusion at this apparently simple question. “Well that’s no mystery at all: the humans do the thinking and the dogs do the running.”

I laughed and, for a moment, everything felt normal.

Then I lost control of the laugh and my teeth started to chatter. God how I wanted something hot inside me. I 60

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don’t think he noticed me shivering, but he waggled the empty mug in the air as though to tempt me and I did that sort of going floppy for a moment thing where you show you’ve been won over. I trudged back towards him; within three steps all I could think of was drinking the tea.

He disappeared back inside the hut and came out straight away with another deck chair, something from the 1970s with orange, yellow and white flowers printed on a brown background. He unfolded it for me with a metal shriek and placed it on the other side of the gas stove. I took off my backpack and eversoslightly flopped into the chair. He chuckled. “First time camping?” he asked me as he poured the hot water. He’d obtained another mug for himself at the same time as the deck chair. It was white and had a picture of a tractor on it, with JOHN DEERE printed underneath.

“How can you tell?” I asked. In fact, it wasn’t. But the last time I’d been camping it had been with my parents many years ago, and in a much bigger tent.

“That’s not really a camper’s rucksack now, is it? I doubt you’ve got much more than a change of underwear in there.” Then he held up his hand sharply, as though he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to know whatever answers there were to his question.

“Scratch that,” he said.

“It’s none of my business

anyway. I don’t have any milk, I’m afraid. Wait – scratch that too!” He stretched out in his chair, became long and straight and unbent, and dug deep into the pockets of his khaki shorts. Keys and loose change jangled. Finally, he brought out three tiny UHT cartoons of the sort you get in service stations next to the sugar 61

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and cutlery and napkins. He offered them to me. They were a bit battered, but intact. “I forgot about these.”

I took one and peeled it open, then tipped the vaguely beige liquid within it into my drink. “Thanks,” I said and swirled my mug a couple of times. I took my first sip and it was totally the most wonderful thing I’d ever consumed. Within not much more than a minute, my mug was a third empty and I had started to hope I’d be offered another. I felt the heat within me start to spread out from my stomach.

He sat back in his chair and for a moment we stayed like that in silence. I guessed him to be in his midthirties. He looked windswept like a surfer but without the sharp edges. He was wearing a thick, hand-knitted sweater that was multi-coloured in a way that suggested it hand been constructed from all the left-over bits of wool on the factory floor.

He gestured at the waves. “Not bad, eh?” he said.

“Not bad at all,” I replied.

“I’m Theo, by the way,” he held out his hand.

“Gemma,” I replied and shook it. Instantly, I regretted my little hidden joke, but it was too late now.

“Pleased to have tea with you, Gemma.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

He waved his mug to one side, as though suggesting it was nothing. “Few pleasures rival seeing the start of the day by yourself, but the company of one other person can challenge it. Depending on the company, of course.”

“Only one other person?”

“Well, if it’s more than that then the day can no longer be starting.”

“A fair point.”

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“Would you rather be anywhere else right now than watching these waves with a hot mug of tea and no-one else around for as far as the eye can wander?”

“I’ll admit, it’s lovely,” I told him. “But honestly? I’d rather be in bed right now asleep.”

He grinned. “Are you staying at a site now Gemma or are you bumming it in a field someplace?”

I paused, then yawned, then laughed. “Bumming it,” I said.

“I thought as much.” He raised his mug as though in salute and it occurred to me that Theo appeared to require a cup in his hand for the majority of his body language expressions. “Well there’s a bunk inside if you want to put your head down for a while,” he said, indicating the interior or the beach hut with a lazy backward jerk of his thumb. I glanced inside and saw a low, unmade bed across the back wall of the hut; just a few bits of wood, really, except it had a mattress and sheets and a pillow and a duvet…

“Oh,” I said, “I couldn’t…” convincing to myself.

I didn’t even sound

“Of course you could. The beach will start to busy any moment now, so it’s not as like you’re in any danger from me. And please don’t take this the wrong way, Gemma,” he said, “but you look exhausted. And I’m done with sleeping for the time being today.”

“You sleep here?” I asked.

“Not as often as I’d like, but sometimes.” He put a finger over his lips. now.”

“Not a word to the committee,

“There’s a committee?”

“Isn’t there a committee for everything?”

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I looked again at the bed, hoping it might be still a little warm from when he’d been in it. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to sit here a while longer and maybe share some more tea with the next person who comes along, although I might just watch you sleeping in a fashion because watching women in sleep is almost as tranquil as watching waves breaking on a shore. Then, at seven, I’m going to fry up some bacon. Do you like bacon?”

My stomach growled at that moment, as though the very word ‘bacon’ had elicited this response like I was a fucking Pavlovian dog. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Bacon in thirty-five minutes, then. Now get your head down, Gemma. I’ll shake you awake in an hour if the smell doesn’t rouse you first.”

I got up meekly and went inside. There was just enough room in there for me to take off my boots and socks and sweater and jeans, then I curled up in the bed with my back to the still-open door. I was asleep within seconds, my final conscious thoughts that I had experienced so far that day both the most wonderful cup of tea I’d ever had and the most wonderful bed I’d ever slept in. Not bad, given it wasn’t even 7am yet.

When I woke, it was gone 10:30am and there was a note on the floor next to the bed: Didn’t have the heart to wake you, Gemma.

I’ve gone to work. There’s a plate of bacon on the table (under the bowl) and bread in the bin.

Stay as long as you like, but if you leave the hut 64

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please lock the padlock and leave the key under one of the bricks. Or take it with you, if you want – I have another with me.

Theo The door to the hut had been closed, but was only held shut by a hook on the inside. Light squeezed in through a thin chink and the soundscape of seaside noises with it.

The ‘table’ was a foot wide shelf along the right hand side of the interior; it had a single wooden stool tucked underneath it. I cut two slices from the loaf in the bread bin and heaped the bacon between them. There was even a bottle of brown sauce. It tasted out of this world.

I opened the door and sat on the step to eat my sandwich. The beach was crowded now. Children made sandcastles and flew kites; teenagers sunbathed and threw Frisbees at one another; I counted six games of beach cricket that I could see, two games of beach badminton and one of beach volleyball; three jet skis were buzzing about offshore; couples passed me with their fingers interlocked; parents passed me with their children on their shoulders.

Perhaps it was just relief at having a momentary base of relative security, but I decided that the hut was simply glorious. Everything was right and good and well in this place.

I found the hairdressers at the top of Arthur’s Hill. I had to wait twenty minutes and flicked through a copy of Hello! whilst I did so. They let me charge my phone at a socket next to the till. I found a picture of Pink and 65

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showed it to the stylist when it was my turn. “Like that,” I told her.

I walked back down the hill trying not to think too much about what I was going to do next. I had to get a place of my own and I had to get a job, but neither of those things were possible without some sort of ID. At that moment, my phone buzzed to let me know I had an email, and since Spencer Huckleberry was the only person I was expecting any sort of message from, I snatched the thing out of my pocket and stabbed the screen on.

Spencer Huckleberry: I have a contact in Basingstoke, Thursday. He can sort you out a new passport, but he says it’ll take him a week at least once he has your pictures if you want it done properly. It’ll cost you ten grand GBP. That’s the discounted price, you understand. I’m doing you a favour, Thursday.

He’s expecting you. His email is…

Ten thousand pounds. I hadn’t even thought to consider how much it would cost me. Where the fuck was I going to get ten thousand pounds from?

I looked at my watch and saw that it was five to one in the afternoon. Twenty-four hours ago I’d stepped off my train at Portsmouth harbour to make for the Spinnaker Tower. The only part of that life I now had with me was the data on the SD card in my phone and the contents of my handbag, and I was lucky to have even that.

I had no money, no home, no ID, no future.

I walked past a newsagent and my heart stopped dead 66

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in my chest as I saw my own face from twenty-two hours earlier staring out at me from the front page. MURDER SUSPECT EVADES CITY POLICE. Oh yes, and I was a wanted woman. Amazingly, I seemed to have forgotten that part.

My mouth dry and sticky, I nonetheless managed to blag my way through half of a fictional phone conversation

with

my

mother

about

a

departed

boyfriend whilst I bought the paper. I noticed, with satisfaction, that the shopkeeper tutted under her breath at my rudeness. I hoped I’d been successful in altering my appearance substantially from the image on the front page, but there seemed no point in taking any chances.

I rolled the paper up and tucked it under my arm. At the bottom of the hill, I went to one of the cafés on the beachfront and ordered what they seemed to think was a black Americano. I sat down in the corner and read the story.

POLICE OFFICERS IN PORTSMOUTH today face difficult questions over their response to the detention by a member of the public of a woman now suspected of murdering a retired social worker in Plymouth four years ago.

John-Paul Barnaby was sixty-nine when he lost his life in a flat fire now thought to have been arson to cover up his murder. His suspected killer, 31 year old Emma Kline, was apprehended yesterday by a friend of Barnaby who had long suspected her of his murder. In a confidence trick sounding like the plot of a Hollywood thriller, Barnaby’s friend – currently not named by the police – managed to get Kline to confess the murder, all the while recording this secretly on tape. The unnamed 67

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vigilante then managed to secure Kline in a hotel room and alerted the police. By the time officers arrived at the scene to accompany him back to the room, however, Ms Kline had managed to escape.

A spokesperson for the police today told The Journal that a woman resembling Kline bought a ticket for and was seen boarding a train to London Waterloo at Portsmouth harbour. “We have not yet been able to determine the point at which Ms Kline left the train and are examining closed circuit footage in order to establish this.” Police do not think that Ms Kline poses a significant risk, but caution members of the public against approaching her.

This embarrassing evasion takes place only days following an independent report criticising Home Office spending cuts that have seen over 5000 response officers made redundant since 2010. Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the Shadow Home Secretary this morning cited Ms Kline’s escape as “yet more evidence that the government has got its priorities wrong”. A spokesperson from the Home Office responded that “the government remains strongly committed to the protection of front-line services.”

Hampshire Constabulary refused to comment on the competence of its response other than to say that “police officers responding to this call did so in a manner entirely consistent with procedure.”

So there it all was: my name, my picture, my crime.

Everyone who had known me in RL would now know what I had done. I’d supposed this moment would come, but to see it now so publically declared made me sick with anxiety and for several minutes I thought I was going to vomit. And this was not even half of the story.

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I couldn’t wait for the press to get hold of the details of my ‘detention’ or the role that Second Life had played in this all.

I left the newspaper on the table and went out onto the esplanade, where I closed my eyes and listened to seagulls calling and children playing on nearby swings.

Everything is an illusion, they say, and nothing around me felt in any way real or solid. The sounds could have been from the loudspeakers on my computer at home, the breeze from my fan; I couldn’t tell how much of the heat I felt was from the sun and how much was from the guilt and fear and shame that was overwhelming me. I blinked back tears.

But what else was there to do other than continue to live? I listened to the sea reclaiming its water over the sand and realised that, up to this moment, I had still in tiny ways been holding on to my past life, still in denial, still thinking about what I’d lost and how I might somehow get at least some of it back. The newspaper article was the end of that existence. It was all gone now and I was back to zero. Nothing lay ahead of me and nothing lay behind.

So be it.

I flicked off my flip flops and walked onto the hot sand. I took the key out of my pocket and headed for Theo’s beach hut.

69

HIDE

5 The last chords of Stevie Wonder’s amazing performance of ‘Happy Birthday’ were still ringing in my ears as I interlocked my fingers with Theo’s on our torch-lit walk back across the Bestival field to my two person camouflage tent. “So you liked that, did you?” he asked me, whilst I knelt to undo the zip. “I did,” I replied, pulling him into the tent and wriggling out of my jeans even before he’d had a chance to do the entrance back up. “Thank you for bringing me.”

“That’s it now,” he said, unbuckling his belt. “The summer’s over.”

“Not quite over,” I told him.

We got back to the flat the next day at just after nine.

Theo tossed his keys into the bowl and went straight to the shower. I put bread in the toaster and the coffee pot on the stove, and turned on Radio 2. Chris Evans chirped about cars over the fade-out from a new Pet Shop Boys track.

“Mrs Stuman today, right?” he asked, whilst he towelled dry his hair and left wet footprints across the kitchen area tiles. He plucked a slice of toast out and started eating it dry, which is an inhuman thing to do.

“That’s right.” I poured him a glass of orange juice 73

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and got two mugs from the tree for coffee. “And you?”

He wrinkled his nose. “A wall to plaster in Wootton, I think.” He held the toast by a corner in his mouth whilst he sliced open two rolls for his lunch and threw grated cheese and tomato slices at them.

I held him from behind for a moment. “When can we go out to the hut again?” I asked.

He chuckled. “You’d spend all your days there if you could now, wouldn’t you?”

“I like it. It’s peaceful.”

“Well now.” He put the rolls in his sandwich box and the box in his rucksack. “Let’s take a trip out this evening to sweeten the week and be sure to end up there again on Friday night.”

“I’d like that,” I said to the spot between his shoulder blades.

Once he was gone, I plugged in his laptop and connected the key drive I’d installed Firestorm viewer to. I logged in to Second Life – another new account, because the story had broken two weeks previously about my SL identity, so Spencer knowing ‘Camper232’ was Def was now a risk – and I took my avatar to a public sandbox, creating first a work platform at 4000 metres and doing a scan for any prims or people within a twenty metre radius. I rezzed a pine cube and started up a new script in it, copying code into the editing box from a screen on my mobile phone. It took about ten minutes. What you need to understand about my mobile phone is that it contains more or less my entire digital life on that tiny 74

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SD card inside it.

Once I’d finished typing in the code and checked it, I hit Save, closed the various edit windows and leftclicked the box to run the script.

The air is thick with communication in Second Life.

Plenty of the objects you walk past are all gassing away to each other in their own particular way. In Real Life, objects communicate in digital codes; in SL, one object can send a message to another on any one of literally millions of channels. It could be a digital code. It could just as easily be a message like, 'you smell'. And, of course, objects can listen as well as talk. The prim I’d just constructed listened to the talking of another prim halfway across the grid, specifically one in the office of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency.

Object: Asset UUID I could have hardwritten the asset unique identifier of the distant object into the script itself rather than enter it as a variable value, but script had to be saved in order to run, which meant that it itself became an asset, which meant a copy of it came into being somewhere on central Linden servers, which meant that even if I deleted the cube from my inventory it would still exist there with its script (one of these days, they’ll make something of this in the Terms and Conditions), with my new avatar listed as the creator and the property of a wanted avatar detailed within. It wasn’t much of a breadcrumb, but it was a breadcrumb nonetheless.

I entered into chat the asset number of the message 75

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machine on Definitely Thursday’s distant desk and a brief, circular whirl of white puffs about my cube told me it was connecting.

Object: Password I entered it.

Object: Three messages Object: Receiving…

Messages were stored as notecards in the distant machine. Rather than sending me or the pine cube copies of these notecards (because that would be a very definite breadcrumb), the distant object contained the script for a line reader and would now commence reading ‘aloud’ each notecard to itself, but on channel 4624 in case someone or something was nearby listening in. Each line got sent as an IM to the cube. The cube then read aloud each line into chat; I could copy it and paste it into a fresh notecard if I wanted.

Object: Message 1 Object: Assumption Asymptote: God damn you, Thursday.

Object: Assumption Asymptote: I should have tied those knots harder.

Object: Reply?

I tapped the Y key and pressed enter.

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Object: Anonymous?

I hit Y again.

The cube would send my message (minus my name) via IM to the answering machine, which would then look up Assumption’s UUID and send her the message via IM, so that all she would see was a message from Definitely Thursday’s answering machine.

Object: Message?

But what to say? What to say?

Burned Badly: lol And that was when I realised I was no longer in love with Inch Sideways. It was a feeling I’d had for a while now, tucked away in an unobserved corner of my mind.

I’d left it unexamined, knowing I was leaving it unexamined, because loving Inch was a constant and I couldn’t imagine it being not true. In the same way that I’d consciously avoided thinking too much about the life I’d lost, I’d avoided also thinking about the fact that I wasn’t now thinking all that often about Inch. I wasn’t, in fact, thinking about her at all. Almost.

Previously, I’d have thought about Inch on any walk I took. I’d have thought about her in the shower. I’d have thought about her on the bus. I’d have thought about her whilst standing in the kitchen and waiting for the kettle to boil. I’d have thought about her last thing at night after I put my book down and turned off the light.

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None of these thoughts were plans; they were just idle whimsy. Sometimes it would just be a tiny detail, like wondering how she held a pen when she was writing, like imagining how she picked up books. Sometimes, I’d revisit particular thoughts over and over, returning to them like they were little treats. I’d even refuse to think them occasionally, because to do so would be a distraction from whatever task I was supposed to be doing; I’d hold them back for an appropriate reward moment later.

As I typed in those three letters, I realised that not only was I not thinking about Inch any more in those ways, but that I wouldn’t be thinking about her in those ways ever again. That little pocket of my mind she’d lived in for so long was now empty, vacant. It was all over. It was just me in my head now.

How can I begin to describe what that felt like?

I

found it both liberating and incredibly sad. I’d always imagined I would always be in love with Inch Sideways, yet the spell, when it had been broken, had been broken seemingly with just an off-hand flick of the wrist. I’m not saying that what happened to break it wasn’t significant, just that the ease with which the attachment ended on my part, frankly, shocked me. So much for big, all-encompassing love. It was no more profound than a joke that made you laugh and the next day couldn’t remember.

And I had killed a man because of this love. I had ended his life. I had ended his life, it appeared, due to feelings pervasive but no less superficial than a head cold. I had effectively ended my own life too. How, I 78

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wondered, had the state of love evolved in human beings when its function appeared to be only to remove all sense and rationality?

But I was, at the same time, glad that I was no longer in love with Inch. It made things, ultimately, easier. It had to be this way and I was grateful that my mind – that my body – appeared to accept that, even if it was with so shockingly indifferent a shrug of the shoulders. It left me feeling empty, but better empty than in pain.

I guess.

Object: Message 2 Object: Spencer Huckleberry: It’s been a month, Thursday.

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: My contact’s heard nothing from you.

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: What’s going on?

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: Do you want this ID sorted out or not?

Like Spence didn’t know now why I needed the new ID. Within a day of the Daily Moan breaking the details of my Second Life on its front page, the blogosphere had practically wet itself with excitement. I tried not to read too far into any of them. Statements ranged from the incredulous to the outraged to the fascinated to the revolted. A few posts expressed excitement that a good murder might just kick-start a new interest in SL. One thing was certain, Definitely Thursday was now Second Life’s most famous private investigator. It was a shame I could no longer conduct business: the publicity would 79

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have been amazing.

That said, there were only three messages on my message machine.

I wondered how many people, though, had sent me – had sent Def – IMs. Of course, those got re-routed to my email when I was outworld, but I could no more log onto that safely than I could into Def’s account in SL. That reminded me: I had to get some research done on anonymous proxies.

Spence was such an amateur. Anyone else would have realised that omitting to mention in any way my current notoriety meant far more than waving it in my face.

Possibly, he imagined this was his way of communicating that he didn’t care, but if so he should have considered the other interpretations. Pretending he didn’t know wouldn’t fool me for a moment, and could only cause me to wonder why he was pretending. Could he have contacted the police and told them he had a hook that might just reel me in? Had they advised him to set the meeting up at a time and place of their choosing? But if Spence turned me in then he’d be losing his cut of a £10,000 deal, not to mention flag-posting himself to the police as someone with who knew people who did naughty things – people who’d drop him as a contact like a stone if there was any suspicion he was a songbird. Sure, he could tell the police he’d been lying to me when he told me he knew someone who could set me up with a new passport; he could tell them that elephants were yellow with green spots as well, but that didn’t mean they’d believe that for a second either.

But guys like Spence didn’t plan any further than the 80

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next morsel of food along the trail. What was more, even with his RL contacts severed, taking me down would remove his number one competitor in SL investigations; in fact, that was something his contacts would understand.

I supposed the only logical course of action was to call the whole thing off and see if he was happy to walk away or made any attempt to sweeten the deal.

Object: Reply?

I tapped the Y key and pressed enter.

Object: Anonymous?

I hit Y again.

Object: Message?

Burned Badly: Sorry Spence – the situation changed.

Don’t need the ID any more.

So we would have to wait and see.

Object: Message 3 Object: Fred: Hello, Mr Thursday. I hope to see you again very soon.

What? No. Surely not.

Without any action from me, the screen went blank and the teleport bar appeared. I clicked repeatedly on the cancel button, but of course it had no effect.

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I materialised in a beige and brown office.

82

6 It was the same office, alright. 1970s interior; pine walls exterior. It floated at 700m, just like before. Just like before, I was apparently in the space between regions.

The only difference appeared to be that this time I was by myself. I assumed that whatever code it was that had teleported me over was automated, programmed to spring into action the moment someone activated the long-distance playback of that message; ie, Somewhere, I supposed, Fred was being alerted.

me.

There was no point in trying to teleport out and no point in relogging. Here was where my avatar would remain until Fred had showed up and said whatever it was he had to say. I suspected that Fred was American, which probably meant – I checked my watch and subtracted five – he was being woken up at an unholy hour. Good.

The last time I’d been dragged against my will to this office, I’d been asked to look into the affairs of a man who’d set up a parallel metaverse where avatars could die.

Arton Urriah: The whole body state emulation thing is nowhere near as thorough as it could be.

Arton Urriah: It's just a handful of variables at this stage.

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Arton Urriah: One for the functioning of each limb, one for the neck, one for the head...

Arton Urriah: We have a few of the major organs covered – it's a little bit more detailed than just on or off, but not a great deal.

Arton Urriah: The infection routines are about as far from biologically accurate as I imagine it's possible to get, but it does introduce the possibility of SL illness.

To demonstrate avatar mortality, he’d shot and ‘killed’ a man nearby: his account was deleted and his inventory wiped.

Arton Urriah: Hey - what do you think of this idea: when you log off at night your avatar stays exactly where you left it!

Arton Urriah: So if someone should come along and kill it whilst you're AFK then that's just too bad.

Arton Urriah: Homelessness will actually mean vulnerable.

Arton Urriah: People will have to buy land and build secure houses.

Arton Urriah: Oh and did I forget to mention food?

I never really understood completely what interest Fred and the organisation I suspected to be behind him had in Arton and his world. Once I’d passed what I’d learned back to them, however, I heard nothing more of ‘Vivre’ or anything like it. And, in return, I got paid in real money.

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And in John-Paul Barnaby’s RL address.

I’d been waiting for nearly fifteen minutes – and was starting to think I should maybe log off so I could get to Mrs Stuman’s in time – when a cloud of orange smoke above one of the two chairs at the desk in the centre of the room announced Fred’s arrival. After a few seconds, he resolved into the same avatar – rolled up shirt sleeves; thin blue tie – who had convinced me to work for him five years earlier. Somehow, he’d managed to rez straight into a pose. He sat leaned forward with his hands clasped together on the table. Impressive as this was, his flexi-prim tie hung vertically through the wood.

It appeared that Fred had not yet been introduced to the wonders of mesh.

Fred: Welcome back to the van, Mr Thursday.

Fred: Or should I say… Emma?

Burned Badly: Who are you? What is this place?

Fred: Word on the street is you’ve been a bad, bad girl.

Burned Badly: I don't know what you're talking about.

Fred: Come now, Mr Thursday, do we really have to do this?

Burned Badly: Do what? What are you talking about?

Fred: If you prefer, I could ask Linden to look into your device’s communication with the message taker on your desk – on your *old* desk, that is.

Fred: Of course, that would rather draw you to their attention.

Burned Badly: Fuck you.

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Fred: It's good to see you too, Def. Burned Badly: Like Linden keep that sort of information, anyway.

Fred: Perhaps it’s never occurred to you, but more-orless every interaction that occurs in here can be described through a combination of assets and text.

Fred: Every incidence of a particular piece of furniture is actually only one piece of furniture – a piece of furniture stored on the central asset database. When you sit on a comfortable sofa, you are in effect sitting on a subroutine.

Fred: This particular table that we’re sitting at, for example, might be rezzed in a thousand different places across the grid, yet all that is required to define it in those places it is one number.

Fred: This ultimately means that our entire location could be recorded as a series of asset numbers and modifications: table x at such-and-such a scale and in so-and-so a position, chairs y and z and so on.

Fred: It’s all reducible to text and numbers, Mr Thursday, and these are hardly difficult to archive.

Fred: I believe that, one day, the entire metaverse will be examinable – not only in any given present moment, but for each of the moments leading up to it.

Fred: We will be able to rewind virtual time, to enter a date and a place and observe exactly what happened and – perhaps more importantly – what was said.

Burned Badly: You’re saying that’s true right now in SL? 86

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Fred: Of course not. If it were, my job would be considerably easier.

Fred: All I’m saying is that it’s possible.

Fred: All I’m asking you to do, Mr Thursday, is to imagine the ramifications of this as more and more of our lives become… digital.

Burned Badly: What exactly *is* your job?

Fred: You ask that question, Mr Thursday, assuming I have an answer which I will either choose to give or choose not to give.

Fred: I assure you, it is not that simple.

Burned Badly: I guess ‘Intelligence’ would be a good start though, right?

Fred laughs.

Fred: Intelligence, I will agree, covers most of it.

Fred: Though not always good intelligence.

Fred: For example, no-one in my office had you down as a murderer…

Burned Badly: You're only talking to me about this now?

Fred: Believe it or not, we actually did suppose that Mr Barnaby had simply died in a house fire. It would appear that we're not at liberty to believe that any more.

Burned Badly: Don't tell me you didn't know I was with him that night.

Fred: Intelligence is all about fitting together small pieces to form a large picture, Emma.

Fred: That picture is sometimes – and far more frequently, I might add, than I prefer to admit – incorrect.

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Fred: You worked with Barnaby in SL... we assumed you were in love with him.

Fred: So yes, we did know that you were with him that night... but that only served to confirm rather than disconfirm our incorrect hypothesis.

Fred: It fit the picture we had formed, but – unbeknownst to us – in entirely the wrong way.

Fred: After all, you never told us *why* you wanted his address.

Burned Badly shrugs. You never told me your real interest in Arton Urriah.

Fred: But wasn't it obvious?

Burned Badly: You made out he was tied up in some sort of criminal activity... all he ultimately was was some guy with a competitor product to SL. Fred: Mr Thursday, Vivre was not just any old competitor product.

Burned Badly: I know, I know - it was going to revolutionise everything.

Fred: Well, not exactly.

Fred: Vivre was predicated on the success of SL. We were pretty sure back then that SL had already plateaued in its popularity because it had hit a technical ceiling, so it didn't seem likely that any product of comparable technology was likely to fare any better.

Fred: We were far more interested in the concept.

Burned Badly: The idea of a mortal metaverse?

Fred: Quite.

Fred: ‘Mortal Metaverse’ – that’s a good turn of phrase. I think I’ll use that in my next briefing 88

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paper on the topic.

Burned Badly: But why would such a thing interest you?

Burned Badly: It’s hardly a threat to national security.

Fred: Are you sure about that?

Burned Badly: Well how could it be?

Fred: You disappoint me, Mr Thursday.

Fred: Have I not just been talking about the increasing pervasiveness of digital activity in our lives?

Burned Badly: I don’t understand.

Fred: We are at a turning point in our social evolution, Emma.

Fred: Everything is being converted to digital media.

Fred: We no longer take photographs on film, we create digital images stored on computers and cell phones and tablets.

Fred: We no longer listen to music on records or CDs, we download digital ‘tracks’ and store them on computers and cell phones and tablets.

Fred: It’s starting to happen to movies.

Fred: Even the oldest media container there is – the book – is now succumbing to the inevitable conversion to digital, Mr Thursday, and the inevitable storage on computers and cell phones and tablets.

Fred: All of these things used to occupy physical space.

Fred: Now they are just data on storage devices.

Fred: Storage devices prone to becoming corrupt or worn out or lost or stolen or destroyed. None of these mediums come even close to the longevity of 89

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looked-after paper or cared-for vinyl.

Fred: Our books and music and photographs were once upon a time amongst the most important distinguishing features in our identity.

Fred: Now they are bits of data, swimming around in invisible pools – a hard drive here, a USB stick there – and in so disorganised a state that by ‘pools’ I really mean ‘puddles’.

Fred: What do we do with all this digital ‘stuff’?

Fred: As computers and cell phones and tablets get upgraded, as files get lost in ‘Old Files’ folders or become unusable due to DRM restrictions - or even, Mr Thursday, don’t get copied across to the new machines at all because they’ve been forgotten about – people are starting to understand that the instant convenience of digital media is not matched by the convenience of their management.

Fred: There can be only one solution to this problem: connect up all devices and store all of this stuff in one place. And what do we call this place, Mr Thursday?

Burned Badly: The Cloud?

Fred: Precisely. The Cloud. A mystical region that is both up in the sky and safe, and at the same time all around us.

Fred: If I need a particular song or image or passage of text, all I need to do is reach up and pluck it from the air.

Fred: It’s no coincidence that the nomenclature of digital storage is becoming more three dimensional as the mainstream masses adopt it as the place in 90

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which they store their lives.

Fred: What, after all, is a hard drive? What is a memory stick?

Fred: A cloud, on the other hand is big, it is voluminous.

Fred: It’s still an abstract metaphor – we can’t actually imagine putting objects in it – but the spaciousness and capacity implied by it works.

Fred: We are driven, Mr Thursday, towards virtual spaces in the organisation of our digital artefacts.

Fred: Were ‘folders’ on computers, after all, not once referred to as ‘directories’?

Fred: What, to the common person, are directories?

It was getting late. I wasn’t going to make it to Mrs Stuman’s on time if I let Fred lecture me at will.

Burned Badly: Ok, I get that we’re moving towards digital possessions, but what does that have to do with Vivre?

Burned Badly: And I have to leave in a few minutes to go to work.

Fred: The future is not written, Emma.

Fred: But one increasingly likely route is that of digital possessions and virtual spaces to store them in.

Fred: I’ve spoken about music, books, film, photographs…

Fred: In Second Life, we can add to that clothes, furniture, buildings, plants…

Fred: In Second Life, *everything* is a digital possession – even the appearance of your skin.

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Burned Badly: Second Life is a minority interest now, Fred.

Burned Badly: It’s hardly in the process of becoming a mainstream activity.

Fred: Even if it withers and dies tomorrow, Mr Thursday, it is still a future echo of what might come to be.

Fred: Just as ‘home taping’ was a future echo of music copying and sharing.

That took me back. The HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC campaign had made an impression on me as a young child. The idea that music could die had scared the shit out of me, primarily because this suggested it was alive in the first place. For a while, I imagined that every time I heard a particular song, I was being visited by a living creature that used loudspeakers to enter into rooms like people used doors. I say it scared the shit out of me, but when it was later explained to me by my mother that songs were just sounds and that the campaign was about people having music for free they were supposed to pay for (so that musicians had money for food) it was as though a whole layer of life as I saw it was stripped away. I cried for hours at the thought that music wasn’t actually a living thing.

Fred: Just as photocopying was a future echo of free document distribution.

Fred: Imagine a future where this is taken to the extreme, where people have *no* physical possessions and lead their lives almost entirely in 92

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the metaverse.

Fred: They work there, play there, sleep there.

Fred: The size of their virtual house is dependent on the size of their virtual income.

Fred: Everything they have – every last memento of their existence – is stored in that cloud around them.

Fred: Can you imagine, Mr Thursday, what digital terrorism might look like in such a world?

Fred: Lives destroyed without the shedding of a single drop of actual blood.

Fred: We were interested in Vivre not because of any actual threat it represented at the time, but because of the ideals on which it was based.

Fred: The ‘mortal metaverse’, as you put it, might be an abstract, extremist idea now.

Fred: But one day it will strike genuine fear into the hearts of ordinary people.

Fred: Now go to work, Emma.

Fred: When you come back online, I’ll tell you about your next job for us.

93

7 Mrs Stuman was a lady in her 80s who lived in a flat on the west side of Cowes. I ran down to the chain ferry, only to see it departing from my side of the Medina. I had to wait ten minutes for it to return.

It was a low tide and a sunny day. Whilst I stood leaned against the wall and watching the old boat clanking its way across the river, the siren of the closing doors of the Southampton car ferry cut across the harbour’s maritime soundscape. The road leading to the port was still backed up a mile with cars leaving the island after the festival, although Theo had assured me this congestion was nothing compared to that created by the Isle of Wight Festival in June.

“Your next job for us,” Fred had said. Work in SL. I wish I could say I was planning on telling him this was absolutely the last thing I wanted or needed right now, but nothing could have been further from the truth. A little piece of my old life had been returned to me.

Actually, there was nothing remotely ‘little’ about it at all.

I know it should have worried me that there was now at least one person in the world who knew that Burned Badly was Definitely Thursday was Emma Kline, suspected murderer of John-Paul Barnaby. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Fred had logged by now my IP 94

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– well, Theo’s IP – along with the internet service provider; perhaps they were hacking the ISP’s client database at that very moment for a name and address.

But I knew Fred had no intention of turning me over to the police. At most, he’d dangle that possibility as a means of coercing me into working for him, but since I intended fully to do so anyway, I wouldn’t let it come to that and use the space that gave me to negotiate the best possible fee. I did, after all, have a passport to purchase.

I got to Mrs Stuman twenty minutes late and apologised profusely when she came to the door. Like most islanders, she seemed entirely unconcerned with the lack of punctuality and put it down to the traffic, even though I’d told her many times before that I came to her house on foot. I got to work cleaning the kitchen, and she hovered at the door and told me the news about her son this week.

I hoovered the living room then scrubbed for twenty minutes in the bathroom, finally getting the shine to the bath taps I’d been planning on restoring for the last couple of weeks but hadn’t managed because of the backlog of tasks created by the previous ‘cleaner’. Mrs Stuman was delighted. She told me they looked like new and her pleasure made me glow inside, just a little. I liked Mrs Stuman. I liked all of my clients, although a wealthy Italian lady I cleaned for on Fridays was able to drive me insane at times with her endless egocentric commentary.

I stayed half an hour later than my normal finishing time at Mrs Stuman’s: the twenty minutes I owed her plus ten minutes more by means of compensation. Mrs 95

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Stuman, of course, was oblivious to such considerations, but they were important to me. “You’re off now, are you dear?” she said when I told her I was done. She went to her handbag and pulled two crumpled ten pound notes out of her purse. She told me – as she usually did – that I was a treasure and I kissed her on the cheek before letting myself out.

On my way home, I contemplated logging on to SL later that night, when Theo was in bed.

Theo got back at five-thirty. He put the radio on as soon as he was through the door – something he always did – and found me napping in the bedroom.

“Ready to visit the sandcastle, my lovely?” he asked me, after leaning over and kissing my nose. In truth, I no longer wanted all that much to go to the beach hut now that I knew Fred was waiting for me in SL – or, if I was honest, now that I knew SL was waiting for me – but my enjoyment of that little shed on the sand appeared to give Theo genuine pleasure and I didn’t want to disappoint him. In any case, I knew I would enjoy it once we were there.

I stretched sleepily. “Aren’t you hungry first?” I asked him.

“Like a wolf,” he replied. “But I stopped off to buy six eggs and a loaf of seeded wholemeal.”

“God that sounds good.” I stretched again, this time arching my back so that my nipples pressed through my green t-shirt. The only other thing I was wearing were my white cotton panties. “Do you have time for an 96

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appetiser before we go?”

He was wearing his work jeans still, his grey t-shirt loose and flecked with splatters of plaster and white paint. I could see it in his hair too. He looked tired and radiant and beautiful.

“Well now, there’s always time for an appetiser,” he replied and tugged gently at my panties. I curled so that he could remove them and then I let him open and enter me.

“Will you look at what Madesh found me,” Theo said, once we’d finished off the omelette and two large slabs each of wholemeal bread and butter. He rummaged in his backpack and produced what looked to me like a toy Volkswagen camper van. “That’s nice, baby,” I said.

Theo chuckled and wagged a finger at me. “There’s more to this than meets the eye, my lovely. I’m almost embarrassed at how excited I was when I saw this.” He flicked upright an antenna at the side of the van then turned it over and pushed at the base with his thumb.

“That lad has an eye, I’m telling you. I’ve wanted one of these for ages.”

“What is it, then?” I asked, leaning towards him and curious now.

“Ah ah ah,” he said and leaned away so I couldn’t see it any closer. He got a carpet tile out of his bag and laid it on the sandy ground between us, then reached into the hut and pulled out an LP from the gap between the shelves.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I think I know what it is!” He 97

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grinned. “Aren’t those things supposed to be lethal to records though?”

“It’s not something I’ll be letting anywhere near my main collection, to be sure,” he said, “but there’s plenty of worn-out records in the world with plays yet left inside them.” He took the record – a Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass LP that had most definitely seen much better days – out of its sleeve and laid it on the carpet tile, then he put the little Volkswagen onto it. Immediately, it leapt forward and started driving speedy circles around the groove. A thin, tinny, trumpeted tune came out of a speaker somewhere in the van.

I laughed, instantly, and clapped my hands. “Oh, it works! It works!” Delight spread across Theo’s face. “Is that not now something?!” he declared, and I laughed some more. “And, what’s more, now we’ll have records in the blackout!”

Theo was convinced an enormous power cut was approaching the UK. He’d told me all about it on our second morning together (which had followed our first night together). He said he didn’t know how it would happen – a giant solar flare was a possibility, apparently, or it might be a cyber-terrorist attack on the National Grid, or it might just be that the UK’s supply was nowhere near as far above demand as it used to be and a cold winter could take us over the limit – but it was something he was preparing for. When we went back to his flat in Cowes the next day – and because I’d shown an interest in this rather than declaring him some sort of exhibitionist doomsayer – he showed me some of his supplies, all of which were stored under his bed. He had 98

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a plastic container filled to the brim with candles and Tlights (“Just after Christmas is the time to pick these up in quantity,” he told me). A smaller container was equally crammed full of packs of batteries of all sizes (he kept them in their packs, he explained, to prevent them from accidentally shorting each other out and starting a fire). He had two solar-powered battery chargers and a third he was constructing himself from an array of solar garden lights. He had twenty empty five litre bottles and two twenty litre PVC water bags; he intended to fill these from the cold water tap in the bath as soon as it became clear that the power was off long-term (he explained that mains water pumping stations would only have up to 48 hours emergency power). So that as little water as possible was used in sanitation, he had another plastic container filled completely with bottles of anti-bacterial hand gel and packets of sterile wipes. He’d made up his own first-aid kit (he was, of course, a qualified firstaider). He had two camping stoves and twenty 190g Campingaz canisters, and all the cooking utensils for them. He had water purification tablets. His torch collection he was particularly proud of, the largest of which appeared to give off the light equivalent of a small sun, although he told me he would probably never use it.

And then there was the food: bags and bags of rice, sugar, salt, lentils, oats and flour; tins of fruit, vegetables, meat and fish; five jars of peanut butter; twenty bars of dark chocolate. The cupboards in his kitchen were crammed full of this sort of stuff also.

“You don’t have a generator?” I’d asked him one evening.

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“What’s the point in having a generator if you’re not able to use it?” he replied.

“Why wouldn’t you be able to use it?”

“Think what a noise it would make. Think how your sixty watt bulbs would be visible. Everyone would know you had a generator, and then everyone would want it for themselves.” The psychology of a long-term blackout, he told me, was just as important a thing to understand as the practical issues of light and food and water.

Mass looting and panic was predicted by enthusiasts on this subject. The best plan was to get everything you needed in advance and then lie low and attract no attention until the juice got switched back on again. “The American blogs,” he said, “recommend guns and ammunition.” For his part, Theo had acquired two baseball bats. He told me he hoped to God he would never have to use them.

“Do you really think it will happen?” I asked Theo, whilst the toy Volkswagen span Herb Alpert between us.

“Do I think it will happen?” he said. “Yes, I do. But I don’t want it to happen.”

I chuckled softly. “Are you sure about that?”

“Don’t go getting me wrong now, Gemma,” he said.

“Of course I’d prefer a more simple existence, but there’d be nothing simple about a grid-wide blackout.”

“The looting,” I said.

“Not just the looting,” he said. “The looters will be opportunists at first, raiding shops because there won’t be any working CCTV or burglar alarms. They’ll be no 100

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trouble if you don’t disturb them. But give it a few days and it won’t be colour TVs folk are after. Then it’ll be about food and water and medical supplies and you’ll see previously good and honest people start breaking laws and turning on their neighbours because they’re scared. And on the one hand, being yourself prepared might spare you the indignity of having to beg and scavenge, but on the other how many people will you help before you start turning them away? Or will you help no-one in the first place because you know there’ll come a point when you’re not able to help them anymore and you know they won’t be likely to leave you in peace knowing you’ve even a little – and you know that this will be because you’d be no more likely to just obediently starve to death if you were in their position yourself.”

“I just love that ‘colour TVs’ was the first thing that came to your mind as an example of high price electrical goods,” I teased. tousled my hair.

He laughed, reached across and

“I know someone,” I told him, “who thinks the future’s going to be about virtual lives where everything you do is online and every possession you have is digital.”

“And they might be right at that,” Theo replied. “But it’s not a future you’ll find me living in. What people need is to slow down and take the time to notice what’s around them; to enjoy the trip instead of constantly filling it with hurrying and worrying and squeezing in meaningless digital bullshit.

“I’m not a complete dinosaur now, Gemma.

101

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watched it all unfold. I mean, I have the internet, don’t I? I’m not saying I think it’s only a bad thing – how can writing down useful things and sharing them with the world be wrong? But how much of the reading and the writing concerns actually useful things? I remember when it all kicked off, all the talk was about making websites. But then people didn’t have time for the websites, so the talk became about making blogs. But then people didn’t have time to write the blogs so the talk became about Facebook posts. Now the people don’t have time to write their Facebook posts, so the talk is about Twitter or Instagram photos. And all of this would be fine if it were just one of these things people then did, except it’s usually two or three or all of it. And even that would be fine if you could then turn around and say, ‘look at how happy the people are now that they’re doing all these things’. But they’re not, Gemma.

The more we rely on technology, the worse our mental health gets. We’re creating all this bollocks like our lives depend on it, and it’s wearing out our spirit.”

The tin music came to an end and the Volkswagen appeared to skid across the final inch of vinyl as it followed the run-out groove. Theo picked up the van and pushed down its antenna, then placed it on its side in the doorway of the hut.

He picked up the disc, holding it between his two hands so that his fingers only touched the edges. “This is part of what it’s all about, Gemma. Taking the time to listen – to listen – to a side of a record – not ‘playing tracks’ at random whilst you’re doing other things; actually paying attention to what you’re hearing; 102

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experiencing the music, experiencing it in the way that the artist wanted you to. This track and then this track and then this track and then this track. The grooves on this record, Gemma, were created by tiny magnetic fields, passed through tape but originally created by the microphones put in front of the actual musicians that created the sound they recorded: there’s a tangible physical link between this thing I’m holding and the sound waves those guys created. No-one’s turned it into sterile ones and noughts and removed them altogether from the soul of the artist. It’s real.”

He put the record back into its sleeve and then returned it to its place in the hut. He looked at me and said, “Ask me what I see.”

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“I see your face in shadow in front of the glowing distant sea. I see loose strands of your hair flickering in the breeze. I see your skin looking rosier now than it did when first I met you. I see your eyes looking into mine.

I see the edge of sleepiness.

I see a twinkle of amusement. I see…” He stopped and frowned slightly.

I felt his eyes burrowing deep inside me.

“What?” I said. “What do you see?”

“Some small distraction,” he said, his brow furrowed slightly and his eyes narrowed, just a bit, “and something else…”

I looked away.

He shrugged. “And now – now that I’ve studied and really seen you – now I want to take a photograph.”

“Really?” I said, suddenly worried.

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I wouldn’t have wanted him to have seen the expression on my face just at that moment. “Right now?” I added.

“Right now,” he replied and pulled out an old camera.

It had a metal body and a textured black plastic surround. I relaxed a little.

“Now you’re just showing off,” I told him.

“This, my lovely, is my father’s Olympus Trip 35. It went with us on all our family holidays and I can’t even look at it now without seeing it bumping and sliding against the top of his belly from how he wore it round his neck on a strap.”

Now that he mentioned it, I was pretty certain my own father had had something similar to this, although I certainly couldn’t have said whether it was this exact model or not. Then again, I supposed I’d never really looked at it – never really looked at anything at all, in fact – in anything approaching the level of detail of Theo’s examinations. That was, after all, partly his point.

“Can you guess what’s in it?” Theo asked me.

“Um, film?”

His voice was almost reverential. “Not just any old film. This has slide film in it.”

“Slides?” I said. “As in…” I held my hand up with my thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart. He nodded. “I didn’t realise you could still make those,” I said.

“Oh yes you can,” he replied, “because there’s still a few of us left that understand how special a thing a slide is.”

“And why is it special?” I asked him, posing a smile (that was as different as possible to the look in the 104

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picture taken by Inch Sideways) whilst he raised the viewfinder to his eye.

“Because a slide, my lovely, is the actual physical piece of film that captured the light reflected off your subject.

Unlike the print or the digital image you look at on a screen, the slide was actually there.”

“A tangible physical link.”

“Exactly.

“Now smile for me,” Theo told me.

“Say ‘Twitter’ for me again,” I replied, “and I might even give you a laugh.”

105

8 I could barely contain my growing excitement as Theo cleaned his teeth and got ready for bed. He seemed a little bemused that I wanted to stay up a while and browse the internet – coming as it did on the back of the conversation we’d had, it must have felt, I suppose, like a bit of a snub. I could have told him I was going to read – which he would have approved of – but I hadn’t yet gauged how heavy a sleeper he was and I knew I was going to be typing and that the sound of that carried.

I logged on. My avatar appeared – as I knew it would – in the beige and brown office.

I waited even longer this time for Fred to appear. I chuckled at the inconvenience I was likely causing him.

Finally, the cloud of orange smoke appeared above his chair and he settled into his sit.

Fred: Good evening, Mr Thursday.

Burned Badly: Hello Fred.

Fred: I’m glad to see you back.

Fred: I had started to wonder whether we were going to have to work on our strategies of persuasion.

That wasn’t really the tone I wanted. I decided to play a card I’d been working on in the back of my head all day.

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Burned Badly: Hmm. Burned Badly: I think it’s time we had a bit more transparency, Fred.

Burned Badly: I was very impressed with your little lecture this morning. I won’t deny that your ideas intrigue me greatly.

Burned Badly: But you’ve been trading for a while now on an image I don’t think is entirely accurate.

Fred: Go on.

No matter how successful I was in influencing the balance of power, a part of Fred probably loved the attention I was giving him.

Burned Badly: You present yourself as an authority on SL, but the truth is, I don’t think you spend all that much time inworld at all.

Fred: Oh really?

Burned Badly: Really.

Burned Badly: You’re wearing a tie that’s five years out of date. You have an excellent knowledge of scripting, perhaps from a period when you *did* have time to spend in the metaverse, but today you have so little time to spend inworld that fashion is a luxury you can’t afford.

Burned Badly: Hence your need for me.

Burned Badly: You don’t need me because I’m some sort of maverick detective. You need me because you don’t have the time to do any of this yourself.

Burned Badly: And because you know I’m reasonably bright and interested in this sort of stuff, and 107

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generally keen to do a good job.

Burned Badly: How many people are there actually in your office?

Fred smiles.

Fred: Very good, Emma.

Fred: You have, of course, with that very deduction, proved that you are of far more worth than just some convenient contractor.

Burned Badly: Come on, Fred. No more distractions.

Burmed Badly: How many people?

Fred: There is no office, Emma.

Fred: I work at a desk in an open plan office.

Fred: I’m 0.4 allocated to virtual world cybercrime.

Burned Badly: So… two days a week?

Fred: On paper. Which, basically, means not really that much time at all. But yes. And I have to fight to keep that.

Fred: Back when I hired you originally, it was a fulltime job and there were three of us.

Fred: But SL had a different profile back then.

Fred: It was easy to convince people of the threat.

Burned Badly: Right.

Burned Badly: So that’s all the metaverse is worth to Langley – two measly days of human activity a week?

Fred: For the record, it’s not like the other 0.6 is low priority stuff.

Fred: These are frugal times, you know.

Fred: Every dime has to be accounted for.

Fred: So you’ve made your point. I need you.

Fred: Now do you want to hear about the job?

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Burned Badly: I do.

Fred: Okay.

Fred: So there are people we’re watching online.

Fred: People who’ve been flagged.

Burned Badly: By Echelon.

Fred: No names, Emma.

Burned Badly: Sure.

Fred: You’d be surprised at what we know about the people we’re keeping an eye on.

Burned Badly: I wouldn’t. But go on.

Fred: The point about that statement is that there is much that we can monitor automatically, but there are also things that we can’t.

Fred: Ultimately, electronic surveillance requires people to say things or write things down.

Fred: People can make it harder for us to intercept those things by encrypting their remarks or by disguising their identity or location so that we don’t know who’s saying them – or both.

Fred: But those are problems we have tools for.

Burned Badly: Can you eavesdrop on Second Life IMs? Fred: I’m not going to say what we do or don’t do.

Fred: But SL text communication is not in any way fundamentally different from any other text communication.

Fred: The software and the medium might be different, but it’s still people at the end of the day typing text into a computer with an internet connection.

Fred: The same goes for voice.

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Fred: If there was sufficient motivation to monitor these things, they could be done.

Fred: It’s only a matter of resourcing.

Fred: But there are other ways of communicating and interacting in SL that would be a lot harder for us to monitor automatically.

Fred: The manipulation of objects, for example, would be meaningless to our systems as they stand.

Fred: The same for movement.

Fred: And text or voice occurring within a welldefined spatial context is a lot harder for us to interpret.

Burned Badly: What do you mean?

Fred: Well say, for example, you wanted to give someone directions to pick up some apples.

Fred: One way of doing that would be to write it all down in text…

Fred: You might say, “Take Third Avenue down to Seventeenth Street and look for Clancy’s Apple Store on the east side of Seventeenth.”

Fred: That’s the sort of information we can process: it’s complete; it contains everything we need to know.

Fred: Of course, it’s quick and easy too.

Fred: But suppose instead you created a whole virtual environment online for the town.

Fred: You meet up online with the person you want to give directions to and rather than tell them what you want them to do, you walk them through it.

Fred: You might still say some stuff whilst you do this, but the things that you say won’t need to be as complete because the context fills in all the gaps.

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Fred: You might say, for example, “OK, we’re going to start here.” And then you might walk down to the corner of Third and Seventeenth and say, “We’re going to cross over here.”

Fred: Do you see?

Fred: Instead of something complete and with details, we get fragments that don’t tell us anything without the context they were created in.

Fred: They wouldn’t even get flagged – there’s nothing to flag.

Burned Badly: I think I see, yes.

Burned Badly: You’re talking about using SL as some sort of training environment.

Fred: Exactly.

Fred: And now consider the meaning conveyed by clothing.

Fred: If you were planning to meet a person in RL who you had only previously conversed with online – say for a date – you would need to give them something to recognise you by.

Fred: You might send them a photo.

Fred: Or perhaps you might say, “I’ll be wearing a red hat”.

Fred: But if you were planning that meeting in SL using a virtual environment, you could – if you wanted to – simply communicate what your appearance would be just through the clothing your avatar wears.

Fred: If you’re going to wear a red hat, you just put a red hat on your avatar.

Fred: Other than saying, “This is how I’ll be dressed,” 111

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you have no need to actually say anything.

Fred: And if you already knew that how the other avatar was dressed was how they would appear in RL, you wouldn’t even need to say that.

I was starting to get a chill down the back of my neck.

Yes, I could see where this was going.

Burned Badly: Are we talking about cells here?

Fred: Yes, Emma.

Fred: The problem that cells have prior to an operation is how its members are going to communicate with each other.

Fred: How they’re going to plan.

Fred: They can meet up in RL, but it only requires one of them to be being watched by us and we then have all the other members to investigate.

Fred: They can communicate online, but – again – we only have to be suspicious about one member for that communication to alert us to new suspects.

Fred: And even if we’re not monitoring one of them, our automatic systems will flag up anything detailed.

Fred: Their ideal would be for each member to have absolutely no knowledge about each of the other members prior to the incident itself.

Fred: That way, picking up one won’t lead us to the others.

Burned Badly: So they meet up online as avatars in a virtual recreation of the place they’re going to hit and they walk through the whole thing with 112

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minimal text communication.

Burned Badly: And they wear in SL the same outfits they’re going to be wearing in RL so that they’ll know how to recognise each other when it comes to the real thing.

Burned Badly: No-one needs to know anyone; no-one needs to say anything.

Fred: Exactly.

Burned Badly: Right. I see.

Burned Badly: And you have reason to suppose this is going on in SL? Fred: It’s a suspicion; nothing more at this stage.

Burned Badly: Well you must have something.

Burned Badly: Otherwise why are we having this conversation?

Fred: Well, as I said, there are people we’re monitoring.

Fred: People who we know have been in certain virtual places at certain times.

Fred: Places where other people we’re watching have also been.

Burned Badly: Being in the same places as someone else is hardly conclusive evidence.

Fred: You know the old saying: Fred: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Burned Badly: I think it was Ian Fleming who said that.

Burned Badly: But I don’t think he was proposing serious socio-psychological theory.

Fred: Well, it’s a useful rule of thumb.

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Fred: In any case, no-one’s saying anything’s definitely going on.

Fred: That’s what it’s all about.

Fred: Sorting through the many maybes until a maybe becomes a concern and a concern becomes a worry.

Fred: But if this should turn into one of those worries and acting on it prevents the deaths of innocent people, wouldn’t that be worth something to you?

He had me there. I can’t speak for other murderers, but this one found the idea of saving a few lives as some sort of atonement for taking one undeniably appealing.

Burned Badly: I guess it would.

Fred: So you’ll take the job?

Burned Badly: I need money.

Fred: I know.

Burned Badly: Thirty thousand. Half now and half on receipt of information that points you in either direction.

Fred: Dollars?

Burned Badly: Shit no.

Burned Badly: What am I going to do with those?

Fred: Pounds, then. I can do twenty.

Burned Badly: Not enough.

Burned Badly: This isn’t rocket science; I need a new passport. I can’t stay in the UK indefinitely.

Burned Badly: The Police will stumble across my trail eventually.

Burned Badly: And I’m not going to be any use to you if I’m in prison.

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Burned Badly: Twenty-five thousand. I can’t go lower than that.

Fred: I might be able to sort out a new passport for you.

Burned Badly: Complete with a homing device and an entry on the CIA database? No thanks.

Fred: I encourage you to reconsider that.

Fred: I don’t know who your source is, but passports are incredibly hard to forge these days.

Burned Badly: 25k. Take it or leave it.

Fred: Fair enough, Mr Thursday.

Fred: I assume you’ll want cash.

Burned Badly: You assume correctly.

Fred: It’ll take a day or so.

Burned Badly: How will I receive it?

Fred: How about I arrange for a package to be left under the foot passenger bench on the Cowes chain ferry?

Bastard.

Burned Badly: That’ll do just fine.

Fred: Shall we say twenty-four hours from now?

Burned Badly: Let’s.

Fred: Good.

Burned Badly: Just so we’re clear, if I find out there’s nothing *to* find out, I still get paid the other 12.5k.

Ok? Fred: Agreed.

Fred: So then.

Burned Badly: The details.

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Fred: Yes. Fred: We’re watching four people, three of whom were on our watch list anyway. The fourth might be someone completely new to us or he might be someone we know but lost track of. Or he might be someone completely unconnected to this and just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Burned Badly: You’ve seen them on the same sim together?

Fred: Something like that.

Fred: Their SL names are Troght, Single Star, Georgelennie and Maddester. Maddester is the one we’re not sure of.

Fred: He’s only ever been noticed to be in the same sim as Troght, albeit several times.

Fred: The other three have been noticed together on a number of occasions.

Fred: I’ve observed them twice myself.

Fred: I’m sure they must be communicating, but I don’t know how.

Fred: Anyway, I’m sending you a notecard of the sims they frequent.

Fred: Plus a HUD that will tell you when they come on and where they are.

Burned Badly: Handy.

Burned Badly: Something like the thing you use to pull me here against my will?

Fred: Partly.

Burned Badly: So all I have to do is wait until I see them together on the same sim with no-one else around and teleport over? If they’re moving around 116

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a build, grab a few pictures of it and then get out?

Fred: If it were that simple, Mr Thursday, I would have done it myself.

Fred: First of all, these are non-subscription accounts.

None of these people own any land, although they might rent.

Fred: But the places we see them together on are public areas. There’s a club called ‘The Crystal Ball’ they often use.

Burned Badly: Meaning?

Fred: Meaning that if they are communicating via builds, they are temporarily rezzed builds.

Fred: Now I don’t know about you…

Fred: …but if I were in their position, I’d de-rez any building I was using the instant anyone not on the invite list came anywhere near it.

Fred: In fact, I would script that into the build so I didn’t have to worry about thinking to do it fast enough.

Burned Badly: Fair enough.

Burned Badly: But you do realise, I hope, that none of these guys are going to just invite me to take a look at their creation.

Burned Badly: No matter how close I get to them.

Fred: Of course.

Fred: That’s why we’ve obtained their SL passwords.

Burned Badly: You’ve hacked their accounts?!

Fred: Of course we have. There’s no need to sound so surprised.

Burned Badly: But if you’re able to log in as them, why not just do so and look through their inventory for 117

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something that looks like a build of a real life place?

Fred: Firstly, if one of them were to see their own avatar online they would suspect their security compromised and the virtual cell would scatter.

Fred: Secondly, do you know how many thousands of items the average SL resident has in their inventory?

Burned Badly: Ah yes. Yes there is that.

Fred: We can’t assume they’re going to conveniently name the build, ‘The Hit Zone’.

Fred: If it was me, I’d name the build as the right-side flare on a pair of pants and hide it in an outfit folder.

Fred: Thirdly, there might be several altered versions of the target environment due to edits; how are we to know which is the most current?

Fred: Fourthly, in anticipation of the possibility that their avatar might be hijacked, they might have built a number of completely different environments so that even if we did get lucky and find them in inventory, we’d still be none the wiser as to which is actually the target.

Fred: Shall I go on?

Burned Badly: No thanks.

Fred: No, Mr Thursday, what we want you to do is to get to know each of them. In particular, learn their mannerisms.

Fred: Then, if we should see them in the same place together and suspect a walkthrough is happening, we’ll crash one of them so you can log in on that account.

Burned Badly: Wait… you want me to impersonate one of them?

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Fred: For as long as you’re able to.

Burned Badly: Which one?

Fred: That’s for you to decide.

Fred: Assuming that one is in a leader role and giving information to the others, try not to choose that one.

Fred: You need to be in a position to *receive* information.

Burned Badly: How am I going to know that in advance?

Fred: Possibly you’re not.

Fred: In which case, you’re just going to have to give it your best guess.

Fred: But if it is the case that they’re communicating during their meetings at The Crystal Ball – and if you can crack their method – that might give you an indication.

Burned Badly: And how am I going to know that the way any particular one of them presents publically is the same as how they present to each other when the cell is together?

Fred: No-one said this was going to be easy, Emma.

Fred: If I didn’t trust your intuition, I wouldn’t be hiring you.

Fred: And look at it this way: in the old days, when you had to physically go under cover, you usually lost your life if you got found out.

Fred: What’s the worst that can happen if they rumble you?

Burned Badly: There is that, I suppose.

Burned Badly: So what do you want from me?

Pictures?

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Fred: I want video.

Fred: High resolution. I want to be able to read everything on the screen.

Fred: Including the user interface and HUDs. Fred: Make sure one of the things you do at the start is to right click on any build you see and look at the edit information.

Fred: If it should turn out that the builder is the avatar you’re wearing, we can pull you out and return control to him.

Fred: You don’t think they’d be suspicious?

Fred: If it’s a few seconds and you don’t say anything to any of them during that time? Probably not.

Fred: Most likely, they’ll all just think it’s SL being SL. Fred: When a person logs out or crashes, we often continue to see their avatar for several seconds, do we not?

Fred: Sometimes, a person can crash and come back on and we don’t see any notification in our chat that they were ever off.

Fred: If they’re familiar with these glitches, we might just pull it off.

Burned Badly: Ok, yes. Possibly.

Burned Badly: But suppose we don’t have to do that.

Burned Badly: Suppose I go in, the avatar I’m using is not the leader, I hang around and do the walkthrough – maybe even talk converse with them – they’ll know *then* as soon as the regular guy comes back into the avatar that they’ve been breached, won’t they?

Fred: Maybe; maybe not.

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Fred: This is where their lack of text communication could work in our favour.

Fred: From the point of view of the guy whose avatar you take over, he’ll just experience it as a crash and then one of those long waits you sometimes get before you can log back in.

Fred: From the point of view of the others, they won’t suspect anything provided you don’t blow your own cover.

Fred: Sure, if they talk about it amongst themselves then they’ll probably work it out.

Fred: But let’s not forget that the reason they’re using this approach in the first place is precisely so they don’t have to talk.

Burned Badly: Ok. I guess it’s worth a shot.

Burned Badly: So what are these guys? What’s their cause?

Burned Badly: Are we talking Muslim extremists here?

White extremists? North Korean terrorism?

Fred: Leave me to worry about their cause.

Fred: And in any case, who gives a fuck?

Fred: They want to kill innocent people.

Fred: What more do you need to know?

Burned Badly: It might help to have a little background information.

Fred: And then again, it might not.

Fred: The less you know, the less likely you are to fuck up by letting something slip into your conversation.

Fred: Did you get the HUD and notecard?

Burned Badly: Yes. Fred: Then you’re good to go.

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Fred: Get me good intelligence on this and I’ll get my own section for sure.

Fred: That’ll be good for you too.

Fred: Don’t let me down, Thursday.

Fred: Find out for me how they communicate, okay?

Burned Badly: Are you going to release my avatar now?

Fred: Of course.

Fred: Stay in touch. And good luck.

He didn’t waste any time. The screen went immediately blank and the teleport bar appeared. I was returned to the sandbox from where I’d been taken.

Object: Repeat messages?

The pine cube. I’d completely forgotten about it. I’d intended to delete the thing as soon as I was done ‘listening’ to my messages; instead, it had sat unattended for over twelve hours, inviting anyone who passed by the opportunity to listen to the distant notecards. That was not good. That was not good at all. I swore at myself for not having taken the extra time to add in a self-destruct script triggered by anyone coming within chat range. Horses and stable doors.

Fucking Fred. There was nothing I could do about it now. I deleted the cube. Then I shut down Second Life and went to bed.

Tomorrow I would become a metaverse detective again.

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9 Theo left for work at 8:15. My cleaning that day started at ten but I called ahead to Mr and Mrs Hitchens and rearranged it for nine. I was back by twelve.

I sat at the keyboard for a moment before logging in.

It felt odd having a job to do inworld again. The day before, it had felt like a piece of my old life being restored, but now that I was actually about to embark on this new mission it all felt somehow wrong. It wasn’t the same having to wait now until I was alone in a home that wasn’t mine, log in on a computer that wasn’t mine and into an avatar that felt like it wasn’t really mine at that. Burned Badly had freebie store outfits because I had no Lindens, no means of buying Lindens and no means of getting at the Lindens my other avatars had in their pockets. He had a free animation overrider that consisted of about four awkward stands and a walk with a distinctive wobble.

He was too obviously a noob, I realised suddenly, for the job in hand.

You’re always seeing newbie avatars with just a couple of days on the clock in SL; you don’t have to be a detective to be able to spot easily the difference between a genuinely new resident and an alt with X number of hidden years to add to the number in the profile: it’s all about the appearance. Even the alts who want to make 123

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out they really are brand new can’t bear to go through the thirty or so days it takes most newbies to acquire the understanding that the default avatars look like they’re made out of painted cardboard, and seem to think the ‘I’m really not an alt, I just have fantastic dress sense’ disclaimer in the RL tab removes all suspicion (it does not; it merely adds). Of course, the modern default avatars are a good deal more sophisticated than the lumps of vaguely shaped modelling clay you got stuffed into back when I was genuinely new; even so, they’re still recognisable – because you keep seeing them – and the cheapness they reek of is like the virtual world functional equivalent of body odour. It’s all very unfair: we avoid these people, assuming them to be dull and unimaginative, but really all it is is a form of class discrimination.

And one I felt acutely whilst I looked at my manila avie with his flexiprim jacket and wobbling walk. He would stand out a mile as a genuine newbie; consequently, he would be of no interest to anyone. I realised I should have asked Fred for some Lindens to cover my expenses.

It turned out that I needn’t have worried. When finally I did press the Connect button, the satisfying jingle of coins coming in to land on a hard surface greeted me whilst I rezzed: a gift of ten thousand Lindens from Fred. He’d thought of everything. And so, as my first act of detection, I went shopping.

I attached the HUD Fred had sent me, a very simple little window with the four targets and either ‘offline’ or a region name next to each avatar. Two of them were 124

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online. Maddester was alone on what looked like a sandbox, whilst Single Star was in an RP sim with four other people. A new thought occurred to me. Whilst on the one hand this job appeared superficially easier than many I’d taken on before because I didn’t have to gain anyone’s confidence – all I had to do was get to know them as best I could – on the other, I could still arouse suspicion by turning up too many times in the same place as one of them.

Tempting as it was, then, to

teleport straight over to Single Star’s location as a happenstance encounter, I had to consider the second time and the third time after that that I might ‘accidentally’ bump into him. What was it Fred had said? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. I decided, then, to keep a log of the regions they visited and see if any patterns emerged.

If it turned out that one or more of them frequented a particular club, for example, then that would be a good place to hang out in.

I still wanted to ‘get eyes’ on them, though. Which meant I needed some alts. Back in the day of Definitely Thursday, I’d had a veritable army of them to call upon; now I had just Burned and Camper232, and the latter was now too dangerous to use. So I went through the whole signup routine another three times, creating a little trio of noobs who might end up being good for just one or two outings and nothing more. Still, it was always a good idea to have an unused alt up your sleeve; you never knew when it could come in handy.

For the last of the three, I chose the blonde guy with the tie and waistcoat from the avatar carousel on the 125

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signup page. I called him Masculamity. He moved smoothly from foot to foot whilst I filled in the registration form, a lie through animation because the newly minted avatar would have his appearance but stand like a slightly crooked pencil once loaded. He looked impatient to be launched into the world. The first two I just filled in the forms for, but Masculamity I decided to take for the full test run. He rezzed as an orange cloud floating above a gentle sea with a few small polygons dabbed here and there. I waited. Then, after five minutes I gave up and relogged, which of course a new user would know to do. It was good to see Linden had finally nailed that first hour experience.

Finally, ‘Learning Island’ rezzed around me. Burned and Camper232 had both been created on my phone and I’d removed myself from the induction zone just as soon as had been possible – each exposure a blind stumble to the exit – but this time I took a moment to absorb the new environment. I had to admit, it was a far cry from Orientation Island, the primitive lump of rock Definitely Thursday had been air-dropped onto on his zeroeth rezzday. Not much more sophisticated than a child’s paint and Papier-mâché construction, there had nonetheless been a magic to that place – that was of course more to do with its novelty and the mystery of what lay ahead than any actual design parameter – which Learning Island lacked. That said, Learning Island was pretty, and touching down on a beach with a wrecked sailing boat on some rocks just offshore gave it an atmosphere that some of the first hour experiences between this one and Orientation Island had totally 126

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lacked.

Within those there had been some truly horrendous creations, soulless and sterile, that I didn’t wonder had caused all by themselves the nonplussed shrug that was the premature kiss of death to any new second life.

Still now, I love thinking myself back into the memory of those first few Second Life days. I remember the excitement of so many new things and being thoroughly unable to assimilate even half of the information being pushed upon me. I remember Governor Linden giving me some clothes that included a flat, grey cap. I remember the sound of the wind rushing as I flew, and the bops and bumps of my clumsiness. I remember the sound of keyboards going tap tap tap tap tap tap, and of that guy laughing off in the distance somewhere. It was intoxicating. I must have spent a whole week on the interim stage, Help Island, at once impatient to make my way to the mainland and at the same time anxious as to how I'd manage when I got there.

I walked Masculamity woodenly along the beach, up three steps at the end and through a stone frame.

Wooden signposts directed me along a sandy path to a water fountain, where a guy wearing the long-haired Goth avatar was standing nose distance in front of a girl in the black-girl-in-a-peach-flexiprim-dress avatar and saying, “Responde” to her. A guy in a cowboy avatar IMed me with “Hola”, but I couldn’t be bothered to reply. I crossed a rope bridge, then came to a second one that was half destroyed. Interestingly, there were no signs or information indicating flight might be a good idea here; I supposed that leaving things to newbs to 127

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figure out by themselves was the new Linden strategy – kind of a sink or swim thing, and one I found myself sort of liking. I took to the sky, hovering in place for a full minute before traversing the gap so that the unfortunates who’d hobbled haplessly past and fallen into the pit below might look up and see that people could fly here.

On the other side, the path led up to another rope bridge that led my all-new avatar behind a waterfall.

Finally, it took me up to a circular stone temple, where a portal to the next place awaited me. It was all a bit of an anti-climax. I missed the parrot from Orientation Island that would offer you a kiss if you asked for one.

A small group of newbie avatars stood nearby, their heads wagging this way and that as their drivers tested out their newly acquired alt-clicking skills on the local scenery. Their lookat crosshairs danced around in the air like dragonflies.

Donald333: we are survivors Coffeegirl29: Of what?

Donald333: the boat crash. sweetygirlcute: i cant see u Donald333: the boat is on the rocks Donald333: broken Donald333: we swim to the beech Donald333: the sailing boat Donald333: where we started Donald333: you know?

Coffeegirl29: Yes yes yes; I get it. sweetygirlcute: where are u?

Hornyguy12: u want sex?

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Coffeegirl29: No thanks.

CHRISROXXXXX: GREETINGS DIGITAL PEOPLE. Donald333: we crawl across the sand Donald333: do you have food? sweetygirlcute: i don’t understand sweetygirlcute: what is im?

Hornyguy12: u want fuck?

Coffeegirl29: Really, I don’t.

Donald333: I have water Donald333: but just one botol Donald333: we will have to share Donald333: we must not drink the sea Donald333: very bad Donald333: we must look for a river CHRISROXXXXX: YOU DUMB FUCK WHERE U GONNA FIND A RIVER ON THIS TINY ISLAND? Coffeegirl29: I feel obliged to point out that we did in fact walk under a waterfall on our way up here.

Hornyguy12: we go to sex?

Coffeegirl29: Hornyguy, I promise you the answer’s going to remain no, however you word it.

Donald333: hahaha CHRISROXXXXX: LOL Coffeegirl29: lol is not allowed.

At that last sentence, my heart seemed to stop beating for a full ten seconds. Had she really just said that? Had she really just said that? Had she really just used the phrase that belonged letter and word to Inch Sideways? Could it be her? Could this be the latest SL incarnation of Inch or had she used that phrase so many times on others that 129

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it had somehow worked its way into the lexicon? If it had, then this was the very first time I’d ever witnessed it uttered by another person.

No. That just didn’t fit. This was her. This was Inch.

I knew it. I knew it just as surely as if she’d said, “Thursday is definitely a sideways step”. With her own personal passphrase, she had given herself away. And I wondered for a moment if this was the first phase of her own new adventure, perhaps even a plan to entrap me.

But, in the first few moments of this new avatar’s life, she had shown herself. Unbeknownst to her, her target was standing just a few virtual feet away, disguised in newbie awkwardness, but alert and aware and now one step ahead of her.

My heart was racing. What to do next? Surely she was only seconds away from vanishing in a swirl of white puffs, off to explore the mainland? Did I want that? Was it dangerous to be anywhere near her? Or did I want to keep her close? Did I want Masculamity and Coffeegirl29 to be friends. Would I grow my advantage by inching into her inner circle or would it be an enormous risk? Might I give myself away with a signature comment just as she had?

I decided this was too good an opportunity to miss. I typed out my new avatar’s first ever comment.

Masculamity: Is hahaha allowed?

Coffeegirl29: It all depends.

Coffeegirl29: Did you actually laugh? More specifically…

Coffeegirl29: Did you actually laugh three times.

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Masculamity counts on his fingers.

Masculamity: In fact, it was four times.

Masculamity: But it was a mouth-closed sort of laugh.

Masculamity: All throat.

Masculamity: If you know what I mean.

Coffeegirl29: Hmm Coffeegirl29: I think I do.

Coffeegirl29: This once, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Masculamity: Phew.

Hornyguy12: u want 2 fuck?

Coffeegirl29: Horny, if I don’t want one fuck, I’m unlikely to feel differently about two.

CHRISROXXXXX: LOOOOOL CHRISROXXXXX: IS THAT ALLOWED? HUH? Coffeegirl29: Tell me what each O stands for, and I’ll allow it.

Coffeegirl29: All five of them, mind.

An IM appeared in the top-right corner of my screen.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Registering a great avatar name and simultaneously creating a brand new word is a quality I’m reluctantly forced to admit I like in a man.

IM: Masculamity: Why reluctantly?

IM: Coffeegirl29: This is telling you more about myself than I would care to admit to anyone after even a year of knowing them, but what the hell?

Compliments generally have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of me.

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Back in public chat, she added: Coffeegirl29: I’m waiting, Chris.

IM: Masculamity: So I should treasure this compliment because it’s likely to be the only one I ever get from you?

IM: Coffeegirl29: Very good. You catch on fast.

IM: Coffeegirl29: This isn’t your first time round, I’m assuming.

IM: Masculamity: Of course not. For you too, I suppose?

IM: Coffeegirl29: You suppose correctly.

IM: Coffeegirl29: This avatar is identical in all personality respects to my previous avie, except it has a special power.

IM: Masculamity: Which is?

IM: Coffeegirl29: The ability to give compliments, *of course*.

IM: Masculamity: I see.

IM: Masculamity: I rather like the idea of psychological abilities as super-powers.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Yes, me too.

IM: Coffeegirl29: It kind of opens up a whole new range of super heroes.

IM: Coffeegirl29: After all, they’ve sort of exhausted the physical powers.

IM: Masculamity: Have they? The super-hero scene isn’t something I follow.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Nor I. IM: Coffeegirl29: I’ll admit, my observation was more 132

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a lay-person comment than informed opinion.

IM: Masculamity tuts.

IM: Masculamity: Perhaps we should find a superhero discussion forum and put your comments to the community for their analysis.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Please God, no.

IM: Masculamity laughs.

IM: Masculamity: I actually did laugh then. Is that ok?

IM: Coffeegirl29: Yes. You have my permission to actually laugh.

IM: Masculamity laughs again.

IM: Masculamity: Where have you been all my SL? IM: Coffeegirl29: Depending on how long your SL has been, it could take me quite a while to answer that question.

IM: Masculamity: In that case, we should friend so we have all the time we need.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Ohhhhh, that’s smooth. I have to admit that was good.

IM: Masculamity whistles innocently. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

That thing there with the speech marks following the visible action? I’m pretty certain I never used that in Def’s communications with Inch. It was only a nudge, but I wanted to put as much separation as possible between the writing styles of Masculamity and Definitely Thursday without having to force something that was completely unnatural to me.

IM: Coffeegirl29: You know what? Since you’re the 133

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first person I’ve met in this new form who is able to use both lower case *and* first letter capitalisation, I’ll let you be the first on the list.

IM: Masculamity whoots.

Also not a thing that Def would have done.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Did you *actually* whoot?

IM: Coffeegirl29: Don’t make me regret this now.

IM: Masculamity: This is going to be a rule no matter how close we get, right?

IM: Coffeegirl29: You’d better believe it.

IM: Coffeegirl29: Start forming those good habits now, buster.

IM: Coffeegirl29: You’ll thank me for it one day.

IM: Masculamity chuckles ((actually)).

I sent the friendship offer and, four seconds later (I counted), it got accepted. You’ll think me insane, of course. Why would I take such a risk? Simple. All of a sudden, a new idea had formed; a cruel, dreadful, savage and yet beautiful idea. And the idea was this: I would pursue this new Inch Sideways. I would flirt with her. I would play with her. I would gain her trust.

I would hold her in just the right way if she told me her RL stories. I would use everything I knew about her and everything I knew about lust and everything I knew about love to lead her into falling for me.

Then, when I had my new passport and it was time to ditch Masculamity and Burned and all the other new avies – when it was time to move on from Theo and start 134

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a new life in a new country – I would drop the veil and reveal myself.

I could imagine it already. I could see myself in the airport departure lounge on wireless, the gate open and the last few passengers handing over their boarding cards.

Perhaps we would be naked in SL and approaching the edge of her cliff, and I would whisper to her, “I have to go, baby.” And she would say, “What?”

And I would repeat what I said. And she would say, “Why?”.

And then I would say, “Because Thursday is definitely a sideways step”. And, with that final sentence, I’d log off, close my laptop and leave it all behind.

It was beautiful. It was poetry. I was instantly in love with this plan.

135

10 After all, Inch Sideways had turned me into a murderer.

I spent the next hour buying a few avatar enhancements for Masculamity using Lindens transferred from Burned – skin from Dutch Touch, hair from Exile, a suit from Zaara, shoes from Shoetopia, a sweater and a pair of pants from Dirty Little Secret. As an added touch, I also bought him a pack of Nikotin cigarettes and stuck one in the corner of his mouth. ‘Coffeegirl29’ had TPed away from the stone circle to embark upon a similar task. “IM me when you’ve denoobified yourself,” she told me.

“And don’t spare the Lindens”. Except the Lindens were now starting to run out.

The shape I wanted from

Manifest was just out of my reach. I fired off an email to Fred telling him I needed at least another 10k for the job in hand, explaining my need for more than one avie and listing the three new alts. It felt like begging for money from my Sugar Daddy.

I kept Burned logged on in the background so I could monitor the movement of my four targets – the HUD Fred had sent me was non-transferrable (I added a request for extra copies to my email). After about an hour of Masculamity’s creation, Maddester logged off and, for a while, Single Star was the only one of them online, still in the RP sim. At around about three o’clock in the afternoon, however, both Troght and Georgelennie 136

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appeared. I figured that made at least these latter two probable east coast Americans. Perhaps the other two were early risers, or perhaps they just lived somewhere else.

By 4pm, all three were in a sim that looked on the map like it was some sort of club. There were plenty of other people around them. If this turned out to be a popular spot and their regular haunt, it would be the perfect place to get to know them without it looking like I was a stalker. I decided the first trip would be observation only; I put on the Zaara suit and teleported Masculamity over.

It was the club that Fred had mentioned – The Crystal Ball – and it was one of those ultra-modern, clean lines, pastel greys and translucent glass affairs.

Studio windlight. Curved corners to everything. Sterile and soulless, yet inexplicably popular in SL. Some inoffensive trance music was playing. The dance floor was bordered on two sides by bars and on a third by the DJ station, which stood on a white oval island in the middle of a perfectly still pool of water. What nonsense.

I thought for a moment about Theo’s beach hut and the way the painted wood felt under my fingers. Real.

The three targets were conspicuous only insofar as they were about as far apart from each other as it was possible to be: one standing at one of the bars, one sitting at the other and one dancing in a spot close to the DJ area. A few minutes after I rezzed, the dancer – Single Star – released a ten line text spam into public chat that resembled a howling wolf; at the same time a sound effect was played of – you guessed it – a howling wolf. I 137

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wondered why they were here in the same location if they weren’t taking part in something interactive. If they were communicating in IM – going by what Fred had told me, I supposed they weren’t – they could have done so from distant locations. Could it be that they were there only so that it was clear they were no-where else?

On the other hand, could it be that they actually had no connection to each other at all and it just so happened that they each liked coming to this club?

I remained in the reception area for a while, where a pretty woman in a little black dress greeted me. I returned the politeness and wandered over to the edge of the dance floor.

Meanwhile, I fiddled with Masculamity’s settings so that my lookat was not broadcast, then zoomed in on Troght at the bar. He was within chat range, but contributing nothing to the local conversation, which was mostly random comments at that moment (public chat in very crowded areas – I counted thirty-four avies besides myself – is rarely a single conversation). He stood and did nothing. It was the same for Georgelennie, the only difference being that he was sitting rather than standing.

Could they be communicating in public chat but on a different channel? A scripted attachment could have handled that easily if each of the three avatars were wearing a copy. Anyone else wearing a listening script set to the same channel would also hear what they said, however there were over four billion channels to choose from so this was unlikely to happen by chance. The problem was this was ultimately no more secure than talking in IM. If Fred was able to monitor the typed 138

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conversations of these guys, the likelihood was it was done via a software keylogger that captured letters from the keyboard before they went anywhere near the Second Life viewer, let alone an inworld channel of disguised communication. Fred had been cagey over the issue of whether he was actually able to do that, but he’d seemed pretty certain that if they were communicating in this place then it was through some other method than text.

They could be in a private voice call, I supposed, except I imagined voice communication was probably no more complicated in principle a capture than was text.

Could it be that they were actually AFK and doing other things? Was coming to this sim the special code for, “I’m logged in but away from the keyboard”? Did other sims have their own distinct meanings? Did each of these guys carry a code book in real life with the names of hundreds of sims listed, each one given as meaning a particular thing? Or did it just mean that they had to all do a particular thing in RL? Did coming here mean it was time for them to meet up in RL? I cammed each of them again in turn. No. It had to be something else. Fred had told me he was certain there was some sort of communication going on, and so was I. But how?

My phone rang. It was Theo. “I’m going to be late, my lovely. Can you believe we ran out of emulsion?

We’re sitting around on our arses waiting for Madesh to get back from Newport, but the job’s got to be finished today.”

“No worries, baby,” I said, a little absently, still 139

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examining the silent avatars on the screen. Whatever it was they were doing, it was obviously important to them that it took place in a crowded area. But why? “When do you think you’ll be back?”

Troght suddenly let rip with a four line chat spam that quoted a line from a Clint Eastwood movie. It was accompanied by the associated audio clip, of course.

“It’s going to take us another hour at least,” Theo told me. I loved the way Theo said ‘hour’. It sounded like ‘over’ with the v removed.

“Do you want me to make some food?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.

“Only if you can’t last out. I picked us up a couple of steaks at lunchtime, so I did.”

“God, that sounds good.” It really did.

“Peel a few potatoes ready for me and I’ll fry us up some chips to go with it.”

“You’re on.”

“Are you taking advantage of this lovely sunshine now?”

“Come on, baby,” I told him, “you know I don’t like crowds. Not when I’m by myself.”

“You’re a strange one, Gemma, but I adore you.

Sometimes, I think you’d prefer it if you were invisible.”

I sat up in my chair suddenly. Could that be it? Could it?

“I’d happily be invisible just as long as you could still see me,” I told him, the words a little rushed. “I’ll get those spuds peeled. See you later.”

“See you later, my lovely.”

I almost threw the phone to one side. On the laptop 140

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keyboard, I held down together Ctrl and Alt and T to activate transparency mode. All the invisible and semitransparent prims in the club revealed themselves to me in red. Glass barriers dividing the far bar from the dance floor turned red. Tumblers on the shelves above the upturned spirit bottles turned red. Red penises in three states of arousal appeared between the suited legs of a number of men. And a red number appeared above Troght’s head.

“Fuck!” I exclaimed and looked around for some paper and a pen. By the time my attention had returned to the screen, the number had been replaced by a full stop. Then it was replaced by a number. Then another number. Then a full stop again. Each character displayed for about two seconds. My first thought was that a script was reading these numbers from a notecard, but that would have meant typing them in in the first place. No. The interval of time between changes was varied enough to indicate a manual process. My guess was he had a folder with eleven objects – zero to nine and the period – and was wearing them one at a time.

I wrote down everything I saw: 69.76.76.32.72.73.77.32.70.73.78.32.66.89.32.83.85.78 Then the numbers stopped. I had no idea what they meant. I panned out so I could see all three targets. The mess of red over the thirty-odd avatars on my screen made it hard to make Troght, Single Star and Georgelennie out; seeing any numbers at this distance would be almost impossible – which was, I realised, why 141

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a crowded location was important.

Single Star once more released his howling wolf spam.

I zoomed in on him. After about half a minute, numbers started appearing above his head: 72.79.87.32.67.69.82.84.65.73.78.32.84.72.65.84.63 The spam text, then, was to signal that one of the three were about to talk. Next, it was Troght again: 67.69.82.84.65.73.78 I realised, suddenly, that Fred would want to see this as I saw it. “I want video,” he had said. But I hadn’t yet installed any video capture software on Theo’s laptop. I pressed ‘Prt sc’ and copied the image into a Word document when Troght’s communication was over. A screen capture would have to do.

Next it was Georgelennie: 87.72.69.78.32.78.69.88.84.32.87.69.32.77.69.69.84.63 Then again Troght: 70.82.73.68.65.89.32.54.80.77.32.83.76.84 And that appeared to be that. A couple of minutes went by during which no communication occurred, then Troght disappeared and went offline. A couple more minutes after that, Single Star went also. Georgelennie remained in the club for another ten minutes, then 142

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teleported to another sim.

143

11 I composed another email to Fred. I described what I’d seen and typed in what each person had ‘said’. I had to check and recheck the numbers. It made my eyes hurt. I added in the screenshot. I reminded him I needed more Lindens. I hit send.

Then I went into the kitchen and peeled some potatoes.

Theo got in at just after seven. He looked tired but a shower quickly revived him. He cooked up the steaks and fried us chips in the pan. Just the sounds and the smells of the cooking were wonderful. I wrapped my arms around him from behind and yelped when the pan spat a spot of fat onto my hand.

He served it all up with organic tomatoes and slices of green pepper.

We were sitting on the couch and listening to a Yes album on his record player when I heard my phone buzz the arrival of an email. I waited until the side was done before checking it because I didn’t want to spoil Theo’s enjoyment of sharing it with me. He liked to listen with his arm around me and his eyes shut, and he didn’t move a muscle until the needle had lifted and the arm returned all the way to its clunk. When he got up to turn it over, I kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “One second, baby.” I took my phone out of my bag and 144

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checked it. The message simply read, “First ferry into East Cowes after 10pm”. That was a little earlier than I’d hoped for – Theo would still be up by then. I checked my watch: it was just gone ten past nine. I would listen to side B and then excuse myself.

I let him talk eagerly for a few minutes once the record was finished about progressive rock and the use of the Hammond organ, then I put a finger to his lips and said, “Baby, I have to slip out for a little while. Do you mind?

I’ll be back soon.”

He looked at me. “Are you safe, my lovely?”

“Completely,” I assured him.

“Gemma,” he said slowly, “I don’t mind there being an elephant in the room, but I don’t want you thinking I don’t mention it because I don’t care.”

“I’m in no doubt that you care.”

“I know you’re on the run,” he said. My heart stopped completely at that statement.

“Whoever he is and

whatever he did to you, you can talk about it or you can not talk about it: I don’t mind which, so long as whichever it is you choose you choose because that’s what’s best for you.”

“I love you,” I said. I didn’t mean to say that, but it just popped out of its own accord. “Oh!” I said, my hand over my mouth. “That was unexpected.”

What was even more unexpected was the realisation that I meant it.

Love takes on so many forms and lovers know no norms.

Inch Sideways had taken me by the shoulders and 145

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shaken me hard, but Theo had just crept up from behind, put his hands over my eyes and whispered in my ear, “Guess what?”

What surprised me most of all as I jogged down to the ferry slip was the anger I still felt towards Inch. The arrival of new, reciprocated love had always previously swept in with a wash that wiped out any residual bitterness over previous relationships. It had always felt cleansing. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that the presence of my anger had to some extent masked the growth of my feelings for Theo. It was as if some tiny part of me had formed a conclusion along the lines of, “That I feel anger means I cannot be in love”.

But this was an anger that love could not erase; love or no love, I was a wanted fugitive and that fact could only be changed if (or when) I was taken into custody. Being a fugitive meant I couldn’t ultimately stay with Theo: either I’d be successful in obtaining a new identity and move to a different country or I’d be unsuccessful – in which case, I would either take off or I’d leave it too long and the authorities would catch up with me. I knew it was only a matter of time. Eventually, someone would notice me on the CCTV footage getting out of that train at Portsmouth Harbour. By process of elimination alone, it had to happen: after having examined every second of video looking for someone matching my description getting off, they’d examine it all over again looking for anyone getting off. And there were probably cameras somewhere that had spotted me getting onto the hovercraft. And there were probably cameras that had spotted me in Newport. The net would close eventually.

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It was inevitable.

Which reminded me: I needed to check my messages again to see if Spence had responded to my IM. consider taking up Fred on his offer.

Or

So I couldn’t love Theo, because soon I would have to leave him. I’d have to leave him because I was a murderer. And I was a murderer because of Inch Sideways. It finally dawned on me, just as I reached Cowes Waitrose, that I was angry with Inch because I loved Theo.

After that unexpected admission of mine, Theo had looked and me and said, in his typical, non-avoidant manner, “I love you too, Gemma. But let me ask you something: are you in love with me yet?” It was almost the perfect reply: it didn’t attempt to take us back over the line just crossed, but created a new one further down the road; also, it presupposed that a negative reply at this moment was no bad thing. He was intentionally giving me breathing room, and I took it.

“Not yet,” I had said. “Not just yet.”

But I could feel myself slipping in that direction, just the same.

The first chain ferry after 10pm clanked its way across the river of reflected lights and I walked aboard when the gate was opened, checking both left and right foot passenger areas. An elderly lady with a shopping bag at her feet smiled at me and said, “Will you help me up, my dear?” I went to her and held her hands as she stood.

“Thank you so much.” She winked at me and added, in 147

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a lower voice, “I’ll return after ten thirty.”

“Are you…?” I asked.

“Retired? Yes,” she replied and walked slowly away from her bag.

There was £15,000 in the bag instead of £12,500. In addition to the money, Fred had provided me with what looked like a brand new laptop, only it had been ‘aged’ with a couple of scuff marks here and there. The power chord had been wrapped around it. I wasn’t sure what I felt about using electronics supplied by him (who knew what ‘added features’ it contained?) and I seriously considered throwing it into the Medina.

For the moment, though, it would tell him no more than he already knew and it could possibly come in handy. But I made a mental note to cover the webcam with tape before I first turned the thing on.

He had also thrown in a hand-knitted sweater and a set of thermal underwear. Thinking about it, though, that might have been the old lady.

How could we not fuck that night after what had been said?

I had things to do that I wanted to get done

inworld, but I didn’t really want to be doing them at all at that particular moment; I wanted to be with Theo.

I wanted him; my body wanted him. What I really wanted was for him to cum inside me so I could feel that tight little spot of warmth suddenly there, but the logic centre in my brain wasn’t quite dulled enough to allow 148

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that to happen just yet. Instead, when he withdrew, I took him by surprise and span around on my elbows. I managed to catch his first spurt across my chin and neck, and devoured what was left – which was plenty, because the action pushed him over an even higher ledge. The sound of him out of control, synchronised with the filling of my mouth, toppled me right over mine. I didn’t have time to swallow and, as I disintegrated right there in front of him, his cum spilled from my lips.

We rested a few minutes and I didn’t wipe anything away. Then I told him to fuck me again.

149

12 I hadn’t yet managed to acquire a cleaning client for Wednesday mornings so, as soon as Theo left, I booted up his laptop. Alongside it, I also booted up the laptop from Fred, just to see what was on it. They started up together, but Fred’s laptop soared ahead whilst Theo’s crawled through whatever the hell it was it had to get done before presenting me with a workable computer. I hadn’t realised how used I’d become to working with a slow machine. On it, I’d been running SL with a draw distance of 32 metres and graphics set on low; this was good enough for detective work but looked like the metaverse of 2006, mesh and sculpties aside. The new machine, however, was some sort of gaming monster: it had the desktop ready and waiting for me before the Windows logo was done glowing on Theo’s laptop. I had a quick look at the system information: 8 gigs of RAM, an i7 processor and a top of the range Nvidia GeForce GPU. Sweet. I felt my panties go a little wet.

I looked back and forth between them.

Theo’s

laptop… Fred’s laptop… Theo’s safe laptop… Fred’s unknown risk laptop… Theo’s mind-achingly slow laptop… Fred’s thoroughbred, speed-demon, monster laptop… And so on. I decided that Fred’s monster laptop was in fact my laptop.

I logged in on it as Masculamity. Monster laptop or 150

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not, SL still took its sweet time loading. Whilst I waited for the various spheres and polygons around me to complete their transformation into recognisable objects, I logged in as Burned on Theo’s laptop so I could monitor the movements of the four targets.

I also checked my email. This message was waiting for me: E, Message for you on the secure messaging system on laptop. Use the HUD sent to you for the passkey.

Login: Burned F Ah yes. Burned had received a new HUD titled ‘Secure passkey’.

He’d also received another 10,000 Lindens.

Jolly good.

I attached the HUD. A small blue box appeared in the top-right corner of my screen, with ‘Click’ written on it.

Dutifully I clicked on it. The following green text appeared in my chat window: Secure passkey: 422313 (Valid for 60 seconds) I found the secure messaging system on the start button of the new laptop. I logged in with the ID provided and entered the passkey when prompted. A new window appeared with another message from Fred:

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E, Very well done. Additional £2,500 for fast and very useful information. This is the first indication that the three targets are actually interacting and a new fieldcraft method we can file.

The conversation was in decimal ASCII character codes. It reads: Troght: ELL HIM FIN BY SUN Single Star: HOW CERTAIN THAT? Troght: CERTAIN Georgelennie: WHEN NEXT WE MEET? Troght: FRIDAY 6PM SLT See attached code table for conversion of future discussions. Very important you attend on Friday. I want video this time.

Hope you like new equipment. Please use the secure messaging system on it for all future correspondence.

L$ 10,000 credited. Don’t spend it all at once.

F So. This was real. A little chill went down my spine as I read the decoded text. A cliché, I know; sometimes, though, clichés hit the nail on the head. So to speak.

ASCII. I felt a little stupid for not having thought of 152

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that myself. I’d assumed some more complicated code, but thinking about that now, the purpose of the code was not to be unbreakable, but to appear obscure to the casual onlooker. Anyone who had transparency mode on and was looking close enough to see the numbers and wrote them all down in sequence was probably looking with intent in the first place and could therefore be assumed to have the tools to crack far more complicated codes.

I printed off the table so I had it handy when I next had to decode any messages. I didn’t particularly like having physical stuff around like that for Theo to discover, but on the one hand there wouldn’t be time to flick between the SL viewer and another window with the table in it when I next witnessed a communication, and on the other I had twelve and a half thousand pounds in cash stuffed into my handbag that was a far greater worry than any piece of paper with a few numbers and letters printed on it.

Burned’s window indicated only Maddester to be online, and in a sim with six other people in it.

Inch/Coffeegirl didn’t appear to be inworld in Masculamity’s window, so I decided to go check out the fourth target.

But first I checked my messages. I teleported to an empty sandbox and flew up to 4000 metres, then recreated the pine cube and its code.

Object: One message Object: Receiving…

Object: Message 1 153

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Object: Spencer Huckleberry: For fuck’s sake, Thursday.

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: Ok. Whatever.

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: If you change your mind before Thursday, let me know.

Object: Spencer Huckleberry: After that the price goes up to £15k.

Object: Reply?

Was this Spence’s way of trying to entice me? I wasn’t sure. The message sounded unconcerned, but maybe that was because it was meant to. Perhaps he’d realised that any overt attempt at encouragement would be too obvious and had gone for something more subtle. I’d never really considered Spence capable of subtle before.

There was no encouragement here, but there was incentive: he was saying, “I don’t care one way or another, but if you don’t do it now, it’ll cost you more”.

What was significant about Thursday?

A faint chill went down my back at the thinking of that sentence in my head.

What was significant about Thursday? If I hadn’t known Spence to be the man he was, I might just have wondered if that question was some sort of communication. What was significant about Thursday?

Why Thursday?

What was important about

Thursday? Thursday, after all, is a sideways step. Thursday is definitely a sideways step.

Nah. For God’s sake, this was Spence I was thinking about. For all I knew, Thursday was when he washed his curtains and that was important in some sort of twisted Spencer logic sort of way. But what to do about 154

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the passport? I was beginning to wonder if Fred’s offer wasn’t such a bad one after all.

I had the money now. If I left it another day then I wouldn’t. For the moment, my story was out of the news and things were quiet – the focus was on Team GB’s victory parade, Andy Murray’s win in New York and the commemoration of 9/11 – but who knew when the girl in the yellow tank and black cap and shorts would be spotted leaving the train? Maybe someone was looking at that image right now.

Inch/Coffeegirl/Assumption had spun me a tail at that café at Gunwharf about murdering a guy herself – all part of her ruse to get a confession out of me that she could tape. She’d spoken about imagining a rain-coated detective fussing over the direction of her heel marks across the lawn of the guy she’d killed. I now imagined that same detective picking up on all the tiny clues I knew I’d left. “Why do you suppose she took all the money out of her bank that she could and then paid for the red sunhat with her debit card? Why would she do that when the hat was her disguise?” I imagined him watching the footage from Portsmouth Harbour station over and over and over, and later paying a visit to that clothes shop and spotting a shopper with her white and pink carrier bag coming out; knowing it was significant, but not quite making the link; screwing his face up and wrapping his fingers around his chin; “Did they give you this bag in this shop?” And then remembering – with a jubilant laugh – the bag that the girl getting off the train had held. How good were the police actually? Did every constabulary have a Columbo or Morse or Poirot?

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Or were they the way that action movies portrayed them – slow, cumbersome, unimaginative?

When the moment came and I was unprepared, I would look back on this still time and wonder how the hell I could have been so complacent. The little bubble of comfort that Theo had created had fooled me into a false sense of security. I knew my life was different, but it was still a life: I had a home and access to the internet and an income and satisfied clients. I had to keep reminding myself that the whole thing was an illusion. Until I had a new identity, I could take nothing for granted and I could not become comfortable. Even if no-one ever worked out where I was, what would I do if I got ill and needed a doctor? What would I do if Theo grew tired of the relationship and asked me to leave? What would I do if he asked me to marry him? What would I do if I gave birth to his child?

Object: Reply?

Nuts. I hit Y. Object: Message?

Burned Badly: What do you know – now I need it again. Ok, Spence, I’ll drop your guy a line.

I sent the email before I had time to change my mind.

“I’m an acquaintance of Spencer Huckleberry.

I understand you can arrange a new passport for me.

Please advise on how I go about this.”

Within ten minutes, I had a reply: “Give me phone 156

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number to ring and we talk.�

157

13 Maddester was at a sandbox. At least, it was a sandbox I rezzed into after teleporting to the sim the HUD told me he was in. I couldn’t see him anywhere other than on my radar, which told me he was just over 2000 metres away.

I assumed that meant he’d created a sky platform, and that would make ambling casually by a difficult thing to.

Then again, if I were to suddenly turn up on my own builder’s platform at that height, it might appear simple happenstance. The MystiTool HUD I’d always used previously for building work featured a little elevator you rezzed at ground level and then sat in to be taken up to your chosen height – clicking the ‘Warp’ option once you were seated shot you straight up like a bullet from a gun and the 40m x 40m building platform was rezzed beneath your feet before you’d had a chance to stand up.

If Maddester was a seasoned builder, he would know about that sort of stuff. If he was a seasoned builder. If he was new to it all, my clever cover might still appear – as Fred had put it – an ‘enemy action’.

I had a quick look at his profile. He was three years and four months old. Noobish profile pic. Generic ‘here to meet new friends and have a good time’ main tab text, but also a note to see his picks for information on commissioning building work. Good. He had four picks in total. One was for a pictured but unnamed girlfriend 158

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(“Partnered to the most wonderful girl in SL. Love you, baby.”) – interestingly, no partner was listed in the main part of his profile, so this could have been an ex he couldn’t bring himself to delete, an on-off-on-off relationship or perhaps one of those ‘unofficial’ partnerships that happened for any number of the dissatisfaction-with-the-concept-of-officially-partnering reasons I’d encountered in over five years’ work as an SL detective. The second pick was for a menswear store that (apparently) sold everything the “well-dressed gent” could ever require. The third was a link to his online store that sold a range of skybox and ground-based buildings. I followed it. There were at least twenty designs there, all post-modern styles with extremely professional texturing. They were all low-impact mesh.

The fourth pick was for building commissions and included a list of some of his most visible work. I knew of one of the places on that list and was impressed. His rates were not included.

So this was a guy who appeared to have an investment in SL: he’d been around for several years, apparently was in – or had been in – a relationship and had an online shop full of high-quality builds. If this was a fabricated identity, a lot of work had gone into it. I supposed that was theoretically possible – the buildings could have been copybotted and put onto the web to give the impression of long experience, the account could have been an old account reactivated (perhaps even purchased from someone) – but really, it all seemed rather improbable. Perhaps it was a little suspicious that he sold only via the Marketplace rather than that plus an 159

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inworld shop, but this was something which was becoming more and more common in a metaverse where tier prices were under increasing fire from critics keen to point out that equivalent amounts of land in competing metaverses were selling for a fraction of the SL price (albeit also carrying a fraction of the virtual footfall).

How did Maddester’s profile compare with the other three targets? Single Star was less than five months old, had a very basic profile picture that looked like it had been taken at Learning Island, had no SL information text, and had just one pick – an infohub, perhaps the place where he had first touched down on the main grid.

His RL profile was blank, but for the words “No RL plz.”

A little more work had gone into Georgelennie’s profile, but only a little. There was a professional looking profile picture – a close-up of his head and shoulders – above a quote from Of Mice And Men: “As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.” He had three picks, each for a different literary location on the grid. In his RL tab, there was a picture of a mouse and a second Of Mice And Men quote: “Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em.”

Georgelennie’s avie was also less than five months old.

When I compared the rez date to Single Star’s there was only three days between them.

Troght, on the other hand, had been in the metaverse for considerably longer, although he wasn’t as seasoned a resident as Maddester. His account indicated over a year and six months inworld. For his SL profile picture, 160

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he had a snapshot of a prim dog taking a piss against a virtual lamppost, underneath which he had typed out, “Never piss in a pot when you could be putting a fire out.” Whatever. He had two picks, both of which were popular sex beaches of the sort where everyone stands around naked or semi-clothed and no-one does any actual fucking (there seems to be an unwritten rule in SL that the more of a long-timer you are at a public sex venue, the less cool it is to actually have sex there). In his RL tab, he had, “SL is not RL, and never will be.”

Someone ought to do a tally on the number of times that phrase or an equivalent appears verses the number of times someone writes something along the lines of “There is no distinction between SL and RL”: I bet it’s about 50-50.

Troght, Single Star and Georgelennie had varied profiles, then, but they were all token gestures compared to Maddester’s.

They appeared to be exactly what I

would have speculated they might write, given the relatively superficial actual involvement with the metaverse my hunch told me they had: just about enough to look like a dull, uninteresting, unremarkable avatar. Instantly forgettable. The profile snoop would spend no more than a few seconds examining them before moving on to the next person.

I wanted to check that Maddester was at exactly 2000 metres, as I supposed him to be. With my minimap on, I strode out across the sandbox until I saw my dot become positioned underneath his. The radar now said 1978 metres lay between us. I checked my height above sea level and found it to be 22 metres. That confirmed that, 161

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then.

Since I still had the Marketplace window open from my examination of Maddester’s products, I found the MystiTool HUD and ordered a copy. It arrived about thirty seconds later and I unpacked and wore it. I moved a few metres away from the spot I knew Maddester to be working at, rezzed the builder’s elevator and set its destination height to 2002 metres, then climbed aboard and hit the ‘Warp’ button. I shot up into the sky.

Not without a sense of irony, my elevator appeared in the middle of what appeared to be an escalator. Nearby, my target was working on what appeared to be the beginnings of a shop front, a stream of orange particles connecting his right hand to a doorframe that thickened as I watched it. Then, my builder’s platform materialised and swallowed up both the builder and his work.

Masculamity: oh jeez Masculamity: I’m so sorry Masculamity: should have checked the map Maddester: lol Maddester: no worries… but could you de-rez it, pls?

Masculamity: absolutely Masculamity: grrr Masculamity: hard to select all the pieces I selected all four of the platform pieces easily, then added an extra half minute – enough time to be consistent with the notion that I was inexperienced, but 162

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not so much that it started to get annoying. I hit delete.

Masculamity: there Masculamity: again, sorry about that Maddester: no problem Maddester: could you remove the elevator too?

Masculamity: oh of course.

Another thirty seconds.

Masculamity: there we go Maddester: thanks :) Masculamity: you’re welcome Masculamity: hey, this escalator is pretty cool Maddester: oh thanks :) Masculamity: you making a store?

Maddester: I think so Masculamity: only think? lol Maddester: well, it’s something I’m doing for someone else Maddester: I guess it’ll be a mall of some sort Masculamity: you’re a builder?

Maddester: yeah Masculamity: oh cool Masculamity: do you know how to script?

Maddester: oh sure His short answers and the gaps of twenty to thirty seconds implied he was probably trying to work and I would soon start to get on his nerves. I knew what it was like to have a newbie buzzing around you and 163

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asking countless questions when you were trying hard to get a job done. At the same time, adopting such an approach – because it was so well known – was a good cover.

Masculamity: I went to a class on object-to-object communication yesterday Maddester: oh yes?

Masculamity: to be honest, the pace was a little quick for me Maddester: they can be like that sometimes, yes Masculamity: I probably should have done the beginners’ class first Maddester: ah well yes Maddester: that would probably help Masculamity: do you mind if I work up here with you?

Masculamity: would be kind of cool to have an expert nearby I can call on lol Unless he was Jesus, that would probably have elicited a private sigh or two. But I doubted he would say no.

Maddester: sure, go for it Maddester: although I do tend to get pretty engrossed A very polite way of informing me he would probably ignore any subsequent remarks.

Masculamity: no worries Masculamity: I’ll try to be quiet!

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Maddester: thanks :) Masculamity: tell me if you need me to move, ok?

Maddester: will do Masculamity: I think I’ll engage my ‘busy’ mode lol Maddester: okay lol Masculamity: it’s hard when you’re trying to do something and constantly getting IMs Maddester: it sure is It occurred to me that Maddester might be more a little more voluntary in his communication with me if he thought I was female. Even men attached to the “most wonderful girl in SL” (I’m telling you, she gets around) liked flattering flirtation. ‘Masculamity’ wasn’t really a gender-neutral name, but neither was it as gender inflexible as ‘Frank’. I decided to do yet another quick shop on the Marketplace.

Masculamity: right then Masculamity: work I near enough bought a whole damn avatar from Redgrave: skin (Lyla), shape (Bella), a loose red tanktop and a pair of jeans hotpants. Redgrave was handy because everything got sent unpacked, ready to wear. I got blonde hair from Truth (Faye) – also unboxed – and an AO from TuTy (Fashionista). A bit of a shotgun fusion, but it would have to do. I slung the whole lot into a folder and dragged it onto me, crossing my fingers that I hadn’t created an abomination. My avatar shrank by several centimetres, went bald, went blonde, went 165

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naked, went invisible where the mesh clothes were supposed to be and, finally, became clothed. The overall effect, I decided was satisfactory. Not bad for a blind grope around in the closet.

Masculamity: always seem to work better when I’m back in female lol Maddester: you’re a girl?

Masculamity: yeah My turn to be brief now.

Maddester: with a name like ‘masculamity’?

Masculamity: when a girl creates a male avie, she’s thinking ‘masculine’ Masculamity: when she does it for the first time, she risks creating a calamity Maddester laughs Maddester: ok I get it :) Masculamity giggles If you’re a girl and want to attract a boy, giggling appears to be an imperative.

Maddester: well anyway, nice avatar :) Masculamity: oh thanks :) Masculamity: this is just my slouch outfit Masculamity: plus I build best in bare feet lol Maddester: be careful you don’t drop any prims on your toes!

Masculamity: oh, my pinkies wouldn’t like that!

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Maddester: you might need someone on hand, just in case Maddester: to administer pinkie first aid Maddester: basically to kiss them better Masculamity giggles Amazing what a change of SL gender can achieve when it comes to sociability. Who’d have thought it?

It ever so slightly annoyed me that my carelessly constructed avatar appeared to be so appealing to him.

If I’d had the time to construct a proper honeypot, I’d have gone for mesh feet and hands, and probably now a pair of mesh breasts; I’d have spent ages on the whole colour matching nightmare. But a blonde wig and a skimpy top was all I actually needed, it appeared.

Anyway; now that I had his attention…

Masculamity: so who’s this all for?

Maddester: oh some guy Masculamity: he’s paying you to make it?

Maddester: yeah, and pretty well too Masculamity: and he didn’t tell you what he wants it for?

Maddester: he doesn’t talk all that much Maddester: doesn’t seem to speak English very well Maddester: he sent me a bunch of drawings and plans and photos he’d uploaded Maddester: he said to me, “you make?” lol Maddester: if he has anything specific he wants to tell me, he gets some friend of his to translate it properly to English and writes it down, then takes a 167

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picture of the note and sends it to me.

Masculamity: like what?

Maddester: like it has to be to scale Maddester: and it has to be in bits Maddester: he wants every shop an individual unit so he can move them around Maddester: I guess so he can see what works best Or because he wanted to make it as obscure as possible to the builder that the thing he was creating was an actual place.

Maddester: in fact, I’m not the only builder working on this project Maddester: he’s got at least one other guy Masculamity: oh?

Maddester: I don’t know who it is, he won’t tell me Maddester: I kind of worked it out Maddester: there are bits of building frame I’ve made that couldn’t possibly take any of the shops I’ve done Farm the project out to two (or more) builders and there was even less chance that it might get recognised by anyone whilst it was being created. So Troght would receive it in pieces, which he would then assemble like a building-sized jigsaw puzzle; only he knew what bit went where.

Maddester, it seemed to me, had no idea what sort of people he was working for.

Video. I still hadn’t gotten around to installing any 168

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video capture software and, for sure, Fred would want to see some of this. Naturally, this need had already been anticipated and I found when I looked on the start menu that a screen capture application had been loaded onto my new monster laptop. I started it up and a red, blinking dot – so unnecessary – appeared in the top-right corner of my screen.

Masculamity: so you’re just building the thing in bits Maddester: yep Masculamity: a modular mall Maddester: yes!

Masculamity: can you show me some of the stuff you’ve done so far?

Maddester: well of course Maddester: so long as you’re not faking interest just to be polite.

Masculamity: typical artist always assumes no-one could possibly be interested in their work I was betting he’d just love me referring to him as an artist.

Maddester: I do like to think of myself as an artist, yes Masculamity: well, you are!

Various shop fronts of different sizes began rezzing around us, some of which I recognised and some of which I didn’t: Kroger, Walgreens, Lowes, Victoria’s Secret, Caribou Coffee and Radio Shack. There were ten, then twenty, then thirty outlets. I cammed each one of 169

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them, making sure the video recording captured every establishment. Then Maddester rezzed an enormous hall area – judging by the size of the outlets, it was at least three storeys high. It had three pairs of up and down escalators and a column of four glass elevators side by side that rose between each set of moving steps.

Both the texturing and the finer detail of all these items could be best described as basic, but then I supposed it didn’t need to be perfect for the purpose for which this model was required. It only needed to orientate, to familiarise each of the people who were going to walk into this place at some point in the future with its layout; enough that they recognised it when they entered it, enough that they knew where to go and what they would be doing once they got there.

There were also small corridors and offices and store rooms and closets, the inner, hidden labyrinth of service areas and management. There was a loading bay. There was a security room, complete with a many-screened CCTV viewing area. Amongst the smaller bits and pieces Maddester rezzed, there were individual security cameras, litter bins, benches, plants and several ‘you are here’ location maps.

And then he rezzed the thing that really caught my attention and made everything real in a way it somehow hadn’t been right up to that point; from somewhere inside of me, an involuntary sob broke out when I saw it and tears pricked at the corner of my eyes.

He rezzed a Christmas tree.

And then he rezzed a grotto area, a log cabin with fake snow on top and a little queuing area that wound 170

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through a snow-covered area of busy elves, and piles of gift-wrapped presents, and penguins and friendly polar bears.

Maddester: the builds themselves are a bit basic, but the amount there was to do more than made up for that Masculamity: yes I can see that Masculamity: it’s immense Outside Theo’s flat, it was a warm, September day. The sun was smiling on Cowes and I could hear the summer sound of seagulls calling. But I felt cold in RL as I wrote that. Tears were running down my face. And yet I felt a tremendous surge of gratitude rising from deep within me. I was a murderer; I had taken the life of someone I knew hadn’t deserved to die; I had forfeited my legal right to freedom and my moral need to consider myself a good and useful person: yet, somehow, I was in a position to do something about this terrible thing. I could stop this terrible thing from happening. And I would. I realised in that moment that I’d do anything to stop it. If Fred had there and then told me that the deal was off, I would still do it; I’d hand the information over to the police myself if that was what was required. I would gladly sacrifice my freedom in order to prevent this thing from happening.

And knowing this, with complete and total certainty, was the most human feeling I had ever felt. I felt suddenly real again. I felt genuine. I felt alive.

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Masculamity: how long did all this take you?

Maddester: a few weeks now Maddester: I’ve just a few more items to do Maddester: he wants it finished by Friday Masculamity: oh dear, and here I am holding you up Maddester: oh it’s ok, I like the distraction :) Maddester: all work and no play etc, etc Masculamity giggles Masculamity: I probably shouldn’t say this, because I can see you have a special lady in your profile…

Masculamity: but talented people like you are incredibly attractive to me Maddester: really?

Masculamity: oh god yes Masculamity: I swear I got turned on even more by each new item you added here Masculamity: I mean, just look at it all Masculamity: you created all of it. All of it Maddester: it’s not even mesh Maddester: I offered to do it in mesh but he didn’t like the extra time cost Masculamity: I don’t care that it’s not in mesh Masculamity: I care about your intellect and your sustained attention and your passion for doing this Maddester: you know, I shouldn’t really being showing you any of this Maddester: he wants it kept hush-hush until he opens whatever it is he’s opening Maddester: typical SL start-up mentality, if you ask me Maddester: always assuming they’re the next big thing Maddester: always assuming there’ll be huge interest 172

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in their pissy little project Maddester: he didn’t even want me to work on more than two pieces at a time Maddester: in case someone came along and saw it Maddester: lol Masculamity: I’m glad you did show it to me :) Masculamity: but I don’t want you to get into trouble Masculamity: so put it all away now Masculamity: and don’t tell him you showed it to me Masculamity: and I won’t tell anyone what I saw The pieces started to disappear, one by one.

Maddester: seriously? You got turned on by seeing all that?

Masculamity: seriously Maddester: that’s, um, kind of a turn-on for me Masculamity: as it should be A slightly awkward silence followed, during which I realised I would have to direct him to fuck me behind his girlfriend’s back since, by himself, he would never initiate. I had no particular strategic reason to have sex with him right then, other than keeping him as a contact.

But I wanted to, just the same. I wanted to because, in addition to all those deaths I would be preventing, this was the man whose soul I’d be saving along the way. I was certain that Maddester was innocent in his understanding of what he’d become involved in. He didn’t suspect a thing. Well, how could he? How could any SL builder make the leap from this sort of 173

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commission – however eccentric the request – to the terrible, real life reason behind it? There were just too many obvious SL explanations and if I had been in his shoes, the notion that this was just another self-deluded metaverse entrepreneur full of their own inflated sense of self-importance would almost certainly have been the Occam's Razor explanation I’d have come up with too.

But, when the story exploded across the Christmas front pages; when the scenes of body bags being carried out of the tinsel-decorated front entrance of the shopping centre hit the headlines on the evening news; when weeping parents were interviewed about their dead children and surviving children were filmed trying to process the death of their parents; when anger took charge of the minds of the masses who had to sit, helpless, and witness this outrage, who would give a shit in the clarity of hindsight about the most likely explanation at the time?

Maddester didn’t realise in that moment the lifetime of guilt and public shame I’d be preventing him from having to enter, but perhaps he would know one day if the details of this were ever made public. Realising the emotional burden I’d be saving him from having to carry made me feel intimately connected to him, and I could think of no better way of cementing this intimacy than by fucking his brains out, right there on that builder’s platform, 2000 metres up in the sky.

I pressed the stop button on the video capture program.

Masculamity: I have a sex HUD, if you like…

Maddester: here?

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Masculamity: here Maddester: it’s G rated here Masculamity: which only makes me want it more

175

14 I reached a decision about the passport at 1pm. I crossed the Medina on the chain ferry, then went to the pound shop in the town centre and bought myself a new pay-asyou-go SIM card and ten pounds of credit. I turned my phone off.

I caught the Red Jet catamaran to Southampton, a twenty-five minute trip during which I felt my excitement grow at the prospect of once again being on mainland Britain. After a few weeks on the island, the city seemed enormous. Where Portsmouth was a port for naval vessels and ferries to France and Spain, Southampton was a sprawl of giant freight ships – one that we passed on the way in was so big it looked like you could fit the whole of Cowes into it. There were also a couple of impossibly huge cruise liners docked.

Following my encounter with Maddester, I’d sent the video file to Fred via the secure messaging application.

I’d expected it to take the rest of the afternoon to upload, it was so large; in fact the communications software carried out its own compression on the file before sending, and it was done in under an hour. I used the time to compose a message that relayed everything I’d learned: that the target location appeared to be a shopping mall; that it looked like they wanted to hit it during the Christmas shopping period; that Maddester 176

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was not part of the cell, but a commissioned builder who had no idea what he was caught up in; that the use to which the build was being put to was being partially obscured from him by only giving him part of the overall model to create and by giving him the details of retail outlets individually (I did also speculate that some of the shop fronts he’d created might have been red herring shops that weren’t actually present in the real life place).

I listed all the shops and cafés that I’d seen individually to save Fred the time of compiling such a list himself from the footage. I even gave a brief description of the hall area. If they could work out from what I had where this shopping centre was, the avatar hijack for the walk through might not be necessary – or, at least – not so vital.

Mainland Britain.

The industrial vastness of Southampton made the pretty cosiness of the island at once quaint and pathetic. I walked from the quay to the main railway station and caught the first train to Winchester. On the way, I put the new SIM into my phone and turned it on, then applied the credit. I logged into my email and sent Spence’s contact the new number, hoping he would respond to this note as quickly as he had the last. When the train got in, I took a walk down towards the cathedral, and when I was just in sight of the Buttercross my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Thursday?”

“Yes.” I didn’t let on that I knew who this was. No point in revealing more than was absolutely necessary – in this case, that I was only expecting him because he 177

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was the only person in the world who had the number.

“You want passport?”

The accent was foreign.

Possibly Eastern European.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Thank you for calling.”

“What nationality?”

“Well… British.”

“British not possible.”

“What?”

Too difficult.

I can get

Bulgarian, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian.

Spanish, but that cost more.”

“I no do British passport.

Possibly

“What use are those to me?”

“Passport is passport,” he said, indifferently.

“You

want stay in UK or leave?”

“I want to leave,” I told him.

“Then any EU passport is good. plane,” he added.

Don’t leave by

“Why not?”

“Big security. Face recognition.”

His blunt, unconcerned replies were actually a huge comfort. He really didn’t sound like he especially gave a shit one way or another about whether or not I bought his services, plus he seemed to know what he was talking about. I didn’t especially like the idea of a foreign passport, but if it got me safely out of the country and into a new life, then I supposed it would just have to do.

“Ok. Let’s say Polish then. What do I do next?”

“I need photo. You can email to me. It has to be good photo. Take it in booth with your phone. I will do the passport. When I have name I will tell you, then I need 178

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signature in new name – write on paper and then take photo to send me. Ok?” “Ok. And then?”

“Then we will meet. You pay, I give passport.”

“How long?”

“One week from after I get photo.”

“Ok,” I told him. “I’ll send it in an hour or so.”

“Good.” He hung up.

I walked back up the hill, taking the new SIM card out of my phone as I went and rebooting it once I’d put the cover back on. I caught the next service back to Southampton. Before the train left, I was sitting next to the window and spotted two police officers entering the the main foyer of the station. One came out onto the platform and looked it up and down, briefly. Were they looking for me? Surely not; surely if they were then it would be a much more urgent search; surely if it were they would at least look through the windows of the train?

At Southampton Central I found a photo booth on one of the platforms. The backlit screen wouldn’t work without money in the slot, so I put in five coins and took a selfie with the forward facing camera on my phone, sticking it with gum to the computer screen so my arm wouldn’t be in the picture. I puffed my cheeks out, ever so slightly, thinking about the picture the press had been using and keen to present differently from it in as many subtle ways as possible.

When I got back to Cowes, I put the old SIM card back in my phone and turned it on. I sent the self-portrait photo as an email attachment whilst I took the five 179

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minute clank across the Medina in the chain ferry.

I got back to the flat at just before seven. When I entered, I found Theo being fucked by a woman I didn’t recognise on the living room floor.

My first thought was, Why in God’s name didn’t he make more of an effort to keep it a secret? He would have been expecting me to be at home when he got back from work; why would he have supposed when he found that I wasn’t that I wouldn’t be back soon? Had he imagined I’d left him? Had he imagined I’d left him and, in the two or so intervening hours, managed to sort out a replacement?

I was embarrassed more than I was hurt or upset. My next thought was to leave quietly, maybe even to stake out the flat, return once the woman had left and pretend I didn’t know what had happened. My next thought after that created a fear that gripped and twisted my insides: would this mean I had to leave? Did this mean I was once again homeless? I imagined he would let me stay at least another night, but then I would be on my own again. I told myself I was a fucking idiot for having let myself feel so secure. I‘d relaxed my guard and now I was going to pay, and what quadrupled my anger at this thought was the knowledge of how much harder being homeless would make finishing my job in SL. Everything else, right now, came second to that.

Nothing was more important.

All these thoughts went through my mind in about five seconds as I stood in the doorway and watched her 180

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ride him, her fingers spread out across his chest. It was a slow, slow fuck at this stage; probably she had only mounted him a moment or so before I’d entered. His head was pushed back and so was hers. They were breathing deeply, slowly, loudly.

“Hello,” I said.

She jumped. It was oddly erotic to see that sudden shock displayed across her whole body. Her back stiffened, her arms shot, folded, to her chest and her thighs clamped more tightly against him. You forget that emotion can be displayed across all parts of a person’s body when you’re so used to looking for it in faces.

“Oh Jesus!” she exclaimed and exhaled. relaxed. “You must be Gemma.”

And then

Theo’s head rolled over and he smiled at me.

“Gemma, this is Lisa, my ex. Lisa, this is Gemma, my new love. I’m sorry, my lovely, we couldn’t wait for you. I didn’t know when you were coming back. Where did you get to?” “…Mainland,” I said. prefer it if I left?”

“Stuff to… do.

Would you

“I’d prefer it if you stay,” he said and patted the carpet next to them. Already, the woman had begun to rise and fall slowly on him again. “Come sit down here with us,” he said.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Lisa said to him and shook her head.

“I had it in my mind it’d be something spontaneous and beautiful, so I did,” Theo replied. He looked at me again. “Come, Gemma. Just sit, is all.”

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“I…” “There’s nothing to be scared of, honey,” Lisa said to me. “No-one will ask you to do anything you don’t want to. Just come and be close to us for a moment.” She had a husky shire English accent. Maybe Berkshire. Possibly Hampshire. She had short, red, curly hair and pale skin.

She had a spray of freckles across her nose.

I realised my hand was frozen above the key bowl, the front door key still dangling from it, waiting to be released. I let it drop. I was more overcome by surprise now than by anxiety. I went over to them slowly and sat on the floor where Theo had indicated, my back against the settee, my outstretched legs brushing against Lisa’s knees and calves and feet. She smiled at me warmly and put a hand gently on my knee; I felt the pressure of her palm and fingers increase just a little as she rose and lighten as she dropped.

Theo took my hand. “Have you been this close to two people having sex before?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, now faking my hesitant uncertainty and feeling my arousal starting its slow, determined seep.

“Have you ever been in a threesome before?” Lisa asked, stroking my knee now.

I almost replied, “In real life?” but I caught myself just in time. “No,” I said. “Actually, yes. But that was two boys. A long time ago. University.” A frankly not very erotic evening of experimentation; none of us had felt inhibited, but neither were we in the possession of any actual skill or knowledge. Convinced that the experience was only a valid one if it ended in some sort of double penetration, the boys – perhaps also convinced that this 182

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might be a once in a lifetime opportunity – had gone about the task as though it was some sort of engineering problem. It was fortunate that I’d consumed enough alcohol and marijuana that I found this incredibly funny.

To this day, it makes me giggle when I recall the phrase, “Mate, there has to be ninety degrees between us!”

And, of course, that memory popped right into my mind right at that moment. Of course it did. My lips twitched as I fought to keep the laugh inside me, but – naturally - they both saw it. And, since the twitch of a giggle suppressed is perhaps the most infectious form of laughter there is, both of their mouths started to twitch in sympathy. “What?” Lisa asked. And I tried to say, “nothing,” but found I couldn’t open my mouth. And that just made it worse.

“What? What?!” Lisa repeated, laughing herself now.

“It’s just a stupid memory,” I managed to say, my voice coming out in a high-pitched squeak. And then I could hold it in no more and erupted in a shriek. Tears ran down my face and my whole body shook with laughter. I could barely see them, but I could hear Lisa and Theo joining in. Sometimes, you have no idea what you’re laughing about, and it really doesn’t matter at all.

Lisa leaned forward, pushing her weight through her hands on Theo’s chest, and kissed me. There is possibly nothing better in the world than kissing someone when you’re both laughing uncontrollably. Our lips and teeth bumped into each other and that just made us laugh more. Our fingers found each other’s faces and we held each other’s heads and our tears mingled. Then I found her breasts with my hands and we kissed longer and 183

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deeper.

Just like that, Lisa came, her last few giggles each succeeded by sharp, staccato inhalations: little, highpitched triplets of breath. And then she went stiff and silent, her mouth frozen open. Her thighs tightened and she clutched at my head. I wrapped my left arm around her neck and held her firmly whilst she extended her moment as far as she possibly could. Tighter and harder and tighter and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer. With my right hand, I squeezed her nipple hard.

Finally, she broke apart and an enormous, window-rattling exhale burst out of her as she shook and convulsed.

And that all triggered Theo. I felt her rising as he lifted her at his own last second; no sooner had he freed himself than he came upon his belly.

It was such a beautiful thing to behold. “Oh baby,” I whispered, each syllable taking me further into my own deepening lust. I pushed my fingertips through his semen, feeling through them his rise and fall as his breathing recovered. After the noise of our hysterical laughter, this little bubble of sudden silence was almost overwhelming in its intimacy.

Lisa was the first to speak.

“Holy fuck,” she

whispered.

“Did I not tell you now that laughter and orgasms are the two best things a person can share with you?” commented Theo, his breathing already considerably smooth and even again.

“Shut up with the wisdom a moment,” she said hoarsely, “and let me reorient to the fucking planet.” She 184

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continued to hold on to me, her arms and fingers loose now. She looked down at where my hand still played with Theo’s cum, then her eyes rose to meet mine.

“Anything you want,” she told me. “Anything.”

My eyes wandered around the room until they found what I was looking for: Theo’s robe thrown across the far arm of the sofa. I got up and slipped quickly out of my clothes with my back to them, then turned so they could both see me, the goosebumps rising all over my body.

I went to the robe and removed its belt.

“I want you to tie me up,” I told them.

I said earlier that the orgasm I’d had in the hotel in Portsmouth was the most powerful I’d ever had in my life. These things are hard to gauge once time has passed, but, by my reckoning, it’s now the second most powerful. I came that night with a shriek so loud I’m amazed the police weren’t at the door five minutes later.

Lisa finger-fucked me with such relentlessness her whole body was slick with sweat. Meanwhile, Theo fucked my mouth with his cock, and when I finally shattered he released his second load of the evening into me almost instantaneously, and at the exact moment that I was drawing breath. For a brief moment, I thought I was going to drown and panic ripped through my whole body as I jerked myself urgently free and coughed his semen out of my windpipe. Somehow, this combination of things sent a second wave through me and Lisa’s fingers – still buried inside me – hit the magic spot. For the third time only in my life, I ejaculated. My whole 185

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body shook, during and for about a whole minute after.

I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think. They later told me my eyes were completely vacant. My mind was utterly destroyed in front of them, the twitching and convulsing of my body the frayed remnants of my nervous system.

186

15 Inch/Coffeegirl made contact with me at about two o’clock the following afternoon. I wasn’t long back from my second Thursday morning at Mr Winston’s house.

Mr Winston was a frail old man who appeared to think that he was required to clean everything up before I got there for fear I would scold him for the mess his place was in. I wondered what sort of cleaner he’d had previously to give him this impression. I made him repeat aloud after me that cleaning was what he paid me for. He still promised me before I left that the cooker top would be less messy when I got there the following week. I’m sure he’s a dear old man who doesn’t like to cause bother, but a part of me did wonder if he just enjoyed being told off.

We had all three of us slept in the same bed together the previous night, exhausted and spent. My whole body had ached when I woke to find Lisa’s still sleeping face about three inches in front of mine. Theo, of course, had gone to work. I’d looked at the bedside clock for a full minute before the time displayed on it – thirty minutes short of the time I was due to be at Mr Winston’s – had finally registered. I swore – quietly – and slid out as smoothly as I could. When I got back in, about four hours later, Lisa had left a note saying she was visiting friends for the day. I dimly recalled the 187

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hypnogogic conversation she and I had had before falling asleep. We’d been forehead to forehead, with Theo spooning me from behind. She’d left the island a year ago to pursue her career; they hadn’t really split up, she said, they’d just kind of… ended. They’d slept together right up until the day that she left, and after that they didn’t. “But that’s the way he is, honey,” she said to my chin. “That’s the way he is.”

“What job did you go to?” I asked her, but I was so far into sleep at that stage that, even though I heard her answer, it didn’t really register. It wasn’t until about an hour in at Mr Winston’s that I remembered what she’d said and even then it didn’t really impact in the way I might previously have assumed it to. In fact, a small part of me felt oddly reassured about it.

“I got a position as Lieutenant in West Sussex,” she said. “I work for the Police Service.”

Coffeegirl29: Did you manage to make yourself look respectable yet?

Masculamity: Oh yes, you wouldn’t recognise me as a newbie now.

Masculamity: Just need to prostitute myself around a bit to get the money for a decent AO. Coffeegirl29: And people say there’s no money to be made in SL. Masculamity: I know, right?

Masculamity: Fuss fuss fuss fuss fuss.

Masculamity: And how is your post Learning Island wardrobe working out?

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Coffeegirl29: I’m debating whether or not to sell my soul and enter into the mesh breast community.

Masculamity: Aha. A dilemma indeed.

Coffeegirl29: It feels like an advocation of cosmetic surgery, but damn how I like the way they look.

Masculamity: lol Coffeegirl29: Ahem. lol is not allowed.

Masculamity: Oh yes that’s right; I forgot.

Coffeegirl29: So what I hate about the normal breasts is when they look all polygon.

Coffeegirl29: You hate polygon breasts, right?

Masculamity: Oh well of course.

Masculamity: Curves good; angles hateful.

Coffeegirl29: Exactly.

Coffeegirl29: And every other aspect of our avatars we upgrade without a second thought.

Coffeegirl29: Mesh hair.

Coffeegirl29: Mesh hands.

Coffeegirl29: Mesh feet.

Coffeegirl29: I mean, normal feet look like lumps of clay, right?

Masculamity: Lumps of clay fresh out of the clay bin.

Coffeegirl29: Exactly!

Coffeegirl29: Are we not driven to improve these things?

Masculamity: One might as well ask why we draw air into our lungs.

Coffeegirl29: Exactly!

Coffeegirl29: I’m so glad we see eye-to-eye on these things.

Masculamity: Are those mesh eyes you’re talking 189

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about?

Coffeegirl29: Oh! Do they do mesh eyes?!

Masculamity: Actually, I have no idea.

Coffeegirl29: I must look into those.

Masculamity: Or out of them.

Coffeegirl29: Exactly.

Coffeegirl29: So why, in a world where it’s appropriate – no, *imperative* - that you seek out hands that don’t look like they’ve been fashioned out of fleshcoloured Lego bricks and feet which actually feature distinguishable toes do I feel bad about acquiring breasts that don’t look like polygons?

Coffeegirl29: I mean, a body part’s a body part, right?

Masculamity: Hands, feet, breasts: it’s all the same to me.

Coffeegirl29: I feel so dirty.

Coffeegirl29: No, ‘dirty’ isn’t the word…

Coffeegirl29: I feel like a traitor to feminism.

Masculamity: Look at it this way, you’d be contributing to the SL market community.

Masculamity: I mean, there’s a whole industry built around Lolas these days.

Coffeegirl29: Right!

Coffeegirl29: Think of all the Lindens I’m going to spend on those breast applicators!

Coffeegirl29: This just makes it worse, right?

Masculamity: Considerably.

Coffeegirl29: Bugger.

Coffeegirl29: I’m going to have to stick to crappy crappy polygon breasts.

Coffeegirl29: Just so I can avoid the guilt.

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Coffeegirl29: I’ll never be able to go topless in SL again.

Masculamity: Well pardon me for commenting unwisely on a female issue…

Masculamity: but wouldn’t being ashamed of your non-mesh breasts be almost as bad as being proud of your mesh ones?

Coffeegirl29: Oh, you’re right; you’re right!

Coffeegirl29: Now I don’t know *what* to do!

Coffeegirl29: Should I become a naturist?

Coffeegirl29: Should I put my breastagons on display wherever I go?

Masculamity laughs out loud at the word, ‘breastagons’.

Coffeegirl29: But did you, though?

Masculamity: I promise you I did.

Coffeegirl29: That’s alright then.

Coffeegirl29: Although be careful when you laugh at breastagons.

Coffeegirl29: If they’re my breastagons you’re laughing at, I’ll smash your face in.

Flirting – flirting well – is like an art. The key to it all is spotting the opportunities to take things to the next notch up, and there was my opportunity.

Masculamity: I promise I’ll never laugh at your breastagons.

Coffeegirl29 pouts.

Coffeegirl29: You’d better not.

Masculamity: If you want, you can show them to me 191

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and I can demonstrate my non-laughing-atbreastagons ability.

Coffeegirl29: You really know how to pick a girl up, don’t you?

Masculamity: This will surprise you, no doubt, but I’ve never actually used that line before.

Coffeegirl29: I’m gobsmacked.

Coffeegirl29: It was so well-crafted, too.

Masculamity: Words like ‘breastagons’ merit careful attention to detail.

Coffeegirl29: You know, I’m starting to regret that I invented it.

Coffeegirl: It has a coarseness about it.

Coffeegirl29: It sounds like ‘tits’ in the mouths of mathematics students.

Coffeegirl29: I can just imagine it now: an innocent girl walking past a group of mathematicians working on a new theorem, and one of them wolf-whistles at her and shouts out, “Oi, darling; show us your breastagons!”

Coffeegirl29: Dear God, what have I done?

Masculamity: On the other hand, the window of opportunity for its use would be pretty short-lived.

Mascuamity: I mean, there would have to come a point following any successful pick-up line where the word was no longer used.

Masculamity: I’m figuring, for example, that its use in emoting would be pretty limited.

Masculamity: I can’t imagine anyone cybering about kissing a breastagon. Can you?

Coffeegirl29: You’re right, a line would have to be 192

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drawn.

Coffeegirl29: ‘No more breastagons beyond this point.’

Coffeegirl29: Shit. Have I just invented a new derogatory term?

Coffeegirl29: Is reducing women to a geometric construct essentially no different from reducing them to a piece of meat?

Coffeegirl29: Is that how it works in the metaverse?

Coffeegirl29: Christ, now I’m conflicted.

Coffeegirl29: Ok. Coffeegirl29: We have to murder this thing right now.

Coffeegirl29: This conversation never happened.

Masculamity: What conversation?

Coffeegirl29: Exactly.

Coffeegirl29: We never talked. We never discussed mesh breasts and – and I cannot stress this enough – we never invented the word ‘breasticons’.

Masculamity: Well now you have me confused.

Coffeegirl29: How so?

Masculamity: I know what a breastagon is… but what the hell is a ‘breasticon’?

Coffeegirl29: Huh? Coffeegirl29: Oh FUCK! Coffeegirl29: Now I invented another one!

Coffeegirl29: Jesus Christ, this is getting out of control.

Coffeegirl29: It’s like a chain reaction.

Coffeegirl29: Now there’s two of them out there.

Masculamity laughs so hard the tears are running down his cheeks.

Coffeegirl29: This is your fault!

Coffeegirl29: Why didn’t you just tell me to buy the 193

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goddamn Lolas?

Coffeegirl29: Now the little bastards are going to multiply.

Masculamity: Just out of interest, though, what *is* a breasticon?

Coffeegirl29: Hmm. Coffeegirl29: I’m going to say it’s any cartoon where the attempt at humour is to portray a face where the eyes look comically like breasts.

Masculamity: Right.

Coffeegirl29: We need to kill that one too.

Coffeegirl29: Before you know it, breasticon graffiti will be appearing everywhere.

Masculamity: No worse than cock graffiti though, when you think about it.

Masculamity: Combining the two might make for an interesting art-form.

Coffeegirl29: Still, it’s got to go.

Masculamity: This is turning into wordicide.

Coffeegirl29: All we’re doing is preventing a human tragedy.

Coffeegirl29: We must never speak of this day again.

Masculamity: Does this mean we can never talk with each other?

Coffeegirl29: I’m afraid so, yes.

Coffeegirl29: You were the first to join my friends list… and now you’ll be the first to leave it.

Masculamity: Such a shame.

Coffeegirl29: It’s for the best.

Coffeegirl29: Think of all the suffering you’ll be averting.

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Masculamity: I guess.

Masculamity: How about this for an idea…

Masculamity: Before we part ways forever, we at least get to see each other.

Masculamity: I mean, apart from anything else…

Masculamity: I wouldn’t want to go through life forever wondering what your breasticles looked like…

Coffeegirl29: OH MY GOD YOU JUST INVENTED ANOTHER Masculamity laughs.

Coffeegirl29: You bastard. You did that on purpose.

Coffeegirl29: But look, all you’re doing is affirming this as the only sane course of action.

Masculamity: No. Masculamity: What I’m doing is demonstrating how such things can… pop out… when I feel, um, unfulfilled.

Coffeegirl29: Oh my…

Coffeegirl29: Are you… threatening me?!

Masculamity: Just alerting you to my creative potential.

Masculamity: For every breastagon and breasticon and breasticle quietly silenced, there’s a breastiple, breastumble and breastonite quietly waiting.

Coffeegirl29: Stop! Stop! My ears are bleeding!

Coffeegirl29: Am I going to have to kill you? Is that what I’m going to have to do?

Coffeegirl29: And what for the love of God is ‘breastonite’?

Coffeegirl29: Some sort of breast that kills Superman?

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Masculamity: Shall I continue?

Masculamity: I’m wondering right now if there’s a way I could introduce to the word ‘breast’ the word ‘politician’.

Masculamity: It strikes me that therein lies a unique opportunity to introduce the word ‘tit’ into one of these exciting lexical fusions…

Coffeegirl29: Ok! Ok! You win!

Coffeegirl29: You fiend.

Coffeegirl29: We meet up, we say hello, then we get the hell out of each other’s lives.

Coffeegirl29: Satisfied?

Masculamity: Satisfied.

Coffeegirl29: So help me God, if I ever see any of those words appear in any use of the written word, you will not know what hit you when I come for you.

Masculamity: That sounds delightful.

Coffeegirl29: Oh how cultured you are.

Masculamity: Just send me the teleport.

Bit by bit. Slowly, but surely. Inch by Inch by Inch…

She sent me the teleport and I jumped in the beam.

I rezzed in a light, airy, postmodern skybox. A mesh build. It was exactly the sort of thing that Maddester built. In fact… I right clicked the nearest wall and hit edit; sure enough, his name came up in the creator field.

Well well well.

Once is happenstance, I thought, twice is coincidence… I would say that it had never crossed my mind until that point that Inch giving herself away at Learning Island wasn’t quite the innocent mistake it had appeared to be, 196

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except that wouldn’t be the truth. I try not to make the same mistake twice. I had never for a moment suspected Inch to be the driver behind Hewson and Assumption, and one thing I had vowed myself in the tent that first night on the island was that I would never take anything for granted like that again. So yes, I had considered it.

I’d considered that the phrase, “lol is not allowed” was so much of a catchphrase for her it might just as well have been, “Thursday is definitely a sideways step”. I knew that; more importantly, I knew that she knew it. She would have been in no doubt that saying those words in my proximity would be an immediate alarm going off.

A veritable siren, in fact. This could indeed have been an elaborate honeypot, left out for me to chance upon. For all I knew, she’d been creating brand new avatars every day since I’d escaped her trap, hanging out at Learning Island and periodically dropping that phrase of hers casually into the conversation until someone articulate with a dry sense of humour responded to it. For all I knew, the guy who’d actually used ‘lol’ in the first place might also have been her on a different account, making sure the word got used publically on the off-chance noone else bothered to use it when another newbie walked into chat range. She might have used that phrase a hundred times or more by now. She might have used it a thousand.

So it was plausible. But was it likely? Quite apart from anything else, there were several copies of Learning Island and she couldn’t have hung out at them all. It was possible, I supposed, that this wasn’t actually Inch at all, but a well-briefed police officer impersonating her. Or 197

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perhaps there had been a team of police officers across the various Learning Islands doing a passable impersonation of Inch and then flagging up potential hits by sending her the transcripts, and she would then take over for any ‘shortlisted’ candidates. Plausible. Possible.

But likely? I doubted it. Too complex. Too fanciful. Too expensive. It wasn’t like I was an international terrorist.

Even so, twice was coincidence. I reminded myself that there would be no risks: no letting down the guard to reveal a seemingly innocuous personal detail, like a favourite song that I might previously have mentioned to Inch or Hewson or Assumption; no clever jokes to myself like ‘accidentally’ capitalising the word ‘sideways’ in chat. This was a job and there would be no mistakes.

She would know who I was when I was about to leave the country, and not a moment before.

Masculamity: Well hello there.

Coffeegirl29: Hi. Masculamity: You got yourself a house already?

Masculamity: You *have* been busy!

Coffeegirl29: In for a penny; in for a pound.

Coffeegirl29: Your greeting sounded smarmy.

Masculamity: Smarmy?

Coffeegirl29: Like Leslie Phillips.

Masculamity: Oh my.

Coffeegirl29: There you go again.

Masculamity: I absolutely promise I sound nothing like Leslie Phillips.

Coffeegirl29: Too late now.

Coffeegirl29: The damage is done.

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Masculamity: You’re right now imagining ‘breastagon’ being said by Leslie Phillips, aren’t you?

Coffeegirl29: Yes. Damn you.

She was dressed in an orange, sleeveless dress that started just above her knees and finished in a blood-red collar. She’d adopted a brown up-do for her hair and was wearing a pale, lightly freckled skin. She was sitting on a pastel green sofa with her legs tucked beneath her.

I cammed a little, taking in all the things a visitor might be expected to look at and lingering for a moment on the bed on a mezzanine above our heads. Before I’d come over, I had re-enabled the broadcast of my crosshairs so that she’d be able to see what I was looking at; this was another small way in which I hoped to put water between myself and Definitely Thursday: Def would have never switched that on and allow his wandering eye to be witnessed.

This was assuming, of course, that Inch had viewing other people’s crosshairs switched on in her settings.

That she knew how to do that was without question, I should add: it was me who had taught her.

Masculamity: Nice place.

Masculamity: Incredible how few prims a place can be built in these days.

Coffeegirl29: You’re showing your age even by referring to prims.

Coffeegirl29: I believe the current term is ‘land impact’.

Masculamity: Whatever.

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Coffeegirl29: I doubt I’m going to stay here all that long. In truth, I want something a little less future and a little less pastel and a lot more clutter.

Coffeegirl29: But it seems I need to start off with something like this before I progress.

Masculamity nods.

Masculamity: I think I understand.

Coffeegirl29: You do?

Masculamity: Not even remotely.

Coffeegirl29 laughs and punches your arm.

Masculamity: Ow! Coffeegirl29: I must be nuts to be inviting you here.

Masculamity: What’s the point in having a home if you can’t have visitors?

Coffeegirl29: Sure. Well don’t just stand there. Take a seat.

Masculamity sits on the edge of the settee.

Coffeegirl29: And if you choose one of the sits that has your feet on my new sofa, can you *please* take your shoes off?

Masculamity removes his shoes.

Coffeegirl29: Thank you.

Coffeegirl29: Who knows where you’ve been tramping around in those things.

Masculamity: Oh, it was the most remarkable place.

Masculamity: A whole sim dedicated to the theme of sex in public toilets.

Coffeegirl29 kicks you.

Masculamity: An enormous tiled floor slick with a thin layer of urine.

Coffeegirl29 dry retches.

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Masculamity: You’d think in a *whole sim* dedicated to the idea, there would be at least a small corner where the toilets were actually nice…

Masculamity: Mahogany cubicle doors, granite topped sink area, even a Dyson hand drier; but no.

Coffeegirl29: The sad thing is, I can well believe such a place actually does exist somewhere in SL. Masculamity: Without a doubt.

Masculamity: Still, who are we to judge?

Coffeegirl29: When it comes to my new sofa, I’m completely happy to judge.

Masculamity: Yes: nice new pastel green sofas in tasteful, comfy skyboxes are a definite opposite end of a spectrum to ‘The Bogs’.

Coffeegirl29 laughs.

Coffeegirl29: My lovely new home now feels somehow…

Masculamity: Lived in?

Coffeegirl29: Soiled.

Masculamity chuckles.

Masculamity: Well, you did say you were likely moving anyway.

Coffeegirl29: Don’t count on me inviting you to the new place.

Masculamity: Well of course not.

Masculamity: I believe the arrangement is never to speak to each other again after I leave this place.

Coffeegirl29: It is.

Coffeegirl29: And yet, I can’t deny there’s something oddly satisfying in arguing with you.

Coffeegirl29: Something ever so slightly cathartic.

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Masculamity: Just imagine how good it would be if we had a pillow fight.

Masculamity: Now that might exorcise a few demons.

Coffeegirl29: The only problem with that idea is I am as equally keen to keep my nice new bed and sheets clean as I am my sofa.

Masculamity: Yes. Yes, that’s definitely a problem.

Masculamity: I guess the only way around it would be for me to be naked.

Coffeegirl29 laughs.

Masculamity: I would – naturally – take a shower first.

Coffeegirl29: In my brand new, walk-in wet area? I don’t think so, buddy.

Coffeegirl29: Perhaps if I installed some sort of secondary shower on the roof.

Coffeegirl29: Some sort of rusty metal pipe gushing cold water.

Coffeegirl29: Maybe a broom I could scrub you with at a distance.

Masculamity: I’m starting to feel like some sort of contaminant.

Coffeegirl29: Exactly right.

Coffeegirl29: After all, you’ve only been here a few minutes and already you’re talking about being naked in my bed.

Masculamity: Actually, I was talking about being naked *on* your bed. For a pillow fight. But in is good too.

Masculamity: In is most definitely good.

Masculamity: In so many ways.

Coffeegirl29: In has its plus points, I’ll admit.

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Coffeegirl29: But then, so does Out. Masculamity: I find that combining In and Out usually results in the best overall experience.

Masculamity: And the faster you alternate them, the better.

Coffeegirl29 laughs.

Coffeegirl29: I’m afraid I have to go, my dirty little masculine calamity.

Masculamity: Aww, such a shame.

Masculamity: Have I earned myself any more time before our big farewell?

Coffeegirl29 smiles.

Coffeegirl29: Of course you have.

Coffeegirl29: Are you on tomorrow night?

Masculamity: I will be now.

Coffeegirl29: Then perhaps we shall explore the issue of your nakedness in my bed further then.

Masculamity: Sounds perfect.

Coffeegirl29: Until tomorrow, then.

Masculamity: Until tomorrow night.

Bit by bit. Slowly, but surely. Inch by Inch by Inch‌

203

16 On Friday morning at seven, Theo woke me with a kiss to my forehead. He was already dressed, or rather he would be once he'd managed to tie his boot laces. It was a perpetual daily battle for my poor boy. I opened my eyes to see him silhouetted against the window, his boot on the sill and a piece of toast wedged between his teeth like some sort of cross between Columbo's cigar and a pirate ship's plank. He glanced back at me, saw that I was awake, and attempted to vocalise something through the toast. His intonation rose and fell over about fifteen syllables, a single parabolic leap from point A to point B; some sort of a question, I guessed. I got up and held the toast for him, and when he released it and started to speak, popped half of it in my own mouth.

“You'd steal the bread from a poor boy's mouth, would you?”

“I would,” I said. “What did you just say?”

“I said, 'Are you looking forward to the beach cabin tonight?'”

The beach hut. Fuck.

“Oh God, I can't wait,” I told him, without missing a beat. Except that inside I was screaming. I'd completely forgotten we'd agreed to go to the hut in the evening.

That had been an agreement formed on Monday morning: Monday morning, the morning after Bestival; a 204

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moment before I got swept away by Fred to his beige and brown office; a lifetime before I learned about whoever the hell it was who wanted to kill people in a shopping centre at Christmas. Monday morning, the day before I ran into Inch Sideways' latest SL regeneration and the opportunity to get even with her. Since then, Friday night had become first date night with Inch. Since then, Friday night had become the night I was going to attend the 6pm SLT/2am BST meeting of the terrorist trio at The Crystal Ball, decoding this time on the fly whatever it was they said to each other. Friday night was many things, but it was most definitely not beach hut night any more. Fuck.

An idea came to me, something I thought he might like and which might work well for me later when I had to get him out of the flat so I could do my work. “Can Lisa come?” I asked him.

He smiled. “I was thinking of asking her along, but I didn't know what you'd make of it.”

I wagged my finger at him, “That sort of forward thinking would have come in handy two nights ago.”

His face suddenly dropped. “Are you upset about that?”

I ate the remainder of the toast. “Not upset in the slightest by the outcome, but I would have appreciated nonetheless a bit of warning. For a couple of seconds there, you had me thinking I was homeless again.”

“Fuck,” he said in earnest. “I never thought about that. You're right, Gemma. Fuck! I didn't think about that for a moment.”

“It's fine,” I reassured him.

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“In any case, I wouldn't have invited Lisa tonight because it's something you and I had planned.”

“You're so sweet,” I told him. “But she's only here for another two days and you know I'd love her to come.

And I know you'd love her to come too.”

He grinned his boyish grin at me and said, “Yeah.”

I held my hand suddenly over my stomach. The first tiny little seed. “Mmm”. I frowned.

“What's wrong?”

“Suddenly a little bit queasy. You haven't been putting turps on your toast again, have you?”

He chuckled and I raised my eyebrows as though the pain had departed at the same speed with which it had arrived. I didn't wanting him going to work worrying I had morning sickness.

“Better?” he asked.

“Better,” I replied and smiled.

Friday was the morning of the rich Italian lady.

She

wanted me to clean out the cupboards in which she displayed her best china, but to do so without breaking any of it. She appeared to think that the best way of encouraging this was repeatedly to ask me not to break anything and repeatedly to tell me the price of every single item I touched.

Lisa sent me a text whilst I was there: “Theo told me you invited me tonight. Are you sure, honey?” I replied straight away: “Totally sure. Busy this afternoon?”

“Nope. Are you offering tea and kisses?”

“I sure am! Get your sweet ass to the flat. Home in 20 206

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mins.” I wouldn't actually be home for another 35 minutes, but that was easily excusable and I wanted her there waiting for me when I did get back.

In fact, I didn’t have to lie about being held up by Mrs Simmonds (she’d married an English salesman in the sixties; it was a long story made interesting only by the fact that she never spared the intimate details, but one which I had heard now four times). Just as I was leaving, intent on dawdling my way back to the flat, she launched into yet another tirade on her daughter-in-law’s latest comments (which she’d read in a Facebook post). I had to run the last couple of minutes. When got back, I did a theatrical race up the stairs so Lisa would hear me coming, fumbled the door key, swearing loudly and repeatedly, then sprinted from the front door to the bathroom as noisily as I could. I stuck my finger down my throat and retched loudly.

She was at the doorway immediately. “Honey, what’s wrong?!” she cried.

I held my hand out to her in that give me a moment fashion and spat a couple of times down the pan. Not nice. Then I took a couple of deep breaths and flushed. I stood up, gingerly, and ran the cold tap for a couple of seconds before dousing my face. She came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my midriff, then kissed the back of my neck a couple of times.

“Oh Jesus,” I said finally, “I thought I was never going to make it.” I laughed a little.

“You’re sick, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I felt a little queasy this morning, but then it went away. Then I started feeling 207

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really bad about an hour or so ago.

Simmonds can talk.”

Good God, Mrs

“The lady you were cleaning for today?” I nodded.

“You poor thing! How do you feel now?”

“Better,” I said, disliking having to lie to her.

“Good,” she said. “You should have a lie down.” She kissed my head and, for a moment, I could have sworn she hesitated in some small way, a tiny, undefinable interruption in her movement. But then she turned me around and smiled at me. “Let me make you some tea.”

“That sounds nice,” I said and smiled weakly.

They left at six. Lisa fussed over leaving me by myself, but I insisted. “I feel fine now,” I told them. “I really do.

I just don’t want to be too far away from the bathroom.”

“No-one would know if you needed to hurl behind the hut,” Theo said. Lisa punched him on the arm. “I’m only saying in case Gemma’s worried about what other people might think.”

“Gemma,” she said, and there was another little hesitation, “needs to be in a proper bed with a proper roof over her head and proper privacy.” Earlier, she had cuddled me on the settee for a while and whispered gently, “Would you like me to go out and get a test for you, honey?” I’d wanted to reassure her that there was nothing to worry about, but then I saw how agreeing to the idea would seal the authenticity of this charade. So I’d sighed, just a little, and nodded. She went to Waitrose straight away and was back within ten minutes.

I peed on the strip and one instead of two bars appeared.

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Not pregnant. I acted out a huge sigh of relief and we laughed together and hugged.

“You will call us if you need anything?” she asked me before they left. “We can be back in half an hour, right Theo?”

“In less,” he said, “if you don’t book me.”

“Honestly,” I said, “I feel completely well. It was probably just something I ate. Go. And have fun.” I could see anxiety in Theo’s eyes. She would reassure him on the way.

I watched the car leave through a gap in the curtains, then I sat down and logged in to SL. And rezzed into Fred’s office.

209

17 He appeared a few minutes later. He rezzed right back into his chair across the desk from me.

Fred: Good. I was hoping you’d be inworld soon.

Masculamity: Has the situation changed?

Fred: No no; no change.

Fred: I just wanted a chance to catch up.

Masculamity: Have you gone over the video from Wednesday?

Fred: Yes. Masculamity: And? Are you able to recognise the place?

Fred: No. Fred: The architecture and the retail outlets don’t add up.

Masculamity: I don’t understand what that means.

Fred: Well for starters it’s difficult because it’s not like we have the detailed plans of every shopping mall on the planet to hand.

Fred: And where we do have plans, comparing schematics to a three dimensional model in a video clip is hardly easy.

Fred: I’m just two fifths of a man, remember?

Masculamity: Jesus Christ, Fred.

Masculamity: You’re telling me what I’ve provided so 210

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far isn’t enough to get you more resources?

Masculamity: They’re going to *slaughter* people.

Masculamity: They aiming for the busiest period possible. They want to kill children.

Masculamity: What the fuck is wrong with you guys?

Fred: Calm yourself, Mr Thursday.

Fred: I have people’s attention, don’t worry.

Fred: And resources will be made available to me.

Fred: But looking for a needle in a haystack needs more than a doubling or quadrupling of people.

Masculamity: How is this like looking for a needle in a haystack?

Fred: Emma, there are over a thousand shopping malls in the US alone.

Fred: If we had a person who knew what all of them look like from the inside, then it would be easy.

Fred: Except it wouldn’t be easy on what we currently have, because we still don’t have a complete model to look at yet, and what we *have* worked out is that the combination of retail outlets you filmed doesn’t exist in any mall in the States.

Fred: If it did, we could have deduced the location from that alone, because we do have a databases on what outlets exist where.

Fred: At least a third of those shops you saw are dummies.

Fred: I’m starting to wonder if there might be more than one other builder involved. There could be several.

Fred: But anyway, leaving all that aside…

Fred: If we ignore the shops, what do we have? A 211

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large, three storey hall.

Fred: It’s a distinguishing feature, sure.

Fred: But it’s only likely to be recognised by someone who’s actually seen the real life version.

Fred: This isn’t something we can run any sort of computer analysis on.

Fred: This needs a human being to make a visual comparison.

Fred: So right now, I’m in the process of getting *photos* rather than schematics of every shopping centre in the US. Fred: As the pictures come in, we can start comparing.

Masculamity: You’re assuming it’s a place in the US, then?

Fred: No, actually, I’m not.

Fred: There are a lot of US-specific outlets in that list, which is certainly indicative that it is, but those could be the dummies.

Fred: For all we know, less than ten per cent of Maddester’s build is actually for use in the final model.

Fred: For all we know, there could be just one shop in his whole build that they intend to use.

Fred: We just don’t know the scale of this.

Fred: I’m proceeding on the grounds that this is a US attack purely on the grounds that that’s the most straightforward line of investigation at this stage.

Fred: What would really, *really* help us would be a unique store, a business that only occurs in that mall and that mall alone.

Fred: Most shopping centres have at least one or two 212

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of them.

Fred: Everything you showed us was a chain outlet.

Fred: Are you starting to see the problem now?

Masculamity: Yes. Masculamity: You still need the walkthrough.

Fred: We really do, Emma.

Fred: Or at least a glimpse of the final model.

Fred: Knowing the where is the most important thing right now.

Fred: Knowing the when and the what and the how would be useful when it comes to prosecution, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Fred: The where is the bottom line. The where’s what we need in order to prevent it.

Masculamity: Ok. Masculamity: So what we haven’t discussed yet is how I’m going to let you know a tour’s about to happen.

Masculamity: I’m imagining scenarios where there isn’t much time to work with.

Fred: Correct.

Fred: I’ve automated the procedure for crashing whichever target you select and preventing them from reconnecting.

Fred: I can run it from my phone.

Fred: I’ll send you the three passwords now in a file so you have everything you need to log in with.

Masculamity: It’ll be either Single Star or Georgelennie.

Masculamity: Troght is obviously the leader.

Fred: Yes, I know.

Fred: But you might as well have all three.

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Fred: you never know.

Masculamity: So that just leaves the issue of getting in touch with you in the first place.

Fred: The secure communications application on the laptop I sent you has an instant messaging menu.

Fred: If you select the highest priority for a message, it will send it as a text to each of the three phones I use.

Fred: But, if you select that option, the text will NOT be encrypted, so make sure your wording is vague.

Fred: Something like, ‘Now please Fred’ and the name of the person you want thrown off will be entirely sufficient.

Masculamity: Hmm. Masculamity: That makes me nervous.

Fred: Why? Masculamity: Everything’s predicated on the assumption this is all going to happen neatly.

Masculamity: When I need to get in touch with you urgently, I might need to tell you more than just ‘go’.

Fred: If you send me a message at top priority, I’ll check the lower priority messages as soon as I can.

You can put additional information there.

Masculamity: You’re not listening to me.

Masculamity: When the time comes, I might not have time to type stuff out nice and easy like we’re doing right now.

Fred: So what do you suggest?

Masculamity: Give me one of your telephone numbers.

Masculamity: Let me ring you if I need to.

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Fred: You’re kidding me, right?

Masculamity: For fuck’s sake, Fred. What exactly am I going to do with it that could possibly worry you?

Masculamity: You probably know what brand of panty liners I use; is it really going to kill you to let me have one detail that’s vital to this operation and which you can change once we’re done here anyway?

Masculamity: In any case, surely you have other assets who you talk to routinely by phone.

Fred: Actually, I don’t.

Fred: Technically speaking, it’s not part of my job description to run field operatives.

Masculamity: Well you have one now.

Masculamity: And she needs your support.

Fred: There are strict rules about how contact like that is handled.

Fred: I’d need to speak to my line manager, and I know he’s going to say no.

Masculamity: Fuck your rules and fuck your line manager, Fred.

Masculamity: You got me into this.

Masculamity: It wasn’t something I especially wanted to do at first, but right now I think this might just possibly be the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Masculamity: That would be the case even if I hadn’t killed someone needlessly and stupidly.

Masculamity: But I did, and that just makes me want this more.

Fred: The rules and procedures we have are there 215

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precisely in order to avoid one person’s personal need to balance their karma overshadowing the larger picture.

Fred: Don’t assume they’re just put there by some bureaucrat only to make things more difficult than they need to be. There are good reasons for them.

Fred: And before you attempt it any further, don’t assume either that throwing the f-bomb around after every other word you type is going to in some way persuade me. If anything, it’ll do the opposite.

Fred: I might not be an active case officer, but neither am I a fucking idiot.

My God. Had I actually made Fred angry? Suddenly, he was a human being. Suddenly, I kind of liked him a little.

Fair play to him. He’d totally called my bluff.

Masculamity: Ok, I’m sorry.

Masculamity: I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.

Fred: Thank you.

Masculamity: I wish I were in voice with you right now, actually, because then you would hear the conviction in my voice.

Masculamity: I really, really *really* feel that I need this, Fred.

Masculamity: A hunch of sorts, if you like.

Masculamity: Maybe it’s just plain old common sense asserting itself; I don’t know.

Masculamity: But something in the back of my head somewhere is telling me this is not going to go as we 216

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want it to, and we’re going to have to do some decision-making on the spot.

Masculamity: We’re just not going to be able to do that in text. Not within the time restrictions we’re likely to have.

Masculamity: I can’t let those people die. I really want this to work.

Masculamity: And so do you.

Masculamity: Think what you have riding on it.

Fred sighs.

Fred: Okay fine.

He gave me a number.

Fred: That’s my personal number.

Fred: Use it only if it’s *absolutely* necessary. Ok? Fred: Do not fuck with me on this.

Masculamity: I promise.

Masculamity: And thank you.

We talked a little about the conversation fragment I had managed to obtain on Tuesday.

Troght: ELL HIM FIN BY SUN Single Star: HOW CERTAIN THAT? Troght: CERTAIN Georgelennie: WHEN NEXT WE MEET? Troght: FRIDAY 6PM SLT We were in agreement that this indicated any walkthrough of the finished model was unlikely to 217

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happen before Monday. I would witness the meeting (I would go to The Crystal Ball in Burned, on the very remote chance that Masculamity got recognised as someone who had been present at the previous meeting and noticeable on the grounds that he was one of the small number of men present without a dance partner.

Plenty of men turn up at dance venues without dance partners, but they then either get a partner or they leave or they get involved in some way in public chat as part of their strategy to obtain a dance partner (by ‘dance partner’, I of course mean ‘fuck partner’). These were tiny details that the vast majority of SL residents paid not the slightest bit of attention to and my intuition was that neither would any of the three targets. But I didn’t want to give them even the slightest reason to get nervous and relocate or – worse still – cancel the meeting.

Fred: Ok. So I think that’s it.

Masculamity: Yes. I’m ready.

Fred: Remember: I want video of this conversation.

Masculamity: Yes yes.

Masculamity: It will be so.

Fred: Thank you.

Fred: I’m glad you’re on this operation, Emma.

Masculamity: I’m glad too.

Masculamity: Thank you for bringing me into it.

Masculamity: I really mean that.

Fred: I know you do.

218

18 Inch/Coffeegirl logged in at just after 8pm my time. The meeting of the three at The Crystal Ball was at 6pm SLT, which equated to 2am my time. I had six hours. More than enough.

On a whim, I bought a tux for Masculamity and took him to The Crystal Ball. Then I sent her a message.

Masculamity: Fancy a dance?

Coffeegirl29: Actually, a dance would be perfect.

Coffeegirl29: Let me throw on something sparkly.

Dancing here would give me the opportunity to explore the venue a bit more thoroughly than I’d done before. I didn’t think I really needed to, but it couldn’t hurt. I also wanted to see if any of the targets arrived before the meeting. And, if I was dancing with Inch, I was no longer a partnerless newbie standing oddly on the periphery.

At ten past eight, none of the targets were online. I stood at the reception area and scanned the avatars present anyway. I turned transparency mode on and looked above the heads of all the dancers and the five or six people scattered about the bars. Nothing stood out.

It was a crowded room but one empty so far of treason and plot.

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Coffeegirl29: Ok ready.

Coffeegirl29: TP please.

I pushed the mission out of my mind. That was for later.

Now, I had my personal score to settle.

I sent the teleport. Ten seconds later, an orange cloud appeared a little above and in front of me. Then the legs of a grey avatar appeared within the fading particles.

Inch Sideways dropped down onto the dance floor.

Coffeegirl29: Oh thanks a bunch.

Coffeegirl29: Land me right in the throng of loved-up dancers, why don’t you?

Masculamity: Oops! Sorry!

Masculamity: I was standing too close to the railing.

Coffeegirl29: That much I gathered.

She walked to the steps in a manner that struck me as akin to a cat feigning dignity following humiliation. She was wearing a shimmering silver dress cut just above her knees and with a back that plunged to mere millimetres above her ass. She looked gorgeous in it and I told her so.

Coffeegirl29: Too slutty?

Coffeegirl29: I don’t care if the answer’s yes, by the way.

Coffeegirl29: I don’t mind admitting I’m in something of a slutty mood.

Coffeegirl29: Actually, scratch that.

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Coffeegirl29: If you do tell me I look slutty, it will eat away at me and I shall probably shun you.

Masculamity: Not too slutty.

Coffeegirl29: Correct answer.

Coffeegirl29: Are you saying that just because I told you not to tell me I look slutty.

Masculamity laughs.

Masculamity: I’m in something of a no-win scenario here.

Coffeegirl29: Just answer the question.

Masculamity: I’m not saying that just because you told me not to tell you you look slutty.

Masculamity: I’m saying that because you don’t look slutty.

Masculamity: You look amazing.

Masculamity: But I will add that it’s very pleasant to know that you’re in a slutty mood.

Coffeegirl29: That’s not carte blanche, by the way.

Coffeegirl29: You still have work to do.

Masculamity knows this.

Coffeegirl29: Good.

Coffeegirl29: I can however promise you…

Coffeegirl29: I pay well.

Masculamity: mmm Coffeegirl29: Save your mmms for later.

Coffeegirl29: You’re going to need them.

We walked together back onto the dance floor and I clicked on the nearby Intan for a couple of pose balls, and I couldn’t help but think of that night, years ago now, when first we’d met. It still – even now – had the 221

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power to give me goosebumps.

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.

Definitely Thursday: lol Inch Sideways: lol is not allowed.

Definitely Thursday: hahaha Inch Sideways: hahaha is not allowed.

Inch Sideways resolves to give Definitely one more chance to sing to her before she disappears from his life and from this bar, though not necessarily in that order.

Definitely Thursday: You want me to sing to you?

Inch Sideways: Take a deep breath... We're in IM...

Nobody is going to laugh at you...

Inch Sideways takes a long hard look at Definitely and judges him a fascination. She waits for him to speak...

It still – even now – had the power to make me wish for the umpteenth time that things had turned out differently. If only I hadn’t gone to work when she’d reappeared a year later. If only Step hadn’t been there.

If only it had been me she’d spent that first evening back inworld with instead of him. If only she’d given me a chance.

If only I hadn’t murdered Step Stransky. That was 222

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pretty high up on the regret list too.

The irony of it all was that I was now doing pretty much precisely what had been at the heart of that plan, playing out romance with her in an avatar she didn’t know was me. The plan to impersonate Step using his avatar had fallen within the first few days when it became clear Inch had heard about Jon-Paul Barnaby’s death. The difference between that plan and what was happening now was firstly that I wasn’t pretending to be someone she knew and knew intimately, and secondly that I was no longer in love with her.

And, thirdly, that this wasn’t even about love. This was about hate. This was about revenge. Wasn’t it?

Fuck it. Fuck it. Yes it was. I looked away from the monitor for a moment and reminded myself where I was and why I was there. I reminded myself that I had lost everything because of the woman I was now entering into a waltz with. I had lost it all because she had treated me as inconsequential. She had looked right over me.

She had looked right through me.

Inch Sideways allows Thursday to take her in his arms. Standing at the side of the dance floor, they start to move from foot to foot. She feels a sense of safety wash over her in this place next to him. She buries her head in his chest and finds it soft and warm, as though the good heart she senses beating within has melted away that strong muscle just enough for her to be comfortable there.

Definitely Thursday pulls Inch close to him and rests his head on top of hers. It is enough just to feel her 223

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soft hair on his cheek, he thinks; he could stay in this position for ever. But...

Inch Sideways: But? Definitely Thursday raises his head to look closely at Inch. He crooks his forefinger beneath her chin and gently, but firmly pulls her gaze up towards his.

Inch Sideways allows her gaze to be walked up the face of Thursday, up over his chiselled features to the deep, deep chasms of his eyes.

Definitely Thursday moves his face that little bit closer to Inch's; a tiny movement, but one he's certain she won't have missed. He halts, lingers there for a second, their noses almost touching... a last moment for her to warn him off... a last moment for her to pull away entirely.

Inch Sideways does not warn Thursday off.

Inch Sideways does not pull away.

Inch Sideways continues Thursday's gaze, her lips parting slightly, her eyes saying, 'continue.'

Definitely Thursday brings his lips down upon Inch's – slowly, gently, like a feather coming in to land.

I knew the entire transcript of that night pretty much by heart. I had read it over and over during the year between her appearances.

But enough of this. Enough. That sort of thinking wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Coffeegirl29: You still there?

Masculamity: Sorry. A momentary RL distraction.

Coffeegirl29: Of what kind?

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Masculamity: Of the cold caller at the front door kind.

Coffeegirl29: Encyclopaedias?

Masculamity: Encyclopaedias? Are you connecting to SL from the 1980s?

Coffeegirl29 laughs.

Masculamity: Do you like the club?

Coffeegirl29: Honestly?

Masculamity: Honestly.

Coffeegirl29: Not especially.

Coffeegirl29: Pastels, greys, glass, blah blah blah.

Masculamity: We can go somewhere else, if you prefer.

Coffeegirl29: Oh dear God no.

Coffeegirl29: If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the dance of last-minute venue hunting.

Coffeegirl29: How many hours have I spent waiting for some guy to find a decent club.

Coffeegirl29: And then him expecting all that time of mine he wasted to be tagged on to the end of the date.

Coffeegirl29: No. This’ll do for now.

Coffeegirl29: Just don’t ever bring me here again.

Masculamity laughs.

Coffeegirl29: Seriously.

Coffeegirl29: Not joking here.

Coffeegirl29: The bar on the Starship Enterprise has more character than this place.

Her hair was long and brown, and draped over her left shoulder in the manner that ninety per cent of mesh hairstyles seem to adopt. On the night we had met, her 225

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hair had been blonde.

Definitely Thursday moves into another kiss, his left arm curling round her back, his right hand starting in her blonde bob, pushing the hair back, away from her face...

Inch Sideways is not blonde.

Inch Sideways has *mousey* coloured hair.

On the night we had met, her hair had been mousey coloured Definitely Thursday pulls slowly away from the kiss, holding Inch's head in his hands as though it is an offering, waiting for her eyes to open so he can look into them and ask a silent question.

Inch Sideways feels the moment come that she's been waiting for. Will he want her? Is this that soundless second where the agreement is reached? She feels his gaze upon her. She feels him waiting. She holds her eyes shut just a second longer, luxuriating in the anticipation...

Inch Sideways lets a tiny smile flicker briefly at the corner of her mouth...

Inch Sideways opens her eyes... 'Proceed,' she says, without words, without movement.

Definitely Thursday swings Inch gently round so that her back is to the bar again.

Inch Sideways reclines, resting her elbows on the polished wood of the bar behind her.

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It was lust to begin with. Of course it was. But it was a different sort of lust than I had ever experienced before.

It was her words. It was all about her words. It was all about her mind. It was all about the inside of her head.

There was no major revelation to me that night on the nature of love; I didn’t really know why she meant so much to me: I only knew that she did. I only knew that a part of her had snapped into place with a part of me and it had something to do with the way she wrote about things. A door had opened and there was no way it could be closed again, but I had no idea what it was that lay on the other side. It’s only since that evening that I’ve been able, gradually, to work out what I started to understand.

Definitely Thursday reaches suddenly down... reaches the hem... places his hand on the skin above Inch's knee and moves it upwards.

Inch Sideways feels her skirt being lifted.

Goosebumps rise all over her body. A short gasp escapes her as a little shudder of delight passes through her; she can't resist taking a peek at the dance floor to see which guys are noticing and which are pretending not to...

Inch Sideways: ...and which *girls* are noticing and which are pretending not to...

Definitely Thursday moves his hand all the way up to the round of Inch's thigh, bringing the loose folds of her skirt up with it to expose her left leg completely.

Definitely Thursday sees the excitement in Inch's eyes, sees how she looks past him every now and again to 227

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search for reactions amongst the dancers beyond.

What a naughty, naughty girl.

Inch Sideways: Yes, I am naughty.

Inch Sideways: I should be punished.

Definitely Thursday unhooks his left arm from around her and reaches down... pulls up the other side of her skirt... holds her at both sides of her midriff... pushes the fabric above the bar. Now her legs are completely bare, save for the lace panties...

Inch Sideways shifts her legs apart slightly. She presses her hand into Thursday, feeling him through the denim. She looks past him momentarily at the dancers, seeing at least five pairs of eyes looking quickly away. She tries to giggle, but it becomes a faint gasp. She leans back a little, offering her neck to Thursday.

Definitely Thursday plants kisses all the way along Inch's neck, working his way downward. His hand slips up and under her panties at the point where they cross her hip.

Inch Sideways moves her mouth over Thursday's ear as he nuzzles at her throat. 'Pull them down,' she whispers. 'Pull them down right now.'

What I started to understand that evening is that seeing things through the eyes of your lover is the most powerful intimacy that exists. Knowing exactly what moves them, what excites them, what amuses them, what turns them on, what they think and feel and want when you are fucking them is nothing short of extraordinary. What I started to understand is that ‘true 228

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love’ in its purest form is all about knowing the dirtiest, filthiest desires of your lover and treasuring them because they are the most private things they have and they gave them to you anyway. True love is honesty.

True love is complete nakedness. And that was why I hated myself for having lied to Theo and Lisa that evening, because I loved them both and I loved them both because they had opened themselves to me.

Perhaps I would have got there one day anyway, but that was the door that Inch Sideways nudged open that evening, and I never wanted it to close.

We were waltzing, but the music was in four/four time, so I changed the dance. I selected Slow Dance version 3.

An old favourite.

Coffeegirl29: Good choice.

Masculamity: I love this dance.

Coffeegirl29: Me too.

Coffeegirl29: Funny how so many things have changed in SL over the years.

Coffeegirl29: It literally looks nothing like how it used to when I started.

Masculamity: And good old ‘Slow V3’ is still going strong.

Coffeegirl29: Yep. Coffeegirl29: Whoever it was who made it, totally got things right that evening.

Coffeegirl29: We should track her/him down.

Coffeegirl29: And shake her/him by the hand.

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Masculamity: There should be an award for the most long-lived popular SL product.

Masculamity pulls you a fraction closer to him and feels wisps of your hair tickle his chin.

Coffeegirl29 breaths softly against your chest.

A tiny, tiny part of me sighed. This was it. This was what I’d wanted all those years. I’d given up all hope and now it was actually happening.

It was actually

happening. How many times had I dreamed of having her in my arms like this, if only for one more time. And here she was. Right now. That tiny, tiny part of me didn’t count the fact that I’d licked the pussy of the actual woman behind this avatar just a few weeks ago.

None of that mattered. None of that existed. She’d been acting then and I hadn’t known it was her. That was another person in another world. This was Inch. This was the woman I loved.

Had loved, dammit. Had loved.

Masculamity: Why are you so short, by the way?

Coffeegirl29: I’m not short; you’re tall.

Coffeegirl29: I’m a real life height instead of the crazy tall height most people seem to choose in SL. Coffeegirl29: I have a thing about it.

Really? That was new.

Coffeegirl29: I will tolerate your height so long as you make up for it in your words.

Masculamity: Fair enough.

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Masculamity: I can adjust my height, if you want.

Coffeegirl29: No thank you.

Coffeegirl29: It would ruin the flow.

Coffeegirl29: Just as this conversation is starting to.

Masculamity shuts up.

Coffeegirl29: Good boy.

Masculamity pushes your chin gently upwards so that he can see your eyes.

Coffeegirl29 looks into yours.

Masculamity descends slowly towards your lips a little, hesitating for just a moment at the halfway point.

Coffeegirl29: The point of no return?

Masculamity: The point of no return.

Coffeegirl29: Cross it.

231

19 Inch Sideways gave me the same choice on the dance floor of The Crystal Ball that she’d given me on Christmas Eve 2006, and almost word for word: “Here's the deal: we go somewhere else - somewhere private and you get the visual. Or we stay here and you don't get the visual, but we write about it like we're doing it here in front of all these people.” I knew she wanted the latter, but I chose the former. Partly, it was because I was worried that the harmonies between the two evenings might cause me to slip into some of the words I’d used on our first encounter; partly, I’ll admit, it was because I wanted to see her naked. Some people say Second Life nudity is cheap and meaningless; I say its value goes up the more that it’s hidden. Just like in RL. She slipped off the silver dress and stood in front of me, wearing only her high heels and a pair of black lace panties. We entered into a hug like that, me still wearing my tux. I spread my fingers across each of her shoulder blades and pulled her closer to me, then kissed her hard.

And she spread her fingers across my hardness and gave me the same warning she’d given me the first time: “Use words like 'throbbing' or 'manhood', or if you should even think of referring to my 'juices' then you will become personally acquainted with each of the two thousand metres between here and the ground.” I kissed 232

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her again and started to unzip my fly.

That’s when I realised I hadn’t yet bought a penis.

I raced to the Marketplace, going split screen on SL and the web, trying to keep the momentum going in our IM box without actually getting to the part where I finished the unzip. If the gods of the metaverse had been smiling on me when I’d made my frenzied dash for a female outfit for Maddester, however, their attention was most definitely elsewhere in my attempts to obtain a cock. The vast majority required land for them to be unpacked on and those which didn’t were either too expensive or looked like they’d been made out of marzipan. Burned had the extra Lindens I needed, but he was offline; there was nothing for it but to bring him inworld and transfer money between them. I bought myself additional time by kissing a slow path down her neck and breasts and abdomen, then peeling her panties from her. I bungled Burned’s password twice. Then it took an age for his account to load. Then his friends list displayed codes instead of names for two whole minutes so I couldn’t send money. Finally, the money got transferred and the cock got bought, but I waited and I waited and the goods didn’t arrive. Out of desperation, I removed my pants and talked about my absent penis as though it was there, and faked astonishment and outrage when Inch told me she couldn’t see it.

And then my phone dinged the arrival of a text. And that’s when everything really fell apart.

For the first thirty seconds after reading the message, I 233

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sat in stunned silence, staring at my phone. Then my eyes welled up and I sobbed uncontrollably for about the next minute. It was a completely different reaction from that which I’d had when Inch had revealed herself to me in that hotel room in Portsmouth.

Knowing that I was in love with Inch had been something instant, immediate and clear as day to me.

That’s how it had felt, at least. Theo and Lisa were different.

I knew I loved them, but it wasn’t until I

received that text message that I realised I was in love with them. And suddenly, every last scrap of feeling I’d ever had for Inch just vanished. That tiny, tiny part of me that had hidden from my sight these last few weeks took its final breath and died. But it didn’t stop at that.

Not only did the feelings vanish, but the memory of what they’d felt like vanished also. I knew I’d been in love with Inch, but it was no longer an emotional memory: it was like reading a fact about somebody else in a book.

Breathe. I wiped the tears from my eyes and saw the laptop monitor, and just at that point the cock arrived.

Of course it did. Inch was lying naked on her bed, two lines describing her anticipation of my entrance into her, a third asking if I was still there and a fourth telling me she hoped everything was ok.

Inch. This was all her fault. She was the reason why I was here instead of in my own home; she was the reason I would now have to leave. I hated her. I loathed her. I threw the phone to the floor and typed madly at the keyboard. Vitriol poured out of my fingertips. I told her who I was. I told her who she was. I told her exactly 234

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who was responsible for everything that had happened and found some pretty low metaphors to describe how it was that I thought of her.

My finger hovered over the return key. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. Then I got up, screamed and hit the nearest wall.

I sighed. I went back to the laptop and deleted what I’d written.

Masculamity: I’m really sorry. I have to go.

Coffeegirl29: What’s wrong?

Masculamity: I just received a dreadful text message.

I’m going to have to act on it.

Coffeegirl29: Oh sweetheart, are you ok?

Masculamity: Not really.

Coffeegirl29: Do you need to talk about it?

Masculamity: I don’t have time.

Masculamity: I have to go.

Coffeegirl29: Of course. Of course.

Coffeegirl29: When you’re able to and want to, send me a message to let me know you’re ok?

Masculamity: Sure thing.

Masculamity: I’m really sorry.

Coffeegirl29: Oh don’t be silly.

Coffeegirl29: Go. Take care. And be well.

I logged out. I picked up the phone. I read the message again. It was from Theo’s phone, but the text was from Lisa.

Honey, I’m so, so sorry, but I just realised who you 235

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are. I hope you understand I’m going to have to call it in. I’ll do it tomorrow at 8am; I’ll say I realised when I woke up. Please delete this message. I love you. Lx My time was up. It had all caught up with me.

236

20 I deleted the message and called Fred.

“Hello?”

For some reason, I’d expected deep. His voice was not deep.

“Fred. It’s me, Thursday.”

“Just a second.” He said to someone, “Excuse me – I have to take this.” I heard a rustling sound, then a door closing.

“Jesus Fucking Christ, Thursday.” A hushed, urgent voice. Some echo. I imagined a service corridor with breeze block walls. “It’s not even three hours since I gave you this number and you’re calling me already?”

“Listen to me Fred,” My voice shook. I fought to keep a new sob from escaping me. “I’m in the shit. You’re going have to call me back because I’ve only got a little money left on this phone. I have just over ten hours and then I have to disappear again.”

“What?

What are you talking about?

What’s

happened?”

“What’s happened is that someone who’s staying where I live has recognised me. She’s given me until tomorrow morning to get away. Are you going to ring me back or not?”

A pause. “Fine. Fucking hell. I need ten minutes.”

He took thirteen. I used them to start packing. I’d 237

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accumulated a number of new items of clothing over the last few weeks, most of them bought for me by Theo, albeit from an immense number of charity shops he seemed to know about on the island. I took those and discarded the clothes he had found me in. I knew I’d probably have to get rid of them as soon as I was able to get new stuff. The thought of that made me weep.

Oh yes, and he was knitting me a sweater. It was half done by his side of the bed. Now I’d never get to wear it.

I took deep breaths. The safest thing to do, of course, would be to leave straight away. To my credit, I guess, I didn’t even contemplate that beyond acknowledging that the option existed. I had a job to do.

“Tell me what happened,” Fred told me. I could hear him struggling still to keep the anger out of his voice.

I gave him the overview and spared him the specific details. He listened without saying a word. When I was done, he said, “So that’s it? You’re leaving?”

“I’m leaving in eight hours. I think there’s a ferry to the mainland at seven.”

“You’re still going to do the meeting?”

“I’m still going to do the meeting. But look… you’ve got to put me in as Single Star. You’ve got to put me in tonight.”

“What?”

“I want you to crash him, say five, maybe ten minutes into the meeting; then I’ll take his avatar over whilst they’re still in the club.”

“Are you insane? Why would we want to do that?”

“Listen to me, Fred. The earliest they’re going to show the model is Monday. I have no idea where I’m going to 238

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be come Monday – probably in jail. But Maddester told me his builds had to be done by today. I go in as Single Star tonight, then I tell them I want to see the model now.”

“You go the meeting tonight,” Fred told me, “and we worry about viewing the model later. Nothing can be gained from rushing this.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“You’ll get set up in another place and then we continue.”

“Where am I going to be that I’ll be able to do that?

How am I going to get there?”

“You did it before,” he told me. “You found a place.

You’ll do it again.”

“You think I had a plan? I got lucky with the guy I ran into, Fred. It was sheer luck! Before I met him, I was convinced I was going to be living in a tent for the rest of my life.”

“So find another guy.”

“Fuck you.”

“So what, are you in love with him?”

“Fuck you!”

“Thursday, all I’m saying is nothing you have to do is anything you haven’t done before.”

I said, through gritted teeth, “You don’t understand.

Last time was different. I don’t know if I can do that again. It’s too hard.”

“Look. We’ll find you a place,” he said. “Make that ferry at seven and I’ll have a place for you by the evening.”

“Thanks but no thanks, Fred.”

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“When are you going to start trusting me, Thursday?”

“It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the people you work for.

Listen to me, Fred: I can do this. I’ll tell them I can’t make any date next week for the viewing.”

“We don’t even know if a viewing was going to happen next week. This is an insane risk.”

“It’s not like they talk in long sentences in there.

They’re not going to suspect me from my turn of phrase.

If you can keep that guy offline I’ve got a good chance of fooling them.”

“It won’t work,” he said, hopelessly. “It won’t work.

I stopped talking and let a silence of twenty seconds or so pass. Then I gave in. I said to him, “Fine. Then you’re just going to have to take my place.”

Another, shorter silence. Then he said, “I can’t.”

“Of course you can. There’s no reason at all that this has to be me, we both know that.”

He sighed, heavily. “Thursday, you just have to take it from me that I can’t. If I could then I would, but I can’t.”

What was all that about? Who knew? “Then,” I said, “you have no choice.”

He swore. “Jesus Christ, Thursday; you’d better not screw this up.”

“It’s the best option we have.”

“You’re going to communicate using their system?”

“Yes.” “What if you can’t find the numbers in his inventory?

They could be scattered all over the place.”

“I know that might be a problem. But think about how quickly they change them. There wasn’t enough time between numbers for them to hunt each individual 240

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one down.”

“They could have used search.”

“No Fred.

Don’t forget that these weren’t preprepared messages.

This was spontaneous communication; they were encoding in ASCII on the fly.

I’m not saying that hiding the numbers wouldn’t have made for better security, but the speed with which they communicated, when you think of it, would be remarkable if you threw in the extra ball to juggle of having to search for every number every time. I have a hunch they’re all going to be in the same folder, and what’s more I reckon each object will just be named according to the number it represents. And why not?

Why hide them? What is anyone going to make of a bunch of numbers in their inventory? Too many things to do at once makes the job too hard for the time they have and hiding them brings no tangible benefit.”

“You’re going to have to find the right gesture too to indicate you want to speak. Don’t forget that.”

“That’s one of the reasons I want to watch them for a few minutes first.”

“And why do you want to log in as Single Star?”

“In the message fragment, it looks like Troght – how do you say that? Like Trout?”

“I have no idea,” Fred said, “but let’s assume yes.”

“So it looks like Troght is responding to him – to Star – when he says, ‘Tell him finished by Sunday.’ Who is the ‘him’? I think it’s someone who Star’s in contact with outside SL who knows about the operation.”

“Not necessarily.”

“But think about it.” I sliced the air with my hand to 241

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emphasise this, as though talking to him face-to-face. “If Star’s expected to report back to this guy on the status of the project, maybe he’s some sort of stakeholder.”

“So? Why does that make it Star you want to impersonate.”

“If the stakeholder has some sort of authority, maybe I can use that in order to get the early viewing.”

“Oh. Right.” He spent a moment thinking this through. “But how are you going to refer to him if you don’t know what they call him?”

“They might refer to him in the part of the meeting I observe. If they don’t, I’ll improvise. Maybe I’ll call him ‘my associate’ or something. No wait – I’ll just say I’ve been instructed to view the build today. They can infer the rest.”

“You’re surprisingly good at thinking on your feet.”

“Don’t compare me too favourably to your real-life field agents, Fred; like you said, it’s not like I’m going to get shot if I get found out.”

“Except,” he said, “potentially hundreds of shoppers might die if we don’t get what we need here.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” I’d walked to one end of the living room and now I turned around and walked back.

“That’s why I’m motivated. Whilst we’re on the subject, though, what exactly do ‘we’ need?”

“We need video showing-“ “Yes, I know what you want the video to show. What purpose are you going to put that video to? Will it hold up in court?”

“A video created in Second Life? Come on, Thursday.

You do realise how easy it would be to fabricate 242

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everything you capture, right?”

“Then what are we doing this for?”

“My immediate priority right now isn’t about convincing a jury. In the first instance, it’s about convincing my employer that this thing is fucking real and satisfying their need for convincing detail. Once they’re convinced, action to prevent the attack from happening will be taken, I assure you.”

“And in the second instance?”

“In the second instance, we send a message to those who think they can fuck with us.” Like a doppler shift, Fred’s voice changed. It became lower, harder and sharper. “The very reason they’re resorting to the metaverse is because they know we’re watching every other place online. We’re painting them into smaller and smaller corners and eventually they’re going to realise there’s no place they can conceal themselves from us.

The more brutally we demonstrate we can reach them under whatever fucking stone they try to hide under, the better.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But don’t think this is the last time anyone’ll think of online worlds for doing this,” he continued. “Next time it’ll be InWorldz or a private OpenSim server, or any of the new 3D start-ups. This is just the beginning.”

“Will they… be killed?” I asked.

“Who?” “The gang. The cell.”

“Don’t start down that path,” he said. “Your role is to get me this information. Mine is to pass it on. It’s someone else’s responsibility to decide what to do with 243

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it.”

I would have preferred it if he’d just lied to me and said, “Of course not.” Blinkered ignorance can still be bliss. In order to save lives, then, I had to contribute to the clandestine ending of others. The blood on my hands would multiply. But how else could I go about this? If I handed over my evidence to the police in the UK, would they even believe me? If they did and the video was no good to force a conviction, would my work only serve to alert the cell to our observation and our powerlessness?

Would it push them back into the darkness to plan a different attack in a different location? Would I save one set of innocent people only for a different set to perish?

“How would killing them in secret send out any sort of message?” I asked him.

“Who said anything about killing them?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically, there could be plenty of publicity.

We tried to arrest them; they resisted. They shot at us; we returned fire. Simple. They’re terrorists; who gives a fuck?”

“Maddester would be ok, right?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s connected to them.”

“You’re overthinking this, Emma. No-one would die who didn’t have to die. I have to go. You have a job to do. Text me when you want me to crash Star. The rest is up to you. Get me what I need and don’t fuck it up. And don’t leave it until the last minute before you get your ass out of there, either. I’d prefer it if you were on an earlier ferry than the seven o’clock.”

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I would say I didn’t know he cared, except I knew that he didn’t. I was an asset to be protected now, nothing more.

245

21 I teleported to The Crystal Ball using Burned at 1am my time, willing the cell to arrive early so I could get started on this whole thing and finish as quickly as possible.

The end point felt too far away to be attainable, yet I had only the time I’d spent waiting since Fred had hung up – four hours – to get to it. I didn’t want to have to leave it to the seven o’clock ferry either.

Troght came online at 1:30 and appeared at the club ten minutes later. He rezzed at the landing point, stood for a couple of minutes whilst, I supposed, the place filled in around him, then walked right past me where I stood overlooking the dance floor. The proximity of his avatar to mine sent prickles across my skin. I shivered.

He found a stool at the left side bar and sat on it, ignoring the greeter’s welcome.

I worried for a moment about how conspicuous I was.

I contemplated bringing Masculamity on in her female form and putting her on the dance floor for one of the eager men hovering at the corners to pick up, but if Inch was still on – or wasn’t and then came on – she might start talking to me; the last thing I needed was that sort of distraction. I considered creating another female out of the unused alt I had from the three I’d created earlier in the week, but it was nearly 1:45 and I didn’t have the time. This would have to do.

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Single Star was next. He also rezzed at the landing point, did the brief wait for everything to appear and then walked past the greeter. He went down to the dance floor and started a disco boogie to Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello’. Obviously not listening to the stream, then.

At five to two, Gergelennie arrived and took up a place at the far bar. They were all here. I started video recording, beginning with a wide angle view of the whole club, then focusing on each of the three avatars in turn. Then I activated transparency mode. I picked up my pen and got ready to write down numbers. I took a deep breath.

At exactly 2am, Trought let off his stream of spam into main chat. Thirty seconds later, or thereabouts, the numbers started appearing above his head. I didn’t attempt to look them up as they appeared on the ASCII table I had behind the keyboard – there was no time for that – I wrote each number pair down and converted when the speaker was done. Then I typed this into a notecard to save Fred from having to convert himself – or rather, to give him an immediate read on the conversation (since I knew he’d get the numbers converted himself anyway). This is what they said: Troght: EVERYWHERE Single Star: THAT Georgelennie: MARY I looked at the words I’d written and frowned. It looked like nonsense. I rechecked my decoding and came again to the same result. Everywhere that Mary. Everywhere 247

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that Mary what? I had no idea what that meant.

And then I wondered if it was some sort of a signin/password system. The moment I thought this, the three words snapped into context; out of nowhere, their verse came straight into my head: Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went, her lamb was sure to go.

On each login, then, the next three words of the nursery rhyme were used. I was lucky: I wouldn’t have guessed it if I’d seen the previous exchange – AS, SNOW and AND. This also gave me an indication of how many times the men had met: Mary had a (1) little lamb whose (2) fleece was white (3) as snow and (4) everywhere that Mary (5).

This, then, was their fifth meeting.

Troght: THE BUILDING IS COMPLETE Single Star: THE MODEL IS ASSEMBLED? Troght: THAT IS IN PROGRESS Those three lines took nearly ten minutes in total. Both Single Star and Georgelennie signalled at this point that they wanted to talk. What eager boys they were. There must have been an understanding that Star had priority, however, because he spoke next and Georgelennie remained silent.

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Single Star: WHEN DO WE VIEW? Troght: MONDAY I’d have preferred to have seen more, but this was the moment I had to step in. If Star indicated back that Monday was fine, any subsequent request to see the model immediately would be instantly suspicious.

Before the last two letters of Troght’s message were out, I sent my text to Fred: Crash Star now.

I waited.

I waited some more. Star let off his spam text. He was about to start talking. Oh fuck, I thought. Fred wasn’t going to crash him in time. I sent another text: NOW Numbers started appearing above Star’s head. My heart raced. Sweat started running down my back. I held my breath.

Single Star: MONDAY IS He went silent for about ten seconds.

And then he

disappeared in a swirl of white puffs.

This, then, was it. My heart pounded. I told myself that this was nothing more complicated than any other piece of subterfuge I’d undertaken as a private investigator. I left Burned logged in and opened up a new viewer window, thankful again to Fred for the more powerful laptop that could handle two SL sessions in a crowded region without overheating. I selected ‘Last location’ as my login destination. I counted to thirty. I entered Star’s ID and password, praying he hadn’t changed it since Fred had provided me with these 249

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details. So much could go wrong with this. I tried not to think about that.

Connecting to region.

So much could go wrong with this. And now, the first of those things happened. And the second.

My plan had been to familiarise myself with the contents of Star’s inventory and to try to find the numbers folder whilst the club rezzed around me. I also had to look through his gestures to find the activation phrase for his spam text. A lot to do in not much more than a couple of minutes. But, as soon as my orange cloud appeared and didn’t straight away resolve into the grey humanoid next stage of the process, I realised we’d forgotten something of enormous significance: the cache.

This PC had never run this particular SL account before, so it had to build a cache for it from scratch. In a busy sim, that could take a very long time and might require a number of relogs. Until the cache was sorted, the inventory would be half empty and the world a jumble of non-textured blocks. There was no way I’d be able to see any of the numbers above anyone’s head.

But that was actually the second problem. The first made itself apparent immediately on login via a message box: The region you are trying to enter is currently full.

You have been moved to a nearby region.

‘Nearby region,’ of course, meaning a randomly selected 250

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info hub somewhere on the grid. It was nearby insofar as it was in the same metaverse. I rezzed into one of the bland info hubs – give me Bear or Calleta any day – and was straight away surrounded by a swarm of grey, featureless, day old newbies that hadn’t yet moved away from the landing point.

This was a nightmare. I swore repeatedly at the screen. Why had we not thought of these things? I looked at the map and saw that the hub’s region was next door to a virtually empty sim: if I could make it across the border, the low traffic there might help my cache fill up more quickly. I reduced Star’s draw distance down to 32 metres then launched him into the air and flew at a forty-five degree angle towards the crossing.

Breathe, I told myself whilst I flew. Crashes happen.

Sims fill up. The action of doing something rather than staring in frozen paralysis at the screen got me thinking again. It occurred to me that the first problem might just be the solution to the second: if I couldn’t get back to the club then I had a little time for my inventory to populate.

As for the first problem, I still had Burned back at the The Crystal Ball, holding a place for when I was ready.

Breathe. It’s ok. A lag bubble took hold of me for a good ten seconds when I crossed the border and I held my breath as I watched my disconnected new avatar sail through the air out of my control, a thin projection from the one region into the next: either the elastic would break and I’d be through to the other side or it would snap back, most likely crashing me in the process. It broke, and I was onto the new server. Immediately, I 251

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saw my inventory window start to populate. I typed a letter into the search box there to help speed things up. I don’t know why this works, but apparently it does.

Would the other two wait? In Burned’s viewer window, they remained in their spots. Neither moved or made any communication. Was there a protocol for something like this happening?

Was there a communication I was supposed to send? I doubted it.

Given the trouble they’d gone to in avoiding any sort of observable connection with each other, sending an IM right now seemed to me the most likely thing to turn a happenstance event into a suspicious one.

At that moment, Troght sent out

his

spam

announcement, followed by a string of numbers.

Troght: THE SIM IS FULL Georgelennie: WE WAIT? Troght: FIVE MINUTES Which might just be enough. I watched the inventory number grow steadily. It stopped at just after two thousand items – a small collection, but then this wasn’t an avatar built for leisure. I unclicked the fly button and, whilst he fell, I looked through Star’s inventory and found the folder of numbers almost immediately (it was actually called ‘Numbers’). As I’d predicted, it was just a folder of ten objects, each named according to the number it represented. I noticed that ‘3’ was in bold and activated transparency mode to spot it fixed above Star’s tumbling body. I detached it straight away. It would look authentic, I decided, that I had taken that extra 252

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precaution.

I landed (on my face) in the square of an old Italian village. There were metal tables and chairs dotted around me, and a nearby café and a water fountain and a church. All very picturesque, but the main thing was that I could actually see it. All in all, that had been a pretty fast cache completion and I thanked Star silently for owning such a lightweight inventory. I brought up the gestures panel and found the activation text for the spam chat I’d seen Star use at the club. I tested it out.

I had about a minute left. I found in Star’s inventory a landmark for the club and checked it out on the map to see if the region was still full. It was. So I flicked over to Burned and logged him out, freeing up that vital space.

Without waiting for anyone else to grab it from under my nose, I hit the teleport button on Star’s landmark.

The progress bar filled…

And I touched down back at The Crystal Ball.

I waited the customary two minutes at the landing point for the club and its detail to fill in. There was no need to rush; they would know I was there. When I was ready, I walked to the dance floor and resumed the disco boogie I’d seen Star use earlier.

I zoomed in on Troght, waiting for him to release his spam, assuming that he was giving me time to get ready.

I scribbled out the message I wanted to give in capitals and quickly converted each letter to its two digit ASCII code. Whilst I wrote, my eyes flicked between the screen and the paper. I waited for something to happen.

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Nothing did.

A whole additional minute passed and finally I realised: it was them that were waiting for me. Without hesitating any longer, I activated Star’s spam and sent his slew of green text scrolling up the screen. I was about to start clicking in the numbers I’d written down earlier when I realised there might be a password protocol for this very situation. So I took a gamble.

Single Star: WENT And it paid off.

Troght: HER Georgelennie: LAMB I double-clicked the letters at the same pace I’d observed used earlier – roughly one every two seconds.

Once

Georgelennie was done with his turn in the sequence, I sent out my spam signal once more, waited another thirty seconds or so, and then started clicking in the message I’d prepared.

Single Star: MONDAY IS UNACCEPTIBLE There was a significant pause. Then Troght released his spam.

Troght: WHY? Single Star: I MUST VIEW NOW

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Another long pause.

Troght: WHY? Single Star: THESE ARE MY INSTRUCTIONS Troght: YOU HAVE BEEN DIRECTED? Single Star: YES And another long pause.

This one became two then

three then four minutes.

I decided it meant he was

consulting someone.

Could we be certain that the regular Single Star driver wasn’t able to make contact with any of the other cell members outside of SL? It seemed unlikely that they had the means of making direct contact when one of the points of using SL in the first place had to be keeping them separate until they absolutely had to be in the same physical place as each other. But every operative had to have a handler, right?

Every terrorist answered to

someone above them, who also answered to someone above them, who also answered to someone above them; wasn’t that how it worked? Wasn’t it just a question of going up the right number of nodes before a path opened up right back down to the people you needed to contact?

Would Single Star know yet that something was amiss?

Had he managed to get onto the SL website and found that he was listed as online? Did he even think that suspicious? Was he able easily to get in touch with his handler if he did decide he needed to or did secrecy require a convoluted procedure? Did his handler then have access to the other cell members, or was it an extra layer up or an extra layer still? I didn’t even know if this 255

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was an organisation more complex than a group of friends with grudges. I had no idea how big they were.

How long would it take for suspicion to be aroused and for a message to be passed up and back down again? It could be days; it could be hours; it could be minutes.

Troght: DO YOU REQUIRE TARGET DATA? Did I? I decided that I did.

Single Star: YES Troght: DO YOU REQUIRE DRESS? I hypothesised that this meant each person wearing clothes that would represent the clothes they’d be wearing on the day, just like Fred had outlined. I imagined this might require time being set aside now for us to go onto the Marketplace and sort out our outfits.

Not what I wanted.

Single Star: NO And then another pause. But a shorter one, this time.

Troght: 9PM SLT BE HERE 9pm SLT was 5am my time. A wait of over two hours.

Two hours! Once in the build, I’d have no more than ninety minutes to get the footage I was after if I was going to make the seven o’clock ferry. It was doable. It had to be. After all, once I was in I’d only need a few 256

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minutes to capture enough for an identification to be made. Right? The six o’clock ferry wasn’t yet even out of the question.

But what of the real Star? Would two hours be enough time for him to pass that message far enough up the chain that it could make it back down to the others?

Regardless, I didn’t really see that I had much of a choice. Troght had said earlier that the builds were finished but that the assembly of the final model from all its constituent parts was not yet complete. Of course he needed time to complete it. Of course he did.

I was about to deploy my spam to indicate agreement to this when I realised it wasn’t actually being sought.

Troght had vanished. I suspected that he was still inworld, but the online indicator which would have confirmed this was part of Burned’s viewer, which was now closed down. And Troght did not feature on Star’s friends list. I cammed in on the so far silent this evening Georgelennie. He stood from his position at the bar and then I saw his crosshairs become active. For a whole minute, they fixed on my head and it felt like a little red dot was wobbling over a spot between my eyes.

Then he, too, vanished.

257

22 Two hours. The wait nearly killed me. To try to fill some of it, I walked to the car ferry terminal and bought a one-way foot passenger ticket to Southampton.

I

stopped video recording before I left the flat, but left Star logged in following a conversation with Fred.

“You’re done?” he’d said on answering.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Troght’s putting the model together.”

“He agreed to the viewing?”

“Yes.” “So when’s it going to happen?”

“9pm SLT” “9pm…” He did the maths. “5am your time?”

“Yes.” “That’s cutting it a little fine, don’t you think?

“Thank you, I’m well aware of that.”

“So,” he said, “why are you phoning me?”

“I’m still logged in as Star. What about the real guy?

If I log out, will he be able to get back in again?”

“Not if he stays at home, he won’t. We’ve taken down his whole connection.”

“And if he doesn’t stay at home?”

“Really? You need me to spell it out?”

“Really?” I countered. “I’m supposed to know now the limits of what you can and can’t do?”

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“If he finds a different wireless connection then – yes – he can get back in. Given the lengths they’ve gone to in their security, though, do you really think he’s going to log in from his local Starbucks?”

“What about tethering his computer to his phone?”

“We’ve disabled data on the local mast.”

“Really? Don’t people complain about that?”

“Of course they fucking complain.”

“What about jumping onto his neighbour’s connection if it’s unsecured?”

“It’s not unsecured, Thursday.

We checked that.

We’re pretty good at that sort of thing.”

Even so. I decided to leave him logged in. Better safe than sorry. I took him to his home spot, which turned out to be a rented skybox at 2,000 metres, one of those square spaces with a wrap-around vista on one side of the New York city skyline (at night). He had a mesh sofa and rug and coffee table, and in the corner was a bed with cuddle poses. He had a rubber plant. He had some shelving with fake books. It could have been the starter home for any one of a hundred thousand different avatars. Well of course it could have been. What else would I have expected, a dossier of plans on the coffee table marked, ‘Top Secret’? But why did he need a home in the first place?

I sat him on the sofa and went to get my ferry ticket.

On the way, it started to rain lightly, which was a reminder to me that it wouldn’t be so easy to sleep rough this time round, now that the summer was taking its last few breaths. I had no idea what I was going to do once I made it off the boat on the other side of the Solent. If I 259

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made it onto the boat on this side of it, of course. I was tempted by the idea of heading to the New Forest and camping in my tent; but, really, where was the point in that? There had to be somewhere I could pay for a night without ID: perhaps a bed and breakfast somewhere, just until I could get my passport. My Polish passport. What the hell was I going to do with a Polish passport? I supposed I would go to France with it. I wondered if I could buy a ticket for a cross-channel ferry with cash, or if I’d have to open a bank account first. A bank account, of course, would require an address. I sighed. I had to get a passport so I could get an address so I could get a bank account so I could buy a ticket out of the UK. That was before you got anywhere near the issue of whether or not my passport would actually be good enough to get me across any border in the first place. Everything was so complicated and I was really starting to think that Fred’s offer of a new identity was a gift horse I shouldn’t have rejected so blithely.

And it wasn’t like I actually wanted to leave the country. I wanted to be here. With Theo. With Lisa too.

I got back to the flat at 4:30am, and nothing appeared to have happened in the life of Single Star in the elapsed time. Three and a half hours until the police were told where to find me. I sat down in front of the laptop and waited.

And waited some more. At 4:45am I teleported back to The Crystal Ball and took up my position on the dance floor. Georgelennie turned up a few minutes later and 260

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returned to his spot at the far bar. But 5:00am came and went, and there was no sign whatsoever of Troght.

I kept my viewer focused on Georgelennie in case he initiated communication.

He did not.

We each maintained our silences and 5:10am became 5:20am became 5:30am. Numbers in the club started to thin as even west coast America started yawning and thinking about bed. I logged Burned on in a separate window to check Troght was actually still inworld. He was. 5:45am came and went. 6:00am came and went. I started to sweat again. My bowels started to cramp. What did this mean? Where was he? Why had Troght not appeared?

Had they received a message from the real Star? Did they know that I was an imposter?

Of course, the HUD in Burned’s window didn’t only tell me that Troght was inworld; it told me also exactly where inworld he was: in a sim all by himself, except it wasn’t a private island and there were other residents in two of the eight bordering regions. Getting a look at what he was up to would be child’s play compared to some of the viewing challenges I’d encountered in previous cases. 6:10am arrived and with it the cold knowledge that if I did nothing I would very soon be out of time. The only advantage to seeing the build as Star instead of spying on it as Burned was the possible walkthrough (not that one had been promised) and any information Troght might possibly add. Fred wanted first and foremost to know what the target was, and I could at least get him that if Troght was at the build right now. Yes. That settled it.

In Burned’s viewer, I double clicked on a random spot 261

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in one of the neighbouring sims and teleported onto the top of somebody’s roof. I cammed quickly in and found a settee to sit innocently on, then wacked my draw distance right up to 1000m and looked for Troght on the Nearby Avatars list. I found him at a distance of 334 metres and double clicked his name. At once, my camera view shot straight to where he stood.

But there was no build around or near him. Troght just stood in the middle of a patch of empty land in edit appearance mode. There was no shopping centre to be seen anywhere. There was nothing.

6:20am came and went. Troght remained frozen in the air in the middle of his star jump. Georgelennie remained stationary at the bar. Seven o’clock crept closer. Dancers left The Crystal Ball and Star began to look conspicuous in his relentless, repeating boogie.

There were just two couples on the dance floor besides me and no-one else was dancing alone. 6:30am arrived and with it, I knew, the ferry I was hoping to leave on in thirty minutes. I shouted desperately at the screen, “Come on!” But the minutes continued to pass and the nothing continued to happen.

It was decision time. Either I stayed and abandoned all hope of catching the ferry or I packed up now and left. It would take me less than five minutes to run from the flat to the terminal, but each extra minute gone meant that even if I got to view the build now there would scarcely be the time left to film it. It was a straight choice between staying and likely capture, and escaping and 262

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achieving nothing.

I’d still have an hour left after seven before Lisa put through her call. How long would it take the police to respond? Five minutes? Ten? I’d evaded them successfully before from just metres away; in Portsmouth, however, Inch had had to convince no doubt sceptical officers to chase a woman they’d never heard of for a murder that wasn’t recorded. This time, it would be different. This time, their response would be systematic, co-ordinated, relentless.

But the idea of escaping – escaping and making all of this a complete waste of time – just left me feeling hollow.

Except would it have been a complete waste of time?

Surely what I’d done already was enough to prevent the attack from happening. Even if the real Star right now still had no idea he was being impersonated, the truth would be worked out by the cell once they were all back online together. Surely it would. They’d discover they’d been penetrated and that alone would put an end to the plan. They would scatter. They would hide. They’d survive to plot another attack, sure, but the attack now would be averted. Wasn’t that the most important thing? If that was achieved, wasn’t that something?

Couldn’t it be even more than that? They wouldn’t know that it was just me, just this once, just this lucky fucking amateur and not a collection of CIA or NSA professionals. Might this not put them off the whole idea of using SL? Fred wanted enough evidence to convince his “employers” of the threat so that the cell members could 263

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be brought in; so that his colleagues could do who knew what to get information from them. Their contacts, I supposed.

Their plans.

Their other methods of communication.

Another step in the endless accumulation of information by western intelligence agencies, made valid by occasional genuine threats and by occasional genuine deaths. Another justification for the huge amount of money spent, for expanding the budget by another few percentage points here and another few there. An office for him tomorrow, a section next year, a division the year after that. At least it was actually important to him to prevent the attack from happening. A cynic might suppose that the easiest way to make the threat clear would be to let the attack go ahead and ride the public fury afterwards for funding once the SL connection had been highlighted. Except this was actually Fred’s job: regardless of the tiny amount of time he had to do it properly, a successful attack planned in SL might be seen as his failure. An office, a section, a division might well get set up, but Fred might have no place in it. This was the only way he personally came out well; by happy coincidence, it was also the way where the least number of people got killed.

But was it my place to give a shit about any of that?

All I wanted was to prevent those people from dying and the likelihood was that I had already done that. A decision started to form. To hell with Fred’s ambition.

My work was done.

But what if they didn’t find out about the breach?

What if Fred was right and they never worked it out?

What if Star put his lost connection down to 264

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happenstance and assumed that the others would assume the same thing? Their method of communication hardly made detailed conversation easy: what if he didn’t mention his outage because he thought they’d think nothing of it; what if they didn’t mention the first viewing of the mall he had because who starts a conversation off anyway recapping the things they did previously? And if I left now, there wouldn’t even have been a first viewing. If I left now, they might assume a connection failure and if Star then subsequently told them that he’d had a connection failure then that would fit perfectly with what they were expecting. These guys were hardly conversationalists. It would fit the picture they had formed, but in entirely the wrong way. A cold sweat broke out over me. I hadn’t done enough, not yet.

I hadn’t done enough to know definitively that the threat had been averted.

But I could still do that. I could do it now and I could do it quickly. All it would take would be a few lines of text typed into their IM boxes. One for Troght, one for Georgelennie; maybe a notecard left for Star in his inventory: We know who you are and we know what it is you want to do, and we’re coming for you, you fuckers. Yes. That would make it unequivocal.

From Star’s viewer, I did a search on Troght and brought up his IM window.

But right that moment, he disappeared from Burned’s view in a puff of white swirls.

And, a few seconds later, a teleport request to Star from him appeared.

265

23 It was 6:37am. Still time. Still just enough time. My heart racing, and my hands cold and shaking, I activated the video recording software then accepted the request. I logged Burned out again and maximised Star’s viewer window.

I materialised on a huge platform at 4,000 metres.

Grey shapes started appearing around me and resolving, and I pushed up the draw distance to 500 metres. Troght stood next to me and beside him was another avatar called ‘Jones Jones Jones’. It had to be an alt. That was why Troght had been in edit appearance mode for so long; he’d been using another avatar somewhere else to pull everything together. This must have been another little precaution he’d taken: even if we had logged into his account and looked through his inventory for the build, we’d have found nothing.

6:38am. Georgelennie appeared above my head and I took a couple of steps backward so he could drop to the ground in front of me. I used his rez time to cam into building in front of us. The shapes had resolved into an entrance: eight glass doors, beyond which a central tiled area stretched away over what looked like a hundred metres. The shop fronts on either side of this central walkway were still in the process of deblurring; in the meantime, I let my camera wander over the benches and 266

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stalls and fake plants and information signs rezzing in the middle of the walkway. I hovered over one of the latter, thinking maybe it would show me the name of the shopping mall. Coloured, fuzzy blocks on a white background teased me. It was a map, for sure, but I couldn’t yet read any of the text.

6:39am. Troght released his spam. I swore. The very last thing I wanted right now was for time to be wasted on the lengthy process of ASCII decoding. Reluctantly, I moved my camera view away from the information map to the top of his head and waited for numbers to start appearing.

Troght: SORRY IT WAS COMPLEX 6:41am. Odd. The word ‘sorry’ humanised him in a way I hadn’t expected. He really was just some guy at a computer in his home. Who were these people? Was he a husband? Was he a father? Were there other members of his household nearby doing everyday things like watching television or playing with the dog or cooking food?

I needed to take control of this. Whoever Star was, I imagined he would not have been happy about the wait I’d just had, and this gave me a mandate to move things along. I activated my spam gesture and gave them just ten seconds to focus on my head.

Single Star: MY TIME VERY SHORT SHOW TARGET NOW

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6:43am. Troght turned immediately and entered the building. Georgelennie pushed in front of me to take a place behind him, which was fine by me because it gave me time to adjust to a wider camera angle. I followed them in. The exchange had at least given textures plenty of time to rez. We walked down the tiled central area, shop fronts now fully rezzed and visible, and when I passed the information sign again I could this time make out the title as, “Welcome to Meadow Bridges”.

The

name meant nothing to me. 6:44am. We came to a large, central, circular hub, from which four walkways – including the one we’d just walked down – stretched towards their own sets of distant glass doors. Above us, a circular mezzanine overlooked the hub and I cammed up briefly to see a ring of restaurants and cafes, and the entrances to a ten screen cinema and a bowling alley. It was a completely different area to the one in Maddester’s build.

Troght stopped in front of a set of escalators to the floor above – one going up and one going down – and, for a moment, I thought he was going to speak again.

Then he walked around to the rear of the moving staircase. Underneath it was the Santa’s grotto: a wooden hut backing onto the underside slope of the escalator (there were sacks full of presents in the wedge of space behind it, screened off by large, festive signs announcing the grotto and its pricing) and in front of it a snow-covered queuing area of busy elves and piles of gift-wrapped presents and cheerful penguins and friendly polar bears. This part I recognised.

6:45am. Troght retraced his path back to the foot of 268

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the escalator and stood there for a moment. A beam of orange particles connected his right hand to a metal step and a jagged grey sculptie appeared which resolved quickly into a copy of the old boy-next-door avatar. He stood it on the fourth step facing up and then a second orange stream placed a large red shopping bag on the step to its right, beside the yellow inner tread mark.

6:46am. He rezzed a second boy-next-door four steps down from the top of the other escalator, facing downwards. He placed a second shopping bag next to it on the inner tread. I peered at the two bags and frowned. One at the top and one at the bottom. But why? And then it came to me.

They were going to blow up the escalator. The bastards were going to blow up the escalator and drop the thing right on top of the grotto and everyone else underneath.

6:47am. I had seen enough. I logged out, switched off recording, folded up the laptop, grabbed my rucksack and made for the door of the flat, trying not to do a last, lingering look. But failing.

I looked for several seconds at the spot in the lounge where Theo, Lisa and I had had sex – had made love – and then I pushed the memory out of my mind and left.

It turned out the ferry was running five minutes late. I had time enough to queue for and buy coffee before the safety announcement came and the ship started to inch away from the dock. I found a table, opened the laptop and started to compress the video files. Then, my coffee 269

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only two sips depleted and the adrenalin that had been powering me through the night now finally leaving my system, I fell asleep. I awoke nearly twenty minutes later to the completion ding of the software and started the upload. It took over half an hour to send the files via the ship’s wireless, but, as we passed Hythe pier and the Southampton terminal came into sight, the progress bar completed and vanished, and everything I‘d said I would do was finally done.

It was eight o’clock.

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24 I left Waterloo Station via the newsstand exit at the North end and crossed the footbridge towards The Shell Centre, then took the steps down to York Road and walked across the Jubilee Gardens. At the South Bank, I stood leaned against the wall with my back to the sixth tree along from the Eye. Tourists flowed around me like water. Whilst I waited, I closed my eyes and saw again the text on the folded headline board on the exit from the railway station: US BOMB PLOT FOILED. My work. A week ago, the headlines had read, KILLER AGAIN EVADES POLICE. Also my work. I opened my eyes and looked at London. I inhaled it.

I heard someone next to me clear his throat.

I turned. The man was in his forties and wore a plastic mac that fitted the grey, damp weather but did no justice at all to the glorious location. He was unshaven by about three or four days and he wore a white, “I <3 London” cap.

“Hello,” I said.

“Thursday?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied. “Do you have the passport?”

He mirrored my pose, leaning against the wall and looking across the Thames at the North Bank. “I have passport if you have money.”

“I have the money,” I told him. “Will I be able to use 273

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this thing to get a European Union ID card?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you need also birth certificate. I have it.”

“Is that more money?”

“No,” he replied. “Is of no use to me now.”

He

reached inside his coat and pulled out a manila A5 envelope. He held on to it. “Money first.”

“Take the passport out of the envelope so I can see it.”

He sighed and opened the envelope, and pulled out a black passport that had RZECZPOSPOLITA POLSKA embossed on the cover in silver ink above a crest.

“This is bullshit,” I said, my heart suddenly beating in my throat. “That’s a pre-2001 passport. Did you think I wouldn’t do my research?” Fuck it. I’d contact Fred and ask him to sort out an ID for me. I knew now it was what I should have agreed to in the first place.

“Goodbye,” I told the man and walked away from him.

“Where to now, Thursday?” a new voice called from behind me in perfect, unaccented English.

I turned back to look. The man had taken off his raincoat and draped it over the wall. He was wearing a dark blue suit now, and he was taking off the cap whilst I watched him. He smiled at me, a wide cheerful grin.

I took a few steps back towards him. “Who are you?”

I asked.

“Come now,” he said. “You don’t recognise your old business partner?”

“What?”

“Let me see now,” he said.

“Oh yes: Thursday is

Definitely a Sideways Step. That’s the right phrase, isn’t it?”

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I opened my mouth for a moment and then closed it.

“Wha?” He opened his arms. “Come here,” he said. “Give your old buddy Step Stransky a hug.”

275