November 1st, 2008

Chapter One

The oddest job available in the æthre has to be the position of an Enforcer. It is an incredibly thankless job… yet, there are people who will worship you as gods. Well, maybe I’m going too far as to say gods – we are a few levels below Servers and Espers. I suppose that we are demigods – the bastard offspring of gods and mortals.

Personally, the aspect of my job that I find most tedious is the fact that the ground I walk on is practically hallowed. I’d rather be spit at than have that ridiculous horde of sycophants follow you around. It was for that reason that I applied for the position of a Global Enforcer for Senses Squared. Ah, deskwork! To be locked up in an office all day processing complaints and monitoring from afar! Never setting foot outside onto a Senses Squared public server ever again!

I had thought that I lost every last shread of my naivety decades ago, but evidently I haven’t hit rock bottom quite yet.

This is my first day as a Global Enforcer for Senses Squared. I have yet to customize my office to suit my needs. Hell, I had basically just walked in the door before my boss (whose avatar looks disturbingly similar to an incredibly sparkly Al Capone. Disturbing because nobody these days even knows who Al Capone is and because I’ve never seen anyone turn their aura up so bloody high. It was almost blinding.) physically turned me around and told me that there has been a trolling incident on one the more frequented server that has been lasting for the past week. Honestly, I had just looked at him blankly and said that if this was some juevanile hazing game, I was taking no part in it. I went on to expand that nobody would be so incompetent to be unable to evict an AI written by a thirteen year old hopped up on the latest energy drink and teen angst for an entire bloody week.

Turns out that nobody was able to evict said drama queen for an entire week… and that Al Capone was the last one to try.

Needless to say, the stick-up-the-ass bossman was not impressed.

So here I am, back on a Senses Squared server to perform some idiotic grunt work because evidently my coworkers are bloody morons. Do you wanna know what I just learned? Oh, I promise you, it’s quite exciting. Almost… surprising, even.

With the golden aura of a Global Enforcer sparkling along my black cloak and somehow managing to give my face, which hasn’t felt the sun in ninety years, a healthy glow, I attract even more of those damned sycophants. And not even just sycophants – people were beginning to flock to this server for the pure hilarity of watching a bunch of Global Enforcers make idiots of themselves. Fuck. And double fuck, since the gold clashes hideously with my ensemble. I’ve always been more of a silver or platinum kinda girl.

So by the time I managed to reach the AI, I had an audience of several hundred. The more astute members of the crowd, including a few I recognized as fairly popular bloggers, immediately began heckling me. Ah well, I’ll take great pleasure in booting them off of all of Senses Squared servers for a week on the trumped up charges of obstruction of justice and insulting a Global Enforcer. Standard practice for 90% of the Enforcers – most of them have such swollen egos considering that they’ve got an incredibly shit job.

When I finally managed to get a clear view of the AI, I couldn’t help but laugh. The physical representation of that thing was pure brilliance and the programming was interesting and even fairly tight. I could immediately pick up on a handful of exploitable flaws, however. For now, I was content to watch the program in action for a small while. It is almost like a piece of art.

The AI had a chameleon avatar that represented itself as a caricature the nearest important person (the algorithm for ranking people had almost made me smile – the comments the creator had added had a very cynical bent. He or she clearly had a bit too much knowledge of the æthrenet and was both amused and disgusted by the popularity contest therein. It was there that I had decided that there was no way that this AI was built by a teenager and that it was actually misclassified as a troll. It was more of a practical joke. A cruel one, maybe, but a joke all the same.) and promptly began to mock them, with disturbing accuracy. I noticed that the loudmouthed bloggers stayed well out of the AI’s range. Pansies.

With my obnoxious and obvious aura, I was an obvious and easy target for the AI. Unsurprisingly, it honed on my position and its form shifted to an ubergoth with obnoxiously large golden sparkles. I smirked in amusement – el bossman musta busted a lid when he saw that his precious golden look being mocked.

Picking up on my smirk and my undoubtably arrogantly stance (I’ve been accused of arrogance probably once a day for the past ten years. What can I say – I’m the oldest woman ‘alive.’ Surely I’ve got a cause for arrogance), the AI swaggered over to me and adopted a high pitched, excitable voice.

“Ooooo, I’m soooo goth,” the AI shrieked. In response, I merely raised an eyebrow, not that you could tell since I had my hood pulled over half my face. The AI continued, “Just look at me with my golden sparkles and my oh so prestigious job! I’m sooo much better than you peons!”

At that, I had to let out a slight snerk. My arrogance has nothing to do with my job, which should be pretty apparent considering that I’m using the lowest setting for my aura as possible. I could turn it off, or hack it so that it’s less noticeable, but that’s against the company policy. All Enforcers must be clearly marked, there shall be no secret police, blah blah blah. I don’t believe a word of it – I know that Big Brother is watching.

“But, oohhh, I’m a master programmer. I can do anything. I could even hack into the Pentagon! Wanna see me do it? You wanna? You wanna?” The AI pushes ‘her’ face into the woman beside her. The woman looks disgusted and leans away from both myself and my doppelganger.

“Oh, yes! I’m such a brilliant programmer that I managed to become a Wraith! Clearly my genius knows no bounds!” The AI pushes ‘her’ hood back and reveals the wrinkled face of an old, bitter woman. Her eyes are black and have that flat quality that is such an obvious marker for an AI. She turns to me directly and her squeaky voice rises in volume. “Why, I bet you believe that with a wave of your pretty little hand you could just… get rid of me! Just like that!” The AI turned away from me at that and, in a loud sotto voce, addressed the crowd, “I bet she, or is it a he?, can’t.”

“You know what,” I said calmly, my low, slightly gravelly alto a stark contrast to the AI’s high tone. Feeling that this situation deserves a bit of a dramatic flair, I give a slightly mad smile, make my eyes flash a fluorescent blue under my hood and oblige in the completely unnecessary (well, the entire display was completely unnecessary. Letting the AI see me was completely unnecessary. Hell, I bet I could have even remote connected to the server and still have been able to remove the AI. But such ridiculous displays by their Enforcers is encouraged by Senses Squared – the users eat that shit up and the more simpleminded ones worship us for it) arm wave, “I believe that I could.”

“Oh… shit.”

Such poetic last words.

The look of horror on the AI’s face as it decompiled was quite hilarious and I felt the smile plastered on my face turn into a smirk. Now who’s the arrogant one, programmer? You should have instructed your AI to judge a person’s programming skills and for it to leave when their skills outmatch the AI’s programming. While I do hide some of my prowess, I still have enough of it wrapped around me to mark me as a very, very good programmer. Most of us do, really. It’s a mixture of a ‘mine’s bigger’ contest and a warning to others not to fuck with you. Of course, some hotshot programmers think that it’s a ‘challenge’ to go after high ranking programmers, but their attempts to mess with me always have… interesting… outcomes. I’m by no means the best programmer out there, but I am the most experienced.

Heh. It’s hard not to be the most experienced programmer in the world when you’re also the oldest human alive. If you can even call me alive. You see, I’m something that people call ‘wraiths.’ We wraiths are quite an interesting group. Since our numbers have been increasing as time goes on, a debate had started up several decades ago on what to classify us. Technically speaking, we’re not living beings. We can’t eat, age, reproduce (though having sex is still possible – mmm, simulated pleasure!)… we sure aren’t cellular beings.

What are we, then? To put it simply, we are people who, for whatever reason, no longer have corporeal bodies. We’re just spirits in the æthre, trapped, and destined to live out a theoretically eternal life in the machine. Some become wraiths by choice – out of desire for immortality, a better life or simply because they think it’s cool. Others have been trapped here. Faulty hardware corrupting our bodies or our minds and preventing the download back into the physical reality is the main reason. I heard rumours, unsubstantiated ones, mind you, a few years back that someone had engineered a virus that would cause people to become wraiths. Personally, I don’t know why anyone would willingly choose this existence. There is such a stigmata against wraiths, almost as if our condition is catching.

End result? We’re a legal limbo, which means that we’re so very exploitable. Since I am a wraith, I make minimum wage. The other Global Enforcers…? Well, let’s just say that they get paid a wee bit more.

Senses Squared's justification for this is that wraiths are getting free æthrenet access, something that they have the monopoly on, as well as server space and, well, have no use for money anyway. Money only has value in the corporeal world. It’s all true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bloody unfair. I do a lot of work and I’m damned good at what I do. I deserve a much higher wage. But whatcha gunna do, really? I’m just one woman whom history barely remembers.

It’s kinda pathetic, really. Here I am, the first human to ever log into the æthrenet, a member of the original team – the only surviving member of that team – and I’m given all of a passing mention in the history books. Ridiculous – just because you don’t mention me doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. And you cannot erase my existence entirely – I’m the deep, dirty secret hidden in the æthrenet’s past.

Who am I?

Well, I’m about 120 years old (didn’t your mother ever tell you not to ask a lady’s name?), five eight and too skinny from skipping too many meals. My hair is black and hangs down to my shoulder blades, my eyes blue and my skin pale. I have a fondness for the colour black and wear a very old, very battered black cloak.

More importantly, I’m known only as Wraith.

I am the first person to be trapped in the æthrenet and all others have been named after me.

Table of Contents

November 2nd, 2008