It could happen to anyone!

another in my occasional series of Second Life-inspired tales...

We hear a lot about playing safe on the Internet in general, and Second Life in particular – any game that demands such immersion and offers such emotion will inevitably have its bad side, as well as its good.

We seem to be going through a quiet period right now so far as Internet Horror Stories are concerned… just the usual rash of concerned Nigerian businessmen asking for your banking details, and credit card companies offering you an Erection That Will Never Die. But there are also occasions when it’s difficult to go a couple of days without one trustworthy source or another unearthing a new Real Life Incident designed to scare us all into regarding every new acquaintance with suspicion. Could she be the Noobie Island Mangler?

This was written during one of those periods.

It is not a confession… it’s not a true story… it’s nothing but a short piece of fiction, a piece of salutary satire that reflects as much on the game’s potential for harm as it does on our own fear of somehow being harmed.

Make of it what you will…

**************

She’s weak, she’s strong, she’s whatever I say she is.

She loves me, she feels me, she does what I tell her to.

Sometimes when I call her to me, she says she has other plans. I accede to them gracefully without a word of dissent. She has me, she thinks, where she wants me. She does not know that I have her.

Sometimes, on those occasions, I will beg a boon. May I visit you, my Lady? And I stand and drink in her beauty, bathe in her radiance, dance in her spotlight. For that is what she requires of me and we all know, what my Lady craves, she shall receive.

I give her all she desires. And, in return, she gives me herself.

I live in her dreams and I fascinate her. I walk in her reality and I satisfy her. I step between the two dimensions, virtual and actual, as though the barrier were butter. And, when she tells me that she has never felt this way before, she believes she speaks only of her role in the game. That the words she types are the moment’s alone and, once they are spoken, they are forgotten. But she is wrong.

All of the memories that she laughingly gushes, all of the dreams that she whispers in pillow talk, I preserve them in pixel, animation and script, so that when she steps into the world I have invented, she steps into a world that she knows and loves.

“Why, there is the church I used to walk past to school.”

“Why, there is the stream that I fell in while playing.”

“Why, there’s the old post office where I used to buy candy.”

And the words that she says to me in that half-forgotten landscape become a part of her memories of that land, permanently seared upon her soul. They can not be discarded as the passion of the mind, for we are not playing a game here, my Lady, or rather, we are not playing the game you believe. When you see that church now, you will see me in the doorway. When you think of that stream, you’ll feel my hands helping you out. When you remember that candy, you’ll be tasting my sweets.

You say you love me, and maybe that’s a game too? That’s what you tell yourself, but I know that you do.

Who knows your deepest secrets, your most fiery fantasies? Not the man you call your husband.

Who do you look for when you first log on, and keep looking for on the nights I don’t appear?

Who is waiting in the back of your mind when you turn away from your computer and return to reality?

Who is the first person you say more than “good morning” to when you arise every day?

And the last you say “goodnight” to when you go to bed at night?

I cannot be dismissed like the lights you switch off behind you as you climb those lonely stairs; I cannot be brushed away like the hand of your husband as he reaches for you in his half-asleep horniness. I cannot be blacked out like the computer image that you stared at since the moment you got home, and which is branded upon your retina when your eyelids close to sleep.

I eliminate your friends, because they do not understand us. One is a liar, one is a cheat, one is malicious and the others are meaningless, We do not need them, for we have one another. And if your rl friends, too, try and turn you against me, I don’t care. They tell you that I exist on the Internet only. But to you, I simply exist. And that is enough. For now.

She gets wet to my words, she orgasms at my command.

I control her.

She speaks words and emotions that no other lover has ever heard.

I possess her.

She tells me of her oldest dreams, and I make them come true.

I own her.

“Build me a castle where I can be Queen.”

“Build me an ocean where I might swim.”

“Buy me a gown that I may look lovely.”

And I hasten to obey because that is what she asks of me, and the gifts grow as extravagant as my generosity.

At first she chooses, but soon I make the selections, dressing her as I wish to dress her, in the styles that I choose myself. And, as the styles and what they say slowly change, so does their nature.

“I have a gift for you, my lady, as exquisite as you are. May I have an address to send it to?”

I know where she lives

And she falls deeper under my spell, darker into her own living nightmare – the nightmare where she has lost all control, while thinking that she rules the world.

The game is slow. It may take weeks, it may take months. But the play is as exquisite as the end result, and why hurry the perfection of my art?

“I crave the touch of your hand,” I moan as our avatars grind in poseballed perfection.

“Then let me touch myself,” she says, and she types a long gasp with suddenly moistened fingers..

“I long to hear your voice,” I whisper, as our pledges and promises tumble out in mad passion.

“Then let me whisper your name,” she replies, and she switches on her microphone, “just for a second, while there’s no-one around.”

“I need to glimpse your flesh,” I gasp, as her fingers flash the words that tell me what she wishes.

“Then let me give you that glimpse,” she giggles, as she activates her cam and shyly flashes a breast. And I type a long moan as I speak of its beauty, as she clicks on the box that brings my cam to her screen, then types her own liquid longing for the image she sees.

“Touch me,” I breathe and her finger snakes out, to run down my cock as it hangs on her screen.

“Kiss it,” I whisper and she inclines her head, her lips to the screen of the laptop she bought so she could manage the household and play online banker.

“And fuck me,” I cry as she lowers her lens and I look and I listen as she rides her imagination to orgasm – the imagination that I created in my very own image; the imagination that will follow her wherever else she goes.

She asks if she can text me when she is not near her laptop. I give her my number. Her first notes are shy, all fingers and thumbs, misspelled abbreviations like a child’s first code. But they will grow.

I pay a few dollars for an online subscription. Her phone number becomes an address, and a search result in Google maps. I study her neighborhood and then tell her of my home… that has the same color siding, the same kind of garden, the same favorite trees. We aren’t simply one in love and devotion, she breathes. We are one in spirit too.

I agree and I bring us closer still. And closer and closer, until I could almost believe that I really do care for the woman who grinds on the carpet when my buddies come round to watch the Internet show. Whose moving image is “live” on the web, you can search for it now if you like… yes, I’ll wait. It’s called “horny housewife calling my name.”

Her photos are seeded across a dozen more websites. I’ve even posted the audio for the whole world to hear, because a beauty this rare should not be kept to myself. It should be shared with everyone who appreciates her talents.

Including, should they ever mouse in the right direction, her husband… her son… her employer… her friends.

But that is another game, one that I will not be here to play, because I will be playing another by then. I will have tired of her, her neediness, her love, and I will do so in the knowledge that I can move on.

And that she can not.