sent, so it was a badge of honor in some circles just to have produced a piece of information worth payment.
I had a dozen messages and nearly all of them pertained to the attack on me or Ferdinand’s disappearance. I started with the messages about Ferdinand. The first two messages were from unknown contacts and didn’t offer anything I didn’t already know. The third message was from someone I’d worked with before. It hinted about Ferdinand’s dinner with Evelyn, which wasn’t public info as far as I knew. I sent them a small payment and a request for more info. They probably didn’t know anything more than I did, but double-checking was worth the expense.
None of the other messages about Ferdinand were useful, so I moved on to the messages about the attack on me. Only one message seemed like it might be useful. The sender claimed to have information about the shooter. The contact was one of my regulars, so I went ahead and made the good-faith payment and requested more information.
I posted an oblique request for information about House von Hasenberg and House Rockhurst on a couple of the boards buried deep in the underbelly of the respectable Internet. Making a semipublic request meant I would get a lot of spurious messages, but it also meant anyone with real knowledge would know I was looking.
Unfortunately, my usual passive information gathering hadn’t turned up any useful information, at least not yet, so I had to switch to active looking. The risk was higher, but so was the potential reward.
I refreshed my security protections, then stood and pressed a switch on my desk. The lights in the room died and the walls disappeared. welcome to hive hovered in front of me, formed by one of the projectors in the room. Below the text, a red virtual connect button glowed softly.
I passed my hand through the button and held for a count of five. It was a safety measure to ensure I didn’t connect accidentally. The button winked out, replaced by a bustling projected street in a gleaming virtual city. I rested my fingers on top of my desk as I waited for the initial vertigo to dissipate.
HIVE stood for High Impact Virtual Environment, though few remembered the name was actually an acronym. It was the largest virtual reality zone in the ’verse, and one of a handful of communication protocols allowed to use the FTL communication network. Every few years another new zone popped up to try to derail HIVE’s dominance, but so far, none had succeeded, in part because HIVE was backed by the three High Houses.
On the low end, users could enter HIVE with just a set of cheap smart glasses. At the other extreme, some users had dedicated rooms with treadmill floors and force suits that made interacting with the virtual world feel real. Originally designed as a game, HIVE was now used for everything from business to pleasure, though both the Consortium and the syndicates tended to eschew it for more traditional face-to-face meetings—there were fewer hidden eyes in the real world, after all.
Although the Consortium rarely conducted internal business in HIVE, they still wanted everyone to know that the zone flourished because of their benevolence. Each High House owned a prime block of the main street where entering users landed. Users could bank with the Houses, shop for virtual items like synthesizer recipes, or deal with various administrative issues like taxes and fines.
To my left, House von Hasenberg’s stone-and-crystal skyscraper defied physics but made for a pretty building. On my main account, I “owned” an entire floor of that building. I used it for the occasional long-distance meeting, but I, too, preferred face-to-face appointments.
Today I was logged in as Fenix, one of my anonymous accounts. This avatar was a tall, busty redhead with matching red cat ears, wearing a black corset and black leather pants, complete with a high, giggly voice. Everyone assumed I was a man in real life, an assumption I protested too loudly and too often.
Avatars had to be approximately human-sized but were otherwise only limited by the user’s imagination, so all manner of creatures inhabited HIVE. A blue mermaid wearing a sparkly silver bikini top swam by, despite the fact that we were nowhere near water. Realism was optional in HIVE, and users competed to have the most interesting and unique avatars.
“HIVE,” I said, “transport to Nadia’s bar.”
“Transporting to saved location 172b.217r6.2a2w,” a female computer voice responded. The projection flickered then