Virtually Dead

by Peter May

  Doobie: We might have to pay her something, though, to persuade her to come down and talk to us for a few minutes. You don’t have any money, do you?

  Chas: I did have three million or so. But right now I’m down to my last two hundred.

  Doobie: Well, that should get five minutes of her time.

  Chas paid his remaining two hundred Lindens into Lashing’s tip jar and logged into a three-way IM with Doobie and the dancer. As he did, he glanced up and saw that Lashing had removed her top, and a pair of magnificent virtual breasts swung free as she slid down the pole and swivelled to face them.

  Lashing: Thanks, honey.

  Chas was unaccountably embarrassed.

  Chas: I didn’t mean for you to take your top off.

  Doobie: LOLOL!

  Lashing: Well, it’s five hundred if you want me to go all the way. You wanna see my cock?

  Chas: No! We want to talk.

  Lashing: Hahaha. Well, talking’s expensive. Especially in a threesome. You guys are kinky!

  Doobie: How much?

  Lashing: Another five.

  Doobie Littlething sighs.

  Chas heard a cash register as Doobie paid another five hundred into Lashing’s tip jar.

  Doobie: You owe me, Chas. Okay, girl. Tell us about Quick.

  Lashing: Well, I’m not really the one to ask.

  Chas: Jesus Christ! We just paid you seven hundred Lindens.

  Lashing: Okay, cutie pie, keep your shirt on! You’re getting your money’s worth, aren’t you? Take a look.

  Chas glanced up from the dialogue box and saw that Lashing was now wearing nothing except for a pair of black leather leggings, with cutaways around the crotch and calfs. Between her legs hung an enormous penis in full erection.

  Chas: OMG!

  Doobie: LOLOLOLOL! So who should we ask about Quick, Lashing?

  Lashing: A girl called Raika Spirit. Another of the dancers here.

  Doobie: A shemale?

  Lashing: Only in SL, dear. RL female. Just like Quick.

  Chas: Are most of the dancers really women?

  Lashing: Some of them. It’s easier to get work, you see. Too much competition in the straight clubs. And in SL it’s easy just to buy an add-on attachment.

  Doobie: What about you?

  Lashing: Oh, I’m the real deal, sweetheart. SL and RL. Why? You interested? I can give you an hour for fifteen hundred in one of our skyboxes.

  Doobie: Hahaha. No thanks, Lashing. Interesting thought, though.

  Lashing Vollmar smiles sweetly and blows Doobie a soft kiss.

  Chas opened up his search window and typed in the name of Raika Spirit.

  Chas: Raika is online. I’ll IM her.

  Lashing: No, let me talk to her first. I don’t want her thinking I’ve been shooting my mouth off. Hold…

  Chas and Doobie watched for several minutes in silence as Lashing gyrated around her pole, thrusting her naked bottom in their direction, then spinning around and leaning back to raise her erection toward the ceiling. A large crowd was gathered around them now, everyone watching. None of the other dancers was yet revealing as much as Lashing.

  Lashing: Okay, Raika’s not sure if she wants to talk to you. She and Quick are good friends.

  Doobie: Were, Lashing.

  Lashing: Were what?

  Doobie: Good friends. Quick is dead. SL and RL.

  Lashing: OMG! Hold…

  This time she was back to them much faster.

  Lashing: She’s at home. Here’s an LM

  Landmark windows appeared on both their screens.

  Lashing: But before you go…Tell me. What happened to Quick?

  Chas: She was murdered, Lashing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Raika Spirit lived in a rectangular Japanese house of windows and screens built around a central courtyard with a hot tub and flower garden. Eerily, it made Chas think of the house in Dolphin Terrace. But in all other respects it was quite different. Set in rolling parkland, thickly wooded by leafy, deciduous trees, it stood in the tranquility of an arboretum behind a brick wall and high hedges. It was breezy here, and everything bowed and dipped in the wind’s soft caress. To access the garden they had to pass through an arched brick gate bearing the sign “Slow Down!!! Sim X-ing.” Chas was aware of the slight jolt as they passed almost seamlessly from one sim to the next, and looked up to see Raika standing waiting for them at the top of the steps.

  Raika: Come in.

  She led them into the long east wing of the house, divided by screens into three open rooms. The door slid shut behind them. They passed a Buddha on a bookshelf, potted plants, and occasional chairs, and followed her into a corner room with windows looking out over the arboretum toward the ocean beyond. A long, low table with kneeling mats then led off into the central area of the house. There was a bottle of saki sitting on the table, and several china cups.

  Raika stood for a moment, as if contemplating her next move, and Chas thought how attractive she looked. She had long, crinkly, red hair tied at the nape of her neck and tumbling in a mane down her back. She wore tight jeans and a cross-over cream sweater that revealed the swell of her breasts. Her face was thin, with an almost pointed chin, and she had the most penetrating amber eyes that blinked continuously behind long, long lashes.

  She padded in bare feet across the carpet and sat on one of the kneeling stools.

  Raika: Take a seat.

  Chas knelt with his back to the window and saw, through a partially open screen door, water tumbling over a collection of large boulders in a square, marble hot tub. The sound of running water tinkled gently in the silence of the house.

  Raika: Tell me it’s not true.

  Chas: I wish we could, Raika.

  Raika: I can’t believe it. She was my best friend in SL. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t heard from her. We exchanged IMs every day. And when the grid was down, we would chat on Skype. What happened?

  Chas: Somebody shot her, Raika. We think she was killed for a large amount of money that was in her SL account. Did you know anything about that?

  Raika: No. I didn’t know that much about her RL. Except that money didn’t seem to be a problem. She had a huge house in SL, just off an island called Revere. She’d bought it, along with an enormous parcel of land. God knows what she was paying in tiers. We used to hang out there a lot when we weren’t working. Fabulous beach. Views across the water to a little group of islands and a smoking volcano. It was cool, you know. People used to drop by. We would drink wine and chat.

  Doobie: Where did you meet her?

  Raika: At Twisted’s. She’d been dancing there a while, and I was the new girl. The guys, you know, girls, whatever…they were a bit cliqué, know what I mean? Nice, but, well, you know, the third sex. So we real girls kinda stuck together. Quick took me under her wing. Took me shopping for clothes, skins, anims. She’s basically responsible for the way I look now.

  There was a long pause.

  Raika: I…I still can’t believe it. I could tell her anything, you know? And she never judged me. Jees, I mean, I had some pretty rough relationships in here, and she was always there to pick up my pieces. I don’t know how I’ll survive without her.

  Chas: Did you ever hear her talk about a guy called Maximillian Thrust?

  Raika: No, not that I can remember. One of her clients, maybe.

  Doobie: Clients?

  Raika: She did escort work, as well as dancing at Twisted’s and a couple of straight clubs. Loved the whole virtual sex thing. Playing the slut. Know what I mean? She didn’t do it for the money. She got such a kick out of it.

  Chas: Did she have any boyfriends? Or any other special friends?

  Raika: She had lots of friends. She was a popular girl. But she didn’t seem interested in having any kind of serious relationship in here. No BFs that I knew of.

  Chas: Did she ever give you the idea that she was scared of something, or that something was troubling her?

  Raika
: In RL?

  Chas: Both.

  Raika: Not really. She always seemed pretty fearless to me. Nothing fazed her, you know?

  Doobie: Could you give us a Landmark for her house in Revere?

  Raika: I’ll take you there, if you like.

  There was a pause.

  Raika: Oh, God. I just looked in my Landmark folder and saw the LM. Quick’s Place. I used to click on that so often. Every time I was down. Every time I was up, and needed to share. I guess this’ll be the last time I go there. What’ll happen to the house and all her stuff? I suppose it’ll be returned to her Inventory when the tiers run out.

  Doobie: There is no inventory Raika. The account’s been erased. I guess all her things will just be deleted from the asset server.

  Raika: Aw, shit. That’s such a shame. She has lovely stuff, too.

  She stood up.

  Raika: I’ll send you a TP.

  ***

  As in RL, Quick Thinker lived in a mansion, a huge house that filled an entire corner of an island in Emelia Bay, just off the coast of Revere. Water tumbled over the smooth boulders of an enormous waterfall into a small inlet behind the house. Acres of deck space, and a roof terrace covered an area the size of two tennis courts. The west-facing beach was punctuated by leaning palm trees and dotted with tables and chairs and loungers. A campfire sent smoke and sparks spiralling up into a clear sky. On the far corner of the parcel stood a blue helter-skelter tower with dance animations on its flat roof, and beyond it, the smoke from the volcano hung over the island like a dark, brooding cloud.

  When Raika clicked on the wood-panelled front door, it turned transparent, and they were able to walk through it into a marble-floored sitting room where sofas and armchairs were grouped around a large open fire. Coloured light filtered in through a tall stained glass window above the mantel.

  Reproductions of works by famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century impressionists hung on red and tan walls. In the hallway, a Roman-style bath sank into the marble had two poseballs set along one side of it, lix m, lix f. Which didn’t take too much imagination to envision.

  The hallway then opened into another sprawling lounge area, arched windows looking out over palm-shaded gardens. Here stood another open fire, and an oval frame on the wall above it showed an SL photo sequence of Quick herself.

  Raika: That’s her. OMG, I think I’m going to cry.

  Chas watched the slide-show once through. The sequence contained half a dozen pictures, some portraits, some full-length poses, and one depicting her naked on a beach. She was tall, blond, and beautiful, like so many other women in SL. Chas had seen her corpse spreadeagled across the bed and knew that, in truth, she’d had short, brown hair and a broad, plain face. But, then, death had a habit of stealing beauty away from the features of its victims. Quick, he imagined, was how Jennifer would have liked to look.

  A spiral staircase led up to a sumptuous bedroom, where a bed was raised high on three levels. Flames licked around the hearth of yet another open fire. Windows looked out over the sea, and patio doors opened on to the roof terrace. There was no sign of a corpse. Quick’s dead AV was not here.

  A touch on a tile set into the wall TP-ed them back downstairs.

  Chas: Nothing here.

  Raika: What were you hoping to find?

  Doobie: A corpse.

  Raika: I don’t understand.

  Chas: We’re pretty sure that her AV was killed in SL before or after she was murdered in RL. There should still be a body somewhere.

  Raika: Maybe in the Whorehouse.

  Doobie: The what?

  Raika Spirit laughs sadly.

  Raika: It’s what she called the place she took her clients. Just a small house, over on the main island. She did it up like your classic whorehouse. Red velvet. Black velour. Silk sheets, sex furniture, and more poseballs than you’d find in a sex shop. Wanna see it?

  ***

  They flew over to Revere, following Raika as she passed over the Lost Frontier sound stage and Emelia shopping plaza. Beyond two enormous trees whose spreading branches supported platforms and pavilions that overlooked the stage, they overflew an open-roofed art gallery and crossed a stream, landing finally beside a small, square, two-storey brownstone house with blacked-out windows. Raika led them around to the far side, where an ivy-covered wooden fence bordered the property. She clicked on the door and it slid open.

  From the inside, the windows were clear, giving out views across the stream toward the gallery. Sex settees and lapdance armchairs filled the downstairs area. An item of furniture called Sex Stand Behind Pleaser looked like some implement of torture. Floating green text above it read Pump and Tie Down. White shaggy rugs covered the floor, and a variety of poseballs offered every imaginable sexual position. A ramp led upstairs to where a large bed with black silk sheets and white pillows was pushed up against the wall.

  Quick was stretched out across the bed, just as in real life, still attached to her poseball in the open-legged missionary position, a single black hole torn through her naked chest. Blood was spattered across the pillows, and the wall behind the bed. The sheets were soaked in it, as if it were still fresh and wet. Light slanting in through the windows was reflected white on red.

  Raika gasped.

  Raika: Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How is this possible? Oh, my poor Quick! I can’t stay and look at this.

  Chas: Just two minutes, Raika, please. I need you to tell me if there’s anything here out of the ordinary. Anything here that shouldn’t be. Anything that might give us a clue as to who did this.

  Raika controlled her urge to flee and turned, looking around the room. In the end, she shook her head.

  Raika: I’m sorry. I can hardly see for the tears in my RL eyes. It’s just awful. But there’s nothing…you know, that I can see. It just looks normal. Except for Quick. Can I go, please?

  Doobie: Go, hon.

  And Raika was gone in a twinkle of lights to nurse her SL grief and spill her RL tears. Chas and Doobie looked at the dead AV in silence for several minutes, before Chas ran off a series of snapshots, putting them in a folder in his Inventory, and copying them to Doobie.

  They moved out, then, onto a long terrace, with views over a small lake to a collection of beach houses on the far side. Dolphins frolicked in the water, and seagulls swooped overhead, their distant cawing carried on the wind.

  Chas: It’s a dead end, Doobs. Nothing to connect her to Thrust. And nothing in RL that we know of to connect her to Smitts.

  Doobie: And apart from the body, nothing much here to go on, either.

  Chas: Unless there’s something that strikes you. You have a more experienced SL eye than me.

  Doobie looked around again.

  Doobie: Nothing immediately obvious.

  Chas leaned on the rail and gazed at the water, hope deserting him as depression descended once more. He was no further forward. No nearer to securing the required three and a quarter million or to finding out who had murdered Smitts or Mathews.

  Chas: I think I’ll log out.

  Doobie: What are you going to do?

  Chas: I’ve no idea. But I’ve reached a dead end in here. And time is slipping away. Time that I can’t afford to waste.

  Doobie: You know, in a strange way, you have more time in here than you do out there. You could have three days in Second Life before your real life deadline runs out. And you can do a lot more in three days than in six hours.

  Chas: I suppose…

  Doobie: What you need to do is empty your mind so you can think more clearly. There’s nothing much better for doing that than a game of chess.

  And when he didn’t respond…

  Doobie: Would you like a game?

  Chas sighed. He remembered all those games he had played with Mora. How he had lost himself in them, and how that single focus had created a perspective on the rest of his life that was somehow lacking now.

  Chas: Yes, Doobs. I would.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


  The air was suffused with the pink glow of sunset. They were well into their game and the sun seemed no lower on the horizon.

  Chas: Does the sun ever set here?

  Doobie: I’m not sure that it does. I know that night falls in other parts of the island, but on the chess terrace it has only ever been sunset while I have been here.

  The circle of columns around them glowed warm in the reflected light from the water below, and each chessman was highlighted in amber. On Doobie’s advice, Chas had zoomed back, adjusting his POV so that he was looking at the two of them facing each other across the chessboard, with the light of the dying sun shimmering on the moving surface of the ocean beyond.

  Doobie had changed her outfit yet again. A long, black dress, sleeveless, with a dipping neckline. Her skin seemed to shine like tinted ivory, her hair piled high on her head. For a time Chas forgot the game and examined her. He had seen more glamorous AVs in his short time in SL. But there was something different about Doobie. There was almost beauty in her face, a serenity in her expression that he knew was more than animated pixels. In some way that he couldn’t quite understand, her personality was colouring his perception of her appearance. He followed the line of her fine, full lips with his eyes. Her cupid’s bow, the slight upturn of her nose, her liquid brown eyes. The tiny heart-shaped birthmark high on her cheek, below her right eye. And he thought that she was very lovely. And that if he had been a man on his own looking for a woman, he might have found her. He was a man on his own, certainly, but the only woman he had ever really loved was lost, and he doubted that he would ever find another.

  Doobie: Chas…

  Chas: Yes?

  Doobie: It’s your move.

  He glanced down at the board and saw that she had shifted her knight to C6. But he barely had time to consider the consequences of her move.

  Doobie: I sense a sadness in you, Chas.

  He looked up. How could she sense anything across the ether? He had known her for such a very short time, and their exchanges had hardly been intimate.