SL FanFic "Second Life's First Life"

Second Life’s First Life
A Short Story of Eight Parts, by Jack Cline

Disclaimers: This story, though not this first part, contains strong language and violence. Always read at your own discretion. Some characters in this story are loosely based on actual SL residents, without their consent. It is just a story. Relax. Comments welcome.

******************************************
Part the First
In which Second Life’s new weather system harries a traveler; atoll ecology; the grid shudders under an unusual load.
******************************************

Arley Torgeson frowned as the first sheet of rain staccatoed a rapid cadence against the windshield of her watermelon-pink and green hoplite. The readouts projected on the inside of the canopy seemed to brighten as the little aircraft shot into the onrushing cloudbank at 30 meters per second. Dynamic weather on the grid was a relatively new development, fully functional only since the rollout of the last point release a week before. Corin Mandreka, the engineer who had overseen the development of the weather generator implementation, had been reiterating ad nauseum two warnings, that weather would be beyond the control of any residents at least in the near term, and that the turbulence, precipitation, even temperature phenomena might have adverse effects on anything attempting to navigate the waters or skies of the grid. Arley, it seemed was about to test the latter assertion firsthand. She had received from its developer a version 3.1 hoplite with updated features to improve flight stability in adverse weather conditions, or so the accompanying notecard had promised with its polished marketing-speak.

The ship started to shudder and convulse in the high winds. Arley’s grimace became a tight smile of excitement as she fought against the yoke to maintain level flight. ‘This is the real deal! The storm’s cold thermal’s pulling me downward,’ she thought, impressed with the detail of the weather simulation. Even the rivulets of stormwater streaming off the cockpit’s cowl, buffeted by the 25 knot headwind and her own speed, were rendered in exquisite detail.

Flicking a glance at the altimeter, she realized the ship was in fact dropping like a stone. Her smile faded somewhat as she slapped at the mode-control lever on the console near her right arm. The hoplite hummed softly as its wing geometry shifted, the wingtips pulling in closer and dropping out of sight below the rim of the cockpit. Suddenly the three engines just aft of the powerplant cast a sharp whine as they vectored in flight to break the descent of the still-rocking ship. The neutral, synthesized voice of the hoplite’s limited AI intoned in softly Nipponese-accented English that the conversion to hydrofoil / submersible mode was complete.

A bare moment later, Arley’s little craft punched hard through the ocean’s surface. Immediately the dashboard lit up, sounding off discordant klaxons. “Depth warning, impact in three seconds,” said the too-calm AI. Arley cursed under her breath and knew the warning was too late as she was jerked to a violent halt. She felt more than saw her head bouncing off the HUD and noted with a curious detachment that the front third of the ship had embedded itself in the seafloor. Recovering her senses, she thumbed the throttle toggle and let the engines, still in atmospheric mode, spin down. She sighed. She'd nicely crashed the hoplite just offshore of a void region's single, featureless atoll.

“So much for useful voice AI,” she muttered to herself as she smoothed her flightsuit. Just on the other side of the canopy, a school of curious fish stared back at her, attracted to movement. For just a moment, Arley forgot that she was already very late to the PrimAry Academy opening gala, still more than several dozen regions away, as she watched the fish school and inspect various lit or shiny surfaces across the fuselage of the hoplite. The raging storm overhead, roaring and intense only a moment ago, seemed a thousand miles away as she motionlessly watched the fish gently brush fins, mouths along the graceful sweep of the hull. It felt almost like watching a lover tenderly rousing the beloved. Arley shook her head.

“Torgeson, you’re running behind,” she reminded herself. “Hoplite, engines reverse full to surface, flight mode, engines ahead full, resume course,” she said, queuing the commands. She leaned back, watching the fish dart away alarmed and the hoplite righted itself, and she wondered how fashionably late one could be before it became unfashionable. She had a niggling fear that she was already approaching that horizon. Of course, she could have teleported, but with the recent sweeping improvements to vehicle physics, it was de rigueur to arrive under one’s own power, so to speak.

The hoplite breached rapidly, rocking hard to port as a storm-whipped whitecap barreled in from the opposite direction. Above, the storm was growing rapidly in intensity, the ash gray clouds roiled by gale winds. The cockpit flashed painfully bright, and Arley glanced at the dash, surprised that any of the warning telltales would be so like a flashbulb. Just then the thunder shockwave blasted through, percussive enough for the pilot to feel it in her organs.

Time to get out of here, Arley decided. Weather was fine, but this was a little too Perfect Storm. She told the hoplite to take her to ten thousand meters, easily above the tempest, and leaned back into the form-fitting seat. Lightning flashed again, this time further away, then again. The hoplite ascended rapidly and visibility went from abysmal to totally blind as she hurtled upward through the storm. Only when she had punched the flight harness release to stretch did it occur to her that the release notes for the weather algorithms had explicitly noted that no lightning was to be included. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured.

And then the storm simply stopped. Not dissipating or attenuating, but frozen. “Wonderful, what now?” Arley breathed, getting a little frustrated. A glance stolen at the HUD noted that the hoplite was frozen midair as well, though the region’s FPS and time dilation were perfectly healthy. She tried to drum her fingers impatiently and discovered herself quite stuck fast as well. A glitch? These things always seemed to happen when she was late.

Abruptly the clouds forward and starboard of her thinned, revealing a floating figure perhaps a hundred meters away wreathed in grasping, writhing fingerlets of lightning. The distance nor the intervening haze could conceal the gaze settled on her by the man hanging there midair. Calculating and uncomfortably interested, it conveyed in a way no words could thoughts that made Arley want to squirm and get away. The man held the look a second longer then gestured perfunctorily.

The hoplite was thrown into the clouds, spinning crazily. Arley wrestled with the stick for a long minute before she could bring it under control. Hastily she checked her minimap and found herself four regions from where she’d just been, now clear of the storm. The man was nowhere apparent any longer. The hoplite drifted half a region while she collected herself. Presently, she resumed her course, wanting and needing to forget the bizarre, unsettling encounter. That had been no ordinary griefer.

***

The man grimaced, deep in thought, as with another flick of his fingers, he banished the writhing halo of lightning. His tests at controlling and extending the weather system had gone quite satisfactorily, but in getting so absorbed in the effort of it, he’d not noticed the small craft approaching. Would it compromise his painstaking secrecy? He pondered that a moment, wondering if his years of efforts could come to nothing if discovered. Then he shrugged, dismissing the thought to stress-induced paranoia. It was probably just some traveler unlucky enough to get in the way of his efforts for a brief minute. If, though, it had indeed been an investigator sent by the Sons of Ahern, then that pilot could be the harbinger of much greater troubles.

Time enough to worry about that once his plans were finally set into motion. But then once that were true, he thought, it wouldn’t be him doing the worrying. He smiled grimly.

Part the Second

In which a new stranger enters the Welcome Area; time dilation without dilation; database issues

“In retrospect, the addition of the emotion and autonomy modules to the notion of the avatar in Second Life was both the coolest and potentially dangerous innovation we put in any of the 4.x releases. Collectively they allowed us to add intelligent, independent (and totally synthetic!) agents into the metaverse. Of course, by that point, AI—real AI—had advanced to the point that serious moral issues were cropping up even beyond SL; the Turing Test barrier had been broken several years prior and development only accelerated after that dubious milestone. So-called ‘avsynthes’ were, in my opinion, ultimately too risky a gamble for Linden Lab. Indeed, the moniker itself was apt in more ways than one. Like the now-illegal drink absinthe, their potential was intoxicating, their capability quite dangerous. Imagine a fully intelligent actor with purely synthetic morals, capable of anything you are, and free to roam the grid. Scary.”

--Haptic Go Lucky: The Personal Memoirs of Corin Mandreka
******

Weeping Zander irritably shifted again on her bench, letting her fingers play over the detailed engraving scrawled along the sun-warmed vertical faces of it. Just within earshot across the four-sim intersection called the Welcome Area, some self-styled savant with a “W-Ho” group tag was poking none-too-subtle fun at a furry. The latter would, no doubt, soon be filling the forums with cries of fursecution. It was an old axe to grind and by now, far too familiar for Weeping’s tastes. This kind of griefing was old hat for W-Ho folks, yet they never seemed to tire of it. It was only a matter of time until the abuser threw herself on the ground and triggered various and sundry autoerotic animations. In spite of her ill mood, Weeping found herself smiling. Just another day at the WA.

“Somehow I figured I’d find you here,” a familiar voice said as Weeping felt a friendly arm splayed across her shoulders.

Devil Gallant sat next to his old friend as she greeted him with a bearhug. He smiled and pushed at her gently. “Tsk tsk. Careful with the new suit! It’s a Musashi-Do custom!” He grinned impiously as she swatted at him.

“Didn’t know you were the dressup type, hon,” Weeping replied as she gave him an appraising once-over. “You look sharp. Very east meets west.” She laughed as he preened in a grotesquely exaggerated way.

“What’s new, luv?” he asked idly, scanning the crowd then craning his neck to watch Cyro Extraordinaire, an enormous incendiary phoenix, circle in slowly for a landing.

“Watching a W-Hoer lay into a fur. Same old.” She squinted at the altercation across the way. It had heated up; apparently the fur had had quite enough and was firing back. Devil watched for a moment.

“I’m gonna go over there and break it up. Fifty bucks says as soon as I start, the W-Ho kid will start calling me a griefer.” He grinned widely. As an early entrant to Second Life, he had seen it all and often had compassion on the victims of griefers, as they were often new denizens and had little skill in properly defending themselves. Devil, on the other hand, was quite the oldbie and could handle himself very, very well.

Weeping rolled her eyes as she watched him lean forward and push himself off the bench. He had long ago pegged the W-Hoers as inveterate griefers who abused for the sake of it, but Weeping saw them as something far more complex; almost artists tuned to a different but admittedly offensive aesthetic. Then again, much worthwhile art was that way. Deil refused to hear any of it; to him a griefer was a griefer was a griefer. She shrugged and observed him striding easily into the crowd making a beeline for the benighted fur.

Something caught Weeping’s eye as Devil wove beyond a pair of musclebound thugs remonstrating with each other in leetspeak about the relative merits of various firearms. A fresh newbie had just rezzed outside the main circular wall and was making his tee-shirt-and-jeans-clad way toward the fountain that stood at the heart of the concentric circles of gardens, walls, and outbuildings of the Welcome Area. This was a perfectly normal thing; it happened numerous times every day as new residents wandered from Orientation Island to the main grid. Something was different about this one, though, and Weeping couldn’t figure out what it was until the newbie got close enough to other avatars to provide a sense of scale. It quickly became evident that he was perhaps a meter and a half taller than the biggest avs in evidence.

To be large wasn’t anything remarkable, having been done for years with special scripts that moved the av from one height to another; the difference here was that the actual mesh, the network of polygons that skinned the av, was far too large. Normally governed by Second Life’s internal logic, av mesh size could not exceed a largish human limit. Either she was seriously glitching, or this newbie had in his first five minutes on the grid managed to hack a serverside setting.

Now he was pushing others aside roughly, beelining for the fountain. Further on, Devil had reached the griefer and the target and was occupied getting yelled at by both of them for interrupting. Weeping moved to IM the newbie, hoping to inform him of his innocent mistake in pushing folks around. He had reached the fountain and was busy rezzing a large spherical object at an even level with his chest. Weeping stayed her hand as it hovered over the IM button and looked more closely at him in surprise. The brackets surrounding his name, Milton Johnson, indicated he was an avsynthe, but that was unremarkable. But how the hell was he rezzing anything in the Welcome Area? It had been rez off-limits for as long as she could remember, and she’d been around almost since the beginning. After several seconds, the object’s name floated into view over it.

“Primium bomb Mk. I,” Weeping read to herself.

Movements of the various avs became jerky and slow as the four servers hosting the Welcome Area digested an enormous slug of data from the asset server, trying to finish rezzing the bomb. Chat began to lag behind the animations of the avs speaking as the chat buffer filled to overflowing and slowed the process further still. Motion became like a struggle through rapidly cooling tar. Lag like this was unheard of since 3.7, when HavokQuad and Mono had been optimized for the Second Life environment. Paired with gigabit Ethernet, the metaverse was usually most spry. Whatever scripting was crammed into that bomb was enough to bring four expensive, powerful servers directly to their knees.

The newbie was saying something as he slowly spun in a circle, observing all around him, including not a few avs put off by his earlier shoving. As he completed the circle, he simply waved and there was a flash-BANG centered on the bomb. Weeping watched as a solid wavefront of thousands of scripted prims spouting angry orange red particles exploded outward. Where the expanding cloud touched any av, pinned in place by the massive lag, the av fell to the ground and disappeared, simply winking out of existence unceremoniously. Milton, too, vanished under the nascent explosion as the framerate dropped to below five per second.

The chat buffer finally caught up.

[Milton Johnson] says: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in heav’n.”

Meanwhile the primium bomb shockwave had spread beyond the cluster of victims at the fountain. Weeping could only watch as Devil turned in slow motion to see the blast front only inches from him. A look of horror crossed his features as the outermost prims collided with his av. Jerking uncontrollably in a full-body paroxysm, he fell to the ground and was gone.

“CALLING CARD SERVER ERROR: Account ‘Devil Gallant’ no longer exists. Unable to find record. Fatal error 5813.”

The message flashed across her field of view as more and more avs were caught by the bomb’s expanding sphere of prims.

“CALLING CARD SERVER ERROR: Account ‘Numidian Craven’ no longer exists. Unable to find record. Fatal error 5813.”

“CALLING CARD SERVER ERROR: Account ‘Cyro Extraordinare’ no longer exists. Unable to find record. Fatal error 5813.”

More flashed by. These were her friends, people she’d traded calling cards with long ago, some she'd known for years. Their accounts were completely gone? They’d been right here a moment ago. A rising swell of panic gripped Weeping as she realized there might be more to this bomb than she’d first guessed. It was accelerating and close enough that the individual cubic prims, 0.01m to a side, in the blast were now visible.

Quickly she tried to stand to run, but the lag held her in place as surely as if she’d been stapled to the bench. She slammed the quit button and waited. She hit it again, harder this time as if to make it comply by force. Still nothing. The wave was almost on her now. “Shitshitshit!” The explosion prims loomed, filling her field of view, consuming everything before her.

She tried to bring up the high level map view to teleport home, away, anywhere. Nothing! She still couldn’t wrest herself free from the seat and could only watch as the explosion chewed its way through the last half meter to her.

A moment of heat and light, then darkness.

Ack!

*bump*

( This story is fun )

I heartily agree!

Me too

ack!!! More please!!

Thanks for the kind words sent along IM as well! I aim to have Part the Third posted later today.

all we need now is the gay rape of 2 popular male Celebreties or television stars and this thread will be worthy of the title fanfic.

Very Cool! Looking forward to reading another installment.

(Oh and please bring Dev back, we just don't seem to have enough Cherub's in SL)

Second Life....... fan fic? Dear sweet jesus I want to die.

Ryen, do yourself and us a favor and go play an FPS. You obviously hate SL and what people choose to do with it during their free time.

You are SO cool dude! So above us! God, How DO you do it?

Hey, I'm sorry to hear you feel that way, man. Have a good one anyway.

Part the Third

In which we meet Jobe Fairchild & Ghost Squad; Ekaterina Omega attacks.

“And how about this one?” Alli asked hopefully, holding up an ornate, pearl encrusted wedding dress. The fitted, strapless bodice was surfeited with an elaborate tracery of lace punctuated nicely with hundreds of the glossy beads. A frown creased Jobe’s sun-darkened forehead a little as he studied the way the beautiful garment caught the shaft of sunlight pouring through the window. Alli watched him carefully. “Too much decoration, then?” she guessed, “well I didn’t like that one either.” A little crestfallen, she gingerly returned the dress to its packing as she hummed an idle tune to herself. Beyond the windows of the bridal boutique, the afternoon in Fujin was warm, cloudless and still, though the sidewalk outside their marbled building was alive with the customary sightseers, window shoppers and tourists.

Actually, Jobe liked the dress very much; he could imagine it cupping her slim curves just so. As she’d readied it against herself, he’d caught a glance of the price tag, though, setting off that grimace. He ran a quick mental calculation. His nominal soldier salary at 200 Linden dollars a month would pay down the limited edition dress in a little over a year, assuming no other big expenses. There were always other expenses. If he’d had any idea what she was asking at the time, he’d have found a way to refuse, but Alli had been so set on a Vindaloo. He was determined to make it happen one way or another. Maybe Indra, the designer, accepted slave labor as an alternative to timely payment. With that thought, Jobe’s frown melted into an affable grin for her.

Allison Midnight was possessed of the magnetic charm and grace—in Jobe’s gleefully biased estimation—that seemed to touch all of the Midnights, though she’d yet to make it big to any degree that a few of the others certainly had. A month or so before she had first met Jobe she had launched a tiny flower shop with dreams of providing flowers and plants sculpted well beyond the barely three-dimensional de facto standard. Two bitter disputes with rivals Caramon Fate and Higgins Protagonist, a storefront defacement later and fourteen months the wiser, she had held onto that vision, determined to be successful. Her clientele was small but loyal and almost as supportive as Jobe.

He and Alli had met at a Maringo gala that was the latest variant in a long line of entertainment based on Bingo. This particular strain involved filling up the card to the hollers of the caller while laboring to complete intricately timed latin dance maneuvers. Allegedly it was supposed to be a much more social improvement on its predecessor games, but Jobe hated this kind of thing, seeing it as the epitome of mindlessness. He had been dragged along by a squadmate he didn't even like all that much who was intent on snagging an unwitting philly. He had been sulking quietly at the bar when a friendly and quite forward girl grabbed him by the wrist and with a cute smile, pulled him onto the dance floor. Introducing herself as Allison, she’d quickly made him forget his discomfort and clumsiness with the rapid dance steps with her quirky humor and ready grin. Hours later, exhausted, he’d nonetheless had the presence of mind to ask to see her again. She had pretended indecision for an agonizing moment then assented with a wink. That had been a memorable night, the first of many.

Jobe ran a hand through his hair, surprised that he wasn’t getting impatient with the long browse they were spending in the wedding apparel shop. Normally he had low tolerance for such things, considering himself a man of action, but more and more he was finding that he frankly didn’t much care what he was doing, as long as it was with her. Also, he didn’t mind the chance to speculate on just how he intended to extricate her ever so tenderly from the dress when the ceremony was complete and the guests gone. Heck, maybe before the guests were gone if he could manage to slip away with her.

“Honey, what’s wrong? You’ve been pretty quiet since we’ve started looking through here.” She tried to smile meanly, but the effect of it on her pixielike features was more comical and endearing than menacing. “Not getting cold feet are you?”

In three steps he was close against her, speaking softly so that the echoing stone architecture would not carry his voice to others. “Never. If you could only know how absurd that thought is, ‘Li, you couldn’t even poke that jibe about it.” His stolen kiss was the briefest peck. “It’s just, well… we’ll have to hold off on a lot of expensive things, you know? Until your floral venture gets established, we will need to live pretty leanly. You know what my paychecks are like.” Her face was downcast as she studied her shoes. Jobe tipped it back up, holding her gaze for a long moment as he brushed an errant strand of hair, escaped from her ponytail, away from her face. “But if you want this dress, girl, I will move heaven and earth until I can make it happen. Got that?” Mentally, he began assembling a list of his possessions that he might be able to exchange out for some Linden dollar value. It was a distressingly short list, but time enough in the world to worry about all that later. Maybe he could sign on for additional tours of duty, net some extra hazard pay. Of course, that meant being away from Alli for longer stretches of time, which was no good. Jobe shook his head, banishing the thoughts to another day.

Alli had selected another dress, this one an alabastrine affair with no extraneous embellishments. At her questioning look, Jobe nodded approvingly at the graceful sweep from the strapless top to the hem, so she wove her way between racks of clothing to a mirrored changing room. He had a quiet minute to let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and well that he did; a moment later, Alli emerged into view. Her dress’s understated elegance shifted the focus from itself to its radiant wearer made all the more beautiful by her excitement. This was the dress to get. All over again, Jobe’s will and worries drained from him as he drank in the sight of her. Dumbly he watched as she approached. She was smiling, beckoning him closer to whisper somethi—

***

“Hey boss, snap out of it. Time to suit up in fifteen. McAuliffe’s orders just came across the wire.” Mike’s latino features were carefully neutral.

Jobe startled, snapped out of his reverie. He reached for the smokes in his pocket, fumbling with the case. Wordlessly he flicked the lighter to life and took a pull from the smoke.

“Remembering Alli again, sir?”

Jobe didn’t answer, blinking once as the pale gray smoke particles stung at his eyes. The memory of her vanishing still was a raw hole in him. Time to pack that down and away, he thought. Game face time. In the distance he could hear another Ghost squad member, Artemis Kuklos, swearing loudly at her chaingun again, dire imprecations about where the gun could shove itself if it didn’t un-fucking-jam yesterday.

“Colonel wants a word with you inside when you’re ready,” Mike finished and turned on a heel, heading for the squatty hulk of their forward attack dropship, the eagle-emblazoned Accipiter.

‘When you’re ready to snap out of the funk you’ve been in for the last year,’ Jobe knew Mike was thinking. The two of them had served together for almost three years now and each considered the other like a brother. Mike Codesmith wasn’t the kind of man to call Jobe on the dark spirits he had been in since Alli had disappeared, but Jobe knew concern for his squad leader weighed heavily on his mind. And even though it was clear Mike thought the way it sapped Jobe’s concentration was a liability, he trusted Jobe implicitly. It was mutual.

Mike was the pilot, munitions/payload expert, and mechanic of their dropship. The squad valued his steady hand on the flight stick in the tense situations in which they inevitably found themselves. A reserved man, he was often more at home tinkering with the scripted innards of the Accipiter than catching R&R with Jobe and the others.

First signing on in an exploratory and peacekeeping role, the two of them had battled mafias, terrorist cadres, and stubborn malcontents across the grid. With the advent of the as-yet unsolved primium bombings eleven months before and the resulting Grid War, the tasks assigned Jobe and the rest of Ghost Squad had become increasingly grim. Since the Initiate army had begun using primium-based weapons, the casualties had become very real, though Ghost squad had not sustained any losses yet. It was Jobe's personal theory that primium suicide bombers had easily infiltrated the Grid Proper, despite tightened border security. How could one deter a subversive agent whose inventory was a sealed, private vault?

Jobe stood, stubbing the cig on the pockmarked surface of the picnic table. He watched the ashy filter derez for a moment then headed for the corrugated aluminum half-cylinder temporary structures that had been division command since their arrival from Seneca a week ago. Inside, Colonel Egmund Lippmann was waiting for him.

“New developments, First Sergeant Fairchild,” rumbled Lippmann in his Portuguese accent as Jobe entered his office. “Omega isn’t waiting for us to muster strength; she’s pouring her assets into a massed strike at Midway. Latest nanostrat indicates a capital ship escorted by an impressive array of corvettes and support vehicles.” Nanostrat was intelligence gathered by an endlessly self-replicating network of minute, high-flying prims that scoured the grid for any activity. They were hard on the grid, but provided vital intel that could not be safely gathered otherwise. Lippmann continued, his arms folded across his chest. “Intel staff believes she’ll make landfall at Midway in perhaps 12 hours. If your team scrambles in a hurry, you can probably reach her there just as they commence the attack.”

Midway was the easternmost landmass on the Grid Proper, just offshore of Novaterra, the largest continent of Linden-hosted regions; this was to say it was the last of the corporately-owned regions before the Freehold ocean and mainland far beyond. Freehold regions were powered by servers provided by individual users; the basic rules of physics and reality could be quite different from region to region based on the whims of the particular host. It made for a dangerous place to be at the best of times, moreso with the coming of the war. From these freehold lands the Initiate army, headed by Ekaterina Omega and equipped with weapons that bent the very laws of Second Life, had arisen and spread eastward and was now making for the mainland. Everywhere their forces spread, martial law was imposed, followed by the quick destruction of mostly anything that wasn’t terrain. Finally, the Initiates were rumored to have begun taking regions offline entirely in a sort of digital holocaust. The Freehold ocean void regions spread away from Midway in an ever-expanding track and eventually butted against the Freehold mainland, some eighty thousand kilometers away from Novaterra. The geography of it funneled all traffic across Midway, making it the critical beachhead for the inevitable invasion of Novaterra by Omega’s troops.

“We’re attacking the Initiate spearhead force, Colonel?” Jobe’s surprise was evident in his voice. What effect could four even highly trained commandos have on an army of thousands?

“No, you’ll be shooting right past them in the confusion of the attack, with any luck. We have reason to believe Omega will be commanding the attack from aboard her capship, but that’s much too difficult a target for us to take at our current state of deployment.”

Lippmann didn't need to reiterate that the Novaterra regular army was hopelessly understrength, especially considering the awful disparity in technologies between the two armies. Primium was an incredible force multiplier and only the Initiates had it.

“Your team is to break through and continue to the Freehold mainland. From there you will conduct a tactical extraction unsupported. We have arranged a diversion at Midway that should provide enough hubbub for you to safely evade detection on your return trip. We certainly won’t be able to hold the island for long with our shoestring of a guerrilla force stationed there now, but we can disrupt them long enough to get you back.” Lippmann paused significantly. “But it will be a short window of opportunity. Get in, get out fast. The details of the extraction are all in this folder. General McAuliffe’s people put this intel together, so it should be trustworthy.” Fairchild nodded, leafing through the thin stack of prim sheets detailing the crazy operation. He looked up again as the Colonel fell silent.

“Respectfully, sir, making a run on Freehold is a bit of a suicide, much less trying to plow through the Initiate invasion on the way. That’s fully-controlled Initiate territory and you know that getting in there will be like walking into a minefield with big, big shoes.”

Lippmann nodded soberly as his mood soured. “Squad leader Fairchild, we don’t have anything that can stop or match those primium weps. Our very best folks at Chung Heavy Industries have been hammering at it for months, and nada. Plainly put, if we can’t get our hands on Initiate technology, we’re cannon fodder like a Linden at an open townhall. You’re going to get that tech for us. You will not, cannot fail. Get moving.” The colonel snapped the last bit irritably as he tossed a salute, sat, and turned to the latest report scrolling across the display on his desk.

Fairchild ground his teeth at the dismissal but held his tongue as he turned to leave. Even through the building walls, he could hear the stuttering rumble of the Accipiter's engines warming up. No use in arguing now. Greater, wider events were pushing him well outside his realm of comfort and control now.

At the dustoff pad, Codesmith was busy grunting under the straining weight of the last munitions being loaded into the underbelly of the dropship as the squad leader approached. Yelling to be heard over the roar of jetwash, Fairchild called out, “Kuklos and Phoenix?” Mike paused loading for a second, mopping his brow with a grime-streaked hand. He pointed to the crew compartment, where he could see Artemis Kuklos strapping one or another of her heavy weapons to a rack on her drop pod. Jobe nodded. “And Zack?” Codesmith was already pointing at the firing range. Without another word, Jobe broke into a fast trot toward the range.

Zachary Phoenix was lying prone with a striking, new, very experimental Chung Tactical Exploder ER butted to his muscular shoulder. Calmly he drew a bead through the Iridioptics scope on a small concentric-circle style target a thousand yards distant, dim in the afternoon haze. Barely breathing, he waited for his heart rate to slow as he dead reckoned windage and elevation. The recoil pad felt hot and a little too firm for his liking, but as the squad sharpshooter, he was expected to overcome these difficulties and come through with much-needed fire support. Ergo, zeroing this new sniper rifle detailed to him by division command.

The latest track of Torgeson Truly, a currently popular group, was piping softly through earphones jacked into the NextPhone at his hip. Zack let the music overpower his senses as he fell into the beat, centering himself. He knew that listening to music in combat bothered Jobe, but what did it matter? He’d never missed when it counted. Almost preternaturally, he sensed the approach of the squad leader. Time to show off. He coaxed the crosshairs of the 145 cm-long gun onto the target and barely pressured the trigger. The single shot reverberated raucously, hammering at his eardrums and obliterating the throb of the techno.

Zack rose without bothering to check the shot, and turned to Jobe standing nearby. The squad leader lowered a pair of binoculars he’d grabbed from the firing station shelf at his side. “Dead on as always,” Fairchild noted with a quick glance at the NextPhone. “Keep sharp like that; we’re shipping out hot in three.” Zack nodded and began disassembling the rifle for travel.

Two minutes and forty three seconds later, Ghost squad was mounted and the Accipiter blasted skyward on the 13 hour flight to Midway and several thousand of Ekaterina Omega’s finest forces lying in wait.

Well, I only got Part the Third halfway finished, but I should be able to wrap up that bit tomorrow. Good night all.

Aww, I really liked the love story part, got me all verklempt. 'Tis not cheesy, it is. 'Tis good.

I've been getting various IMs about using characters loosely based on SL personalities, and I wanted to clear a few things up. First, a reiteration that the relationship between the story characters and the SL people is quite tenuous. For example, Ekaterina Omega at this point in the story is the walking personification of evil. The SL personality she's (barely) based on is by all accounts a kind, skilled and well-respected person. Same goes for the other characters. Also, various characters meet their doom in the story. The life expectancy & characterization of folks in the story are in no way a comment on the SL folks.

As I said in opening up Part the First, it is just a story.

Jobe Fairchild and Allison Midnight are 100% fictional. They have NO basis in ANY SL person; any perceived parallel is coincidental. I thought it would be fun to include nods to various SL people in the story with other characters, but for Jobe and Alli, the characterization is a bit too personal. So, I created them out of thin air from particles, spiderwebs, and lag.