Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (21 page)

Insomnimania Manual: Into Action

This is where the real excitement begins. You can create a highly-mobile virtual self with a wide range of capacities. This full-fledged alter will make your networking experience richer, more rewarding, and more deeply involving than anything you’ve encountered on any other network.

The next best thing to being there

Click a name. Then click “Participant” instead of “Spectator.” If you’ve already created a body for your alter, it will appear, and you can edit it as you wish. If not, all you have to do to create a body is to follow the instructions in each dialogue box as it appears.

Your alter can drink and chat in Ernie’s Bar, read for a book club in La Bibliothèque Érotique, play baccarat in the Casino del Camino, make a political speech at the Speakers’ Corner, join in a musical jam session, throw a party in a “room” of your own making, or take part in any of a multitude of other activities.

note:
For complete details concerning each of these steps, turn to the Reference Section in the back of this manual.

What’s that? You say you can’t draw? Big deal! You don’t have to be an artist to create a alter.

Insomnimania makes it easy to create a vivid and exciting personality for your alter. Just click into the factory and follow the directions. Images can be constructed from a selection of heads, torsos, and limbs from our clip-art library. A wide variety of hair, facial features, and wardrobes are available to choose, mix, and match.

If you wish, you can also modify your image with our easy-to-use paint tools. A full range of colors and shades is at hand to use as your imagination directs. And to make creating a well-rounded alter even easier, when you create a front view, corresponding profiles and a back view are generated automatically.

What’s that? You say you
can
draw? Well, then, there’s no reason to limit yourself to our clip-art! Use the Factory’s paint tools and easy step-by-step instructions to create a virtual self purely of your own invention.

The cartoon you create will soon become an extraordinarily sophisticated electronic marionette—but you’ll have to attach “strings” to it first. Once you’ve created your image, you can use Insomnimania’s prepackaged set of keyboard commands or devise your own to animate your virtual self and bring it vibrantly to life.

Don’t limit your fun

Logging on as more than one alter offers you the intriguing possibility of carrying on conversations—or even arguments—with yourself! This can be delightfully deceptive to other spectators or participants, who may well believe they are watching more than one user in action.

For information on all the exciting Insomnimania rooms and activities, continue to the next chapter.

01111
L-FY

Marianne Hedison set her laptop computer on the hotel room’s dressing table. She glanced at Nolan with concern.

“You look beat,” she remarked.

“Thanks,” Nolan grumbled.

“Is the case going badly?”

“Could be going better.”

Nolan observed Marianne’s deft, economical movements as she busily connected the computer to the electrical outlet and the modem jack. She sure looked in top form tonight.

Nolan wanted to tell her, “You don’t look beat. In fact, you look downright terrific. And you just got back from a funeral. Shit, you just got back from Iowa. What’s your secret?”

“What’s going on with Pritchard and Maisie?” Marianne asked as she continued to arrange things. “Are they cooperating?”

“You bet they are,” Nolan said, chuckling. “Finding out that Auggie faked up his membership information didn’t upset them too much. But the fact that Auggie never
paid
to be on the network, not even on somebody else’s credit card—well, that really got their attention. All their old ideals about liberating information really bit the dust in a hurry.”

“How are they helping?”

“They’ve programmed their mainframe to record when Auggie logs on and off and generally keep track of his activities. He hasn’t shown up again yet, but when he does, they’ll be able to nail him.”

“Haven’t the police got some kind of electronics outfit?”

“The Computer Fraud Division, yeah.”

“So why do you need
me
to show you this stuff?”

“We can’t seem to get those jokers interested. So far, all we’ve got is some character committing penny-ante credit fraud, so they aren’t impressed. They like to tackle big league hackers—real headline stuff.”

“But this involves murder.”

“That’s what we told them. And they said, ‘Great. You’re the homicide dicks. Go for it.’”

“It must be fun working in a bureaucracy,” Marianne said as she completed the connections.

“Yeah, a real blast.”

Nolan was only telling her part of the truth, though. Pritchard and Maisie had arranged for Kim Pak, homicide’s computer whiz, to log on and wander around the game site invisibly. They called it “superuser privileges.” Kim was now showing other homicide guys—including Clayton—how to use Insomnimania. So Nolan didn’t actually
need
Marianne to teach him anything.

But Kim could only give a cop’s eye view of the game, and Nolan wanted a user’s eye view. He wanted to find out what it felt like really to
belong
to Insomnimania. Maybe Marianne could show him. Maybe she could give him some insight into this Auggie character—how his mind worked, what he was up to.

Nolan hadn’t told any of the other guys about this meeting, though—not even Clayton. He found himself wondering why, wondering whether he had some sort of underlying agenda here. Did he want more from this woman than he was admitting to himself?

He didn’t think so. He certainly didn’t
want
to think so. Marianne had proven helpful and sincere at every turn, and Nolan now felt a little embarrassed at having ever suspected her of anything like murder.

Marianne stood up and brushed her hands. “It’s ready to go,” she said. “Would you like a drink before we get started? Or are you on duty?”

As Marianne stood facing him, he couldn’t help but note again how fine she looked with her aristocratic features and simple but stylish wardrobe. She was wearing gray slacks and a gray cotton blouse, nothing formal. The first time he’d seen her at the scene of the G. K. Judson killing she had struck him as overdressed. Nolan couldn’t understand why women went in for all that fashion-page overkill. It usually backfired, making them look strained, uncomfortable, too preoccupied with
looking
beautiful just to
be
beautiful.

But tonight Marianne looked wonderful, and Nolan found himself slightly aroused. It surprised him a little. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t his type—not with her bone-thin frame and measured manner. She lacked what he regarded as a certain essential earthiness. But even so ...

“Well?” Marianne asked with an amused look.

“What?” Nolan blurted stupidly.

“Do you want a drink?”

“No. I’m on duty. Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Christ, Nolan, watch yourself. Better hope she just chalks it up to exhaustion.

Marianne pulled a chair up to the dresser and sat down in front of the computer. Nolan pulled up another chair and sat down beside her. Perhaps he was crowding her a little, but he had to get in fairly close to see the little screen.

Marianne switched on the computer and logged into Insomnimania, dropping a pair of tiny eyes labeled “l-fy” into an elaborate desktop maze. The eyes scurried up and down and back and forth through little corridors leading to various icons bearing room labels like Babbage Beach and the Speakers’ Corner. As the eyes scuttled about, Marianne rattled off random information about the network. Nolan took notes. He enjoyed listening to her talk. She knew how to do things, and she knew how to explain them to other people.

She told him everything that came to mind—all about menus, double-clicking, logging on or off, downloading.

“Why was your copy of the animation showing Renee’s murder incomplete?” Nolan asked.

“There’s a Snuff Room command that says ‘send me a copy,’” Marianne replied. “If you select that, a copy of the file is supposed to download to your computer. Somehow Auggie set it up so that the file that was available for downloading was different from the one actually running on the screen.” She thought for a moment. “I had never downloaded a snuff animation before, and it didn’t occur to me that it might be incomplete. I guess we get to depend on the computer doing exactly what we think it’s supposed to do.”

Nolan nodded and Marianne went on to other infoworld topics. She told him about networks in general—how some of them provided access to specialized business data while others mixed data and social exchange. A few were entirely pornographic, she said. Insomnimania was a little of everything, but almost purely recreational—a way for busy, sleepless people to count electronic sheep.

“Busy, sleepless
rich
people,” Nolan remarked dryly.

She shot him a slightly indignant look. “Are you calling me rich?” she asked.

“If you can afford this game, yeah.”

“By Santa Barbara standards, I’m barely middle class.”

“By L.A. standards, Santa Barbara
vagrants
are rich.”

Marianne brushed this observation aside and began to tell Nolan about Insomnimania’s rooms, alters, and the like. She told him that “1-fy” was an abbreviation for “Elfie”—her own alter.

At one point, Elfie’s eyes blinked.

“Are they supposed to do that?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s part of the program.”

“Pretty spooky.”

“It still startles me sometimes.”

“So do you think we might run into this Auggie character tonight?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll have to look around. There’s no central list to check like they’ve got on some other networks. We have to just poke around from room to room.”

“If we miss him, I guess Pritchard and Maisie will spot him,” Nolan added. “But if we do run into him, will I be able to tell if he’s some kind of nut?”

Marianne laughed. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “What if this were a costume party or a Mardi Gras? How many nuts would you expect to run into? When people put on a mask, all inhibitions go. But things get even crazier in this place. Here, you can change your appearance completely—and there’s no midnight unmasking. Nobody’s ever going to find out who you really are unless you decide to tell them. Most people don’t.”

“Where should we look first?” Nolan asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Ernie’s Bar. He spends a lot of time there.”

She hurried Elfie’s eyes to the “Ernie’s Bar” icon and checked “who?” A list of names followed by their abbreviations appeared on the screen:

Sudopod (sudo)

Taser (taz)

Jazz (jz)

Mon Oncle (mo)

There were twelve altogether.

“No Auggie,” remarked Nolan.

“Guess not.”

“Still, could we go inside for a look around?”

“Sure,” Marianne said. She double-clicked the room icon, and the view opened out into the old, western-style saloon replete with swinging doors, brass rails around the bar, and a wildly varied, semihuman clientele. A tinkly piano played over the computer’s tiny speaker. Nolan was astonished by the palpability of the scene, with its vivid color and shifting perspectives. The fact that the screen itself was only an inch or so thick made the effect even more amazing.

Elfie’s disembodied eyes floated around and through the bar. The customers’ conversations appeared in balloons above the scene. Nolan took note of one almost unreadable comment—apparently an insult.

jz>ure mthr sux grt grene donky dcks.

“What kind of writing is this?” Nolan asked.

“Shorthand, slang, playful oddness, what have you,” Marianne answered. “People here make up their own ways of saying things.”

“Can’t you just spell normally here?”

“Sure. But if your conversation doesn’t show some creativity, some—
style,
nobody’s likely to answer you. Also, it can help save space in word balloons.”

“How the hell is anybody supposed to read it?”

“It takes getting used to. Try reading it aloud.”

“‘Your mother sucks great green donkey dicks,’” Nolan heard himself say. Then he laughed. He had spoken the words, but it fleetingly seemed as if he had actually heard Jazz say them. Maybe his tiredness was playing tricks on him.

“You’re right,” he said. “It takes some getting used to.”

“What do you think this is?” Marianne asked, taking Nolan’s pad and pencil and jotting something down:

:)

Nolan looked at it sideways. “It’s a smiley face,” he said.

“Right.” Then Marianne quickly listed a whole set of shorthand facial expressions:

;/

:(

:0

:]

“I don’t see any of those on the screen,” Nolan observed.

“No. They’re more common in other networks. There’s not much call for them in a world of animated alters. Here, if you want your character to smile, you just give him a smile. If you want him to frown, you give him a frown.”

Elfie exited Ernie’s Bar and slipped through the corridors, checking the logs of one room after another in search of Auggie. Nolan was particularly intrigued by what appeared to be a cybernetic red-light district called the Pleasure Dome, but Elfie checked the list of occupants in a room called the Weightless Chamber and moved on without further exploration.

Eventually, Elfie wound up at the Casino del Camino. A new list of names appeared after Marianne selected “who?” Nolan began to read the names aloud.

“Twolip, Caligula, Rubberbarren, Hejhog, Loosy, Supersloth … No Auggie here, either. Still, do you mind if I have a peek?”

“Not at all.” She double-clicked Elfie again, and Elfie was inside the Casino del Camino—a gaudily lush Vegas-style gambling palace with classical columns and gold leaf everywhere. Elfie’s eyes floated through the outlying portion of the casino with its many rows of slot machines, then into the heavily carpeted, oval main room where multifarious clients were playing canasta, roulette, blackjack, and poker. Many of the customers were mutated-looking creatures, as
they had been back at Ernie’s Bar. But they all wore black bow ties. It seemed to be a house requirement. Cocktail waitresses wafted here and there, but they didn’t actually seem to be serving any drinks. Perhaps they were just for decoration.

Nolan burst out in a guffaw. “Hands against the wall, everybody!” he barked at the screen. “Play time’s over! This is the police!”

“Actually, I think it’s perfectly legal,” Marianne said, laughing. “Nobody’s playing for money. They’re just playing for time at the games. You’ve got to pay admission to play, but you can keep playing as long as you’ve still got chips. The chips aren’t worth anything except for more time at the tables.”

Nolan fleetingly remembered something Lieutenant Paul Spiroff had told him in Chicago about the murder of Miles Braxton. “He’d been playing canasta in some kind of virtual, online casino,” Spiroff had said—and also that no money was involved. Was Braxton playing at an Insomnimania casino? If so, might yet another murder be connected with Insomnimania?

But no, the idea seemed too dumb to consider. Braxton was killed in
Chicago,
after all, stretching the serial theory way too far. And lots of networks probably had casinos. Even so, Nolan made a mental note to find out if Braxton had ever belonged to Insomnimania.

For the moment, he intended to get into the spirit of Insomnimania. He rubbed his hands together. “Whaddya say we get into a game?” he asked.

Marianne gave him a startled look. The request seemed to have taken her completely by surprise.

“We can’t,” she said bluntly.

“Why not?”

“Elfie hasn’t got a body.”

“What’s that mean?”

“She’s just a pair of eyes. She can watch, but she can’t do active things like carry on conversations or play games.”

Nolan could hardly believe his ears.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is your computer broken or something?”

“No.

“What, then? Did Elfie have some terrible childhood disease?”

“I just never got around to making her a body.”

“I can’t believe this!” Nolan exclaimed crankily. “Here you go to all this time and expense to get on this big-time computer network, you learn its lingo, all its nooks and crannies—and you can’t do anything except watch! What’s with you, anyway? Are you some kind of kinky voyeur?”

Nolan could see Marianne’s face redden a bit—he couldn’t tell whether it was from anger or embarrassment. She clicked Elfie’s eyes out of the Casino del Camino back into the maze.

“What are you doing?” Nolan asked.

“We’re going to the Factory.”

“To do what?”

“To make Elfie a body,” she said with a defensive edge. “What do you think?”

Marianne clicked Elfie into the Factory, which displayed row upon row of variously shaped heads and bodies. Marianne picked a head for Elfie—one with a pointed chin and a wide brow. Then she moved her pointer across the selection of bodies, stopping at a short, chunky one.

“Nah,” Nolan snorted. “Make her taller.”

Marianne looked at him disapprovingly. “She’s an elf.”

“So what?”

“Elves are supposed to be little.”

“Yeah, but does she have to be
squat
like that? Besides, who says she has to look like all the other elves?”

Marianne sighed, struck a command that made the little body rubbery, and stretched it a little taller and thinner. Then she slapped the head on top of it. The basic body was sketched out now, but completely unadorned. Nolan watched raptly as Marianne used computer brushes and pens and textures to give Elfie more detail—green pants and a green jacket, curly-toed shoes, and large pointy ears that stuck out through a halo of yellow hair. The skill and speed with which Marianne operated the graphics tools astonished and delighted Nolan.

“There,” Marianne said when Elfie’s large, round eyes were in place. “That should do it.”

“Wait a minute. This Elfie’s supposed to be a ‘she,’ right?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“You hadn’t
thought
about it? It’s kind of an important question, isn’t it?”

“She’s androgynous, okay?”

“Did you ask her if she
wanted
to be androgynous? What if your parents had decided to make
you
androgynous? What would you have to say to that?”

Marianne crossed her arms. “Maybe you’d like to take over,” she said.

“No, no. You’re the computer expert. I bow to the higher authority.”

“No, let’s work this out. I don’t want you to walk into the Casino del Camino with an elf that embarrasses you. What do you want me to do to make her look feminine?”