AFK, Indefinitely

By Huckleberry Hax

"This was it. This was what I'd wanted all those years. I'd given up all hope and now it was actually happening. It was actually happening. How many times had I dreamed of having her in my arms like this, if only for one more time. And here she was. Right now."

Step Stransky is dead. And everyone knows now it was murder. And everyone knows now it was Definitely Thursday who murdered him. Can Thursday stay ahead of the law long enough to complete one last mission in the metaverse?

'AFK, Indefinitely' is the latest entry by Huckleberry Hax to the 'AFK' series. See also 'AFK' and 'AFK, Again'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Huckleberry Hax
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310363153

Huckleberry Hax

Huckleberry Hax writes novels set in and around virtual worlds. His best-known titles are the books of the AFK series set in Second Life®.A resident of Second Life since 2007, Huck also writes regularly on his blog about the metaverse and was a columnist for the acclaimed AVENUE magazine for over two years. His book, Second Life is a place we visit, collects together 42 of these articles.Huck is also an experienced voice performer in SL and has read aloud from his and other titles at a wide range of venues, including Milkwood, The Blue Angel, Bookstacks, Cookie, Nordan Art and Basilique.Huck's other interests include poetry (he has published a volume of his own poems called Old friend, learn to look behind you in the coffee queue and co-edited issue one of the poetry journal, 'Blue Angel Landing'), photography and machinima.

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AFK, INDEFINITELY

By Huckleberry Hax

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Huckleberry Hax

Huckleberry Hax is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover image by Huckleberry Hax; typography design by Canary Beck

The terms 'Second Life,' and 'Linden' are copyright © Linden Research Inc.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Harri

ON 9 DECEMBER 2013 – THE SAME day that Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Yahoo clubbed together to form the Reform Government Surveillance alliance – The Guardian newspaper ran a story featuring another of Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. Written in 2008 and titled, Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, this one outlined terrorist potential for Games and Virtual Environments (GVEs), and made the claim that ‘terrorist target selectors’ had been found associated with Second Life and other GVEs.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation of all was that the FBI and CIA have HUMINT [human intelligence] operations in Second Life and other GVEs. According to the Guardian article, Second Life continued to occupy the intelligence agencies' thoughts throughout 2009.

There are spies in Second Life.

Or, at least, there were.

www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life

RUN

Chapter 1

Got you, said Inch Sideways, as she left.

In a way, you could say that it was Inch who turned me into a murderer in the first place. I mean, it’s not like I’d even contemplated killing anyone before I met her, aside from the occasional (and entirely understandable) desire to slaughter in cold blood the odd politician here and there. And it’s hardly the case that, having done the deed once, I would go on to murder again. I like to think that I’m no more likely to kill a second person than anyone I pass on the street is likely to kill their first.

So I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her after a single night. Can I be blamed for that? Last time I checked, falling in love wasn’t exactly a cognitive decision-making process. When someone like Inch comes along – someone who upturns the table and everything on it – you either recoil from the emotional shock and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction or your curiosity gets the better of you and you make the fatal error of pausing to look more closely for a moment; next thing you know, your eyes are doing that swirly, hypnotised thing and it feels like they’re being pulled out of your soul. What I’m saying is it’s an involuntary reaction. Some part of one person snaps into place with some part of the other and, from that point on, it’s not about whether you’re in love with them, it’s entirely about what you’re going to do about the fact that you are.

Can I be blamed any more than a bee can be blamed for its attraction to flowers that I saw that night in Inch Sideways everything I wanted and everything I’d always imagined had to exist somewhere in a single human being? There she was, my very own Higgs-Boson, realised in the prims and pixels of Second Life®. Finding that your hypothetical ideal somebody really does exist is more than a moment of happiness, more even than a moment of love: it is, quite simply, the moment of ratification, the sigh of relief that you don’t have to discard the way you have personally constructed happiness all these years, that the wait was worth it, that you were right to think all those well-meaning nudgers towards John from IT or Mary from finance could go fuck themselves.

A single night. Forget me, she said at the end of it, and you go straight to hell, ok? There was no possible way I could ever have forgotten Inch Sideways. It was almost a year before I saw or heard anything from her again, and I pretty much spent all of that time trying somehow or another to cope with what she’d awoken in me. I tried everything I could think of, including breaking the heart of a beautiful person along the way in the futile hope that I might transpose my love for Inch onto her, but Inch had somehow hard-wired herself into me and all I could ultimately do was get used to how it felt to be alive with a little bit missing.

Then, out of the blue, she appeared again, tapping me on the virtual shoulder at some Egyptian-themed club and asking me for a dance. It was like the restoration of air to my lungs. I still remember how deliriously happy I felt that evening, even when I turned down that dance to go to work in RL. She was back and she had sought me out, and that tiny little piece of happenstance information danced in my head all night and meant more to me than any other fact I had possession of.

I didn’t know at that point why it was she’d spent fifty weeks out of SL. To be honest, I didn’t really care. But that night, whilst I served pizzas with an inanely cheerful grin to customers I’d ordinarily have considered scowling at a wasted facial effort, she talked about her year to my SL business partner, Step Stransky, the decision-making half of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency. She told him about the death of her husband and little boy on the day following my encounter with her, and Step, supposedly because he’d suffered his own personal loss a few years earlier, knew exactly how to listen to her. The next day, I logged on to discover that the two of them had become partnered in the intervening twelve hours, and that was the moment when my world collapsed around me.

Did Inch turn me into a murderer? No sane person would ever consider unrequited love a justification for killing someone; of course they wouldn’t. But even now it staggers me that she didn’t think for one moment that partnering Stransky within hours of meeting him might have some sort of emotional impact on me. I’m not saying she should or could have guessed that I was in love with her – if the situation had been reversed, I wouldn’t have supposed that myself for a second (frankly, I’d have laughed at the very idea); but come on: the last time we’d met, we’d fucked; didn’t that earn me even the littlest of pauses? Was I really so far out of her mind that it never even occurred to her that jumping into the arms of my so-called best friend was lacking just a little in tact?

Of course I was. The night Inch Sideways met Step Stransky was her first night back in the metaverse; her recollection of the previous one was likely to be less anything to do with me and more that it was the very last time her man and her baby had been alive and safe and nearby. But I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, it was months before she finally told me what had happened to her during that absence.

Even so, I still have to ask myself what it was about Step’s listening skills that was so unbelievably amazing that she submitted to him so completely by the end of a single night. I have to keep on reminding myself that, at the start of the evening, he was a total stranger to her. And I have to ask myself what it was about my own presentation that – clearly – put me somehow in a whole league below him. I’d be the first to admit that the rather amateur edge to my role playing skills was on full display during my one intimate night with Inch, but has anyone ever judged someone’s ability to listen and console based solely on their ability to communicate in fictional paragraphs – and an ability previously experienced nearly a year ago at that? Did I really come across that badly that it was inconceivable she could have shared her pain with me? And if I did, why did she bother with that tap on the shoulder in the club that night when she could have just turned around and left? Why speak to me at all if I’d left such a hopeless impression?

It never occurred to me at the time to be angry at Inch for any of this. Actually, that’s not true – all of these points occurred to me before, but it was abstract information then, like the knowledge that I’m moving all the time at over sixty thousand miles per hour due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. I knew these things, but they affected me no more than I become dizzy from the Earth’s rotation: I just didn’t feel them.

But I feel them now.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes…

*

Got you, said Inch Sideways, as she left.

And just before this, so that I knew exactly who she was, she had used our secret passphrase. It was something we’d agreed between the three of us, several years previously. Me and Inch and Step.

Step Stransky: We should have a code.

Inch Sideways: A code?

Step Stransky: A code.

Definitely Thursday: What sort of a code?

Step Stransky: An identifier code. Something we can use to identify ourselves by.

Inch Sideways: To each other?

Step Stransky: Exactly.

Definitely Thursday: Are we talking SL or RL here?

Step Stransky: Both.

Inch Sideways: Both?

Step Stransky: Why not?

Inch Sideways: Are there plans to meet up in real life that I don't know about here?

Definitely Thursday was about to ask the same thing.

Step Stransky: Why, you want to?

Inch Sideways: Do you?

Step Stransky: I asked first.

Definitely Thursday: Haven't we had this conversation before?

Definitely Thursday: Several times?

Step Stransky glares at Thursday and puts his finger across his lips.

Inch Sideways: Funny like being smashed in the face.

Step Stransky: What I was thinking is...

Step Stransky: We all use alts, right?

Definitely Thursday: No.

Inch Sideways: No.

Step Stransky: Exactly. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a code phrase we could use to each other when we thought we'd 'spotted' one.

Inch Sideways: Eh?

Definitely Thursday: Oh I see what you're on about.

Inch Sideways: You do?

Step Stransky: Well it works like this: say I'm out and about and I see this fabulous young blonde admonishing someone for the use of the acronym 'lol'...

Inch had a thing about the acronym ‘lol’ (this was in the days when lol was still an acronym and not a word in the Oxford English Dictionary). One of her signature phrases was, lol is not allowed.

Inch Sideways: Oh for crying out loud...

Inch Sideways: I can't believe I'm the only one with this issue

Definitely Thursday: It is so wrong...

Definitely Thursday: ...people laughing out loud like that.

Inch Sideways: That's just it, though – are they? Are they actually laughing out loud in front of their monitor? Are they actually filling their rooms with laughter?

Inch Sideways thinks not.

Step Stransky: May I continue?

Inch Sideways: Is this actually going to be interesting?

Step Stransky: Think of it as a game, if you will.

Step Stransky: You walk past the avatar you think is an alt...

Step Stransky: ...and as you pass you utter the code phrase in chat.

Step Stransky: If you're right you get a point!

Inch Sideways: That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

Inch Sideways: For the principle reason...

Inch Sideways: ...that if I didn't want you know that such-and-such an avatar was me in the first place...

Inch Sideways: ...then code phrase or no code phrase I would still ignore you.

Definitely Thursday nods.

Step Stransky hadn't thought of that.

Inch Sideways: Wow. The great detective.

Step Stransky: Still think it would be good though...

Step Stransky: Then we could... use it to identify ourselves!

Definitely Thursday: Isn't that what you said in the first place?

Inch Sideways: So I'm in an alt – unrecognisable to you – and you, for some reason, come up to me and identify yourself using the code phrase?

Step Stransky: Exactly!

Inch Sideways: And I haven't recognised you already because...?

Step Stransky: Right, right. Yes, there is that too.

Step Stransky: Aha! But what if *I* was in alt form *too*?!

Step Stransky: Eh?

Step Stransky: Eh?

Inch Sideways: Do you think we should have a secret code, Thursday?

Definitely Thursday: Yes. Yes I do.

Inch Sideways: For what purpose?

Definitely Thursday: Because it would be well cool.

Inch Sideways laughs.

Inch Sideways: Best argument I heard so far.

Step Stransky sniffs.

Definitely Thursday: Where you would *actually* use it…

Definitely Thursday: …would be if you wanted to identify yourself as an alt…

Definitely Thursday: …and prove it.

Inch Sideways: Right. I think I see.

Inch Sideways: I meet this guy and he says to me in IM that he’s actually an alt for Thursday…

Inch Sideways: …and I say to him, How do I know you’re not Stransky or some other stalker?…

Inch Sideways: …and he uses the code phrase to identify himself. Is that it?

Definitely Thursday: Exactly.

Step Stransky: Well of course, that’s what I meant.

Step Stransky: Obviously.

Inch Sideways: Obviously, darling.

Inch Sideways pats Stransky’s hand.

Definitely Thursday: We should make a phrase out of our names.

Step Stransky: How about this: ‘Thursday is a sideways step’.

Inch Sideways: Oh I like it.

Definitely Thursday: Not bad.

Definitely Thursday: But.

Definitely Thursday: We also need an ‘under duress’ variant.

Definitely Thursday: A code we give to villains who torture us for the code…

Definitely Thursday: …so that they can pass themselves off as one of us…

Definitely Thursday: …only when they use it we know they’re really an imposter.

Definitely Thursday: Naturally, we play along in order to skilfully entrap them.

Step Stransky nods in agreement.

Step Stransky: Good thinking.

Inch Sideways: Oh, it’s so thrilling to see professional minds at work.

Definitely Thursday: I propose ‘Thursday is *Definitely* a Sideways Step’ as the authentic code.

Definitely Thursday: And ‘Thursday is a Sideways Step’ as the under duress code.

Inch Sideways: That’s not fair!

Inch Sideways: Why should your name feature twice?!

Step Stransky: Because, my dearest, that very indignation of yours…

Step Stransky: …will ensure you remember which is which.

Definitely Thursday: Yes, exactly.

Definitely Thursday: That is totally the correct reason.

Definitely Thursday coughs.

Inch Sideways sighs.

Inch Sideways: You know…

Inch Sideways: ‘Step Sideways an Inch’ works much better.

Definitely Thursday: Oh great.

Definitely Thursday: Now I’m getting ejected from the passphrase?

Inch Sideways: Nothing personal, you understand.

Inch Sideways: Think how your indignation will help you to remember it.

Step Stransky: We could always take a vote on it…

Definitely Thursday: Yes, of course…

Definitely Thursday: Yet another reminder of my minority status.

Definitely Thursday: In any case…

Definitely Thursday: It makes no sense…

Definitely Thursday: How can one take a step of only an inch?

Inch Sideways: And ‘Thursday is a Sideways Step’ is logical?

Definitely Thursday: I think you mean, ‘Thursday is *Definitely* a Sideways Step’.

Inch Sideways: Whatever.

Definitely Thursday sighs.

Definitely Thursday: I’m just the cameo role in the Inch Sideways and Step Stransky Show.

Inch Sideways: That’s right – you’re the whacky one.

Step Stransky: The guy with odd habits for extra laughs?

Inch Sideways: And some sort of clueless catchphrase.

Inch Sideways: Something uttered in ambiguous, comedic moments.

Inch Sideways: Like Step’s changing a light bulb and I’m steadying the stepladder, then the stepladder wobbles and falls over and I’m holding his legs with my face buried in his crotch.

Inch Sideways: And then Thursday enters the room with some sort of detective problem he needs to talk about, only he stops mid-sentence when he sees us like that and says…

Inch Sideways: …’Is there something I should know about’?

Definitely Thursday: That’s it? That’s my catchphrase?

Definitely Thursday: Not even something *slightly* clever, like, ‘There’s DEFINITELY something going on around here!’

Step Stransky: Haha. I see what you did there.

Inch Sideways: Pffft

Inch Sideways: With enough canned laughter, you can make anything a catchphrase.

Definitely Thursday: So, basically, we’re a sitcom now.

Step Stransky: A sitcom from the 1980s, by the sound of things.

Inch Sideways: Nothing wrong with sitcoms.

Definitely Thursday: Is the on-going joke that I have no idea the two of you are together?

Definitely Thursday: Me being a detective and all.

Inch Sideways: Very good.

Inch Sideways: See, now you’re thinking like a writer.

Definitely Thursday: How about we throw in an extra layer of irony for the viewers when the ratings start to flag and make it so that not only has Thursday actually known all along that Sideways and Stransky are together, but that he’s secretly in love with Sideways himself?

Definitely Thursday: In other words, it’s Stransky and Sideways that are really clueless, not Thursday.

Step Stransky: Interesting twist.

Inch Sideways: I guess it gives the series a way forward if you get too cocky with your contract re-negotiations, Stransky.

Step Stransky: Wait, you’re writing me out of the show?

Definitely Thursday: Now who wishes he’d stuck with the original passphrase?

Step Stransky: Come to think of it…

Inch Sideways looks at Stransky sternly.

Step Stransky: Well, it *would* be more fair if it had all our names in it.

Definitely Thursday: Absolutely.

Definitely Thursday definitely doesn’t look smug.

Inch Sideways sighs.

Inch Sideways: Once again, the superior female idea loses