Virtually Dead Read online

  Michael sat thinking about it. He had enough problems to deal with in his real life without having to worry about a virtual one. Angela looked at her watch and stood up.

  “I have another patient coming.” She walked to her writing bureau and checked her diary. “Why don’t I come round tomorrow evening, show you where to download the software, and help you set up your AV. Are you free?”

  “I might be on call, but yes, I guess so.”

  “Okay, about seven then.”

  And somehow, it seemed, he had agreed to it. She opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper, holding it out toward him.

  “Your final account.” She smiled. “I hope you can still afford to pay me.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The sunset had been glorious, turning the horizon the colour of blood. As its luminosity faded, a red moon rose slowly into the gathering darkness, and the sounds of revellers rang out across the island of Revere. A DJ was playing music from the Lost Frontier sound stage, and a crowd had gathered to line dance across the open area below it.

  Out on the river, people stood on the deck of a yacht to watch and to listen to the music.

  Couples had gathered on wooden platforms built into huge trees with spreading branches that overlooked the stage. Some were making out, others dancing, some communing in silent conversation.

  On the far side of the island Quick was engaged in her second sex act of the evening. 1000 Linden dollars already paid into her account. Of course, she didn’t do it for the money. But that gave it a little extra thrill. She simply enjoyed the fantasy of selling herself for sex. Of being in complete command of a man, any man, and making him do whatever she wanted in total security.

  She had met Gray Manly at the club where she was employed as a pole dancer. But that was boring, taking your top off when a mere two hundred Lindens were dropped into the tip jar, a bunch of horny men sitting on stools watching in silence, occasionally IM-ing to suggest a private rendezvous.

  Of course, there was the lapdance chair in the room behind the stage, or the sex room in the skybox for those customers who wanted more than just a blow job. But her employer took twenty percent, and that seemed unfair. So she had set herself up here on Revere. A private house, her own rate card, and the promise of fabulous sex if the customer guaranteed confidentiality. She would lose her job if the boss found out, and jobs in SL were at a premium these days. Competition was fierce. There were a lot of beautiful AVs out there. And she needed the job to pull in the customers.

  She had spent a long time furnishing this house as she imagined a whorehouse might look. Cheap, flashy, gaudy colours, porno pics on the wall. She particularly liked her sex bed. It had nearly a hundred animations, and she had sole charge of the control hud, the window with all its menu options appearing in the top right corner of her screen.

  For the moment she was sitting astride the client, naked apart from a flimsy top that barely covered her large, perfect breasts, and the animation she had chosen was making her slide slowly up and down on his very erect penis. She was barely aware of the banalities he was uttering in open chat.

  Gray: Yeh. Yeh. Fuck me, baby…

  Her mind was somewhere else altogether, creating the future she dreamed of with all that money. Discreetly, and over time, so as not to arouse any suspicion. She could transfer some of it through PayPal to an offshore account in Europe. Take out a dollar debit card. Who would ever know?

  Gray: Oh, baby, you turn me on.

  She looked at the menu, and selected an option to flip them over into a missionary position. Time to make him do a bit of the work. She uttered some words of encouragement.

  Quick: Oh, I’m so horny, lover. Go faster. Gimme all you got.

  Gray: Going faster baby. Giving it to you big time.

  And she returned to her fantasy, unaware of the female figure lurking in the twilight outside, a shadow against the night sky, hovering on a level with a second floor window that was blacked out so no one could see in. But the hovering figure picked a spot on the outside wall of the house, zoomed in and swivelled left, swinging her POV beyond the wall and into the bedroom, affording her an unfettered view of the sex act being performed on the bed, unseen by either of the participants.

  Gray Manly was surprised by the message that appeared suddenly in his IM box, from an AV called Green Goddess. It wasn’t a name he recognised.

  Green Goddess: Hi, Gray

  Manly’s sexual concentration was broken, to his annoyance.

  Gray: Who the fuck are you?

  Green Goddess: I’m your worst nightmare, Gray. I know who you are in RL. I know where you live. The name of your wife. Her email address. I don’t think she’s going to be very happy when I tell her you’ve been fucking other women in a virtual world. Or show her the proof. All the photographs I have of your AV in action. She helped you create it, didn’t she? When you first came into SL. She’ll have no doubt it’s you.”

  There was a time lapse of nearly half a minute before he responded. Panic apparent in his silence, as he took in the implications of this threat.

  Gray: What do you want?

  Green Goddess: Simple. Just TP out of here. Now. No questions. Just go.

  Manly didn’t need any second telling. He teleported out.

  Quick barely had time to register his disappearance before Green Goddess clicked on the vacant blue poseball and adopted the departed Manly’s missionary position on top of the hooker. The animation had previously placed Quick’s hands on Manly’s chest, as if pushing him away. Now they were holding on to the swell of Green Goddess’ ample breasts.

  Quick: WTF?

  Green Goddess detached herself from the poseball and stood at the end of the bed. And as Quick sat up the intruder’s arm extended toward her, an elaborate-looking handgun held in a steady hand. A single shot rang out, tearing a large hole through Quick’s nearly naked torso. Blood spattered all around the bed and across the wall behind it. And Quick’s screen went black.

  ***

  Jennifer Mathews had lived the life of the millionairess she had been destined to become. Then a single bullet had torn a hole through her chest, passing through her second life into her first, and bringing her prematurely to that place where all lives end, for both rich and poor.

  She lived in a luxury apartment block high on the hill overlooking the marina. Her red Porsche 911, parked in its private slot close to the entrance, was almost completely obscured by the accumulation of police and forensics vehicles in the lot. Unlike the whorehouse on Revere, this three bedroom condo was filled with expensive, Swedish-designed furniture and scattered with oatmeal linen cushions. Signed, limited-edition, Vettriano prints hung on the walls, and thick-piled woollen carpets covered the floors. This was a $10,000-a-month apartment, with a west-facing balcony that looked out over the Pacific sunset. In the sumptuous master bedroom, where walls displayed tastefully erotic Helmut Newton photographs, the white silk sheets of her unmade four-poster bed were stained red by her blood.

  The cops had no idea who she was when they first arrived at her apartment, following a panicked 911 call from the maid. When Michael came to photograph her, spreadeagled naked on the bed, she was just another murder victim. A clumsy uniformed officer had already tripped on the power cable that connected her computer to the electric supply, so the screen was dead. And the pale green, open-palmed logo in its top left corner was long gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was one of those classic Newport Beach sunsets that began with a reddening sun sinking beyond the mountains of Catalina, and ended with rivers of blood flowing around Balboa Island.

  Angela stood on the terrace outside Michael’s office and gazed upon it with wonder. “I get great sunsets from my house, too,” she said. “But nothing like this. It’s the elevation you have here. It’s just spectacular. I feel house envy coming on.”

  Michael emerged from the interior with a bottle of chilled chardonnay and two wine glasses that he set on the parape
t to fill. He handed one to his therapist and they chinked. “We used to watch it almost every night when we were here. It was a kind of ritual. Sunset, sunrise. The best times of the day.”

  They sipped in silence from their glasses, and she raised an eyebrow. “Mmmm. Wonderful wine. Toasted oak. Very subtle.”

  “It’s a Bourgogne.”

  “Oh? Is that in Napa or Sonoma?” But she could only hold her face straight for a moment, and he grinned.

  Michael said, “Mora was something of a connoisseur. It was a kind of passion passed on by her husband. There wasn’t much she didn’t know about wine, and hardly any limit to what she would spend on it.” He shook his head. “Before she met Tom she hadn’t known the first thing about the stuff, except that she liked it. He was really well connected in the wine world, a friend of the Mondavi family. He used to take her to France and Italy and Spain, wine-tasting in all the best vineyards. Teaching her about the different varietals, the best vintages. How to smell a wine, how to taste it, how to differentiate the various flavours.”

  He sipped thoughtfully on the buttery white chilled liquid and let it slip slowly over his tongue.

  “There is a large wine cellar attached to the garage, kept at a constant 12 degrees centigrade. And she had a room in a wine storage facility in Newport. Between the two there must be thousands of bottles. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of wine.”

  “Well, if you’re short of cash, Michael, why don’t you just sell it?”

  “They won’t let me, until the question of inheritance has been settled in court.” He held up his glass to the sky and saw it flush pink in the sunset. “This is the first bottle I’ve opened since she died. But I don’t see any reason why it should be the last.” If he couldn’t sell it, he could at least drink it.

  Angela slipped a hand around his upper arm and turned him gently toward the door. “Come on, let’s get started.”

  She pulled up a chair beside him at the computer and told him to enter the Second Life URL. Up came the welcome page. A sequence of photographs of young, beautiful avatars in a variety of settings. An orange banner urged him to get started.

  In the top left-hand corner of the screen was the Second Life logo. A pale green hand held up, palm facing out, fingers spread. It doubled cleverly as an eye, with the pupil in the centre of the palm, the raised fingers like eyelashes. Michael thought there was something familiar about it. He knew he must have seen it before. But where?

  “Just click on the Get Started banner and you can choose a name.” Angela sipped on her wine as he followed her instructions and chose the surname Chesnokov. Something to do, perhaps, with his Eastern European ancestry. Then he tapped in C-H-A-S. Charles had been the name of his Scottish great grandfather. “Chas Chesnokov,” Angela said out loud. “I like the alliteration. Now you can choose your avatar.”

  Michael chose a poser with a black shirt and charcoal jeans, and a mop of long, dark hair swept across his forehead. He clicked to the next page to activate his account.

  Welcome, Chas Chesnokov

  It took only a few minutes for the software to download and establish its icon on his computer desktop. The small green hand/eye. He sat looking at it, that strange sense of familiarity striking him again, accompanied this time by an odd feeling of anticipation. This would, after all, be another world. A world he had never shared with Mora. A world where she had never existed and never would. A world where he could be someone else altogether. And there was a feeling of comfort in that, of freedom, and escape.

  “Don’t go in right now.” Angela’s voice broke into his thoughts. “It’s a disorienting experience at first. It’s something you need to do alone. Set aside some time, and enjoy the experience.”

  She drained her glass and stood up.

  “I have to go. Let me know when you’re in and found your feet, and we’ll arrange a session. My AV name is Angel Catchpole. Do a search for me and send me an IM.”

  Michael stood up. “IM?”

  “Instant Message.” She smiled. “You’ll pick up the shorthand in no time. SL, Second Life: RL real life; OMG, WTF…” He grinned and she said, “See? You’re catching on already.”

  By the time she had gone, so had the light. Michael sat in the dark with the remains of Mora’s bottle, sipping on the wine she had so carefully chosen and never tasted. The computer screen cast a pale, ghostly light around the room. He turned toward it and wondered about taking his AV into Second Life straight away. But decided to do a little research first.

  Google presented him with a choice of thousands of articles and blogs on SL. He picked a couple at random and set them to print, then searched his desk for his reading glasses. They were small, round tortoiseshell glasses that Mora had bought him. She said he would get prematurely wrinkled if he kept screwing his eyes up to read. He had never even noticed that he did. He had no idea what they might have cost, but Mora had expensive tastes. She would never buy anything at a knockdown price if there was something more expensive available. He hadn’t liked to tell her that he didn’t much care for them. Especially when she told him that they made him look cute, a young intellectual. And so he had kept his mouth shut and always used them when she was around.

  Now he couldn’t do without them.

  But he couldn’t find them anywhere. They were nowhere to be seen on the desktop, and not in any of the drawers. He frowned, wondering where else in the house he might have laid them down. He had just stood up to go and look when the phone rang. He checked the time. It was after eight. The Caller ID panel told him it was his office. He lifted the phone and hit the green button.

  “Yeh, it’s Michael.”

  He wandered off into the hallway. Lamps in the courtyard, operating on a timer, spilled light through all the glass into the front of the house. He headed for the kitchen, wondering if he had laid his glasses down in there.

  “Mike we got a shooting in Laguna Beach. One fatality. There’s a team on the way. Can you meet up with them?”

  “Sure. What’s the address?” He switched on the kitchen lights and blinked in the sudden brightness. Then froze where he stood as the dispatcher read out the name and number of the street.

  “Fuck,” he said. And his voice was smothered by the emptiness of the house. “That’s where Janey lives.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A phalanx of police and forensics vehicles was parked in the street at the foot of the steps leading to Janey’s bungalow. This suburban street ran parallel to the highway that followed the line of the ocean, but several streets back and well up the hill. There were more vehicles than he would have expected. Several unmarked cars and only one patrol car. Three forensics vans were drawn up side by side, which was unusual. But, then, maybe not, given whose address this was.

  The van hadn’t yet arrived to remove the body, which gave Michael fleeting hope that perhaps it wasn’t a fatality after all. He grabbed his gear from the trunk and leaped up the steps in twos, breathless by the time he reached the wooden veranda that ran along the front of the bungalow.

  Two uniformed cops stood smoking just outside the front door. They turned as he hurried up the last few steps on to the veranda. “What’s going on?”

  “Looks like murder, Mike.” The cop regarded him grimly.

  “Who?”

  The officers exchanged uneasy glances. “You better go take a look.”

  Michael felt sick now as he hurried into the house. He had been here often. Everything about it was familiar: the worn carpet, the scuffed kickboards, the smell of stale cooking that came from the kitchen. The hall seemed to be full of people, but he was barely aware of them. He heard someone say, “Take it easy, Mike.”

  He turned into the doorway of the sitting room at the front of the house. Someone had already rigged up lights, and the scene was thrown into sharp contrast by the glare. More people congregated here. Faces he recognised, some half obscured by surgical masks. The deputy coroner was crouched over a body, and stood up as Michael cam
e in. A silence fell on the room.

  The body of a young woman lay twisted in the middle of the floor, hair fanned out across the carpet. She wore jeans and sneakers, and her white tee-shirt was soaked in blood. It was Janey.

  Michael felt his legs almost give way beneath him. A wave of nausea rose from his stomach. Someone grabbed his arm. And he knew there was no way he could take photographs of her. He had known Janey for nearly fifteen years. They had started the same week at the FSS offices at Santa Ana. She was a couple of years older than him, and they had become good friends. Not in any sexual way, although it had been clear from the start that she found him attractive. There was, however, nothing attractive about Janey except her personality. But few men had got to know her well enough to find that out. Her hair was a straight, mousy brown, plain cut, usually drawn back in an untidy ponytail. She had a thin face with a nose like a blade and eyes set slightly too wide behind her thick glasses. She had a boy’s figure, with no waist, and an almost flat chest. There was nothing very feminine about her. She wore no make-up, and Michael had never seen her in a skirt, only jeans and sneakers and, when she was working, a pair of plain, dark-blue pants. Almost from the start her co-workers had dubbed her Plain Jane. Except when Michael was around. Everyone knew he had a soft spot for her.

  The DC stepped toward him and took his arm. “Better take a look, son.” And he led a numbed Michael across the room to the body. “Seems like someone left us a message.”

  Michael saw a blood-stained note pinned to her chest, but he couldn’t read what it said, and in a moment of bizarre incongruity remembered that he had misplaced his reading glasses. Slowly he crouched down and glanced at her face. There was a peaceful serenity about it, and he thought for the first time ever that there might actually be something quite beautiful in its plainness. Something like a smile rested on her pale lips.