“You really like wearing those fatigue things,” Meg said to me smiling.

“They’re comfortable for backcountry stuff. They don’t really call them that anymore, you know,” I replied, grinning back.

The Warthog hummed along as we cruised down the dry wash going about 55 KMH. The big utility vehicle’s suspension easily handled the bumps but the ride was still far from smooth. I was happy for the seatbelt.

“Then what do they call them?” my wife teased over the wind noise.

“Clothes,” I grinned back.

“Oh bullshit, ever since you got to play commando and rescue the fair maiden you’ve worn them whenever we go on a tour.”

“Hardly a maiden” I shot back and instantly regretted it.

I meant it jokingly but after a second’s reflection the quip was in poor taste considering what she had been through. Meg had been the bait in our scheme to get rid of an individual who was an existential threat to our world, and as such had suffered pretty intensely before I had been able to get a clear shot at the bastard and end him.

You see, we’re dead.

We live inside a digital simulation that we refer to as Afterlife. Afterlife started as an experiment; could you digitalize memories and personality and recreate a person in a digital environment. It worked quite well actually, but every Eden has it’s serpent and ours was unbridled capitalism in the form of an investor who used Afterlife to play Marquis de Sade.

Afterlife was funded by and then taken over by his entertainment conglomerate who turned it into a virtual playground for the wealthy and the digitalized ‘people’ inside, the Echoes, became as close to slaves as one can get without the chains – and in some of the kinkier parts of Afterlife (now marketed as ‘Paradise’) the chains were de rigueur.

That’s how I got here, but first, I got old and died. I wasn’t supposed to be uploaded. In life, I spent a good amount of time working for the Government doing things that needed doing but on the quiet. One of the creators of the original Afterlife, Ani, made some highly illegal changes to my records and I wound up uploaded, where I was reunited with my wife, Meg, who was one of the first Echoes to successfully make it into Afterlife.

Ani had a plan to get rid of the Head Serpent in the Garden, a guy named Ian, and she needed me (and a few friends) to do it. Well, to paraphrase the old song, I got by with a little help from my friends and, suffice it to say, things have changed now that we’re under new management.

Paradise is now open to anyone who has the money to come visit, and there’re packages for most budgets if you really want to do it (we call the tourists ‘meats’). The big difference is that the Echoes can choose to participate and how they participate or not. We don’t really have ‘money’ here, but we know that our little world requires Meat World money to exist – someone has to pay for the server space – so most of us are happy to be involved. Anyone who wants to become an Echo does sign a contract that they’ll do a specified amount of tourist work to pay off their upload (and while the chains are still there, there’s no enforced sex-work or murder porn like the bad old days. Anyone working those scenes are there because they want to be), but that’s it. If you want to quit after you’ve paid your entry fee off, you can and you can ‘live’ a nice, quiet life. If you want to continue though, you get perks.

Some of the adventures are fun in and of themselves (actually most are), think about your day job as living Treasure Island, or The Prisoner of Zenda. Beats sitting at a desk all to hell and you get to ‘upgrade’ your living arrangements. Meg and I live on a mega-yacht, our business partners have a cliff-side mansion that would do a Bond villain proud.

Yes, we have a business. Fiddler’s Green Adventure Tours, specializing in lost cities, dungeon crawls, Yeti encounters and dinosaur hunting. Our partners are Tom, and his wife, Ani (yes that Ani). Of course our silent partner is Alexander.

Alexander is the sentient AI that runs Afterlife, or Paradise, or whatever you want to call it. We don’t have a government, per se. There are few enough Echoes that direct democracy works for most issues, like a big New England town meeting, but Alexander handles the day-to-day administration of our world. He’s City Hall. Occasionally we do jobs for him, which brings us back to the present moment.

Happily she wasn’t offended, she laughed.

“Why anyone would want to do a ‘virgin’ is beyond me anyway. I’d think you would prefer someone who knew what they were doing,” she said.

“Hey, my preference is you, period.”

It was the right thing to say judging from her expression.

“How close are we?” she asked.

“We’re coming up on the grid coordinates Alexander gave us,” I replied. “Over that rise up ahead.”

“Looks steep, can this thing climb it?”

“In a pinch, but let’s hoof it. I want to approach this quietly anyway,” I said.

I parked the Hog at the bottom of the ridge and killed the engine. We got out and I watched Meg stretch and rub her butt. She caught me looking.

“What? That was a bumpy ride!”

“I’m just enjoying the view,” I replied. “You look good in those jeans,”

She did. She had on what I call her Indian Jones outfit. Her preferred backcountry wear is jeans and an old leather jacket.

“And THAT is why I don’t wear those army things you like,” she replied. “They make my ass look flat.”

“That would be a crime,” I agreed, pulling my HK417 rifle out of the Hog and chambering a round.

“You think we’re going to need that?” she asked me.

“I’d rather have it and not need it than…”

“Point,” she agreed.

She buckled on a gunbelt with her M17 pistol.

I can hear you asking, do you really need guns in a computer simulation? It’s not real. Well, for us it is real and for anything or anyone in this simulation it is ‘real’.

Part of the outcome of our little revolution was an agreement that stabilized the ‘rules’ of Afterlife. I mean, we did kill a user. If we wanted Meats to continue to visit, we had to make some guarantees for their safety. We agreed to and published the parameters the Sim runs under. The basic ‘laws of nature’ for Afterlife/Paradise. While in the Sim itself, everyone and everything is subject to them. If I shoot you here, you ‘die’. Now if you’re a meat, you respawn back at your hotel. If you’re an Echo you respawn at your house, and if you’re part of the Sim itself – ie a true computer generated character, you die, until Alexander uses you someplace else.

So what did we expect to run into? There’s the billion dollar question. We didn’t know.

“I need your help,” Alexander had told us earlier that day.

“What’s up Amigo?” I asked. “Want a coffee?”

“No thank you,” Alexander’s avatar responded politely. When he’s interacting with us for any length of time, he assumes the form of a middle-aged human male. At first his avatar was stiff, robotic, but as time went on, he’s become more and more human-like in appearance and interaction. He is a sentient AI, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. I take it as a good sign that he wants us to be more comfortable with him. You want to be on good terms with the being that controls your universe.

“How can we help?” Meg asked.

“I need you to go here,” he said, manifesting a map, “and tell me what you see.”

The location was pretty much in the back-of-the-beyond of the Sim. Desert country, at the far end of where we take the Meats dino hunting.

“What are we looking for?” I asked him.

“That’s the question. I have no idea. I know something is there, but I can’t see or sense it other than there is something in the Sim that shouldn’t be there.”

“Well fuuuuuuck” I drawled. “Have you run this by Ani?”

Ani, as I said, had been one of the lead programmers for Alexander and the Sim before she died and became an Echo. She’s sort of our local techie high priestess.

“She’s mystified. She and Tom are leading a party of Meats on a dungeon crawl – bachelor party weekend - or I’d send them.”

“We’ll go,” Meg said.

“I’ll ensure that none of the NPCs bother you but please be careful,” Alexander cautioned. “I’m not sure what we’re dealing with.”

Well, we were here to find that out.

“Keep alert babe,” I said as we trudged up the ridge.

“I keep one right in my pocket,” she replied.

I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“A Lert. It’s cute too.”

I shook my head.

“You walked into that one mister.”

We crested the ridge.

“What the fuck?”