Cables and switch boxes lay strewn across Clay's workbench like the aftermath of a storm.

Clay had teased out every bit of the feedback going into the Everhome headset and redirected it. Tinny speakers handled the symphonic music of Everhome's login screen. She tested the video splitter by setting the basic Everhome output to go through one monitor, and the PERSEUS-only visual info through another flatscreen she'd had Vonzell bring out from the back room. A half-dozen cables went to individual boxes handling the brain stimulation electrodes of the visor, set aside for now.

She had an old keyboard and pointer set up, too. This she used to select the Everhome base world as her destination. Svetlana stood in a grove, one hand on a hip, the other resting on the pommel of her sword. Clay pressed the "Begin the Adventure!" button. Svetlana whooshed through a tunnel of blackness before arriving back in the starting village.

The second monitor showed a complex world in simple white lines on a black background. Svetlana stood as a stick figure with little balls as joints. Little clusters of numbers and code covered parts of her figure like swatches of fabric. The tavern was rendered in similar stark lines, like a child's drawing come to life. The stick-figure innkeeper did busy work behind the ruler-straight lines that defined the bar. Inside a box was a small area, a volume in simple 3D with pointed "flames" at the top that had the notation "fire" inside it with some associated code-markers.

Clay hunched over the keyboard and tapped in her old backdoor PERSEUS access command. Nothing seemed to change on the Svetlana game screen, but a little text-only shell window popped onto the PERSEUS monitor. Clay tried out the "transport" command. She went nowhere, instead looking at an error message saying, "Non-avatar debug mode disabled."

"The hell?" Clay said. She moved Svetlana around a few steps with the pointer and tried the transport command again with the same result.

Clay logged out of Everhome and looked through her old professional contacts. She had contact info for Percy, with whom she'd worked during the DARPA days. He was still working doing system coding for government contractors, probably in the defense industry as she could find out nothing about his current employer. Hardly a surprise in the years since the Corporate Personhood Privacy Act. She reached out to him with a quick message and waited for a reply.

The PERSEUS program was the "bones of the world," as X had called it. It was a wireframe construct that could be fed geographical, climatic, and even geological data of any place on earth. It would create a skeleton over which could be laid the skin of that area's physical appearance in VR. For the Tai-shan simulator for DARPA, that skin was satellite and aerial imagery of a large part of China.

The aim was to construct a faithful recreation of what American troops might, hypothetically of course, encounter were they ever to put boots on the ground in China. They didn't bother with most of the western provinces, knowing that the powers-that-be didn't want another Central Asian quagmire. Percy had snuck in an Easter egg, a sign in English on the border of Xinjiang province that said, "If you can read this, you've invaded too far."

Was Everhome based in part on the Tai-shan sim? A fantasy world roughly the size of the fourth-largest country on the planet would take some time to explore, Clay reflected. She admitted she was curious about Everhome. It'd been decades since she'd been bitten by the online gaming bug. She got disgusted by the gold rush surrounding VRMMORPGs, which ultimately and predictably degenerated into corporate branded mini-worlds that anyone could visit by sticking their phone in a cardboard box strapped to their head.

PERSEUS was miles ahead, pulling together talented coders and people from not just the gaming industry but from the fossil-fuel industry, whose engineers were specialists in simulating what was beneath the earth, and geographic information service professionals, who were experts in describing what lay above it. They brought in climatologists and meteorologists. It seemed at the time that X, the overall project manager, was "overbuilding" PERSEUS. Clay realized now that this had been part of his end game.

Xenophon Kaminides, she had learned at great personal cost, had an ulterior motive underlying everything he did. He had planned from the beginning to wrest PERSEUS away from the clutching grasp of US government intellectual property contracts. And he had designed PERSEUS to simulate not just China, but anyplace on earth. Or not on Earth, as the case may be. She wondered if this was where X's ambitions ended. She hoped so, but had the uneasy feeling it was not.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Clay got a message from Percy, whom many of the women on the team called "Pervy" among themselves. He had, without Xen's knowledge, created a small-scale PERSEUS project and made it into a hedonistic, anything-goes life simulation with a strong emphasis on forbidden pleasures. It was invite-only, to keep it under Xen's (and DARPA's) radar; Clay had received an invite, and spent a brief time in-world before deciding it made her too uncomfortable. She had kept Percy's secret, though, initially just out of spite for Xen as their relationship--along with the Tai-shan project--began to crumble.

She made a voice call to Percy. After some basic pleasantries, Clay got straight to the point. "Percy, Xen has created a game world built on PERSEUS and he's up to something dodgy. I have some documentation, but what I really need is a complete dev kit."

Percy whistled. "That's a tall order, Clay. I knew about the game and the end-run he did around DARPA's claim on the intellectual property--but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with giving you access to the root of his game system, something that the government still kind of owns."

"I see. You don't know what my intentions are, so you assume they're malevolent."

"Well, not so much that--"

"Did Xen ever find out about your little sex-world, Percy? Did DARPA?"

There was a long silence. Finally Clay said, "Percy."

"Yeah, I'm here," Percy said. "I just... I mean, wow, Clay. Is this how the government trained you to squeeze intelligence 'assets'? I never thought you'd hold something over my head like this."

"Percy, I wouldn't. But I've spent too much time over the years bringing men around to my way of thinking. This is an emergency, and I'm in too damned big of a hurry to be nice."

"Okay." Percy paused a long moment. "And once I've given you what you want--Xen never hears about my sim, right? I'm a little nervous trusting you on that now."

Clay sighed. "Relax, Percy. I'm sorry to strongarm you. But this is important."

In a slightly quieter voice, Percy said, "Well, my project is important to me, too. I'd be happy if we could both just live and let live once you have what you want."

Clay frowned. "All right, Percy. If that's the way you'd like it. And... I'm sorry." Losing a friend was such a long-ago, now unfamiliar feeling that it felt almost novel before the throb of heartache began.

She had the complete sim-development system within five minutes.

Clay studied well into the evening, then logged back in to where Svetlana was standing around in the tavern. Her reader beside her for reference, she focused on the PERSEUS shell in its little black-and-white world. She ran the "avatar.create" command. A new stick-person skeleton bloomed into existence behind that of Svetlana. She looked over to the Everhome monitor. Nothing. She flipped back and forth in the reader and pulled up information pages within the console. She typed "dual.presence=true."

A ghostly form began to take shape behind Svetlana in Everhome. A slow smile spread across Clay's face.

A banging came from the front door of the house. Moments later, Vonzell came into the workroom. "It's JohnnyLaw outside! Miss Clay, you know I can't talk to them," they said.

Clay made an annoyed noise and walked her slow way to the front door, picking up her knitting bag on the way. She opened the door to see a pair of armed men in heavy black uniforms and gear, jet-black visors covering their faces. "Yes?" she asked.

"Claybelle Pritchard?" the one on the right asked.

"Yes, that's me."

"Claybelle Pritchard, we have received a complaint of trespass against you. We are here to declare the complaint and log your response."

She knew damn well who sent the private police force after her: X, upset that she'd peeled back the respectable veneer of his operation. JohnnyLaw was foremost among rent-a-cop firms the well-off sicced on the powerless. They were professional harassers.

Clay held up a finger for them to wait as she rummaged in her knitting bag for her pocketbook, opened it and fished out a real paper business card. She handed it to the JohnnyLaw agent.

"That's my lawyer," she said. "Go to hell." She closed the door.