Alternia Comics

   “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” Varrow shouted at Em, ripping the Key's plug from her neck.
   “Varrow! Calm down, please!” Em pleaded, stumbling backward, treading uncertainly over piles of junk. He heard the crunch of a circuit board and was at once glad and sorry he was still wearing his boots. He kept his hands at arm's length, palms toward Varrow.
   “CALM DOWN?! YOU WANT ME TO CALM DOWN AFTER THAT STUNT YOU JUST PULLED!” She showed remarkable restraint in staying seated on the couch, despite every muscle of her body screaming at her to jump up and rip out his throat.
   “I can explain.” Em had backed up eight feet, his back pressing against the wall.
   “Alright. Explain.”
   Em had seen her that angry once, but he had never seen her as calm as she was now. He wasn't sure which made him more afraid. He swallowed hard and put his hands down. “The Key is a customized tandem netdive rig. Both users have to have some skill at diving and navigating cyberspace, but their relative skill levels are irrelevant.” He paused, waiting for some indication that this sounded familiar to her.
   “Go on.” The eerie calm continued to permeate her voice. Varrow folded her hands in her lap.
   “So, unlike a standard tandem rig, where the secondary would simply follow and watch the primary, the Key will actually merge the users' consciousnesses, a new digital entity. We called ourselves Vex”
   “Why?”
   “Why Vex? I dunno ... guess we just liked the sound of it” Em shrugged.
   “No. Why build it?”
   Em puzzled for a moment, staring into space above and behind Varrow, a look of confusion plastered on his face.
   “Why build it?” Varrow asked again, a little louder. “And why force me in to it?” She unfolded her hands and turned toward him.
   “D'you mean to say you've no memory of it?”
   Varrow looked at her lap again, her hands resting palm down on her thighs. Slowly she shook her head side to side, trying to remember.
   “You called it another of my harebrained and halfbaked schemes ...” Em had a wry grin on his face as he stepped slowly back toward the couch. “It was originally a way for a couple to be more intimate with each other than was possible in meatspace. After, ehm (clear throat)” Em cleared his throat, “initial testing, we found that the resultant being was more a gestalt than an amalgam. Instead of simply combining the two users minds, it amplified their unique strengths and specialties, creating something greater than the mere sum of its parts.”
   “Vex”
   “Right, yeah. Exactly. That first test was a bit shaky though ... Vex disassociated and I was unceremoniously dumped from cyberspace. You managed to stay logged in, with half an ear open to the physical world. You started working on designing the gateway while I fine tuned the Key, getting the resultant personality to stabilize.”
   “Why build the gateway though?”
   “You never did think my home security was good enough. Said Vurdalak was a hacker's treasure trove of information, and if we were going to keep the Key safeguarded, we'd need something a lot stronger.”
   “Why me though? Why use me like this now?”
   “Varrow,” Em said softly, resuming his perch on the arm of the couch, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean any harm. I thought you knew what would happen, after all, you built half of it. A month ago I tried using a simulation, reconstructed from a scan of your brain map. I couldn't hold Vex together for more than a few seconds. I tried diving with Xagafinelle, but we couldn't get past the Gate. And when we almost did, Baub stopped us. He's the second best hacker I know and I know the Gate better than anyone but you, so it seemed there was no other way than to ...”
   “It wasn't quite mental rape,” Em relaxed a bit as Varrow's voice took on its usual tone. “But it was goddamned close!” She looked up suddenly, startling Em in to falling backward off the couch. Varrow laughed through her anger.
   Em picked himself up and took an exaggerated bow. “If you like, we can teach Baub to let me through in the future, but either way Vex has to go through the Gate at least one more time. We can wait a bit if you need ... but the sooner we get the data, the sooner we can track down Sadhur and get paid. After that we can go our separate ways again.”
   Varrow nodded slowly. Em picked up the cord end of the Key and stepped toward her. She put up a hand and waved him away. He took the halo off and set it aside.
   “Would you like anything to drink?” he asked, heading toward the kitchen.
   “No, thank you.” Varrow leaned her head back and closed her eyes, logging back in to cyberspace. When she was here, she felt like a different person, some how detached from her flesh. In times like this, that detachment helped her clear her mind, setting her thoughts in order.
   Em nodded toward Varrow, recognizing her body language and knowing she'd be away for a bit. He continued to the kitchen and brewed a fresh pot of coffee.

   Varrow bounced around Em's network for a bit, drifting with the dataflow as she lost herself in her thoughts. “Why can't I remember everything he's saying?” She turned her mind's eye inward, searching her memories. She saw her childhood. Her twelfth birthday. She had asked for only one thing, and knew her parents had saved for months to buy it: her first cyberdeck. It looked like a glorified computer keyboard, four inches thick, a foot and a half wide and six inches deep with a dozen different ports on the back. A few ports were for outputting video to a monitor, most were just the various “standard” data jacks of the day: Ethernet, USB, IEEE 1394, even an RJ14. It had a battery pack on the right hand side, almost a four inch cube itself, but the deck also had a C14 inlet on the back so it could be plugged in to an external power source “For extended duration cyberspace experiences!” according to the box.
   She had nearly missed her birthday dinner later that day after jacking in for the first time. He mother said she took to it like a duck to water. Varrow didn't understand until she looked up the aphorism on one of her daily excursions. Her father made a deal with her: she could go online whenever she liked, as long as one of her parents were watching through the external video, and as long as she had all of her school work done. This proved to be an excellent motivator for the young student. Every afternoon after school she would do her course work, using the desktop computer to access cyberspace through the archaic hypertext transfer protocol. Her homework was almost always finished before dinner, allowing the girl to spend the hours between dinner and bedtime jacked in and surfing at her leisure.
   It wasn't long before she had learned to record and playback the external video, giving herself nearly free reign over her activities. When her father would glance up from his evening reading, he would see her avatar on the screen joyfully scanning through the library's index, or flying between two schools' public nodes. More often than not, Varrow was hacking through her school's ice, into her teacher's files to take a look at the week's lesson plan and homework assignments. She never copied the answer key or changed her grade though. Some honest bit of her, or perhaps her father's mere presence in the room, urging her to just read the the projected lesson plan and use it to get a head start on the week's work.

   Varrow's memories brought her forward half a dozen and one years. She had moved out of her parents' house, sharing an apartment with a friend while they went to college. Varrow continued to use the cyberdeck as a carrot on a stick to keep up with her coursework, with the exception that she used it to do her research as well. The temptations to simply change her grades, or take the answer key for the tests were greater now that no one was watching her. More and more often she found herself standing in the digital representation of her class room. The lesson plan was in the same place it always was, laying face open on the top of the desk, available for any student to read. She knew the answer key was inside a desk drawer. Often she stood before the desk, staring at and reaching toward the drawer. Once, she had opened the it, carefully, cautiously, wary of any lurking ice. The lock was easy to pick and Varrow wondered who among her classmates had done it before. She saw the answer key inside, and quickly closed the drawer, her heart racing.
   She asked her friends if any of them had ever done it. Most said they had only ever looked at the lesson plan and left. A few said they had tried to pick the lock and failed. Word quickly spread through the students that Varrow could get the answer key and she quickly found herself facing a decision: refuse the money the others were offering and keep her principles, or take the money and the answer key. She went back and forth on her answer for a week, running the scenario in her mind when she was thinking about the hack. It wouldn't be hard ... She'd gotten into the protected directory before with no repercussions. How would the school know the difference between looking in the directory and copying data out of it?
   Finally, on a darker impulse, she snuck into the electronic office one night and took the answer key. The file was mostly gibberish, waiting to be decrypted into sensible data. Varrow thought briefly that she would have a sizable sum of money coming to her, but she focused instead on the thrill of the hack. She had done the impossible and felt her spirits buoyed by the accomplishment. She started the decryption routines and went to bed for the night.
   In the morning, she was having second thoughts. What if everyone got a perfect score on the test? Would the administration suspect anything? She could change a few answers, but then everyone would have the same wrong answers ... She resolved to rewrite the answer key into eight distinct versions, or rather she wrote a small program that would rewrite the answer key. They all had at least 75% correct answers, but each had different wrong answers. She would distribute these files later that morning at school and in the afternoon, every student that had pitched in to pay Varrow had a passing grade on the test. More than a few others had passed on their own merits and if the administration suspected anything, Varrow never heard anything about it.
   
   She woke from her reverie for a moment and stared at Em's network's glowing structures. She unfocused her eyes and let her memories take her again. This time, she found herself staring at a door. The place had a sense of the Real to it and she knew this door actually existed in the real world, or it at least had existed three years ago. If she opened the door, she would find a short, pudgy man in an immaculate white suit with a scruffy beard that would once have been a deep red but was fading to a dignified gray. It was the door to Dix's studio, and the pudgy man would be Dixon Green. She pulled the invitation out of her pocket again and double checked the house number. As she reached for the doorbell, the door opened and Dixon stepped out to greet her.
   “You made it. Excellent, just excellent.”
   Varrow balked on first seeing the jovial little man, nearly six inches shorter than her own five foot frame. “I uh... I've got this invitation ...” she stuttered, brandishing the piece of paper at Dixon.
   “Of course you have. I sent it to you, and people generally get things when I send them.”
   “You're Dix? The famous master hacker that teaches by invitation only?”
   “Last I checked. Let's not stand out here all day though. Come in, come in.” He gestured inside the building, holding the door open for her. He followed her and threw four deadbolts and a turnkey lock on the door. He shooed her out of the foyer and into the living room with a gentle “Come along. We mustn't keep your classmate waiting.”
   Varrow tread lightly down the hall in mild confusion. “Classmate? Only the one other student?”
   “Oh yes, very selective. Not just anyone can be taught, and very few have the true knack as you do. This one,” Dix gestured toward the young man seated on the floor, legs crossed with a Hosaka deck in his lap, “Doesn't have the knack, but has an eagerness that can sometimes be enough.”
   Varrow took a closer look at her classmate. His eyes were closed, and his back was perfectly straight. The electrode halo looked like it was a bit tight on his head, but he either didn't notice or didn't care. He had a soft face, the kind that seems to say “I'm alright, you can trust me” without any effort. The effect was somewhat marred by the light scruff that might be a beard given more time. It was difficult to judge his height as he sat with his legs crossed, but Varrow guessed him to be between five feet nine inches and five feet eleven inches. His brown leather jacket hung loosely on his frame, draped over the white t-shirt and faded blue jeans. “He's kinda cute. What's his name?” she asked Dix.
   “Ed MacKenna. He's not very deep right now, so he's probably heard everything we've said. Isn't that right, Ed?”
   The young man nodded in reply, and managed to shoot a wry grin in Varrow's direction. “You sound pretty cute yourself.”
   “Ed, this is Varrow. Finish up there and we'll have a proper introduction.”
   “Yessir.”
   The memory suddently went black, as if a movie that had been playing had several frames replaced with an opaque filter.