PAUL COLLINS
PAUL COLLINS has had over a hundred and twenty books published. He is best known for his fantasy and science fiction titles: The Jelindel Chronicles [Dragonlinks, Dragonfang, Dragonsight and Wardragon) and The Quentaris Chronicles (Swords of Quentaris, Slaves of Quentaris, Dragonlords of Quentaris, Princess of Shadows, The Forgotten Prince, Vampires of Quentaris and The Spell of Undoing). His trilogy The Earthborn Wars (The Eorthborn, The Skyborn and The Hiveborn) was published in the United States. He has edited a dozen anthologies, including Metaworlds, Dream Weavers, Trust Me!, the Shivers series of children’s horror novels, SF aus Australien for Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag in Germany, and The Melbourne University Press Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (with Sean McMullen and Steven Paulsen). He is currently collaborating with Danny Willis on a trilogy: The World of Grrym.
He has been short-listed for many awards for his fiction, and has won the inaugural Peter McNamara, Aurealis, and William Atheling awards. He is also the publisher at Ford Street Publishing, an imprint of Hybrid Publishers.
In the edgy, contemporary, in-your-face story that follows, Collins extrapolates the possibilities of love, sex, adultery, and death in virtual worlds such as Second Life...
* * * *
The metaverse had become a minefield.
The dossier in my hands made me want to puke. I popped a dozen ‘ludes’, the kind that fool you into thinking everything’s okay. The main question before me was whether or not it’s permissible by law to kill an avatar — a digital manifestation — and if not, can perpetrators be tried for murder?
Perhaps the pills unfogged my mind. I decided it was an indictable offence. I mentally ticked off key points leading to my conclusion.
Legislation was passed after a lovelorn celeb called Elvirat suicided because his toygirl avatar, blitzed by a beta-virus, deconstructed block by digital block before his helpless eyes.
Since then, an estimated 200 million avatars had ‘died’ and 20,000 creators with vitamin-D deficiencies had self-destructed. The Bureau was called in but so far the FFC had come up with zilch. No ‘body’, no DNA. All they could do was interview witnesses and get their meat-space contact details.
I studied the dossier for the fifteenth time since it’d been dumped on my desk. How do you catch someone who can be someplace deep in Russia killing off avatars, someone whose digital creation left a bigger footprint on the real world than their meat-space makers did? Frankly, the whole thing gave me a headache.
Not that I could talk. My own life was circling the drain, or is that the toilet? To make ends meet I’d written three crime novels whose royalties made a slight dent in the rent and scored me seats at Sisters of Crime conferences.
That’s me, a sister of crime. Only the person I aspired to be was something else ...
Anok Helstrom. Paper Goddess. Or just goddess, the kind that left you dripping. Rumour had it she’d once sold her shopping list to InStyle webzine. When her latest book appeared, the world stopped.
And I adored her. We’d sat in rooms together, breathed the same air. Problem was, she didn’t know I existed.
Then one day our feet touched under the table. Her stilettoed boot tapped mine as she shared thoughts with some A-list arsehole. I almost pulled my foot away, but didn’t. The merest touch from the object of my obsession was like tantric sex.
A week went by. I could think of nothing but that tapping on my foot, like some zit-faced adolescent. Make that stupid zit-faced adolescent. For Christ’s sake, she was married. Had two kids. Happy, for all I knew.
Like me.
So I emailed her. I figured what the heck, if she didn’t reply it didn’t matter. I typed, deleted, typed some more, deleted some more. Started all over.
* * * *
Hey Anok
Just touching base. Putting together a crime anthology, titled: Dark Times & Dark Crimes. The malaise of the metaverse. If you’re interested, what about meeting up next time you’re in town?
Yours
Angel Hart
I had no intention of putting together such an anthology. And less hope of her wanting to be in it. But you don’t catch a fish without bait. I clicked SEND and a truckload of tension purged itself from my shoulders.
And that’s how it started.
She replied the same day.
Dear Angel
How lovely of you to think of me. I’m off to London, back in a week. I’ll be in Melbourne the 25th to the 30th. Can we play catch-up then?
Anok
Catch-up. The word made me salivate. All over. I hit reply and pinned her down to date, time, place. Must be the detective in me.
And what a week that was. Hey, back up and defrag! I’m talking the week before we met. Emails sizzled to and fro.
Hey Anok
You’ll never guess what happened last night at work. Detected an unauthorised datastream on one of the private medical channels we scan. Discovered some dude chatting up a girl in a singles bar, having answered an ad.
Should have disconnected them and ran a viral interloper. That’s my job. But I’m on a bigger case right now and the small stuff slips through. Anyway, I dialled for sensory input. And suddenly I was ‘there’, freeloading on the orgasmic ocean till they’d exhausted themselves. Bliss. So what do you think, am I perverted?
* * * *
She laughed. Said my hard-drive was in over-drive.
I met her in a café she’d suggested. In meat-space, not the metaverse, where most ‘first-dates’ usually happen. She was hidden at a corner table, camouflaged in shades and hat. She was line-editing a manuscript.
‘Don’t know how you can work in here,’ I said, sitting down, moving straight into my agenda of getting her out of there. God was on my side for once. The hubbub in the café intensified.
She wrapped her manicured satin-tipped fingers around my hand. Electricity sizzled through me. ‘What seems like chaos,’ she said, ‘is actually keeping me in a necessary state. I go to cafés when I’m not focusing well and wham, suddenly I’m concentrating ten times harder just to blank out all the noise.’
Maybe she’d rehearsed that. No matter. I’d rehearsed mine, too. ‘It’s crowded in here,’ I said. And, thank you God, it was. ‘How about we go someplace quieter?’
She looked at me, head tilting sideways in what, disbelief? The pressure on my hand loosened and she took her hand away. My heart skipped a beat.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Where did you have in mind?’
I stood before she could change her mind. I’d already made a reservation at a nearby motel. If I’d been more confident I’d have paid up front and got the discount.
‘Oh, I have to pay for my cappuccino,’ she said, slightly confused. This was fast-tracking beyond her control.
‘I’ll get it.’ I paid at the counter while she gathered her stuff. The motel I’d found was only a block away.
Within minutes I was shutting the door of our room behind us. After that, well, I don’t remember much for the next couple of hours. I do remember getting out of the shower and Anok saying, ‘I hope you’re not leading me on.’ My nipples hardened as I stood there. I think that answered her question.
I emailed her the moment I arrived back at the Bureau. Within the hour she had replied from her laptop:
* * * *
Hello darling
I can still feel your hand and mouth prints on my skin.
I think of seeing you and being in your arms and my thinking rationally stops right there. It’s like my mind can’t go past that moment. It’s so necessary and so delicious. I truly can’t wait to see you again. That thrilling, dangerous encounter scared me in retrospect, but it’s an electric memory. I was so terrified of having crossed the Rubicon and started to babble and you just took a couple of strides and kissed me and all doubts went up in flames. I would love to be lying on your naked chest having this conversation but I have to settle for a cyber connection. You have to tell me more about our skin being virtual to virtual. I’m such a Luddite!
What a sweet diversion into a parallel world you are. A dangerous and intoxicating imagining ... You once joked about being hard-wired into me as if I’m a hot spot you can connect to — I hope you found it as electrifying and shocking as did I.
Next time?
Yours
A xx
* * * *
We saw one another every time she came to Melbourne over the next year. But the last time we were almost caught. Mutual friends saw us go into her motel room. Nothing odd about that, really, but it unsettled Anok. If her husband found out ... she had her boys to think about ... all the standard doubts shared by adulterers the world over. To give up security for the unknown is a risk many don’t wish to take.
During this time an epidemic was gaining momentum. Another 8,000 people worldwide suicided at the loss of their beloved avatars. Every major government in the world bankrolled investigations into catching the creator of the virus.
Meanwhile a shady character by the name of Jerry Anderson took avatar construction up another notch. His avatars aren’t constructed — you are them. Wireless, too — key in your biorhythm index to your reality space and you’re there. Actually are you them or are they you? They’re better than human for they never get tired and they cope with rejection. Configure yourself — your avatar — to be the woman or man that all others want, then step into the metaverse and have fun ...
The interslick tech is nothing special to look at, just a neckband and headband of material that feels cold and wet when you put them on. I had a loan of a prototype set of series #1. No way could I ever be able to afford one on a detective inspector’s wage. Jerry Anderson was a scumbag who mainly dealt in hardcore dildonics until I’d busted him a year before. He’d created virtual reality snuff flicks like Private Predator and embedded them with neural-induced hypnotherapy. An REM-triggered response that reacted with the player’s amygdala creating a neural feedback on the victim’s brain like an immense emotional shock. Basically, it killed men who viewed his sordid flicks. To say actors committed bestial acts of depravity in those hack and slash flicks would be an understatement. I let Anderson off with a caution and a pat on the back. He was ridding the world of some choice acts. The killings stopped and the Bureau tucked it all away in the Cold Case file.
Anderson finally repaid me. Whoever was killing off avatars by the cartload was actually destroying his stock and trade. The virus was now sweeping the city’s avatars and people were pulling out in droves. Hundreds of customers had opted out of reality, too, leading to scathing media attacks on SpaceScape Productions. Anderson’s business was going bust fast. He wanted the hacker caught and quick. Hence the prototype of his new series.
‘Have fun, Angel,’ Jerry said with a smirk. He never did get it, the loser.
I studied the package and set up a plan to bring down the Avatar Butcher, as the media had so garishly labelled him.
I emailed Anok with an idea to assuage her fears of our affair being made public. We’d set up in Jerry Anderson’s frontier town, Lovago, already the world’s largest alternative universe. Every brand name corporation from Nike through to Ford and Hooters had set up shop there — a metropolis of cash-driven nirvana. It was bandied about that the government now made more tax dollars from the metaverse than it did in meat-space. And that’s in spite of only receiving an estimated ten per cent of its dues. Would I be a cynic to say it was no wonder the governments wanted to stop this mass serial killer from continuing his or her spree? It was costing them big time.
Using the new interslicks we’d simply be superior to our neighbours, but it’d only appear as though we were slumming rich dudes with huge graphics cards. With pseudonyms we could live our parallel lives in anonymity and without fear of getting caught providing we were careful. No, I didn’t tell Anok about my ulterior reason for continuing our affair in Lovago. I tried to. I hinted of dark things beyond my control that might make her mad. I told her I’d never seen her seething, that it would be a sight to behold.
Her reply marginally eased my conscience:
Hmmm ... me when I’m mad. Not a pretty sight, I suspect. It’s only in books and movies that ugliness is supposed to look attractive. I hate feeling angry, and I feel ugly and corroded. I can’t imagine you will ever see that side of me. Especially given that in a funny (not amusing but quirky) way our lives keep us apart from that. We don’t have enough time to waste being mad. Any doubts will be seriously soothed, skin to skin, avatar to avatar. It makes no difference — I can’t wait to be in your arms.
I love u
A xx
* * * *
And that’s how the love-nest came to be. I downloaded the software — the Bureau has the latest high-volume graphics channels on the market, and terabytes of volatile memory to assimilate tactile stimulation inputs from one’s partner.
All the while I marvelled at Anderson’s invention. He was set to become a demigod and bring down governments. No one need ever leave their house and interact with others again — a social inertia if ever there was one. It’d be a lot safer in the sex sector. One never knows what you might pick up if more than electrons and photons flow between bodies. And Anderson’s avatars were more human cells than avatar blocks — viral-proof.
I bought a wad of andos — virtual currency that doesn’t exist in meat-space. At the going rate, 200 ando dollars equalled one ‘real’ dollar.
Anok and I soon moved into a condo. Whenever she was touring we stayed the night in Lovago, had breakfast, went to work. At nights I’d call out the proverbial, ‘Hi, Honey, I’m home.’ It was a cry that became ritual. We rarely ventured out into the city, colourful though it was with its frilly-maned dragons with Bambi eyes, Gandalf-inspired wizards, hissing vampires and other loops. People who construct this virtual stuff are high on image quality but low on imagination.
Lovago was just our little niche of the metaverse in which we were a happily married couple. Ostensibly, that is. Like the bug-chasers of yesteryear before a cure for AIDS was discovered, I laid Anok and me out like virtual bait.
Things started unravelling when I found a blonde hair in the shower plughole. My first thought was that it was a leftover from the previous tenants. But we’d been here a month now, and no way could that hair have remained stuck there. The detective in me took over briefly. A computer-generated DNA analysis on the follicle cells would tell me exactly which avatar the hair belonged to. I figured I was being paranoid and let it drop. You do things like that when you’re in love. I didn’t want to know if she was having an affair in our home. I knew I could never compete with her husband — but another woman? I sent her an email about this part of our relationship and in passing said I hoped to have her hooked for a long time to which she replied:
Hooked and landed. As for Frank, he’s a social cripple and puts everyone’s back up, curdling them like month-old milk. There are many times when he feels like a big anvil around my neck, a dragging weight that slows me and makes everything heavier and harder. But I can’t be bothered dwelling on it, because he is never going to change and if I give him a blast about it, he’ll sink into a morass of despair and go lie on his bed in funereal gloom. That might be worse than the slackness.
See you tonight, my love.
A xxoo
* * * *
Till I received that email I’d kept the blonde hair in an airtight crime scene bag. I flushed it, bag and all, down the waste disposal.
A week passed and we continued on as before. We craved one another so much that my meat-space partner became worried that I was working too much. Only by staying away from home could I visit Anok at our condo. For her part, she accepted more and more interstate and international bookings. We were pretty much in Lovago 24/7.
But doubt rides hard when spurred. I searched our condo with a thoroughness best reserved for work. I found Cherry Blossom lipstick — Anok always wore PlumVamp. I found more blonde hairs in her hairbrush. And the final proof of her adultery was on the phone. I hit re-dial. A man’s voicemail answered. ‘Hey babe, Hans here.’ I didn’t really listen to the message, but it was personal, as though only Anok had his number. I know he said, ‘Can’t wait to catch up at the condo.’ It appeared she was having at least two affairs — one male, one female.
Can someone be a double-adulterer? Who was I to condemn Anok for cheating on me when both she and I were cheating on our partners? I wrestled with the conundrum. Were our avatars really cheating? If you watched a movie about adultery did you partake of it yourself? If your avatar committed adultery, was that any worse for you than watching a movie about it? I’d put men away for years for enjoying the thrill of date-rapes and murders in virtual realities. But it was the avatars doing the pillaging, not those enjoying the experience. Can adultery, or rape, even, exist in the metaverse? Cyber-bullying was the basis for today’s harsh virtual legislations. But was the whole concept basically flawed? The foundation of everything I’d ever worked towards was suddenly cracking up.
One part of me wanted to sell up, clear out. Cut Anok and her lover/s out of the picture forever. Another part of me wanted my dream to last for however long it could, warts and all. Then I realised all this stuff wasn’t about me. It was about the job. I was on stake-out duty. Business first, pleasure second. It wasn’t until I had this figured out that I knew I was getting somewhere with the case.
So I let it rest. Nonetheless, doubt gnawed away at me like a cancer.
Anok and I met in meat-space during the Canberra Literary Festival. Real life sex is marginally better than the metaverse variety. You can’t beat the smell of sex, and that is one sense the metaverse hasn’t replicated yet: smell. Anderson boasted to me that he was within a whisker of solving that problem.
The moment I arrived back at the office I went straight ‘home’. My suspicions that Anok had been cheating on me were allayed after our weekend encounter. But a nagging thought drove me to give the condo a thorough check.
I wasn’t really surprised when I found a man’s handkerchief with an H embroidered on it in the bed. It confirmed a suspicion that I’d been harbouring for a week. Back at the office, I phoned Anok via a secure line on her cell. It was late. But it was serious. I told her the whole sordid duplicitous story.
The next night we had a row at the condo.
‘So what do you call this?’ I demanded, throwing the lipstick, brush and the handkerchief on the bed. ‘And who’s Hans?’
‘Angel ... don’t do this. I don’t know how these things got here. They’re not mine. Of course they’re not.’ She looked about the room. ‘Maybe Frank —’ but the words died on her mouth. No way could Frank navigate the metaverse. His skills lay strictly out at sea and his own dark space.
‘Get out, Anok,’ I said. ‘I’m selling the place.’
She nodded slowly, as though understanding. ‘Okay, Angel. Do what you have to do. You always do.’
She snatched her bag and with head bowed she went to the door. She paused there, and I had hoped to see her turn and at least acknowledge me. But she didn’t. The door opened, and that was that.
I put in two more visits before everything fell neatly into place.
There was a knock on the door. It was the security guard. She was cutting edge perfection in a uniform so neatly ironed the creases looked sharp as razorblades. An obsessive-compulsive then. A lean woman, she was quite attractive in a harsh way. Something predatory in her manner reminded me of a dozen psychos I’d put away over the years. I buzzed with adrenalin.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Sheila. Security. I heard you guys arguing the other night.’ She winced with heartfelt commiseration. ‘Saw the “For Sale” sign up.’ She looked beyond me, into the lounge room. ‘Thought I’d pop over.’ Then hopefully, ‘You might need a shoulder to cry on.’
Like a cyber-rebound, I smiled pitifully, lips trembling. If I could have squeezed out a tear I would have. But I almost over-played it. Sheila froze for a moment. Like maybe a human would when confronted by another human so perfect that it couldn’t be real. Like meeting an angel in meat-space.
A professional, she recovered. From behind her back she drew a bottle of merlot. ‘The best ando dollars can buy.’
I stood back from the door. ‘Sure, come in.’ When she entered I locked the door.
She turned, a smile touching the corners of her cherry blossom lips. ‘Do you lock in all your female visitors?’ She had already scanned the condo for the firewall — the only obvious means by which our avatars had not succumbed to her virus. We shouldn’t exist, yet we did. The virus had wiped out two thirds of Lovago’s populace in the last month. Now she needed to get up close and personal. Decipher how to crack our immunity codes. An insatiable hunger I knew she could never quench, could never resist. If we were immune to the virus she needed to know why to combat it. A challenge to match that of the Mac virus that knocked out three quarters of the smug Mac users whose catchcry was once: ‘I don’t get viruses. I have a Mac’
She unscrewed the top of the wine bottle. Raised it in salute. ‘Glasses? You should toast. You’re a free man.’
Without saying a word I undid the top five buttons of my blouse. I’d been waiting for this moment for two whole days.
The avatar’s eyes dropped to my cleavage. ‘So you’re a woman.’ Her smile evaporated as her earlier suspicion dawned large on her. ‘What is this?’
Anok used her key to open the door. Only now her avatar was a lithe beauty dressed in a jet black neoprene bodysuit. She’d needed to log in under a pseudonym to avoid the real Sheila’s detection. Several Lovago officials fanned out from behind her and flanked Sheila.
‘There’s been some mistake,’ Sheila began.
‘Yours,’ I said. ‘Spreading viruses across the metaverse is an international offence.’ I looked at my watch. A meaningless gesture here in the metaverse of course, but old habits die hard. ‘Right now there’s a bruiser called Burbank knocking on your door in meat-space. I suggest you answer it before the FFC kicks it in.’
‘You can’t prove a thing!’ Sheila hissed. She started laughing then morphed, losing layer upon layer of blocks till there was nothing there.
A self-destruct virus. Clever. But not clever enough. Burbank would be reading the hacker his or her rights by now.
I showed the officials to the door and thanked them with the bottle of merlot. Then I held Anok at arm’s distance. ‘Why, if it isn’t Cathy Willow from Willow’s Game.’
‘On loan from jerry.’ She undid the rest of my buttons and unclipped my bra with practised ease. With fingertip softness she pushed me backwards onto the bed. ‘We need to talk about you setting us up,’ she said. ‘But not right now,’ she purred ...
* * * *
AFTERWORD
‘Lure’ follows ‘Wired Dreaming’, a story published in Dreaming Down-Under. It’s not often that I get a chance to record my forecasts for the future. That the predictions here will occur there is little doubt in my mind — it’s more a matter of when. I couldn’t resist the dig regarding Mac users, having sparred with many over the years, defending my reliable PC with religious zeal. Who, I wonder, will take up the challenge and take that second bite from the apple ...
— Paul Collins