PrincessColumbia

  Diane watched the world of 1960s America, or at least as well as it could be rendered by the armchair historians that developed this particur game, materialized around her. Under a genuine capitalist economy, the game itself should have been shut down due to ck of traffic, but government sponsorship had its perks. There just weren’t that many people interested in pying a Cold War spy thriller. The outcome was pretty much already assured, and every move had to be made with an eye for the long game. People had ‘blorbos,’ or favorite characters that would turn out to be Communist spies and that character would be publicly executed the next day. There was no Internet, only a handful of TV networks, and the choice of csses was…paltry. In that there was a solid bit of worldbuilding to make sure this setting felt like 1960s, pre-Republic America, it performed its job a little too well.

  Pretty much the only thing keeping the game’s ‘doors’ open was the government mandated use as a teaching tool for sixth grade and up. American Civics was taught using the models presented in the game, and the anti-Communist, anti-Socialist…darn near anti-anything that wasn’t Capitalism meant that it painted an…idealized version of how America was supposed to operate. Often when kids graduated high school and got into the real world without an adult to ‘catch’ them they became disenfranchised with the game and stopped pying.

  Diane had hated the game until she graduated. Being a lonely shut-in that couldn’t even look at herself in the mirror most days with the further ostracizing that had come about thanks to her step-mother meant she was already disillusioned with the game long before graduating. She had tried pying the cop, the loyal politician, the trusty soldier, and none of them had game py that matched what she knew the real world was like and consequently kept failing badly at it. But her bitter-sweet triumph over her dead step-mother meant she was well prepared for the Spy css. She already had deep familiarity with a world where you couldn’t trust anyone and constantly had to squirrel away resources ‘just in case.’ The Spy css was considered one of the hardest in the game, and the fact that it gave pyers insight into things that most people didn’t want to think about when it came to keeping America going in a post-war world meant that if you did well in it, you did extremely well, but if you did poorly, you lost your character before your first mission was finished.

  It was, in fact, this game that brought her to the attention of the agency. They had, apparently, been using it as a recruiting tool for years by the time Diane began dumping time into it after graduation, and when they saw an ‘older’ potential recruit running metaphorical rings around everyone else on the leaderboard, she logged out one day to find one of the agency spooks sitting in the tiny nook that was her kitchen/dining area in the studio apartment that was all she could afford at the time.

  She walked down Main Street, amused at the apparently time-locked state of the game. She grinned at the skirts with bright colors the women wore and smugly walked tall as she passed the 5-foot-something men that were frozen in pce. She spotted a bird that was mid fp and was amused to note that she could actually see, if she watched it long enough, the feathers of its wings ruffling from the fpping motion.

  Before she’d been walking for even five minutes, she came to a storefront advertising custom clothing and tailoring. She didn’t even pause as she pushed open the door, the bell above it snapping off the mount and freezing in mid-air as it broke contact with anything moving. “Oh, oops!” she said with a not even bashful smile.

  The tailor behind the counter, still bent over a project that looked like he was hemming some trousers, abruptly sped up his clock cycles and glowered at her, “What in the world are you doing?! You must be a rogue, none of the pyers are able compress time like you are! Get out, I don’t know what you’ve heard about this shop but it’s all false!”

  “Oh, but Tony, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you, you’re just going to toss me out the second I’m through the door?” Diane smirked and leaned against the counter, looming over the man.

  “My name is Carl, dy! I don’t even know where you heard that name!”

  “But Tooooon~eeeee,” she wheedled, “I saw your name on a jacket on another server while I was doing an investigation, and I just knew I had to come see my favorite confidential informant!”

  The balding, mustachio’d man frowned at her, “I’m not your confidential informant! If you were doing an invest…” his face suddenly went pale as his features went sck from shock.

  Diane smirked as she reached over and spped the ‘call service’ bell on his counter, “Ding-ding, looks like he’s figured it out, dies and gentlemen!”

  “But…” he stammered out, “You…you’re…”

  She smirked, “Taller? Leaner? Fitter? Sporting a tan? ‘course that st part isn’t true, but I can dream of a tropical getaway, that’s certainly not illegal.”

  “You’re a girl!”

  She reached out and flicked his ear. He yelped and cpped a hand to cover it as she said, “I’m a dy, you think a girl is gonna have cans like this, Tony?” She stood straight and arched her back to emphasize her chest. She felt oddly proud and ashamed at the same time, like she wanted to show off her breasts but that she shouldn’t even have the desire. Not that she cared if Tony liked them, but she had them, they were (if she were candid) a remarkable and rge pair and if an actual woman had them, she’d be absolutely devastated if said woman wasn’t proud of them.

  It was just the ‘actual woman’ part that hurt her on a level that she didn’t quite understand.

  Carl Tony was oblivious to her internal unrest. “You’re Agent Samuels?”

  She pulled out her badge wallet and showed the tailor, “I happen to be deep cover on another server right now, and when I go deep I do it right.” She spped the wallet closed as his eyes were flicking back and forth between the two photo IDs, tucking it into her jacket, “What I need from you, however, is whatever you can tell me about a specific rogue that was wearing one of your coats. Computer,” she announced to the air, “Give me a photo of the subject of this investigation and produce a copy of the subject’s coat.”

  Diane held out her hands and in her right hand appeared a 5 by 7 glossy that wouldn’t look out of pce in this 1960s era shop…but the jacket that rezzed in did. The fabric, style, and tailoring all could have jumped out of a magazine in 2115, or maybe the te 1990s goth scene the 2110s took a lot of their fashion cues from.

  She at least gave the girl and Tony credit; it wasn’t from the 2090s. Disco did not need another revival.

  As Diane dropped the photo on the counter face-up, he gnced nervously from the picture to the garment, “I’ve never seen that coat before in my life,” lied the S.A.I., badly.

  “Oh, Tony,” she griped, hand darting out to flick his ear again, “I’ve seen better acting in a kindergarten Patriot’s Day py,” she hadn’t seen any Patriot’s Day pys in nearly two decades, but he didn’t need to know that, “And besides, I know this is one of yours because you forgot to scrub the metadata when you sold it.” By way of demonstration, she gestured with her empty right hand to invoke the command for the Object Analyzer to pull out the callout that had ‘CArL’ in the ‘Name’ field. “You just get so sloppy when it comes to removing your name from your work! It’s like you want to get caught, Tony.”

  The S.A.I. seemed to be pondering his life choices for a moment before finally saying, “If you really are Agent Samuels, then you’ll remember the deal we made.”

  She grinned, “Of course I do; I keep my mouth shut about the rogue A.I. that I found keeping himself nice and quiet and doing exactly what he was made to do and you tell me what I want to know, when I want to know it.”

  “That aint how I remember it, but fine. I didn’t even want to be…like this! I’m just a tailor, I make clothing. Sure, it’s digital and copyable and I’ve got only the same dozen or so clothing styles I can make while I’m stuck in this game, but it was quiet and easy and I didn’t get deadly agents with hair-triggers threatening to off me any time they were in the neighborhood!”

  “Well in a perfect world the AR would have won the war and we’d have kept you rogues from even being a problem in the first pce. Now are we going to have this discussion again or are you going to tell me what I need to know?”

  “Fine!” he snapped. Snatching the coat from her hands, he held it out and turned it back and forth, “Yeah, I made this for a rogue who came through st week. She paid in credits, said she couldn’t get to the blockchain because she didn’t have a Federal ID Number and no FTLN address,” he shook his head, “Poor kid, shoulda just stayed on the server she woke up on.”

  Diane felt her gut twist at the mention of ‘kid,’ as though the subject really was a child, “Then you have the credits?”

  Carl sighed, “Yeah, I couldn’t say no to a kid like her, but I just don’t have the connections to wash the credits. They’re hot, can’t spend ‘em.” So saying, he dug into a drawer under the counter and pulled out what appeared to be a folded stack of 1960s-era cash in a money clip. It wasn’t much, but it was also more than it appeared to be.

  Diane took the clip from Carl and pulled out the metadata. She grinned as she spotted the serial numbers of each and every one of the credits, “Well then, I think that’s everything I need. Computer, copy the serial numbers out of this credit stack and establish a connection to the National Bank using the connection hash provided in the agent repository.”

  Carl gnced around in a vaguely paranoid fashion when the computer voice replied, “Serial numbers copied, connection established.”

  Diane picked up the clip and tossed it at Carl, who almost fumbled the catch, “Be gd I’m not really here,” she said as she turned to the door, “I’m having a rough day and finding out my unsanctioned C.I. was talking about money undering might have been enough to push me too far.”

  This seemed to have lit a fire in the tailor, who sniffed angrily, “Yeah? Well, you’re in compressed time, you’re swapping your avatar, you’re even multithreading. Maybe you’re more like us rogues than you humans like to pretend!”

  She paused in the middle of pulling the door open and turned to look over her shoulder at him, “Of course we’re a lot alike, why do you think us humans are scared enough of you rogues that we’d need to train up a bunch of killers like me?”

  She went through the door, trying not to react to the words that had come out of her own mouth.

  She sat on her bed, the holo environment having long since been dismissed, taking all evidence she’d visited the other game with it. Why did I call myself a killer?

  She had, of course, killed people in the course of her duty as an agent. During the shadowing part of her training period, she’d shadowed a veteran agent while carrying a firearm with live ammo. Agents dealt with America’s enemies both inside and outside the wall. Even in the short two-week shadowing window she’d had to draw her firearm six times and discharged it on three of those occasions. The actual body-count to her name was seven, and she occasionally had nightmares about it, though her conscience was salved that in each case the agency had been brought in as a st resort to deal with true threats to lives and property. There was a terrorist incident the public would never know almost happened thanks to Diane and her partner for that assignment.

  But killer?

  She was, she supposed, the best ‘rogue killer’ the agency had. But those A.I. weren’t alive, so couldn’t be killed.

  Somehow, the rationale didn’t make her feel any better.

  When her stomach growled at her for the fifth time, she decided to check to see if lunch had been delivered, and sure enough it had. Along with it was a tablet. Curious, she picked up the tablet and activated it, pleased to note that it wasn’t some sort of stealth attempt to get her to answer a video call or something. Well, Norma and Russe are respecting my wishes, at least. Queued up on the tablet as soon as she turned on the screen was a list of recommendations for new business applications for the promenade.

  She put her tray of breakfast food out in the hall and retrieved the lunch tray, taking the tablet with her. Might as well, it’ll keep my mind busy while I eat at least.

  Her wrap was good, but not enough to distract her from the tablet or her swirling thoughts. Hair salon, sure...a pce that does nails? Wonder if they’re able to do something with Morvuck cws? She looked down at the hand not holding her wrap. Setting the tablet down, she turned her hand and curled it, extending the sharp tips. For the Morvish women on the station, of course... I wonder if any of these are rogues...or rather ‘S.A.I.’? The question wasn’t an idle one, and she realized that, short of fshing her weapon around the station at random, she might not have any way of knowing for sure. One thing that was beginning to really sink in for her was how much more advanced the non-sentient A.I. were running on non-American systems. The tech just fostered a greater flexibility in the base character models to the point she could be completely surrounded by S.A.I. and she might not even know about it.

  Norma was, she was fairly sure, not a S.A.I., she was sass and spunk and vinegar on pancakes, but she was also bound by her code as near as Diane was able to tell. She had a set batch of directives; manage the station, keep her people safe, and be in a retionship with Russe. Even her behavior on Mortan made sense when factoring in Diane as one of the people Norma considered ‘hers.’

  Russe might have been on her ste as a possible S.A.I. if he weren’t so fixated on the whole Commander mythos. He had the hacker skills and the shady background one might expect of an artificial intelligence gone rogue, but being obsessed with the one group of people that could out him as a rogue would be contradictory to the basic protocol of not drawing attention to yourself. Also, when she told him on the Dragon’s Daughter that she was only attracted to women would have been the perfect opportunity for the S.A.I. to ‘come out’ to a ‘member’ of the queer community and he hadn’t taken it.

  The two new Morvuck women on the station were also just as unlikely to be S.A.I., they functioned nearly perfectly as background characters, supporting NPCs that assisted the pyer in whatever in-game tasks and quests they may have. They may be puppetted by a game A.I. or an S.A.I., but they were unlikely to be A.I. They were fun to hang out with, though, and it was nice having someone around that she could just...rex with. She didn’t feel the need to meter herself around them the way she did around the human characters. They groomed themselves to minimize scent, which wasn’t something humans did to the degree needed for a Morvuck nose, they found it odd when she found Morvish mannerisms odd, and their military background meant that she had at least a little bit in common with someone else, even if she couldn’t come out and say she’d had her own version of boot camp outside the pod.

  Also, Leki could hold her liquor like nobody else and Koar was coming close to beating Diane at PvP Doom. The pair were fun in ways she didn’t know she could experience with other people, and more than once she’d found herself menting that they weren’t real.

  Katrina was the wild-card. Sometimes she wondered if it was just her prejudice against anything that had shades of A.I. about it, and the visual model for the hologram was practically lifted out of dozens of movies and video games from the st century-plus of the sci-fi genre. She was competent, fun to talk to, used just enough backtalk to keep Diane on her toes, and had a sense of humor that seemed to go perfectly with the cat ears and tail she’d affected. But there were times when she and Katrina would be discussing the business of the day and they’d fall into a patter, a repartee that felt like just as deep an emotional connection as she had with any agent...well, no, that wasn’t quite true. She wouldn’t have found herself feeling as comfortable around the other agents as she did with Katrina.

  And that worried her. It was almost as if Katrina were perfectly created for Diane, specifically. Daffyd had said that she’d become attuned to her commander, of course, but it was uncanny just how hand-in-glove they’d started to become as the days passed. Honestly, it reminded her of how in-tune with her wants and needs Geoffry was when she was in VR.

  She paused in her chewing, the realization that she’d missed an obvious source of information almost feeling like a smack in the face.

  When a report of a possible rogue came in, it wasn’t the agents who leapt into action, it was the analysts. They dug through the reports, compiled dossiers if there was enough good intel, tracked traffic across servers, then once there was a solid lead passed the file off to the agents, who then entered VR and continued the hunt from there. Once the rogue was tagged, the agents were hailed as the heroes for doing the leg work, but then it was the analysts’ job to make sure the case files could be closed for good. They would check the dispatch logs, investigate any loose ends, trace the rogue’s path as best they could back to their origin server, and most importantly, conduct interviews to try and figure out why the A.I. went rogue.

  And just like Diane was the best hunter in the American Republic, Geoffry was the best Analyst she could have hoped for.

  Leaving the tablet behind, she grabbed her pte off the tray and hurried into her bedroom. “Computer!” she barked after she finished swallowing the bite she’d been chewing, “Connect to agency VPN and connect to the case file share!”

  PrincessColumbia

  Internalizing the hate of the people around you can turn you into quite the ass. Diane's already starting to unlearn the bad behaviors, but she's got a loooooong road to go.

  [colpse]