No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro Page A

the quickening pulse, the anticipation,
and the anxiety. For all his skill on the Net he lacked the
sophistication of a person-to-person bout and he was naked before
her. Another twinge of pity. Oh, well, time to get to the
point.
    “ So what do you have for me?” she
asked.
    “ Huh?” Staring at her tits. “Oh,
right. Yeah. It’s interesting.” She could tell it was. He was torn
between sharing his news and delaying to try…something with
her.
    “ Oh?” She flattened her tone.
“Show me.”
    “ Okay.”
    He sat down on the small couch facing the
floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She
poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped
his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net
wave and she found herself standing in Jojran’s vik, his virtual
kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the
command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his
side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by.
She’d been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but
they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre
sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack
studio apartment. She’d considered building one herself, putting up
some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn’t like the
viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from
fiction.
    Jojran’s vik was especially unsettling. She
knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy
couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep
herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on
the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the
gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping.
She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your
reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working
dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the
connection fee and stay logged in. Here, in this fantasy starship,
she could even glimpse the motives that would lead a mind to
explore, to push deeper and deeper into the fantasy, into the dark
place of the Net that promised to make all dreams come true. What
else was an elzi, really, other than a Net head with
conviction?
    “ Do you like this setting?” Jojran
asked, anxiously. “If you don’t we can change it. I have a whole
bunch. We could go to a forest or I’ve got some abstracts, and one
where we fly around in a big feather bed.” He seemed to be hoping
for the last one.
    “ This is fine,” she said tersely.
Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her
hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open
connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security
measures and he could protect her, but she didn’t know what she was
up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through
another person’s implants. He’d never tried seeding thoughts or
mind control.
    “ Okay, so I looked up all the
girls you gave me.” Their faces appeared in the view screen—their
real faces, thank God, from varying IDs, not the mutilated ones.
They all had blue eyes. “And it was pretty much a no-go in terms of
connection. Different ages, different backgrounds, though nobody
especially important. The only connector seemed to be the fact that
they had blue eyes.”
    “ I know all that.”
    “ Right, but then I found
this.”
    A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a
knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was
absolutely meaningless to her.
    “ What am I looking at
here?”
    “ A program rendered visually, an
AI or bot. People use them to scrub the Net, do searches, machine
tasks, but this, this is wild. Usually these’ll have one or two
strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like
artistry right here. I’ve been trying to unravel it for days and
it’s had some