Chapter 1

The notion of privacy, these days, is purely laughable. They know how much you eat, and what flavours you enjoy. They know what your favourite colour is, and how much you can afford to spend on clothes, perfume, jewelry, data, makeovers, medicals, toiletries, furniture, art — everything really — and what your preferences are. Of course, they sometimes get it hilariously wrong. There is a netjournal devoted to all those amusing, and sometimes costly, errors.

They? Adders, the 'focused advertising' companies. If you weren't in their database, you didn't exist. At least, not much above subsistence level. Oh, signing your privacy away wasn't mandatory, not yet. The big companies didn't rule the world, not yet. But it did make one's career path ever so much smoother, removed any number of little obstacles, and actually made things more convenient. These were professionals, and they made a good job of at least making it look like they cared. The psychs they'd hired had done a marvelous job for them. When you feel like you've twisted your back, checking all those machines, it makes you feel a little warm inside to see the offer for a full body massage.

They even had that cute little service, 'Surprise Me'. All you had to do was dedicate a portion of your budget to it, and you were guaranteed a pleasant surprise every now and then. Or your money back. I'd actually been tempted to sign on, but a couple of horror stories I'd looked at held me back. There was some litigation going on, I think, the Adders claiming it was pure invention, an urban legend. With at least one of the stories, I'm pretty sure.

Machines? Oh, I'm a senior medical technician at Mount Sinai hospital. The maintenance and update of the diagnostic machines is my responsibility, and there are five people who routinely check up after me. The slightest little miscalibration on my part, and things would be, if you'll excuse my bluntness, really fucked up. It was a difficult, tedious, and occasionally fascinating job, and it paid very well indeed. I've been working for almost four straight years now, with nary a vacation, and what with call-ups and the irregular schedule of updates, I was starting to burn out. The responsibility was a heavy weight, but that wasn't it. It was the loneliness.

I'd had six years of virtual-study, at least an hour every week, plus serious hands-on work. I could just about build one of those machines, and I took a virt-course every time a new model came up. My recommendation, buy or don't, carried more weight than that of all the medical doctors. I lived and breathed these machines. I was actually on the consultant list for the manufacturers of the V-Biotine series, after I rejected their SVSG-14 device and sent them some feedback from the maintenance point of view. I got quite a bit of money out of that, too.

My colleagues think I'm a cold fish, but that's not really true. I'm just terminally shy, when I'm not discussing the nuts and bolts. My grandparents, on both sides, were some of the early investors in Virtech, one of the pioneer virtual technology firms, and they made out like bandits. Of course, their youngest granddaughter had to be educated to the best standards, that being in the first completely computerized school in the world. They yanked me away from everything, when I was twelve, and gave me access to more information than anyone could possibly deal with. It was awfully lonely. The other attendees were mostly the richest of the rich, and I just hadn't grown up that way, so I absolutely did not fit in. I didn't know how to dress, what to say, who not to speak to, what jewelry to wear. Their conversation material was alien. The latest, most flash fashions in everything were something I didn't get, and couldn't afford even if I did, and I was much too stubborn and independent to become a pet of one of the rich boys. Not that they didn't try — I wasn't exactly ugly, even in the gawky stage. My parents didn't give me much of an allowance, and didn't seem to notice my complaints or sullenness. After a few months, I grew quiet, and began to really study. I graduated with a double doctorate, one in theoretical and diagnostic medicine, the other in robotic system interface. I wasn't any sort of genius, according to the tests, but I fit comfortably enough in the niche just below, the 99^th percentile.

Getting a job, even at 18, had been ridiculously simple. And here I was, almost 22, a terminally shy non-virgin. In one of my more desperate moments, I tried one of the virtual dating programs. Lark, as he'd called himself, was more than smooth enough to get into my panties. The way he said my name, "Oh, Kylie", had been enough to send shivers down my spine. Technically, he'd been competent enough. I didn't explode with pleasure, not really, but it was quite pleasant for a first time. I found myself not entirely surprised, when I never heard from him again. Oh, he paid for his perfidy. You don't piss off a smart girl with money, not when she's also a skilled programmer and a major heiress. The dating services, and most everything else, had comments and reviews on people. I made very, very sure he'd never have a date again, blacking any alias he could possibly make up beyond redemption. Petty of me, perhaps, but you know what they say about scorned women. I even got him fired for virting while he was supposed to be working, which was perhaps a bit too vindictive. Getting Virtech to give me the data was no work at all. It took me a couple of months to climb out of the swamp of despair, and another month to lose the ten pounds I gained, overeating and not keeping in shape.

So there I was, in my little suite in the hospital itself, a privilege granted the most senior doctors, the hospital administrator, and yours truly alone. I was alone, and I'd just finished dissecting the most recent proposed update to the pregnancy monitors, and taken a hot shower. There was a standard Adder package, the 'fancy introductory offer' type, sitting on my desk.

It contained a typical virt diadem and a data chip. Apparently, Daddy Addy had decided that what my life was missing was some rousing virt gaming. My first, automatic response to other people (or computers) telling me that something was good for me was rebellion. But I did know that I needed something, and I couldn't argue with that something until I looked at it.

The data chip was mostly legalese, over 3,800 pages of legal documents I'd be automatically agreeing to by using the virt. The game itself was a full hour of full play, which had to be run at a single sitting. I don't read for entertainment, I hadn't done that since I'd started the school. To purge the tensions, I mostly went on virt shoot-'em-ups, usually solo. Sometimes I went flying, as a bird, which was a marvellous sensation of utter freedom, raced a car, or went skiing or on virt-rides, where you strap down in a little bullet-craft and go wheeeeeee-ing through impossible permutations of reality, only just managing to keep the intestines inside. Great fun. Reading 3,800 very dry page would have dehydrated me entirely, and really wasn't my thing. That's why lawyers existed.

I was pretty sure that the usual game virts offered you incredible options for character creation, letting you make up your own unique abilities. Most of them were scifi or fantasy types, with quite a few historical ones, or more accurately, alternate history ones. The introductory offer, especially designed for me, though supposedly full, offered very limited choices, all restricted to a single theme they called 'fugitive', in a selection of five fantasy worlds. Six of the ten choices were of elves of various sorts, and I had to check exactly what an elf was, just to be certain that my understanding was not in error. The dictionaries weren't much help, so I checked the net, and was inundated with information. Too much of a good thing, and the virt, as a proper introductory offer should, offered a full explanation, so I left off investigating things further, and decided to just go ahead and try it. A year of subjective time, true, and I noticed that I couldn't simply quit if I didn't like it — that was a big part of the legalese. I wasn't normally impulsive, but the temptation of letting go and fading away, doing something new entire, quite seduced me.

I lay down, adjusted the diadem, and closed my eyes. I opened them again to find myself in a hall of mirrors. I looked at myself: Slightly rumpled, short and fluffy brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin (I almost never saw the sun), average height, average build. Pretty rather than cute or beautiful, with a thin triangular face, almost foxy, a small straight nose and a pert chin. I was in pretty good shape, which was easy with the exercise machines, and my tits formed small, firm bumps on the blue coveralls I wore.

I turned around, looking at the ten mirrors and the pictures they presented. All of the mirrors contained females. Gender bending was extremely popular, but not something they'd offer to me, not like this. I had trouble enough with being female, and the very idea of entering a male body was repulsive.

Three mirrors held women, and as I examined each I learned that they were wizard, thief and warrior. They were all beautiful, utterly magnificent, in very different ways. In virt play, almost everyone was beautiful. Next was an impossibly cute catgirl thing, which struck me as very strange. I didn't look closely enough to learn more, rejecting it immediately. How does one control a tail? The next six were apparently elves, or at least some of the possible types. Elves were described as an elder race, long-lived and magically adept if physically frail, with pointy ears and slender build. Otherwise, they looked just like people, if somewhat thinner and more delicate. The skin tones ranged from utter black to greenish, blue, pale gold and white, hair and eyes holding equally exotic colours. The blue skinned elf actually had gills and webbed fingers, and I rejected the idea of aquatic play immediately. I wanted to experience the basics, before I tried the strange and exotic. That meant rejecting the black skinned one, however exquisite she looked, as her habitat seemed to be tunnels beneath the surface of the earth. Very strange.

I finally narrowed the choice down to two, a milky skinned elf with blue black hair, supposedly a priestess, and a green skinned elf with darker green hair, a druidess. Both had leaf green eyes. I learned that in most fantasy virts, and this one specifically, there were a few traditional divisions. The first divided those who used magic from those who relied on physical skills, be it weapons mastery or stealth. Within the purview of the spellcasters were the arcane practitioners, who relied on their own skill or talent to call power from somewhere, and the divine servants, who drew power from either the gods or nature, be they priests or druids. The source of power supposedly affected the type and power of spells provided, with priests being the most skilled at healing and protective magic, druids specializing in elemental magic and shapeshifting. I was warned that such generalizations were somewhat misleading, as customization options for players allowed for much that was hidden. In this introductory version, many of the options were closed to me, many choices already made. Of course, I noticed that the more powerful priests have a trump card they can bring into play — directly calling on their god. It was dangerous, costly, and invariably resulted in a quest of some sort, but it was usually survivable, if you were playing the priest properly, that is to say: Looking out for whatever deity's interests. Of course, gods were not obligated to actually answer, so it was a card of last resort.

Originally, such games' purpose had been to become powerful by killing things, finding treasure and magical items, and completing quests, thereby gaining 'points' and rising 'levels', which granted points you could add to various abilities and skills. Basically, an endless shoot-'em up of sorts. Things had mutated somewhat, as the virts became almost another 'real' world of their own. Though, come to think of it, they were real enough. They existed, after all. I looked at the rules behind the virt, and saw that the basic mechanism hadn't really changed, but you received rewards for doing things, not just killing things. The sneakier, smarter and more in tune you were with what you were supposed to be playing, the more you got. Even with the newest games, you mostly had to gain levels to increase powers, though certain 'special' things could permanently enhance specific abilities or actually change the nature of your character. There were tedious lists of skills, anything from picking pockets to identifying poison, from weapons and spell skills to using the corpses of things you killed. I had to take another look at that last one — cannibalism was actually possible, and it seems that you could make things in the virt, including magical items, by harvesting resources both natural and unnatural, and using certain specific player skills. Or paying others for using those skills on what you gathered. There was, obviously, a thriving market and exchange, even including 'real' money. I wasn't really up to date on economical theory, but I did wonder how things actually worked. It was all much more complicated than I'd imagined. It wasn't really a male adolescent 'go kill and loot' virt, not anymore, though those elements were still there.

I also learned that I'd been entirely too hasty in simply plunging in. It seemed that 'full' was a euphemism for 'adult'. In a virt, where there were few limits and no real repercussions, people showed their darkest side, and their best as well. Those who wanted to be heroes, and those who wanted to rape and pillage. With an emphasis on 'rape'. Much of the virt was all about sex, and there was an actual sexual economy of sorts. Even an arena that took bets on such things as slavery!

To say that I was upset, was to say very little. I was angry, afraid, confused, pacing through the mirror smooth corridor that spun back on itself, kicking the unyielding wall. If the Addies were telling me I that what I really needed was to have wild, orgiastic sex — well, it was hard, exceedingly difficult in fact, to argue with that. If only I weren't so utterly tongue-tied. But against my will, virt or no virt, was going a bit far for my taste. Vanilla, really. The exotic... frightened me.

A flashing warning, that I must make my choice of character, shook me out of my fugue, and I picked the priestess, without thinking. Green skin and hair was just too weird. As I perused the list of possible gods, many of them much weirder than green hair, I ponder my seeming conformity to 'human norm'. Why hadn't I picked one of the women, instead of an elf? I didn't know.

Recalling from their description that elves were supposedly skilled with bows, I picked the elven god of hunting and archery as my own. Staying as far away as possible from the flying blood and guts seemed like a good idea.

Working on fleshing out the rest of the details, I was thankful that many of the choices had already been made. Every choice affected at least a dozen things, and I had no real idea how things balanced. Fortunately, there was a guide and help options for the novice. It was specifically noted that I began much more advanced and powerful than the ordinary start for a character, as part of the introductory offer was showing you some of the more advanced skills and magical items. I couldn't help but smile suspiciously, and asked another question. Yes, by paying more, you could begin at a higher level. Each session lasted a maximum of three hours — you couldn't spend more than that in virt in a single day, legally — and you had the option of rebuilding or completely changing the character each session, at a small cost in power. That is to say, in points.

Reading about it and making choices was the simple part. Spending several sleepless days studying how to actually do it, was much, much harder. In an elven body, which admittedly felt very nice — light, graceful, fast and strong. I could actually do somersaults, and acrobatics a circus tumbler would envy. Watching a replay left me open mouthed in utter astonishment — was that me, making cartwheels and impossible twisting leaps, dodging blindingly fast dagger throws and rays of coloured light?

As for the sleepless part, it seemed that although there was a cycle of night and day, the players did not really need to rest. Your spell points and life points regenerated as time went by, and most players — or should that be characters? — quickly gained something that allowed them to see in the dark. Elves had excellent night vision.

I learned the very basics of how to hold and shoot a bow, how to use dagger, spear, sword, staff, a small axe, and something called a mace, a flanged orb of metal attached to a stick. You used it to club someone down. It was more than slightly odd for a non-violent person like me — I'd never so much as participated in a brawl, not once in my life. When I was ten, one of my older brothers pushed me, and I fell and cried. I remember it perfectly, and I recall that he was severely punished for doing it. That was the extent of my experience with violence. Now I was supposed to kill, just like that? Only knowing that it wasn't real, that no one really got hurt, allowed me to pass the training. It helped that the training aids they used — spindly, ugly little humanoid creatures called 'goblins' — didn't really bleed all that badly, that there were no shows of guts and viscera, or awful smells. It served to reinforce the 'not real' feeling, buoying my confidence. I could do it if I really had to, and I'll definitely have to. The stupid virt had too much violence and death in it for me to avoid it, especially as I wasn't too keen on being violated. Why hadn't the Addies picked a nice sci-fi space trader sim for timid little me?

The physical practice was the least of it. As a priestess, I had to acquire a passing familiarity with the stupid excuse for pagan religions the virt used, and with all types of magic. I also had to practice all of my spells, learn how to 'cast' them perfectly. I was playing a pretty powerful priestess, so I had access to a number of more effective spells that required special materials to cast successfully — mostly gemstones, incenses and rare herbs and flowers. As a priestess of the god of archery and hunting, I had a list of special spells that dealt with exactly those... domains, they were called, the domains over which a god held dominion. You could, and were actually supposed to, recognize what spell someone was casting by the words and gestures used. I did manage to memorize quite a few, since my memory was quite good, but there were so many, and so little time to learn, that I was swamped with details. My brain felt overloaded.

Then came my equipment. What I had to wear was rather scant, and didn't inspire much confidence as far as armor goes. Blueleaf mail, it was called, a very lovely minidress made entirely out of lacquered blue leaves, with sleeves reaching just above my elbows. It very nearly left my ass hanging out in the breeze, and the cleavage factor was significant. The tits, of course, were utterly perfect, if modest in size, and perfect for my size. I was jealous of me, which was stupid, so I tried not to think of them. My supposition, that the game was designed for the teenage male, was instantly reinforced. Especially when no underwear were provided. Bunch of perverts. The holy symbol of my god was a blue fletched silver arrow, which served as a pendant. I had a long silvery dagger, the blade etched with golden runes, a pair of boot knives, and a slender spear of pale brown wood, tipped with a wicked looking head of black metal. At least it was now obvious why they'd had me spending the most time practicing with dagger and spear. I was provided with lustrous grey boots, gloves and cloak that felt incredibly smooth and soft. The grey was the colour of water when a droplet strikes a puddle beneath hazy clouds, shimmering with every colour, the hues moving and changing as you watched. I fell instantly in love with them. So stylish! The boots were supposed to silence my movements, the cloak to hide me, and the gloves enhanced speed and grace. Next came a pair of filigree work bracers of the same silvery metal as the dagger, studded with moonstones, in a pattern which suggested an arrow. A protective device, the bracers were also supposed to improve my archery skills. Crystal lenses went over my eyes, allowing me to see magical auras, through ordinary magical invisibility, into shadows, and further and better. Very useful, for an archer. A ring of braided gold and silver was a magical device that would allow me to instantly transport myself a short distance away, a minor teleportation. A small belt pouch held spell components and functioned as a purse, holding much more than it should — an extradimensional space, the help told me, helpfully. The backpack, supremely comfortable, was likewise provided with extradimensional storage. I was warned that space was far from endless. A platinum and diamond earring curled around my pointed, lobeless ear, allowing me to speak and understand all languages, if not read them, and improving my hearing. Playing with it, I was dismayed to learn that the ears were an erogenous zone for an elf. Touching the tip of my ear was almost like playing with a nipple, a connection that ran straight down to my pussy. I reddened, and tried touching myself. It was intense! The feelings were much stronger than when I played at home, with just my fingers. Angrily, I took my fingers away, automatically looking around to see if someone saw me, which was silly, of course. Those bastards attracted customers by manipulating the pleasure centers of the brain. That wasn't legal, I was quite certain. How did they get away with it?