Free The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 by Larry Niven, Nancy Kress, Mercedes Lackey, Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, C. L. Moore, Tina Gower

breath, missing him, had killed a number of innocent pieces of software going about their legitimate duties.
    Marcus knelt next to a whimpering, frightened jpeg—an image of a beautiful baby being sent by its proud mother to the baby’s grandmother. Now that image would never arrive, fading away as he held it in his arms.
    Sadly he stood, watching the surviving data constructs rush around in panic. This was just wrong ! An attempt on him had destroyed good data, useful utilities and other programs—something very much against his principles. It was all a waste.
    The attacking script had been crude but powerful. Someone or something out there was ruthless in its hatred of him. Well, he would see about that! He would make it his mission to hunt down this killer!
    The train of data packet cars whizzed to a stop and all the data and snippets of code hurried to get on before another dragon could come along.
    Marcus started to enter a car and a wall of stench hit his virtual nose. Spam! Of all things in the Internet universe he hated spam the most, spam and the evil humans who caused it to spew like so much sewage from their computers.
    This packet was crammed to the ceiling with the slimy, stinky stuff. All spam must die! He donated them a couple of filter bombs from his backpack, ducking as tons of fragments blew through the packet’s sides and more or less neatly landed in bit bins on the platform.
    Satisfied, he moved to the next packet, boarded, and took a seat.
    He called up a screen and scrolled the work order. Hmmm … An anonymous IP address—not usual, and it cost extra. Spammers, hackers, and other evil humans, they liked to have anonymous IPs. He had a bad feeling about this.
    A tall black gentleman in a three-piece suit slid into the seat next to Marcus. He held out a check for four million dollars, smiling broadly.
    Marcus tapped the certification patches on his T-shirt. “No phishing around here.”
    The software’s eyes widened and he jumped up, motioning several of his kind to turn back. “Copper! Run! It’s John Law!” he yelled in a Nigerian accent.
    Several pieces of legitimate email nodded their thanks to Marcus. Phishing gave them all a bad name—almost as much as spam did.
    A stream of porn oozed into the car. Marcus pointed to the next packet and they left. Porn was pretty mindless stuff, but it knew when the wiz was around.
    Speaking of such stuff, Marcus turned around in his seat looking for Gwen. He had not seen her in a week or more. Gwen did some racy stuff, but she was a real woman and far from mindless. Some men paid a lot for interaction. She was the only other virtual human he’d seen down here besides himself and Oscar. They’d had some great conversations, riding together. He knew she hated what she had to do for a living. Certainly she didn’t want her only family—her brother, who was an attorney with a big firm downtown—ever finding out.
    Gwen’s virtual body was as voluptuous as his was buff. She’d confided that her real body was a female geek, flat, not curvy. She even had a computer science degree and loved to code, but couldn’t find a programming gig so was reduced to this—her face showed her disgust—“job.” And she told him about her server—she also favored Ubuntu as her Linux of choice—and mentioned how she had backup virtual reality software on it. Even told him her real name, Gwendolyn Louise Baker.
    Wow! Beautiful, and she knew computers and Linux, too? What … a … woman!
    Marcus surprised himself by hugging her on their last ride. He didn’t do well with girls, not nearly confident enough usually to initiate affection. What’s more, she’d returned the hug! That was the last time he’d seen her.
    * * *
    He landed after his wireless jump from the platform via a 40mb up-and-down connection at the IP address on his work order. It was a very fancy and powerful Internet connection with tons of bandwidth, but the port into the computer was