Virtually Dead

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Doobie couldn’t concentrate. She hadn’t heard from Chas in nearly an hour. At the urging of her boss at Sinful Seductions, and under the threat of dismissal if she refused, Doobie had agreed to entertain a customer in the privacy of her own home. Had she had the least idea of what else to do, she would have told her boss where to stick her job, and what she could do with her precious customer.

But as it was, she had reluctantly agreed, and lay now in the missionary position beneath a humping, grunting AV called Axel Corvale, who fancied himself as one of SL’s great lovers. She had muted him, in order not to be distracted by his muttered sexual inanities, and had her head turned to one side, looking from the window out over the lagoon.

She thought about Chas and how she had lain with him in this very bed only a few hours earlier. Only then it had been different. He had awakened feelings in her that had been long dormant, and the little seed of regret he had sown in her during their unfulfilled lovemaking had grown to a terrible ache. An ache she knew she could never satisfy. A relationship she knew she could never realise.

She opened her Friends List to send him another IM and saw with a shock that stung her, that he was no longer on the list. There had to be some mistake. She closed the box and opened it again. Scrolled down the list and back again. He was gone.

In a panic she opened her Search window and tapped in his name. Not Found was the response. Chas Chesnokov no longer existed in Second Life. She closed her eyes and knew with a terrible certainty what had happened. Which meant that Michael Kapinsky was now in grave RL danger. And she was trapped in this virtual world without any way of helping him. She thought about logging off and calling the police. But what could she tell them? It was an impossible story. And she had no idea where he might be, or who the killer was. An AV called Dark Daley. But beyond his SL name, she knew nothing about him.

She put the name into the Search Engine and brought up his Profile. It was blank, apart from the date he had been Born. Just four weeks ago. Which meant, in all probability, he was the second or third AV of someone else. Her mind was racing, and she forced herself to slow it down. To think her way through the problem as she would a game of chess.

What other information did she have?

She remembered the photographs Chas had taken at the Maximillian Thrust crime scene, at the house where she had discovered his body. She went into her Texture folder and pulled the pictures up on screen one by one. They brought back to her a vivid recollection of the shambles inside the house. Floors, ceilings, walls buckled and canted at odd angles. The detritus of a panicked battle that had ended in Thrust’s murder. She looked at the body, wedged between two sections of dislodged floor, the blood pooling beneath it, and had a sudden thought.

The doors had been locked and there had been no furniture in the house with poseballs to latch on to. So how had the killer got in? She remembered very clearly, how she herself had got in and out, by shifting her POV to the inside and the outside, rezzing poseballs to latch on to. The oldest griefers’ trick in SL. So the killer must have had to rez a poseball inside the house in order to get in. And in all the ensuing confusion and disruption, wasn’t it just possible that the killer had lost sight of it, and might have forgotten to take it back again?

Doobie scrutinised every picture. There was no sign of a poseball, and the hope that had flared briefly died again, like a match that never quite caught. But there was only one way to be certain. And that was to go and look for herself.

She opened up her Landmark folder and found the LM she had taken inside Thrust’s house. She double-clicked it and teleported out of her own home in a scattering of fairy dust, leaving her grunting client humping fresh air.

It took him a moment to realised she was gone, and even then he was unable to assimilate it. The hooker had run out on the virtual world’s greatest lover.

Axel Corvale: Huh?!!

Doobie rezzed inside Maximillian Thrust’s Asian home, sunlight streaming across his tropical island paradise outside to slant in through the window and cast deep shadows amongst the chaos. Thrust was still there, where they had found him. Nothing had changed, and Doobie began a meticulous search of every hidden corner and crevice, switching POV when she could to look beneath sections of upturned floor. Nothing. It was still possible, she thought, that it was there somewhere, and that she just wasn’t finding it. If Thrust had possessed terraforming rights for the island, then the very sand beneath the house could have been churned and deformed, hiding forever any poseball that might be down there.

But then, like that moment of revelation during a game of chess, when you see the route to checkmate with unparalleled clarity, she had an epiphany. The Land Window!

She clicked on the name of the land, written in blue across the top of the screen, and opened up the Land Window. Then she clicked on the Objects tab. The information that filled the window told her how many prims the land would support. There were 1265 primitives, with 681 still available. Then the crucial piece of information. Primitives Owned by Parcel Owner: 582. Doobie did the math. There were two prims unaccounted for.

At the foot of the Land Window was an option to refresh the list of object owners. Doobie clicked on it, and two names appeared. The first was Maximillian Thrust, who was the owner of objects accounting for 582 prims. The second was the owner of an object worth 2 prims. The missing poseball, Doobie was virtually sure. And her eyes opened wide in confusion and disbelief as she took on board the name, and knew now with an absolute certainty who the killer really was.