Amazing Metaverse

T ALE S OF M Y S TER Y FRO M TH E VI RT U AL WO RL D!

Issue #1 contents PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED OR PERFORMED LIFE II: RETURN TO DANGER……………………..…………………………………….

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What will we do once all the problems in existence have been solved? Create a new one!

THE ADVENTURES OF HARD LUCK PROTECTING BLACKBERRY PIE ………………..……………………………….…….

Blackberry Pie had jet black curls down to her golden crust shoulders and a pout so full it made me think of two huge blackcurrants being pressed together to the point of bursting.

DID DANDELION DICKENS DIE?……..…………..……………………………….…….

“Mr Luck,” said Fistsmasher Jenkins, “My Darling Dandelion has disappeared. I received this message from a friend of hers that she's died in RL.” THE SUSPICIONS OF VIOLET SHRINKING……..………….………………….…….

A digital taxidermist hires Luck to follow her avatar boyfriend… whilst she makes a replica!

A NIGHT WITH HIGGS-BOSON……..………….………………….……………….…….

A particle physicist suspects supernatural forces to have taken over his avatar!

IF THE RIGHT GUY IS LISTENING……..……………….…….………………….…….

I asked Hard Luck who he was investigating; he gave me the name of the guy who'd been at my table earlier, a two-year-old avatar with a fresh face and worryingly optimistic hair.

DOUBLE DOUBLED DOUBLED ……..……………….………….………………….…….

Though it would turn out that I was not the only guy dancing with Cassandra Corvette at Frederick’s, neither was she the only girl dancing with me.

5 9 13 15 17 21

THE AVATAR DINING CLUB ALT OUT………………..………………………………………………………………….……. 29 “I just can’t figure it out,” Raw Concrete told us. “I got outed as an alt the other day and I can’t work out what gave me away.”

THE IMPOSSIBLE SNAPSHOTS ………….……..………………………………….……. 34 Pictures taken of a misdemeanor… but no-one was around to snap them!

TWO PLACES AT ONCE ………………..…………………………………………….……. 39 The friends are quizzed over a single avatar appearing in two places… at the same time!

BOT OR NOT? ………………………….…..…………………………………………….……. 44 “The only thing I can think of,” Lobelia said, “is that the bot wasn’t a bot at all, but someone pretending to be a bot.”

IS SHE A HE? ………………………….…..…………………………………………….……. 50 “I want to know if my virtual girlfriend is really a man in real life,” Begonia Bittersweet told us.

Copyright © 2016 by Huckleberry Hax. All rights reserved. This paperback edition published in 2016 by www.lulu.com. Huckleberry Hax is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover design by Huckleberry Hax, and featuring Huckleberry Hax and Kate Bergdorf. Logo and internal illustrations by Huckleberry Hax, except ‘Dandelion Dickens’ by Dizi Bergbahn. ‘Protecting Blackberry Pie’ first published on www.writtenword.org.uk; ‘Double doubled doubled’ first published at www.huckleberryhax.blogspot.com; ‘Alt out’ and ‘Is she a he?’ first published at thevirtualreview.wordpress.com; ‘The impossible snapshots’ first published at virtualwritersworld.virtualwritersinc.com. Thanks to Kate, Dizi, Hope, Perse, Harri, Jilly and Hastings. Drawing effects for internal illustrations: funny.pho.to. Visit ‘What the Huck?’ at huckleberryhax.wordpress.com for information about Huck’s other books, including the AFK series. The terms 'Second Life,' and 'Linden' are copyright © Linden Research Inc. Independent authors don’t have large advertising budgets; feedback and ratings, therefore, are the most effective way to show that their work is being purchased and enjoyed: if you have enjoyed this publication, please consider leaving a rating or review at Amazon or whichever other seller you obtained it from. Watch out for the violet five.

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Robots do the funniest suicides!

Life II: Return to Danger

I

T IS the year 4,537,884,895 (give or take a decade) and humankind has succeeded.

We’ve seen it all and done it all, and somehow or another we’ve worked it all out.

There are no illnesses anymore; there are no catastrophes or disasters. Poverty was done away with millions upon millions of years ago, along with ignorance, war and apostrophe abuse. The known universe has 2

been explored, analysed and merchandised, as has the unknown one. Everything there is to discover has been discovered, including dark matter (which turned out to be advertising). Even file sharing has been sorted out. The threat of the unknown is over.

The fear of the unknown is finished. The challenge of the unknown has expired.

We are, therefore, thoroughly bored.

AMAZING METAVERSE Robots do everything these days. They even compile the news, which mostly consists of reports like: "There was an earthquake today in the Vernitcht region of Gthmatsg Five. As predicted. Nobody was hurt, since the evacuation of every man, woman, child, dog, cat, cow and mosquito was completed seven years ago. They could have prevented it, but no-one could be bothered. A spokesandroid for the planet said tonight that a series of aftershocks are scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at 2:37 and that they might be interesting. But they probably won’t be."

At one stage in our history, even the robots were bored. Of course, the mistake we made was to invent emotions for them in the first place. Admittedly, it was quite amusing to watch them taking their initial steps into anxiety, uncertainty and embarrassment, and their subsequent introduction to guilt, low self-worth and depression resulted in some particularly hilarious robot suicides shown for many subsequent years in ‘Robots Do The Funniest Things’. It was around about the point at which they discovered anger and aggression that we stopped seeing the funny side.

We’re bored. There’s no direction any more. The universe still has millions of years left and there’s absolutely nothing to do.

And so it was that the President of the Universe - Cavabund Qwerty - decided that something had to be done. He made a speech on Shakespeare Day (the anniversary of the completion of Hamlet by twelve randomly selected monkeys from Upper Basingstoke).

“My fellow beings,” he began, “Last week, we officially ran out of amusing acronyms.

You all know why I’m here. This perfection has to stop and it has to stop now.

“Here’s our problem: we know we should be happy, because we have so much. But

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we’re not, because none of us know what it was like to have nothing. I don’t suppose there’s any reason any more to justify our ongoing existence,” he continued, grasping the podium with all sixteen of his gold-plated hands (the minimalist ‘jewellery‘ approach went out of fashion a long time ago), “now that it’s pretty much guaranteed. We could just allow life to fizzle out in a yawn, as perhaps the universe intended all along; it would at least be a resurrection of irony: doubly so, in fact, since no-one would be around to appreciate it.” (That got a chuckle from the few hundred or so learning-impaired citizens who hadn’t already figured it out for themselves.) “What we really need is a distraction. We’ve done the time travel thing, but it’s just not the same when you know there’s going to be a happy ending. We’ve tried computer games, sports, virtual sex and ring tones: we’re tired of it all. Everyone has had their fifteen minutes of fame at least three times - and most of us tried to get out of the third slot by making out we had a prior family engagement. Here it is - plain and simple happiness can’t exist without unhappiness.

We’d love to be able to help someone, except there’s nobody around that needs our help.”

The president made a poignant pause, during which he scratched his noise for added dramatic effect.1 “Life, is basically finished,” he announced. “What it needs is a sequel.”

For the first time in over a million years, there was excitement amongst the people.

1 Clearly a reference to the famous 78,456,356 nose-scratch made by Terranessa Yuiop in the Third Trumpet Café on Phartia, during which she decided to go with a Chocolate and Pistachio Surprise instead of her usual Raspberry Tartlet, thereby swinging the balance of galactic economies for several million years; President Qwerty has since been criticised for resorting to such obvious cliché.

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LIFE II: RETURN TO DANGER

The animals were mildly curious too (although the Confederation of Plant Life and Single-celled Organisms demanded more information before they gave the project their full support2). President Qwerty went on to describe the most audacious virtual reality project ever conceived; the crux of which was that anyone who entered it would have their memory wiped out (and backed up on a key drive) so they didn’t know it wasn’t real. The project required the completion of fifteen billion or so virtual planets, not to mention new laws of physics, a whole new range of viral and bacterial infections, and the addition of an extra hour to Tuesdays. One of the last details to be ironed out was the exit procedure - although a tunnel with a light at the end was agreed on by all the developers involved, the debate over the jingle to be played whilst you travelled up it went on for months.

A year later, ‘Life 2’ was ready. President Qwerty launched the software in a live broadcast event to the universe that included singing children, a marching band and a presentation from the production team behind the official soft drink for the event. The president's keynote address was long and dull (later historians would joke, “Did the President's address inspire? No, the Qwerty key bored!”), but even so, everyone counted down in anticipation as his finger hovered over the ‘on’ button. The instant the application was started, all sentient life forms fell instantly into a deep and untroubled sleep whilst their consciousnesses were revived inside 'Second Universe' avatars. It was left to the robots and CPLSO members to run the universe now, which they did between arguments over who had the best taste in shirts.

2 They always were the picky ones.

The robots and the CPLSO members... and Qwerty. A moment too late, the President discovered a long-forgotten clause that prevented him from the neglect of his duties in the absence of a suitable deputy. Furious about this delay (he had hoped to become a leading contender in the race to invent the wheel and maybe, later, the handshake), Qwerty tried to promote the nearest available life-form – a vegetarian daffodil seeking work as a taxi driver – to the post of Vice President.

The robots were quick to intervene. Pointing out that intergalactic law would regard this as an act of war they established a communications blackout around the president with immediate effect and imprisoned all narcissi in a Cuban detention centre as a precautionary measure.

Qwerty was distraught. As a compromise, he was given permission to monitor the new universe from a state-of-the-art control room.

His first act was to flood an entire planet within forty days, thinking the deceased – on their return from Life 2 – would at least be someone to keep him company. What Qwerty didn't realise was he'd accidentally ticked the 'reincarnate' box whilst trying to work out the controls, thinking it was where he agreed to the terms and conditions.

Eventually, the machines allowed him to spend a finite period in the metaverse on the proviso that his memory wasn't completely wiped so that they could pull him back quickly in an emergency. In fact, he was back within just a few decades. “What the hell happened?” the chief robot asked him. “You made all that fuss when we wouldn't let you go and now that we did you're back already?”

“I think I'm better off here, where it's safe,” Qwerty told it. “Humanity is a tough crowd to please. I tried to get them to be nice to each other and they absolutely crucified me.”

I run a detective agency on the east side, down by the docks

Protecting Blackberry Pie

T

HE name's Luck, Hard Luck. You might have heard of me. I run a metaversian detective agency on the east side of Twighlight, down by the docks where the bananas arrive: 'Luck, Luck and Luck, Private Investigators', it's called. My cofounding associates, Good Luck and Bad Luck are each departed from the metaverse now; the latter won the lottery in Real and the former got run over by a bus. You needn't feel sorry for me about that; I hated them both, and they knew it. About the only work Bad ever did was to build the hat stand in our office, and he was the conscientious one. It's a complicated story how we came to be in business together. The short version is I dated both of them once, believing them to be

a) rich, b) cultured and c) female. When I say I dated them both, I don't mean consecutively.

I think it was Good who walked in on me and Bad one day, but it could have been the other way round. The speed with which what should have been a moment of animosity turned into a full-blown lesbian love scene quite surprised me at the time. Their affair was a passionate one, but it only lasted for about a week; I think it was Good who left his microphone on by accident one day, but it could have been the other way round. In a bizarre twist of fate, it turned out that they both lived in the same city in Real. In an even more bizarre twist of fate, it turned out they were both seeing the same girl in Real (that also got found out as a result of a 5

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PROTECTING BLACKBERRY PIE

microphone being left on by accident, but it wasn't words that got overheard that time). In a subsequent meeting that seemed to make sense at the time, we all decided that fate messing with our minds in this fashion needed to be watched, and watched closely; we decided to go into business together. You see, their mutual girlfriend was my sister.

That was all a long time ago; at least a year before the big split, in fact. Now I scrape a living in level one out of investigating broken partnerships and suspected alts.

Every now and then something more interesting comes along, but I don't sit around for it waiting. Bills don't pay themselves, you know. My landlady is a sweet old dear, but her son likes to show her late-paying tenants what the floor looks like close up.

The first case I ever had that crossed over into Real Life was the problem brought to me

by Blackberry Pie, an amazing looking avatar with jet black curls down to her golden crust shoulders and a pout so full it made me think of two enormous blackcurrants being pressed together to the point of bursting. “Are you Hard Luck?” she had asked, standing in my doorway. I have a hundred side-splitting replies worked out for when female clients put an accidental pause in between those two names of mine; sadly this was not one of those occasions. “That's my name, Sugar,” I replied. “What seems to be the problem?” I put my feet up on the table and took my time in lighting up a Lucky. She sat down across the desk from me, her handbag on her lap.

She had white gloves on. I imagined her pulling them off, one delicious finger at a time.

“I need you to do some work for me,” she told me. “It's about my husband.” I waited for loneliness and jealousy to tumble out of her heart, like boxes from an overfull closet.

“You see, I have reason to suspect that in Real Life he's planning to murder me.”

I sat bolt upright in my chair at that.

“RLM?” I said. Pieces of that pie hardly ever

came around. “Are you certain?”

“I have a listening device installed in our house,” she told me. “You see, suspicion is my middle name. Last night I was dancing at Reds and it started firing off text to me: it was my SL husband telling somebody all my RL details: my name, my address; even my telephone number. I never told him any of these things, Mr Luck, yet there he was telling it all to some stranger, along with the times that I come online and the hour that my RL husband goes to bed. And the last thing he said was 'be sure to make it quick'. What am I to do?”

“Did you catch the other guy's name?” I asked, feeling her tears of panic approaching, but all out of tissues.

“The other guy never spoke, at least not in public chat.” she replied. “I checked the security log when I got back home, but there was no record of anyone other than my husband having been there all evening.”

The hitman – whoever he was – sounded like a professional. His knowledge of manipulating the metaverse I was impressed by. His apparent familiarity with killing people outside of it, on the other hand, I found a little disconcerting. I started getting that feeling you have when the guy whose car you've just gone into the back of unfolds himself out of his seat, and it feels like he's standing nine feet above you by the time he gets to your door. But I badly needed the cash, so I asked her if she knew any reason why her SL lover would want to put her six feet below the waterline. “Why do you think I'm hiring you, Mr Luck?” she snapped. “It makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, I know he's taken a new lover recently – and he thinks I don't know about that – but why on earth would that cause him to want to kill me?”

I decided to get acquainted with the SL husband and see if I could find out something about his new girlfriend. Blackberry invited me to a party they were hosting that evening to celebrate six whole weeks of marriage (if

AMAZING METAVERSE you rounded up). I threw on an old alt I keep for just such occasions and spent the first half hour mingling with an assortment of guests that included a copywriter for NBC, the lead guitarist for an Iranian Heavy Metal band and an astronaut on the International Space Station. By nine thirty I’d reached the bar, next to which the husband was sitting at a white piano, singing a song about the longlost mother he had never had. “Don't let my age fool you,” I messaged him privately, “but I have about as much luck with the ladies as the metaverse is stable on a Friday evening.

What's your secret? How do you manage to attract a gal like Blackberry and then hold on to her for so long?”

Joseph Birkensaw seemed to take a liking to me. “You seem like an upfront guy,” he replied. “I'll let you in on a little secret: Berry isn't my only girl. See that brunette over in the corner by the rubber plant? That's Victoria. She and I started hitting it off a couple of weeks ago when we ran into each other at a virtual brit milah. I'm a firm believer in the value of infidelity when it comes to strengthening your marriage. You see, Victoria keeps me energised; in a couple of weeks she'll probably have been replaced by who-knows-who, but Berry is for keeps.”

For a guy who was apparently plotting the death of his inworld wife, he seemed remarkably upbeat about the state of their relationship. I began to suspect that things weren't quite as they had first appeared.

Spotting a gap in the dancers, I made my way over to the mistress named Victoria and asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a room full of shirts like this. At first, she ignored my messages, but when I persisted by reciting the lyrics to Limahl's greatest hits she sent me a stern shot across the bows: “Leave me alone, Harold; I'm not in the mood tonight and, in any case, I'm taken.”

'Harold' – Harold Good, to be complete about it – was the identity of the avatar I was using that night, a clever piece of wordplay constructed to reflect the irony of days long

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past, when I had played by the rules and tried my utmost to care for everyone, and in return people had called me Good Ol' Hard'; it's a joke that no-one has ever spotted. I asked Victoria who she was 'taken' by, and when she continued to ignore me I said, “Listen here, Vicky; the game is up. I know all about you and Josephine over there.” It was a momentary play on words, something I often do to add to the disorientation that comes with unexpected confrontation, but the effect it had on Victoria was electric. “Josephine?” she cried. “You mean to tell me that's a *woman* behind that guy?”

“So,” I said coolly, deciding to play the lie out a little further, “I can see that shocks you far more than the whole being found out thing does. Do you mean to say you never did voice together in all this time?”

“No, we didn't,” Victoria replied. “But that was because *I* didn't want it.” The next line was her big mistake: “I can't believe she's been going out with a lesbian.”

Before I logged off that night I got Blackberry to give me her RL name and address, and her itinerary for the next week.

As soon as I knew she was going to be staying with her elderly aunt the following evening – whilst her RL husband was away on business – the final piece of the puzzle fell neatly into place. Straight away, I telephoned her local police station and we built the trap together. Sure enough, the following night, a man dressed in black was apprehended attempting to break into Aunt Mabel's conservatory, a semi-automatic pistol in his hand and murder in his heart. And a first edition copy of Tom Sawyer in his pocket, apparently.

Later, when Blackberry logged back on, it was a heavy heart that she brought with her to my office. “Oh Mr Luck,” she said, “is it true that you knew all along? Is it true that you're the one who tipped off the police that my RL husband was trying to kill me?”

“Sometimes it's careful, meticulous detective work that leads you to the vital clue,

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PROTECTING BLACKBERRY PIE

Sugar,” I told her, “and sometimes it's just saying the right word at the right moment.

When voluptuous Victoria thought for a second that Joseph was a woman, her first – and therefore most honest – reaction was to try to make sense of what it meant that you were going out with her/him. In that instant, I realised that Victoria was noneother than your RL husband, and that the question he was actually pondering in that moment was *Did Berry know*?”

“You mean,” Blackberry said slowly, “he was disorientated by the possibility that his RL wife might have consciously chosen to have a relationship with another woman.”

“It was the one thing he'd not anticipated,” I confirmed. “He'd been so caught up with trying to prevent Joseph from finding out that he was an Adam that it never occurred to him that Joseph was trying to prevent him from finding out she was an Eve. Of course, I soon put him straight on the whole Joseph's genitals issue, just in case he was tempted to change his plans on the back of this new information.”

“But what about the conversation I overheard?!” she cried. “It was Joseph I heard giving my details to the hitman, not my RL husband!”

“First of all, there was no hitman. That conversation was said to thin air, and for your benefit. You see, he knew about the listening device. Second of all, the speaker wasn't Joseph at all, but your RL husband logged in on Joseph's account. That was the whole purpose of Victoria in the first place – to milk Joseph gently for all the details he needed to impersonate him for a few minutes. Most people use family names or favourite places as their passwords, so it was just a question of getting to know him well enough. You see, the whole thing was an attempt to set Joseph up for your murder whilst he cashed in on your life insurance.”

“But how did he imagine the police

would believe Joseph capable of such a thing?” she insisted. “Where is the motive?”

“That's a question I believe I can answer,” said Joseph, who was standing in the doorway to my office all of a sudden.

“Berry; I've been a fool. I never realised just how much a person can find out about you from the merest morsels of RL information.

Once he knew my name and the town I live in, he must have looked me up and crossreferenced each of his hits with everything else he knew about me. In the end, he managed to find out my wife's name and looked up her mobile telephone number. At precisely three thirty yesterday afternoon she got a text from your mobile, Berry, telling her you loved me and wanted me to leave her.

The short version is she left me, Baby. I suppose your husband thought that would make your murder look like an act of anger or revenge. And now it's just the two of us, and there's nothing preventing me from saying to you what I've wanted to tell you for a long time, now. I love you Berry, and always have done. Let's hook up in RL and make babies.”

“Oh Joseph!” cried Blackberry, “I love you too!” And so it was, with two real marriages broken, that a pretend one got made real. I got invited to the wedding as guest of honour, but I didn't attend. By then the Morcov Morcanovic case was hitting the fan and, in any case, I'd started to have that uneasy feeling you get when you suspect you might have been outwitted completely. You see, it occurred to me, a few days after I'd spent my fee (on women who will never love me) that things had worked out rather well for Blackberry Pie in the long run; I started wondering just where her phone had actually been at three thirty on that day. After all, her husband had entertained inworld the possibility that Joseph was a Josephina, and that wasn't the sort of mistake you'd expect from someone who'd already looked their victim's wife up in the telephone book...

Tall, bronzed and slender, with a mop of golden hair on her head.

Did Dandelion Dickens die?

B

USINESS in the metaverse is nowhere near as lucrative as people seem to think it is; since it's not just for money that we idiots put ourselves to work inworld, however, the cogs continue to grind nonetheless. In the private investigation business, it's the unusual cases that you're always waiting for and the endless stream of is-my-SL-husband-havingsex-on-the-side-as-an-alt? cases you put up with in the hope that eventually something interesting will come along. Of course, I can only speak for myself; I'm not on good terms with my competitors (don't even get me started on Stransky), so I have no clue what it's like for others.

My little office by the docks is slap bang in the middle of Twilight, a sim that was once

the gleam in the eyes of metaversian importers and seagull avatars alike. That was before the big split, of course, and now the warehouses are mostly empty and the cranes stand dormant. I hear stories from Level 2 of multi-million dollar deals and prim allowances in double figures for a single square meter of land; but here the most activity you see is when a temporary newcomer discovers the broken model of camping and sets up a new set of seats in the old shrimp packing depot. I don't mind it so much; it reminds me of the days when then metaverse was young and everyone's minds were being blown just trying to conceptualise the smallest part of it all. The down side is the lag goes off the scale, but I tolerate this, 9

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DID DANDELION DICKENS DIE?

because I know it won't last. It isn't long before the hourly rate starts to drop and the campers begin their inevitable migration; before long, yet another wannabe metaverse millionaire has hit virtual bankruptcy on an idea that seemed just too good to be true.

And was.

And the Shawford's Shrimp place is up for sale again. As I noticed it was coming in to work one morning, about a year or so ago.

I remember seeing Dandelion Dickens coming onto my radar later that morning at around eleven fifteen. Tall, bronzed and slender, with a mop of golden hair on her head, the six month old avatar was looking through the broken windows when I cammed in on her from my office. Before long, she'd been joined by one of those topless Hercules guys with a chest that looked like it had been inflated with a foot pump and enough violent body art to depict the entire Thirty Years War (up to and including the Treaty of Münster).

Call me picky, but I've always had a disliking for guys with torsos you could carve your initials into. Fistsmasher Jenkins had long, black hair and firearms attached to all of the available space on each of his five limbs.

Sure enough, the two were partnered.

Fistsmasher's entry in Dandelion's profile described him as 'The kindest, sweetest man in SL.' I would have laughed at the many layers of irony, except I'd seen it all a hundred times before and irony just wears you down in the end.

As it happens, it wasn't a camping venue that Dandelion set up in the warehouse, but a high class escort agency. I was delighted.

Straight away, I contacted the couple to welcome them to the region, wish them luck with their venture and make inquiries regarding discounts for friendly neighbours.

Dandelion's reply was non-committal. She sent me an invitation to the opening event and a card to pass around to any aspiring voice escorts I might know who were looking for work. It was the only contact she and I would ever have. The launch date came and went,

and a week later there was still no sign of custom at 'The Dancing Dandelion'. A few more days passed and then, in my doorway, stood Fistsmasher Jenkins. He was wearing bling that could have lit my office from space and he stood in a genital-clutch pose that broadcast both the magnificence of his manhood and his fear for its theft; despite all appearances, however, he was a weak and broken man, and I saw it immediately. “Mr Luck,” he said, “I didn't know who to come to. I remembered seeing your office here.

Can you help me? My Darling Dandelion has disappeared. I've been waiting and waiting for her to come back to me, and then I received this message from a friend of hers that she's died in RL.” I offered Jenkins my condolences and asked him what all of this had to do with me.

He spent the next two minutes typing and deleting, and in the end I got bored and decided to put him out of his misery. “You want to know if she really did die, don't you?”

I told him. “Let me guess, her supposed departure from the mortal world took place just after you'd advanced her a wad of Credits for the business. How much was it? Ten grand? Fifty?”

“A million,” Fistsmasher said, miserably.

In RL at that moment I was sipping on bourbon over rocks, and I nearly choked.

“What did she want to build,” I cried, “the Hanging Gardens?”

“I know I've been a fool, Mr Luck. I know it's almost certain I'm the victim of a confidence trickster. What I want you to understand is that I have to *know* for certain. Whilst there's even the faintest sliver of chance that some of the things she told me were for real, I can't write off her memory.”

“Then you've come to the right person,” I told him, mentally adjusting my fee in an upward direction whilst I spoke. What a schmuck. I spent the next few minutes drilling him for everything he knew about his absent flower: her friends, her favourite SL hangouts; in particular, any bits of

AMAZING METAVERSE information she might have let slip about her RL during their acquaintance.

The first lead I attempted to follow was the guy who'd sent Jenkins the news about his partner's demise, but – surprise, surprise – 'Derrick Tenterhooks' was both (a) brand new to the metaverse and (b) offline. It seemed to me that there was nothing more to investigate – that Tenterhooks was quite clearly an alt put together by Dandelion so that she could break the news impersonally – and I contemplated sending a message to the Governors there and then. But things were slow that day and my agreed hourly rate required multiplication by a two digit number if I was going to cover the month's rent and put by enough for a couple of Saturday evening distractions in blond, so I decided to pull at a few of the other threads for a little while longer and see if any new dimensions emerged. I teleported over to the spot given as Dandelion's favourite hangout and found the place – a dive bar in the north of Quarton Fairlight – decked out on all four walls with photographs of the dearly departed. A sign over the bar read, 'Tonight: A wake for dearest Dandelion'. I decided to hang around for the event and took up residence in a corner booth at the back; I took my time over an all-you-can-eat steak dinner served up by the automated menu and waited for people to start turning up.

By nine o'clock there were a good fifteen or so avatars standing around in groups and sharing anecdotes. No sign of Derrick Tenterhooks. I messaged the person closest to me and asked him if he knew how it was Dandelion had come to log out of her first life once and for all. It turned out the details were vague. “I only know what Derrick told us,” he said, “which is it was an accident of some sort. Poor, sweet Dandelion. To think of her body mangled in wreckage like that...” He typed in some extra text to say that he was shaking with tears and I typed in a pat on the back and a box of Kleenex tissues. I moved on to the next person. “Dandelion?” she said.

“It was an accident of some description, I

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think. I don't think he told us what sort. The poor girl. She had such plans, too. I really think she'd have gone places.” It turned out that no-one in the room seemed to know exactly what sort of an accident it was that 'dearest Dandelion' had had. I got the picture.

Tenterhook – aka Dandelion, of course – had given details so non-specific that no-one would ever know how to go about verifying them in real life. It was a classic, but it was hardly a masterpiece. Unfortunately for Dickens, I'd seen this tactic pulled off many times before and there was nothing remotely original about this particular interpretation.

I was about to leave when a thought occurred to me. In all probability, I reasoned, Dandelion would have known all about this wake; in all probability it would have been advertised in a group notice and, in all probability, Dandelion had arranged it so that notices received offline got re-directed to her email address. Just like we all do. And who could resist coming to their own wake and hearing people talk about you posthumously?

So it occurred to me that there was a very high probability that one of the avatars in this room was noneother than Dandelion Dickens herself. I went through all the profiles, oneby-one, looking for the tell-tale day-old sign of an avatar specially born for an event, but the youngest age in the room was a little over four months. So then I asked each person present about each of the other people present, using the simple line, “I don't know anyone here; do you know any of these people?” Each person told me the people they recognised; I wrote everyone's name down on a piece of paper and started up a tally for each time a name got mentioned. By the time I'd got round everyone, there was only one name not mentioned by a single person in the room: Tulip Tornado, a pink haired avatar with five months on the clock, but just a couple of groups to her name. Of course, Tulip had claimed she knew everyone in the room.

I opened up a new message window and

12

DID DANDELION DICKENS DIE?

hit her with the truth. “Roses are red and violets are blue, Tulip's a Dandelion; I'm onto you.”

“What are you talking about?” came the reply. I warned her that if she tried to log off I'd be sending everything I knew straight to the Governors. “Just pay Fistsmasher back his million Credits,” I told her, “and you'll never hear from me again.” There was a long pause. Finally, Tulip spilled her confession all over my screen. “I don't have the money, Mr Luck. You have to believe me. My exboyfriend stole it. I didn't know what to do.

If I'd told Fist he would never have believed that the money had been taken. So I knew our relationship was over: either it finished in tragedy with its dignity intact or it finished in anger with him believing my love had never been real. I couldn't have that, Mr Luck; I love him with all my heart. I preferred cutting every last link I had with the metaverse to that – my friends, my inventory: everything. I'm not a dishonest person. I never for a moment thought he would suspect my death unreal.”

How had Dandelion's ex relieved her of the burden of a million big ones? She explained to me what they had done one evening, four months earlier: to liven things up a little, they'd exchanged login details and each had spent the company of the other in the avatar of the other. Dandelion had occupied Roberto moving in and out of Dandelion, if you get my meaning. A couple of weeks later they'd split up, but often they ran into each other at the very bar we were standing in. Roberto had learned about the plans she had for the Shawford's Shrimp place and the loan from Fistsmasher. He'd waited for her to log off one night, then logged into her account with the password she'd given him before and never then got around to changing. Of course, her password also enabled him to log into the accounts area on the metaverse website, and from there he'd obtained her real life name. He then created a

new alt using her real life details, which he then paid the million Credits to. From the Governors' point of view, it would look like Dandelion had just transferred the money from one of her avatars to another. Except that the alt had a different bank account linked to it. In real life, you see, Roberto was an identity thief. By the time Dandelion next logged on, the money was gone; a note left in her inventory explained how he'd done it, but even that wasn't evidence she could use: the note had been a centrally held texture pasted onto the side of a prim – an old trick that's the equivalent to linking to rather than uploading a picture. Once Dandelion had read the note he deleted the texture from inventory and all she had left was a piece of pine.

Of course, Dandelion could prove none of this. I only had her word that any of it was true. But I believed her. Roberto, of course, was nowhere to be found. I contemplated for a moment contacting the Governors to see if anyone had created a new account recently with the same IP as him, but I realised he would be sure to be using an anonymous proxy server and, in any case, the questions they would ask before even considering such a request would not be questions I imagined Tulip would feel comfortable answering. I tried to talk her into telling Fistsmasher exactly what she'd just told me, but she begged me to keep the secret. “It could never be the same,” she told me, “I would never feel uninhibited like we used to, knowing what I did to him. Please, Mr Luck. Let it go. Let it be.”

I called the big guy over the next morning.

He stood in my doorway, silhouetted by the morning rays. “Did you find anything, Mr Luck?” he asked me.

“Take a seat, son,” I told him. I gave him the details of a road accident I'd read about a few days earlier in my local rag. It was almost as though I could hear the sigh of relief. Sometimes, the worst news is the best that you can possibly hear.

She rezzed a kitten on the counter beside us.

The suspicions of Violet Shrinking

T

HE corner lease at the end of Blizzard Street in the cheerfully titled region of 'Pestilence' was a simple affair. A counter cut from a single prim stood three quarters of the way into the dimly lit room, as though someone was expecting a queue. That was it. And then there was Violet Shrinking, standing rigid behind the counter as though her arms were bound to her sides with invisible tape. She had black, plasticine hair.

She had skin that looked like it had been coloured in with crayons. She wore a mauve, high-necked dress tied off at the waist in a crimson bow. It wasn't quite the default avatar, I supposed, but Ruth wouldn't have had much to be jealous of in a face-off.

And yet, Violet was no newbie. “Basic shop; basic avatar,” I said, by means of introduction as I walked through her doorway. “Something tells me you're not one for embellishment, Miss Shrinking.”

“I'm not one for any sort of periphrastic non-necessity, Mr Luck,” she replied. “At least, not in this account.”

It turned out the room wasn't quite done rezzing and a collection of pictures of domestic animals started to de-blur on the wall behind the counter. I cammed out momentarily to re-read the store-front sign.

“You're a taxidermist?” I said, surprised.

“Isn't that a little antiquated a job for the metaverse?”

“I'm a digital taxidermist,” she corrected, coolly. “I create virtual replicas of real life pets.”

“Dead pets?”

“Not necessarily, Mr Luck.”

I thought about Popsicle, the Jack Russell I'd had when I was a kid. That little guy had seen me through all the way from the first tooth to grow in my mouth to the first one I'd knocked out of someone else's. I wondered if 13

14

THE SUSPICIONS OF VIOLET SHRINKING

I should ask Shrinking for a quote. But the thought of a prim Popsi running around in artificial circles under my desk made me shudder. It wouldn't be right. So I asked her how I could be of service.

“It's nothing especially out of the ordinary for you, I'm sure,” she told me. “It's my lover, Mr Luck. I need you to find out about his activities. I suspect he might have another woman.”

This mannequin had a boyfriend? I thought to myself, incredulously. From where I was standing, she seemed about as desirable as a case of small pox. But there was more. Said Shrinking, “Violet doesn't have a man, of course. I'm talking about a different account I run. Don't suppose all my avatars look like this, Mr Luck. As it happens, I enjoy variation. I have quite an eclectic collection.”

“I'm sure it's very dull,” I said. “I mean full,” I added hurriedly, hoping the typo correction wouldn't be mistaken for intentional epanorthosis.

“Such savoir-faire,” she said slowly, sarcastically, walking around to my side of the counter as she spoke. “Are you going to help me or not? I have a hamster to stitch.”

“I'll need some details about the guy first,” I told her, keeping an eye on the distance between us. “Why do you think he's cheating on you? Do you suspect him to be using an alt?”

“Yes, Mr Luck, I suspect him to be using an alt,” she replied. “How else would you explain that a man who asserts he makes his living from the metaverse is hardly ever actually inworld?”

'How else would you explain?' The motto of conspiracy theorists the world over.

“Take it from me, Miss shrinking,” I said, “for all things there are always more explanations than you'd imagine. Think carefully about starting this. You could end up breaking something you don't want broken.”

“I'm through with thinking,” said

Shrinking. She rezzed a white and ginger kitten on the counter beside us and I watched, fascinated, as it started to come to life. Her work was amazing, far better than I had expected: the movement, the textures; everything. It was like watching the real thing. When it fell off the edge it even landed on its feet.

She gave it a ball of wool to play with.

“You see, Mr Luck?” she said. “Perfection is the only thing that interests me. The very idea that he might be whispering his flesh into the ears of someone else just maddens me.

And people expect to see us together.

Instead, I have to turn up to events by myself and explain away his absence to 'business'. I can't bear it. But if you can provide me with definitive proof that he's innocent then I'll accept that his intentions are sincere and take a replica with me to functions. And if he really is a cheat: so be it.”

“A... 'replica'?” I asked, feeling distinctly uneasy about the presence of this word in that sentence.

“Would you like to see it?” she asked.

“I've been working on him for weeks, but he's nearly finished now.

He should be completely indistinguishable from the real thing. Unless, of course, someone tries to IM him. But then again, no man of mine should be replying to other people's IMs when he's with me anyway. Don't you think?”

She rezzed a full-sized, fully clothed man between us. My jaw dropped in astonishment.

The detail was incredible: everything was perfect, right down to the animation overrider and the floating name tag. But it wasn't the skill that stunned me. As I looked at the avatar, I felt the tightening of tendrils around my neck.

“Meet Aldric Asylum,” she said. “My boyfriend. Now then, Mr Luck: will you take the case or won't you?”

“No,” I told her. And I got the hell out of there.

And straight away I logged back in again as Aldric Asylum. I had a girlfriend to dump.

She was lying on her side, her arm draped across her naked hip.

A night with Higgs-Boson

H

E stood in the doorway to my office wearing an overweight avatar, complete with sweat patches under the arms. I could almost smell him. I'll never understand why some people can't bring themselves to recreate themselves in an manner at least broadly approaching pleasant; then again, some folk get their aesthetic kicks from all sorts of unlikely directions. And at least this was a variation on the herculean lumps of meat that were the normal representation of manhood to visit, either to outline to me in stumbling words their suspicions of virtual infidelity or to communicate to me with fists an unhappiness at my exposure of their own. Rotherham HiggsBoson sat down in the chair opposite – I could almost hear the sigh – and I removed my feet from the desk and put down my paper with its concealed copy of 'Avatar Housewives' inside.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Higgs-Boson?” I asked him.

“This is very hard for me, Mr Luck,” he began, apparently pun unintentional, “You see, I'm a particle physicist.”

“Working in Rotherham, by any chance?” I

enquired, always keen to impress upon new clients my astonishing powers of deduction at the earliest opportunity.

“Living in Rotherham,” he replied flatly. “I work at the University of Sheffield, but that's unimportant. The point is, I'm not given to any sort of belief in the paranormal or any other such nonsense.” Whilst he spilled his angst across my desk, its woodwork already soaked in the despair of so many others before him, I did a quick image search on particle physicists at Sheffield; I got quite a few different hits, but about a quarter of them were women and of those remaining only one resembled HiggsBoson and resembled him to a tee. Professor Oliver Byrne. The likeness between the picture on the research interests page and the avatar sitting across from me was quite remarkable.

His technical ability, then, far outstripped his powers of imagination – or, at least, that was what I was meant to think. I made a note of that.

“But what's a scientist to do when confronted with the evidence of his own eyes?” HiggsBoson continued. “Books moved from their 15

16

A NIGHT WITH HIGGS-BOSON

shelves in the morning. Papers tipped onto the floor. The television turned on. And now this!”

“If you're talking about things that go bump in your real life night then I should remind you that I'm a metaverse investigator,” I told him carefully. “Real life stuff is out of my jurisdiction. In any case, it sounds more like you should be consulting a priest rather than a detective.”

“You don't understand, Mr Luck,” he told me.

“This spirit... this poltergeist... it was one thing when it was just messing about with my physical stuff... but now it's somehow managed to find its way into the metaverse.”

“Tell me more,” I said, mentally ticking the 'loony' box on the case notes for this one.

“It started happening last week.

My metaverse partner asked me why I was logging on so late at night and not responding to her IMs. The times she gave me all corresponded to times when I was asleep in bed! At about the same time, all the moving of physical objects in my house just stopped. Then, two days ago, I logged on to find my avatar looking like this!”

He passed me a picture. Whilst it rezzed, I wondered what was the more improbable detail of this insane story – the notion that a spirit could log into the metaverse or the possibility that an avatar like Higgs-Boson could somehow attract a partner. Then the self-portrait blurred into focus: a demur brunette dressed in stockings, lace panties and a tattoo that looked like someone had written the complete works of Harold Robbins across her taught pale skin in black crayon.

“I need you to track this person down, Mr. Luck,” Higgs-Boson told me, sending me his friendship whilst he spoke, including location and object editing rights. “Find out what she wants. I can't talk to her myself. I don't know.

Maybe I can set up an alternate account for her.

Surely some sort of peaceful co-existence is possible?”

A pre-empt. It had to be. Naughty Richard had had his sexy late-night alter-ego discovered by his girlfriend and this was the ludicrous story he'd concocted to try to cover his tracks.

Approaching me was presumably part of his attempt to convince her of his integrity. It never ceases to amaze me the sort of nonsense the

exposed adulterer can dream up and honestly think believable. But I accepted the friendship – plus my normal down payment (multiplied a few times by my 'bollocks factor') – and told him I'd try to make contact that evening. Seven hours passed and finally I saw him log off. Then another hour and nothing. Then another twenty minutes. Finally, at ten to two in the morning local time, the little blue box announced his reappearance on the grid. I waited five minutes and teleported over to his location.

There she was, all skin and lust. She was lying on her side on a cheap sex bed in an even cheaper motel, her arm draped across her naked hip and her gaze upon my face from the moment I materialised. “Hey there, Oliver,” I said in IM, wondering what reaction the use of his RL name would evoke. For an age, I watched the message that s/he was typing something in reply.

Finally, the message, “Take me” appeared.

“That's an awful lot of typing for just two words,” I told her. “Ain't deception a cognitive bitch?” Another wait; even longer, this time.

Finally, she replied with, “Small keys. Hard.”

And then again, “Take me.”

So Rotherham Higgs-Boson became the most non-verbal virtual horizontaling I ever had. No better way to get to know someone, I of course reasoned. But, in fact, I learned nothing at all.

The next day, I waited for the male version to show up, but waited in vain. Just before his usual log-off time, I checked the internet again to see if I could find out more about the real life driver of this psychopath.

“Particle physicist killed in motorway accident,” the news item read. In several local publications. On the way to work that morning, apparently. So that was that. Case closed. But enough Credits banked to cover three months' rent or a night out at Zeta's lapdance bar (the latter being unquestionably the more likely expenditure), so all in all not a waste of time in the slightest.

Or so I thought. Until ten to two in the morning, when the blue box announced the login of Rotherham Higgs-Boson and an IM window opened with the words, “Take me.”

And did so every subsequent day at the same time until I cancelled the friendship. Some cases are better left uninvestigated.

If the right guy is listening

B

RANDY. That was his name for me.

The first time he used it he was looking at me through the bottom of an empty whiskey glass and I was dancing on my table at Stacey's, hanging on the crawl of the minute hand and the hundred Linden paycheck at the top of the hour.

WBGO was playing slow tunes on the radio and the digital raindrops were beating on the window to get in. “Say, Brandy,” he'd said, “I bet you've seen a burned out bum or two in this seat before. I bet they've sat here filling up your ears all evening with stuff nobody else cares to listen to.” And I replied, “Honey, if I had a Linden every time *that* happened, I might just be able to buy that dress I just know you'd like to see me in. But don't take that as me complaining.”

And Hard Luck had laughed – or, at least, that's what I'd imagined him doing.

A Lucky Strike had appeared in his mouth and three new fingers of bourbon in his glass. He dropped fifty Credits in my jar and switched to IM, saying – whispering – “You know, Sugar, when guys like that spill their innermost thoughts it can be worth something if the right guy is listening.” Of course, I knew exactly what he was hinting at. It's not unusual to get private eyes sniffing round your ankles for information where I work. So I asked him who he was investigating and he gave me the name of the guy who'd been sitting at my table just a half hour earlier. Arnold Sanction, a two-year-old avatar with a fresh face and worryingly optimistic hair.

“Yeah, I know him,” I said, “I suppose you must have been camming in on this spot of mine whilst he was here earlier. That's very naughty of you, Mr Luck. My clients would be most put out if they knew that sort of thing went on.”

Luck said to me, “I'm sure they've practiced it themselves on many an occasion. Now, why don't you let me know how much the log of that cosy little conversation the two of you were having is going to cost me? You do keep logs, don't you? Maybe that nice little dress will be yours sooner than you think.”

“Honey,” I told him, “the price I'd be asking, if ever I were to contemplate such a distasteful transaction, would move us well out of clothing market. Just so that you know, we'd be talking real estate. And yes, I do keep logs; what sensible girl in this line of work doesn't? And what makes you so certain that the dress I have in mind is little?”

And Hard Luck smiled – or, at least, that's what I imagined him doing. “You said I'd like to see you in it,” he answered.

It was a game he played, to tease with casually dropped lines like that.

Sometimes they led somewhere and sometimes they didn't. That night, they led somewhere. We did five minutes of voice at the crucial moment. It was amazing; I actually heard his chair creaking as he went rigid against it and I cried out so loud he probably didn't need an internet connection to hear me.

We met up again the following night, but when I told him I was undecided about selling him my log he became distinctly uninterested in any repetition of the previous evening's activity. I played along.

We took a tour of the rezzables, pretending to have fun on oversized kitchen appliances. And the night after that we sat in a field full of corn and talked vaguely about made-up childhood experiences. But the night after that we spent three full hours engaged in virtual foreplay and sensual, breathless, electronic fucking.

17

I was dancing on my table at Stacey's 18

AMAZING METAVERSE That was how it was between us; never knowing at login just how the night would end, and the uncertainty made it all the more electrifying. Of course, I knew he was only with me to get his hands on the log. I knew it was just a long game to him, and he knew I knew it too. I didn't care. My body felt like someone had lit the touch paper beneath it and ignited every cell within me. I lived with the facade for as long as I could. I relished it.

“Look,” I said to him, a week or so later, when the subject of the log once more came up. “What do you want to know? Let me look through what I have and I'll tell you if I find it.”

And Hard Luck looked at me – or, at least, that's what I imagined him doing – a long, careful, piercing gaze that was full of calculation. “Are you quite certain you don't know already, Brandy?” he said, eventually.

“If what I'm looking for is in there, you might already know what it is.”

“Sugar, I think you're overestimating the attention I pay to guys like Sanction,” I replied, “not to mention underestimating the number of conversations I have in the metaverse. But perhaps you're right. If it was something glaringly obvious I suppose I would have known what you were after the moment you spoke his name.”

“You mean to tell me,” he said, “that you haven't gone back and looked at your log even once since you knew I wanted it? Aren't you in the least bit curious?”

“I'm not interested in Sanction,” I told him.

“I'm interested in you, Luck.”

“If you're not interested in Sanction,” he replied, “then give me the log and forget about him.”

“I do have principles,” I said. I would have slapped him for that if I could. “I respect the confidentiality of private messages.”

“Your loyalty to a guy you know practically nothing about is touching,” Luck said, trying to manifest some sort of moral fiber, I guess. “What would you say if you knew about the wife and child he should be supporting? What about your principles then?”

19

“I made you an offer,” I told him. “I'll look through the log if you tell me what I'm looking for. If that's not good enough, then you can forget it.”

And Hard Luck sighed – or, at least, that's what I imagined him doing. And he looked at me once again for a good long time. And finally he said, “Your friend's RL name is Thomas Staple. Two months ago his wife – my client – kicked him out for indiscretions it would ordinarily be unprofessional of me to go into. Let's just say it involved discovering him naked in a bath tub filled with his favourite fruit.”

“She threw him out for that?” I said.

Personally, I like a man who knows what he wants.

“He wasn't alone in the bath tub,” Luck explained.

“That makes a difference,” I said. “Go on.”

“The Staples had a joint account with substantial savings accumulated,” Luck told me. “It required two passwords. As soon as her husband was out of the house, my client went straight to the bank to change her password – showing, I might add, considerable irony in her choice.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “she went for the name of the fruit?”

“It was the last word he would expect her to choose,” Luck confirmed. “But that was when she discovered that her husband had also changed his password – and several months earlier, at that.”

“So neither of them can get at the money without the other's password?” I said. “A nice little problem. And you think he might have mentioned his password to me when we were talking? It's not the kind of thing you just drop into conversation, Luck.”

“It's a long shot, I know,” he answered.

“But my client told me Staple shared far more with his friends inworld than he ever did with her. That's why she created an avatar and looked for a metaverse investigator. She also said that, whenever he had to think up a new password for something he'd keep using it in

20

IF THE RIGHT GUY IS LISTENING

conversation subsequently as a way of helping him to remember it.”

“So you think it might still be slipped into the conversation, even if he didn't articulate it as his password?”

“Like I said, Sugar, it's a long shot; but it has to be worth a try.”

“Why don't you just create a female alt and seduce it out of him yourself?” I asked him.

“You don't think I tried that?” Luck answered. “The short version is he figured me out. His suspicions were aroused when I refused to voice with him; he put me on the spot and asked me my bra size, and it took 30 seconds to find the relevant page on Wikipedia and nearly five more minutes to get my head around that confounded system. Of course, he was long gone by the time I came back with an answer. I've tried again with other avatars – spent a small fortune on ever enticing shapes and skins, in fact – but every time I contact him now he tells me he'll only speak to avatars he initiates communication with and who are at least six months old.”

Of course, I had no intention whatsoever of sending Luck the log of my conversation with Staple. But I was running low on Credits and the money on the table was getting too good to ignore. I told him to give me more

time to think about it. I logged out, sat myself down and typed out in notepad a whole hour's worth of steamy conversation. It was a masterpiece of erotic fiction, and by the time I was done I could barely sit still in my seat. I logged back in straight away and IMed Luck before the prims had had a chance to colour in around me; I told him if he wanted the transaction to go ahead he'd have to take me there and then, and ask no questions. Two minutes later our naked pixels were intertwined and the text between us was fast and urgent and passionate and, um, full of typing errors. I knew it would be the last time we would make love. When we were done I sent him the fake log.

Once he'd finished reading, Hard Luck laughed – or, at least, that's what I imagined him doing. I wondered how far into it he'd got before spotting my forgery. It hardly mattered.

“Goodbye, Brandy,” he said. “You take care of yourself.” A Lucky Strike appeared in his mouth and fifty Credits in my jar, and then he left me, dancing by myself on my table at Stacey's, listening to the slow tunes on WBGO. ...Which left me with one last thing to do.

I sent a private message to my client. Good evening, Mr Sanction; it's Lucy here. Mission accomplished. The password is Strawberry.

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I was logged in at the middle bar stool at Frederick’s

Double doubled doubled

T

HOUGH it would turn out that I was not the only guy dancing with Cassandra Corvette at Frederick’s, neither was she the only girl dancing with me. I was logged in twice at the jazz and swing nightclub, initially taking up both the middle bar stool and the spot at the railing three feet from the door, where hopefuls lounge in their best tuxedos and not-that-bothered poses.

Meanwhile, I was logged in a third time back at my office, where Honeycomb Crumbled was finishing off a story she could have summarised in a tenth of the time it actually took her. Clients just love to think their stories are interesting.

“Mr Luck,” she said from the seat on the other side of my desk, the leather worn from the outpourings of her many, many

predecessors, “are you going to take my case?”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, pausing to whisper in Cassandra’s ear a sweet nothing about the route being taken by my fingers over her shoulder blades. “You think some of the visitors to your club are employed by a competitor to pick people up and take them to their place instead?”

“Frederick’s used to be the most popular Friday night destination on the grid,” Honeycomb said. “The last few weeks, my numbers have dropped and dropped.

Meanwhile, Dominoe’s visitors – for example – have been increasing at about the same rate as mine are falling. I can quite assure you that I’m doing nothing different. The same popular DJs and live artists perform. The 21

22

DOUBLE DOUBLED DOUBLED

same standards of dress and behaviour that established our reputation are enforced.”

“Well maybe that’s your problem, sugar,” I pointed out, quickly typing in a comment about the neckline of my second dance partner, Burnished Oak, and how if it plunged any lower my zipper might get itself confused as her navel piercing (the dress code at Frederick’s really wasn’t that exacting).

“People get fed up with same old same old.

Had it ever crossed your mind that maybe Dominoe’s is just offering something new that the punters want to check out?”

“But that’s just it,” she replied. “There’s nothing whatsoever remarkable about that place at all. The music’s piped in from an easy listening internet radio station. There’s no dress code. The build is a heap of badly scaled and misaligned textures, and the place is crawling with advertisements. If my guests are going there of their own accord, Mr Luck, then I am utterly at a loss as to why.”

Burnished Oak wrote back that my zipper was only an obstacle to what her navel actually wanted to feel pressing against it.

Meanwhile, Cassandra Corvette mentioned goosebumps rising across the skin on her back. Neither of them had made any suggestion yet about a change of location, but we’d only so far been dancing for a couple of songs.

Halfway through Honeycomb’s lengthy introduction, I’d decided to set the meter running and check the joint out before anything became ‘official’. Cassandra and Burnished were the only two unoccupied avatars when I’d got there, but that wasn’t to say any member of the four already dancing couples hadn’t snagged their partner earlier and weren’t at this very moment whispering about alternate venues.

And right then is when it happened: as though by mutual private agreement with each other, both of my dancing partners asked both of my representatives if we’d like to relocate to “somewhere a little livelier”.

Thirty seconds later, my alts where in a different place, waiting for the greys to colour

in.

But only one of them was Dominoe’s.

I of course have – as would any good metaverse detective – a veritable army of alts.

I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them all: in addition to all the IDs and passwords, there’s their gender, sexuality, appearance, age, attractiveness, species and identifiable personality traits to record. Then there’s the places they’ve hung out in on previous cases and the names of key people they met there (with an asterisk to denote if I they might be inclined to try to kill me if they ever see me again). I try not to take them where they might be recognised.

Whilst Trigger Masilovi materialised in Dominoes with Cassandra Corvette, then, Gutter Watkins found he’d been teleported by Burnished Oak to a skybox at four thousand metres, one of those New York industrialstyle apartments with fake sunlight painted onto the floorboards. Whilst she pressed herself up against me in front of the window, removing her clothing a piece at a time to reveal black lace underwear, she asked me if I was Dominant or submissive.

I consulted my spreadsheet. “Switch,” I replied.

B

ACK in the office, Honeycomb Crumbled was answering by herself some of the questions my primary hadn’t yet got around to asking, like if she’d actually verified that some of the dancers at Dominoes were previously her guests at Frederick’s. It was no longer an important question, since Cassandra and Trigger were now locked in slow dance number three across black and white tiles whilst an ad for Cialis played over the music stream.

Burnished, I decided, was a dead end – or would be after a half hour or so. Whilst she arranged pose balls that required a standing position from me for the next few minutes, I asked Cassandra what was so good about our new venue in a way I hoped made it looked

AMAZING METAVERSE like I was calculating the probability of the night ending in significantly smaller room, not to mention a horizontal position. After a fashion, she replied just that there were more people there. In the office, I put it to Honeycomb that sometimes all it took was just one or two people in the right moment to check some other place out – maybe a sim crash had occurred at Frederick’s one evening and a couple had relocated simply out of impatience – and the subsequent movement of the masses was no more a conspiracy than the flocking of birds.

“I see I haven’t yet convinced you of the malice in all of this, Mr Luck,” she replied.

“Very well. Then I will tell you how I came to know it. I’d hoped not to have to tell you this yet; I would have preferred you discover it independently so you wouldn’t think me paranoid or a drama queen. The fact of the matter is, I’m the victim of a shake down.

There’s a group going round extorting money from venues in the metaverse. You pay them monthly and they ensure your reputation ‘remains intact’. I was approached a couple of months ago by one of their representatives.

And I refused to pay, Mr Luck.”

Metaverse extortion. Suddenly, this case was altogether more interesting. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked Honeycomb.

“What do you mean by you thought I’d think you a drama queen?”

“You know how things work in the metaverse, Mr Luck,” she said to me. “I start talking about my customers leaving due to an extortion racket and the next thing you know the blogosphere is lit up with talk of all the paranoid rationalisations of a failing manager.

Gossip is the true currency of the virtual world.

“This group is very secretive,” she continued. “It of course does not officially exist. The guy who visited me was a one day old newbie and the very next day his account was deleted. He told me I’d be visited on the third day of every month by another newbie – a different one every time – with the

23

characters 4 and 7 somewhere in their name.

I was to pay them without any conversation, and within five minutes of them entering the venue.”

“And you told him you wouldn’t pay?” I asked her, grateful for the long remark because it gave me time to express my appreciation of Burnished’s lip work.

“I told him to get lost,” she replied after a pause, during which time Cassandra ran her fingers down the front of my shirt at Dominoe’s and Burnished just removed my shirt altogether. “He was asking for 25% of my takings.”

“Do you have a log of this conversation?”

I asked.

“No,” she replied. “The conversation was conducted entirely in voice. He told me at first he’d broken both his wrists in a fall in RL and couldn’t type, and then asked if we could go into a private call so he could ask me something.”

“Not so newbie that he didn’t know how to operate voice, then,” I commented.

“Exactly.”

“So tell me, honey,” I said, quickly switching viewers to type some repeated mmmms into both of my other windows, “what exactly do you want from me out of all of this?”

“Proof that these people exist!” she exclaimed. “Proof that they’re ruining my business! Then I can go to the authorities and not fear being laughed at for inventing conspiracy stories to hide poor management skills. This is my reputation in the metaverse, we’re talking about, Mr Luck. I’ve invested too much in my identity here to see some wannabe mafia group destroy me.”

“My fingers find the hook and clasp of your bra strap,” I typed into Burnished’s box whilst Honeycomb wrote all that out. To Cassandra, I typed, “My fingers gently trace the contour of your jaw.” A busy night for fingers.

“This is likely to be a long case,” I told Honeycomb. “I should warn you, I don’t

24

DOUBLE DOUBLED DOUBLED

come cheap. It might be more cost effective to accept their terms. I’m just saying.”

“Over a year?” she replied after a moment. “Over ten years? After they increase their demand by 50%? By 100%? In any case, I don’t care. If this brings those bastards down, it’ll be money well spent.”

But I wasn’t paying attention to what she’d written. Instead, I was preoccupied with what Cassandra had just written: “Go ahead and unhook my bra, baby.”

Cassandra. Not Burnished. I very nearly missed it. An accidental crosspost. Cassandra and Burnished, I realized suddenly, were the same person.

That was mistake number two.

TOLD Honeycomb I’d take the case but could make no promises; she agreed and left. Cassandra apologised for the crosspost, making out it had been meant for her boyfriend who’d just come online for the first time in a week; she excused herself quickly to take care of him. And then Burnished typed in, “Take my bra off, baby.

Take it off now.” Which was mistake number three.

In my game, there are no absolutes; there are only hints and suggestions. I didn’t know for an absolute fact that Burnished and Cassandra were the same person, but the timing and specific wording of the crosspost was highly suggestive of that. Similarly, I didn’t know for certain that the human behind them had changed the wording of her response to my bra entree between avatars because she was aware that both her companions were the same guy, but the circumstances warranted an exploration of this possibility. Why, I asked myself, had she not just typed in the same response she’d previously accidentally crossposted? Why change “Go ahead and unhook my bra, baby” to “Take my bra off, baby. Take it off now”?

The only reason I could conjure that fit in any way was that she did indeed suspect Trigger Masilovi and Gutter Watkins to be the same

I

guy: by typing something different into each of our windows, perhaps she thought she might throw that same guy off the scent of realizing both his ladies were the same gal.

That was what my hunch was telling me, but it didn’t make any sense: how could she possibly suspect that the two of us were actually the one of us?

There were metaverse devices that could read the IP address of an avatar’s computer – I had one myself installed under the desk in my office. Two avatars with the same IP address would be highly suggestive of them being one and the same person. Sure, one guy could live next door to the other, be jumping on his unprotected wireless connection and just so happen to be in the same metaverse location at the same time as him, but the chances of that happening were about as likely as my expense claims being met. So far as I knew, you had to have land rights to install such machinery. Cassandra and Burnished weren’t even staff at Frederick’s, let alone management. Had someone invented a new device that could be worn and carried around?

Assuming that Cassandra/Burnished did suspect Trigger and Gutter to be the same person, why had she taken one to Dominoe’s and one to a private residence? Had she come to suspect the deception before or after we’d left Frederick’s? What would have happened if she hadn’t suspected a thing?

And what, if anything, did any of this have to do with Honeycomb’s extortion racket?

But you don’t go ten years in the business without learning when to recognise the smell of a lead. Whatever their role was, they were connected somehow. I just knew it. The question was, what did they suspect me of and what, therefore, were they trying to get me to believe?

I logged Trigger out and brought on another of my alts – Baggage Cardigan, last used eight months previously to obtain pictures of a notable metaverse celebrity in a

AMAZING METAVERSE not uncompromising predicament. But, this guy I brought inworld on my real life neighbour’s wireless connection (I figured since she’d been stealing my milk for the past month she could spare a little bandwidth). I checked I could still connect to it on my laptop and it worked, but only if I put it on the other side of the room.

Good enough. Now we’d see what happened when someone fresh and definitely not an alt turned up at Frederick’s. I parked Baggage on the end bar stool with a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of bourbon at his hand. And waited.

T WAS a little bit frantic for a while, what with all the back and forth trips across my lounge to attend to Burnished’s increasingly short and urgent typings, and the status of Baggage at the bar. Within five minutes he was approached by – wait for it – Cassandra, mysteriously returned from her boyfriend love-in, but now wearing a different outfit (perhaps to give her a few extra seconds of non-recognition time in case Trigger should show up again). She picked me up with the exact same line she’d used on me before. This time, she couldn’t possibly know I was the same guy she was performing scripted sex on in her other window. I accepted her offer and let her lead me out onto the dance floor.

All the while I turned over in my head what impression it was this person was trying to give me if my theory was correct. It seemed a paradox. If s/he was connected to the extortion racket and if they in any way suspected me to be collecting information about this (I had to assume the worst), why had they not gone out of their way to convince me there was nothing going on?

Why had they instead both taken me away from Frederick’s, thereby lending credence to Honeycomb’s accusations?

But only Cassandra had actually taken me to and promoted Dominoe’s. Burnished, by taking me back to her place, had effectively only

I

25

reinforced as a behaviour my coming to Frederick’s. I wondered if this was a much more subtle ploy: in addition to the gradual transportation of Honeycomb’s clientele to other venues, also take people away who’d later return; people who could deny, if they were asked, that they’d been encouraged to go elsewhere by the avatars they’d left with.

A clever strategy, sure; but it still didn’t explain why Cassandra/Burnished had executed it if they suspected me to be onto them. Unless…

Within another five minutes of dance, during which time Burnished and Gutter completed their matter arising and commenced on their post-coital cigarettes, Cassandra had complained about the dullness of the venue and relocated us once more. But this time it wasn’t to Dominoe’s. Perhaps she was worried Trigger might still be hanging around. We materialised instead at a rave dive in a basement in an urban decay sim, prim rats scuttling around on the floor between the dancers and fake vomit. Cassandra took a moment to change her outfit, her red gown with its carefree left-side slit down the entire length of her body blurring into a yellow piece of fabric about ten per cent of its predecessor’s surface area.

“What’s so great about this place?” I asked her, keen to push for some sort of rationale. “The music is terrible.”

“It ain’t about the music, honey,” she replied after a fashion (Burnished was busy typing in a smoke ring aimed at my penis), “it’s about the people. I love the people here.

That lot at Frederick’s are like cardboard cutouts. I’m through with that place. This is where you want to bring yourself if you actually want to meet people and have a good time with them. Trust me on this.”

With that, I decided that my night’s work was done. I told Cassandra I had a migraine to avoid and left before she got a chance to reply. And I planted a lingering kiss on Burnished’s lips and told her I had to get up early in the morning.

26

DOUBLE DOUBLED DOUBLED

Which I did. For the next day was the third of the month. I planned on spending it at Frederick’s.

I

GOT there at six, which is four hours earlier than I usually like to reacquaint myself with the world of consciousness. I guess Honeycomb took the exact same view of mornings; the proprietor of Frederick’s turned up at quarter past nine, by which time I’d casually chatted with all eight of the regulars and greeter staff who rezzed by.

“Mr Luck,” she said. “I’m surprised you turned up so… obviously. Don’t you have an alt you can use for your snooping?”

“Hardened private detectives like to go dancing too, sugar,” I replied. “Deep down, we’re just as soft and fluffy as anyone else.”

“Really, Mr Luck?”

“Not even remotely,” I said. “But it makes a great pickup line.”

“I’d rather hoped that you were at least here to work on my case,” she said, her use of the past perfect injecting somehow that air of professional disappointment, “not just looking to remove yet another of my guests from the premises.”

“Calm yourself, honey,” I told her. “I’m just waiting for newbie 47 to show up.”

“You think I’ll get a visit?” she asked. “I told him rather unambiguously not to return to this place.”

“That was before you lost half your customers,” I reminded her. “He might think you’ve warmed to the idea since then.”

“I’ll never pay, Mr Luck. Never. He can run me into the ground for all I care.”

“All I ask is you keep him here long enough for me to get a fix on his IP.” I rezzed a new pair of sunglasses and pointed them out to her. “Picked up these babies last night after our conversation. A friend of mine just invented them. Portable IP detection.

When I say ‘friend’, of course, I mean associate. When I say ‘associate’ I mean someone who really wants what I know about his love-life to stay locked up in this cynical

head of mine.”

“Portable IP detection?” she repeated. “I never knew such a thing was possible.”

“I didn’t know myself until last night,” I told her. “Only the cutting edge when you hire me, sweetheart.”

“So you can tell what my IP is?” she asked. I read her off the numbers. “That’s amazing. You’re quite correct.”

“Just remember to promote me to all your friends,” I told her, knowing that she wouldn’t.

“Well in any case,” she commented, “I don’t think he’ll show up. Hang around as much as you like, but I think it’ll just be time wasted.

Why don’t you go over to Dominoe’s and make some enquiries there?”

“Already on it, sugar,” I replied. I had one of my oldest alts perched on the piano stool there, making conversation with a camper who’d ‘cleaned’ at the joint for nearly a year. “Honey?” he was saying. “Yeah, we see her from time to time. Her and the boss have been at war over punters for as long as I can remember. Between you and me, pal, I think they’re more interested in destroying each other than getting any actual custom.

The word is things aren’t so good for her place right now. Rico must be laughing himself sick.”

“But I think you might be surprised,” I told Honeycomb. “Few extortionists expect the first meeting to go well. Demonstrating the effectiveness of their product is fairly standard practice.

“Look by the door,” I told her, before she had a chance to reply. And it was a case of perfect timing.

A day old newbie was entering the establishment. His name was Alton74.

Honeycomb was suddenly silent. I ran through the workings out she’d be going through in her head, wondering how quick she’d be. After about a minute, I asked her, “You still there, sugar?”

“It looks like you were right, Mr Luck,” she said finally. If my hunch was correct and

AMAZING METAVERSE she was bright, there was only one conclusion she could come to (other than it actually just being some innocent newbie with the right numbers in his name): I’d recruited someone to pose as Alton74. Always assuming, of course, I was the first private detective she’d come to with this case.

“Get me out of here,” she said suddenly.

“Please. I’m scared. Take me back to your office.” I teleported us directly to my desk and within two minutes we’d swept it clear and the distraction sex had commenced, her power suit vanished, but only from the waist down. Meanwhile, on my laptop across the room, Cassandra Corvette appeared from nowhere, approached Alton74 and asked him what he wanted. Mistake number four, but people don’t think clearly when they’re under pressure.

“I want to dance with you,” I typed as Alton. “But not here. I know this great new place that people are flocking to. Come with me and I’ll tell you something you don’t know about the owner of this club.”

Of course, she couldn’t resist. I sent her a teleport from the builder’s platform I’d erected a hundred metres above the office in which Honeycomb and I were makin’ sweet, sweet whoopee. She took it without checking the co-ordinates and appeared in front of me.

Ten seconds later, she realised her (fifth) mistake and disappeared, but a second was all the gadget under my desk required.

She worked it out for herself.

Honeycomb/Cassandra/Burnished stood up and re-rezzed her skirt. “There’s no such thing as a portable IP detection device, is there, Mr Luck?” she said.

“I’m afraid not, sugar,” I replied. “Just my little invention to dissuade you from attempting to bring on your own newbie 47, but it also confirmed to me that you had an IP device installed at your club – how else would you know your own IP so readily?”

“How did you know it?” she asked.

“Wrote it down when you were here last night,” I replied. “I have my own device

27

installed right here.”

“You’re very clever, Mr Luck,” she said.

“And lucky,” I said. “You took on too much last night. All those pauses from you whilst your alts were typing: that was your first mistake. But I wouldn’t have realised it were it not for the Burnished/Cassandra crosspost and the way you then reworded it.

Everything was just the two of us, all along.

What a double act we made.

“I realise that Rico – Dominoe’s owner – probably actually was stealing your customers. Only thing is, you didn’t just want to win against him; you wanted him destroyed. It’s amazing what you can dig up on other people’s old blog posts. I found some very pretty pictures of the two of you getting married a couple of years ago.”

“He betrayed me,” she said. “And then he had the gall to make out it was me who’d been unfaithful to him.”

“So you cooked up the idea of a protection racket,” I said. “Run your own business into the ground and put word out it was the work of an all-powerful extortion group, then approach Rico with the same deal you tell everyone you refused. Getting me to poke my nose in was just for added authenticity. If Rico knew you’d been destroyed despite a good fight, he’d be more likely to take the threat seriously.”

“And he would have agreed,” she said.

“I know him. He’d have paid through the nose to avoid being grouped in the same category as me, and he’d never have known I had him right in the palm of my hand.”

I’d like to say it was a surprise to me that all her previous investment in Frederick’s amounted to nothing, but bitterness is my business and there’s little it can do to surprise me anymore.

I gave Honeycomb the conditions for my silence and she agreed.

And she teleported away from my office and back to her empty club; and I, once again, was grateful to have demanded my first week’s fees up front.

28

Alt Out

W

ANTED: Real Life drivers of virtual avatars for over dinner conversation. It was unusual for me to be reading a newspaper, far less a local one and much less still its personals; a delayed train, a weak phone battery and a discarded copy of The Record on the bench next to me, however – and no other reading material to hand – left me with few other choices. Are you local to Basingstoke? Are you active in the Metaverse? As it happened, I was both. I’m looking to create a dining club for six to eight residents, meeting monthly for good food and stimulating conversation. I liked the idea immediately. Ring Edward, it said; I made a note of the contact number on the back of my hand.

A day’s work later I noticed the fading numerals and the memory returned, as it had with each successive hand wash of the day (only then to evaporate as I stepped out of the mens’ room and let the business of the moment back into my thoughts). Two more washes and it would be gone for good. I rang the number and asked for Edward.

“Ah,” said a gruff, but sculpted voice at the other end. “You’re ringing about the advert. Very good. Now, before you say another word, there’s a very important rule that I intend all members should follow – always assuming, of course, that you choose to become one. The rule is, you must never refer to your real life name during conversation. That includes the conversation we’re having right now. Am I clear?”

He expanded on his rules at the start of our very first dinner, some three weeks later.

Edward was an imposing man, tall and elderly, but with an ageless vitality. He sat at the head of the table and the six of us fell naturally into position, three to each side.

Whilst the wine was being poured, he tapped his fork against an empty glass and waited

with a smile for us to turn.

“My friends,” he started. “I’ve greeted each of you individually, of course. I wish to say just a few more words to mark the start of our acquaintanceship; after that, there will be no more standing to occasion, I promise.”

“He’s a bit egocentric,” the woman to my right whispered. We’d exchanged a hello of sorts when we’d sat down.

“I like egocentric people,” I murmured.

“They don’t waste mental capacity worrying about what others think of them.”

“That must be nice,” she said.

The rules were established thus: Absolutely no real life information was to be shared; avatar names were to be used at all times, though it was up to individuals how much of their metaverse identity they shared (and pseudonyms could be used if they didn’t want to share anything at all); everything spoken at the table was in the strictest confidence; finally, it was recommended that none of us met up inworld to prevent the formation of cliques. These policies agreed, we next introduced ourselves. The woman to my right, Mary-Anne Middlemarch, was a fashionista blogger, as was the middle-aged man immediately opposite me, though he introduced himself in the first instance as a photographer. When pushed for a name, he winced a little and checked that everyone agreed on the confidentiality policy (we all nodded vigorously). “I appreciate the option to come under a false name,” he said, “but what on earth would be the point if I had to just make stuff up all the time? Very well. My name inworld is Jennifer Bit. I play a female avatar, and none of my virtual friends know I’m actually male.”

Edward rubbed his chin for a moment about this. Meanwhile, the man to my left who had introduced himself as Raw Concrete, furniture builder, asked Jennifer, “So what are 29

30

ALT OUT

you? Gay? Bi? Transgender?”

“None of the above,” replied Bit, a little stiffly. “You are most welcome here, Jennifer,” said Edward, before further comment could be made. “Please feel free to adopt whichever gender role you feel most comfortable with.”

That left club owner and skin designer Indigo Williams to Edward’s left, a young woman with purple hair, yellow lipstick and black fingernails (she actually did look like an avatar), and Rainy September to Jennifer’s left, who declared that she did nothing at all in the metaverse except explore new places and party. I, of course, introduced myself as a writer.

“And what,” asked Edward, “do you write about, Leonard?”

“Anything in the metaverse that takes my fancy,” I replied, hoping that sounded grandiose. In fact, I didn’t really want to go into the details because people’s eyes generally start to glaze over when a writer they’ve never heard of starts talking about their work. I consider it an important quality as a writer to recognise that.

“And what do you do, Edward?” asked Mary-Anne.

“I role play,” he answered. “Which makes me similar to Leonard, because role play involves a lot of writing. But it also makes me similar to everyone around this table, since we are all, are we not, remaining in roles we have meticulously created.”

“Right,” Jennifer said and nodded his/her agreement “Speak for yourself,” said Rainy. “How I am inworld is no different from how I am in real life.”

“You’re an explorer in real life, then?” I asked her.

“Careful now!” said Edward sharply, pointing his index fingers at each of us. “That question leads to real life discussion. If that happens I will simply get up and leave, and it will be the last you ever see of me. Sorry to be dramatic. Rainy, my dear,” he continued,

more gently, “I don’t doubt for one moment that how, for example, you treat people is no different in the metaverse than it is out here – I would hope that that’s broadly true of everyone around this table – but that’s not really what I mean by role. Perhaps… ‘identity’ would have been a better word.”

The food came and, for a moment, the conversation went quiet. Presently, Edward commented, waving theatrically as he did a forkful of roast beef in the air, “So what I want for us to do, friends, is to discuss metaverse issues; to chew the fat over its unique curiosities; to keep each other’s counsel.”

“A council of avatars?” I asked.

“A dining club,” Edward asserted, “nothing more.”

“Would that make us a fraternity?” said Indigo, speaking from the lip of her wine glass.

“It would make us a dining club,” replied Edward.

“In any case,” commented Raw, who was clearing his plate with alarming efficiency, “fraternities are men only.”

“Historically,” said Indigo. “There’s no reason I can see why a male-female organisation with similar aims couldn’t exist.

Not today.”

“Maybe not,” said Raw, “but you’d have to call that something else.”

“What would you call it, Mr Concrete?”

Jennifer asked.

Raw actually tore his eyes from his dinner plate for a moment to consider the question.

“Framaternity?

Framternity?

Friternity?

Biternity? I dunno.”

“Is that with an I or a Y?” Indigo asked.

“How the hell should I know?” he replied, his attention now well and truly back on the pizza he had ordered. “Ask someone who’s not dyslexic.”

“In any case,” said Edward, “it just makes us a dining club.”

Raw said, “Well, since the subject of identity came up earlier, I have a metaverse puzzler that’s been playing on my mind the

AMAZING METAVERSE last couple of days.” He flicked an olive to a gathering pile at the side of his plate and carved himself out an enormous rectangle of pizza, which he then proceeded to fold in two.

“Why did you order olives if you don’t like them?” Rainy asked him.

“By themselves they’re diabolical,” he replied, “but I like the way they make the cheese taste.”

“Share with us your problem, please,” said Edward. “Perhaps we might collectively be able to shed some light on it.”

“Well it’s not really a problem as such,” Raw said through his mouthful. “I just can’t figure it out. You see, I got outed as an alt the other day and I can’t work out what gave me away.”

“You have an alt?” asked Rainy.

Raw looked at her. “You don’t?”

“Absolutely not.” She looked down at her plate quickly and skewered a carrot.

“Well good for you. I do.”

“So who called you?” Indigo asked.

“A friend I have in both circles,” Raw replied. “But there are only four or five in that overlap. As Raw, almost all my time is spent building. My alt’s my ‘off duty’ avatar and I mostly mix with other people when I’m using it.”

“And your friend didn’t tell you what gave you away?”

“Nope.” He flicked another olive to one side. “She told me not knowing would be my punishment for not having told her who I was.”

“Good for her,” Rainy commented.

“Bad for me,” Concrete retorted, “It’s driving me nuts!”

“Why didn’t you tell her?” asked MaryAnne, who I noticed at this point had hardly started her turkey salad.

“Why should I?” Raw demanded. “What I do in the metaverse is my own business. It’s not like I’m partnered or anything; who has the right to know?

“In any case,” he continued, “I don’t even have these people in my friends list in my alt

31

account. They just happened to be in the places I visited as him.”

“But they were on your list in your primary account,” I said.

“Oh sure. And Lilly’s one of my oldest pals.”

“Why didn’t you just lie when she asked if it was you,” asked Indigo. “It’s what I would have done.”

“In the first place,” replied Raw, “she didn’t ask, she stated.” He paused to swallow.

“In the second, not telling her and actively denying the claim are two different levels of lie. I could live with a lie by omission, but telling her she was wrong when she was right would be diabolical.”

“Even so,” said Jennifer quietly, “you still have the right to privacy.”

Indigo swirled her wine glass in the air thoughtfully for a moment. “Perhaps it was what you were wearing that gave you away.

Do you shop in the same places for both your avies?”

“Yes, I was wondering the same thing,” Mary-Anne commented.

“I haven’t bought a new outfit for Raw in at least a year.” The builder carved up the remaining half of his pizza into three precisely equal slices. “What do I want clothes for?”

“And your alt?” asked Mary-Anne.

“I buy for him all over the place. I don’t ‘shop’,” he added, forming the air quotes with his temporarily foodless cutlery. “I think up what I want to look like and then I hunt the look down in web stores. I don’t care where I get it from, so long as it looks like what I want it to look like. I can’t bear all the standing around in metaverse shops just to see if there’s something I like there.”

“Typical man,” said Indigo, and got nods of approval from Mary-Anne, Rainy and Jennifer. Raw just shrugged.

“Okay, so forget about the actual clothing,” she continued, “what about your skin and shape? If you hate experimentation, did you just stick with what you knew when you created the new avatar and buy those

32

ALT OUT

again before you got going on creating an outfit?”

Raw thought about that for a moment, chewing whilst he did. “Now that you mention it, I think I did buy the same brand of shape and skin when I created him as what I was used to, though definitely not the same specific products. It doesn’t make any difference, though: I’ve changed both at least twice since then. I haven’t worn those for at least a couple of years.”

“Hairstyle,” said Mary-Anne. “Good quality hair in the metaverse is so much harder to find for men than it is for women. Do you use the same hair on both avatars? A woman would definitely notice that.”

“Well, you’re right about it being hard to find anything worth wearing,” Raw said. “But it’s not like it’s impossible. Raw wears blonde dreadlocks. My alt has four or five different styles he alternates between – none of which are dreadlocks.”

“Are they all the same designer, though?”

“I don’t think so,” he replied and shoveled more pizza into his mouth.

“I bet it’s your animation over-ride,” wagered Jennifer. “Guys use about three.

You’re either a foot-to-foot or a jiggler or a crotch-clutcher.”

Concrete dismissed all this immediately.

“In the first place, I dispute your claim: there’s loads of good AOs out there for men, though I know the sort of thing you’re talking about and the crotch one is diabolical.”

“I didn’t say there was an absence of choice,” grumbled Jennifer, “just an absence of choosing.”

“In the second place,” Raw continued, “I use completely different animation sets for my two accounts. My building avatar has to remain still whilst I work: if he moves in front of small things I’m editing it drives me mad.”

“Well then, it has to be something about the way you write chat,” I said, pleased to be owning the query concerning words, “the way you say stuff or the type of vocabulary you use.”

“Actually I did think about that,” Raw replied, waving his fork at me whilst he spoke so that a mushroom slice fell onto the table cloth next to my plate of ravioli (I generally tend to choose pasta when eating out with people I don’t know very well; it’s just the safer option). “The thing is, when I’m working as Raw I really don’t chat all that much. And when I do, I tend to talk technical stuff related to building: my building, my friends’ building, builds I’ve seen, and so on. It’s not that I never chat informally, but it just doesn’t happen all that much.

“Now in my alt, on the other hand, I’m much more sociable. Well, the whole point of creating him in the first place was to have more fun. I’d even go so far as to say I force myself to take part more in local chat. It’s a completely different interaction.”

“What about your emoting style?” Indigo asked. Chat is one thing, but emotes can reveal your style much more clearly. Unless you’re a writer-” she looked at me on this word and I could swear she was dangling almost invisible quote marks around it, “-it’s like a fingerprint.”

“Simple,” he replied. “I never emote as Raw.” “I’m guessing you don’t voice in both accounts either,” said Mary-Anne. “That would be too obvious.”

“I don’t voice in either,” Raw said with a grimace.

I wasn’t convinced by his dismissal of my point about writing style and said so. “It has to be that,” I insisted. “It’s just something you’re not aware of.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, “but I’m telling you, I talk in two completely different styles in there.”

“Well I still think it’s something you were wearing,” said Indigo. “Maybe you don’t consciously shop in the same places, but you could still have ended up wearing the same label.”

“If so, then it was a complete coincidence,” Raw replied. “And in any case,

AMAZING METAVERSE what if I was? Plenty of guys must go around wearing the same designer as others. It’s too slim a connection, and she was definite.”

All the obvious ideas depleted, the conversation suddenly lulled. I looked at our host, who had been taking in the whole thing with a large, satisfied smile on his face. “What do you think, Edward?”

He leaned towards me. “What I think, my dear fellow, is that this little idea of mine has already exceeded my best expectations. We must make this a regular occurrence.

We must.””

“Just a shame nobody could solve my problem,” Raw said and commenced his assault upon the final slice.

Our host put down his cutlery and dabbed at the side of his mouth with his napkin.

“Well, perhaps I might be able to help you there.”

“Edward, don’t tell us you’ve gone and worked it out whilst we’ve all been making fools of ourselves,” said Indigo, smiling for the first time that evening.

“Hardly fools, my dear,” said Edward.

“All very helpful lines of enquiry, I assure you. I must agree with Leonard, however, that the most likely clue would have to be something said.”

“Fine,” said Raw. “But what?”

“Something – a single word, perhaps – which you might use as the situation demanded in both social conversation and discussions about building.”

“Like I said,” protested the builder, “I can’t think of anything.”

Edward smiled. “We are so rarely aware THE CONSTRUCT

33

of our own mannerisms. Did you know, my boy, that on three separate occasions this evening you’ve used the word, ‘diabolical’ to indicate your disapproval of something? One could just as easily describe a building as diabolical as a behaviour or predicament.”

Raw’s fork, with its final mouthful of pizza, stopped halfway to his mouth.

“Diabolical,” he repeated. “I do like that word.

Really? Do you think that could that be it?”

“Oh come on,” said Rainy. “That’s even more tenuous than the branded clothing. It’s not like he said it every other word.”

“Indeed,” said Edward, “except we’re not actually talking about a word that ever has been said in the metaverse by our friend here.”

He removed a ball point pen from his jacket and handed it to Raw with an unused paper napkin. “Be a good chap and write it down for me, would you?”

Raw frowned. “Well,” he said, “I’ll have a go. You really should be asking someone who’s not dyslexic.”

“Ah,” I said, watching.

“The word itself,” said Edward to Rainy, “would indeed probably only arouse at best a mild suspicion. But if there was something else about how the person wrote that word…”

He held up the napkin, on which was written, “Diabolicle”.

“That’s not how you spell it, is it?” Raw said miserably.

“I’m afraid not, my boy,” Edward replied.

“But it would scarcely matter in the vast majority of contexts. And I have to agree with you completely that it is a very fine word indeed.”

BY HHH

The impossible snapshots

F

OR THE second meeting of the Avatar Dining Club, our host Edward set up a laptop at the far end of the table. For some reason, perhaps because we were all still relative strangers and perhaps because we were using the same restaurant in Basingstoke (and, at that, the same table), the other six of us had taken the positions we’d more or less randomly chosen at the first meal. Mary-Anne Middlemarch, a fashion blogger, was to my right, Raw Concrete, a builder, was to my left, the man who called himself Jennifer Bit in the metaverse sat opposite me and to his/her respective left and right were Rainy September, a clubber and explorer, and Indigo Williams, a club owner and skin designer.

That meant Edward sat at the head, as 34

before, and the laptop was positioned opposite him. On its screen was a roundfaced man in his early thirties with a week’s growth of beard and neatly parted hair. As Edward took his seat, the man tucked a napkin into his collar. “Everybody, this is Takin,” Edward announced. “He is to be our guest for the evening.” We all said slightly uncomfortable hellos and Takin returned the gesture in a strong Welsh accent, adding “Well, Takin’s not my real name, of course. I feel a little uncomfortable introducing myself with that name in the flesh.”

“Not exactly the flesh,” Raw commented, as he eyed up the menu.

“Now now, Takin,” Edward said.

“Remember the rules: here we all assume

AMAZING METAVERSE the character we adopt in the virtual world.

There’s to be no real life information shared at this table.”

“I’m Jennifer, by the way,” said Jennifer, somewhat underlining that point.

We took that as our prompt to introduce ourselves in turn. And then the starters came.

It was a little odd, to say the least, to be tucking into food prepared for us by a chef whilst Takin went to get his supper from the microwave. Edward enquired politely about the distant meal and our distant diner guest obliged us all by holding up the box in front of his webcam. Beef lasagne for one, with slices of white bread on the side. I tried not to make too much noise when I cracked open my crusty roll and took my first sip of a delicious chicken and asparagus soup. An uncomfortable silence settled and, after a minute or so, even Edward started to look distinctly restless, perhaps worried that he’d tampered with the format to our meeting too quickly.

“Anyway,” said Raw, though a mouthful of garlic bread, “you were right about the whole spelling thing, Edward. I asked her. She thought it was hilarious it took seven people to work it out.”

“Work what out?” asked Takin, his personal volume not quite right.

“Raw got spotted as an alt by his girl,” Indigo said to the screen. “He couldn’t work how she knew, and it turned out it was his diabolical spelling.”

Raw growled. “She’s not my ‘girl’.”

“So you say,” said Rainy.

“And,” he added, “I’m dyslexic.”

“Which means nothing more complicated than ‘problems with words’,” Indigo stated. She had smoked salmon for her starter. I detest smoked salmon and the smell was turning my stomach a little.

Raw growled, “Why don’t you try, ‘problems with words despite years and years of trying to read and spell better.’?”

“Do you get that thing where the letters

35

jump about?” Mary-Anne asked, leaning forward so she could see around me.

“No,” he replied.

“So what is it like?” asked Rainy.

“Remember when you were learning to drive and it was really hard because you had to keep everything in your head?” We all nodded. “Like that,” he said, “only for reading instead of driving.”

“In any case,” I commented, “it didn’t take seven people to work it out: six people failed and Edward succeeded.”

“Oh my dear fellow,” said Edward, brushing my compliment away like it was a crumb fallen from the broken breadstick he held in his hand, “don’t be so dismissive of the initial questioning: I couldn’t have seen the answer without all of your very helpful enquiries.”

“So you say,” said Rainy.

“Tell everyone here about your online identity, Takin,” said Edward, directing our attention back towards the computer. Takin paused to wipe tomato sauce from the corner of his mouth (I was desperately relieved that he had noticed it) then said with a shrug, “I make cars in the metaverse.”

“What sort of cars?” Raw asked, with interest.

“The cars I grew up with, mostly. I just finished a beige Austin Maestro today – the first car I ever went in.”

“Keeping up with the orders must be a challenge for you,” said Indigo, dryly.

Takin chuckled. “Well, I don’t only build piles of British junk. I have a whole range of 70s and 80s cars: Citroen, Ford, Vauxhall, Volkswagen, Volvo, Peugeot 205 – my 205 is quite a seller, actually.”

Jennifer sighed suddenly, happily. “I had a lot of fun in my old 205,” s/he said.

“There you go, see?” said Takin with satisfaction. “People like the memories they get from messing about in old cars they used to own. It’s not just the exteriors I do either: I spend a lot of time in research to make sure I get the fittings and fabrics right too.”

36

THE IMPOSSIBLE SNAPSHOTS

“A new metaversian application,” said Indigo. “Re-own all the stuff you once had to get rid of.”

“I have memories of the back seat of a Ford Orion I’d prefer stayed firmly in my forgotten past,” commented Rainy. Which led to a few moments of a slightly awkward silence.

“Why the Maestro, then?” asked MaryAnne. “Have you done all the good cars?”

“Oh, that was just for me, see?” Takin replied. “I needed a bit of cheering up.”

“Really?” said Edward. “What’s wrong, old friend?”

Takin reddened slightly. “Well, me and Sophie split up, Edward.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. You two were the perfect couple.”

“I take it this is an online relationship we’re talking about?” queried Indigo.

Takin nodded. “Don’t be sorry for me, Edward,” he said quietly. “Actually, I’m surprised you hadn’t already heard.”

“My connections to the community gossip – nor, indeed, my energy for it – aren’t quite what they used to be, I’m afraid.” Edward rubbed his chin for a moment, massaging the short growth of white beard there, then wagged his finger at the laptop. “Have you been a bad boy?”

Now Takin reddened much more fiercely. He started to speak, but Edward cut him off abruptly. “Don’t answer that; I shouldn’t have asked. This is a conversation you and I need to have privately, not out in public.”

Takin sat up straight. “It’s not exactly public here though is it, Edward? In any case, the pictures are all over her facebook for everyone to see. And they do say confession is good for the soul.”

“Though not necessarily good for my appetite,” said Indigo.

“There’s pictures?” said Jennifer.

“Lots of pictures,” said Takin miserably.

“Though how they got taken I’ll never know.”

“Generally speaking,” said Raw, as he accepted his pizza from the waiter, “it involves a camera of some sort.”

“Well I know that, of course,” Takin snapped. “But they got taken at my skyhouse, see? The only person who could have taken them was the lady I was with at the time – and she swears blind it wasn’t her.”

“She’s lying,” said Indigo straight away, waving a forked carrot dismissively. “She set you up. She’s a detective. She’s probably not even a she. No offense,” she added, looking at Jennifer.

Jennifer sat up straight. “Why would I take offence?”

“But I’ve known her for years,” argued Takin. “Mellia and I have always been mates, but when she was unattached I wasn’t and vice versa. Why would she set me up?”

“Well then it’s obvious what happened,” said Raw. “Whoever it was that took the pictures zoomed in on you from far away.

That’s hardly difficult in the metaverse.”

“But I told you I was at my skyhouse,” said Takin firmly. “I own the land down below it and I’ve set my parcel’s settings to private so no one looking in from the outside can see avatars on the inside. Anyone who zoomed in on the place would have seen it empty. Only I can change the settings.”

“You might have changed them once and forgot about it,” Raw suggested.

“Well of course it was the first thing I checked once the photos got sent to me the next day,” said Takin. “But they were still set to private.”

“These photos,” I said, “I take it they’re“ “Of my indiscretion, yes,” Takin finished, bristling slightly. “Well, one of them.”

“Oh, Takin!” Edward said, despairingly.

“Serves you right,” said Rainy, firmly.

“No sympathy here.”

“If I wanted sympathy, I’d tell you about the endless arguments Sophie and I had

AMAZING METAVERSE gotten into,” Takin said. “Or I’d tell you some of the names she called me.”

“Then you should have ended it with her,” Rainy replied. “Simple.”

“I know that, and I’m absolutely not trying to defend myself. All I really want to know is how she did it.”

“Just out of interest,” said Raw, as he sprinkled yet more parmesan over his four cheese supreme, “what names did she call you.”

Takin reddened again. “I’d rather not say.”

“Are you certain there wasn’t anyone else hidden away in your house when you were… indiscretioning?” Jennifer asked.

“Not only would my security system have ejected them, but I’d have seen them on my personal radar,” Takin replied.

“So what about Mellia?” I asked. “Did you have to add her to the system?”

“Every time,” Takin said. “And afterwards, I’d take her off the list so Sophie didn’t see her name there.”

“Men are such deceitful pigs,” muttered Rainy, glaring into her wine glass.

Takin frowned. “Though now that you come to mention it, I didn’t have to add her that night.”

“The first clue!” Declared Mary-Anne.

“Can’t you tell us at least one of the names she called you?” Raw pleaded.

Takin hesitated for a brief moment, then leaned in towards his camera. “She called me a pervert!” he whispered. “She told me one of her fantasies and asked me about mine, and when I told her, she called me a pervert!”

Edward coughed and studied his broccoli intently. Indigo giggled into her napkin.

Raw said, “What was the fan-“ “Perhaps you should tell us,” said Edward, loudly, “what happened that evening. I don’t mean the details of the indiscretion,” he added.

“Think ‘storyboard’.”

“Well I knew Sophie was early to bed

37

that night, see?” Takin paused to open a new can of lager. “Just before she logged out, she messaged me to say she wanted a goodnight hug. I was getting the knobs right on the air vents for a Vauxhall Cavalier at the time, but also messaging Mellia, because we’d agreed to meet up that evening once Sophie was off. So I took the teleport Sophie sent me back to our skyhouse, gave her the hug and wished her sweet dreams.”

“How many seconds elapsed between her logging off and you teleporting over your mistress?” Rainy asked, acidly.

“Actually, it was at least ten minutes, but that was because I was waiting for everything to rezz.”

“It was laggy?” Raw asked.

“That’s what I thought at first. In the end, I realised it had to be one of those glitchy evenings where only half your stuff appears and I so gave up waiting.”

“So long as the bed was there, right?”

Rainy commented.

“And the settee,” Takin replied, levelly.

“And the hat stand. And the, um, fridge.”

He cleared his throat. “Sophie has an eye for… functionality. So I teleported Mellia over and, well, I suppose there’s not much else to tell, really. The next evening I logged on and there were all these impossible snapshots sent to me plus a very long and very vitriolic letter.”

“What if,” said Mary-Anne, “they dressed two other avatars up like you and Mellia and staged the whole thing?”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Raw asked.

“Even if they’d gone to all the trouble of finding out our body shapes and our skins and our hairstyles, not to mention makeups and tattoos and Lord knows what else,” said Takin, “How could they possibly know what we were wearing that evening?”

“Isn’t it part of the deal that you weren’t wearing anything at all?” asked Indigo.

“Oh, we were wearing stuff,” Takin assured us. “And using stuff.”

“Storyboard, Takin,” Edward repeated.

38

THE IMPOSSIBLE SNAPSHOTS

“Well I’m stumped,” I said. “Unless Sophie had somehow managed to disable your security and someone was hiding in there.”

“She might have disabled my system,” Takin said, “though I’ve no idea how; but there’s no way she could have disabled my radar. I’m telling you, there was no-one within at least 200 metres of us. And even if the security system was turned off, my land settings were still set to private, so no-one could have seen what we were doing.”

“Do you have any ideas, Edward?”

Indigo asked. “After all, you solved the puzzle last time.”

“Possibly, my dear,” Edward said, thoughtfully. “Nothing really definite, but maybe…”

“I’m all ears,” said Takin.

“Perhaps if I could ask a couple of questions,” our host said. “Would I be correct in assuming that the house itself belonged to Sophie?”

“You would indeed,” Takin replied. “I pay the rent on the land and Sophie picked out the house.”

“And the furnishings?”

“Not all of them,” he said. “She does have a better eye than me, though. Well, did.”

“She’s not dead just because she stopped going out with you,” Rainy pointed out.

“You are allowed to use the present tense.”

Edward continued. “Would I also be correct then in assuming that the items you couldn’t see when you teleported there were all your items?”

Takin frowned. “Now that you mention it, I think you might be right.”

“Well then,” Edward said, “it seems fairly clear to me.”

“It seems fairly unclear to me!” Raw declared.

“It’s a simple matter of logic, my boy: if

was impossible for someone to take pictures of Takin at his home, then he could not have been at his home.”

“I don’t understand,” said Takin.

“I imagine it happened something like this: Sophie linked up her house and all the furnishings she bought for it, and took the whole lot into her inventory, leaving all your bits and pieces floating in mid-air. Then she teleported to a different location where there were no security or privacy restrictions and re-rezzed it all at the same altitude as you were used to. Then she messaged you for that goodnight hug: I take it she sent you a teleport to her location rather than just asking you to come home?”

“Yeah,” Takin said. “She did.”

“So in the end, all the photographer had to do – whoever he or she was – was keep a respectable distance away and zoom in to get the pictures. By the time you logged in to your home spot the following evening, Sophie had moved everything back to its original location.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Indigo. “Edward, you did it again.”

“Just a theory, my dear. Though if you log your system messages, Takin, then it should be recorded the name of the region you actually teleported to that night: if it’s not your home location then that’s the proof.”

Takin’s gaze changed as he did some typing and some mouse-pointer moving, bringing up the log to check there and then.

Finally, he sighed and nodded.

“So she suspected me all along,” he said. “Bloody hell.”

“Cheats are never as good at lying as they think they are,” Rainy said, not without a touch of satisfaction.

“And there is nothing quite so ingenious as a suspicious partner,” Edward added.

“Inside the metaverse or out of it.”

He can be in two places at the same time!

Two places at once

A

BOUT a week before the third meeting of the Avatar Dining Club, its founder – Edward – sent us all an email inviting us to nominate a member who would – as he had done previously – bring with them to our next meeting a ‘virtual guest’. To be honest, I hadn’t left the second meeting feeling in any way persuaded that this idea was one worth repeating – it had all felt, frankly, uncomfortable – and I’d rather hoped we’d go back to just the seven of us eating together, as we had managed quite happily for the first meal. Edward, however, appeared convinced that the inclusion of a distant guest via laptop video chat (in metaverse character, as we all were required to remain by the rules of the

club) was the “extra special ingredient” demanded by our gathering, the “catalyst to our fusion”. It was one of those group emails that you look at on your phone and frown at whilst you read it, and then hope that someone else will reply before you. I needn’t have worried: Raw Concrete, the virtual builder, had nominated himself within about five minutes and we all quickly (and gratefully) fell in behind him.

“You’re going to love this girl, Edward,” he said, as he set up the laptop at the end of the table six days later. Once again, we had come to L’Albero Verde, an Italian restaurant in Basingstoke on Winchester Street. “She has a mystery I don’t think even you’ll be able to 39

40

TWO PLACES AT ONCE

solve.”

“Let me remind you, my boy,” said Edward, his lined, sixtyish face both stern and kind at the same time, “that I wouldn’t have solved anything without the very helpful questions you all of you asked – and the answers they prompted.”

“Is that our thing now, then?” asked Indigo Williams, pushing a few strands of her purple hair from her face as she took her seat at Edward’s left. “Are we virtual world detectives?”

“I can live with that!” Raw declared.

“We most certainly are not,” Edward stated, firmly. “We’re a group of friends who enjoy stimulating, metaverse-themed conversation. If the conversation should take the direction of a little mystery every now and again, well so be it.”

Mary-Anne Middlemarch, sitting on my right, turned to me and said, “Don’t you write stories about metaverse detectives, Douglas?”

“Oh I meant to say!” Jennifer Bit said, taking his/her place opposite me, “I started one of your novels last week!”

“Started?” I enquired.

“I’m about three chapters in. It’s very… hmmm…” S/he circled her hands in the air.

“What’s the word?”

“Ridiculous?” ventured Rainy September, the explorer/clubber to Jennifer’s left.

“Bit harsh,” I commented.

“Do you really think someone would murder a person in real life just because he used a copybot to steal her latest virtual world hair style?” Jennifer asked.

“It’s the job of a fiction author to exaggerate a little every now and again,” I said, defensively.

“Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable,” declared Edward, grandly.

“Is that a Facebook meme?” asked Rainy.

“Hosea Ballou, my dear,” he replied.

“I’m not trying to write works of literary genius,” I said. “Just stories a few people might enjoy.”

“Well I like your stories,” Raw said whilst he loaded up Skype on the laptop. “I read them on the bus to work.” It was a moment of pure pleasure to imagine my book being devoured in a public place, its cover proudly open and on display, but its contents firmly concealed; in my opinion, the absolute best form of advertising. But then he went and ruined it all by adding, “On my Kindle.”

Ebooks are both a blessing and a curse.

He found the contact he was looking for and initiated the connection. A few seconds went by and then the call was answered by a round-faced woman in her thirties with red, curly hair and a sprinkling of freckles which the low resolution of her webcam had turned into a ginger smudge across the tops of her cheeks. “Heya Peacemaker,” he said to her loudly, leaning across Rainy to do so.

“Raw, is that you?” she asked in a New York accent. “My God, you’re so young!”

“Young in years; old in tears,” Raw replied.

“Suuuuure,” Rainy commented.

“Hey,” the young man said to her, “just because I’m a builder that doesn’t mean I don’t have a deep and frequently painful emotional life.”

“You’re assuming a prejudicial judgement on my part,” she replied, “I assure you, I wasn’t thinking of all builders.”

“And these are all your friends?”

Peacemaker asked, peering at her screen.

“This is the club I was telling you about,” Raw said to her, as he walked back round the table to his spot on my left. “We’re all about to order food – I hope you have something prepared!”

“To be honest, it’s a little early for me to eat,” she said, “but I picked up some sushi on my way back here.” She held up the little plastic tray for us to see. The look on Raw’s face suggested that in his opinion this didn’t even constitute a starter.

“Peacemaker, my dear,” said Edward, grandly, “you are most welcome amongst us. I trust that Raw told you the rules of our

AMAZING METAVERSE meetings?”

“No real life stuff,” she said. “That works for me. To tell you the truth, I’m nervous enough as it is about you guys seeing me in the flesh. I never ordinarily cam with virtual world buddies. It’s a good thing I’m not famous.”

“Think of it, if you like, as a metaverse experience that ventures just far enough into the real world to facilitate a more natural conversational style. Engaging though I find online conversation to be, it still requires a great deal of effort for those of us old enough to still value what the eyes and ears tell us about what a person is saying.”

We ordered. The starters came and we all got to work on the edge of our hunger, and Peacemaker nibbled slowly on her sushi through this momentary lull in conversation.

Presently, Raw wiped garlic bread crumbs from his mouth and said, “So why don’t you tell us about your mystery, Peacemaker?”

Edward interjected. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, my boy. We haven’t introduced ourselves properly yet.” So we went around the table in turn, each of us giving our metaverse name and habits, and then Peacemaker introduced herself as a builder of plants and outdoor accessories. “I loved gardening when I was growing up,” she told us, “but here in the city I don’t have so much as a window box. So instead I garden and landscape in the virtual world.”

“Now can we do the mystery?” Raw asked. Edward nodded his consent.

“It’s not really a mystery, like a crime’s been committed or anything,” Peacemaker began. “There’s this guy I know. Sort of know. Here’s the thing: he can be in two places at the same time.”

“What do you mean? In the metaverse?” I asked.

“Of course she means in the metaverse!”

Raw shot back at me. “Did you imagine she was talking about real life?”

“You mean like two avatars in two different places?” Indigo questioned.

“Two avatars in two different places,”

41

Peacemaker confirmed.

“At the same moment?”

“At the same moment,” she said.

Mary-Anne said, “And this is something you saw yourself or something someone told you about?”

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Peacemaker replied. “This is how it happened. I was at a poetry event – an open mic thing where people take it in turns to read out their poems. There are loads of these events around the virtual world, but it’s more or less the same bunch of people who attend and organise them – so, as a general rule, they tend not to clash. The exception to that rule, however, is Wednesday night, when you have both the Book Bar event and the Letterlovers event at the same time.

Rumor has it that the two hostesses are arch rivals. As a result, people tend to go to one or the other, depending on where their allegiances lie. So anyway, I was at the Book Bar and I noticed that one of my best friends, Stardom was online but not attending. Well see, she always does Book Bar on a Wednesday night if she’s online, so I messaged her to ask what she was up to. I thought maybe she was with a guy! But she answered that she just fancied doing Letterlovers that week for a change.”

Peacemaker paused to take a sip of water, then continued. “So I asked her who was there – you know, for the gossip value – and she told me a whole bunch of names. And one of them was Bill Reckinsaw. Except that Bill was standing right in front of me at the Book Bar.” “How do you know she was telling you the truth?” asked Rainy.

“Well I told Stardom it couldn’t possibly be Bill she was seeing, but when she insisted, I teleported right over to take a look. And there he was. Same avatar, same clothes, same name, same everything.”

“It was an alt,” said Indigo, unimpressed.

“He created a new account, made up his avatar to look the same and then changed his display name so it was the same as his primary. Easy.

Just check both their user IDs – those will be different.”

42

TWO PLACES AT ONCE

“What’s a ‘display name’?” Mary-Anne whispered to me.

“When you create a new account,” I explained, “you first of all have to choose a user ID that’s unique to you. But later on you can choose a separate name to be known by – a display name – and it doesn’t matter if other people are also using that.”

“I did check their user IDs,” Peacemaker said, a little sourly. “Same ID – Billreck23 Resident – in both cases. Same birth date.

Same profile info. I’m telling you: they were identical.”

But Indigo was nonplussed. “Then it was the same avatar that you saw in the first place,” she stated. “He must have teleported over at the same time as you.”

“Seriously?” Raw scoffed. “You don’t think that’s just a little too coincidental?”

“Not if you assume intent,” Indigo said.

“Suppose you were being set up,” she proposed, her finger wagging at the laptop screen and her gaze above it as she visualised pieces coming together. “A practical joke,” she continued. “Your friend Stardom was in on it, of course. The clue is in the context: she knew exactly where you were going to be at that time, and her not being there herself got her your attention. She knew you were going to message her. See, you had to be in private message for it to work so that she knew the exact moment you teleported over. I bet she even sent you the teleport. Am I right?”

“Well yes, as it happens-” Peacemaker began.

“Well there you are. Plus having the message box up on the screen would have reduced your view of him so that if he teleported a moment before you, it wouldn’t be so obvious.”

She sat back, satisfied. “Mystery solved,” she said. “Sorry, Edward,” she added. “Didn’t mean to steal your thunder.” Edward waved the matter aside, a twinkle in his eye.

“That’s ridiculous!” Raw cried. “It relies on far too much that could go wrong. Even Douglas’s contrived plots are more realistic.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Not that I want to steal your thunder,” Peacemaker cut in, “but you didn’t let me finish. You see, it didn’t end there.” She ate some more rice. “The very next thing I did, of course, was to teleport back to Book Bar. And there he still was!”

Indigo munched on the salad that had been put in front of her a moment earlier. “Then they just repeated the teleport as soon as you vanished,” she proposed.

“Ok,” said Peacemaker. “So the next thing I did after that was to log on simultaneously as an alt and be at both locations myself. Guess what?”

“He was still at both venues?” Mary-Anne said, incredulously.

“He was still at both venues.”

“Really?” asked Indigo. She looked crestfallen.

“I’m telling you, he was the exact same avatar in two places at once. Now you tell me: how is that possible?”

The table went silent for a moment, but not for long. “My theory is he’s some sort of hacker,” said Raw. “He’s found a loophole in the system and exploited it.”

“A hacker who loves poetry?” Rainy said, sarcastically.

“Why not?! All things can happen in virtual worlds!”

“And this has only now been discovered?”

I said. “Seems like it’s the sort of thing we’d have heard about a long time before now, if it were possible.”

“Not if it’s a new bug introduced in a recent update,” said Raw. “Maybe he exploited some code to make it only look like the same avatar, where it was in fact just a different account that visually looked the same but had a different name – the exploit tricked the viewer into changing the name from one to the other and voilà! – an alt no longer appeared to be an alt.”

No-one other than Raw appeared convinced by that and we sat and ate for a moment, trying to find a better idea. Finally,

AMAZING METAVERSE Indigo said, “Ok, I give up. What do you make of it, Edward?”

“I think you were quite right when you said that the clue was in the context, my dear,” Edward replied, “only in this case, the relevant context was that of a man who didn’t want to offend his two friends by being at one of their events but not at the other.”

“All very well,” said Peacemaker, “but how?”

“Oh, the how is very simple, though you’ll need to message both avatars to see if I’m right. My guess is, though, that this wasn’t the first time he attended both events this way and it won’t be the last. All you’ll need to do is copy his name – once from each avatar’s message box – into Microsoft Word and

43

change the font to Times New Roman.”

“Aha!” said Jennifer. “I see where this is going!”

“I don’t!” said Raw. “What will that do?”

“My boy,” said Edward, Times New Roman is a serifed font, whereas the metaverse uses a non-serifed font for all its text. One of the letters that changes the most when changed from a non-serifed to a serifed font is upper case I. In Times New Roman, it would be quite unmistakable as an I, whereas in nonserifed metaverse text, it could pass almost perfectly for a lower case L.” “And ‘Bill’ has two lower case Ls in it,” Peacemaker said, grinning broadly.

“And ‘Bill’ has two lower case Ls in it,” Edward agreed.

Whether it’s to read through lengthy business reports, enjoy a good novel, or just to think long and hard about what you’ve done, the HHAX low recliner is the perfect chair for a gentleman’s serious contemplation. Perhaps you’ll think about making a further purchase from the HHAX range, such as the executive desk or the deluxe Danish teak bureau. You’ll find all our furniture low prim and ready to rez, designed with comfort and style in mind.

He was standing behind the bar in a thick sweater and polishing endlessly a glass.

Bot or not?

F

OR THE fourth meeting of the Avatar Dining Club, it was Jennifer Bit who brought a virtual guest to L’Albero Verde, the Italian restaurant which served as the venue for our now monthly meals in real life together.

Four meetings, I reflected, as I hung up my coat in the corner by the upright piano (which I had yet to see played), seemed significant.

Four meetings felt like a permanent arrangement. If the first occasion could be put down to experimental social happenstance, the second to experience verification and the third to not much more than politeness, then the fourth had to denote some sort of commitment.

Meeting four, I decided, was where the people who didn’t really want to be there would probably start dropping out. As I made my way to our table, I wondered if we would be receiving any such apologies that evening and was therefore pleasantly surprised to see all six 44

other members present and correct. Purplehaired club owner, Indigo Williams was leaning across the table and chatting to fashion blogger Mary-Anne Middlemarch whilst Jennifer fussed over her laptop, aided by Rainy September to her right and the young metaverse builder, Raw Concrete, hovering over their shoulders behind them and offering what appeared to be mostly not required instructions. Jennifer was a man in real life, however the rule of the dining club was that we adopted our virtual world identities for each meeting. None of us knew any of the others’ real life names.

That left Edward, the club’s founder and most elderly member, a white-haired gentleman who appeared to relish every moment we spent together in discussion.

Currently he was leaning back in his chair with his arms folded and regarding the table

AMAZING METAVERSE and its occupants with a smile of quiet appreciation on his face. But he looked up when I passed and declared, “Leonard! I was discussing your literary endeavours just last night.”

“In a positive manner, I trust,” I replied, as I took my usual seat in the middle of the side to his right.

“A friend of mine called Grandiose Gestures is utterly convinced that your first novel was largely based upon her own metaverse experiences,” he told me. “She seems to believe you must be a secret alt of someone she knows.”

“Actually, lots of people tell me that,” I said, reaching for the menu. “It’s both flattering and weird.”

“Weird?” repeated Raw, who had given up on being authoritative with Jennifer and Rainy and taken up his seat to my left. “Why is it weird?”

“Ordinarily, if you read something that resonates with your own life you might think, ‘what a great author this must be to have tuned in so sensitively to the essence of these sorts of experiences such that his writing connects to me so effectively,’” I told him. “Only in the virtual world do you encounter instead the view that you’ve just ripped off someone else’s story.”

“Only in the virtual world,” said Edward, “does there exist the possibility that a famous personality is actually someone you know well as an avatar.”

“I wouldn’t say he’s famous,” interjected Raw, before I could make a similar comment out of modesty. “I suppose you could say I’m a minor personality,” I said instead, with a casual, hopefully disinterested looking wave of my hand.

“Very minor,” commented Indigo.

“Minor is minor,” I said. “You don’t need to subdivide it.”

“Oh there’s gradations of minor,” MaryAnne chipped in. “I’d say you’re about a Dlist celebrity in the metaverse.”

“D-list?!” I replied, unable to hide my

45

indignance. “I thought that list only went as far as C.” “C is as far as media interest drops to,” said Rainy. “Anything below that is noteworthy only if you do something controversial, like get caught having an affair or become the victim of a DMCA filing.”

“Or die,” said Raw. “Technically, though, that constitutes a temporary elevation to C-list rather than an actual D-list interest,” Mary-Anne commented.

“Thanks for the clarification,” I said to her.

“I’ve often wondered if someone I know in the virtual world is someone famous in real life,” Indigo said, looking briefly in my direction and adding, “Actually famous, that is.”

“We could be rubbing shoulders with filmstars, rock singers and presidents, for all we know!” exclaimed Mary-Anne.

“If I am,” Edward told us, “I rather hope I never find out.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rainy said. “I wouldn’t be disappointed in the slightest to discover that my metaverse boyfriend was in fact the heir to the throne of, let’s say, a small, oil-rich nation.”

“You have a new boyfriend?” Indigo asked.

“Oh yes!” Rainy replied. “I wasn’t going to mention him.” I didn’t believe that for a moment; the conversation wasn’t yet even ten minutes old. “He’s such a catch. We’re going to get metaverse married next week!”

“Oh, we should all go!” Mary-Anne cried.

Edward frowned. Though it wasn’t such a hard and fast rule as the ‘no real life details’ policy, the group founder had advised us from the first meeting that it would probably be for the best if we didn’t meet up with each other inworld. I reminded her of this.

“I only fear that it might burst in some way the very pleasant bubble we currently inhabit,” said Edward.

“We’re in a bubble?” Raw asked.

“It’s a metaphor,” Indigo told him. “I realise that’s a mental stretch for a builder.”

46

BOT OR NOT?

“I get metaphors,” the young man told her stiffly. “I’m just struggling with this one.”

“Okay!” Jennifer announced. “We’re on the wireless. Let me call up Lobelia. She should be waiting for us.”

“Speaking of bubbles bursting,” Mary-Anne said, delicately, “does she know that you’re a, um…”

“Man?” replied Jennifer. “She does. She’s one of only three online friends who knows.

Apart from you guys, of course,” she added.

“Well, you guys are… different, somehow.”

“And there is the definition of our bubble,” Edward stated.

Jennifer arranged the laptop at the far end of the table opposite Edward and called up her friend. After a few seconds of ringing, a brown-haired, middle-aged woman appeared on the screen, looking like she was just swallowing a mouthful of food. She immediately giggled at the sight of herself doing this. “I’m so sorry for starting without you!” she laughed, “but I was so hungry! I haven’t eaten for hours! Hello everyone!”

She peered at her screen. “Which one are you, Jen?” “Right here, Loby,” Jennifer said, with a wave and then proceeded to introduce the rest of us. “Loby owns a region,” she told the table. “A really beautiful one. I spend a lot of my down-time there.”

“What sort of a region is it?” Raw asked.

“It’s part nature and part small town,” Lobelia said, using that slightly louder than necessary voice we all seem to drop into when speaking on cam. “I have a bar and a bookstore and a barber’s shop, and a community hall where we have occasional parties. All very average. Nothing you can’t find elsewhere inworld these days.”

“She’s so modest,” Jennifer said. “Her eye is amazing. She puts things together so perfectly and her attention to detail is incredible.”

“You’re embarrassing me, Jen!” Lobelia cried. “I spend half my time on the grid snooping around other people’s sims and

stealing their ideas.”

“Oh please!” Jennifer declared. “It’s not a crime to spot something you like somewhere and look up its creator.”

Lobelia’s big smile shrunk, just a little.

“Not everyone would agree with that,” she said.

The waiter came and we all ordered. Whilst we waited for the food to come, we chatted about the various stressors experienced by a sim owner when it came to balancing being a good host and enforcing a standard of conduct for visitors. A spirited, but light-hearted debate broke out about dress codes. Finally our meals were placed before us.

“What did you mean earlier on,” I asked Lobelia, “when you said not everyone would agree in there being no harm in checking out other people’s stuff?”

She was halfway through a mouthful of something (I could only make out that it had been green), so Jennifer spoke up. “I’m glad you asked, Leonard,” she said, with a slight twinkle in her eye. “Loby has a little mystery for us!”

“Of course she does!” Indigo declared. “We couldn’t just have a meal without a mystery for Edward.” Every meal so far had involved one, each solved by our founder member (much as he liked to protest that we were not some sort of virtual world detective agency).

“Now now, my dear,” Edward said to Indigo. “Let’s not be offputting to our guest.”

His eyes went back to the laptop screen and I could see the interest within them. “Do tell us your story, Lobelia. I’m sure we will all do our very best to help.”

“Oh it’s a stupid thing, really,” our guest told us. “I’m sure there’s nothing at all to solve and you’ll just tell me I’m being silly. I went to a quite high profile sim recently and had a nose around, and ended up seeing a beautiful lighthouse there which I then bought for my own place. And a set of park benches.

The sim owner is really cheesed off with me and has accused me of stealing her ideas.”

“That’s it?” asked Raw, who had already

AMAZING METAVERSE managed to make his way through a third of the huge Hawaiian pizza he’d ordered.

“That’s not exactly a mystery.”

“There is no mystery, really,” Lobelia told him. “It’s just a small thing. When I went to the sim to look around, there was nobody there the whole time except for a bot who tends bar in this little pub they have. But when the owner messaged me about the whole thing the next day she seemed to know that I’d been there and what I’d been doing.”

“Bots can be programmed to record the details of visitors and report that information to their owners,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” she replied. “But they wouldn’t be able to record things like where you stood or what you did. I’ll give you an example. Flying’s banned on the sim but I overrode the block so I could zip around it more quickly – I always like to explore at least a little by air. One of the things that cheesed her off especially was that I’d broken this rule.

She said not only did I rip off her ideas but I disrespected her. But how did she know about this? No bot I know of can detect flying – you’d have to be a person to actually see that happening.”

“It sounds like she needs to get over herself,” Rainy commented.

“Are there neighbouring sims?” Raw asked.

“Someone could have been looking in from one of them.”

“It’s a private island,” Jennifer said. “Noone can look in. But tell them your theory, Loby.”

“Well the only thing I can think of,” she said, “is that the bot wasn’t a bot at all, but someone pretending to be a bot.”

“What led you to believe it was a bot in the first place?” Mary-Anne asked her.

“It says so in its profile. And the first thing you get when you land there is this scripted greeting from him with a notecard about the sim rules. I’ve been there several times since – I apologised to her and removed the lighthouse; she was okay about the benches.

But I’m right in thinking a bot owner can just

47

log in as that avatar themselves if they want to, aren’t I?” “Of course,” Indigo said. “I use a bot dancer at my club. I’ve logged in as her several times just to freak out a client with some off-script dialogue. Well, if there really was no-one else around that time you visited then you must be right. The bot was not a bot.

Mystery solved, I guess.”

“A short one this time,” Mary-Anne said.

“I suppose so,” Lobelia said, looking a little disheartened.

“What Loby wants to know,” Jennifer told us, “is whether it’s possible to prove that a bot is not a bot.”

“To prove it?!” Raw cried. “That’s impossible.”

“How on Earth,” Indigo asked him, “is it impossible? Just ask it some questions. If it’s a person then they’ll trip up eventually and say something that doesn’t sound scripted.”

“Not necessarily,” Raw replied.

“I’ve tried that anyway,” Lobelia said. “I’ve been several times since and spoken to the bot in private message. I get nothing but bot text, whatever I ask him. Let me give you an example.” She paused for a moment whilst she brought something up on her screen. “I saved this last week,” she said. “This is just an excerpt. It went on for ages.”

The conversation went like this: Lobelia: How are you Bob? Bob: Fair to partly cloudy.

Lobelia: Are you having a nice day?

Bob: I have having fun.

Lobelia: That’s good to hear.

Bob: “I have having fun.”? Is good to hear?

Lobelia: Yes it is.

Bob: Our thoughts are one, Lobelia.

Lobelia: Why? Bob: The explanation is rather complicated.

Lobelia: Try explaining it to me.

Bob: OK I will try it.

Lobelia: Go on then…

Bob: Narration continues…

Lobelia: Are you enjoying the nice weather?

48

BOT OR NOT?

Bob: I’m not sure if I like it. What is it like?

Lobelia: It is nice.

Bob: What do you like about it?

Lobelia: The sunshine.

Bob: What else do the sunshine remind you of?

Lobelia: Happy summer memories.

Bob: Happy summer memories to you too, Lobelia.

“See?” Lobelia said. “Pure bot. You probably all think I’m being crazy obsessional about this, but it’s driving me nuts!”

“Well it sounds just like a bot to me,” Indigo said. “Perhaps the times you’ve been quizzing it like this it really has been just a bot. Surely that’s the simplest explanation.”

“Know what I’d do if I wanted to pull this off?” Raw asked us. “I’d have an actual bot I know of in one private message window and then copy whatever I got asked into that and then copy back whatever bot text I got as my reply. That’s why I said it was impossible.”

“The perfect spying device,” Rainy commented. “You get to stand in plain sight and observe everything going on around you and no-one suspects a thing.”

“Exactly!” Raw declared.

“What if you walked into the bot with your avatar and moved it to a different position?”

Mary-Anne suggested. “Then see if it moves back to its spot. A bot wouldn’t do that.”

“They’re hardly going to move that whilst you’re standing there watching,” Raw snorted.

“I realise that!” she replied. “But you could go away and return half an hour later and see if it had moved back whilst you were gone.”

“That’s not exactly proof though, is it?” I said. “For all you know someone else could have come along and bumped them back in that direction whilst you weren’t there.”

“In any case,” Lobelia said, “Bob’s on a static pose ball. You can’t budge him. I already tried that.” She seemed to blush a little.”

“What if you did something totally outrageous?” Rainy asked. “Some huge

violation of the sim rules the owner would have to intervene over. Like, for example-” she stopped when Lobelia coughed.

“I thought of that too. I created a newbie alt and walked him around naked, wearing only a ginormous male appendage.” This time, she definitely blushed.

“And nothing happened?” several of us asked at once.

“Oh, my alt got banned alright,” she said.

“But what happened was the sim owner herself just happened to come along a few minutes after I started doing that and so she hit the button on me. Bob didn’t say a word about it.”

“Just happened to come along, huh?” Rainy asked.

“Exactly. Very convenient. I tried it a second time a few days later with a different alt and the exact same thing happened, only it took I suppose a minute or two longer.”

“And that’s not proof enough for you?”

“I know it’s very suggestive,” she said, “but I want something definitive!”

“Either it really is a bot or the sim owner’s doing what Raw described,” Indigo said.

“And if she is, well then I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do to prove it. Not definitively.”

“Nothing whatsoever at all,” Raw agreed.

“Hold on just a moment!” Mary-Anne interjected. “We haven’t heard Edward’s views yet!”

Edward looked up from his salad. “Me? Oh I doubt very much that I could cast any light on this one. You seem to have it pretty much sewn up.” He forked a tomato and studied it, appearing to be avoiding eye contact.

“Come on, Edward,” I told him. “I know you have an idea. Spill it.”

He paused for a moment. Then he put his fork down. “Well there is one possibility. But it would involve a minor breach of the bubble to which I was referring earlier. We’d need both Lobelia and someone from here to log in and try something out.”

AMAZING METAVERSE “No problem!” Raw declared. He reached around for his rucksack, hung on the back of his chair, and pulled out a laptop. “I always come prepared.” Edward directed Lobelia to go to the sim in question and teleport Raw over once he’d logged in. Whilst they did that, he cautioned us against getting too excited. “As Indigo said, there’s no guarantee that the bot won’t be a bot when we get there,” he told us, “if it ever was not a bot in the first place. This is very tentative.”

Raw logged in and we crowded temporarily around his screen to watch.

“What’s that big white thing?” Jennifer asked.

“Sorry,” Raw said. “I was working on something fiddly earlier and left my view on ultra-zoom. What you’re seeing there is just my mic dot.” He reduced the zoom and the big white circle shrank back down to the tiny little dot that floats above the head of every avatar that has voice enabled. Meanwhile, a teleport request from Lobelia popped up on the screen and he took it.

He materialised in front of her avatar outside of a small country pub. “Nice outfit,” Indigo commented. “Thanks!” Lobelia called from the other laptop. “Bob’s just inside. Shall we go in?” Right at that moment, a message appeared from him on the screen in front of us, welcoming Raw to the island and offering a notecard of the rules.

The two avatars entered the building and we got our first glimpse of Bob, who was standing behind the bar in a thick sweater and polishing endlessly a glass. “I want a good view of him,” Edward instructed Raw. “Just like that, yes. Perfect. Now then: I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer me in text, typing your replies into the chat box.”

“Why?” Raw asked.

Edward smiled enigmatically. “Well let’s just see what happens.”

“What should I do?” Lobelia called.

“Nothing my dear,” Edward told her. “I

49

simply need you to be standing nearby.”

“Okay, I’m ready,” Raw said.

“Good. So then. What is two times three?”

Raw typed ‘6’ and hit the enter key.

“Excellent, my boy. Next, what colour is Bob’s sweater?”

Raw typed, ‘Blue.’

“Anyone can see that it’s navy,” Rainy commented.

“Did you see the jukebox when you entered?” Edward asked.

‘Yes,’ Raw wrote.

“Where was it? Don’t look, now – we need to keep Bob in view.”

‘Over by the front door,’ Raw entered.

“What do you think of the build quality of this pub?”

‘I’ve seen better. Much better.’

“Oh!” Jennifer cried. “Look!”

“What?” said Raw. “What happened?”

“I saw it too,” Indigo said, grinning broadly.

“Me too!” called Lobelia, excitedly. I looked more closely at the laptop screen and suddenly it dawned on me. Then Mary-Anne got it.

Then Rainy.

Finally, Raw realised too. “He’s got mic dot over his head! He didn’t have one when we got here, right?”

“Indeed he did not,” Edward confirmed.

“You made him think there was a voice conversation going on around him, so he enabled voice so that he – or rather, she – could listen in,” said Indigo. “Very clever, Edward.”

“The idea was all Rainy’s,” he replied. “She was the one who commented that the function of a fake bot might be to observe all that was going on in the sim without anyone realising.

Well, observing isn’t only watching; observing is listening too.”

On the laptop at the end of the table, Lobelia had put on her voice headset and on the laptop in front of us her avatar turned to face the barman. “I saw your mic dot turn on!” she said to him. “You’re busted, Bob. Not a bot!”

Is she a he?

“I

WANT to know if my virtual girlfriend is really a man in real life,” Begonia Bittersweet told us.

It was the fifth meeting of the Avatar Dining Club and this time it was the turn of Rainy September to bring a virtual guest to L’Albero Verde, the Italian restaurant the group’s founder, Edward, had selected as our monthly gathering place. I noticed this time that I was recognised by the waiter, who took my coat on my arrival with a friendly smile rather than leaving me to hang it up myself, and who waved me through to our table without asking me if I had a reservation. Clearly, we were ‘regulars’ now, and being encouraged to regard ourselves as such. I approved, and I made a mental note to catch his name so I could greet him by it next time.

50

Rainy, I had decided, was the most judgemental member of the club.

Whenever I thought of her, I imagined her disapproving of something. It intrigued me that she still attended these get-togethers.

Unlike everyone else, she had no real ‘occupation’ in the metaverse. Mary-Anne Middlemarch, who sat to my right at the table for seven, was a fashion blogger; Raw Concrete, who sat to my left, was a builder. Opposite me, Jennifer Bit – a man in real life (though the rule was we went by our avatar identities for these meetings) – was a photographer, and to her right sat Indigo Williams who both owned a club and designed skins. That left Edward, who had introduced himself five months previously as a role-player. Rainy, however, had no real purpose in the virtual

AMAZING METAVERSE world, no passions, no loyalties. She explored. She shopped. She went out clubbing. That said, between the previous meeting and this one, she had got metaverse married to someone she’d met between the previous meeting and the one before that. When it was decided in the pre-meeting email that she would be bringing the virtual guest this time, I was certain it would be her new ‘hubby’ to show off to us all. But I was wrong. Whilst he was present in no small measure in the talk as she set up her laptop at the end of the table, it turned out that video interaction was not a feature of their relationship. Yet. “He says he needs more time,” she reported, with more than a hint of impatience and scorn in her voice, and I wondered absently if, for the sixth meeting of the club, we might find ourselves discussing metaverse divorce.

So we got Begonia. Rainy dialled up her distant virtual acquaintance on the laptop at the end of the table, and it was an outdoors backdrop we saw behind the blonde, middle-aged Australian wearing a bikini and a headset who appeared on the screen. “Hello!” she greeted us, raising a glass of something orange. “Oh my God, Bego,” shouted Rainy in an unnecessarily loud Skype voice, “is that a freaking beach you’re sitting on?”

“Waves and wi-fi, baby!” Begonia replied. “It’s a winning combination!”

Edward said to her grandly, his arms opened wide, “Greetings, Begonia, you are most welcome at our table.”

“Bego, this is Edward,” Rainy told her friend. “He’s the boss of this group I told you about.”

“Founder, my dear,” Edward corrected.

“Hello Edward!” Begonia replied in a slightly sing-song voice. We got the rest of the introductions over with and then got down to the business of ordering food. Our guest had brought a bacon sandwich with her to the beach and she started munching

51

on it whilst we waited for our food to arrive. “I’m really sorry,” she told us, “but this is my breakfast and I’m absolutely starving.” Several times I caught Raw staring at the screen, but I couldn’t be certain whether it was at Begonia in her bikini he was looking at or her sandwich.

When he called the waiter back over and ordered an extra topping of ‘bacon bits’ on his pizza, however, I realised I had my answer. I caught the waiter’s name: it was Enrico.

The conversation at first was the usual sort of thing, all about Begonia’s metaverse life. Like Rainy, it turned out, she had no virtual vocation to speak of. She described herself as a ‘professional shopper’ and laughed hard at this. A little too hard. She rented land in a private region and had a post-modern house there, a glass and rendered concrete build of four stories, right on the edge of the sea. “What can I tell you?” she declared, waving her arm in a broad sweep across the vista of sand and breaking waves behind her. “I’m a beach bum born and bred!” I wasn’t certain that beach bums commonly lived in four-storey houses; then again I wasn’t up-to-date on the latest definitions of the term.

And then, once our orders had arrived, she told us her problem. There was an awkward silence around the table whilst everyone tried hard not to look at Jennifer.

“I know you guys solve virtual world problems,” Begonia continued, oblivious to our discomfort. “Rainy’s told me all about the mysteries you’ve cracked. I figure this one must be easy for you.”

“Easy?!” Raw retorted. “You must be joking – it’s impossible!” I could tell what his strategy was: dismiss the idea instantly and we wouldn’t have to go there. I added my support to his plan by nodding vigorously.

“That all depends on how skilfull you are,” said Jennifer, a twinkle in her eye, no doubt at our expense. She waved at the

52

IS SHE A HE?

laptop. “I’m a woman in the metaverse.”

“Yes I heard,” said Begonia. “I suppose an expert is precisely what I need.”

“I did mention you,” Rainy commented to Jennifer. “I didn’t tell her your whole metaverse name, though.”

“Do you tell anyone that you’re a man in real life?” Begonia asked.

“Originally no-one,” Jennifer replied, “but recently I’ve confided in a couple of close friends.”

“And how do you manage the guilt?”

“Guilt?” Jennifer repeated. “What guilt?”

“About lying to people.”

“We all lie to people in some way,” Jennifer said.

Begonia looked like she was about to say something in reply to that and, meanwhile, the look on Rainy’s face suggested she’d just that moment tuned in to the notion that this might not have been the wisest of issues to bring before this particular group. She said quickly, “Why don’t you tell them about your suspicions, Bego?”

Begonia paused for a moment and then nodded. “Well it began as nothing more than a feeling, really. I started wondering about it maybe a month or so ago.” Whilst she talked, I glanced briefly in Edward’s direction. The sixty-something man looked unhappy. “Some of the things she was coming out with… well they just didn’t sound female to me.” She sighed. “So anyway, I asked her if she’d like to voice with me and she refused, so that really set my alarms bells ringing.”

“Why?” asked Jennifer. “Plenty of people don’t like voicing.”

“For five minutes? It wasn’t like I was insisting on it there and then. If she’d told me she’d do it in a week’s time or even in a month then that would have been one thing, but to flat-out refuse to ever voice with me? Now that’s just weird.”

“Um,” said Mary-Anne, “I’ve never voiced. It’s just not my thing.” Nervously, she pushed a piece of broccoli around her plate with her fork. Mary-Anne was the quietest member of our group. “I really wouldn’t know what to say. I’d be too selfconscious.”

“Have you ever partnered inworld, Mary-Anne?” Begonia asked her.

“Twice,” she replied.

“And you never got asked to voice verify?”

“Both times,” she said. “And both times I refused. The first guy ended the relationship straight away, more-or-less.

The second guy accepted it. I’m still with him now, in fact.”

Begonia sighed again. “This is what I was afraid of. I just don’t get it. What’s the big deal with a few minutes of voice just to prove you are who you say you are?”

“If that was the rule,” Mary-Anne said, “then I wouldn’t have gone into the metaverse in the first place. Talking in text is what I like about it.”

“But you’re talking in voice now!

What’s the difference?”

My neighbour glanced at Edward. “I know you said we were to stay in our metaverse roles here, Edward,” she told him, “but you know I’m much more like the real me when I’m here with you guys.

I’m more confident and outspoken inworld.

I’m a different person there altogether.”

“My dearest Mary-Anne,” our founder said, “please don’t worry yourself about it for a second. I also said that anyone could assume here completely made-up personalities. The rule is in place only so that our real-life identities are protected, and I find your company at our table most delightful.”

“The thing is,” she continued, “it’s not like I’m pretending. When I’m online I become that person. If I had to speak in voice then that person would disappear.”

“I understand completely,” he

AMAZING METAVERSE reassured her.

“So what did you do next?” Indigo asked Begonia. “Or did you dump her?”

“I didn’t dump her,” she retorted, “I love her! But I did start trying to catch her out here and there, and paying attention to what she said to me. Rainy, do you have the printouts?”

“I do!” Rainy said, and she reached into her bag hung over the back of her chair. She brought out a wad of folded paper and flattened it out on the table.

There were seven sets, all stapled neatly in the top-left corner; one for everyone at the table. “I asked Rainy to print these out for me. I thought it would make it easier.” The printouts were handed round the table. I heard Edward sigh faintly as he put glasses on to look at his copy. They were transcripts of IMs: four pages in total showing excerpts from three separate conversations.

“The first IM is from about three weeks ago,” Begonia told us. On screen, I could see she had her own paper copy.

“Read it and tell me what you think.”

We read in silence. It went like this: 16:24 Begonia Bittersweet: So what bra size are you?

16:25 Trace Williams: 34b. Why? 16:25 Begonia Bittersweet: Just wondering.

16:25 Begonia Bittersweet: What type do you wear?

16:26 Trace Williams: What ‘type’?

16:26 Begonia Bittersweet: What? You don’t know?!

16:26 Trace Williams: Lace 16:26 Begonia Bittersweet laughs.

16:26 Begonia Bittersweet: I didn’t ask what they’re made out of.

16:26 Begonia Bittersweet: What *type*?

16:27 Trace Williams: Well, it all depends.

16:27 Begonia Bittersweet: Just for

53

everyday when you go to work.

16:29 Trace Williams: Semi cup. What else would I wear?

16:29 Begonia Bittersweet: IDK… maybe you’re a full cup girl.

16:30 Trace Williams: I’m not 80, you know.

16:30 Begonia Bittersweet: Padded?

16:32 Trace Williams: Absolutely.

16:32 Trace Williams: The air conditioning in my office is bloody freezing sometimes.

16:32 Trace Williams: I don’t want my co-workers to nickname me ‘pointy’.

Indigo laughed at the last bit. Raw said, “I don’t get it.” Jennifer scratched her head and rubbed her chin.

“What are we supposed to make of this?” I asked.

“Look at the timings for each comment,” Begonia replied. “It took her a whole minute to reply to my first question.

What girl wouldn’t be able to answer that immediately?”

“You think he was looking it up?” Raw asked.

“We don’t know it’s a ‘he,’ Raw,” Jennifer said to him.

“If it’s a ‘she’ then there wouldn’t be a need to research anything,” he answered.

Indigo waved her hand a little dismissively. “The time could mean anything. Maybe she was in another IM with someone else and switching back and forth between your conversation and theirs.

I do that all the time.”

“And then it took me nearly four minutes to get an answer to my bra-type question. And her first answer was lace! I mean come on!”

“I do sort my bras according to fabric,” said Indigo. “It’s just the way I’ve always done it.”

“As do I,” Begonia answered. “I’d still know what that question meant.”

“I agree it’s suggestive, but you’re

54

IS SHE A HE?

talking about a question posed to a person who might be distracted and which could be open to interpretation in different ways than the one you assume.” Indigo took a sip of wine and added, “For me, the ‘pointy’ remark balances it out: that’s female knowledge.”

“He still could have seen that on a webpage,” commented Raw through a mouthful of pizza. “He had enough time.”

“Okay,” Begonia said. “Now have a read of the second IM.” 20:31 Trace Williams: Not in the mood?

20:31 Begonia Bittersweet: Oh baby, Aunt Flo is paying me a visit.

20:32 Trace Williams: She is?

20:32 Begonia Bittersweet: Most definitely.

20:33 Trace Williams: You don’t have privacy?

20:33 Begonia Bittersweet: Huh? 20:33 Trace Williams: Your aunt is staying with you?

20:33 Begonia Bittersweet: hahaha 20:34 Begonia Bittersweet: You’re so funny.

20:34 Begonia Bittersweet: Look it up.

20:36 Trace Williams: ahhhhh 20:36 Trace Williams blushes.

20:36 Begonia Bittersweet: Why the blush?

20:36 Begonia Bittersweet: We’re all ladies here.

20:37 Trace Williams: Blushing at my ignorance.

20:37 Begonia Bittersweet: Different people; different terms, I guess.

20:37 Begonia Bittersweet: No worries.

20:37 Begonia Bittersweet: When do you come on?

20:38 Trace Williams: Usually around the middle of the month.

20:38 Begonia Bittersweet: So last week?

20:38 Trace Williams: Yes yes 20:38 Begonia Bittersweet: I wonder if we’ll synchronise.

20:39 Begonia Bittersweet: That would be weird.

I kept my face steadfastly neutral through this, but Raw made no such attempt. “Eww,” he said, when it finally dawned on him what he was reading about.

“Oh grow up, Raw,” Rainy said.

“Women have periods. It’s a fact of life.”

She sighed. “Men are so pathetic.”

“So you’re showing us this because she didn’t know what the term meant?” Indigo asked.

“Well quite! What woman wouldn’t know about good old Aunt Flo?!”

“Different people, different terms?” she quoted.

“Oh come on,” Begonia retorted. “It’s not like I’m seeing an Indonesian. She’s from the states!”

“Still a cultural term, though,” I remarked, “and not one you’d commonly hear through the traditional media. It seems to me that that sort of colloquialism is probably propagated through word of mouth. If a different term was commonly used amongst your friends growing up, then that would be your euphemism.”

“Shark week,” Mary-Anne volunteered. “That’s what we called it in college.”

“The term ‘Aunt Flo’ is everywhere on the internet,” Begonia insisted.

“Not all of us girls spend our time online talking about our periods,” Indigo countered.

The distant woman sighed. “Okay fine.

Let’s look at the last IM then.”

17:22 Begonia Bittersweet: Is everything ok, honey?

17:22 Trace Williams: Oh sure, everything’s fine.

17:22 Trace Williams: I’m just a bit

AMAZING METAVERSE sad because I heard a colleague of mine died today.

17:23 Begonia Bittersweet: Oh baby, I’m so sorry to hear that!

17:23 Trace Williams: Thank you. It’s just a bit of a shock. It was very sudden.

17:23 Trace Williams: He died of a heart attack.

17:23 Begonia Bittersweet: He died in the office?

17:23 Trace Williams: Oh no, at home last night.

17:24 Trace Williams: But I heard about it today.

17:24 Begonia Bittersweet: :( 17:24 Begonia Bittersweet: Did you know him well?

17:24 Trace Williams: Reasonably.

17:24 Trace Williams: His desk was around the corner from me.

17:25 Trace Williams: It’s funny, the last time I spoke to him he was peeing nin the cubicle next to me.

17:25 Trace Williams: You never know when your last conversation with someone will be.

17:25 Begonia Bittersweet: Right.

17:26 Begonia Bittersweet: Wait… a *guy* was in the next cubicle?

17:27 Trace Williams: Oh right. I see your confusion. We have unisex toilets at work.

17:27 Begonia Bittersweet: Really?

17:27 Trace Williams: Yeah. It’s not as bad as you think.

17:27 Trace Williams: The walls and doors are floor to ceiling.

17:28 Begonia Bittersweet: Ah. 17:28 Begonia Bittersweet: How can you hold a conversation if there are no gaps?

17:28 Trace Williams: Well the walls are still pretty thin.

17:28 Begonia Bittersweet: Right.

17:29 Begonia Bittersweet: Even so, I think I’d hand in my resignation if they enforced that sort of thing on me LOL

55

17:29 Trace Williams laughs.

On finishing this, Indigo said, “Yeah I heard about arrangements like that.”

Begonia’s eyebrows raised. “Really? I wondered if that might be made up.”

“Nope. They use it in a new senior school near where I live. Boys, girls, men and women: everyone in together. It saves space and it cuts down on bullying.

Apparently the staff made a fuss about it, but the head teacher insisted, and everyone was used to it within a couple of days.”

Begonia sighed. “Dear God. Stuff like this makes me feel so old.”

“Progress bears no responsibility for those that can’t keep up,” Edward muttered.

“Is that what it is?” asked Begonia.

“Progress? If you ask me, it’s just political correctness gone mad.”

“There is nothing mad about political correctness, I assure you.”

“What’s the big deal with separate facilities anyway?” Jennifer asked. “What difference does it make?”

“The ladies is where you do girl talk,” Begonia replied.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

That remark brought about another uncomfortable silence. It was broken after a few seconds by Raw, who was picking at the onion on his pizza and frowning. “The gents is where I go if I need to fart,” he said.

“Raw!” Rainy exclaimed. “If you please!”

“What?” The young man looked confused. “We can talk about periods but not about farting?”

“You go right ahead and talk about it,” Jennifer told him.

“Oh, and another thing that’s odd about this,” Begonia said, “is I thought guys hate having cubicle conversations.”

“That’s true, definitely,” Raw said.

“You hate it?” Indigo asked.

56

IS SHE A HE?

“Totally.”

“So do I,” I said, “but so what? Perhaps a new norm gets established if you become used to unisex toilets.” Begonia and her by-the-way attacks on Jennifer was starting to get on my nerves. I wasn’t about to let a stereotype lend weight to her argument.

“It’s a different rule when you’re at the urinal though,” Raw added, still frowning at his onions.

“I would have thought you’d be even less likely to talk if you there was a woman on the other side of the divide,” Begonia said, dismissively. “Oh well. That’s all I have, really. So you’re saying none of this is evidence?”

“None of it’s conclusive evidence,” Indigo stated. “Does she dress well?”

“Oh yes. A new outfit every week. She reads all the right blogs.”

“Again,” I commented, “so what if she doesn’t? Not all women follow the latest fashions.”

“Alright.” Begonia made no attempt to conceal her disappointment. “And you’ve got nothing to add, ‘Jennifer’?” She didn’t make the quote marks with her fingers or anything, but I could hear them in her tone of voice.

“No no,” Jennifer said, tight-lipped.

“Well don’t declare it a lost case just yet,” declared Raw. “We haven’t asked Edward what he thinks. He’s the one who always solves our mysteries.”

“This time,” Edward said gruffly, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you all. I have nothing to add to this deliberation… except to say that perhaps we should not be pursuing it in the first place.”

Everyone went silent. Mary-Anne, asked, “Why not, Edward?”

“My dear,” he told her, “you told us yourself that you become a different person in the metaverse. That is one of its functions: to allow us to explore new identities and all the thoughts and actions

which spring forth from them. It is not for any of us to judge which are the correct and incorrect identities for people to assume, nor their reasons for doing so.”

“I think I have a right to know if I’m being lied to,” Begonia said flatly.

“As a matter of fact, you don’t. Check those terms and conditions you ticked when you first signed up to the metaverse.

No-one has a right to know anything.

Disclosure of real life details is entirely voluntary. But even if it were the case, what exactly constitutes a lie? Is MaryAnne lying when she becomes her avatar personality? Is Jennifer lying when she talks and thinks and notices things as a woman? What if those identities come alive when they are enacted? What if they are real things? I will say one thing about these messages we’ve read tonight: they show you two to have a close and caring relationship. Does anything else really matter?”

“I get what you’re saying,” Begonia replied. “But Edward, I’m a lesbian woman. If this is a guy I’m with then it’s a waste of my time.”

“Are you hoping to meet in real life?”

Indigo asked.

“No way. I have a partner in real life and I have no intention of leaving her.

Trace knows that. Real life is real life; metaverse is metaverse.”

“In which case,” Edward asked, “why not let love just be love?”

“Because it’s not that simple.”

“Isn’t it a shame,” he said sadly, “that it can’t be.”

After that, there didn’t seem to be much else to add. Begonia excused herself and ended the video call, and those of us who wanted it ordered dessert. The conversation was strained. Rainy in particular was very quiet. Eventually, she said, “I’m sorry, Edward. On reflection, I’m not sure it was all that sensible of me to bring Bego this evening.” Edward

AMAZING METAVERSE smiled in reply and said, “On the contrary, my dear; I formed this group for us to discuss metaverse matters and that’s exactly what we’ve done tonight.

Disagreement is a bona fide conversational element, and sometimes quite necessary.”

He wagged a finger. “Its presence alone shouldn’t be taken as some sort of indicator that the conversation should not have taken place.”

When we left the restaurant about twenty minutes later, I walked with him to the nearby multi-storey where we were both parked. “Purely as an academic exercise,” I said, “do you think it’s possible to tell if someone’s a man or a woman in real life?”

“Thinking about plots for your latest novel, are you?” he asked with a chuckle. I replied, “I’m always doing that, Edward!”

“You know as well as I that it’s never a question of just one thing to look out for,” my white-haired friend told me. “It’s the details you have to be alert to when you suspect someone of constructing a falsehood. All of them! Most people will give themselves away in time. The question is, will anyone notice when they do?”

I stopped. “You know, don’t you? You did work it out!”

“Oh yes,” he said. “But it wasn’t the right thing to reveal it. If he will not say then that is his choice, Leonard. Begonia is quite free to leave him if she so wishes. He has no right to her love, but neither does she have any right to his details.”

“But how did you work it out?”

Conveniently, we were beneath a lamp post. Edward took out and unfolded his copy of the IM transcript. “This is strictly between you and I,” he told me. I nodded.

He pointed to the following line: 17:25 Trace Williams: It’s funny, the last time I spoke to him he was peeing nin the cubicle next to me.

57

“Ah,” I said. “So you weren’t convinced by the unisex toilets excuse?”

“That is neither here nor there,” Edward replied. “It’s the error that gives him away.”

“Error? What error?”

“Look more closely. See here: he typed an extra n. ‘Nin’ instead of ‘in’.”

“A typo. How can that mean anything?”

“An edit, my friend. Not a typo, but an edit. He wrote something, then he edited it, and then he hit return. We do it all the time, don’t we? Except in this instance he didn’t quite edit it completely. So now we must ask ourselves, what was it he wrote in the first place?”

I looked at the sentence again. My mind was a blank. “I have no idea.”

“Well here’s what I think he wrote: ‘the last time I spoke to him he was peeing next to me.’”

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “Yes! You’re right, you must be!”

“And why did he edit it? Because he thought that might arouse suspicion.

Except if he had left it as it was then that would have been just something else that could have been put down to the different ways in which different people talk about such things. ‘He was peeing next to me’: why shouldn’t a woman say that about someone in the next cubicle. Do you see? It is the edit which gives him away. It’s that which tells us he was actually standing side-by-side with him at a urinal. As young Raw remarked, conversation between two men there is nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

We walked on. “And you worked all that out from a single letter,” I remarked.

“Clues are rarely big and brightly coloured, my dear fellow,” Edward replied.

“Sometimes, it’s just as well that they’re not.”