Reality intrudes - Here's a fragment from my notebook, shared raw and mostly un-edited. I don't believe in reposting old stories, so this will have to do. Thank you for understanding.
Harlan was naked, again.
Sighing as he rubbed his face, breathing in frustration at yet another interface glitch in TriLife. It had happened during a high profile art gallery opening, in the middle of a group of dignitaries and invited guests. Cheeks rapidly growing red, Harlan hit the emergency transport button and arrived in his virtual home.
It wasn't the end of the world, but he had planned on growing his network – and this wouldn't improve things any. TriLife was a backwater of virtual constructs that substituted for moving about the real, dangerous world – at least, that was part of the earnest pitch on the TriLife site.
Harlan had a few friends there, mostly professional contacts. He preferred to stay far away from the other users looking for personal liaisons. Most of the avatars – pixels representing people – were controlled by the aging and the desperate. Most women ran around in outfits that would make a hooker blush, if they even resorted to logging in.
Harlan doubted this, since paying for sex was as easy as buying a drink. That is, if the user piloting the crudely shrink-wrapped and glossed mesh was female. There was a running joke in TriLife, that every woman you met was really a man. It would certainly explain some of the clothes he saw.
This simulation was anchored in the obsolete geographic method of showing locations.
It was semi-lucrative for the company that ran it, only because of the investment paradox. If a user made it beyond a week and had something on their plot, they were more likely to stay. This only worked up to a point, due to a fatal error in the construction of the underlying protocol. The framework or “glue” that held the whole network of virtual tracts together had severe delays when updating large continents.
For Harlan, this was perfect. He didn't want any attention, personal or otherwise, to his activities here. Palming the control board, Harlan moved to the sub-menus for creating objects. The controls were complete crap, enough to make even the most dedicated artisan rip their hair out, but he didn't have the time or sophistication to create a viable substitute.
It would just have to do, for now. The regions of TriLife were shared in a lopsided fashion between the coders, designers and porn freaks. Each usually kept to their own, but there were always exceptions. Harlan had almost built something recognizable when an avatar strolled up to him. Man? Woman? Hell, who could tell? Looking at her outfit, he noticed that someone dressed like that usually didn't make it this far from the isles of inane chatter and nude-pic swapping.
Annoyed, Harlan initiated his private sandbox. This was where he could build or code in private, without unwanted intrusions. Typing in the commands, he instantiated the environment. Statuses and executed responses flying by in a blur of command line synchrony, he knew all the daemons that made this system run.
He imagined them laboring, putting together the millions of polygons and textures to summon what he had made. It wasn't perfect, TriLife was a bottom-rated world after all, water didn't lap the shore and the sky was rendered with clouds that moved a bit too quickly. But it was his. If he could think it, he could build it. In perfect focus, a small figure in the massive island rendered on a tropical sea.
Occasionally he would open up a port and allow someone to visit, but that wasn't the norm. They were usually professional clients and only stayed long enough to take some pictures of what he had made, and then request changes before he shipped the actual finished product.
Harlan visualized the port as a doorway, the bridge over the moat into his private world.
Sometimes he left it open, hoping that someone would visit randomly, even if most of the time nobody did.
