Another Life by Peter Anghelides Page A

against the base of the Asteroids arcade game, the latest gun victim stared sightlessly at the Hub’s high ceiling. It was Kvasir the Viking. One way or another, at someone else’s hand or his own, that dumb Scandinavian was always going to wind up dead.
    Owen kicked the dead man’s fur-clad leg. ‘Get up, Kvasir,’ he told him. ‘You’re not as smart as they told me you were. Try again with your next life. I bet you can’t lose four times in a row.’
    The corpse blinked twice, rolled over and returned to the table.
    After another couple of games, the novelty of combining elements of the Second Reality game with the physical contents of the Hub started to pall for Owen. For the first hour, it had amused him to run the 3-D projectors in the Hub’s games area, but he soon found it distracting to navigate around the solid real-life objects, and a lot duller than exploring the unlimited, uninhibited worlds created by other people inside Second Reality . At one stage, he checked his watch to see that it was already approaching 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. After that, he put the helmet-mounted display back on his head and immersed himself once more in the startling clarity of the images on the stereoscopic screens.
    He was keen to meet new characters, in the hope that they were also new people in the real world. You could never tell, because one person might have several avatars in the game. Penny Pasteur had already proved a disappointment. Remembering Toshiko’s words earlier, he’d gone to the Wumpaam district where a Mage called Candlesmith had sold him a pair of sunglasses that showed you what the person’s fleshspace name was. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t work on Candlesmith, but when Owen used them on Penny Pasteur it revealed her in real life to be Donald McGurk Jr., logged in to the game from Minneapolis. And while Donald wasn’t the hairy-arsed fifty-year-old that Toshiko had speculated about, when confronted with his true identity he confessed that he was a thirty-two-year-old Star Trek fan who secretly wanted to be Lieutenant Uhura.
    Owen abandoned ‘Penny’ back at the Lunatic Fringe, making good use of an unfortunate accident when she had fallen into a huge pile of rotting fruit that had mysteriously appeared in the street outside the barber-shop. Within seconds, Owen had vanished around the corner and lost himself amid the glittering skyscrapers of the uptown Millennium Capitol, heedless to the wails from Penny and the screeches of the pteranodons that had swooped down from nowhere to peck at her where she lay in the street like a tempting hors d’oeuvre.
    More promising was Egg Magnet. In his guise as Glendower Broadsword, Owen picked him up outside the Surer Square, a tapas bar near the centre of Millennium Capitol. He decided that Egg was the most stylish person in the place, because he was dancing on the table-top, and eating fire rather than the queso con anchoas . This endeared him to Owen, if not to the waiters, so he intercepted Egg as he was being thrown out into the street.
    They danced diagonally across the cobbled streets of the food district. Owen considered the newcomer’s brilliant white trouser suit and startlingly bright silver hair.
    ‘What kind of name is “Egg Magnet”?’ he asked.
    ‘Name of a band,’ Egg replied. ‘How about you? Did your parents read a lot of Tolkien?’
    Owen considered his Glendower Broadsword outfit. ‘I’ve always wanted to visit New Zealand. But I never got further than dressing like this. It’s a hobbit I find hard to break.’
    Egg Magnet pulled a face. Literally. He seized hold of his cheeks and stretched them like putty into an exaggerated expression of dismay.
    ‘Sorry,’ grinned Owen. He reached over and smoothed out Egg’s distorted features with soft pressure on the skin. Left his hands in position, gently holding the other man’s cheeks and considering the possibilities. He’d experimented with Second Reality sex sessions in