The Virtual Possible

Things in my pocket on the fourth of January, while falling from a twenty eighth floor window:

1. Four dollars and fifty two cents.
2. Passport (Meerhautz Menzes, D.O.B 12/6/2008)
3. Three stray tic tacs, partially melted.
4. Two halves of a broken NNAC (neural network access chip), snapped by yours truly in a hapless attempt to deny the virtual possible.
5. Meerhautz Menzes' business card.
6. A coalesce of pocket-lint, which fuses to my fingertips with the consistency of candyfloss.

Yesterday in a fit of pique you arrogantly claimed all your nightmares were real. In the tumultuous depths of the neural network you'd seen phantasms, digital echoes of lives as tangible as your own. The recollections of strangers haunted you, lingering on long after you pulled the plug. Lying there in the darkness of our bed, you remembered the crowded beaches of Hawaii, Paris in the Spring, the dank heat of Africa and the snowy peaks of Tibet - all places you'd never been, never dreamt of until now. These dislocated memories had wormed their way uninvited beneath the shield of your firewall and insinuated themselves in the raw folds of your brain.

You said: -It isn't safe in there any more.

The network has a curious way of disrupting the human mind. The more intense your involvement is, the greater the impact. Most people don't notice it happening - your displaced memories are the exception which proves the rule. I'll be the first to admit it: the system isn't perfect. The network's gates are open to any fool who can lay their hands on a neural implant. You expect to experience minor mental discomfort. You expect to encounter the criminal element. You expect the inexplicable. Everything is a virtual possible. Once or twice a year some smart-arse hacker crashes the network completely, and if you're not careful they can take you down with it. Blackouts, comas. More than once I've bluescreened, gone screaming out of the net as it caved in upon itself, tidal waves of binary crashing the fragile architecture of its digital core.

Call it a job hazard. On insurance claim forms they refer to it as disconnective liability. In practical terms it means I take sick leave until a department technician shows up to tune my implant. That's what you get for messing with the virtual possible.

Virtual possible, VP. It's netslang, of course, a term coined by one of the many slippery psuedo-intellectuals who roam the network's corridors. Simply it means that in the network anything can and will occur. Even net detectives like myself can't tame its inherent chaos. Much as we'd like to believe otherwise, we aren't invulnerable. Strip away our shields and our matrixes and we're just like everyone else, thin-skinned net junkies teetering on the edge of an inevitable, fatal bluescreen.

Yesterday, you warned me.

-It isn't safe, you said.

-It goes both ways, Ron, you said.

You said: -They'll find you just as surely as you can find them.

Avatar, (n).
1. The incarnation of a deity.
2. An archetype.
3. A temporary manifestation of an entity.
4. A visual simulation representing a network user, which can be operated to perform physical movements found in the non-virtual. Typical avatars include models, celebrities, cartoons and mythical creatures.

Meerhautz Menzes - my adversary, my obsession, my despair. For five years he'd led me on a merry dance though the network. A slow neural drag in Western Europe, a cyber foxtrot through France; we waltzed through seven countries and sixty four states, and each time he left me breathlessly behind, the shadow of his avatar dissolving wraithlike into the real world.

I admit it - it was pure luck on my part that I ventured into the right sector that night. It's been a nostalgic habit of mine to keep tabs on the less vulnerable neural systems - namely, government caches. More than one overconfident hacker has foundered outside those mighty firewalls. What had alerted my attention that evening was a faint tremble along the network's fiber optic web, a fluctuation no more sinister than the dissipating ripples on a pond's surface. A staff misconnection, I assumed, but nevertheless it warranted a cursory inspection.

I keyed access. I dove in. I held my breath.

We crossed paths on a neural loop, a triple-layered system bypass four clicks from a government slush pile. Just the two of us: me and him, him and me. A halcyon moment, unreal and incredible. Our simulated gazes locked across the netspace void, guided missile style. He did not waver. I set my tracers on instinct. I chased him through bouncers and subshields without blinking, grounded him in an office skyscraper a block south of Sydney. The pink core of his implant glowed in my clutches like a single, perfect pearl.

I said, -It's over, Menzes.

He laughed and looked over his shoulder. Behind him databases cycloned: medical records, tax file numbers, job histories - humanity condensed, compressed in binary. In the network a firewall is an entity unto itself, a showery neon halo like the reflection of the sun on still water. From the inside it appeared as a glowing ring of some primitive arena. The silhouette of his avatar flickered, winked.

He joked, -That's not a virtual possible.

The pink implant spat curlicues of fluorescence into my palm. It glued to my fingertips and rode an electrical current shotgun up my spine. As I thrashed out hapless SOSs into a digital oblivion my peripheral vision framed the predictable haze of an oncoming bluescreen.

Power surge.

He held my circuiting. He ripped through my shields. He ejected me shrieking foetal helpless from the driver's seat and shot me silver-sparking into virtual stasis.

Systems down.

Plugs pulled.

Disconnective liability.

Blackout.

As I fell I remember thinking that his avatar looked identical to mine.

The criminal offenses of Meerhautz Alfred Menzes:

Net detective in charge of investigations: Ronald John Harvey.

-Walk long enough in another man's footsteps, Jack Hollway once said, -and you become like him.

These are words attributed to him by departmental sources; I never met the man myself. Amongst we netdetectives Jack's legend has gained him an informal celebrity status, his story one of fierce and all-consuming obssession.

For over a decade Jack Hollway hunted the hacker Damien Rand through the network. Jack began to dress like Damien, to walk like Damien, to talk like Damien; the hacker literally became his addiction. I've heard that common street detectives suffer a similar complaint. To catch a crook, virtual or non-virtual, it stands to reason that you must consistently stay one step ahead of him. To do that means you have to understand how he thinks. Unravel the criminal psyche! What's his method of attack? What's the profile of his victims? What are his hobbies? What's his favourite breakfast cereal? In the worst case scenarios the criminal wheedles his way into the detective's homelife, becomes a new member of the family. Their recent exploits are discussed over the dinner table. They are the subject of idle banter and speculation. They gain presence, like some omnipresent, perpetual ghost.

In Jack's case the ghost took over. He lost his wife, he lost his friends. After the breakdown, he lost his job.

Six days subsequent to Jack's dismissal from the department, a positive ID in Malaysia unearthed Damien Rand's body. A random homicide: Damien had inadvertently stepped into the crossfire of rival street gangs. Call it a real life example of the virtual possible. Needless to say, the irony wasn't lost on Jack. He shot himself in his apartment, left his landlady to clean up the mess.

When the department did the obligatory postmortem of Damien's network cache, they discovered the Jack Files. It was all there in the hacker's implant: bank transactions, candid photographs, family history, even the man's primary school reports. You said it yourself: -It goes both ways. The mania was mutual. And in some sick, twisted way it made perfect sense. In order to successfully evade the netdetective on his trail, Damien had thoroughly analysed the psychology of his antithesis.

Damien thinking like Jack thinking like Damien...ad infinitum.

Jack Hollway had Damien Rand. I had Meerhautz Menzes.

Transplantation, (n).
1. To uproot and replant.
2. To relocate.
3. To transfer, in the case of medical organs.
4. One of the wilder pipe-dreams associated with the virtual possible, a method whereby two network users literally swap physical bodies through intense neural implant interfacing.

I came out of it dripping fearsweat, my implant a hot white knife savaging the hub of my brain. Wildly I groped to regain my bearings. My straining fingertips encountered flesh so cool that for a minute I imagined I had accidentally brushed against a wax-work.

Beside me lay a sleeping woman whose face was not yours. The pale cord of her neck was ringed in hand-bruises with a span equal to my own. She did not breathe. My pulse rhumbaed. Her eyes were open. They stared dully at the ceiling. We spent a thousand years together. She watched the ceiling and I watched her, while the meat of my brain charred around its implant-kernel.

Loudspeaker static broke me from my vigil. A brusque, Australian voice spat: -Open up, police, and a siren strobed an earsplitting squeal. I experienced an overwhelming sense of apathy and moved from the dead woman's side to the window. I noticed blood beneath my fingers and bite marks on my wrists and felt simultaneously useless and used. My head was a funnel of red noise that bled into the rims of my eyes.

-Menzes, we know you're in there.

In the window I saw the freeze-frame of an improbable city, the white shark-fins of the opera house and the wide gray tongue of the harbor bridge nestling amidst the rocks. In the window I saw the pellucent outline of a face that was not my own and in my pockets I found objects which scared me in their unfamiliar familiarity. In the window I saw the virtual possible and when the metallic corners of the NNAC bit into my palm I clenched my fist involuntarily, felt it shatter. Two halves.

-Walk long enough in another man's footsteps, Jack Hollway once said, -and you become like him.

Menzes is Ron is Menzes is Ron is Menzes...ad infinitum.

No, not the virtual possible. This was the virtual probable, for I understood now that I had not encountered Menzes by chance. Meerhautz Menzes knew me as intimately as I knew him. He had killed the woman and called the police; he had duped me and framed me; he had predicted me from beginning. Transplanting my mind into his body was the final step in this hideous inversion of our roles. The hacker becomes the cop; the cop becomes the hunted.

Behind me the door burst open: hinge-scream and a dull, jarring thud that reverberated against the walls of my skull.

I turned around. I think I even smiled.

-Menzes is gone, I said.

I raised my hand on reflex. They shot me on reflex. On reflex, I stepped backwards.

The window broke.

Things on my mind on the fourth of January, while falling from a twenty eighth floor window:

1. Your face.
2. Your hair.
3. Your convictions, your fears, and your virtual phantasms.
4. The thought of you holding Menzes as me as Menzes as me...ad infinitum.

Lover, listen to your phantoms. You were right; it wasn't safe in there. You were right; it goes both ways. But what could I have done when there was no possible recourse left? Of me, only those scraps that have filtered into the network's labyrinth remain - one more disconsolate human echo in a graveyard of digital memories.

RJ Astruc is an Irish-Mauritian writer currently based in Australia. Her speculative fiction has been accepted by Andromeda Spaceways, Forbidden Speculation, Infinitas, Strange Horizons and Abyss and Apex, amongst others. She hates writing but possesses no other useful skills.