Mistress of Cinders

The Kingdom is the world's most exclusive VR platform where the rich, famous, and evil can cavort in a utopian fairy tale world. Little do they know that the code beneath their feet grows weak. The only thing keeping the platform-and all their secrets-secure is the tireless and unsung efforts of a single Plaxis employee and sole remaining Purusha Prime language programmer, Cindira Tieg.

For her part, Cindira couldn't care less if the Kingdom went permanently offline tomorrow. Only, the same source code that makes it possible also powers Plaxis's original VR platform, Gaia. There, war is waged virtually, saving the planet and humanity from ruin. It was the greatest legacy her mother left the world, one she intends to defend and sustain.

But when a detective from Authority shows up at Plaxis, demanding access to the source code, Cindira fears an enemy at the gate. In the real, Francisco Batista is a mystery, untraceable and without public record. The only way to discover his true identity and intentions is by going into the vreal herself. But when the coder confronts her mother's creation, she'll discover there's a lot more at risk than legacy. Making the wrong move could defragment the vreal and lead to her very real downfall.

THE CYRSTALINES GLOWED a soft green, reflecting off the semi-opaque lids of the two jackpods. “Four minutes is damned fast. Are you sure I can beat that?”
“If I thought you’d lose, I wouldn’t have put ten thousand greens on you.”
“Ten thousand—” Shock cut off the coder’s words. “That’s a hell of purse. You sure that much crypto won’t cull attention?” If the transaction had been in kartz or rubis, she wouldn’t worry. While not technically illegal, tracing the transactions through the neo-c blockchain was a task only the most talented of fiscal hackers could handle.
“Sorry, babe, I only have the regular kind of crypto. And you of all people should know that 10K isn’t enough to raise any eyebrows in this town.”
“Isn’t it what you pay in rent each month in this town?”
Scotia shook her head. “Not this month. Not unless you win, that is.”
In so many ways, Scotia was everything Cindira was not. Beautiful where she was plain. Courageous where she was timid. Opportunistic where she was passive. She was also the only reason Cindira had the courage to show up in at a place like this. Hackdomes were a clear violation of her contract with Plaxis. Something about its elite tier of code writers using their skills in environments it didn’t own…. When Scotia was around, no one paid much attention to plain, little Cindira Tieg. No one ever noticed, therefore, the keen resemblance she bore to the vreal’s patron saint and its most famous martyr.
A martyr she might follow in death, if an earthquake hit and the building pancaked into the basement.
Scotia must have read the anxiety written in Cindira’s features. She wrapped a hand around the young woman’s shirt and pulled her along.
“I promise,” she said, “if the water starts pouring in, I’ll hit the emergency shut down and get you out of here. I’ll even throw you over my shoulder and carry you out if I need to.”
“But don’t forget to get our winnings on the way out, okay?”
Scotia turned back over her shoulder, giving Cindira a Who in the hell do you think I am? look.
Two ancient devices occupied the room, fourth generation or worse, each sprouting wires from its underside like weeds. Officially, they were called NNIPs, or Neural Network Interface Pods. “Jackpod” was the colloquial term, but the truly cynical used more morbid terms. Meat locker, crypt, sarcos, chippers… If you didn’t know you were in the basement of a hackdome, you might think you’d just ended up in an Egyptian tomb. Except for the fact that the devices had transparent walls and a cranial interlink shield that looked like an upside-down pasta drainer cut in half, the similarity couldn’t be overstated. On the opposite end of the bar, her opponent would be shimmying into his own device, getting ready for battle. Cindira needed to do the same.
Scotia tried to calm Cindira’s nerves with levity. “Already for you, Sleeping Beauty.”
The coder grimaced as she used a small step stool to climb up into the device. “Any sign of water, right?”
It was ridiculous. This wasn’t the Ferries. There were no dilapidated buildings in this part of town, now halls full of wasted chipheads, offering any part of their body, real or vreal, for just enough crypto to get them jacked up another hour. Cindira thought it might have been in the Ferries and other underground cyberdens like them that the jackpods got their most infamous moniker: coffins. Chipheads jacked in, and if their wallets allowed for it, never jacked out. In the vreal, problems were few and opportunities for diversion, great. In the years after war had uploaded, the government had been all too happy to encourage their addiction, the theory being that experts in vreal immersion could make prime soldiers in the wardomes outside Gaia’s capital city someday. What had they been thinking, Scotia would say? The chipheads didn’t even fight for their own prosperity, why would they fight for their countries? Especially given that most of the countries who fought their wars in Gaia hadn’t even existed fifty years ago.
Sure, hackdomes were looked upon by the digi-elite as plebian, but the Stadium was a legitimate business. Its owner, Talia Green, wouldn’t risk getting shut down—or worse— by letting one of her regular champions drown.
Despite only being a year older, Scotia knew how to summon a comforting smile any mother would recognize. No doubt a skill that came in handy for a Social Worker.
“The smallest drop, and I’ll eject you.”
Cindira tried to ignore the smell of sweat and trace amounts of urine that clung to the inside of the jackpod. These low level vreals and standard jackpods didn’t have sophisticated enough source code to carry over physical pain from the vreal into reality. If they had, Cindira would have been a convicted murderer many times over by now. That didn’t mean the brain and body never reacted to something inside the platform.
So far, Cindira had never felt that kind of fear. The vreal was the only place she controlled everything, where she had real power. She’d never lost a match. Why would she fear anything? She sat back and nodded to Scotia to close the lid. Cindira reached up, looking for the launch button that would turn on the neural interface and turn off her interaction with the real.
The game was afoot, and she was ready.