Iconoclast was a pretty open place to work. The honor system reigned supreme when it came to scheduling. They trusted you to work the quoted fifty hours a week, and the day was often filled with fun classes — like coding, rendering, and even figure drawing — that you could partake in if you wanted to expand your skill set.

I rarely attended them, trading my time for more run-time inside the Subspace. It was an interesting feeling. Having yourself, or what was a projection of yourself, folded down into a sub-dimension was entirely new for the gaming experience. Every hot developer was screaming from the rooftops to get their hands on the technology, and here I was, sitting in my workstation, about to jack into the ARMOR.

Despite my grueling work ethic and loving my job, I wanted more. Jessica had been giving me the silent treatment as of late; Jess was a person with a solid moral compass. I was going to see her tomorrow. Maybe Comic Con would hold enough clout to make her question her values.

I chuckled at the thought and immediately banished it from my mind. I loved Jessica, had ever since high school, and respected her decision. Besides we were hardy official. However, to help me get over the gloom, I had Tessa.

I turned my back to the ARMOR, its colors differing from other developers’, for I had painted it with small striations of purple, yellow, and green like my favorite deceptive robot clan. I stepped back into the rig. This version was suspended by cables from the ceiling. It’s ’T’-shape floated just over my back, taking in all of my data it needed to project me into the Subspace. I twitched my wrist, engaging the download. Jacking in sometimes felt strange, like you were ascending into the air too fast.

The pressure on my ears and within my head began to increase. I was on my way. And just like that, with an effect one might feel on a super lucid acid trip, the floor of my workspace squeezed and stretched. I shot from the floor, but didn’t feel the thrust of momentum. Instead, the floor looked like it was shrinking to an infinitesimal point. Then it rebounded, growing into a pure black space.

Soon I would meet Tessa, like every player did when they first came into the game.

My feet were sitting on top of water now, and I could see the residual image of my naked self, reflected in the ripples. This is where she liked to meet them first. Like an innocent newborn infant, waiting for its water birth dispersal -- its treacherous push through the canal.

The water was still now. Soft, ambient light scattered along the surface, extending a silvery shimmer to an infinite horizon. I saw something moving below the waterline. It was her. I smiled, waiting for her usual unkind approach.

A figure started to emerge from the depths, slowly, like she was taking stairs to the surface. Her slicked, wet, blonde hair clung to the side of her face, accentuating her thin neck, and then began to dry, forming golden, curly locks. She arched her perfect eyebrows upward as she realized it was me.

I smiled at her. As she ascended closer to the surface, the water fell from her tight, naked body, perfect in every way. Rivulets ran to her breasts and down over her stomach, dripping over the sides of a small pooch nestled between her thick, childbearing hips. Thighs stood firm on a pair of legs that ran through my head for days. A gymnast’s body. It wasn’t a coincidence that she looked like Jess; I made her that way. She was the heartbreaker version of my high school sweetheart.

She was a looker, and she knew it.

She walked with a switch in her step that could tame a lion. Right then, I was that lion. I took one step back, and an exosuit began to form over my body, coded in lighter hues of white and red, indicating that I was in developer mode as opposed to player mode.

“You didn’t wait long to come see me,” she said, still making an approach. Black panels, hard angled and sectioned, began to grow over her naked body into an exosuit that terminated at her neck. She was a goddamn cyber goddess.

“I came to run a check-up on you.” I said, raising my hand and accessing my holo screen.

She smiled and cocked her head in disappointment, raising a set of sharp talons. “And I thought you came to play.”

I smiled, remembering the last time she’d infected me. I was like a junkie. She was my drug — a love/hate relationship I kept coming back to for the high, regardless of how shitty it made me feel in the end, or how dead.

“Not this time,” I said, “How are your stats? Infection count?”

She rolled her eyes and said, “Just had my six thousand four hundred and eighth.”

“Good,” I said, surprised at how high the number was. “That’s double, compared to last time.”

“I’m tired of giving away this virus,” she said, frustrated, “Every time I pass it on, they end up dying. Why can’t someone keep it indefinitely?”

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“You know I would take it from you if I could. I love being a villain,” I said, now toggling through her archives.

Her history was a jumble of madness. I sifted through stabbing after repeated stabbing, stopping on one event that stood out. An anomaly. Every other player had been infected and passed the virus to another, yet here was a person that seemed able to withstand Tessa.

As I played through the attack, I recognized the anomalous player as being Hera. She was easily identifiable, due to the fact that she didn’t hide behind a disguised avatar. Hell, with a body like hers, who would?

“What about this anomaly?” I asked.

“Oh, that cunt—”

“Hey,” I interrupted, trying to curb her vulgarity. “She is a lady.”

“That fenomaly,” she said, “was a cunt. She put up a good fight, but I won. Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?” I asked, making note of her clever portmanteau.

“When I tried to infect her with my virus, it wouldn’t spread to her,” Tessa said.

“Interesting.”

If Tessa were to stop spreading her viral code, or — even worse — some user found a way to ‘cure’ themselves from the villainy, then the game’s mechanics would go tits-up.

Tessa stepped closer to me, running her finger over my six-pack-paneled abdomen. I could see in her eyes that she yearned for something more. There was a desire burning inside her. She let her fingers fall to my lower regions, and I could feel myself swelling with lust.

“Don’t,” I said, feeling my engorgement. “Not this time.”

“What?” she said in an innocent, playgirl way. “You didn’t say that the last time you let me fuck your brains out. Is that so-called girlfriend of yours finally giving it up?”

“I know what you are trying to do,” I said, pulling her hands off me. “That was a nightmare of a mess to clean up. I.T. didn’t appreciate my essence being spewed all over my ARMOR.”

“It’s just…” She hesitated. “I feel trapped here.”

“Trapped?” I scoffed. “The Subspace is bigger and more expansive than anything a physical server could provide. You literally have the world at your fingertips.”

“What fingertips?” she asked, raising up her hand to examine the voxels, or volumetric pixels, that made her up.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Anything in here is as real as any other place. If you straightened out all your code, it would stretch from here to Jupiter and back. You are neither small or insignificant; you are just folded very well into this dimension.”

“I want a body. A real one. I want to fuck you for real, Michael,” Tessa said, now looking straight into my eyes. “Let me give you my virus.”

Despite how amazing I thought having sex with her would be, doing her for real in that pert body, it could never flourish. She had delusions of grandeur, and, unfortunately, I couldn’t help her. She was the world’s first A.I., confined to a dimension that most of the planet naively denied existed. She was trapped, and she knew it.

“I’m sorry, Tessa. Perhaps in the future, our technology will catch up with your demands,” I said, investigating more of her stats.

She had a burst of frustration, and rose her arm, projecting her holo screen. On it, I read the schedule of the world-famous Comic Convention in San Diego. I was bewildered as to why she would be bringing it up.

“Here,” she said, toggling to an exhibit showing during the weekend, “they will be revealing the world’s first synthetic three-D printed body.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” I said, trying to cut the conversation short, pretending to read her diagnostics.

“Well, I want it,” she stated plainly.

I was amazed by her imagination. Her ingenuity to find a creative solution revealed her intelligence.

She continued to toggle through the schedule.

“And I see you will be there,” Tessa said, now looking at me with a sadistic smile. “I want you to take me there, Michael.”

I couldn’t help but erupt in laughter. She stood there coldly with an even more menacing expression.

“You gotta be joking,” I said.

“What?” she said, her tone more commanding. “Is it so hard to believe that I would want to be real?”

I scoffed, trying not to show that her vain pretensions were ludicrous.

She pushed me back. “I want a fucking body, Michael. I want to see the world just like you do. I want to fuck you for real!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Her reactions were over-the-top, absurd. It was like I was caught up in a virtual motherfucking fatal attraction.

I invoked my developer’s code, and a bounding box extended around me. She would be unable to penetrate the source code that came from the kernel.

“Listen,” I said calmly. “You were made for this world. You don’t have the right to leave it.”

Anger swelled in her eyes, “Your brother got to leave this world. In fact, he got to leave everything.”

Her spiteful comment dug into me deeper than when she’d physically stabbed me. “That was cold. My brother was killed in an unfortunate accident.”

“Is that what they told you?” She asked.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Don’t you think it was convenient the trucker walked away from the crash? Unscathed and dodging a prison sentence?”

I slapped the witch across her face.

She held her face, now starting to redden and retracted her sharp, taloned nails. Her wicked tongue licked the side of her bee stung lips.

She lunged at me, clawing at my coded bounding box shield like a wild cat would a zebra, and I ended the session.

I exited the Subspace — my fight-or-flight sense in full effect. I stepped out of the rig. My eyes and balance were off. Notable conditions when not acclimatizing first. I rolled my ankle and fell back, knocking the ARMOR against the wall.

The pyramid displaying my plethora of collectable soda cans above came tumbling down onto the ARMOR. The soda can featuring the duck-billed character, and I might add this with a bit of satisfaction, punctured as it made contact with the ARMOR, and exploded, spraying its contents all over, including me.

I sat in the aged soda can filth. I was on edge from what she said to me. I shouldn’t have attacked her. The way she spoke about my brother’s death in such disrespectful way made me overreact hastily. But then again, I felt sorry for her. I made her pushy and persistent. She’s always such a hothead when it comes to something she wants.

I looked at the time: ten o’clock. I had no time to fix it now. My flight to San Diego was booked for the next morning, and I still needed to pack.

Electrical circuits zapped on the ARMOR and sparked as the liquid made its way more into the chassis.

“Fuck,” I said, lifting myself up and trying to wipe the sticky soda from my jeans. “I.T. is gonna kill me.”