November 4th, 2008

My neighbour’s cry of pain (I think it’s a high pitched masculine one... but, hey, it could be a chick. You never know) made me laugh a little on the inside. Oh, electrical jolts are always fun to give. The girly-scream man poked his head over the edge of the cubicle and glared down at me. As far as one can tell with avatars, he appears to be in his mid twenties. He has pale blue/grey yes and longish white blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Average height (as far as I can tell since he’s leaning over a cubicle), average weight. Fairly good looking, but totally not my type.

“What was that for?” I can’t believe he actually had the audacity to ask that.

“Oh, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to zap you, I meant to hit the guy next to you. I mean, I’m perfgectly okay with people perving on my butt and all,” I’m rolling my eyes, but I do n’t think the guy can see it behind my hood.

“Hey, I’m just trying to get a 360 view of our newest colleague. Giving what the masses want, you know?”

“...are you going to be selling that video?”

“Yes, actually. I split it with you – 20/80.”

“60/40 and I won’t up the voltage next time.”

The guy gulped. “Next time?”

“It’s how I show my affection for people.” My smirk usually creeps people out, but this guy seems to be enjoying it. Weirdo.

“Sounds kinky! Wanna meet up some time after work?” The blond leers and wags his eyebrows ridiculously. I”d be offended if it wasn’t for the fact that he is so obviously joking.

“Oh, that depends – what’s your threshold for pain?” The man laughs and sticks his hand out to me.

“Not very high. James Spencer.”

“Nice to meet you, Jimmy,” I reach out and grasp his hand firmly. “The name’s –“

“Wraith. I’ve read all about you... Well, I had to write a paper on a famous person back in college and I picked you. I must say, there isn’t a lot of data out there for your life, and what information does exist, well, it...”

“Condridicts itself? I know. Someone keeps trying to spin my past in the most politically advantageous way.”

“Yeah. Someone.” Jimmy had a rather cynical look in his eyes. Hmmm, it appears that Senses Squared employees are not as loyal, or blind, as they would hope. “Look, the offer for a drink after work still stands – but as friends, friends! So do you wanna go out for coffee after this shift is done?”

“I gave up caffeine. Eighty years ago.” For someone who apparently knows all about me, Jimmy sure overlooked the minor fact that I can’t eat.

“Okay, so it’s virtual coffee. It still tastes the same. There’s a small coffee shop on one of Crossard’s servers that has a really great atmosphere.” Jimmy’s giving me puppy dog eyes. He must have all of the girls around here just hanging on to his every word. What is he doing asking me out for drinks?

“Alright. I’ll come.” Sure, it’s against my regular MO, but I really want to know why this guy wants to talk to me. It’s unlikely that he’s going to go all fanboy on my ass, so hopefully he has some real information for me.

“Awesome! But I should get back to work; I’m nearing a deadline.” With that, Jimmy dropped out of sight and I finally had a chance to read the readme message.

It turned out that the readme wasn’t all that exciting – it was just telling me that I was to update a bunch of provided code. So I checked out the code they wanted me to fix up and determined two things.

1) That is a lot of code. How long do they plan on keeping me here?

2) The code is very, very familiar.

Wow. I can’t believe that they actually gave me my old code back and told me to fix it. How rude. Ah well, at least I’m not digging through someone else’s garbage.

Huh, this old stuff truly is rather horrendous. Some of it was rather sloppily laid down. Oh, it works and it’s effective, it’s just not as elegant as I now prefer. I guess I can afford to take things slower now – my life isn’t hanging on the balance and, well, the days all blur together now.

I guess I better start fixing this stuff up. Not much else to do around here.

Chapter Four

Jimmy was right, this coffee shop really does have a nice atmosphere. Not too trendy, not too divey. No open mike poetry nights, thank god. Teen angst is so ridiculous, if you ask me. Unfortunately, while the atmosphere is great, Jimmy has just made idle chatter since we got here. He better stop wasting my time, and soon.

“So, Jimmy,” I start, “is there a reason why you wanted to talk off of the Senses Squared servers?”

“What are you talking about, Wraith? The server’s owner has nothing to do with why I chose this place.” Jimmy looks so guileless with his hair escaping his ponytail and hanging in front of his eyes.

“Mmm, right. And that’s why you specifically mentioned that this is a Crossard server to me. What’s your deal?” This is getting ridiculous – it’s not like anyone can hear us – I’ve got up enough spy detectors and have heavly (but not noticibly – it’s an art) encrypted this conversation.

“Just a sec...” Jimmy looks pensive for a bit, and then his eyes snap to mine and their suddenly not so soft and boyish. I wonder how old he truly is. “Okay, we’re clean. Nobody is watching us.”

“Well doy.” I roll my eyes. C’mon, does he honestly think that I would be willing to meet with him if there were spies around? I’m notoriously paranoid, after all.

“I must say, that is a rather nice encryption you’ve got running. Way beyond my abilities.” Jimmy looks genuinely impressed... I think. I’ve already determined that the man is a very good actor.

“Years of practice,” was my modest reply.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” Jimmy says sharply. Yes, I really do wonder who he truly is.

“So what did you want? And, please, no games.”

“I just wanted to say that I’m safe to talk to... and not to panic when you get back home.” Jimmy’s face is very serious. Oh my, just what have I gotten myself into?

“What do you mean by that?” I demand. I’m not all that happy when I get cryptic warnings and messages.

“I’m sorry, truly sorry, in fact, that I can’t get into any further detail. I’m already operating outside of my limits just by bringing you here. But I feel that it is necessary.” He really does look remorseful. What have I gotten myself into.

“Cut the crap. If you’ve broken some rules, you may as well go all the way.” God, must everyone be playing games with me these days?

“I would, really. I really, really would. But this isn’t quite the secure enough for me to give you this information... besides, I can’t explain it as well as Am... you’ll see. By tomorrow, you’ll understand.” Jimmy looks a bit embarrassed by his slip up. Looks like boy wonder here isn’t all that perfect.

Am... Am what? It’s probably a name, and I have a feeling that I should recognize it. This isn’t the time to get into it, though.

“I’m really sick of you guys screwing around with me,” I move to leave the table, my mouth set in a hard scowl. Jimmy’s hand shot out and held me back.

“Please, no, don’t rush off in anger. We’re going to keep up a friendly line of communication in the days to come, even if it’s just a facade.” He’s doing the puppy dog eyes again. “The thing is, Wraith, I really don’t want it to be just a facade.”

“God, will you all stop bloody well fucking with me? Can’t anyone ever give me a straight answer?!”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have invited you out for coffee until I got the go ahead,” Jimmy pondered, “but it was such a good opportunity. I didn’t get where I am today by playing it safe.”

“You know what, whatever. Fuck you guys – I’m going home.” And with that, I removed the encryption and walked rapidly out of the room, my tattered cloak billowing melodramatically behind me.

So something is going to happen when I get home tonight. What fun. Needless to say, I was incredibly careful when making my way back to my apartment. Someone, probably another wraith, must be tailing me – my apartment is incredibly secured. By the time I had made it back home, well over an hour had passed since I left that cafe. The instant I downloaded myself onto my home network, I knew something was wrong. I reached out, shoved the problem into quarantine and moved to switch off the apartment’s connection to the æthrenet, only to find that I could not.

“Hey, woah there! Can we not do that, please?” Well, what do you know, it was the problem that I shoved into quarantine who stopped me. Evidently the quarantine wasn’t strong enough. Not surprising, really, considering that my visitor is Amelia Crossard. And I think she’s here in person – I’m not noticing any AI tags.

Crossard looks exactly like how she appears in her publicity speeches... which isn’t surprising, considering that she practically lives on the æthrenet these days. She doesn’t count as a wraith because her body is still hooked up, but she hasn’t attempted a download in several years. She probably is a wraith by now, but as long as her body stays alive, hooked up to the machine and she never tests the theory, she gets all of the rights of a person in a corporal body.

I can’t say that I blame her for ditching her body, though. She developed early onset, æthrenet-induced Alzheimer’s – something that the only cure for, even to this day, is to be a permanent resident of the æthrenet. However, that only truly works if you catch it soon enough – as soon as part of your brain has degraded, it’s inaccessible. Crossard’s Alzheimer’s was, undoubtably, caught incredibly early. She would have been monitored closely for it, considering she basically grew up online.

“Amelia Crossard... what brings you here?”

“I wanted to congratulate you on your promotion, Wraith, you should have had that position years ago.” Crossard was smiling genuinely.

“I had that position years ago. I left by choice, Crossard, you know that.” I rolled my eyes – we’ve had this conversation before, “come to try and convince me to work for your company now that I’m back in the game, so to speak?”

“No, I’m not. Well, I kind of am. But not in the way you’re expecting,” Amelia looks sheepish, her silvery hair flopping into sharp, light green eyes.

“What is it with you people and being vague? Honestly!” I push my hood off angrly and take off the cloak interly – it’s my house, I can do what I want.

“I’m not doing it intentionally! I would never give you half information, Wraith!” Crossard was rather fervent about that statement; her hands were gripping my upper arms tightly.

“Right, I don’t think Jimmy got that memo.” I shrug off Crossard’s hands – a bit too friendly for my tastes.

“Jimmy... James Spencer has been talking to you?! What waqs he thinking?” Crossard looked horrified.

“Apparently, he wasn’t. He said something about having too good of an opportunity to pass up. He works in the cubicle next to mine, you know.”

“Ugh, that impulsive idiot! Does he want to bring a lawsuit for corporate espionage down on our heads?”

“Ah, so you are spying on S2.”

“Like they’re doing anything different with me. Fair’s fair, you know. I need every little edge I can get in this war.”

“War? Don’t you think that you’re being a little bit... extreme in your vocabulary?”

“Ah, you never did have any experience in the corporate world, did you Wraith. It really is war out there.”

“Right then. What do you want – you already have a spy.. in the same department I’m in, no less!”

“While he is working in the same place you are, you have a far greater access to far more classified information than James does.” Crossard admitted.

“So you do want another spy.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Not interested.”

“Look, Wraith,” Crossard placed a hand on my shoulder, “I think it’s really important that you hear me out. Things have always been bad politically in the æthrenet, but the politics are beginning to affect the æthrenet itself now. It’s... becoming dangerous to spend too much time here.”

Once again, I brush off Amelia’s hand and this time I snort.

“Like I care – it’s hard to do anything worse to me than what’s already been done.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Wraith. If the æthrenet is deemed unsafe for the public, what do you thik is going to happen to you and the rest of the wraiths?”

“And you?”

“And me.”

“So even the great humanitarian Amelia Crossard looks out for herself first. No surprise there.”

“Don’t look so shocked. Look, you obviously aren’t interested in anything I have to say. So, here, take this.” Amelia holds out a stack of papers and I look at them warily. “It’s publicly available data I’ve been able to compile off of the Senses Squared servers.”

“Wow, that’s so deep – and so hard to find.” My god, is she seriously wasting my time with this?

“No. You have to check this out, Wraith. The statistics are disturbing, to say the least. This information, while accessible to the public, has been incredibly obscured behind garbage data. Just take it.” Amelia shoves the papers at me again. Reluctantly I take them and file them into my to do pile.

“I’ve got to go – if you need to see me, try arranging a meeting with James – but discretely!” And, with a parting grin, Amelia Crossard left my apartment.

The instant she was gone, I closed off æthrenet access to my home network. After whipping up a quick program to go apartment hunting for me (this place is obviously not secure enough – if Crossard knows about it, Senses Squared does and I really don’t want them to know where I reboot), I start to set things in order to reboot.

Being a wraith is very odd – despite the fact that we do not need sleep, we still need to have a rest period. In my case, the rest period is a little over an hour combination of a reboot and a defrag. It keeps me thinking straight and speeds up my reaction times. When I first got trapped in the æthrenet, I only had to reboot every few months and it only took a few seconds. Now I need to reboot every other day. I suppose that it is possible that I could die, but I predict that I’ll come up with a solution to this problem before that is necessary.

The reboot period is interesting as well because I sort of dream. If reliving your memories over and over again is dreaming, that is. And, the thing is, I have an eidetic memory (though it only applies to anything that has happened to me since I became trapped here... so I have about eighty years worth of perfect memory floating around in my mind) – every little detail of everything I have ever done is relived when I ‘sleep’ as the memories are reorganized time and again.

I can never predict what memory I’m going to relive next – it’s in a completely illogical order for the human mind to comprehend, but for the computer it makes perfect sense.

I just hope that it’s one of my better ones this time.