Having said previously to quite a number of people that I wouldn't write a sequel to AFK, last year I wrote a sequel to AFK. I enjoyed doing this way more than I expected and so this year I'm going to write during NaNoWriMo a third novel in the series. It's pure indulgence on my part, but then what is writing if indulgence doesn't figure anywhere?
Here is the opening section.
“Got
you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.
In a way, you could say that it was Inch
who turned me into a murderer in the first place. I mean, it’s not like I’d
even contemplated killing anyone before I met her, aside from the occasional (and
entirely understandable) desire to slaughter in cold blood the odd politician
here and there. And it’s hardly the case
that, having done the deed once, I would go on to murder again. I like to think
that I’m no more likely to kill a second person than anyone I pass on the
street is likely to kill their first.
So I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her after a single
night. Can I be blamed for that? Last time I checked, falling in love wasn’t
exactly a cognitive decision-making process.
When someone like Inch comes along – someone who upturns the table and
everything on it – you either recoil from the emotional shock and run as fast
as you can in the opposite direction, or your curiosity gets the better of you
and you make the fatal error of pausing to look more closely for a moment; next
thing you know, your eyes are doing that swirly, hypnotised thing and it feels
like they’re being pulled out of your soul.
What I’m saying is it’s an involuntary reaction. Some part of one person snaps into place with
some part of the other and, from that point on, it’s not about whether you’re in love with them, it’s
entirely about what you’re going to do about the fact that you are.
Can I be blamed any more than a bee
can be blamed for its attraction to flowers that I saw that night in Inch
Sideways everything I wanted and everything I’d always imagined had to exist
somewhere in a single human being? There
she was, my very own Higgs-Boson, realised in the prims and pixels of Second
Life®. Finding that your hypothetical
ideal somebody really does exist is more than a moment of happiness, more even
than a moment of love: it is, quite simply, the
moment of ratification, the sigh of
relief that you don’t have to discard the way you have personally constructed
happiness all these years, that the wait was worth it, that you were right to
think all those well-meaning nudgers towards John from IT or Mary from finance
could go fuck themselves.
A single night. “Forget me,” she said at the end of it, “and
you go straight to hell, ok?” There was
no possible way I could ever have forgotten Inch Sideways. It was almost a year before I saw or heard
anything from her again, and I pretty much spent all of that time trying
somehow or another to cope with what she’d awoken in me. I tried everything I could think of,
including breaking the heart of a beautiful person along the way in the futile
hope that I might transpose my love for Inch onto her, but Inch had somehow
hard-wired herself into me and all I could ultimately do was get used to how it
felt to be alive with a little bit missing.
Then, out of the blue, she appeared
again, tapping me on the virtual shoulder at some Egyptian-themed club and
asking me for a dance. It was like the
restoration of air to my lungs. I still
remember how deliriously happy I felt that evening, even when I turned down
that dance to go to work in RL. She was
back and she had sought me out, and that tiny little piece of happenstance
information danced in my head all night and meant more to me than any other
fact I had possession of.
I didn’t know at that point why it was
she’d spent fifty weeks out of SL. To be
honest, I didn’t really care. But that
night, whilst I served pizzas with an inanely cheerful grin to customers I’d
ordinarily have considered scowling at a wasted facial effort, she talked about
her year to my SL business partner, Step Stransky, the decision-making half of
the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency.
She told him about the death of her husband and little boy on the day
following my encounter with her, and Step, supposedly because he’d suffered his
own personal loss a few years earlier, knew exactly how to listen to her. The next day, I logged on to discover that
the two of them had become partnered in the intervening twelve hours, and that
was the moment when my world collapsed around me.
Did Inch turn me into a murderer? No sane person would ever consider unrequited
love a justification for killing someone; of course they wouldn’t. But even now it staggers me that she didn’t
think for one moment that partnering Stransky within hours of meeting him might
have some sort of emotional impact on me.
I’m not saying she should or could have guessed that I was in love with
her – if the situation had been reversed, I wouldn’t have supposed that for a
second (frankly, I’d have laughed at the very idea); but come on: the last time
we’d met, we’d fucked; didn’t that earn me even the littlest of pauses? Was I really so far out of her mind that it
never even occurred to her that jumping into the arms of my so-called best
friend was lacking just a little in tact?
Of course I was. The night Inch Sideways met Step Stransky was
her first night back in the metaverse; her recollection of the previous one was
likely to be less anything to do with me and more that it was the very last
time her man and her baby had been alive and safe and nearby. But I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, it was months before she finally
told me what had happened to her during that absence.
I have to ask myself – still – what it
was about Step’s listening skills that was so unbelievably amazing that she
submitted to him so completely by the end of a single night. I have to keep on reminding myself that, at
the start of the evening, he was a total stranger to her. And I have to ask myself what it was about my
own presentation that – clearly – put me somehow in a whole league below
him. I’d be the first to admit that the
rather amateur edge to my role playing skills was on full display during my
night with Inch, but has anyone ever judged someone’s ability to listen and
console based solely on their ability to communicate in fictional paragraphs –
and an ability previously experienced nearly a year ago at that? Did I really come across that badly that it
was inconceivable she could share her pain with me? And if I did, why did she bother with that
tap on the shoulder when she could have just turned around and left? Why speak to me at all if I’d left such a
hopeless impression?
It never occurred to me until now to
be angry at Inch for any of this.
Actually, that’s not true – all of these points occurred to me before,
but it was abstract information then, like the knowledge that I’m moving all
the time at over sixty thousand miles per hour due to the Earth’s orbit around
the sun. I knew these things, but they
affected me no more than I become dizzy from the Earth’s rotation: I just
didn’t feel them.
But I feel them now.
Anyway, where were
we? Oh yes…
“Got
you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.
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