Free Versim by Curtis Hox Page B

to dig because I fear they’re immersing in Collides for more than a Rend-V catastrophe.”
    “We have to be careful,” Tripp said.
    “It’s bigger than we thought.” She lay down on a cot. “Sammy, let’s go.”
    Tripp laid himself down as well. “See you inside.”
    13
    Miesha Preston sat in her old Upper Deck bedroom watching the staid Rend-V for which her mother had left her. She sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor in a thick, cotton bathrobe, her head wrapped in a towel. Around her, she’d lined every inch of her room with digital imagery from popular Rend-Vs. This was the room she’d grown up in. And it hadn’t changed in years. Her mother’s image dominated. She’d once thought of it as her gilded cage, this bedroom she rarely now visited.
    A wide holovid projected a paused 3D image from the wall. It showed a wide shot of Times Square from Collides . In it, Specialist Harken Cole stands on a sidewalk, getting ready to cross a street. She was watching it live as a regular viewer, just to check up on the narrative.  
    Miesha ran her fingers through the image to douse it. Specialist Cole was at this minute right where she wanted him. Yes he was.  
    Her Voxyprog contact, Pizer Dauk, had promised her they wouldn’t interfere in her illegal insertions beyond a cursory attempt to thwart Hark—just to look like they had tried. EA would soon send a specialist to stop him, but only one. In fact, Pizer and a small faction in EA was secretly green lighting the project for her. They wanted to see her flip it, and she planned to do it with style.
    She tossed her towel aside. Her shaved head was dry, of course. The sub-dermal plating and nodes under her skin gave her the requisite posthuman look she affected. She also wore permanent ash-colored eye makeup that ran from her lids around the side of her face.
    She walked to a long desk, atop which sat painted figurines taken from her favorite productions. In the center stood a character that was taller than the rest. The most famous villain in narrative history, she’d tell you. He was tall, handsome, dressed casually, almost as if he’d take a young girl to dinner. Devastating good looks. Made super tough-guy Harken Cole look like a backwoods hillbilly.  
    Rend-V antagonist Ervé Wrighter had broken all records in the last few years as the kingpin of Steel Edge , a horror Rend-V in which antagonists from a variety of other popular Rend-Vs were all put together to see who performed the best. Ervé had ruled like a god since it began. He was a legal person who’d applied for Rend-V principal immersion. He got the job because he possessed a super-human intellect package that, even in-V, made him a super star. His stroke of genius: using the strengths of the archetypal horror tropes to his advantage. He had them all under his thumb: the Monsters and Beasts, the Mad Men, the Cannibal Vampires and Zombies, the Ghosts.
    He made her psychic gifts look like the cognition of a retarded chimp. Then Harken immersed in Steel Edge and arrested him for going off script too many times. After that, everything changed.
    She returned to her holovid and swiped.
    “Play my favorite scene from The Borderlands ,” she said.
    The light formed an image the size of a large mural projected in the air.
    She stared at a still shot of Harken Cole in the role that had started his career: face muddy and bruised, dirty cowboy hat askew, hair wet and in his eyes. The Borderlands was a buddy film about two Old West American cowboys on the run from the Oglala Sioux. She had only been a young girl when she’d stumbled on the V, only one of several hundred running at that time.
    “Play.”
      The lights flickered and the action began. She stared at it as if through a window. She watched two tired and hungry men struggling at night through a rocky canyon. She’d been too young to jack in or immerse in any way, so she’d watched it like a film on a 3D screen, just as she was now. At this point