February 11, 2004

Thomas closed his eyes and popped off his visor, then kept his eyes closed as he stripped off the rest of his VR gear. He opened his eyes slowly, to adjust to the harsh flourescent light of his room.

He sighed and tossed his two hundred-pound frame onto the frayed sheets of the metal bed that was shoved up against one wall of this fifteen-by-fifteen foot room. Three of the four walls were papered with posters for various singing idols—some of them real, some CG—in various stages of dress. He liked the CG idols for their sheer kitsch. The fourth wall was plain white. Stacks of magazines and papers created a miniature cityscape on the floor, with one wide boulevard leading from the front door to the bathroom, and a large space cleared in the corner where his VR gear was now laying. He sighed again, deeper and with more force this time, and stared up at the square of flourescent light beaming down from slightly off the center of the ceiling.

This was bad. It was so bad, it had never happened to him before. Then again, he had always been careful before. Nothing illegal. Well, nothing against which there was a specific law. He may’ve taken a few liberties with his access to peek around a few times, but never anything like this. Never anything that might put him in jail.

He swore to himself that this was definitely not worth ten thousand dollars.

A blue light began to pulse insistently on the two-foot cylindrical compuer that was standing at attention near the middle of the room. He frowned at it for a moment, as if blaming it for his recent troubles, then heaved himself out of bed and brushed a hand over the top of the cylinder. Infinitesimal beams of light glittered onto the white wall, creating a small window near the bottom, which read:

Pending Instant Message from (Unknown)