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The door opened up and a slim guy walked in, looking like an over-sized bug, V/R helmet on his head. He took the helmet off and a couple of voices were raised up:

"Hey, Collins, decided to join in!

"Collins, what's new?"

Collins hung up his helmet, his short blond hair matted down with sweat. "Man, I almost got nailed in the parking lot. You'd think the pizza delivery boy-o's would know which end of the lot is the exit. Hey, I made the seventh level on Saturn's Rings. Finally!"

He ran his hands across his hair, wiped at his face. "Oh, one more thing. Got a NewsNet flash on the way over here. Saigon got nuked."

Emerson said, "No shit. What does it look like?"

"Suitcase job, what else? Near the Mekong so it could rain glowing water down on mama-san and papa-san. Nasty stuff."

"Credits?"

"Two so far. Both Islamic fundie branches. You bet it'll be a dozen by tomorrow."

A laugh. "And the new Hundred Year's War goes merrily along."

One of the short-termers said, "Saigon? I thought it was called Ho Chi Minh City."

"It was until Dell took over. One of the corporate officers had a dad who was a Viet war vet. Changed the name for sentimental reasons. They had bought naming rights when they set up their first assembly lines. Hey, anybody got stock in emerging Southeast Asia markets?"

Another laugh. "Those markets have been emerging for decades. You'd be an idiot to sock away some stuff in there. C'mon, back to work."

Fletcher finished his water. The new way of the world. Reality wasn't the huddled masses in the Third World and Second World, pressing out from their slums, their apartment high rises, the porous borders. Ships at sea and aircraft in the skies and buses on the ground being hijacked and commandeered by desperate people, trying to get someplace where the phones worked and the lights came on and men with guns didn't come into your home at night, blast you into bloody pieces over some ancient feud. All that didn't matter.

What did matter was the reality in the V/R helmets, the home theaters, the connected Sim Game networks spread across the world. That was the new reality. Everything else was markets and support and raw materials.

He stood up, stretched, felt the tendons and joints creak. He guessed he was raw material, in a way. He had grown up in one of the last wild stretches of Montana, dropping out of school, doing odd jobs here and there – mostly there, since who had money to pay for what passed as an odd job nowadays? – and hunting and fishing and trying to live like the old guys did, like Lewis and Clark. Reading book after book in the free libraries around the county.

Some adventure, until the Montana Highway Patrol picked him up one day, cited him for vagrancy. No real job, found himself on the welfare rolls – even though he had never asked for welfare a day in his life – and he found himself sucked into the Fed database for welfare recipients.

Rules were pretty clear – after assessment and testing, you had to go to where the jobs were, and that's how he found himself here, two years later, on the Left Coast, testbedding a new sim game, complete with everything you wanted in V/R. Hell of a ride. The aptitude tests and screening fitted him into this little slot, and he guess he was more fortunate than some, for he was considered a full-timer, not a short-termer. Which meant those extra goodies every two weeks and the fact that he could let loose every now and then.

Like right now.

Fletcher got up from his chair, tossed the plastic water bottle in a recycling bin. "Heading out," he announced to no one in particular. "Gotta go clear my head."

Most everyone ignored him, except Emerson, who said. "Going to take long?"

"Don't think so."

"'Kay. Make sure it's not more than fifteen minutes. Pager on?"

"Yeah."