Being harassed by pseudo-police did not please Clay one bit. "Vonzell. We're going to the Copper House, and we're doing it now."

"Yes, Miss Clay. My cousins are out, but they might not have left the place tidy."

"'Tidy' doesn't matter. Call some movers and get everything we talked about sent over there. Make sure they come for the computer equipment last; I was interrupted in the middle of something."

"Yes, Miss Clay."

While Vonzell directed the movers, Clay logged in as Svetlana. She opened the PERSEUS shell window and ran an inquiry into the physical "skin" of the character. She got a readout of "race.human;gender.true.female;markings.false" and a number of hexadecimal codes representing her physical appearance down to fine detail; not just hairstyle and hair and skin color, but facial and body features, even bone structure. She looked at the animations available to her and even the speech presets. Clay's mind whirled a little bit, recalling the complicated nature of these games, but she was excited in a way she had not been in a very, very long time.

It was time to make something, to build something that was hers.

She believed she could get away with leaving elements in the system with ownership exclusive to her. X the Ex did everything the most ruthlessly efficient way possible, and that meant distributed teams, one-off collaborations to pursue certain coding and design elements. Freelancers all, they would never meet face to face at an office Christmas party. Did people even have office Christmas parties anymore? she wondered. Or any office parties? Or even offices?

With a team as large as Everhome needed, it'd be hard for someone to keep track of who created what assets. Clay was sure that a character, controlled by her part of the time and acting as an NPC at other times, would not raise too many suspicions. She was likewise confident she could craft some tiny corner of the game world to her liking without anyone knowing.

So, then: to create her own special persona in the world. It was going to have to look like a duck, and quack like a duck, but with her knowledge of the underlying code Clay could make sure it had some profoundly un-ducklike abilities. To any gamemaster staff, it had to look like a possible character; to players, it needed to stand apart as someone special.

Svetlana was, Clay admitted, not the right tool for this job. Her virtual emissary had to be tall, and possessed of an impressive physique. It also, she thought with a combination of sadness, resignation and anger, probably needed to be male to convey authority. So much has changed, yet so little has changed, she thought. The voice, which had stock phrases but also modulated the user's input based on subvocalization, needed to be deep and resonant. How to explain his not being able to see the Everhome "skin" over the PERSEUS reality engine? Well, by his inability to see anything at all, she thought.

She figured he needed a mystical-sounding name. Something very slightly Asian-sounding but still fantastical. She settled on Khorun. Khorun, the Blind Monk: it had a ring to it.

Clay set out to create a new "real" character in Everhome with all these parts so that she could check how it looked as she created it. When she tried, Spryt the helper-spirit said, "At first, you can have only one avatar in a given world. Would you like to create one elsewhere?" Everhome pulled back sharply and around it was a solar system of different game worlds, with the fantasy world at its center. Clay peered at the nearest ones. A science fiction world, one full of occult noir, a dieselpunk mecha... one verdant globe labeled Jade Kingdom caught her eye.

She selected Jade Kingdom. The viewpoint swooped down to the character screen. She clicked the "Call forth a hero!" button. A kindly looking old woman in a silk robe appeared, ready to be customized. Clay watched as a stick-and-ball skeleton materialized on the PERSEUS screen.

Clay looked closely at the cluster of words and numbers describing the new character. She changed the character on the creation screen and noted what changed in the PERSEUS info. Seeing where the code and model intersected, she began to play with some of the hex codes in PERSEUS and observed how that changed the character's appearance.

She found she could even enter values beyond what Jade Kingdom usually allowed. Distinctive as it might be in Jade Kingdom, she wouldn't need the blue skin of someone from Everhome's superhero or science fiction games. Leave his ears uncovered, she thought. Let people figure he could "hear" things that he otherwise wouldn't be able to see. She hunted around and found what she was looking for in an asset library meant for Tai-shan: a blindfold that didn't cover the ears. She played around with the values for the ears and made Khorun's very slightly tapered. That would make him look like a slightly eerie human. Or a Vulcan, Clay thought. A touch of fae blood? Ye gods, here she was constructing backstory like she was still in college playing games--but she was smiling.

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Khorun the Blind Monk was ready to take his first steps into the Jade Kingdom. That had to wait, though, as the movers were ready to take her equipment.

Clay quickly saved the settings on Khorun in PERSEUS and set the Jade Kingdom character back to its defaults. She considered the old lady character for a moment, then gave her black hair and an emerald green robe. She made the character a trader and named her Madam Greensmoke, after a friend's contraband-dealing character in a long-ago play-by-post game.

The movers took a mostly-unused bed-chair; IV stand, bags, and tubing; electronics and microcomputing tools; and a good share of Clay's computing equipment, including the computer she needed to run Spike. Clay took along her knitting bag and a small go-bag; Vonzell brought their own clothing and food, as well as Clay's medications.

The Copper House was special. It was an old, unassuming two-bedroom bungalow on what once was the edge of town. Serendipity had placed it very close to the copper wire infrastructure used first for phones and then for data. It was outfitted for fiber optic as well, but copper proved to continue to have its uses. Clay had made some improvements to the line to the house over the years, most of which were legal. The solar array would provide a sufficient amount of extra power for her equipment.

As they drove over in a car, Vonzell said, "You're actually happy about all this."

Clay felt the smile on her face and reined it in. "About feeling I needed to go to ground and fight a digital guerrilla war? No. But I've been away from gaming for a very long time. And the whole situation is... exciting."

"All right, Miss Clay, you don't have to admit you're happy. Whatever you are, I'm glad you're it." Vonzell sat back and settled into themself.

Clay thought about the vector graphics of PERSEUS and wondered how much that was responsible for her nostalgia. She was already supposedly a grown woman by the time video game mania hit in the '80s, but she couldn't resist the siren call of the arcades. Space Wars, Death Race, hell, even Pong she played once just to say she had. The frenetic action of Ripoff and the speeding roadside posts of Night Driver. And that football game the boys played, the one with Xs and Os and used giant trackballs that threatened to pinch your skin if you weren't careful. Later came Battlezone and Red Baron, with their worlds drawn in lines of green and blue, respectively. She referred to that time as her "misspent adulthood."

In the Copper House, she set up the computing basics as Vonzell looked to the medical equipment. The two monitors and her keyboard and pointer were easy enough to get going, and Clay logged into Everhome and chose Jade Kingdom as her world.

Madam Greensmoke entered a smoky haze that when it cleared resolved into a small teahouse. Clay tried using the pointer and keyboard to move around; it was slow and clumsy. She switched control over to the PERSEUS rig, and invoked Khorun. He formed from nothingness behind the old lady avatar. Clay used the old-fashioned control system to move the mannequin that was Khorun through the lines that sketched the teahouse. He went outside, and Clay saw notations indicating the weather, visibility conditions, and even the variety of grass beyond the teahouse.

Khorun strolled through the grass for a bit, then stepped onto what Clay thought was a path. The viewpoint lurched and Khorun fell. He bobbed up slightly and the viewpoint began to recede on its own. Water? Oh, hell. There had to be swimming commands. Clay tried what seemed most obvious; Khorun splashed around a bit, not making headway against the current, but not submerging and drowning, either. Off to the right a little opening appeared. Clay guided Khorun to that. The water level dropped off sharply and Khorun could walk, but the perspective showed a mostly black screen. A code indicator described the darkness with a light level number, "source=natural," and "magic.missile=false."

A little bundle of code approached Khorun along the floor. Clay leaned forward and read the markers. River turtle. Aggressive. Oh, hell. She brought up the shell window and typed "setpower.level=50." A message came up saying, "setpower disabled." She tried it with different level variables and even without; no good. Meanwhile, the turtle was right at Khorun's feet and a separate info-cluster came up for the combat. Khorun was hit. His automatic dodge and his armor were factored in and them applied against the turtle's weak attack and the random number generator.

"Come on," she said. She tried using the pointer and then the keyboard to target the turtle. She realized she still had the shell window open and closed it as the turtle took another chunk out of Khorun's foot and his hit points, appearing in larger figures on the screen, went down. She tried again and had no success. The turtle made another attack and missed.

Finally Clay decided to retreat to the river and then to safety. She could take a break to go through more of the documentation, which obviously didn't contain some of the changes made to the Everhome implementation of Perseus.

The viewpoint teetered, then went up sideways and stopped. The turtle had hit Khorun again and his hit points were gone. Clay pulled the point of view back slightly, and there lay Khorun, a limp bundle of sticks and balls.

"Well, fuck," Clay said.