The Party
The Party was fairly regular at first, my own software projected my green Hulk image reasonably well into the artificial universe created by the newbie who was giving this little hoe down. I must be one of the few people left on the meta site that knows what hoe down even means…
What that actually means is that my body is barely alive and is currently being maintained in my own household facility. Yeah, life’s a bitch, but I can still wander cyber space with some reasonable impunity. A rather large coin investment in hardware to run my self-written software had so far resulted in a reasonable amount of autonomy in most places and a huge presence in places where I was actively invited like this little newbie get together.
My newbie friend was not paying close attention to my and a few others advice on who to invite and how to invite them. My software was picking up several known trolls in the room, my software changed their depiction into slack jawed idiot parodies of what they were trying to show and no doubt a few of them did the same to my avatar in their own view but I doubted any of those guys could make anyone one else see me that way while I was pretty sure my own software had a reasonably easy time of making everyone else see them as jokes… petty but satisfying nonetheless…
My avatar went around the room digitally shaking hands and making kissy faces at friends and frenemies around the room. Nice looking place really, looks a lot like some super hearo’s lair, tacky but I hey I was the Hulk! Pretty much tacky personified…
The newbies were of course trying to gain access into social networks by giving this little soiree so they had pretty much pulled out all the protection software to allow all of the guests to project their own software unimpeded… a mistake no doubt but working out so far.
There seemed to be more than a few guests who were incognito, many of their real identities were immediately pegged by my own software, mostly because they were friends. More than a few were a mystery even to my own rather rude probing’s… rather interesting!
Incognito avatars usually looked like dark humanoid renderings with no details, just a smoky darkness shaped like a human. Of course there were hundreds of people here, amazing collection of old school and newbie avatars, one was familiar, a rogue really, very powerful software, usually benign but seldom really getting caught up into doing anything but observing.
He appeared to everyone as a floating ball of spines, my own software could only see him that way even though I had programed the machine to enforce some rules of reality to make things easier to understand his software pretty much allowed his avatar to do whatever it wanted floating around defying even reasonable basic rules like gravity.
Always makes me uneasy to see someone flaunting the rules, never know what else they might be able to do but he, actually a she, was a friend from real life and I didn’t really consider her a threat. The trolls were beginning to get aggressive, trying to strike out at various guests but so far everyone had immediately ignored them and they slowly began to fade away as fewer and fewer people acknowledged their existence.
The lack of room constraints had worried me from the beginning and sure enough a predator showed up! My own software recognized him and my own armor went to maximum immediately. Of course that meant Hulk got bigger and greener as far as the room could see but the asshole picked up on an avatar that wasn’t backed up by particularly strong protection and went into feeding mode ignoring the chaos his actions created in the room proper.
Almost immediately two trolls unboxed predator software and started trying to feed on other avatars and the room was thrown into pandemonium. Avatars began to wink out as those who had weak software and or hardware decided to run but this little get together was to get the attention of my own social group for possible admittance so this time at least they began to unbox their battle personas. The first predator, who did have an impressive octopus avatar, was immediately attacked by Captain America but the Captain was over whelmed and had to reboot almost immediately.
Thor stepped up and put the god smack on his ass, he was reeled by that and his image faded as he almost had to reboot but he firmed back and up and I immediately began to Hulk smash his ass. I think it was the first time I had encountered this particular predator and I immediately tasted bot. Then I was pissed, I hate bots only slightly less than the people who release them, outta be a law!
We grappled for an amazingly large time span, 30 milliseconds or so before the predator simply vanished from the room. Typical cowardly software, written to survive no matter what and running from a Hulk smash was about the only way.
As all the other members of the Super Group firmed back up and gave a serious probe of the room, almost all of the trolls and incognito avatars were gone, good move if your software wasn’t up to the task and or you felt like you didn’t have a dog in this hunt. No need to get caught up in other people troubles.
From there on out the party went pretty good, once the wannabes and flat out predators had been shaken out the software enhancements had come out. As usual a party had attracted the purveyors of unusual and profound experiences that when applied to your software could be uploaded into your own wet ware for some sweet dreams.
Some of the dealers had cyber examples of their programs to display in the room, the more serious sellers were usually a little more secretive and generally only a handful were judged by me to have solid delusions to sell.
I stayed for a while, a few avatars I hadn’t seen in quite some time and I needed to find out what was what about them. After a time it was decided to disband the party, a few more cyber hugs and kisses and some really wild cybersex, was passed around, no viruses had survived the little battle for room control so some people had gotten bit wild but most of us have the software to prevent than for ourselves and everyone else anyway so no worries along that front tonight.
So I picked up a few wetware delusions to run later, told everyone good bye and disconnected, not a bad party, not a bad way to spend 1.5 seconds…