Virtually, a Witch Hunt
Sunday Night
At the touch of her icon hand, the crystal ball filled with digital smoke. A neon-green schematic of a womans head appeared in its midst, surrounded by labels and diagrams in electric blue. Lines of code began to appear, with memory files superimposing over them. Running down an unpolluted beach as a little girl; a teenage boyfriend driving up in a new red sports car; watching her baby daughter being delivered from a vat
Then the schematic switched to that of a laboratory brain. The memory files instantly distorted, corrupted, garbled. Colors turned all wrong, resolution was lost, stray glitches began appearing. Finally the womans consciousness file crashed altogether. A few regions of the diagrammed brain turned yellow. All the rest turned red. Red lettering appeared above it:
Consciousness Transfer Success: 11%.
Theyd made it all the way to eleven percent!
Alice wrapped the data file back in its cloth and carefully set it in her backpack. Then she helped herself to the other five stored in the cabinet, setting them into her pack one by one.
She took a final glance around the wizards laboratory before producing her lockpicks and re-locking the cabinet door. Then she reactivated its magical seal by speaking the phrase: Delete writeline two-four-seven-eight-six-nine-seven. White Queen. When the programmer wizards came back to the laboratory processor tomorrow morning, they wouldnt suspect a thing until they tried to get out their master project files, only to discover theyd been heisted over the weekend.
Alice left the laboratory, locked the door behind her, and skirted the edge of the ill-concealed pit outside. Across the outer chamber, the hobgoblyn guardian program was activated again, and stood once more facing the opposite door. He rested his elbow on the hilt of the two-handed sword propped up beside him. The weapon was over six feet in length, nearly as tall as he, and taller than Alice by several inches. His great muscular body icon outweighed Alices at least two to one, and was encased in battered metal armor.
But he stood with his back to Alice.
Alice drew her dagger program as she crept up behind him, feeling her neural activators electrifying her virtual bloodstream. With another neat stroke of her poisoned blade, she could put him right back to sleep again, and if she could get him with a quick stab in the back it would be so much easier this time. But the fight was never over until the threat was eliminated
Just as she closed within two and a half meters of him, he suddenly screamed his battle cry and, in one motion, turned, caught the hilt of his weapon, and slashed it sideways at her
He was a two-way defense after all.
Alice sprang back, as the tip of the rusty blade tore through her sleeve. She threw her dagger, but it bounced harmlessly off the guardians armored shoulder. She drew her sword program as he charged forward with silicon death in his vicious yellow eyes. The great, hulking guard handled his longer weapon almost as deftly as Alice did her own. She had no choice but to leap backward away from his blade, her sword icons reach easily at a meters disadvantage to his
As he came forward with another attack, she dropped beneath, then stood, with her sword raised. Her thrust was low, and the guardian program lunged into it with his steel breastplate instead of his throat. Before she could follow through, he deflected her blade and hacked into her shoulder as she somersaulted away.
Rolling to her feet, she parried his next blow, and gave ground again to keep clear of his weapon. Falling back like this was a choice with a painfully finite future, as the guard chamber was only so large. Still, he forced her to withdraw, again, and again, and again, driving her ever backward toward the laboratory vault
She met the full force of his next attack with her sword, bracing the weapon in both hands with all her might. She was knocked half a step backward anyway. With a blood-curdling shriek, the hobgoblyn came lunging forward, his weapon icon raised overhead, and swung a deadly blow down upon her. Alice raised her own, much smaller, blade in a hopeless effort to block the attack
Just as their swords met, Alice dropped sideways to the floor, and the brutish hobgoblyns sword cleft nothing but air. The armored toe of his boot slammed into her stomach, but his foot stopped short of catching his balance He tripped over her and plunged headfirst into the covered pit. His cry of surprise abruptly cut short.
Alice took a few deep breaths before she got up and brushed herself off. Below, the guardian program lay impaled on spikes. The trap did its job all too well.
The wound in her shoulder hurt, but no more than it should. Alice sheathed her sword and probed at the injury with her fingertips. Her head felt alright, so she hadnt been poisoned, picked up a virus, or any such thing. The wound was disappearing already, so the attack hadnt reached her brain.
She left the room and slipped down dark passages. The other guardians in the system proved easy to sneak by. She emerged from the mainframe to find her horse waiting her.
Leaving Designer Dreams Caverns behind her, she rode along the road until she reached a faint trail leading into the forest. Ducking beneath low branches, she followed it to a little cottage hidden among the trees. There she dismounted, and without bothering to tether the horse, she unlocked the door and went inside.
The house had only one room that met the eye. Alice went to the torch bracket mounted on the wall and shifted it downward. Then she turned around, opened the door to the wardrobe, and retrieved her candle from the bins of utility programs lining the inside of the doors. She pushed the hanging garments aside. Spark, she instructed the candle. It flared to life immediately, and with it she found her way through the closet and the secret door in the back.
There she removed the crystal data files from her pack and deposited them among the assortment of other treasures already stored in the secret memory vault. She returned to the front room, closing the wardrobe doors behind her, and went over to the mirror on the wall.
In the glass, her Alice in Wonderland 8.1 icon remained frozen in mid-fall down the well, awaiting her return. Alice stepped through the looking glass and back into the body of the eleven-year-old girl in the blue dress
###
She glimpsed the woman with chestnut-brown hair frozen on the Camelot 5.2 side of the mirror, and again found herself floating gently down the well. She looked about as she fell, past cupboards and bookshelves, until she came upon the clock on the wall. It read twenty past two.
Oh, dear, she said to herself, its twenty past ten in London. Then she added as an afterthought: The Dormouse is sure to be asleep.
Rather than attempting to sell the stolen project files to an unavailable acquaintance, she raised the hem of her dress and allowed the up-draft to lift her out of the rabbit-hole
###
Alice drew a deep breath as she returned to the physical world. She kept her eyes closed while she settled back into her body. Feeling one numb hand along the nylon carry case of the smart-modem cradled in her arms, she found the plug to the uplink cable. Instinctively she pulled it from its port.
With her uplink physically severed, she was safe to relax and wait for her senses to fully return. After a few seconds, she pulled the plugs of the interface wire from her head link and the modem, coiled the wire and stowed it in the case.
Her nerve endings rebooted to discover Gink curled up in her lap. Even as she reached down to pat her dormant feline, he sensed her movement, and looked up at her with alert green eyes.
Hey, guy. She greeted him softly, as most women might upon awakening with a male companion on the bed although technically, she hadnt been asleep.
He responded in kind, or so she liked to think, by turning his face up into the caress of her hand. Anybody come by while I was out? she asked, stroking his black fur. He didnt even act like hed heard the question. No? Well, thats good.
She set her modem on the bed, and convinced Gink to follow it, though he went reluctantly and with much more physical effort on Alices part. Finally free to rise, she got up and went to the window to peer through the venetian blinds.
The street below lay serene, beneath the hologramatic orange-and yellow 24-Seven logo and the glitter of the remaining holo-advertizements. The movie-ad projector across the street cut to the same close-up of Devonny Haney and her billion-dollar smile it had been showing for a month, before switching to the lead-in for Jewel Heist. A lot of the other projectors were switched off now, and most of the rest just played late-night ads for home-education programs, compilation albums by singers who were famous thirty years ago, or discount DNA samples from washed-up celebrities. Off in the distance, people were shooting submachineguns at each other again.
At least the Combat Police werent converging on the front of her building.
She went in to brush her teeth.
The whole project sounded like something from a farcical science-fiction screenplay, but evidently, body swapping was soon to become a reality. Not that many people were likely to start trading bodies with each other, but there was such a demand for genetically engineering children that celebrities were selling patented samples of their DNA on the open market. Soon with a dash of accelerated growth hormone and a quick body swap, grown-ups too would be able to join in the genetic engineering fun
It was still just an idea hiding somewhere beyond the technological horizon, though. It would probably be a multi-trillion dollar industry in another decade or two, but for now it was just an experiment that wasnt being taken as seriously as it could be. And as a result, the internal counter-espionage programs defending it werent as adequate as they shouldve been.
The Dormouse might give her a hundred thousand dollars for the files. With a take like that, Alice would be able to keep her modem components and software up-to-the-minute for a month or two.
Alice smiled smugly to herself, before she spat and rinsed out her mouth.
But when she looked up, it was still her own face staring back at her from the mirror.
It was the same face that was always there when she brushed her teeth: the fairly attractive face, atop the nice but unglamorous body. Her appearance mainly had been left up to chanceher hair was even trapped in that purgatory between blonde and brunette. The same face that kept getting older year after year, and never had anyone in the background excusing himself past her to get in the shower.
It was still the same face, a hundred thousand dollars richer or not.
She had to look away.
It was getting late; she needed to get to bed. She went out to the living room and checked all the locks and alarms on the front door. Then she dragged a bar stool into the hall, climbed upon it, and pulled the battery out of the smoke detector.
She went around the apartment lighting candles, then went back to the living room to stick her Spiritual Ambience Volume VII music chip in the stereo. She selected Track 4 and, to the ghostly wail of pipe organs and the whisper of wind through pine trees, she returned to the casting chamber.
She could still hear the gunfire. She took off her T-shirt and underwear and tossed them in the chair anyway. To become intimate with the world, first one had to make oneself vulnerable to it. As she opened the closet door to get out her casting robe, a particularly intense and lethal-sounding barrage broke out. She left her robe hanging where it was and remained completely naked just to spite the world.
She spread her casting cloth on the floor before the altar, then sat cross-legged upon it, loaded her censer with incense, and arranged the element candles in the usual order. As she lit the candles one by one, she envisioned a shell of pure white energy into being, spreading around her and enclosing the circle.
All that existed without existed within. The power of the Universe existed within her as it did within everything. It enabled her to affect her surroundings directly and proportionally. This small sphere of the Universe was now her place, her domain, the space in which she could focus her creative energies, the site within the Universe that she was able to customize to meet her needs
Dark cloak of night,
Protect me in my sleep,
From all such dangers as haunt the darkness,
Til daylight here my safety keep
After chanting the verse, she blew a long breath upon the smoldering incense and felt the harmonious balance of the night air surrounding her skyclad body flowing from the room, into her lungs, out through the burning incense, and back into the room. She repeated the process until she had the incense smoking healthily.
She stood, and slowly pushed her sphere of energy outward to envelop her entire apartment.
She traced the Pentagram on herself before she stepped over the circle of the candles. There she waited a moment, until the organ and wind were suddenly joined by the rapid ceremonial drumming. She danced through her apartment, chanting the verse, waving the censer around her, fanning the burning incense. In the living room she jumped up in the armchair and over to the couch to dance down the length of it; in the bedroom she danced on the bed.
Dark cloak of night,
Protect me in my sleep,
From all such dangers as haunt the darkness,
Til daylight here my safety keep
Once her abode, such as it was, had been suffused with enough protection incense to sustain the safety barrier by itself, she returned to her casting chamber. There, she traced the Pentagram again, re-entered the circle, set the censer on the altar, and sat before the altar again. She snuffed out the candles in reverse.
Leaving the incense burning, she went around her apartment snuffing out candles, finishing in the bedroom. The gunfire had stopped, and she still didnt hear any sirens approaching. As she crawled under the covers, Gink came sauntering into the room and jumped up on the bed to curl up against her stomach.
Tomorrows Monday, Alice informed him, reaching out to stroke his head. You know what that means, dont you? I hate having to do it, but I got bills to pay, you know, and I hafta keep anyone from wondering how Im doing it, dont I? Gink seemed to understand, at least as much as a cat was able to, anyway. But sometimes I just wonder if its worth it
Across the dark room, the light shining through the venetian blind shifted and changed color, as, Alice imagined, the movie ad projector cut to the close-up of Devonny Haney and her billion-dollar smile. Somewhere down in the gang lands, automatic gunfire broke out again.
She closed her eyes, trying to ignore it, and wished she knew a good spell for blocking out gunshots. Sometimes she repeated, I wonder if its worth it
Sunday Night
At the touch of her icon hand, the crystal ball filled with digital smoke. A neon-green schematic of a womans head appeared in its midst, surrounded by labels and diagrams in electric blue. Lines of code began to appear, with memory files superimposing over them. Running down an unpolluted beach as a little girl; a teenage boyfriend driving up in a new red sports car; watching her baby daughter being delivered from a vat
Then the schematic switched to that of a laboratory brain. The memory files instantly distorted, corrupted, garbled. Colors turned all wrong, resolution was lost, stray glitches began appearing. Finally the womans consciousness file crashed altogether. A few regions of the diagrammed brain turned yellow. All the rest turned red. Red lettering appeared above it:
Consciousness Transfer Success: 11%.
Theyd made it all the way to eleven percent!
Alice wrapped the data file back in its cloth and carefully set it in her backpack. Then she helped herself to the other five stored in the cabinet, setting them into her pack one by one.
She took a final glance around the wizards laboratory before producing her lockpicks and re-locking the cabinet door. Then she reactivated its magical seal by speaking the phrase: Delete writeline two-four-seven-eight-six-nine-seven. White Queen. When the programmer wizards came back to the laboratory processor tomorrow morning, they wouldnt suspect a thing until they tried to get out their master project files, only to discover theyd been heisted over the weekend.
Alice left the laboratory, locked the door behind her, and skirted the edge of the ill-concealed pit outside. Across the outer chamber, the hobgoblyn guardian program was activated again, and stood once more facing the opposite door. He rested his elbow on the hilt of the two-handed sword propped up beside him. The weapon was over six feet in length, nearly as tall as he, and taller than Alice by several inches. His great muscular body icon outweighed Alices at least two to one, and was encased in battered metal armor.
But he stood with his back to Alice.
Alice drew her dagger program as she crept up behind him, feeling her neural activators electrifying her virtual bloodstream. With another neat stroke of her poisoned blade, she could put him right back to sleep again, and if she could get him with a quick stab in the back it would be so much easier this time. But the fight was never over until the threat was eliminated
Just as she closed within two and a half meters of him, he suddenly screamed his battle cry and, in one motion, turned, caught the hilt of his weapon, and slashed it sideways at her
He was a two-way defense after all.
Alice sprang back, as the tip of the rusty blade tore through her sleeve. She threw her dagger, but it bounced harmlessly off the guardians armored shoulder. She drew her sword program as he charged forward with silicon death in his vicious yellow eyes. The great, hulking guard handled his longer weapon almost as deftly as Alice did her own. She had no choice but to leap backward away from his blade, her sword icons reach easily at a meters disadvantage to his
As he came forward with another attack, she dropped beneath, then stood, with her sword raised. Her thrust was low, and the guardian program lunged into it with his steel breastplate instead of his throat. Before she could follow through, he deflected her blade and hacked into her shoulder as she somersaulted away.
Rolling to her feet, she parried his next blow, and gave ground again to keep clear of his weapon. Falling back like this was a choice with a painfully finite future, as the guard chamber was only so large. Still, he forced her to withdraw, again, and again, and again, driving her ever backward toward the laboratory vault
She met the full force of his next attack with her sword, bracing the weapon in both hands with all her might. She was knocked half a step backward anyway. With a blood-curdling shriek, the hobgoblyn came lunging forward, his weapon icon raised overhead, and swung a deadly blow down upon her. Alice raised her own, much smaller, blade in a hopeless effort to block the attack
Just as their swords met, Alice dropped sideways to the floor, and the brutish hobgoblyns sword cleft nothing but air. The armored toe of his boot slammed into her stomach, but his foot stopped short of catching his balance He tripped over her and plunged headfirst into the covered pit. His cry of surprise abruptly cut short.
Alice took a few deep breaths before she got up and brushed herself off. Below, the guardian program lay impaled on spikes. The trap did its job all too well.
The wound in her shoulder hurt, but no more than it should. Alice sheathed her sword and probed at the injury with her fingertips. Her head felt alright, so she hadnt been poisoned, picked up a virus, or any such thing. The wound was disappearing already, so the attack hadnt reached her brain.
She left the room and slipped down dark passages. The other guardians in the system proved easy to sneak by. She emerged from the mainframe to find her horse waiting her.
Leaving Designer Dreams Caverns behind her, she rode along the road until she reached a faint trail leading into the forest. Ducking beneath low branches, she followed it to a little cottage hidden among the trees. There she dismounted, and without bothering to tether the horse, she unlocked the door and went inside.
The house had only one room that met the eye. Alice went to the torch bracket mounted on the wall and shifted it downward. Then she turned around, opened the door to the wardrobe, and retrieved her candle from the bins of utility programs lining the inside of the doors. She pushed the hanging garments aside. Spark, she instructed the candle. It flared to life immediately, and with it she found her way through the closet and the secret door in the back.
There she removed the crystal data files from her pack and deposited them among the assortment of other treasures already stored in the secret memory vault. She returned to the front room, closing the wardrobe doors behind her, and went over to the mirror on the wall.
In the glass, her Alice in Wonderland 8.1 icon remained frozen in mid-fall down the well, awaiting her return. Alice stepped through the looking glass and back into the body of the eleven-year-old girl in the blue dress
###
She glimpsed the woman with chestnut-brown hair frozen on the Camelot 5.2 side of the mirror, and again found herself floating gently down the well. She looked about as she fell, past cupboards and bookshelves, until she came upon the clock on the wall. It read twenty past two.
Oh, dear, she said to herself, its twenty past ten in London. Then she added as an afterthought: The Dormouse is sure to be asleep.
Rather than attempting to sell the stolen project files to an unavailable acquaintance, she raised the hem of her dress and allowed the up-draft to lift her out of the rabbit-hole
###
Alice drew a deep breath as she returned to the physical world. She kept her eyes closed while she settled back into her body. Feeling one numb hand along the nylon carry case of the smart-modem cradled in her arms, she found the plug to the uplink cable. Instinctively she pulled it from its port.
With her uplink physically severed, she was safe to relax and wait for her senses to fully return. After a few seconds, she pulled the plugs of the interface wire from her head link and the modem, coiled the wire and stowed it in the case.
Her nerve endings rebooted to discover Gink curled up in her lap. Even as she reached down to pat her dormant feline, he sensed her movement, and looked up at her with alert green eyes.
Hey, guy. She greeted him softly, as most women might upon awakening with a male companion on the bed although technically, she hadnt been asleep.
He responded in kind, or so she liked to think, by turning his face up into the caress of her hand. Anybody come by while I was out? she asked, stroking his black fur. He didnt even act like hed heard the question. No? Well, thats good.
She set her modem on the bed, and convinced Gink to follow it, though he went reluctantly and with much more physical effort on Alices part. Finally free to rise, she got up and went to the window to peer through the venetian blinds.
The street below lay serene, beneath the hologramatic orange-and yellow 24-Seven logo and the glitter of the remaining holo-advertizements. The movie-ad projector across the street cut to the same close-up of Devonny Haney and her billion-dollar smile it had been showing for a month, before switching to the lead-in for Jewel Heist. A lot of the other projectors were switched off now, and most of the rest just played late-night ads for home-education programs, compilation albums by singers who were famous thirty years ago, or discount DNA samples from washed-up celebrities. Off in the distance, people were shooting submachineguns at each other again.
At least the Combat Police werent converging on the front of her building.
She went in to brush her teeth.
The whole project sounded like something from a farcical science-fiction screenplay, but evidently, body swapping was soon to become a reality. Not that many people were likely to start trading bodies with each other, but there was such a demand for genetically engineering children that celebrities were selling patented samples of their DNA on the open market. Soon with a dash of accelerated growth hormone and a quick body swap, grown-ups too would be able to join in the genetic engineering fun
It was still just an idea hiding somewhere beyond the technological horizon, though. It would probably be a multi-trillion dollar industry in another decade or two, but for now it was just an experiment that wasnt being taken as seriously as it could be. And as a result, the internal counter-espionage programs defending it werent as adequate as they shouldve been.
The Dormouse might give her a hundred thousand dollars for the files. With a take like that, Alice would be able to keep her modem components and software up-to-the-minute for a month or two.
Alice smiled smugly to herself, before she spat and rinsed out her mouth.
But when she looked up, it was still her own face staring back at her from the mirror.
It was the same face that was always there when she brushed her teeth: the fairly attractive face, atop the nice but unglamorous body. Her appearance mainly had been left up to chanceher hair was even trapped in that purgatory between blonde and brunette. The same face that kept getting older year after year, and never had anyone in the background excusing himself past her to get in the shower.
It was still the same face, a hundred thousand dollars richer or not.
She had to look away.
It was getting late; she needed to get to bed. She went out to the living room and checked all the locks and alarms on the front door. Then she dragged a bar stool into the hall, climbed upon it, and pulled the battery out of the smoke detector.
She went around the apartment lighting candles, then went back to the living room to stick her Spiritual Ambience Volume VII music chip in the stereo. She selected Track 4 and, to the ghostly wail of pipe organs and the whisper of wind through pine trees, she returned to the casting chamber.
She could still hear the gunfire. She took off her T-shirt and underwear and tossed them in the chair anyway. To become intimate with the world, first one had to make oneself vulnerable to it. As she opened the closet door to get out her casting robe, a particularly intense and lethal-sounding barrage broke out. She left her robe hanging where it was and remained completely naked just to spite the world.
She spread her casting cloth on the floor before the altar, then sat cross-legged upon it, loaded her censer with incense, and arranged the element candles in the usual order. As she lit the candles one by one, she envisioned a shell of pure white energy into being, spreading around her and enclosing the circle.
All that existed without existed within. The power of the Universe existed within her as it did within everything. It enabled her to affect her surroundings directly and proportionally. This small sphere of the Universe was now her place, her domain, the space in which she could focus her creative energies, the site within the Universe that she was able to customize to meet her needs
Dark cloak of night,
Protect me in my sleep,
From all such dangers as haunt the darkness,
Til daylight here my safety keep
After chanting the verse, she blew a long breath upon the smoldering incense and felt the harmonious balance of the night air surrounding her skyclad body flowing from the room, into her lungs, out through the burning incense, and back into the room. She repeated the process until she had the incense smoking healthily.
She stood, and slowly pushed her sphere of energy outward to envelop her entire apartment.
She traced the Pentagram on herself before she stepped over the circle of the candles. There she waited a moment, until the organ and wind were suddenly joined by the rapid ceremonial drumming. She danced through her apartment, chanting the verse, waving the censer around her, fanning the burning incense. In the living room she jumped up in the armchair and over to the couch to dance down the length of it; in the bedroom she danced on the bed.
Dark cloak of night,
Protect me in my sleep,
From all such dangers as haunt the darkness,
Til daylight here my safety keep
Once her abode, such as it was, had been suffused with enough protection incense to sustain the safety barrier by itself, she returned to her casting chamber. There, she traced the Pentagram again, re-entered the circle, set the censer on the altar, and sat before the altar again. She snuffed out the candles in reverse.
Leaving the incense burning, she went around her apartment snuffing out candles, finishing in the bedroom. The gunfire had stopped, and she still didnt hear any sirens approaching. As she crawled under the covers, Gink came sauntering into the room and jumped up on the bed to curl up against her stomach.
Tomorrows Monday, Alice informed him, reaching out to stroke his head. You know what that means, dont you? I hate having to do it, but I got bills to pay, you know, and I hafta keep anyone from wondering how Im doing it, dont I? Gink seemed to understand, at least as much as a cat was able to, anyway. But sometimes I just wonder if its worth it
Across the dark room, the light shining through the venetian blind shifted and changed color, as, Alice imagined, the movie ad projector cut to the close-up of Devonny Haney and her billion-dollar smile. Somewhere down in the gang lands, automatic gunfire broke out again.
She closed her eyes, trying to ignore it, and wished she knew a good spell for blocking out gunshots. Sometimes she repeated, I wonder if its worth it
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