To the 74th Street Swingers Club

After his brief exchange with Richard Kinson, John decided to head back to the 74th Street Swingers Club. He had a pretty good idea what the terrorist had done: self-righteous God-wannabe that he was, he had probably selected the 74th Street Swingers Club because it represented a violation of the good old values he believed in, like chastity, monogamy, and all that good stuff. Looking through its logs of frequent clients, Kinson had simply sought out their IP's and deleted them from the system, erasing all backups. Considering that his group's slogan was Reality Is Best, John was certain that the man was not one of the 500 million people who lived as downloaded consciousnesses within the Mainframe; he was probably using an old-fashioned keyboard-and-camera rig to hack into the system in real time from outside.

Now that he knew Kinson was probably somewhere outside the Mainframe, it would be a simple task to locate where he had broken into the virtual club's guest logs, then back-hack whatever rig Kinson was using to access the Mainframe. Once he had pinpointed the location, all he had to do was alert the authorities in the real world, and Kinson would be found and arrested in short order. With any luck, Kinson would also reveal the Department member who had been working with him; with a thousand deaths pinned to his name, all of whom counted as legal citizens, electronic or not, the terrorist would need all the plea bargains he could get.

Walking down the street, John looked around. Beautiful people strolled down the sidewalks; men wore fine suits or whatever else they felt like wearing, and women wore anything and everything from party dresses to business clothes to goth-rock rags. Vehicles of all shapes and descriptions rolled or hovered down the street; in the Mainframe, you could drive or pilot just about anything you could imagine, whether it would actually work in the real world or not. Like anything else, all a person had to do was to ask their companion AI to render their request - a fast car, a new motorcycle, new clothes, Peking duck - and it would appear as soon as the supercomputer network could process the request.

And yet, looking at the faces of the people around him, John noticed that they all seemed to show a kind of deep boredom. They could have anything they wanted, as much of it as they wanted, and yet people were unhappy.

Nothing really matters here, he thought glumly. He may be a zealot, but could Kinson possibly be right? Maybe we do need to get out of the Mainframe. Then again, is the real world really that much better?

He arrived at the club, waked in and sat down at one of the tables. A two-dimensional screen appeared in midair, and John set to work, sifting through the local network in search of any anomalous data. It only took about five minutes; part of the code embedded in the east wall, represented in the Mainframe as a data cable, had been accessed from an unrecognized address.

Moving past the frolicking men and women, he crouched down and pried loose a metal plate set into the wall. Sure enough, a white fissure had appeared inside the wall, and the area around it had become pixelated, its visual representation distorted by unauthorized tampering with the simulation code.

"Hi! is your name John?" a young, pretty feminine voice called down to him. John turned around to see a gorgeous blonde woman in a red dress standing over him, leaning against the wall, an amused smile on her full red lips.

"How do you know me?" he asked.

The blonde's smile got even wider. "Actually, I came to give you a wake-up call."

In one quick motion, she drew a gun from some concealed pocket in her dress, aimed it between his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

---PROGRAM TERMINATED---