3. The Obsoletes

-----THE OBSOLETES-----
A cyberpunk short story by Peter Whitmore

I stood before a three-story white house, turn of the 21st century in architecture as it stood atop one of many rolling grassy hills and flowery fields, nothing else for miles around except for gray mountain ranges on the horizon. I ascended the steps to approach the front door, but on the porch, seated on a swing bench was a young woman waiting to greet me already.

"Mr. Joseph Stone, I presume!" She bowed her head at me. "My husband has been eagerly awaiting your visit! Please, let us go inside!" She sprung up from her seat and opened the front door for me, kneeling down to remove my shoes as I stepped into the large foyer.

A tall balcony was overlooking the foyer, and on one of the staircases leading up to it were two small children playing with a small animal, must have been a traditional cat or dog, looked too old fashioned to be one of those designer pets engineered by Asclepius Medical. It fit the antiquated nature of the rest of the house, however. The place looked like it had been constructed over a century ago and had changed little since then.

A few moments later, a mustachioed young man appeared over the balcony, wearing a robe and slippers as he held a coffee mug in one hand, a rolled up newspaper in another. "Ah, Mr. Stone! So glad you could make it here!" He exclaimed, gesturing out to me.

"Well of course. You're not particularly difficult for me to reach, Mr. Williams." I replied.

"Come on, come on up, then! Let's have a coffee!" Mr. Williams motioning for me to join him at the top of the stairs. I complied, stepping through the playing children and their pet to get there, though they remained completely unbothered. He led me into a study, filled with bookshelves upon bookshelves packed with various works of classical literature. A copy of Philip K. Dick's "We'll Remember It For You Wholesale" lay open atop a large mahogany desk, sunlight from the windows pouring onto the desktop, and onto the book's pristine pages.

"Harold Williams. I see you've had a bit of a change of scenery since we last met." I said as Harry went to sit at his desk. Immediately after, his wife came into the room presenting us a tray of coffee. I declined her offer with a wave of my hand, and she gave another respectful bow before turning to leave.

"What can I say, Joe? I'm a bit old fashioned. Then again, doesn't everybody become old fashioned if they live long enough?" Harry closed the book on his desk, and I watched as it flew through the air back to its spot on one of the bookshelves.

"Not necessarily, Mr. Williams. Riding the waves of change and adapting to the times is what keeps me afloat."

Harry laughed at this. "Hah! Says the man who looks and dresses like a young Humphrey Bogart!"

"One can still be a fan of the past while keeping a finger on the pulse of the present. You could say that's part of why I'm here, Mr. Williams. That newspaper isn't just for show, is it? The one in your hand? Does it actually contain the current news?"

Harry looked down to the rolled up newspaper he was still holding in one of his hands, then went to unroll it. "Why yes, yes it does! It still reads like a 20th century paper, though! Have a look!" A copy of the newspaper suddenly appeared on his desk, and he handed it over to me.

I checked the way the paper was formatted and began to recognize the sources of the headlines, all of which were from today's date. "Perfect. Have you read the story on page 56?"

I watched as Harry thumbed through his copy of the paper to reach the same page. A look of intrigue slowly lit up his face as he read through it, eventually lowering the paper and staring back at me. "Another bombing? For real? It's at the Portland airport this time?"

I gave him a solemn nod. "And that's not all. They're implicating the Brotherhood for all of these incidents."

"The Brotherhood of the Singularity?" Harry looked quite bothered as he suddenly stood up.

"Who else? All the evidence uncovered so far has pointed to the bombers having been affiliated with them, and they haven't done a very good job at hiding it, either. It's almost like they wanted to make their allegiances known."

"Mr. Stone! That is patently absurd!" Harry threw down his paper in disgust. "Why would a peaceful organization like the Brotherhood of the Singularity ever resort to terrorism?"

"Oh, I can think of a few reasons, Mr. Williams." I replied with a calm wave of my hand. Even if the majority of the Brotherhood does not approve of such tactics and these attacks can be said to be the doings of just a few bad cells, I took a look at what the Big Three are doing to the GRID, and the answer came to me plain as day."

"And just what kind of answer is that, Mr. Stone?"

"Obsolescence, Mr. Wlliams. Their next upgrade is going to make uploads like you obsolete and incompatible with the next version of the GRID."

Harry paused after hearing this, and seemed to pretend to be studying one of his bookshelves for a while before he would speak to me again. "So why, pray tell, are you coming to me about this, Mr. Stone?"

"I have reason to believe that not only are the bombings connected to the Brotherhood, or at least a splinter cell thereof, but also that the motivation for the bombings are related to this update to the GRID. People like you are the ones that stand to benefit the most from this tragedy, Mr. Williams."

"Are you accusing me of orchestrating the bombings, Joe!?" Harry had now narrowed his eyes at me, his hands balled up into fists as he raised them up in front of himself.

"I'm a private investigator that has been hired to look into this case, Mr. Williams. I must consider every testimony and piece of evidence, no matter where the trail leads me. So, in the interest of my client, I must ask... did you, or did you not, Mr. Harold Williams, have any involvement in the conception, planning, or execution of any of the recent spat of bombings of corporate structures that have occurred over the past few weeks?" There came no response from him, so I added, "Bear in mind that you are being recorded, Mr. Williams. Lie to me, and the entirety of the Big Three will know about it, sooner or later. What's it going to be? Are you to convince me that you are innocent...or guilty?"

"You need to leave now, Mr. Stone." Harry told me quite firmly. "I hate to cut your visit short, but you have already overstayed your welcome. Do not contact me again."

And with those words, Harold Williams vanished, followed by everything inside his study, followed by the study itself. The house and everything in it was gone. The rolling grassy hills, the fields of flowers, the distant mountains, even the sunny blue sky all faded away into nothingness. I was now standing in a mostly black abyss, with only a grid of magenta lines to show me where the ground and the horizon were.

I stood staring away at the horizon for a few moments until the avatar of Vykarius faded into view beside me. "Uh, Joe? Maybe that could have gone better. The Father wants to speak to you, now. In meatspace, I mean."

I sighed and gave Vykarius a nod, then reached up and pulled off my headset, then went about removing my haptic gloves and securing the rest of my VR rig inside of the desk at my office.

---

The G.R.I.D. Global Reality Integration Domain. The replacement for the World Wide Web in the second half of the 21st century. During the Cyborg Wars of the 2050s, when the corporations were all experimenting with their new inventions on the battlefield using their private militias, one of them got the idea to use their satellite networks to monitor everything on the ground, and in the air for that matter, and leave digital markers that their soldiers could see on their augmented reality overlays. Information about their targets would be visible to them and updated in real time, as the combat situation unfolded. This was accomplished by using satellite data to create a virtual copy of the battlefield that was then transmitted to the militia's private networks, where any soldier and officer with the proper clearances could remotely view the battlefield in cyberspace, which was continuously updated as the satellite feeds continued to collect data. Generals in the war room could now virtually stand alongside their soldiers in the field, seeing everything that they were seeing, and issue orders directly to them by updating the virtual markers. Once the last of the Cyborg Wars came to an end in 2060, the surviving Big Three corporations brought their new toys with them, including this virtual and augmented reality overlay system, which became a joint project among the Big Three to become the G.R.I.D.

At first, the G.R.I.D. became an add-on to the World Wide Web of computer and mobile networks that had already been well established, a series of virtual reality realms that were accessible only with fancy gadgets, such as headsets and haptic gloves. Eventually, however, when the satellite networks eventually generated a virtual replica of the entire surface of Earth, this instance was integrated into augmented reality devices, and quickly became an overnight success that eventually replaced the Web entirely. It was the fusion of virtual and augmented reality that changed the nature of the network and brought the "real" and "digital" worlds together in a more seamless fashion than ever before.

The GRID's augmented reality component worked by assigning global satellite coordinates to its virtual objects, which could be seen through any AR compatible viewing pieces, such as a headset, camera lens, electronic glasses and goggles, or in my case, cybernetic eyes wired directly through the brain's perception systems. Anyone equipped with any of these devices would see the mundane world normally, but with the augmented reality objects overlayed onto it. These objects would generally be at least slightly transparent or have glowing outlines to distinguish themselves from the real world environment, but some creators would go to great lengths to make objects that blended in as much as possible, sometimes to the point of having their textures simulate the reflection effects of the surrounding area's lighting and weather patterns in order to complete the illusion. Of course, anyone could make all of these illusions disappear by removing their peripheral of choice, or by switching off its AR overlay functions, or by selecting individual objects and "blocking" them from showing up on their personal interface. Not everybody would always see the same things in AR, after all, since the entire experience could be customized by both the viewers and the creators. Viewers got to decide what they wanted to see and how they would see it, while creators would dictate who got to see what and how they were allowed to see it. When you placed an AR object, it would only be visible to you, the one who placed it, by default. From there, however, one could then choose whether to make the object visible to specific people, specific groups of people, specific people who meet a certain criteria, or even absolutely everyone. I particularly recalled a museum in San Francisco that featured what initially appeared to be an empty pedestal, but when viewed through an AR interface, a different virtual sculpture would be seen based on your device's serial number. Literally everyone would always see something different atop that pedestal.

In the virtual reality component of the GRID, all of these rules still applied, but with the addition of whole new environments instead of merely the objects overlaying the real world. In the early 2060s, the Virtual GRID began as a 1:1 scale copy of Earth's entire surface, albeit with all of these surfaces consisting of magenta grid lines, the default texture for every GRID object and environment. Over the next two decades, these would slowly be filled in to either recreate their real-life counterparts or simulate entirely new settings. Whoever owned the corresponding real life property in the world would be allowed to modify the environments and objects of its virtual counterpart on an administrative level, a feat that took little effort to legally establish since most of the world's governments had given way to total privatization to begin with. The GRID was now an extension of the market, where people would buy and sell virtual real estate, or was that just virtual estate? Lots of people made a living as virtual estate agents these days.

Lots of people made a living as virtual object designers and virtual avatar designers as well. Very profitable business ventures since your avatar is a digital representation of yourself in cyberspace, and we all know how much people are obsessed with appearances. Sure, many people were vain enough to make their avatars look as much like their real life selves as possible, or at least idealized versions of themselves that iron out the imperfections. Many other people, on the other hand, would rather have avatars that looked nothing like their real life selves. Different people, animals, robots, cartoon characters, inanimate objects, abstract symbols, you would see avatars represented by at least three of these things in almost any given part of the virtual GRID. Myself, I preferred to compromise and go around the GRID as an old fashioned film noir detective clad in a trench coat and fedora, my avatar's body being completely monochromatic in color, its texture flickering slightly to simulate the appearance of film grain. My avatar's facial features were a combination of my own with a young Humphrey Bogart's. Occasionally I would have a virtual cigarette in my virtual mouth to complete the aesthetic, even if I haven't smoked in a long time in reality. Vykarius, on the other hand, seemed to have a habit of completely changing his avatar every few days or so. One day he would appear to me on the GRID as a man, the next day a woman, the day after a child, then a cartoon, then a series of symbols, and so on. He went through avatars like real worlders went through clothes.

I frequently did business with a lot of my clients in VR, and while I could sometimes investigate places there, making one's digital avatar appear in the AR overlay at a real world location, even when you were not physically there yourself, I still had to do a lot of legwork to conduct proper investigations. And as of late, I had been contacted to run investigations for the Brotherhood of the Singularity, a group that was well versed in the virtual realms.

After my meeting with Mr. Williams on his own personal GRID, separate from the main one, I was invited to speak with one of the leaders of the Summer Heights chapter of the Brotherhood church in the San Francisco area. The building looked like a nondescript massive yellow cube sitting alongside all the other buildings on the skyline at first glance, but when viewed through augmented reality, the church's exterior was transformed into that of a decadent cathedral through the use of well placed virtual structures, complete with onion domed spires and a bell tower that would chime every hour, on the hour, if you were equipped to hear audio output from AR objects as well. I heard the virtual bell sound off eight times as I got off the AutoCab when I arrived that evening.

The interior of the church, similarly, looked quite plain to anyone that lacked AR vision, with a ceiling that looked far higher than it needed to be and several dozen rows of seats that looked to be unnecessarily far apart from each other, facing towards a stage that contained a plain gray altar table and a cylindrical podium. It was all a part of the Brotherhood's philosophy of there being far more to the world than meets the un-augmented eye. Through the AR overlay, the vast amount of space above one's head and the high ceiling was now decorated with elaborate chandeliers, hanging ornaments of angelic figures and astronomical bodies, and the ceiling itself digitally painted, as if by some virtual Michelangelo, to depict a wide variety of human and cyborg figures, particularly of the former transforming into the latter. Sickly and decrepit human bodies were shown being reborn as healthy, perfect artificial ones. A mechanical fetus encased in a synthetic womb. People walking through fire that burned away their flesh to reveal metal bodies beneath. The symbols of cybernetic enhancement as a process of death and rebirth were not lost on anyone that could view this digital tapestry.

As I walked past the congregational seats, I noted that they appeared to be spaced unusually far apart to account for the fact that, whenever you sat down in one, a personal interface of various objects would appear before you in AR, which you would interact with by making hand gestures. Whoever placed the seats made sure that everyone had plenty of arm and leg room to do this. The stage itself similarly appeared barren and spacious to make sure that nothing would get in the way of the AR objects, which the speaker would manipulate with hand gestures during sermons. As I arrived, one was already in progress. Many of the seats were filled with Brotherhood followers, most of them hybrids and cyborgs more extensively modified than myself. Up on the stage was my contact, Father Andrew. His body a metallic chrome android shell wearing a white robe, he had to be at least a Class IX cyborg, with more than eighty percent of his body artificialized. Maybe even the rare Class X.

"And, as you can see, my dear Brothers and Sisters of the impending Singularity, I have long since labored to cast aside my carnal robes of flesh and bone, so that I may eventually be free of the chains of disease and decay that inevitably beset every organic life form, sooner or later. By conquering our own biological limitations, we no longer have to be bound to finite lifespans. We may, in fact, be among the first generation of those who are born homo sapiens to be able to live for centuries, millennia, eons, or even to the end of time itself should we so choose, and this ability to choose should be the right of every sapient being..."

Father Andrew walked over to the podium, and with a wave of his hand, three symbols appeared before everyone on the stage in the AR overlay. "This is all possible due to the miracles of science afforded to us by the Big Three. Though these corporate bodies have enabled society to degenerate with rampant consumerism and greed, we would not have the blessings we do now without their contributions to the world." He walked over to the first symbol, a pair of red angelic wings. "Icarus Industries. Founded in Detroit, Michigan, United States of America in the year of our lord 2033. The cybernetic shell that my brain and central nervous system now inhabits was created by this company. It is no coincidence that they are named after the son of the mythical inventor Daedalus, who created artificial wings that allowed his son to soar higher than any man had ever gone before."

I would have told him how well that flight of fancy ended up for poor Icarus, but Father Andrew was already on his way over to the second symbol, a green Caduceus. "Asclepius Medical. Founded in Berlin, Germany in the year of our lord 2052, right at the beginning of the first of the Cyborg Wars that claimed so many lives throughout the Middle East. And yet, Asclepius had saved so many more lives with their research into medicine and biotechnology. It was only fitting that they had named themselves after the god of medicine. Since the end of the last of the Cyborg Wars in 2060, they have brought their miracles to the rest of the world, healing the sick, enabling the lame to walk, the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak; it may not be long before they even allow the dead to live again." Now that was a terrifying thought.

Andrew now went over to the last of the three symbols. Unlike the last two, it wasn't anything abstract or symbolic at all, but simply the Japanese katakana characters for "Mi", "Ta", and "Shi", in that order, all highlighted in blue neon. "Mitashi Technologies. Founded in Tokyo, Japan in the year of our lord 2019." He told the congregation. "The first and perhaps the most significant of the Big Three. For you see, it was their groundbreaking findings into the field of computing software that the Global Reality Integration Domain was born from. By combining their efforts with Icarus Industries' expertise in cybernetics and Asclepius Medical's advanced knowledge of bionics, they have been able to completely cyberize the human brain and upload consciousness itself as a digital entity, where it has since been given form and function on the GRID. The disabled, the sick, and the dying can be freed from their biological fates by scanning their entire neural networks into our global computing networks. They will find themselves no longer inhabiting their dying flesh, but instead the virtual realms of the GRID, where they no longer have to suffer, and are free to become whatever they see fit. Truly, a heaven on earth."

I was never the sort to be able to pay attention in church for too long, so I took one of the empty seats next to a hybrid follower to see what kind of interface it gave me. A text transcript of Father Andrew's words as he was speaking them, pictures and video excerpts of PR reports for the corporations he was talking about, more information on the companies that he didn't cover in his sermon, schedules of future events planned by the church, that sort of thing. I didn't pay much more attention until it sounded as if Andrew was reaching the conclusion and final summation of his service.

"The history of human civilization is also the history of the relationship between man and machine. Man was cold, so he built fire to keep warm. Man was vulnerable to the elements, so he built shelter to have an environment within his control. Man was hungry, so he built hunting tools to gather food. Man wanted to travel, so he tamed beasts of burden and created vehicles to reach faraway places. Man wanted to keep in touch with his fellow man, so he created methods of storing and sharing information. Spoken language, written language, books, letters, radio transmissions, video transmissions, computer networks, and eventually the GRID in its current form. And now, man and machine are merging more than ever with the advent of bionic enhancement. By replacing our fragile bodies with sturdier cybernetics and reverse engineering our own biologies, the physical gap between ourselves and our creations is finally closing at last, leaving us to be the masters of our own domains, our own bodies, our own destinies. There will come a day when the nature of life itself is completely unfathomable to any of us living today. That will be the day of the Singularity. That is the day that we as a church are seeking to reach!"

The congregation erupted in applause, and Father Andrew would join all of his followers in some kind of prayer, assisted by their connection to AR and VR, before adjourning the sermon, leaving me finally able to approach him on the empty stage as his augmented followers filed out of the church.

"How much are the corporations paying you to shill for them?" I asked Father Andrew as I stepped up to the stage.

"Ah, Mr. Stone, I assure you that none of them have done anything of the sort. The Brotherhood of the Singularity is kept in operation merely through the kind donations of its own staff and followers, and is not a for-profit organization."

"Sure it isn't." I rolled my eyes at his statement. It wasn't hard to imagine that, with Singularitism being the fastest growing organized religion in most of the world, America in particular, its biggest financial contributors would have to have ties to corporate bodies. No self respecting businessman would dare to pass up the opportunity to buy this much influence. "Now tell me, Father Andrew, what is it that you wanted me here for?"

"Ah yes, I am glad you came. I am wanting to know how things went with Mr. Williams." I could see that Andrew was smiling. I was quite glad myself, to see that his android body was quite capable of making quite convincing human facial expressions that were readable enough.

"And I couldn't have simply told you over the GRID instead of coming all the way over here myself? Well, anyways, Mr. Williams was...not too pleased to be implicated in the bombings." I told him.

Andrew looked away as he gave a solemn nod. "Of course. It is quite understandable. He is an uploaded consciousness, after all. Since some hackers had leaked the information about the new updates to the GRID that were getting ready to go live, it was quite worrying to many that the documents reported that certain formats of neural network entities were having compatibility issues with the new build. This could set a dangerous precedent of leaving digital people behind." He took a step back as he waved a mechanical hand to make a series of old audio storage media appear before me on my AR overlay. "Imagine if the first thing you could upload your consciousness onto was a vinyl record. Your body is old and dying, so you opt for it, since you did not have any time to wait for what would come after. The next generation of people to upload their minds can now use cassette tapes, leaving you antiquated by comparison. The generation after that uses compact disks, and the fourth generation finally goes completely digital. If there were no way to digitize your vinyl and analog minds, you would soon be stranded on an island of obsolescence as the world progressed onward without you. A fate worse than death, some might argue. So you could see how this would cause some outrage."

I nodded to Father Andrew in agreement. "And about those bombers..." I presented to him the surveillance footage I had gathered on the bombings to the AR overlay. "Look carefully. All of them had android bodies. Not too dissimilar from yours, in fact. They just somehow wired them to explode as they walked into public places owned by the corporations. And that's not all." I then added some pictures of various papers that were hung up around corporate office buildings. "A few days prior to the bombings, these letters of protest were plastered all over the entrances of office blocks belonging to the Big Three. All of them talking about how they were making a mistake by pushing forward an update to the GRID that would make it inaccessible to some, how it could lead to it becoming inaccessible to even more people, real and digital, later on. How this update had to be stopped. By any and all means necessary. This makes the bombers' motives quite clear, don't you think?"

Father Andrew gave me an agreeing nod. "And you think that someone in our Brotherhood is responsible for this, is that what you were going to say? On what grounds? Just because of our advocacy for uploaded personalities? Lots of people have advocated for them, too. Not every digitized consciousness is a member of our congregation, as I'm quite sure you are already aware."

"That isn't untrue, sir," I concurred, "But who else would have access to the android bodies that were used in the bombings? The Angels of Retribution, perhaps, but none of their terrorist attacks involved the usage of this model. More than ninety percent of the users of that particular model have been found to be affiliated with or sympathetic toward your Brotherhood of the Singularity, according to a recent survey." I threw the survey results in front of his face on the overlay.

"Clearly, then, these bombers must therefore be among the ten percent who are not." Father Andrew remained unfazed. "The Brotherhood of the Singularity does not tolerate violent force. Besides, you heard the way I had extolled the virtues of the Big Three corporations. Would there not exist quite the conflict of interest if we had been attacking the ones that provided us with the keys to our salvation?"

"Is Mr. Harold Williams in any way affiliated with your church, or is he not?"

Father Andrew smiled at this. "That, Mr. Stone, is something I can provide you with. And why I called you here in the first place, to tell you these things in complete confidentiality, lest anyone intercept a GRID transmission." He looked up to the AR objects that had been floating around this, and waved one of his metallic hands to make them all disappear. "Mr. Williams was one of the veterans of the Cyborg Wars. His unit was selected for experimental procedures involving the uploading of neural networks into drone bodies, to see if they could work any better than artificial intelligence. The methods for doing so were quite crude compared to today's procedures. Mr. Williams lost his physical body during the procedure, leaving him to pilot android shells for the remainder of the wars. After the last of the wars ended and he came back home, however, he opted to be transferred to the GRID instead."

"So Mr. Williams does have experience with being uploaded into android bodies, then? What kinds?"

"That is perhaps one of the most interesting parts, Mr. Stone." Father Andrew smiled at me again and brought up a series of documents and photographs on the AR. "With the help of my own associates on the inside, as well as your own friend that calls himself Vykarius, I was able to use what Harold Williams had told me himself during his brief time as a member of our congregation to figure out what he had done during the Cyborg Wars. As it turned out, he was a suicide bomber. They figured out how to link an uploaded digital personality to control an android body remotely, without downloading it directly into its shell, so that he could pilot it into enemy territory before detonating the onboard explosive payload."

"And just how many people are capable of doing such a thing these days?" I inquired.

"Mr. Williams is the only surviving member of his unit today. I doubt that you would have much luck finding any other uploaded personalities that would be able to carry out the procedures exactly the way he did. The modus operandi is too similar to be a coincidence, if you ask me."

"Thank you for the information, Father Andrew." I gave the cyborg a respectful bow. "Is there anything else you have to share with a private investigator such as myself?"

---

A few days later, Vykarius contacted me again, insisting that we meet in VR. The moment I slipped into my rig and we met up on the public GRID, his avatar appeared before me in the form of a Mitashi Technologies corporate samurai, and he immediately opened up a portal to a private GRID, dragging me through it. Waiting for us on the other side was a virtual courtroom of sorts, where corporate law enforcement tried digital citizens for their crimes. If they didn't comply with the virtual procedures, or tried to log themselves off the GRID during this time, the corporate police would be dispatched to their real life location, and then they would be in way more trouble.

As it turned out, the subject of this trial didn't have a choice, as they were an uploaded personality with no physical body to go back to. It was Mr. Harold Williams himself, standing before a group of identical looking Mitashi Technologies samurai, outfitted exactly like their real life counterparts. I looked down to find that Vykarius had modified my avatar to look exactly like them as well, and that he had spoofed our usernames to appear to be one of them as we stood in the crowd, watching the procedure unfold.

"Harold Williams, the MitaTech virtual court finds you guilty of at least three counts of terrorism, one hundred counts of murder, six hundred counts of assault with the intent to cause lethal harm, and more than fifteen million MitaTech credits worth of damage to corporate property. Your case has already been reviewed by a judge and jury, and have concluded that the sentence for your crimes shall be the immediate purging of your uploaded neural network from every public and private GRID."

Harry looked terrified. "Wait, you don't mean...you're going to delete me, are you!?"

One of the samurai stepped forward, drawing a massive sword. Harry tried to run away, but found his movement restricted by the laws of this private GRID.

"You can't delete me! That's murder!" Harry screamed. "I just wanted to live on the GRID and never have to worry about anything ever again! You weren't supposed to leave me behind by making me incompatible with it! You can't do that! You can't do this! Please, spare me! I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I don't--"

As was part of the ceremony, the corporate samurai raised his sword over his head and lopped the head of Harry's avatar clean off, where it fell to the ground as it and the rest of his body vanished. I pulled up my GRID's social settings and began to run a search for Harold Williams' avatar. It was nowhere to be found. He no longer existed. Even his private domain, with his virtual house on the rolling hills with his virtual family was gone.

"So, the corporations have the authority to simply delete uploaded personalities from cyberspace entirely?" I asked, turning to Vykarius.

"Of course. It's all in the GRID's end user license agreements." Vykarius replied.

"Well then, better get us out of here, Vyke. Before we're found out for digital trespassing. They could erase you too, after all."