Twist: Shit, Chas, that’s rough. And there was me thinking I could seduce you and marry into a fortune. But, hey, maybe I still can if you’ve got three million in your SL account.
Chas: How is that possible, Twist?
Twist: It’s not. It’ll be a phantom figure, Chas. A glitch. It’ll probably be gone when you relog.
Chas: Well, I know that at least 500 of it’s mine. From the geckos.
Twist: So get the gKill HUD and we’ll come back for the Immortals another time.
Chas paid for the weapons system, and the SL cash register rang up the expenditure. Almost at the same moment, an IM came in from Doobie.
Doobie: I found out a bit about your murder victim, Chas. Well, about his AV anyway.
Chas: Great, Doobs. What did you learn?
Doobie: Well, I learned that this guy was a bigshot dealer in SL land sales. Virtual Realty was his Group. Massive turnover in the purchase and sale of offshore sims.
Chas: Sims?
Doobie: Short for simulators. A sim is just a parcel of virtual land. People buy and sell property here, and some of them make a fortune.
Chas: Wow!
Doobie: But there’s more. He owned property himself, Chas. A tropical island called Pitaya in a group of islands known as the Fruit Islands. Beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. He’d just built a house on the island. A stunning asian home. I’m there right now.
A pause.
Doobie: Chas?
Chas: Yeh?
Doobie: This guy was murdered in real life, yes?
Chas Chesnokov nods
Doobie: How was he killed?
Chas: Shot three times in the chest
There was a long silence.
Chas: Doobie, are you still there?
Doobie: He was killed the same way in SL, Chas.
Chas frowned.
Chas: I don’t understand.
Doobie: Someone shot his AV three times in the chest at the house here in Pitaya.
Chas: How can you possibly know that?
Doobie: Well, someone might have erased his account from the database, but his AV’s corpse is still here in the house. Lying where it was shot.
Chapter Nineteen
Chas and Twist teleported into the house almost simultaneously. Doobie, dressed in a sober, tailored grey suit, her hair tied back, stood in the middle of the shambles that was the interior of the house. Sunlight streamed in through enormous picture windows on either side.
Twist: Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?
Chas: Arnold Smitts was in Second Life, Twist. He had an AV called Maximillian Thrust. He was a bigshot land dealer in here, and this is his house,
Twist: So?
Chas looked around for the body.
Chas: Where is he, Doobs?
Doobie climbed over a jumble of beams and planking, disjointed sections of floor and wall, and through a moongate that led to the bedroom. They scrambled after her. Maximillian Thrust lay in an oddly twisted heap between two sections of floor that had been pushed up, as if by an earthquake. There were three gaping holes in the centre of his chest. There was animated blood all over his torso, and it was pooling on the floor beneath him.
Twist: Jesus Christ! How’s that possible? He must have been logged out for days.
Chas: Even more impossible, Twist. There is no record in the Linden Lab database that he ever existed.
Twist: So how’s his AV still here?
Doobie: Because it’s not his AV.
They both turned to look at her.
Chas: How do you mean?
Doobie: Well, it can’t be. It has to be a clone.
Chas: Explain.
Doobie: Not an explanation, Chas, just a guess. His AV was shot with a scripted gun of some kind. Most weapons in SL fire scripts at their targets that generate the desired graphic effect. Smoke, fire, a cage, whatever. My guess would be that the script in this gun actually destroyed the original AV, but made a clone of the victim, showing the damage and the blood. And that’s what we’re seeing here.
Twist: That makes sense, Doobie. I’m Twist, by the way. Since Chas doesn’t seem to be going to introduce us.
Doobie: Hi, Twist.
Chas: What we have here, then, is a virtual crime scene. Undisturbed. So we should be able to piece together at least part of what happened.
He looked around.
Chas: How the hell did the house get into this state? It looks like it got blitzed by something at the top end of the Richter Scale.
Twist: Something pretty close to that, I’d say. The only way you could do this amount of damage, Chas, would be if you were in Edit mode.
Chas: What’s that?
Doobie: A mode you go into when you are building, so you can move stuff around.
Twist: Thrust must have panicked when he was attacked, and hit the wrong button. If he went into Edit, everything he touched would have started shifting around with him. Just like a real earthquake.
Everything had been moved or dislocated. Whole sections of floor and wall buckled out of place. The ceiling was dragged down almost to the floor in one corner.
Chas: So how come none of this has been disturbed since it happened?
Doobie: Because the whole place still belongs to Maximillian Thrust. If you click on the name of the property — it’s written in blue at the top of the screen — it will bring up the Land Window. That tells you who owns the property, and how many prims it supports.
Chas: Prims?
Twist: Primitives. The name given to the bits that go to make up everything in SL. It’s a kind of measurement of processing power. Every object has a prim value in here.
Doobie: Anyway, the Land Window shows Maximillian Thrust as the owner. And there’s a rock out there on the beach where you pay your tiers. Thrust was paid up for several weeks to come, so no one would have been coming to reclaim the property for some time.
Chas sighed.
Chas: One of these days we’ll get back to speaking English. What are tiers?
Doobie Littlething smiles.
Doobie: Even though you own a property, Chas, you still have to pay a kind of rental on it. Land-use fees. They’re called tiers. How do you think Linden Lab make their money?
Twist: Better take some pictures, Chas. You are the photographer, after all.
Chas: How do I do that?
Twist: There’s a Snapshot button on your toolbar. You can work it out yourself from there.
Chas found that he could easily line up the shots he wanted to take, just like using a real camera, uploading to his Inventory and then downloading to his desktop, so that he had RL and SL copies of each.
He took pictures of the body from various angles and of the interior damage to the house, and was able to give copies to Twist and Doobie by dragging them on to their AVs.
Chas: How about we take a look outside?