Original Science Fiction

Virtually Yours

An original short story
Copyright (C) 1995 by Nate Cull

Virtually Yours was where we first met. It's probably the most stylish V-Cafe on the whole Net - certainly the only one where I deign to log in more than once a year. If there's one thing I appreciate, it's class. And VY has class in abundance.

You notice it immediately; little things like the original unenhanced bitmaps of the Old Masters hanging on the lobby walls. Classical music, and jazz, floating through the public audio channels instead of techno-junk. Mellow ambient lighting, AI attendants morphed to the images of 1930s Hollywood silent movie stars. And a clientele who appreciate these things. VY is the place to be, for anyone who's anybody. My kind of place.

It was her persona which first caught my attention. You see, VidNetting has its codes and conventions; appearance isn't one of them. In the surreal virtual world of V-net, it's all smoke and mirrors. You adopt a persona, a guise for the world to see, and it's part of the fun to try and see who's behind the mask. Normally, you try and push the boundaries of style as far as they will go... which, even in a place like VY, is a long way indeed. It's like a long-running costume ball. Only half of the regular personas here were human; looking round the dance floor, I saw several dozen robots, animals, morphs of famous world leaders, and impossibly glamourous humans.

But she was different, and for a moment I couldn't figure it out. Her persona had been carefully crafted; it wasn't just a quick rush job, a careless scan of her realworld image like some newbies use on their first venture into the Net. No, she had built it all right; spent some time on her image. Yet it wasn't eyecatching, wasn't strange or even beautiful. She just looked ordinary, an everyday face. I had to look twice before I realised that here was real class in action.

I drifted over to her table, where her persona sat holding a glass. Coke, I think, not champagne like everyone else. Another cute touch. It was half-full, signifying that her realtime self was over in another room of the VY complex, but that she didn't mind interruptions. The persona's eyes, programmed to react like a human, glanced up at me as I approached.

"Hello? Would you like to talk to me?"

I hadn't expected it to speak. Voice recognition algorithms are easy enough to code in personas, as long as you use one or two word responses, but most people don't bother to take the trouble. I nodded, wondering if she'd coded a gesture parser too. (Or if she even was a she, for that matter. I've been embarrassed that way before, though VY does insist on real names. Usually.)

She blinked, and touched her glass to mine, the universal VidNet Cafe symbol for persona interrupt.

"Hi, I'm Annabel West," said the image. "I'll be with you in a moment."

The image glowed with fairy-dust briefly, hundreds of little sparkling particles, and the real Annabel West appeared, replacing her AI counterpart.

"Hi. You wanted to chat?"

"Er.. yeah. I was just admiring your persona." I've never felt tongue-tied with a woman before. "Um, you ARE a woman, right?"

She giggled, quite a feat for a texture-mapped persona to do. Smart control algorithms. Very classy.

"Yes. You can check my membership card if you like." Holding the standard white gold-inscribed VY icon up for me to download if I wanted.

"It's okay, I'll take your word for it. Um, I was just curious, you know. About your persona. Am I interrupting anything important?"

"No, I was just painting Niagara Falls. Want to come and have a look?"

"Sure." I touched her hand, another VidNet symbol meaning I wanted to tag along in her reality. She spoke something to her Navigator and the cafe scene vanished.

And we were at Niagara Falls. Not just on the observation ramp, mind you. This was virtuality. We were _in_ the falls, floating midair through a sheer wall of bitmapped water cascading over, around and through us. The thunder was deafening. I called up the Navigator and wound the ambient volume down to half.

"Nice view," I quipped. VY specialised in its high-quality replicas of real-world locations, but virtual painting was something I'd yet to try. "Where's your painting?"

She brought it up in shared space. The white canvas hovered in front of us, a palette and tool set clipped on the side. As I watched, she picked out a brush and began sketching the flow of water, in delicate, precise strokes. It seemed she was ignoring half the scene; then I saw that she was painting not the falls itself, but the landscape _through_ the falls. Style, this girl had it in boatloads.

"I'd paint for a living, if I could sell anything," she shouted back at me. Obviously she hadn't reset her own volume yet. "But I guess the market is flooded with cheap V-art these days."

"I dunno. I'd buy that one when you finish it."

"Okay. It's a deal."

She went back to her painting, dismissing me with a nod and a wave. I teleported back to the cafe, and found her membership card on my table. Evidently she'd auto-uploaded it to my account.

-------

So that was how it began. A chance meeting between strangers, two random particles colliding. Another stochastic event in the background noise of the universe. Or did I believe that anymore? Somewhere, a part of me was saying we had a destiny. That we were meant to be together.

I tried to hold the feeling back. It doesn't pay to get superstitious in my line of work. And I've always counted love as a superstition. One of those cheap beliefs, good for the masses, but which blind the real experts to their path in life. It's a risk you simply can't afford to take.

Style, though - that I can believe in. Style is something that can influence people, make them think the way you want. And the more sophisticated the illusion you project, the simpler it appears. True class, the style that comes from within, is the Holy Grail of netrunners everywhere. And now I'd found it.

That was how I rationalised it, anyway. I couldn't help it, I was falling for this girl who I'd only ever seen in a VidNet Cafe. Big mistake if you let it get to you, but hey, who was checking up? I was cool. I could play this by ear. I'd learn how her mind worked, alter my own persona to make her think she could trust me, play the style game for all it was worth. And maybe - just maybe - she'd make it worth my while. Give me some information, a few hot leads, or even - I was pushing it here - help me out on a job or two. Maybe I could make her an apprentice....

I was breaking my own First Commandment: Never trust anyone.

--------

"Gentleman would like a newspaper?"

I glanced up at the attendant, who was holding a London Times on a silver platter. The latest edition of Newsbytes Hourly, but it looked much classier this way.

"Sure. Why not?" I picked up the paper's icon and tapped twice to unfurl it. Annabel looked up, interested, and I linked her in. The cafe vanished, and we found ourselves in a long corridor lined with news copy and pictures.

"What's this? 'Terrorists Gas Monorail, Threaten City-Wide Action If Demands Are Not Met'. Oh, no! Those poor passengers. Doesn't it make you wish you could do something to stop it?"

That was Annabel all over. We'd been VidNetting for three months, and I was pretty sure her concern was genuine. She must just be one of those people who are naturally sympathetic. And liked showing it in public. Me, I could care less, and as for wearing my heart on my sleeve...

"Hmm. They reprogrammed the ventilation system. Got the air filters to expel oxygen and pump in carbon dioxide. That's actually quite tricky, you know. These guys must be pretty smart to pull a stunt like that."

She was crying, emoting tear-pixels all over the room. They flew down, softly, in simulated gravity.

"Smart??? Don't they realise it's PEOPLE they're killing? And all in the name of fighting some stupid bill, what is it, the Freedom of Information Act?"

"Data Regulation Act. The government's trying to make civilian encryption illegal, so they can eavesdrop on everyone. The Information Freedom Alliance is trying to stop it. They may be terrorists, but they have a cause."

She nodded, wiping her simulated eyes. "I know. But it just seems so - childish. They're hurting the very people they want to help. It makes no sense."

I took her arm, and pulled up the Navigator. "Let's get out of here, Annabel. Too much reality is bad for your health."

She grinned, and we rematerialised in the cafe together.

"Speaking of health, how's that new patient monitor system the hospital installed?"

"Oh, it's wonderful," she chirped, her persona radiating happiness. "Thanks for the tip. The system you recommended was half the price of the closest competitor. A better service record too. And your guys installed it for us free of charge. I guess the hospital board is pretty satisfied."

"And you?"

"Well, I'm just a Staff Nurse. Whatever is best for my patients, satisfies me."

"Aw, c'mon. You ought to set your sights a little higher. You could make Chief Nanosurgeon in a couple of years if you tried. What's there to learn? It's all done by computers now anyway."

She laughed, that classy little laugh with the high-fidelity stereo sampling that always drove me crazy. I just had to kiss her.

-------

I spent a lot of time roaming the city matrix that night, trying to settle my mind. Somehow, the bland coloured lines, pyramids and cubes, each representing a data site, seemed a lot more solid and reliable than the too close, too personal fully-photo-rendered detail of VidNet. Machines were things I could understand, if not exactly trust. People were an unknown quantity.

Eventually I found myself outside the City Hospital, a huge blue six-armed Star of Life as its icon. Annabel's place of employment. I flew down on autonav, aiming for the big white sliding doors on the 'roof' that marked the public login node. They opened at a single touch, and I slid inside into the automated lobby. A white stylised AI, dressed in a doctor's uniform, stood in the centre of the room waiting for my command.

I fingered my shoulder-bag icon and picked out a plain, generic data disk coloured green. It floated along by my fingertip as I held it out for the AI to examine. His eyes blinked, and he nodded.

"Identification accepted. The maintenance console is opening for you now."

The wall panel beyond turned transparent, revealing a featureless grey corridor. As I moved through, the panel blinked to translucent white signalling that I was now offline from the main hospital system. Nobody would find me here unless they had maintenance priviledges or higher. Which in actual terms meant only the software installers - who were long gone - or the supervisor. And in a minute, he'd have better things to worry about.

I fingered the bag again and pulled out another unmarked disk, this one red. Touching a wall panel brought up a set of slots, complex gauges and view screens. The heart of the new patient monitor system.

The red disk fitted easily into one of the slots. A few spins of the appropriate dials was all I needed to activated it. But for some reason I waited, undecided. There had to be a better, more stylish way to do this. Finally I gave in, and pushed the enter button...

"Hold it right there!"

That voice - and that sudden flash of red in my view - I turned, saw her standing pointing the black laser pistol in my face. The icon was one I knew well, and feared. The Node Intrusion Lock, available only to registered supervisors and the Net Police. Capable of freezing any user's net connection and making an instant satellite trace accurate to within tenths of a metre. A guaranteed ticket to cryo-jail for the next few decades.

"Don't touch anything!" she warned, keeping the NIL gun trained on me. As if it mattered. My link was frozen so tight I couldn't even drop carrier. But my attention was on her, anyway.

Why, oh why, had I been such a fool?

She grabbed for the disk, watching in dismay as its contents scrolled up the transfer monitor. The uplink had already been initiated. I heard her scream, and shout a word someone with an angel face like hers shouldn't know. But then, that image had been pretty well shattered by now.

I must have been pretty tense, because when she released the NIL lock I lost my balance and nearly fell to the floor. I blinked, seeing her holding the disk triumphantly - and laughing. It took a moment to realise she was laughing at me.

"Annabel West?" I offered with all the grace I could muster. "That's not your name, is it? And you're not a staff nurse. Who are you?"

"System Supervisor Floria Jenkins. And you're not exactly a convincing software maintenance person, either, you know."

I sighed. "Steve Macy, ex-member of the Information Freedom Alliance. That disk - it's not what you think. I wasn't installing it. Read the transfer monitor if you don't believe me."

She laughed again, the same cafe laugh I'd heard a million times. It sounded strange in this drab non-personal corridor of the matrix.

"I just have. Complete source code for the IFA's patient monitor virus, full documentation of all our system's backdoors, and an antidote patch to be installed in case of later infection. Plus reverse-engineered samples of the monorail virus, and plans for a dozen new mutating data worms. All for immediate transmission to our head Software Engineer. That's a pretty impressive package. Enough to earn you a civil commendation, I should think. You wouldn't want to round it out with a list of all your ex-freedom fighters?"

I shrugged. "Not really. They'll already know I've left, and changed their access codes. And I'll be on their most wanted list if I say anything. Why make any more enemies than I need to? Besides - "

She grinned and finished the sentence for me.

"It wouldn't be classy."

The End