Virtually Reality

[Barbara Nolan]

Being in charge of closing the Gotham Public Library meant that there was about an hour of being practically alone in a huge building. Of course there was the security guard, Warren, but he was usually outside, and the other junior librarian, Ms. Anne Pinkley, spent the time tidying up books while Barbara worked with the computer network.

Not that she was working, persay. She moved the mouse and clicked a link, bringing up the Gotham PD database. Barbara used one of the detective's passwords to access the information, and was soon browsing mugshots from the last few weeks of drunk and disorderlies. There had been a particularly unpleasant homeless guy using the computers that day, muttering stuff about the one percent and how they'd get theirs. He'd been writing nasty comments on Gotham First National Bank's website for his entire thirty minutes, then after a few hours he'd come back and played Second Life for another third minute stretch.

Barbara knew this because she'd checked the history while she was dousing the keyboard and seat with Lysol. And the thing was, the guy hadn't even really seemed properly homeless. He'd been dirty, for sure. Grumbly and creepy, check. But something about him had just seemed off.

The mugshots revealed nothing, but they'd been a long shot. Barbara signed out of the GPD system before too long, and finished wrapping up her work. Then she frowned and sat down at the computer console, pulling up Second Life. She'd never played the virtual world 'game' before, but there was a first time for everything.

Barbara checked her watch. She still had twenty minutes before the library officially closed, and it was very quiet. Creating an account didn't take too long, and soon xOraclex (why were all the good names already taken?) was standing in a virtual Gotham.

"Time to wrap up," said Anne, behind her, making Barbara jump.

"Oh yeah, sure. I'll be right out. Go ahead and lock up, I have some... Uh..." Barbara looked vaguely guilty, and Anne laughed.

"Go ahead and play your game, I won't tell. Don't be too long, I think Warren only hangs out front for another hour."

"Right! Got it, thanks. I'll see you tomorrow!" Barbara grinned, and then watched Anne walk down the stairs to the first floor and the doors. She pulled her hair down from its loose ponytail and sent her very plain avatar wandering the virtual streets.

[Barbara Nolan]

xOraclex walked down a brightly lit street. For lack of any other ideas, she was sauntering toward First National Bank. Maybe the guy had tagged it with virtual graffiti.

For all she knew he was a zillionaire in game, and had been checking on his Internet investments. The lights in the library were dim, only a few left on to burn overnight, so Barbara was sitting illuminated mostly by the glow from the computer screen.

Virtual Gotham was, as far as Barbara could tell, a complete copy of the original. Some names were changed. There was some sort of slutty hotel being run where the Hilton was IRL, and quite a few avatars were going in and out. xOraclex tried to go unnoticed, and in her current dress of basic everything it wasn't hard to be ignored. It sort of reminded her of the charity ball the other night. The haves usually tried to pretend the have nots didn't exist.

The bank was around the corner from where she was, so Barbara halted the toon and fiddled with her settings. After a moment she realized that she could exploit the appearance code, and went to work hacking. She granted herself $10,000 in in-game dollars, and reskinned her avatar to make it invisible to others. As long as she didn't try talking to others, no one would know she was there.

Barbara executed the code, and watched xOraclex flicker out of sight. She grinned, and set out to scope out the bank.

[Barbara Nolan]

She walked into the bank, which hopefully looked like a glitch to anyone looking in that direction as the front doors opened. Once the interior loaded Barbara found that it was full of people.

Not people, actually. Someone had created NPC toons and filled the bank with them. They appeared to be little more than animated mannequins, made of rough polygons with blank faces. Barbara tried to keep xOraclex close to the wall, unsure what would happen if she bumped into the NPCs.

A blue NPC was hanging out by the door, and xOraclex turned to look at it. After a moment Barbara realized that it was supposed to be a security guard. She sent xOraclex edging around the perimeter of the bank, insanely curious as to what exactly was going on. Were all the buildings filled with weird NPCs? No, that couldn't be true, she'd read that every avatar you encountered was supposed to be a real person. Was it a cult of users who were rejecting a realistic (HA, thought Barbara, remembering all the thin and busty women she'd passed on the street) look in favor of something even more stripped down?

But why would they be standing blankly in the bank, even standing where the tellers would be? Barbara narrowed her eyes at the screen, slowly turning her toon until a quick movement caught her attention. Her breath caught, then she giggled at how tense she was feeling. A group of four avatars walked from the back room of the bank in tandem, each sporting a black sports coat with a white symbol on the breast.

They walked near enough to xOraclex that Barbara could see that the symbols were card suites. She mentally labeled the four by their suites, and wondered why they were being so quiet. They were standing by the front doors, the figures moving back and forth a bit as though they were pantomiming something.

"Duh, Babs," she smacked herself mentally. "They're talking on a private channel." Hearts was turning in a circle with his hand out, pointing. Pointing at the security cameras. Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds ran into the crowd of NPCs, who began to cower in the center of the large bank as they were apparently programmed to do.

It still took her a minute to realize what she was seeing. The avatars were robbing the bank.

[Rick Grayson]

An often overlooked byproduct of having a cover identity with a legitimate day job is keeping up the appearance that you actually do that job for a living. Field operatives loathe desk work, but if they don't take the time to give at least a cursory review of what their "job" entails, they make it that much harder to sell their cover under scrutiny.

It's about more than just playing a role. Ask any method actor and they will tell you; it's the little details that really sell the performance. For a spy posing as an IT specialist in a highly rated private security firm, this includes being aware of -- if not actually reading -- the same reports about threats against your client's computer system that your boss reads.

Normally Spc Agent Grayson just skimmed the summary provided by the Checkmate contractor who did the actual work, but this time a particular line item caught his attention. It looked like some Occupy whack job was sending malware encoded hate mail to Queen Industries. The IP of the latest traced to a terminal at the Gotham Public Library.

Seemed worth investigating. The fact that a certain redhead worked there was pure coincidence. His interest was strictly in the interest of mission security.

Honest.

Rick jogged up the stairs to the front doors, sidling past a few stragglers forced to head back to their dorm rooms.

"Sir, we're closing in less than five minutes."

Rick just kept walking past the guard, giving him little more than a nod. "Thanks. I'll be done in two."

He made his way into several rows of computers, where a lone terminal was in use. His approach slowed as he took note of what was on the screen. He didn't even realize they had games installed on library computers.

"Hard at work, I see," he called out once he got within a few paces, so that particular redhead didn't jump too high out of her chair.

[Barbara Nolan]

"Holy shhhhhh!" Barbara jumped in her seat and turned to face the unexpected voice. She flushed pink, and had a moment of indecision - was she going to get up, or turn off the screen, or tell Rick off for being in the library so late when Anne was no doubt scooting the last people out the door so she could get home to her kids.

Instead she remained rooted to her chair. "Uh, I mean... sort of?" Her hands unconsciously went to her hair and started gathering it all back into a ponytail. "I... actually you should probably see this, Rick." Barbara grabbed the chair from the console beside her and tugged it a bit closer before nodding toward the computer screen.

xOraclex was still standing against the wall, and the avatars had disappeared into the back of the bank, save for Spades who was standing over the herd of bank NPCs. "I mean, hello of course, but I seem to have ...well I'm not sure what this is except - I'm babbling, I'm sorry."

[Rick Grayson]

"Uhm... okay," Rick replied hesitantly as he sat down. "What am I even looking at? Some kind of Sims game?" He squinted at the screen quizzically. "Oh, this is that online Life thing. Yeah. Oh my God, Babs you're kidding me. You're into this stuff?"

He snorted comically and added, "Hey that looks pretty real. So they're pretending to rob a bank? Cute."

[Barbara Nolan]

"What, me? No. I've never played it before. I'm not even playing it now, I promise." Barbara considered she was probably protesting a little too much, but couldn't help herself. "No, there was some guy here earlier sending hate mail to the bank - this bank - and then he came back and played this game and I was curious and well...

"Look, my avatar is invisible, isn't that cool?" Barbara wished she was invisible, and put her face in her hands. "Never mind, can we just pretend this didn't happen?" She peeked out between her fingers at Rick. "Did you need something from the library? We take overdue books very seriously," she mumbled.

Onscreen some dialog appeared in the local channel.

KnaveofSpades: look we've been over it five times i dont think im going to forget
KnaveofSpades: whats so great about safety deposit boxes anyway
KnaveofSpades: fuck i did it again stupid keys I swear theyre right next to each other
KnaveofSpades: fuck you too its not like theres anyone here to hear
KnaveofSpades: goddammit hearts i get stuck with the hostages and
KnaveofSpades: FINE

[Rick Grayson]

"Look, my avatar is invisible, isn't that cool?"

Rick's thoughts didn't linger on how cool or uncool that was. He wanted to know how the hell she did that. Well, he knew theoretically how to pull it off, but more accurately he wanted to know how did she do it. Pulling a stunt like on the game's server was no small feat of hackery.

But before he could ask the question, Barbara got weirdly embarrassed and started babbling again. That's when the local chat channel in game started getting spammed.

"Whoooah kay. What was that all about? Hold on. Take a look around the bank for me."

She did so, prompting Rick to pay considerably more attention to her virtual surroundings. "Oh hell no," he breathed with a flicker of realization. "Go back toward the vault. If this is an accurate replica it'll be...." He stopped as she flawlessly navigated past "Spades" and the teller gate. "But of course you'd know that," he said in deference to her photographic memory.

Grayson's eyes popped out at the gathering of 3 avatars looting the safety deposit boxes. "No flippin' way. We got a bunch of gamers doing a dry run to rob the First National Bank."

He leaned back in his chair with an amused sigh, processing that. "You say there was some homeless guy sitting here. Wild guess: the IP of this terminal is 136.67.0.22."

He shook his head in disbelief at the confirmation. "Unreal. I guess it's a decent plan, though. If another player wanders in, they can claim they were just goofing around. Hell I can't help but wonder if this is serious or not myself."

[Barbara Nolan]

Barbara's adrenaline spike from being surprised and then embarrassed thudded down back to normal levels as she made xOraclex walk through the bank. Hearing Rick voice the same conclusions she had come to already was nice, too. "Well, Spades seems a little dense but, wait, hang on. Let me just..."

She pulled up another window and started typing, lines of code filing into place as she began trying to hack into any private conversations in close proximity to her toon. Her teeth caught the very tip of her tongue between them as she worked, Rick sitting quietly beside her and watching the screen.

The text box highlighted itself, and then began filling up.

ClubsAce: we'r estill running long by 1 min
ClubsAce: cops will be crawling up our asses is we don't get this
KnaveofSpades: you're clock is wrong, we have this timing down tight
ClubsAce: *if
tenOFdiamonds: We can run it again. Practice makes perfect.
TwoHearts: keep getting hung up on disabling the security cameras, shouldn't be a problem tomorrow. Keyboards are different than

The text stopped scrolling and the screen locked up. "Dammit dammit, the admins found me. Dammit!" She bit her lip, trying to figure out her options, but the mysterious Second Life admin who had uncovered her rogue code had locked down her toon and blocked her IP before they started stripping out the code. xOraclex appeared in the bank, still lurking around the safety deposit boxes. The four playing card themed avatars swiveled around and then one ran up on her, his pixelated face looming large in the screen.

"Fuck me," she groaned, and then she was booted out of the game. Her account showed it had an email from Admin, which probably read something like 'Your IP has been blocked, do not come back kthxbye.'

[Barbara Nolan]

Tim had convinced her that calling the police because of an online pretend bank being pretend robbed would only serve to get dispatch to laugh at her. He was, after all, an officer of the GCPD, so he should know. The so-called evidence was tenuous at best. He did admit that he'd try to get someone to look at it, only to keep Barbara from throwing herself into danger again.

It didn't mean that Barbara could stop thinking about it, at home, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Shouldn't be a problem tomorrow they'd said. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow... She drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Staking out a bank on her day off was hard, because she didn't have a car, and young women didn't usually loiter on sidewalks downtown. Barbara managed to find a seat near a window and also near the door at the Starbucks across the street from the bank. Thank God for free Wifi. She fiddled with her phone, taking some pictures of likely groups of men on the sidewalk, none of which ever stepped inside the First National.

She'd put some thought into what her first move would be. Calling the police with a tip seemed so... passive. Being inside the bank wasn't an option - by the time she saw the robbers going inside it would be too late to run across the street to intervene. Plus, the only 'disguise' she could come up with on short notice was an oversized hoody and an old masquerade mask. Not exactly prime vigilante material, and no, she wasn't wearing the mask.

She sipped her coffee, and then realized there was a way to be inside the bank, if the timing was lucky. Barbara slipped out of her seat, pulled the hood up to cover her red ponytail, and walked across the street into the bank. Once there she waited in line to talk to a banker about opening a safety deposit box. The guy was thrilled to be helping her, and she set about filling out the paperwork. Nothing was going on in the bank, but Barbara was starting to get an itchy feeling between her shoulder blades, like someone was watching her. Probably just nerves.

She followed the banker, Daniel, back into the room with all the safety deposit boxes in it, ready to take her time putting her items inside her newly acquired box. Those items being a pen, the receipt from Starbucks, and a package of kleenexes from her purse.