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Hailja (part 1)
1. Forth
"Hailsha vo" There was no ready referent for this feeling. The closest thing to it was from an old film she’d once seen after joining the AnarchArtists. The film had portrayed a bunch of people flying off to blow something up. When they got within range of it, they showed a mixture of fear and obviously false bravado in the face of an overwhelming enemy. But that wasn’t it, either. As she checked her support systems before going in, she felt nervous, but she didn’t know if she was feeling nervous enough. She examined the available information on the location she was going to explore, but all she had was the address and the name: Hailja. It was a Dark System, an undocumented virtual reality environment that people went into but didn’t come out of alive or sane. Nobody knew who owned them or why they existed in the first place; some said they were written and placed by the Dominion in an attempt to cull the dangerous users. Others said it was a result of natural human perversity, that no one could stand to see a good thing without ruining it somehow. Mina had her own theory: they were testing grounds. If you survived, you became a member of a secret elite. She’d believed this ever since she’d been able to access the net. In her time as a virtual explorer, she’d broken open nine Dark Systems, but membership of the imaginary, secret elite still eluded her.
Mina had run away from home. She’d given up her chance at citizenship, escaped from the creche (where life was safe, if a little tedious) and had gone to live with the AnarchArtists in their squat. They hadn’t minded an extra person moving in. The building was twelve stories tall and mostly uninhabited, so another hand against the encroaching dilapidation of the structure was welcome. A friendly neuter named Gaeren showed her how to steal data and power lines from the tunnel which ran underneath the structure, and she knew enough to get free meals at the city dispensary. Now, she felt, observing her bare room with a mattress she’d found in an abandoned factory, she was part of the real counterculture, the fashionable; the cool. She spent her first few tendays just observing them, seeing exactly what the counterculture did with their time. Most of them seemed taken up with learning parts for theatrical productions, plays which she’d never heard of. Perhaps they also wrote them. Some of them spent all of their time plugged into their terminals, netted (judging from the way their bodies twitched while plugged in); oblivious to all else. Not wanting to seem out of place, she joined in with a small group occupied with making costumes for the theatrical productions. She had a basic idea of how to put clothes together, and, after some encouragement from Mileva Barker – the costume-group’s apparent leader – she even contributed some designs of her own. Having found a way to demonstrate her creativity got her accepted much more quickly. This was, though, just something to take up her time until she could obtain a terminal. The bare data lines poking out of the gap in her wall were of no use by themselves; she had to have the box which would interface between her and the net, and they weren’t easy to come by. The terminal was what she was after, the link to the net; it was the face of the counterculture that she was most familiar with, having caught glimpses of it through gaps in the creche security systems now and then.
She considered the catheter but decided she wouldn’t be in there long enough to need it. Besides, if she came out of this one alive she wouldn’t mind a little mess. She lay down in the couch, attached the net connections and was about to press the START contact when she remembered her lucky 20C toy – a battered box made of dark red plastic with golden designs printed on the sides. Can’t go on a run without that, she thought; she rattled it (there was something inside, but she hadn’t wanted to break it open to find out what it was), kissed it for good luck and then dived into virtual reality.
One evening Mina had been sitting around with the others on the roof of the building, listening to the marathon musicians (who played continuously, serial teams of them, always someone ready to take over from someone who grew too tired to keep playing). Mileva arrived, practically jumping out of the elevator car, a big grin on her face: "We sold the rights to Tube-fed Repose!" she announced. This was a short play for which Mina had done at least half of the costuming work; she hadn’t realised that the play was being sold, and wondered which mediate had bought it. Mileva came over to her, took her hand and touched wrists, the currency buttons clacking together. "You get ten percent of the rights, and a five percent cut of the fifteen percent of the profits from the show, Mina," she whispered. Mina glanced down at her button and clenched her middle and ring fingers to the palm of her hand; tiny holographic digits lit up showing her new account balance. She had enough money to buy a citizen’s terminal if she wanted! That would have been the customary thing to do; the Straight thing to do. ‘Terners never did things that way. She solicited some advice from Gaeren and went down to the Market to shop around.
She dove into the system, arriving at the Meeting Place. The first environment most people saw on entering... The fashion changed almost daily, but never so drastically that it became unfamiliar unless you didn’t enter VR for more than two months. The last time Mina had been in, the city square paradigm had been in use; it still was. The Meeting Place for people in virtual reality looked like a small park in the centre of some city, seats arranged on multilevel concrete steps, ornamental fountains and trees dotted here and there. Transition squares (which would instantly put you into currently popular custom environments without the tedium of entering the coordinates) were marked by diagonally-striped yellow and black borders. She saw people’s virtual forms step onto the squares and vanish as their point of view was shifted somewhere else. Private chat rooms, battle games, musical and dramatic performances (she idly wondered if Tube-fed Repose was playing at the moment), training simulations for everything from security guards to shop assistants, ‘boudoirs’ (more commonly known as BonkWare), playgrounds... and Dark Systems. Even as she moved through the crowd, she imagined that someone was entering a Dark System right this very second, and being swallowed by it...
The ‘Terner Market was a different thing altogether to the Straight Ginzas that she’d visited while living with the creche. For one thing, it was partly outdoors; while most of it was nestled in a structure which had once been a multi-level car park, it had expanded until segments spilled out into neighbouring blocks, roofed over with a variety of plastic sheeting and treated cardboard panels. What she was shopping for would be in the deepest levels, inside hidden from common view. She had learned how to dress the part, how to shave the sides of her head so that she looked like a traditional ‘Terner; the stance, the moves, enough of the language to get by. After she bought some plastic chewing gum spiked with Elricin, the whole process became much easier. The chemical made everything recede from her, almost as if the people around her were slaves bowing and assuming their rightful place in a drama of which she was the star. A tiny part of her stayed aloof even from this odd detachment. She observed that the people didn’t change the way they behaved towards her; it was in the way she viewed them viewing her. Somehow, imagining that she was a member of the counterculture (she lived off her wits, alone; she wore clothes she’d made herself; she took psychoactive drugs; she would sleep with anyone who met the criteria of her convoluted value system; she stole access to other peoples’ computers) made it so. She was one of them. It was as simple as that. Twenty minutes of wandering around the second-lowest level (the Elricin giving her the objectivity to detect minute currents in the crowd) showed her where to go; a small hardware store. The structure – a container about the size of three apartment rooms sitting end-to-end – had the hollowed-out semicircles at its corners which indicated to the history student that it had once moved across the ground on wheels. One whole side had been opened up and the inside was home to a dealer of indeterminate gender, eyes hidden behind a silvered mirror-shade bar. It didn’t appear to be looking at her, but Mina knew that video feeds from several hidden cameras were being piped into those mirror-shades, and to avoid arousing suspicion she’d have to do something quickly. She decided on the simplest course; approached the van, smiled winningly (she knew how effective this smile was; she’d tried it out on Mileva), held out her wrist, currency-button first and said, "I’d like to buy a terminal, please." At the same time, she displayed the account balance so the dealer could see it. There was a pause of perhaps fifteen seconds, then the dealer (a female, Mina decided) smiled and half-recited, half-sang, "Better by design, fly the friendly skies, through appliance of science, we’ve got that ring of confidence...". Mina recognised the allusion (the dealer was saying, in a convoluted way, that they could do business). She relaxed, sat down crosslegged on the floor before the dealer, folded her hands and looked up expectantly. The dealer tilted her head to one side and then removed the shades. Her eyes were milky white; no pupils. Two tiny ridges of electronic contacts ran from the corners of her eyes back into the stubble of her ‘Terner haircut. The shades had been plugged into these. The dealer gestured to the back of the van, where a black-rubber-padded recess about the size of her head was set amidst a mass of white-enamelled machinery. A narrow padded couch ran up to the recess. "Please, lie back here," the dealer whispered. Mina did so without hesitation; after all, this dealer was a ‘Terner, one of the clan; if she were harmed in any way, this person would have the rest of the ‘Terners to answer to. The couch slid backwards on plastic rails until her head was within the dark recess; inflatable padding expanded until her head was held firmly in place, and tiny articulated arms folded out of the darkness towards her temples.. The process was completed in a matter of minutes. The dealer sold her an address where she could find orientation routines which would train her in the use of her new connections. Almost as an afterthought, she handed her a slim cartridge, half a centimetre thick, six by ten centimetres along the sides, with a coil of fibres in a plastic pouch; the interface between her and the net. Mina could hardly wait to get back to her room to try it.
She wandered around the Meeting Place for a while, telling herself that she was testing her reflexes and looking for a quiet spot to try out the slow cut-out timer. After ten minutes of this, she stopped herself and moved over to a relatively unpopulated corner. When entering a Dark System, caution was the watchword, always. There were twelve separate logical safeguards attached to her VR form, and before going into any Dark System she turned them all on. She loaded the address of the Dark System, keyed the terminal timer to return her to the Meeting Place after two hundred milliseconds had elapsed, looked about as if saying her last farewell, then triggered the jump. She had almost enough time to recite her own name, more than enough time to get a glimpse of the inside of the system before the timer brought her back. It hadn’t looked significantly different from environment she’d left from; pale blue sky overhead, distant winter sunlight, grey and silver buildings around her. There had been no grabbing at her self-image; no one-way mirrors underfoot, no cold barriers against return, no glue, no Hentaicles, nothing overtly threatening about the backgrounds. She raised an eyebrow at the sudden relief she felt and went back in, this time for two seconds. Same result. The only way she could tell she’d moved at all was the way the people around her vanished and then reappeared. There had been enough time to get a better look around; the structure was exactly like the meeting place, but without the people. She’d heard of similar Dark Systems; they pretended to look like the environment you’d entered from, then they sprang some kind of nasty trap on you. She tested this theory by jumping over to Test Bay One, the free-for-all environment where people played with aspects of environments they wanted to build. Someone was holding a Warner Brothers cartoon festival in there, all explosions and anvils falling from the sky and frantic, exaggerated movement. When she jumped from there to Hailja, a stray anvil came with her, but the environment looked the same as before; plain grey cityscape. Her next suspicion was that the system would lure her in with a false sense of security; the trap would only spring when she went in without any detectable safeguards. She had a way around that, too. Back in the real world, she arranged a physical timer over the power switch. A dumb clockwork mechanism built from the insides of a 20C clock, there was no way the net could sense it and therefore no way in which a clever Dark System could tell that she wasn’t there to stay. She wound it up and set it to give her three minutes on-line, then jumped directly into Hailja. She didn’t notice anything different this time, either. So much for her theory of the system sensing her timers. She walked about and examined the structure which, she learned, wasn’t an exact copy of the current look of the meeting place; there were differences. Most likely they’d both been copied from the same template. The fountains had been turned off, possibly to cut down on the processor overhead needed to render the droplets. She looked into the still waters and noticed a glitch; the trees around her reflected in the water, but her face didn’t. She brought a hand up to her mouth, waggled her head; no reflection. A sudden feeling of someone standing behind her was obliterated by a rush of sensation brought on by the return to her real body. The clockwork cut-out had shut off the power to her terminal; it had gone into emergency power-failure mode and dumped her out. She was tempted to reset it for a fifteen-minute delay and dive back in. As she reached for the clock she remembered a conversation she’d had with another ‘Terner about Dark Systems...
"That’s the way it goes," he’d said. "They present an innocent face, lure you in deeper. The minute you let down your guard, the jaws of the trap close. It happened to me, once. I was in this endless corridor, blocked by a series of doors, each one different. They were all locked, but the keys had been left in." The anonymous ‘Terner – she’d met him at the Meeting place – sipped his imaginary drink and smiled at the memory. "Each door was stuck. I can see now that it was designed to frustrate; you could get them open with a lot of pushing and wiggling of the keys, but it was slow going. My timer was set to cut out after two minutes, which was almost long enough to get one door open. Eventually, I got sick of having to dive back in, so I reset the timer for five minutes. This triggered some alarm. The next door I opened released a flood of honey. As soon as it rose above the level of my head, it froze solid, slowed my metabolism down to nothing. I was stuck there for what felt like a week in the slowest slow motion you can imagine before someone found me on the outside and pulled me out." Mina raised an eyebrow; what happened? He waved his hand dismissively, then brushed it over the rows of contacts set into his temples. "Some contact nerve burns. It was a warning more than anything else. They were saying you know what we could have done, so be grateful." "’They’?" He smiled, finished his drink. "Well, you know."
She unhooked herself from the terminal and went down to the communal dining area in the squat, looking for someone she could impose on to baby-sit for her. She found Vala Rendri – the head of the AnarchArtists’ Cinematography division – examining a paper pad full of rough sketches. She’d glance at a page, mutter "Crap", tear it out, screw it up and toss it over her shoulder, leaving only every fifth or sixth page. When she got to the end of the pad she smiled mirthlessly and handed the tattered remains of the pad to her assistant, an ex-pilot called Genesis. He tried not to look utterly crushed and gave her an uncertain smile. "So, you liked it, huh?" "Block them all out again. This time, try to imagine that your viewpoint is fixed in one place. Like your head is the camera and your body has been impaled on a stake. Got that?" He nodded. Mina leaned in behind Vala and put her hands over her eyes, the thumb and forefinger of each hand at right angles to form a rectangular frame. "While he’s doing that," she murmured, "could I borrow him to watch over me? Going into a Dark System, and I’d rather have someone there to pull me out if I get caught." Vala reached up, grasped her wrists and kissed her fingers. "May as well. He’s useless at storyboarding." She was back in; the same grey shells, the same calm stillness that you might experience in a system that hadn’t been activated yet. Almost as if this environment was still under construction. She leaned over the pond; this time, she saw her reflection, dark hair brushed back, thin face, eyebrows merging with the terminal contacts at her temples. Had she always shown the world such a driven, intense look? She frowned into the water; her reflection faded. Spooky, she thought. It reacts. She stood up, turned around; there was a copy of her form standing a few metres away, faintly rendered, rippling as if her reflection had been peeled off the water and hung up in the air. Routinely, she checked that her control hadn’t been blocked; it hadn’t. She could still leave the system if she wanted to. She held up her left hand and, after a brief delay, the other Mina did the same. She smiled; it smiled back. She moved towards it. It made forward-walking movements, but slid backward across the concrete, keeping an even distance between them. Mina paused, then took three steps backward. The copy stepped backward while sliding towards her. Mina gave an incredulous laugh, and the copy’s face had just started to copy her expression when the cut-out pulled her out. Genesis was sitting on her couch, hunched over a new sketch pad, squinting at a morass of dark lines and occasionally adding to them with a stick of charcoal. He looked up as she stirred. "Having fun in there?" She smiled back at him. "You know, the more it pretends not to be a trap, the more I’m convinced that it is. It’s got a kind of unfinished air to it, too. False sense of security. I’m going back in for ten minutes, this time. As usual, you know..." He nodded. "If you don’t wake up, I’ll go get Gaeren." She set the timer and dived back in.
She remembered the first Dark System she’d entered. Someone had decided to recreate De Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’, recruiting anyone who came in to the system to play the parts of the servants. It hadn’t been done with any subtlety; only one of the four main characters was being played by a human (the other three were running on scripts), and she’d found an escape clause after only twenty minutes. The second one had been much harder to break out of. The structure was perfectly sealed, no logical inconsistencies, no other characters to play off. If her anonymous ‘Terner friend hadn’t been busy breaking in to the system she was trying to break out of, she might have died in there. After that sobering experience, she set out to learn everything there was to know about coding VR. Given that she didn’t have much of an aptitude for abstract geometry, it wasn’t exactly a labour of love; she spent an entire year creating structures and then finding ways to break out of them. She knew she was doing well when she had been invited into a Dark System and found it to be based on one of her early maze-generating routines. She had laughed while exploiting its known weaknesses and finding a way out. Mina divided her time between devising new traps for herself and working out a solid plan of attack for escaping existing Dark Systems. She’d even put some of her efforts up for others to play with, but always with the provision of an easy escape clause; she wasn’t out to hurt anyone. Anyone trapped in one of her games only had to say the words ‘I bow down to ye, Mistress Mina’ and they would be released. This was common knowledge. She remembered the only time she’d ever been so frightened that she lost control. She’d been isolated from her internal cut-outs and dragged into a mob scene, the obvious conclusion being that they were going to kill her. She’d never died in VR before; certainly never impaled on a stake in a virtual 12th-Century Wallachia. She knew that the mechanical cut-out was going to save her, but she spent twenty minutes in agony before the system crashed and dropped her out. Understandably, the incident put her off the idea of sex for the next month.
This time when she dived in, someone else was already there. There was no mistaking it for the water-reflection image that had haunted her before; this one was an elongated humanoid figure made of translucent green glass. It was striding away from where she’d landed; she could see another figure partially hidden by the first. By the time she’d finished establishing herself in this environment, the other figure had vanished into a wall. The green glass man walked up to the wall, appeared to reach out for a door handle – which she couldn’t see – opened an invisible door and then vanished into it.. This environment presented different views for different people. The form she’d just seen could have been one of the owners, or it could have been just another outsider stumbling into a trap. It was impossible to tell simply from the shape the person had used in VR; she’d been through this with other systems. The particularly strange ones tended to be run by people who displayed little imagination in their own VR forms – they used pre-packaged standard forms that had been available for years. Conversely, people who spent weeks crafting bizarre and convoluted shapes to parade around in public seemed to have spent all of their creative energies on their clothes and none on their homes, so to speak. Always room for exceptions, she told herself. She turned around and the rippling reflection was there again, her head tilted slightly to one side, smiling faintly. This time, Mina held herself as still as possible. Neither of them moved for the next eight minutes and forty seconds. The timer cut in; she dropped out of VR. Impatiently, she set the timer for fifteen minutes and dived back in. Instead of fading into the bland grey cityscape, she lurched through the floor of her apartment, pitched backwards and down, falling through caverns hewn from angular rock. She had no control over her fall, as if the system had suddenly decided that this would be played by the rules of regular physics. With an effort, she controlled her panic and pretended that she was skydiving. She was wearing the standard light-grey pants, top and sock-shoes that the system defaulted to unless you specified more elaborate clothing. The area below her was pitch black with faint patches of dark grey drifting past slowly, like clouds. It was a cheap effect, one that most people had given up using a long time ago. Black background, wind blowing in the user’s face, free-fall sensation and hints of movement below to give the impression of wide open spaces. She was about to make a derisive comment to this effect when a vertical crack opened up across the sky beneath, angry red glow showing through. The illusion of vast scale was complete; it took her breath away. Briefly, she lost what control she had and flipped head over heels a few times before she could stabilise herself, arms outspread. It was then that the system began playing with her in earnest. Her temporal sense lurched; the frenzied whipping about of her hair slowed, almost stopped and then resumed at a slightly slower pace, lending a dream-like air to the scene. It was an old effect. An isolated memory lurched out of her mind, a 20C video she’d seen while researching. It had been filmed at twice normal speed; the actors had moved about rapidly. When played at normal speed, they appeared to drift about the set languidly, their hair and clothing drifting about as if they were underwater. She consulted the clock display and to her alarm, real time was passing at a drastically slowed rate – she slowly counted to forty before the second counter clicked over. At this rate, her fifteen minutes would last ten hours! She carefully checked over her options. None of her cheat controls worked; there were no cracks in the superficial structure of this environment. She’d have to go deeper into it, explore and hope to find a logical inconsistency somewhere. The environment lurched again, slowed and steadied. The second counter stopped moving altogether. She’d just steeled herself for the dive downward when she saw dark red specks twisting against the faint grey clouds below. Approaching her, flying in a capricious spiral pattern, circling around, homing in. As they got closer, details became apparent. They were humanoid, elongated as the green glass man was; the colour of dried blood. They had long, thin tails. And wide-spread bat wings.
Last time I ever accept a dare from Mileva, she thought as the peasants dragged her through the village square and towards the church grounds. The spire of the building loomed over them all like a schoolmaster (fish-eye lens effect when you look up. Cheesy!); she could imagine its remote distaste, hands held behind its back with a whip-thin cane and the desire to punish evident in every line. Her sense of the ridiculous hadn’t deserted her, though; despite the mob’s impassioned righteousness, someone was taking the opportunity to squeeze her buttocks. She almost giggled; what halted the laugh in her throat was the sight of the stake. It looked for all the world like a goal-post; the end had been hacked to a point and smeared with oil, as if they couldn’t decide whether to impale her or burn her. Perhaps they’d do both. It was at that point that she realised she wasn’t going to escape this; they were going to impale her. On a stake. She renewed her struggles, but they weren’t about to let her go. Someone ripped her rough gown in half up the back and tore away the rags that the system had put on her in the way of underclothes. They released her arms but before she could strike out, they’d slipped a collar over her head; it was attached to a pole held upright by four peasants. They used it to haul her into position while the others held onto her legs. She kicked wildly, tried to grab the pole and manoeuvre her way out of this, but they’d obviously done this before. The end of the stake was forced between her legs and into her; they tugged down, lifting themselves off the ground with the effort and she slid down onto the point with a sickening crunch. She screamed as the first jolts of pain came. The point ground along the front of her pelvic bone and up into her stomach. She could feel the skin around her perineum tearing, splinters along the side of the stake catching on the edges of the wound. She tried to stop her descent by bringing her legs together but some vital muscle or ligament had been torn, and the blood pouring down her legs made it too slippery. The collar was loosened and she was left to wave her arms wildly in a fruitless search for something to hang on to, her gasps growing more hoarse as the stake tore through her chest cavity. It pushed her lungs aside, scraped up the inside of her breastbone, squeezed her wind-pipe shut and finally emerged beneath her jaw. She had to turn her head to one side to let it pass, the blood-streaked wood grain slowly sliding past her right eye. She should have died from blood loss long before this; whoever programmed this routine wasn’t above some selective rule-breaking. She was still gasping for breath that wouldn’t come half an hour later when she felt the toes of her left foot touch the ground, scraping a shallow furrow in the dirt heaped around the bottom of the stake. She didn’t have the strength to bring her hands up to touch the stake; what could she have done, anyway? Pull herself back up to the top? She noticed that the peasants had been rather quiet since they’d placed her on the stake; they stood around the base staring at her, occasionally shifting weight from one foot to another, scratching noses, blinking. Hauntingly faint smiles on every face. She tried to say something, failed, lifted her hand up to waist height, let it drop again. No one moved. They were mechanical actors at the end of a play with no more lines to speak. Both her feet were touching the ground, now; she tried scraping the dirt away from the left side, wincing with the agonising twinges this movement sent through her stomach and thighs. It seemed to be working. If she could steel herself against the pain (it wasn’t so bad if she didn’t try to move), wiggling her left arm and her head at the same time would make the stake wobble in its setting. This in turn gave her better access to the loose dirt at the base. The stake suddenly lurched to the left. She tried to put her leg out to stop it, but couldn’t overcome the pain; the stake leaned over about thirty degrees, paused, then dropped further. The sharpened end caught in the clothing of one of the peasants, jerking it to a painful stop. If she could have, she would have screamed again. She hung from the stake like a spitted animal, gently rocking from side to side as she settled, feet flat against the ground, arms trailing down lifelessly. She could see the peasant through one eye; he moved his arm to scratch his crotch and the end of the stake slipped free from his coat, dropping her to the ground. She lay there for at least half an hour, trying to regain her strength. She couldn’t breathe, yet she hadn’t suffocated; the ground around her feet was sticky with her blood but she hadn’t fainted from the loss. She decided that it was a result of sloppy programming; the impaling scene wasn’t supposed to run this long, but somehow she’d missed the end-of-scene condition and it had just kept running. Perhaps she’d keep bleeding until the environment filled up with her blood. With a heroic effort she began to push herself back up the shaft. After only a few minutes she realised that the blood at her crotch had dried, in effect gluing her in place. She gave up. A few seconds later the ground was split by irregular, jagged triangular folds which flickered and darted at the sky; the ground map was breaking up. Some of the peasants changed into common background items such as barrels, anvils, chickens and miniature haystacks. The pain that lanced through her body abruptly became a soft pulse of warmth, then a searing orgasmic flare of pleasure. I hate badly written routines, she thought before the system crashed completely.
The flying demons had flocked around her like wasps to a rotten melon, grabbing whichever limb presented itself and slowing her fall into a graceful sweeping curve. She’d settled facing towards the sky, so she couldn’t tell where they were going; all she could see when she craned her neck around was the back of the demon which had grabbed her waist, flexing smoothly as it worked its wings. As she’d observed, it was made of translucent red glass; the distorted images of the ground below refracting through its body were incomprehensible. She tried to wriggle around to where she could get a better view and the demon whacked her face with the end of its tail. She tried to bite it as it whipped by; one of the other demons thrust its face into hers and hissed. It looked like a cross between Giger’s Alien and a Hajime Sorayama robot; its features swam and shifted as she stared into its insectoid domino-mask eyes. There was a tiny speck of glowing white at the centre of its head, almost too bright to look at. She shrugged as best she could and waited. The journey was starting to feel like one of those demos designed to show off how well a system’s flying routines worked; almost a cliche, these days. What a shame she was staring straight up and missing all the scenery. Suddenly they released her; she dropped a few metres onto a slippery surface that flexed like a waterbed. Nine red-glass demons hovered in a circle around her for a moment then flew off with an aerial flourish and a sound which was a cross between a scream and an electric-guitar howl. She watched them until they vanished in the distance; no time-saving routines here. Her respect for the author of this system improved. It improved further when she looked down. She was standing on a huge dome made of some translucent material pockmarked with dozens of tiny gasping mouths. Her feet made two dimples like dinner plates in the surface; further down, she glimpsed dark shapes linked to the mouths by twisting gut-like pipes. She had a nasty premonition about this which was quickly proven correct; her feet were stuck to the rippling surface. Uneasily, she smiled, holding her hands out for balance. "Okay..." The dome shuddered and made a basso rumbling which almost had the sound of human speech. Intermittent, faint sounds of distress came from the mouths on the surface; relayed from those trapped below, she guessed. A faint sound behind her made her turn around; one of the red glass demons had returned, wings flapping languidly (with an exaggerated sound-effect, wet cloth in a slow wind) to keep it in the air about two metres from her. She tried to keep it in view as it slowly circled her, tail lashing back and forth like an angry cat’s. Its surface kept changing; one moment smooth, the next rippling from head to tail-tip, then growing a forest of flexing spines, then developing ridges like a finger-print, then the imprints of the faces of a crowd of people, mouths wide and screaming. It drifted closer, to where she could see details that hadn’t been visible when its companions were carrying her. It wasn’t a simple assembly of cylinders and cones with a bit-map laid over the surface, nor was it a standard human VR figure with some cosmetic changes; it was a complex form with muscles underneath the skin (albeit see-through). She could see them bunching as it moved, tendons showing at its neck, veins along its arms. Its face kept changing, eyes birthing out of pits sunk into its skull, mouth stretching wide, then folding in around the edges to become an eight-pointed starfish’s maw, then protruding out into a trumpet-shaped fly’s proboscis. Horns, antennae, mandibles came and went. Presently, it settled down to an almost human form. "My. You’re a pretty one," it said, the inhumanly bass voice strangely distorted. Its surface broke up into a myriad of square tiles, then smoothed over again. "You’re not too bad yourself, big boy." she said, smiling. It recoiled histrionically, wings fluttering, hands held over where its heart would be. "Ah! Could this be love?" Translucent Valentine’s hearts appeared over his head with a series of pops and then floated away. Her eyes widened and she had to restrain an attempt at stepping back. "Oh, I don’t think so." It leered at her and darted close, inch-long teeth scraping against each other with a rusty scissors sound. One hand darted out, snatched a Valentine’s heart from the air and crushed it. The eyes (which resembled radiator grilles) narrowed. The growling voice seemed to drop almost an octave: "I beg to differ." It grabbed her hands with its elongated toes and slowly drew her arms apart, bringing her head level with its crotch. The smooth juncture of legs and narrow waist rippled, pulsed, puckered in and out several times before a perfectly-formed rose in full bloom manifested there. Her eyes widened; it reminded her of something Mileva had once made out of toffee, petals of red crystalline sugar. The Red Glass demon moved closer, holding the rose at eye level, obliging her to strain upward in order to kiss it. Her tongue moved between the tightly-packed petals at the centre, pushing them aside, probing for the swollen stigma which nested within. The demon folded its knees back, bringing her hands up to its behind; she eagerly grasped the narrow hips and drew it closer. The outer petals swelled, became lips, kissed her in return. As far as VR sex routines went, this was a lot more entertaining than anything she’d previously experienced. Almost as if the system had detected that she was having too much fun, the translucent surface below rippled again; the dimples underneath her feet became deeper. Abruptly, the edges flowed over her feet and it began to suck her down in earnest. Wrist-thick clear tendrils grew up her legs and knotted themselves around her waist. The demon released her hands, backed off momentarily then thrust its long arms underneath hers. Its arms wrapped all the way around her body, fingers lacing together at the front over her ribs and underneath her breasts. Its wings beat the air in slow, measured strokes, but the mound would not let go. Mina was being torn in two. The Red Glass demon bellowed something in an odd language, and the mound shuddered a reply but did not relinquish its grip on her legs. The surface had bunched around her, thick rolled-carpet-like rolls inching their way up her waist; below that, the mound had created a hollow cavity which it was gradually expanding, trying to suck her down into its depths. The Red Glass demon squeezed harder and doubled the rate of its flapping. She felt her spine pop in protest, and began beating against the demon’s back with her fists. She felt a sigh rumble through its belly, and the wing-beats slowed. Recognising that it had won the fight, the mound extruded more tendrils, eagerly wrapping them around her shoulders and neck. She looked up as the Red Glass demon let go; reluctantly, her arms slipped down its legs and past its feet. The translucent surface pressed against her with uncomfortable familiarity. Bands of constriction ran from the thick rim that wrapped around her under her arms and over her breasts, down her body to her feet, as if it was trying to chew her without teeth. She held a beseeching hand up to the Red Glass demon which hovered overhead, dejection apparent in its attitude. "Closer!" she managed; it obliged. As the mound slowly dragged her under, she beckoned the Red Glass demon down, grabbed its knees and brought the flower within range of her lips again. Once more she explored the petals with her tongue, feeling them swell slightly, the stigma writhing and pushing back against her lips. As the mound’s tendrils covered her arms and began engulfing her head, she sucked the end of the stigma into her mouth where it expanded to the size of a finger and vibrated wildly. The Red Glass demon’s body was being drawn down with her but the mound’s substance appeared to shrink back from it as if contact between the two was painful. She observed ropy segments of translucence tentatively approach and then withdraw from the ridged surface of the demon’s body. They were losing the struggle. The mound sucked her into itself relentlessly, its aversion to the Red Glass demon notwithstanding. As the tendrils wrapped around her neck, lacing together underneath her chin and forcing her head back, the demon leaned forward, bringing its ever-changing face close to hers. "Soon." it murmured, its voice heavy with meaning. For a moment its face morphed into something almost human; their eyes locked and she thought about those moments in plays and movies when the two main characters were about to kiss. She’d always wanted to shout "Get on with it!", but she was presently in a position to appreciate the gravity of the situation. She managed to stretch up a fraction of an inch closer to the demon, which was cue enough; their lips met and they kissed. Circumstances didn’t permit her to simply relax into the moment and enjoy it; the mound was squeezing her so tightly that she could hardly breathe. Suddenly, that became the least of her worries: the Red Glass demon started sucking at her mouth with painful insistence, drawing her tongue out. It then bit down and a stabbing pain shot through her tongue about an inch from the tip. The demon released her with an exhalation of heated breath and flew back; the edges of the mound closed over her face and she dropped into its depths. The Red Glass demon had pierced her tongue; there was a large round gem set into the top of the stud. She wished she could bring her hands up to her mouth and remove it, but the mound held her with her arms and legs outstretched. Its substance pressed against her all over; a tube ran from her mouth up to the surface, tiny gusts of fresh air conveyed down its length by peristaltic pulses. Occasionally, bands of constriction ran from her neck, down her body, along her legs and to her feet; this had the effect of draining the blood from her head and making her dizzy. Or at least, that was the virtual rationalisation; what was actually happening was that the system was inducing dizziness in her consciousness and applying sensations of constriction to her sense of body. One wasn’t caused by the other. After a few minutes of watching tiny bubbles in the mound’s surface drift past – giving the impression of slow, downward movement – she was folded into a foetal position. Struggling against it was futile; she let it fold her into a ball and roll her onto her back, at which point she started squeezing through some lower barrier. It was as if the mound was plugging a gap between two spaces and it had swallowed her out of one only to extrude her into another. It formed a sac around her, thick walls bunched up around the tube leading up into body of the mound above; then it dropped into open space, bobbing gently. She could see other sacs hanging around her, each with a curled up figure inside. With time to reflect, she began to think about the imagery that this system was presenting. So far it had been mercifully free of any penetration motifs, something she found in Dark Systems with monotonous regularity (whenever these motifs finally appeared she’d say to herself "Well... here comes the dick"). Either this one had been designed by a woman, or the author was trying to prove some kind of abstruse point. More than likely it – the dick – was just being saved up for later. Slowly enough to be subtly done, a drowsy feeling began to soak through her body. She thought that this might be the end of, if not the whole experience then at least this particular sequence; she relaxed into the sensation.
She dreamed that she was back in her apartment, lying on the couch. Genesis was still sitting on the couch, sketching. She watched as her hands reached out, removed the timer switch and dropped her back into VR with no timed cut-out. Of course, she wasn’t dreaming; the system had somehow coerced her body into doing this while out of its influence. Ordinarily she would have been shocked – this represented a breach of the fundamental rights of VR – but after all, it was just a dream... When she awoke the neck connecting her sac to the main body of the mound had elongated; she could no longer see the ceiling that she’d dropped out of. With some effort she managed to wriggle around to lie on one side, but the view below was just as blurred and lacking in detail as the one around her. "This is a fairly lifeless outing!" she managed to say, her mouth pressed up against the wall of the sac. At least in this position, she could touch the stud set into her tongue; it felt like ceramic or a gem. A broad flat plate on the underside held it in, and it seemed to be a single unit – she couldn’t unscrew it or even snap it. Her back came to rest on something; she’d reached the ground. The neck of the sac parted with a snap and the end disappeared upwards, presumably back into the body of the mound. She kicked aside the remnants of the sac (which grew thinner and then evaporated, in time-honoured VR fashion), got out, stood up and stretched. Overhead was a standard template virtual reality sky, pale blue directly above fading evenly to dark blue at the horizon. The floor was an endless repetition of light-toast-brown-coloured ceramic tiles about a metre square with a fist-sized red gem set in the centre of each one. The edges of the tiles – shaped like elongated S-curves – formed moire patterns as her eye followed them off into the distance. She was still wearing the light-grey clothing. She stood there for a few moments, hands on hips, regarding the rather uninspired scenery. "Is this the best you can do?" she shouted to the sky, which didn’t answer. ‘I hate these systems,’ she muttered. "Lack of detail designed to give the impression that there’s an answer there but you’re too stupid to see it." She got down on her hands and knees to examine the tiles. Simple design; edges bevelled at forty-five degrees, a border around the outer edge and the red gem set into the centre like an apple half-buried in sand. She stared into its depths; leaned down and licked it (her new piercing clacking against it). The gem started glowing brightly. She crawled over to the next tile and pressed it like a doorbell; nothing happened. When she licked it, it began glowing. She glanced up at the infinitude of red gems stretching off in all directions and started laughing hysterically at the thought. Surely the author of this system didn’t expect her to crawl across this endless plane and lick every gem... She slumped to the ground, still laughing weakly. A faint pinging sound attracted her attention. She looked up and saw a faint mushroom cloud of purple light flowering on the horizon. Shadowy figures danced through it. She waited; the pinging sound slowly grew louder, the clouds brighter as the figures approached. There were hundreds of them. The details were hard to discern because they were almost the same colour as the floor, but they appeared to be dancing. One of them would step onto a tile and do a little shimmying dance for a few seconds; a ping would sound, glowing purple vapour would swirl around its feet and it’d move onto an adjacent tile. They were less than a metre tall; the most threatening aspect being the little pickaxe that each one carried. Eventually they got close enough for her to observe their large, blank eyes and tiny pointed chins; what she had first believed was a humped back proved to a large sack carried over each shoulder. She regarded them with bemusement as they danced past, ignoring her. She noted that on the tiles they’d danced on, the red gems had changed to purple. She turned to look in the direction that they’d come from. A sense of unease was growing within; slowly, she began to follow the line of imps as they danced across the surface. She spent a while observing them. They all danced at the same speed, with mechanical regularity. Once she saw an imp move towards a square that was occupied by one of its companions; it paused, then turned and darted back in the direction they’d appeared from. With nothing better to do, she followed them at an easy walking pace. It had just become boring when something dropped out of the sky, swooping over the line of imps; they scattered with shrill screeches and ran off in different directions. The thing swooped past again; a blue glass demon. It chased the imps for a few moments, swiping at them with elongated claws. Then it noticed her. While it hovered a few feet off the ground its face shifted, changed, grew a broad smile which morphed into a rack of piano keys and vanished back into its head. Acting on an impulse, she poked her tongue out at it, exposing the piercing. It darted back with an oddly voiced cry, peered at her with its head to one side, then cautiously drew closer. She smiled and held a hand out to it. The demon landed, a flicker of change running from its toes to its wing-tips. Each step it took towards her occasioned changes in its surface. Ridges like gel-styled hair, hexagonal tiling, jigsaw-puzzle edges, eyes with glowing white iris rings, randomly-arranged Cyrillic letters came and went. She took its hand in hers; the feeling of the changing textures crawling past tickled her fingers. "’My, you’re a pretty one,’" she quoted. It stared at her. She shook her head. "I thought this was a Dark System. Bad things are supposed to happen in Dark Systems. So far, this one’s just been... weird." The blue glass demon replied, or at least waited until she’d finished speaking before saying something. She couldn’t understand what it said; the words sounded like they were being played backwards. The imps had overcome their initial fear and were continuing their dance across the tiles. She sighed. "So when is something bad going to happen?" As if answering her question, the tiles underneath her gave way, dropping her into darkness.
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