Dead Mice Terror

By Daved Muttart

What happens when you tell the cops that you've stumbled on a terror plot, a terror plot which will result in thousands upon thousands of deaths?

 

Nothing, that's what.

 

They don't believe you.  They demand proof.  They demand that you go back inside where the plot is being planned, where the mice are being killed, where the weapon is being readied to use against humans.  That is where the proof is.  That's where I might be seen, chased, killed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daved Muttart
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393101741

Book preview

Dead Mice Terror

Daved Muttart

Published by Daved Muttart, 2020.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dead Mice Terror © Daved Muttart 2020

Dead Mice Terror © Daved Muttart 2020

It was three days since I’d stumbled across terrorists torturing mice to death. Of course I had gone straight to the cops. But they showed no interest in the painful demise of fourteen lab mice. I had no choice but to go back in. It might be mice today, but it would be humans tomorrow.

‘In’ was Zyklon’s Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG for short. At the moment I re-entered, there were one million, three thousand, and thirty five players logged into a variety of virtual reality simulations including three historical battles, two futuristic battles, a continent-wide car rally, and a debate on the merits of globalism.

But the MMORPG was only an entry point. My destination was Zyklon’s latest innovation—its private game spaces. Here, for a fee of course, players could fashion their own virtual realities. These custom sims were the latest thing, available online only since the beginning of 2030. Zyklon sold access with promises of infinite customizability. Naturally it also promised complete privacy.

At first the private VR spaces had been used primarily for deviant and forbidden activities:  sex, first and foremost; but also fishing out of season; and illegal hunting—elephants, rhinos and lions. But now some game spaces were just glorified coffee klatches. Are AA meetings really this boring?

Last year’s VR innovations now allowed corporations to use the private spaces to run virtual labs. Experiments ranging from microscopic biology, to software testing, to society-wide scenarios could be run with total secrecy in the virtual spaces. Industrial espionage being what it was, hackers had tried to break into Zyklon’s private spaces. But until me, no hacker had actually succeeded.

Three days ago, I had cut classes at the special-ed high school to which the public education system had shunted me. At work, I’d put the finishing touches on the cutting-edge immersive suit I had been working on and smuggled it back to my apartment. Smuggling the suit out wasn’t difficult. My employer, name concealed to protect the guilty, was ostensibly contracted by Zyklon to test its security protocols. But if my boss could sell backdoors into Zyklon’s private spaces for extra cash, so much the better. So my employer encouraged rather than discouraged my extracurricular activities.

Zyklon would definitely fry my ass if they found out what I had done. And given what it charged for the private game spaces, it wouldn’t hesitate. Worse, most private gamers would likely make unpleasant enemies if they ever got wind of my voyeurism. My failure to tell the cops just how I had managed to discover the terrorist plot may have had something to do with their scepticism.

When it started, virtual reality gear had let the user experience sight and sound via boxy VR headsets. Then came a sense of touch. Around 2022, taste and smell were added