"So do you like it with boys," it was a boy, "or girls?" it was a girl. I punched my hand through the bot’s morphing face and unleashed a bunch of gibberish into its guts. It walked away with the head of a toad, sounding very confused. I slid onto a stool at the end of the bar, just watching for a while. God, what I wouldn’t give to talk to anyone who actually knows me right now. Anyone, I thought, would have to be better than this.

"Come hang out with my and my friends today big fella’" she said to me. Her body was a perfect model, but her eyes were as flat as ceramic tiles. I sighed and shoved her away. There were a lot of bots here, I thought to myself. I scanned the room a little closer, sending out some feelers to see if I could pick the bots from anyone with a human at the controls.

"AIM:gochat?Layer6:roomname=’" said the next one. I looked at her, dumb-founded.

"Come again?" I asked.

"AIM:gochat?Layer6:roomname=’" it repeated, only this time filling the space between us with a different colour.

"My God," I said, laughing. "You are a script and you’re badly written." Incredulous, I put my hands out, and ran them over her skin, looking for any errors in her physical construction. She held mostly still, complicit to my fondling, which in itself was mildly disconcerting. Eventually, I found something near the small of her back, a hook that wasn’t properly closed off. Again, it’s just lazy. How could someone write such bad script with this utility, I couldn’t quite fathom. I slid my finger into the hook, and started unleashing code into the script, reworking what I could find in her database of pick-up lines. It wasn’t even encrypted. I found where her home port was, and probably could have snaked some lines into the server where all the bots were linking to (there were three others in this same room advertising the same space with different scripts) and probably reprogrammed the entire fleet, but decided against it. Instead I released my hapless little script victim, and let her loose back in the general ebb of the room. Now she spoke sense, saying things like, "I am a waste of bandwidth," and "Please, disconnect now, the world is about to end."

I sighed. Well that was, what, eighty seconds? It could be a very long night.

I resolved the bar into a more precise metaphor, and sat down on the resulting stool beside me. The AIM bar had its own internal architecture that was faintly visible to me, through the filters I placed on my own browser, and in this instance, I simply allowed most of it to come through in full. In the end, I had every impression of sitting in a room, full of people, moving around and talking, though occasionally there were certain things that made it blatantly obvious I was in cyberspace posing as realspace, rather than the other way around. I wondered how long it would be before the filters like mine would flare up red on the Reg-spies’ radar. Only a matter of time, I knew, and I’d have to tweak things to slip away unnoticed.

"Hello," she said simultaneously to everyone in the room. Her ghost shimmered in front of me for a moment before they all withdrew back into the single instance of her avatar. I followed her progress through the bar, as she struck up a conversation with whoever had given her the most pleasing reply. Another youngish girl, it seemed. I focused a little harder, reducing the noise around me to quiet murmur so I could hear their conversation clearly. I wondered how the Reg-spies would handle even these minor tweaks to their code.

Only a few minutes later, one of the two girls left the bar, the one who I’d seen enter left alone. She must be real enough, I thought, so I wandered over.

"Left all alone already?" I said to her. She turned, and I sat down beside her, without waiting for an invitation.

"Yeah, don’t you hate that?"

"Mm. Sometimes. Being alone when you have no choice is not terribly comforting, is it?"

"No," she said. "Especially when you come here to find people in the first place."

"Right. Though, it is debatable that coming here in hopes of finding real people is wise at all." I paused briefly. "The place is full of bots, it can be a fucking nightmare."

"Yeah," she said. "What else can we do though?"

"There’s not a lot, not on this layer, and now . . ."

"Yeah, after the restrictions came in, it is harder," she said, looking away from me a little, surveying the crowd of ‘people’ filling the bar. I wondered, looking at her, trying to dig a little deeper, trying to read into her avatar. I didn’t find very much, but I knew there had to be something. Even just a faint flicker, a tiny flame of life, buried way beyond the cyberskin I could see here, stifled, but there.

I paused for a moment, simply to look at it. The fruits of countless, endless hours of creation, manipulation, edition, deletion and no end in sight. Meticulous detail in every pore, I squinted and brought the information worked into the skin up. I could see, as anyone else would be able to, the words and thoughts and ideas encoded there, attached to the metaphor to empart into the viewer what I needed so desperately them to know. It was all there, woven into the fabric of my creation’s being, its very essence was that code, that secret language buried behind the purely visual. Everything I could articulate was enunciated within. Anything I could capture in texture, or colour, ideas that defied language, I sculpted into its shape, its bearing. There were no accidental details, nothing that my hands had not crafted to be just as they were. There was nothing I did not intentionally make, there could not be. There was no room for serendipity, no evolution in this world- the users were responsible for everything that happened, everything that existed, here.

I took a step back from my motionless avatar, inert now as it was without me to guide it. Hidden in a space I’d created specifically to hide me, we two stood facing each other, only me knowing, only me being, and it there lifeless. Lifeless, but in every other way being more like me than I was. I reached out, and cupped the delicate jaw, sculpting it with my virtual fingers to give it the perfect androgonous edge. An angle that suggested femininity, but an edge that held a more masculine air. How long, this time, I wondered briefly. At the back of my mind, I always wondered. Why? What was the purpose for this skin? This thing that was more me than I was, more than I wanted to be, yet was nothing more than words etched onto the aether. But I didn’t ever let those thoughts touch the fore of my awareness. I engrossed myself to heavily in the pursuit of perfection, or of constant maintenance at least of some sort of perpetually fluid state of being, that I could not spare the mental processing power to actually sort through those thoughts. I hated it. How I hated the uncontrollable addiction.

How I needed to finish it! There was always more, there was always something that could be done. My mind, fluid, evanescant, could not be captured, only photographed. Only ever a copy. And a copy was only a copy in the instant it was made, instantly afterward it was a faulty model. A description of what I used to be inside. How I wasn’t anymore. Couldn’t be the way I was, because I wasn’t when I was anymore.

The space warned me, again. Something was passing by, or slipping in close. Someone was moving about. A rush of adrenaline accelerated my movement, which was mostly mental, through the familiar series of routines. The rhythm I went through every time was the same, just faster now. I threw more encryption into the bubble around me, flung the hooks back into my avatar, sealing the orifaces in its essence, and slipped inside. What had been two became one, and I was myself again.

I sent several different images out of the bubble as I allowed it to dissolve to lend some confusion to whoever had been getting close to my little secret. Odds were that what I’d felt was nothing- I hadn’t had time to really check it out, but more than likely it was just some passer-by moving from point A to B to C, and I happened to be in between. No more probable to even notice my fuzzy bit of space as to notice the curve of my jaw . . . But.

But it had been happening more than was usual. I was being disturbed during my secret sessions of crafting almost regularly. Paranoia? There were things brushing my little black holes where I hid. Of that there was no question. What I could not decide was if those incidents were actually any more frequent now, in the past month say, than in the past year. I wanted to say they were not, I wanted to say I’d just been a little nervous since the Regulation, but I couldn’t quite believe that. The Regs had come in a long time ago now. How many months? Six? Time moved faster here, galaxies spun their cycles in nanoseconds. When you spent most of your time online, life seemed so much longer, memories far more distant. I kept walking, without looking back.

The images I sent in the other directions would walk the layer for four or five minutes, then throw a whole stack of garbage at whoever might actually be following them. They were smart enough to notice if anything was actually watching them, so knew who to throw the smokescreen at, and then disappear. By then I’d be in a totally different part of the layer, walking over a tripwire which would let me know if anyone had actually followed me rather than an image. This layer was still pretty clear of Reg-spies, but if they did find you, and catch your avatar out, it was not good.

That didn’t really say a lot about this layer, however, I thought as I looked around. Layer 6. Down pretty low- a lot lower than it sounded if one knew about L0, L0.5, and L0.55, which wasn’t many people, but either way- not the nicest place to spend time. Most of the traffic here was just this side of mind-numbing. Mostly mindless, Spam flowed through like water. It was all to easy to start moving here from one of the higher Layers and get totally flooded, totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of advertising that assaulted a user here. The rules were a little simpler on L6, there was not the empty-space code like there was on L5 and up. Following the old code, to exist, here, there had to be something in that space, which made moving around a totally different deal here. Win some, lose some, I thought. L6 had its benefits. Things… people, were harder to find here amid all the garbage.

I walked, simply sliding my way through the flows of Spam, only aknowledging them enough to gauage their direction and counter it as to not be thrown off-balance. Where to? I thought. I hadn’t been here that long, and didn’t have the routine established that I was used to. Things had changed, and I hadn’t quite caught up with myself.

Its, funny, I thought, how alone I can feel here, when I know there are several million other users right here. Here. Where? Just within my reach, of course, but reach, space, that was all figurative. Unless I was engaging with someone, they were as far from me as the Moon. They might as well not exist. I decided it was time to make someone exist for me.

AIM had a thousand hooks on L6. Far more than any other chat bar had, so I figured I’d hook in to one of those. I just needed some entertainment, and not the kind provided by anything automated. That would be asking a lot from an AIM bar, I knew, but it was one of the best bets in L6, and less likely to get me caught than the better spots. I pinged, and found the SIP for the nearest AIM bar hook, and punched in.

Instantly I was in a room full of people. At least they look like people, I thought, knowing well that half of them would be scripts. Some advertised even seedier chat bars, some advertised things you can’t do in a bar and have to go to PM for, some would just chat you up and make you feel like you have a friend for about an hour, until they started repeating the logic cycles. It doesn’t pay to use cheap AI, I thought. Unless you’re cheap HI yourself. I smiled grimly.

Fuck what I wouldn’t give to talk to her again. Don’t do it to yourself. Wishing it won’t make it feel any better.