Three Times Relative - Feedback please

[n2so4]

I came up with the idea for this short story this morning as I ate breakfast. It's the tale of a programmer who exists in a purely digital format after his body is killed by a virus and his program slowly starts falling apart, trying to track down his killer.
I'd like some feedback on it!

It was around midnight Earth Standard Time when my body died, thrashing and foaming in the SI tank as an illegal geno-virus ripped it apart from within. The virus attacked cell-walls, dissolving tissue into soup and filling my lungs with fluid. My skin blistered and dissolved. It was an unpleasant way to die.
Luckily for me, when this happened I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks on my backup brain from a private domain within the simulated world of Neoclade.

Not many people keep backup bodies anymore; the whole practice is seen as a bit antiquated, a legacy of the unstable years during the Unification War when EW attacks were commonplace and a member of the digital world couldn’t guarantee a run wouldn’t result in an attack program tailing you home and frying your brain before you could disconnect from the Grid. But old habits die hard, and I’m among the first people to admit that I’m also a left over from the Wars.

Still, I kept the fact that I maintain a backup secret, and that night I was thankful of that fact, as the strobing red sigils of the contamination alarms appeared out of the air around me, flashing up details of the last few seconds of my original body’s life.

I stared numbly at the report panel for a second or two before swearing and quickly disconnecting myself from the few subsystems I was still running out of my dying body’s processors. I started a virus check running and told my personal daemon to cut all traffic from my backup tank to any high-level systems, going to silent running.
I watched the sweeping graphic of the virus checker as it picked through the files that were my mind. Seconds ticked by and I paced the length of the simulated maintenance bay that I had loaded to work on my backup in.

I had programmed the domain to appear as a long, low-ceilinged room with brushed steel walls and grillwork flooring. Cold simulated air blew gently in from somewhere overhead, carrying the faint scent of ozone and engine grease, and the whole area was lit by non-directional luminescence that approximated gentle summer sunshine. The avatar representing my backup body hung in the air at the centre of the room, spread open like an autopsy.

“Marginal contamination detected.” the cool female voice of the checker daemon announced. “Systems compromised. Performance impaired. Pattern corruption detected. Sections quarantined. Repair failed. Seek medical attention immediately.”

I swore again and strode over to view the results myself. There, in flashing red decals, the program confirmed my fears; the attack on my body had been double-pronged; a geno-virus to kill my physical form and a digital virus to destroy my mind. Had I not been running my higher functions out of my backup brain when the attack hit I would have been died in the most permanent way possible in this age.

But despite my caution I had still been infected; I had still been running some systems in my primary body and the virus had piggybacked down these and into my mind before the contamination alarms had sounded. Those areas of my mind were now quarantined –indeed there were areas of my memory I could no longer access – but the damage had been done. I was dying; my program corrupted and slowly unravelling.

I checked the display again. According to the scan I had 11 hours before the pattern corruption became so exaggerated as to completely destroy me. Neoclade ran at three times relative, meaning that I had 33 subjective hours before I died.
I was going to find whoever it was that had murdered me, and it was probably the last thing I was going to do.

[ctg]

Pure cyberpunk. I would very much love to see this in published form and I think there would people who would agree. There's nothing wrong with the idea or with the writing. So go ahead and make it bigger.

[Runya]

Originally Posted by n2so4

It was around midnight Earth Standard Time when my body died, thrashing and foaming in the SI tank as an illegal geno-virus ripped it apart from within. The virus attacked cell-walls, dissolving tissue into soup and filling my lungs with fluid. My skin blistered and dissolved. It was an unpleasant way to die.
Luckily for me, when this happened I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks on my backup brain from a private domain within the simulated world of Neoclade.

I just have one question here... How can you feel how unpleasant your death was and then say "luckily for me, when this happened I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks....."

How does that work?

Other than that, I think the story is perfect. I love it. Though it reminded me a bit about Matrix ('cause you leave your body in another place and enter the network with your mind... though I think you're not quite talking about the same thing -- *sighs*), it still seems torridly interesting. You're direct. You're simple. I really really like it...

[n2so4]

Originally Posted by Runya

I just have one question here... How can you feel how unpleasant your death was and then say "luckily for me, when this happened I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks....."

How does that work?

I thought the same thing as I wrote it!
But I couldn't think of a better way of writing it.
What I wanted to express was that the character thought it was a nasty way to kill someone, rather than he experienced the death and thought it was unpleasant.
Kind of how you'd say "He was hit by a steamroller; what a nasty way to die!".

Thanks for the feedback!

[Runya]

Oh... I get it!

But you might reconsider those last words there, because I understood that he experienced it.

Other than that, I think it's great! -- like I said before.

And you're so welcome

[n2so4]

There was a simple framework swivel chair in front of one of the diagnostic consoles; I pulled it out and sat down, staring into space. I felt numb; I had been a Grid soldier in the War and had faced pattern corruption before, but never a case this terminal. I had become soft in my old age; the younger me would never had been caught like this.

I tried to pull myself together and collect my thoughts. The timer on the virus readout told me I had 32 hours and 55 minutes subjective left, and I intended to make the most of them. Who would attack me in such a manner? And more to the point, who had the resources to launch such an attack?

The geno-virus aside, attack programs of the grade use to kill me were expensive and hard to come by on the habitat, not to mention highly illegal. On a space-station where the entire human population spend 99% of their time in digital form people who buy and sell computer viruses are hunted down with extreme prejudice. It was one of the few crimes to still carry the death-sentence; full program erasure.

That meant that it wasn’t some casual programmer rival who had attacked me, and in any case I would never expect anyone from ‘polite’ runner society to resort to such extreme measures to get back at me for undercutting their code or breaching a datavault, as my business sometimes required me to do.

Nor did I think it was one of the undoubtedly numerous people I had crossed during the War; I had been a completely different person back then; a different avatar and handle; nothing to link my old life in the military to my life now in Neoclade.
Besides, the war was decades ago now; almost a full century of subjective time in the Grid.

That just left members of the serious digital underworld or high-class runners working for one of the various system governments. I hadn’t crossed anyone from either of those two power groups in months, years even. I made my living since the War as a simple Grid pilot, obtaining data from semi-secure vaults, programming simple low-order daemons and occasionally running dummy invasions of a client’s system to check their security. I was all but retired from the Grid runner scene.

But someone had seen fit to kill me, and with a weapon more suited to taking out a fully-equipped and shielded cybercommando than a simple data-jock.

The timer read 32 hours 49 minutes.

“Load avatar V1PER,” I told my personal daemon, “Build in my standard invasion toolkit, double standard virus protection and copy across that timer.” I pointed to the slowly-ticking countdown on the virus report. My daemon, represented in the maintenance simulation by a basic revolving cube of turquoise light, acknowledged my command with a beep and turned opaque to show it was working.

A column of blue light sprung into existence to my left, stretching from floor to ceiling and expanding to become several feet wide. Within the pale luminescence appeared a human body, sketched into existence in flickers of azure light.

Minor details of an avatar; clothing and hair style for example, can be changed easily without changing the avatar itself, but major details such as gender, race and body structure require changing into an entirely different avatar.
Every decent Grid runner maintains several avatars, usually three or four, but some own dozens; the vain ones because they enjoy changing their form on an almost hourly basis, and the disreputable ones because they require several ‘disguises’ while they go about their business.

As for myself, I had four, and the one now being downloaded before me, V1PER, was a secondary form that I occasionally used for less-than-legal runs into hostile systems.
I had chosen it because not many people in Neoclade would recognise it as one of mine.

Visibly V1PER resembled a thin, angular humanoid with polished chrome skin and a large, featureless head that had suggestions of a knight’s helm or a mantis’s head about it. Sheathes of neon-blue armour hovered just above its skin; visual representations of the anti-virus programs the avatar carried within its coding.

My daemon informed me that the prep was complete and I stepped out of my standard avatar, leaving it to dissolve into motes of glowing code, and into the new body. The change of form changed my perspective as well; now all the primary data sources in the simulated room glowed a pale green and access nodes were highlighted by faint blue arrows. I felt sleek and dangerous, but deep down I could also feel the damage the virus had wrought, eating away inside me like cancer.

I raised my forearm and consulted the holographic window that hovered there; avatar status, local time, Grid location and, tacked to the bottom edge of the display, the throbbing red timer counting down to my death.

With a flick of my metallic fingers I opened a travel portal in the air before me, keying the destination

[HareBrain]

Originally Posted by n2so4

It was around midnight Earth Standard Time when my body died, thrashing and foaming in the SI tank as an illegal geno-virus ripped it apart from within. The virus attacked cell-walls, dissolving tissue into soup and filling my lungs with fluid. My skin blistered and dissolved. It was an unpleasant way to die.
Luckily for me, when this happened I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks on my backup brain from a private domain within the simulated world of Neoclade.

Regarding the posts above, how about something like:

"It was around midnight Earth Standard Time when my body died, thrashing and foaming in the SI tank as an illegal geno-virus ripped it apart from within. The virus attacked cell-walls, dissolving tissue into soup and filling my lungs with fluid. My skin blistered and dissolved. It would have been unpleasant had I been in my body at the time, but luckily I was on the other side of the habitat, running diagnostic checks on my backup brain from a private domain within the simulated world of Neoclade."

[n2so4]

Fantastic, thanks Harebrain!

[Blackrook]

I'm a bit confused. Was the hero's real world body destroyed by the virus or merely a virtual body that exists only in cyberspace?

[Waziwig]

I've read it all, and its good. Buuuuut ...

There seems a lttle bit too much detail. Some paragraphs could be cut out completely, because while they add detail, they don't add anything specific to the story. In explaining everything, you are explaining it to us, not to someone he might be telling the tale to, which we would assume they would already know. Sure, some stuff is needed, but not all ... unless its a novel ....

The extra paragraphs slow down the pace, while the sudden onset of attack and reaction could hit like a punch. Maybe you could fillet the essential info into a retrospective piece inbetween action pieces, a literal, (and justified in his reterospect), infodump.

Its a very good idea, and I hope you have fun chasing the story down!

(All in my own opinion, proabably all wrong!)

[reiver33]

The hero's predicament reminds me a bit of 'Reno' from 'Hardwired' - and nothing wrong with that! Keep it up...