Strange Flesh (47 page)

With the chaos of fire, ash, and airborne earth, visibility shrinks to a few feet. Still, I can see several avs remain standing. All of us are on fire, our avs’ clothes and hair incinerated almost instantly. We’re treated to the abnormal sight of people watching themselves combust, saying things like “Kewl” and “WTF!?!”

Eventually my avatar freezes. I rotate the camera around him and see that poor Jacques has become a charcoal cinder, now rapidly eroding in the raging winds. Moments later, he’s completely gone, and all I can see is the fire and, through an occasional gap in the haze, the ruins of Billy’s chamber of horrors.

Quite a show. But what does it mean? Why all the wanton, albeit virtual, destruction?

And more destruction follows. NOD suddenly crashes, but not back to the desktop. Sitting there on a black screen is a lonely blinking cursor.
I try to restore Windows, but Billy seems to have formatted Blake’s hard drive as a Parthian shot. And that means he must have compromised his brother’s laptop some time ago. Which would be an easy way to monitor Blake’s activities. But why would Billy scuttle such a valuable asset? Perhaps, like he said, he really thinks he does “know everything.”

I say, “You’re going to need a new laptop.”

But Billy’s just getting started.

Blake’s office door opens to reveal Blythe. She looks over her shoulder and then back at us. “What’s going on, Blake? What did you do to him?” Her voice is low and freighted with tension.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about
that
.” Her arm shoots out toward the frosted-glass ambient display on Blake’s bookcase that indicates movement in IMP’s stock by changing colors. It’s turned a bloody crimson and has started pulsing ominously. “
That
is our stock collapsing!”

“What? Wait . . . Why do you think it’s my fault?”

“It’s Billy. He’s trying to dump his entire trust into the open market. I’ve called Ger. He’s going to have the NYSE suspend trading for the rest of the day.”

The red globe begins flashing more urgently. Blythe closes her eyes.

She says, “We’ll discuss it later. Right now, you need to call your bankers and get liquid. You and I are going to step in and absorb some of this or we will have panic selling come Monday.”

“Wait, Blythe, I can’t really—”

“You can, and you will. I don’t need to tell you what this is going to do to our deal with TelAmerica.”

“Now, let’s just calm down a second.”

Blythe makes an exasperated “please the court” gesture at his stock indicator. “Let me ask again, what did you—two—do?”

Blake falls into aphasia. “I . . . I—”

I’ve never seen Blake at a loss for words. He’s rattled. His brother is getting to him.

“I have to testify in front of Congress next month with this shit going on? I can’t work while I’m always worrying about one of you exploding
a bomb under me. I can’t live like this. Blake, please”—here her voice breaks—“is it never going to stop?”

Blake is up like a shot, taking her in his arms. I assume this is my cue to leave. On my way out, I see written on Blake’s face a plan to exchange every tear shed by his sister for a liter of Billy’s blood.

Blake stops me with a sharp, “James.”

“Yes?”

“I’d hate to think you’ve been subject to conflicting priorities recently.”

I squint at him, not sure what he means. Is he talking about the Dancers?

He adds, “Find my brother before the bell on Monday. Or we’ll need to find someone who can.”

B
illy still isn’t done.

I soon learn that his virtual firestorm was but a fitting prelude to the digital mayhem he’s unleashed.

Only a few minutes after I leave Blake’s office, an emergency email alert arrives saying that Billy’s hacked an IMP server. I have a couple of their tech people pull me a disk image. Live for only minutes before they shut it down, the box is filled with the stuff of IT personnel nightmares.

Billy had reconfigured the server as his own NOD node. I set it up on a clean machine and rez in Jacques to find a duplicate of Château de Silling after the meteor blitz. Only the blackened shell of the castle remains.

However, that leaves the dungeon intact.

And the dungeon has changed. Rebuilt as a prison for the avatars of Billy’s players, each of its cells contains the skin of someone who signed on to the game. Since his labyrinth now stretches hundreds of levels into the bowels of Silling’s mountain, I gather that nearly a quarter million people have at least dropped in to check out his creation.

I walk through the dank halls, taking in the vast array of avs he’s captured. There’s something wrong with these skins. Billy has removed all privacy protections on their users’ underlying profiles.

Even worse: all of the avs’ RL names and addresses appear convincing. I punch a few into the Experian credit bureau database, and they each come back current and accurate. As does phone number, marital status,
and occupation. Billy has tied real identities to all these avatars. Looks like
Savant
’s special NOD plug-ins contained some nasty surprises.

Nastier still are their inventories. They’re stuffed with way more text, image, and video files than one normally picks up in-world. An aggregation of dirty data that seems to represent anything untoward these people have ever seen online. Billy must have developed some kind of automated system to sift their hard drives for the “naughty bits.” Maybe he’s reversed one of the flesh-tone and bad-word filters kid-friendly internet companies use to exclude adult content.

Browsing through the videos, I find a mix of
Savant
creations, amateur porn (including some hidden-camera stuff), and genre porn: fetish, bestiality, torture, child. The volume and variety would astonish even the Divine Marquis. I dredge up note cards containing lewd chats with mistresses, employees, and even a babysitter. There’s evidence of infidelity, abuse, and some serious crimes.

To refute any claims of innocence, Billy provides links to forensic support, including full hard drive images. He instrumented his hapless victims’ computers with all sorts of system monitoring: browsing histories, screen capture, and keystroke logging. The first selection I check shows a Kansas City paramedic logging out of her wedding website. Then she punches in a password to Adultfriendfinder.com. Next I look for my own name, and I’m relieved to see that Red Rook’s custom security suite has prevented Billy from completely defiling my system. But many, many others haven’t been so fortunate.

Ms. Charlene Sweatmon, of Champagne-Urbana, IL, mother of three, created a series of lush videos of
120 Days
vignettes, including the notorious “sticky toilet seat” interlude. Dave Loeffler’s Little League team might like to view his NOD wedding video in which he marries a ten-year-old boy. Glenn Ricardo of Tempe, AZ, is a middle school English teacher who likes commanding (in very colorful language) amputees to coat themselves with tapioca pudding. Ernie Lemuel seems to have a regrettably close relationship with his Labradoodle. Just by dipping my toe in this torrent of twisted video, I can tell that many of the worst offenders are the Pyrexian Innoculytes.

Trusting that I have a pretty good sense of Billy’s dramatic instincts at this point, I pilot my av to the bottom of the dungeon.

True to form, he’s tricked out the lowest level as a sort of antechamber
to hell, complete with stalactites dripping blood and a fiery lake. In the middle is an island on which two avatars are seated in gilded skull thrones. The Duc de Blangis, the leader of Sade’s Friends from
120 Days,
is represented by Dr_B_Longey, a handsome re-creation of Robert Randall at his predatory peak. Next to him is Fedor_Sett standing in for Blake.

Dr_B_Longey has a single video file in his inventory. Billy has spliced together a concise summary of his father’s dubious business deals along with an account of his many crimes against his family. Among others, there’s the clip of Billy’s mother displaying the dire effects of their bedroom activity. A kitchen argument that degenerates into his beating her with a spatula and then coming after the cameraman. A particularly harrowing episode of his stuffing Billy’s face into a toilet.

Blake’s profile contains his personal information (for “occupation,” Billy cheekily entered “Malefactor of Great Wealth”) but no media. He has a single note card, which reads:

One day his plagues will overtake him:

death, mourning, and famine.

He will be consumed by fire,

for mighty is the one who judges him.

That turns out to be Revelation 18:8 with the gender of the pronouns changed. The original passage refers to the Whore of Babylon, a typically subtle dig at Blake. His use of “one day” implies that, though he seems intent on judging his brother for his crimes, Billy has started the trial by granting him a continuance.

Why would he do that? Is it simple showmanship, building suspense for his audience? Or maybe he believes Blake is liable to commit even greater villainy than his father, and Billy simply wants to wait until all the evidence is in.

My friend Eeyore sees the biblical dimensions of Billy’s leak as well. He texts me:

Pornaggedon draws nigh.

I call him to see what he’s learned.

“You think a lot of innocent perverts are going to be spraying their morning coffee all over their computer screens?”

“James, I’ve just determined that our congressman collects crush videos. Women in high heels mashing insects mostly, which is a relief. The attorney general of Delaware has footage with, ah, various mammals.”

“How did you rez in?”

“No, James. Not NOD. I’m using the web database our target has helpfully provided. A nice Flash interface for the casual browser.”

I pull up the link he sends me and can’t resist trying a few searches to get my head around it. After sorting by occupation, I’m not too surprised to see several state reps, a judge, seven clergy, two semifamous actors, and a child welfare specialist among those indulging some peculiar tastes. Though I’m sure these people
will be
surprised to have their private delights so publicly exposed.

Eeyore says, “He’s even got pictures of most people. And linked their addresses to Google Maps.”

“I’m glad I finally have some icebreakers for when I see the neighborhood celebrities in the deli.”

“If you can fight through the camera scrum.”

I check the magnitude of the disclosure. Billy has just shy of a million people pinned to his digital Styrofoam. Like a collection of exotic insects he neglected to suffocate before display, their legs still twitching. That’s a far bigger group than just his
Savant
players, and there’s something else strange about the data.

“Eeyore, how can this database be
growing
?”

“We don’t know yet. Probably some kind of worm. Maybe he’s got black hats on the payroll. We have the trawl nets out.”

“Money is no object.”

“That’s true more and more these days.”

I sit, remembering the terror I felt the first time I was too reckless online and found my laptop at the mercy of a Czech cracker co-op. When you get infected, you worry first about your bank passwords, then about your files, and finally you deal with the notion that your secrets have been exposed to prying eyes. But most crackers just want your bandwidth and
couldn’t care less that you spend too much time at MILFmonitor.com. Billy’s worm is different, however. Here, exposure is the sole purpose. If his
Hell Is Other People
experiment sought to explore fear, then this turn in
Savant
is clearly meant to explore
shame
.

Anonymity is the lifeblood of the frenzy of raunchiness that followed in the wake of the internet. I can’t think of a better way to kill a sex-related business than to start revealing personal details about its clients. What chaos might be created for Blake if his investment in NOD blows up from being implicated in a privacy scandal? He mentioned his board shitting Yorkshire terriers over material losses from his VR project. If Billy’s successful here, I think we’ll see them trying to pass a mastodon.