So, bit of background. Hi, I'm Crazy Minh. I've been writing fiction online for...seven? Eight years now? Point is, I've been doing this a long time. Some of you might know me as a long-time participant in the Whateley Academy community, although I've been largely inactive over there this year after some drama happened on the Discord. The bulk of my work was formerly hosted on ScribbleHub, a site which I have since been driven off in the last couple of days by some very ignorant individuals who objected to me being trans. This is one of my works that I've been writing since November last year, and I'm hosting it here to allow my fans to continue to access my work. I'm really hoping that this is the right way to post stuff on BigCloset, since this UI looks like it came out of the mid 90s, and the posting system is more akin to a forum than a actual publishing interface, so *shrug* here goes nothing.

I was asleep, dreaming deeply when my apartment woke me up. With the sound of an airhorn, no less.

I jerked awake, nearly banging my head on the top of my moulded plastic bedframe as I flailed around in the dark room for the control panel next to my bed. This blind flailing failed to do more than knock over the glass of water sitting on my bedside table, and cause my SpiderCloth™ bedsheets to slide onto the now-wet floor.

Eventually, I managed to switch off the ear-splitting noise, which my SmartHome™ home operating system took as an indication that I was now awake, and that it should open the blinds.

The smart-plastic shutters slowly rolled up, letting the light of the massive neon billboard outside my window light my tiny apartment with a harsh multichromatic glare. As usual, this deep into the urban sprawl of Neo-Sydney, it was impossible to tell what time of day it was, let alone if it was day or night.

I grabbed my glasses from my bedside table and slid them on, my field of vision lighting up with icons and windows almost instantly. Fucking hell, it was five AM?

“House?” I said, collapsing back onto my synthetic mattress. “I thought I said to wake me at six.”

The apartment spoke with the cheerful and bubbly synthetic voice that was, unfortunately, the only option that came with the system. “I apologise, Kara, but your schedule said very clearly to wake you in time for your morning classes. If this was in error, please accept me apolo-”

I swiped at the mute icon in my AR interface, and the voice cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a scrolling field of text towards the top of my field of view that I could thankfully now ignore. I’d been living by myself for a year now, and I still could not stand the home AI that had come with the apartment. Fuck, I couldn’t stand most of the shit that came with living in the 22nd Century, let alone the fact that my home wouldn’t shut the hell up.

I walked over to the window and started out at the towering megablock that occupied most of the world outside my window. The holographic billboard, now advertising the latest brand of medicated toothpaste, towered over my 59th floor apartment, the advertisement repeated multiple times along its length. Between me and the billboard, swarms of flying drones (and the occasional AirCar) zipped past, hovering above the thick fog that obscured the streets below.

Most of my classmates found this sort of thing “inspiring”, the future corporate wage-slaves that they were. Hell, why wouldn’t they? This was the world we had all been born into, and had existed for far longer than the sixteen years we had been alive. Some of their families had been working the same jobs at the same company for three generations. My family…well, they didn’t approve of who I was. Who I am. They certainly didn’t want me in their life after I came out, let alone working the same jobs.

Not wanting to get bogged down in bad memories, I dragged myself over to my apartment’s kitchen nook, and powered on the coffee maker. My house automatically deducted the cost of the crappy Soy-Espresso pod from my monthly welfare budget, and helpfully flashed a reminder in my field of view noting that I had successfully cut down on coffee consumption by 50% this last month, earning me a healthy living merit. Virtual confetti began raining from my ceiling, disappearing a few seconds after touching a real surface. I resisted the urge to imagine throttling the programmer at LifeCorp who came up with such an obnoxious visual effect. And then made it impossible to dismiss.

Soon, my coffee machine was pouring the almost-tasteless greyish-brown “coffee” into a plastic mug, I was doomscrolling through the daily news, and my SoyFlakes™ were going down like the vaguely corn-flavoured cardboard they tasted like. I still had a full hour to get ready for class, and it’s not like I was attending in person anyway. I hadn’t gone to school in person since I came out, not least because of my body-image related issues.

The news was the usual affair. Riots in Old Berlin over the demolition of the historic holocaust museum in favour of a modernised and corporate-funded exhibit in the Lebensstil-Netzwerke Überlegene Ausstellung museum complex. Massive election fraud for the 2182 Australian Presidential elections. Five arcologies in Neo-Paris on fire after a terrorist attack on the local Potemkin Security Solutions research laboratory.

Chemical spills. Terrorism. Corporate Warfare. Ecological Collapse. This was the world I had been born into. The world in which I wished I could ignore. A world where I was stuck in the wrong body, given the wrong name, by parents who refused to accept me the moment I told them who I was inside.

I looked down at my body. Broad shoulders, a flat chest, a bulge down at the groin. This was not what I wanted for myself. And I was a long way off from being able to afford the nanite infusions that were the best way for me to become who I wanted to be. Every day, I felt myself tearing a little bit more from being in a body that felt so wrong. From being unable to meet my small group of school friends in person because they’d probably reject me if they knew what I actually looked like outside of AR. From living in a world where I was a small, unimportant cog living on welfare in the biggest megacity in the southern hemisphere. Half the time, I was bored of engaging with the world, and the other half I was scared of engaging with the world. I was practically a shut-in, only leaving my apartment to go running, the one activity which didn’t make me feel physically sick with my body and the way it moved.
No wonder I got called a nihilist by everyone. It was practically mandatory in this day and age

I walked over to my favourite chair, a ratty old beanbag that was one of the few possessions I’d taken when I left home, and collapsed into it. I checked the time. 05:50 on Wednesday, the 25th of September 2182. Time for school. Tapping the frame of my glasses, I switched them off, and set them down on a pile of books beside my beanbag that served as a makeshift table. I then grabbed my VR headset from a hook beside my beanbag, and began wiping off the small metal disks around the headband with a small cleaning cloth.

My headset was a Toshiba Dynamix-II, a cheap entry-level immersion headset. It was a few years old at this point, having been a birthday gift from my parents before I came out. On the outside, it was little more than a thick loop of scuffed white polymer, which fitted snugly around my temples. A large battery pack was attached to the back, and a small antenna stuck up from one of the sides. The inside of the circlet, however, was where the important parts were. The small metal disks that lined it were dual-mode neural imagers/stimulators that allowed me to interface with the device.

The device then communicated with my home network, which connected me to the internet. From there, I could virtually appear at school without ever having to show my face. Of course, I had no physical presence at school. While I had my own desk for the purpose of seating arrangements, and I technically had my own locker, I had no way to interact physically with the school. I could “see” by the means of a cleverly stitched-together simulation that took data from the school’s camera network, other students’ AR glasses, and various other sensors to give me a near-perfect perspective of what was going on where I was “standing”, and teachers and other students could see my virtual avatar with their AR glasses to give the illusion that they were talking face to face with me.

There were tells, however, that what I was seeing was not fully accurate, however. If someone tried to show me a physical page on a book, I wouldn’t be able to read it unless they were also looking at the page. I couldn’t open doors, or interact with objects, so it would appear to other students as if I had ghosted through a door, and to my as if my perspective had suddenly shifted to be inside the room. If the cameras didn’t have a good view of an area, and nobody else was around to fill in the blanks, that area would be filled by a static or semi-static image of the last time that area was imaged.

All of this was piped directly to my brain via the headset, while my real body sat immobilised in my beanbag. I wasn’t completely disconnected from my physical presence, as what the headset was really doing was artificially inducing a state of REM sleep that I could “wake” from at any time. While I could feel my virtual avatar as if it was really my body, it didn’t feel right. Touch felt muted, although I could only feel that if another person remoting in touched me. Heat and cold were also not simulated, meaning that the only way the simulation would render such sensory information was, again, if a remote user also touched me, and even then it was very clearly artificial in nature.

About the only senses that were accurately reproduced were sight and sound, and that itself took more computing power than was available in the first fifty years of the last century. Fortunately, computing power was cheap these days thanks to publicly subsidised service providers, hybridised quantum computing, and superluminal network uplinks. If there was one think that I didn’t find depressing about the state of things, it was that our drive to turn more and more of our planet into an unbroken cityscape meant that we at least had fast internet.

With the contacts fully clean, and the battery indicator on the power pack reading a full charge, I pulled my messy hair into a loose ponytail, and pulled on the Dynamix. The smart-polymer device automatically adjusted itself to fit my head, and chirped once it was ready to make the connection. The Toshiba’s own AR field appeared around me as I leaned back in my beanbag, and logged into the school’s VR portal with the virtual keyboard that floated in front of me. While I could always just use direct neural commands to interface with the device, I preferred the device’s virtual interface. It was easier than relying on my own fucked-up head. As the clock ticked over to 06:00, I rested my head back against the wall behind me, and closed my eyes.

“Connect to simulation: Macquarie Public School, classroom 406”

And then the world went white.
________________________________________
I opened my eyes to find myself where I was yesterday morning, sitting in my seat in my tutor group room. The classroom was a multipurpose space, oriented in a semicircle around the teacher’s podium in the centre. The seating was tiered, with each seat facing inwards towards the teacher. When classes were in progress, the teacher could use their AR controls to ensure each student could see the learning material, which would appear to float in space above the plinth, and could pipe their voice through each students’ AR glasses to make sure each student could hear them properly. My best friend, Becky Stewart, always used to jokingly remark that the classroom was “A Greek theatre, with the tragedy being the Australian public educational system.”

She was unfortunately not sitting on my left today, as she was currently away at her grandmother’s funeral over in New London. The seat to the right of me was also empty, having not been assigned to anyone yet. Most of my tutor group was already here, including…

“Oi, troll-face! You’re in my way! Maybe you want to turn transparent, so I don’t have to look at the back of your deformed skull?”

Her. Jessica. I twisted in my chair, my virtual avatar- a generic auburn-haired girl wearing the school uniform- presumably doing the same in Jessica’s AR field.

“I’m not in your way, Jessica,” I responded curtly. Fortunately, I'd perfected a feminine voice well before I came to school, so I didn't have to worry about giving myself away. “And even if I was, there’s nothing to see. You’re in the second row, we’re not in class, and you can easily just set your glasses to filter me out anyway.”

She pretended to look around. “Oh, wait, where’s that ugly ghost-bitch gone? Can anyone else see her? Maybe it was just my imagination.”

Maxine, the black-haired twit who was her best friend, cackled shrilly and made a face at me. I turned back to the front of the room in disgust. I couldn’t remember when Jessica had first started calling me troll-face, but it was an insult she’d been throwing my way since the day I transferred here. There were very few students who used virtual presence software to attend school, a practice commonly referred to as ‘remoting’. Most of them did so for reasons linked to social anxiety, or to some form of medical condition.

In my case, it was because my psychologist had given the school a letter excusing me from physical attendance due to “long-term body image anxiety”. This generic and wide-reaching diagnosis covered the specific diagnosis, which was that I suffered from gender dysphoria. This, coupled with the anti-discrimination laws of the Australian Federal Republic, meant that not even the principal could access my full student records, which contained my birth gender, birth name, and other information that would out me for sure. Which was fortunate, considering that the principal of this school was Jessica’s mother, something which did not endear her to me.

Before Jessica could launch into yet another list of barbs, our aging tutor, Mr. MacAdams, walked into the room and took his chair at the podium. He cleared his throat, and then clapped his hands. Everyone in the room suddenly stopped talking.

“Good morning, tutor group,” he started, making hand motions that could only mean he was interacting with a private AR window that only he could see. “How was everyone’s day yesterday? Was the weather good out at Centennial Park?”

There were mumbles of affirmation from around the classroom. Yesterday had been the sports carnival, which fortunately meant I had the day off school. Unfortunately, it also meant that I had spent the day without my friends to talk to, and with nothing to do but watch shitty television and catch up on homework. Mr. Macadams finished what he was doing in AR, and refocused on the class.

“Now, while I’m sure you’re all eager to get your names ticked off, and head off to your first class, I have a couple of small announcements to make. First off, the school would like to remind all students that the HSC examinations for year 12 start four weeks from now.”

He paused and coughed into his elbow. I stared at the wall behind him, wondering why he thought we wouldn’t be aware of this. This had already been bought up in assembly last week. Most of the class was in a similar state of annoyance, as he continued to drone on.

“All students should be mindful that the senior students require peace and quiet during their exams, and that noise in the corridors should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, students are to be reminded that scheduling alterations are in effect during this period, and that room assignments for your classes during the exam period are subject to change.”

He stopped, straightened his tie, and got up out of his chair. “As for the second announcement…Alice, you want to introduce yourself?”

A beautiful young woman, with long dark brown hair, and bright green eyes appeared next to the desk as if she had always been there. She was around 5’7”, fair skinned, and remarkably slender. Her facial features were sharp and elfin, and she had a mischievous grin across her face. She looked around the room, waving. Jessica groaned, and whispered to Maxine at a volume she knew I could easily hear.

“Oh god, not another lazy stay at home. I wonder how hideous she is that she needs to wear a custom avatar like that.”

Alice, if that was her name, cleared her throat, and began to speak, her voice inflected with a strong Australian accent. “Hello, folks! I’m Alice Miller, pleasure to meet you. I’m transferring here from Central Sydney Girl’s Academy, and I’ll be joining the year ten cohort here at MQPS.”

She continued to introduce herself, but I didn’t really listen to the rest. Something about her made my heart flutter, in a way that was strange and unfamiliar. It felt like a thousand butterflies were landing inside my chest, and gently fluttering their wings. It felt…good. I was suddenly aware that Mr. MacAdams was talking to me, and I quickly composed myself.

“Sorry sir, I was deep in thought. What were you saying?”

Jessica sniggered from behind me, but I ignored her. MacAdams sighed, and repeated himself wearily.

“As I was saying, Miss Porter, since you’re the only virtually present student in this tutor group, I’d like you to shadow Miss Miller around for the next few days. Show her where everything is, and make sure she feels comfortable at our school.”

Alice beamed at me, and I barely supressed the urge to giggle as the feeling in my chest was set off again. Goddamnit, this was an unfamiliar feeling. She walked over, her virtual feet not quite touching the floor, and sat down next to me, the VR mesh over the simulated physical space allowing her to contact both the desk and the chair without phasing through it. She grinned at me, and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Alice. You are…?”

I swallowed, and took her hand gently. It felt weird, like I was holding her hand through layers of gloves wrapped around my hand. Her hand felt warm, but again the feeling was muted.

“Kara. Kara Porter. I guess I’m making sure you get to know the school.”

Jessica leered down at us, but I quickly adjusted my setting to block her out from my perception. This wouldn’t last long, as tutor group was nearly over, but it would allow me and Alice to talk without her interrupting. While I was at it, I also blocked Maxine. The two of them became mute blurred out smears that I tuned out easily. I copied my settings, and silently sent them to Alice’s own VR system. She looked at them, said something that I couldn’t make out, and then turned back to me.

“I’m guessing you’re not a fan of them. I don’t think I like them either.”

I groaned. “Trust me, the feeling’s mutual. So, yeah, now that we can’t hear them, and they can’t hear us, how about I show you around? I don’t have classes till after lunch today, so I have most of the morning off, so long as I remain online and “on campus”.

She laughed, making my heart flutter again. I quickly nipped that feeling in the bud, and resolved to check my VR setup for potential problems. She grinned, and brought up an AR window with her schedule.

“Let’s see…I don’t have class until the period before lunch, and then I have two more classes after lunch. English is up next, and then computer science and physics after lunch.”

I grinned, unusually elated. “Oh cool! You have Mrs. Carter for both?”

She looked at her timetable again, frowning. “Uh…yes. I assume that means we’re in the same class?”

“Yeah,” I said, mindlessly twirling one of my avatar’s locks of hair. “It does. You want to go see where everything…”

I stood up, intending to leave, and realised I was still holding her hand. I blushed furiously and let go. She looked down at her hand, looked up, and realised she had also still been holding my hand. Her face went red, and she quickly stood up as well.

“Uh, yeah, a tour sounds good,” she said quickly, nodding furiously and backing away. “How about we start with my English classroom?”

“The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them.” ― William Gibson, Neuromancer

The bell rang, and students filed out of the classroom I stood outside of, waiting for Alice. It was time for lunch, and I’d promised to wait for Alice outside her classroom. The tour earlier had gone well, and I’d shown her all of the important parts of the school. Obviously, this did not include the toilets or the gym, since neither of us would be using those facilities any time soon. I had found out more about her and her family while we walked and chatted, although she seemed reluctant to talk about her mother’s job.

She was remoting in because she lived on the other side of the city and couldn’t commute here easily, she was from a well-off family and had previously gone to a private school before bullying issues forced her into the public system, and she was an academic achiever. All very good things to know. Hell, we even exchanged phone numbers like stereotypical teenage girls. Then, she’d gone off to English, and I’d settled into a chair in the library and browsed the library’s eBook selection for an hour and a half.

While I stood there, I pondered what exactly it was that I’d felt earlier today. The most cliché answer would be “love”, but that could never work. I was a girl with the body of a boy, and she…well, I hadn’t asked her sexual preferences, and I didn’t intend to. I didn’t want to know the answer.

Even if I got lucky and she was a lesbian…I was physically male, and the minute we met in person she’d reject me. Hell, she might even lock me out of her life like my parents…

…like my parents did. God, I love running into mental brick walls. I immediately resolved to talk about this with my psychologist during out meeting this Friday.

Just then, Alice walked out of the classroom (or, rather, glided out with her legs moving as if she was walking- the simulation technology the school was using was quite old, and had some problems animating walking physics correctly), and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, Kara,” she said, smiling. “Time for lunch?”

I grinned back. “Yeah, time for lunch. Follow me, I’ll introduce you to the nerd herd.”

The cafeteria was packed with real students, all sitting down to eat their food. I’d already had my lunch while I was waiting for Alice, leaving VR briefly to choke down a SoyBeef and Cheese sandwich from the food dispenser in my apartment, but I still showed up to lunches to talk with my small group of fellow outcasts and nerds.

---

---

A century ago, Australian children wouldn’t have been eating in a cafeteria, at least not normally. Most of the old schools had outdoor spaces for kids to eat their lunch in, and get some fresh air and sun. They would also have probably had their own packed lunch, or a choice of menu options from the school canteen. Unfortunately for the old ways, rapid urbanisation and heavy pollution meant that it was both healthier and more practical for kids to eat their lunch in a closed-in space, and the rising global population meant that it was more practical to serve kids the same slop made from genetically engineered soybeans and lichen.

It didn’t matter whether it was nominally called “beef stew” or “vegetable salad”. All it was composed of was a few strains of genetically modified lichen plus soy paste for texture and thickness. Plus flavouring and the occasional nutritional supplement. Real food, the sort that people ate back in the 21st century, was prohibitively expensive, and often in short supply.

Even the bread in my sandwich was made from soy, and tasted about as good as slightly damp cardboard. It wasn’t like I had anything to compare it to, but the human body has standards about what it will tolerate eating, and therefore I still found it hard to consume something that tasted only marginally better than the box it came in.

With Alice trailing behind me, I found my friends sitting around a small table at the back of the room. To my surprise, Becky was there too, albeit remoting in. Two of them looked up at Alice and I and grinned.

“Ayy, look who finally turned up!” exclaimed Jaime, shaking out her long blond hair and grinning maniacally. “It’s Ghost-Girl! And she brought a new person!”

Becky simply smiled at us. She looked sad, her avatar out of uniform and wearing a simple black dress. I felt sorrow wash over me. She was usually so much more chipper.

I sat down on one of the benches, my hand briefly ghosting through Becky’s right arm, and patted the spot to the left of me. Alice tentatively sat down where I’d indicated, across from Jaime. As usual, Mike, the sole boy of the group, had his head down in a book, and didn’t appear to have noticed that anyone had showed up. His AR glasses were sitting on the table in front of him, and his reading glasses were on his face. Jaime tapped him on the shoulder, and he jerked upright.

“What?” he yelped, his head snapping from side to side in confusion. “I was reading, I swear! What’s going on?”

Jaime sighed. “Mike, everyone’s here. Put your damn glasses on.”

He pawed around on the table for his AR glasses, before awkwardly trying to fit them over his reading lenses. Realising his mistake, he quickly pulled off his reading glasses, and popped them in his pocket before putting on his AR glasses. His glasses slightly crooked, and his curly black hair messier than it was before, he looked around the table, grinning.

“Ah, sorry, Kara,” he said apologetically, rubbing the back of his head with his right hand. “I was really stuck into this old novel. I should really look into getting some AR glasses with prescription lenses.”

I reached over and mimed mussing his hair. He self-consciously tried to grab my arm to stop me from doing so, but his hand passed right through me, and he quickly put it back down. He then looked towards Alice, and his eyes went wide.

“Oh…um…uh…new person. Hi! I’m…I’m…”

He began stuttering, which caused Alice to break out into laughter. Mike’s face went red.

“Hey,” he said, embarrassed. “I…I’ll…”

Alice stopped laughing, and turned to me. “So, um, Kara…introductions?”

I rolled my eyes, and swivelled to face her. “So, this is the nerd herd. Nerd herd, this is Alice.”

Becky and Jaime both waved, and smiled. Mike was too busy burying his face in his hands and rocking back and forth gently. I tapped Alice on the shoulder, and pointed to Mike.

“Prince charming over there is called Mike Horner. He runs D&D games for us in VR every Saturday. Don’t worry about the rocking, it’s some sort of stim for him to calm himself down. You’ll see him after lunch for programming.”

Mike, while continuing to rock, raised one hand briefly in acknowledgement before dropping it back to the table. I moved my hand to Jaime, and gestured theatrically. “This, dear Alice, is Jaime Merrow. She’s the resident board games nerd. If she offers to play chess with you, run away, very quickly. If there’s a bet involved, run twice as fast.”

Jaime held her heart and pretended to swoon. “How dare you, madame! What a heinous accusation! But seriously, ignore her, she’s just bitter I’ve beaten her in every game of chess we’ve played.”

I shook my head, and finally pointed to Becky. “And this is Becky, my best friend. She’s currently away for family reasons, so she’s remoting in. And not wearing school uniform as well?”

Becky looked down. “I needed to talk to my friends, so I remoted in for our usual lunch meetup. It’s…hard, with Grannie gone. It’s good to see you all. I wish I could say I’m excited to meet you, Alice, but…yeah, it’s been a rough few days.”

She looked up, and smiled sadly. There was a stoney silence around the table, before Mike jumped in.

“So…um…Becky,” he blurted. “If you’re feeling down, we can always skip our D&D session this Saturday, so you don’t miss anything. I mean, only if you want to, but you may not and…”

Becky held up a hand, and he stopped talking. “Mike, you don’t have to worry. Right now, I need to keep my mind out of the weeds, and spending my Saturday playing with my friends sounds like a fantastic idea. Anyway, I’ll be back home by Friday evening, and I’ll have plenty of time to get some rest before the game.”

Mike grinned, and turned to Alice, his eyes not quite focusing on hers. “So, um, Alice?”

“Yes, Mike?” she said, slowly. “That is my name.”

His face went red again, and he began stuttering. “Do…do you want to…to…to…”

Jaime stepped in. “What I think our illustrious friend here is trying to say is that we would be honoured, Alice, if you joined our group this Saturday for a game. That is, if you’re interested?”

Alice frowned. “I’ve never played D&D before. Are you sure you want me there?”

I laughed. “Trust me, the only person here who’s been playing for any significant length of time is Mike. And it’s not exactly D&D in the traditional sense either. You’ll see, assuming you join us.”

I patted her on the hand, and she blushed, lowering her head to conceal her smile.

Jaime began clapping her hands. “Join us!” she chanted, clapping in time. “Join us! Join us! Join us!”

Alice raised her head and nodded. “Oh, alright. I’ll tag along. Might as well, since I don’t have anywhere else to be. You guys seem alright, and you all seem to know what’s going on around here. I guess I’ll hang with you. For now.”

Before anyone could cheer or do much more than grin, the bell rang, and everyone began filing off to classes. I grabbed Alice’s hand again, and rose to my feet, pulling her up with me.

“Come on, we have class to get to. I’ll show you to the computer lab.”

---

---

The computer lab was a large room, with a circle of recliners arranged around a central processor hub. VR headsets sat on hooks next to each seat, and a large, curved window gave an excellent view of the towers of the Macquarie University campus across the way from our school building. The eternally greyish-green clouds had parted slightly to allow some shafts of light down into the city, turning what was usually a very depressing vista into something that could possibly be called pretty.

As usual, the view out the window gave me nothing but a further sense of apathy, so I tried my best not to look in that direction. Alice and I were the first ones to arrive at the classroom, with Mrs. Carter late as usual. Her green jacket was hung over the back of the teacher’s chair, and there was a cup of blue jelly sitting half-eaten on her desk, so I knew she’d at least been here relatively recently before ducking out. Alice walked over to the window and stared out.

“Man, this is the first time I’ve seen this part of Sydney,” she said, turning around. “You can actually distinguish the individual buildings out here without having to rely on AR tags. It’s nowhere near as urbanised here, is it?”

I shook my head. “Nah, this whole area was mainly a technology park up until around 2080,” I explained, walking over to join Alice. “That’s when the city limits began to encroach on North Ryde. See, over there, you can see some of the historic parts of the old university around the base of the towers.”

I pointed to a barely visible patch of parkland and small buildings surrounding the base of the two 90 story buildings that constituted Macquarie University. Then I pointed over to the large pyramid-shaped arcology to the far right.

“And over there is the Optus-Telstra Telecommunications Anex,” I said, grinning. “It’s one of the best places in Sydney to work and live. I was born at the hospital there.”

Alice smiled. “Oh? Do you still live there?”

My grin faded. “I…I live by myself now. In welfare housing. Over near the Glebe sector. My parents sorta kinda disowned me a year ago.”
I began to breathe a little faster, and became aware that my mouth had suddenly gone dry. Alice pulled my avatar into a hug, the feeling of touch calming me down. I was suddenly aware that my virtual breasts were pressing into hers.

“Hey, it’s OK,” she said soothingly. “Don’t worry, I think I got the picture. You OK?”

She released me, and I stumbled backwards, my heart thumping, and my cheeks red. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, a familiar cackle rang out from behind us.

“Oh, look. Troll-girl found a Troll friend,” sneered Maxine, walking over to one of the recliners and relaxing in it. “Why don’t you lesbians find another place to mash your deformed faces together in?”

Alice looked momentarily shocked, but quickly composed herself. She turned on Maxine and crossed her arms.
“Mate, what is your problem?” she asked, furious. “And what’s with the lame pre-school insults? “Troll-girl”? “Troll Friend”? Are you implying that there’s something wrong with the way I look?”

Maxine snickered. “Come on, now. Your avatar looks like a supermodel, and you’re a remote learner. You’re either ugly as sin, or the size of a whale. Or both! As for her, well, she’s using the default avatar. The only reason she’d be hiding behind that is if her real appearance is too misshapen for anyone to see without puking.”

I clenched my fists and tried to reign in my anger. If I was attending school in person, I would have slugged Maxine in the face long ago. The problem was that I had very little recourse. I couldn’t interact with her in any way because she was at the school in meatspace. I was simply a digital ghost that could only be perceived in AR, and who lacked any real physicality.

If I launched back my own barbs, Maxine could easily tune them out. And the school’s settings didn’t allow long-term muting of other students without special permission from the principal. Who was Jessica’s mother, and therefore unlikely to take my side. Furthermore, if I did so, it would likely land me in trouble, something that I couldn’t afford to end up dealing with when my social services guardian next got my school reports. If I was caught fighting, even verbally, she’d restrict my internet access for sure, cutting off my one viable form of social communication.

Alice was less subtle about her anger. Striding forwards, she attempted to slap Maxine, her hand passing right through the girl’s head. The taller, dark haired teen looked surprised for a second, before bursting out into laughter.

“Oh my god, you actually tried to slap me while remoting? God, I wish I’d gotten that on video, Troll-friend.”

Alice looked like she was building up to a massive tirade, but was stopped when the rest of the class, along with Mrs. Carter filed into the room. The blond haired woman walked over to her chair, and cleared her throat.

“I’m sorry, is there a problem?” she asked, picking up her jelly and scooping a spoonful of it into her mouth. “Or do I have to start handing out demerits?”

Maxine smirked, and leaned back in her chair. “No, Mrs. Carter. I’m all good.”

Mrs. Carter looked sceptically at Maxine, but said nothing more on the matter. The rest of the class began sitting down in the VR recliners, but didn’t begin pulling on their headsets yet. Mrs. Carter bought up a private AR window, and began ticking off the roll. Meanwhile, I lead Alice over to the back of the room, where a pair of ordinary plastic seats sat.

“OK, so, since we’re both already in VR, we won’t have our own seats,” I said, sitting down. “But it’s rather rude to stand while class is in session. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Carter says.”

Alice sat down next to me, just as the teacher stopped listing off the roll.

“Alright, class, today we’re going to be continuing where we left off with our lesson on coding in Kaparthy-IIIa,” said Mrs. Carter. “If you wouldn’t mind plugging yourselves into simulation four-two, that would be great. Kara, if you wouldn’t mind helping Alice out, that would also be great.”

I bought up my simulation controls, and quickly typed in the simulation name, and created an instance for me and Alice to share. I sent an invite to Alice, who accepted.

“Ready?” I asked, my finger hovering over the activation button.

“Ready,” she confirmed. “Let’s go visit the wonderful wizard.”

I pressed the button, and for the second time today, everything went white.

---

---

When the world faded back in, I was floating in a black void, surrounded by strings of coloured light. This was the coding environment for Kaparthy-IIIa, a brain-computer interface programming language commonly taught to students in high school. I had read in history books about how coders used to program computers using lines of syntax, clunkily assembling functions from either compiled or interpreted languages that the computer then used to carry out instructions. In the intervening century and a half, computer programming had been revolutionised by the introduction of commercial-grade neural interfaces, making the process more abstract in appearance, but opening up a large range of possibilities for programming.

Usually, I ran my personal instance of the coding simulation without any rendered physical form for myself. However, today I was working with a partner, and therefore needed to make a few changes. Alice’s disembodied voice seemed to ring inside my “head”, or what I perceived as my head.

“Oh. This is different.”

I chuckled, a difficult thing to do without a body, but capable if you knew what you were doing. In reality, I was just imagining myself laughing, and transmitting that abstract thought process to Alice via the uplink we had with the simulation environment. “Yes, welcome to my domain! I will be giving us some sort of physicality in just a second. Let me just fiddle with the settings.”

I drifted towards a strand of twisted red and blue lights, and reached out towards it with my mind. It contorted, and split into multiple separate strings of light. These lights then flowed towards me and the point in the void where Alice was presumably located. The lights then coalesced into rough wireframe outlines, which were shaped vaguely like our AR avatars.

“There we go,” I said, grinning. “That’ll do for now. Anyway, um, yeah. We have work to do.”

Alice’s wireframe avatar blinked, before pulling up a window with a wave of her hand. She proceeded to read out our classwork, her avatar attempting to fiddle with its wireframe hair. We worked together without much chatter for the next half an hour, before she finally decided to talk about something other than our work.

“Kara…I want to tell you why I left my old school.”

I stopped meshing together the program I was working on, and turned to her. “I’m sorry if I misunderstood, but didn’t you already tell me that?”
She looked down. “All I said was that I had to move to remoting in due to physical distance. That was only half true.”

She paused. “The thing is that…I had a small crush on another girl, and it turned out she was a homophobe. She told all her friends, and they proceeded to make my life hell for the next year. I moved schools twice, but she had friends at all the schools in the area, and I was beginning to crack under the pressure. This was the furthest school from where I lived that allowed remoting, so I decided to ask my parents to enrol me here.”

I blinked. “So…um…you’re…?”

She nodded. “A lesbian, yes. That bitch, Maxine or whatever, was at least right about that. I just wanted you to know, so that it didn’t fuck things up for our friendship or something. Fuck, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this now. I’ve known you for less than half a day. I don’t even know what you look like.”

I looked down towards the coloured lights I was fiddling with and fidgeted a little. Then I looked up.

“I got kicked out of home when I was fifteen. My parents rejected me when I came out, and my sister…well, I haven’t heard from her for a year. My mother called me a freak, and both of my parents tried to beat the shit out of me. They were both highly religious, and the idea of me being something they hated was…too much for them. I was picked up by social services after a week, and made a ward of the state. So, I live alone now in welfare housing, with weekly checkups by Sarah, my quote-unquote “guardian”. I can understand what you went through, Alice.”

She moved over, and attempted to hug me, but without any sort of way for her wireframe form to collide with me, the best she could manage was an awkward tackle that passed through my polygonal body. We floated there for some time before we silently resumed our work. Although it wasn’t accurately represented by my current avatar, I was smiling like an idiot.

The next two days passed without much of note occurring. Alice only had two classes with me on Wednesday, and while we continued to meet up for lunch for the rest of the week, I didn’t see much of her during the day. After school on Friday, I forced myself from the artificial sleep that my headset induced, and pulled off the device. It was warm inside my small one-room apartment, the air conditioning switched off to save power.

The blinds were open, letting in the neon lighting of the billboard outside. Across from where I sat, the dishwasher in the kitchen hummed away, washing up the plastic dishes that I had used to eat my lunch off earlier in the afternoon. My bed was still unmade, but that wasn’t unusual for me. Something felt wrong though. It was…lonelier than usual.

Getting up from my beanbag, I walked a few steps to the sliding door that opened into the bathroom, and slid open the divider. The lights above the sink came on automatically, as did the shower light. I looked into the mirror. While I kept my face shaven at all times, and my hair was relatively neat, I was still a total mess. Acne scars dotted my face, and my skin was greasy and pale. Then there was the fact that I…I…
I looked wrong. Like a man. Not like I should. Fucking hell, now I knew for sure that Alice would never be into me. I had probed at lunch about whether she was bi or full-on gay, and she’d answered the latter rather that the former. I still hadn’t told her that I was trans, but I also hadn’t told the people I’d been friends with for an entire year either. Why was it so hard to tell her? We had got along famously. I don’t think I’d ever gotten on as well with someone as well as I did with Alice. I had dreamed of someone like her every night for the last year. I was most definitely, most clichédly, most certainly in love. And it was a love that would never be requitted as long as I remained as I was.

Washing my face off, I walked to the closet, and grabbed my sneakers. I needed to clear my head. I needed to run.

---

---

I jogged through the streets of Glebe, a light drizzle of rain splashing down around me. The world was ablaze with neon signs and holographic displays, all trying to sell me and everyone around me some small slice of happiness that ultimately wouldn’t do anything but make you poorer, and the seller richer. Street cars trailed through the roads, their electric motors whining faintly as they drifted past on SmartRubber™ wheels. Smart. Everything had to be “smart” nowadays. I had long since decided that the only smart thing about anything with that word in its product name was that whoever realised that they could sell more of those products because of a meaningless word in the name was a genius.

The air around me was acrid and harsh, laden with a miasma of chemicals that I really shouldn’t be breathing in. Glebe was, at one point, a relatively upmarket area of Sydney, located in the inner west near the historic CBD area. It was only a short walk from Old Darling Harbour, and was (at one point) home to a thriving commercial and residential district. Now, it was the heart of an industrial slum that housed both factories and welfare rats like me.

While Sydney was better than most cities in terms of air pollution- I wouldn’t want to even set foot outside of a building in, say, Los Angeles without an acid-proof coat and a full hazmat suit- I could easily get away with a short half-hour run before returning home. Besides, most of the so-called toxins that the news feeds warned about were already in our bodies, ingested before we were even born.

Most of the people out at this time of day were hurrying home from work. A couple of heavily armed police riot cops stood on the street corner a few meters away, accompanied by a hulking patrol robot that silently scanned passersby with integrated weapons detectors and facial recognition systems. The cops wore full-face helmets, with mirrored face shields and integrated communications and respirator gear, their armour consisting of reinforced polymer hardshell, coloured blue and white. In their hands, they carried their standard-issue carbines, loaded with flechette ammunition that could tear through both armour and flesh like a knife.

As I passed, their robot, an ape-like boxy machine fitted with some sort of long-barrelled weapon on its right shoulder turned towards me. It looked me up and down with a glowing red eye, invisible sensor beams scanning every part of my body in case I was on some sort of wanted list or carrying illegal weaponry. I quickly moved on, rounding the corner and heading back to my apartment. The cops weren’t particularly fond of people like me, and I didn’t want to spend any longer than I had to in their vicinity.

Sydney’s population had boomed during the 2130’s, when the Resource Wars resulted in a mass influx of refugees. Australia had emerged from that war mainly unscathed, luckier than the US and China, who had both suffered severe casualties during the Battle of San Francisco, the Second Battle of Midway, and the Razing of Beijing. Australia had been forced to pour massive amounts of resources into construction, and even more into trying to make sure there was enough food and water to go around.

The inner city (consisting of the Sydney basin and surrounding areas) now housed around thirty million people, with an additional twenty five million or so living out in the surrounding urban and semi-urban sprawl. Sydney now stretched from the former city of Wollongong in the south all the way up to where Newcastle once stood before it was destroyed during the failed invasion of Australia by the Southeast Asia Directorate in 2078.

Rounding the last corner, I approached my building, and slowed to a halt next to the reinforced sliding door. I entered my door code, the armoured hatch sliding open with a groan of tortured metal. My building was a 75-story welfare block on Kelly Street in what was once the suburb of Ultimo, and housed around two thousand people. It was one of the less densely populated welfare buildings, mainly owing to its location in an area renowned for industrial pollution, and the steady effort by the city council to move people out of the area to make room for more industrial facilities. My building would be here for maybe another two years, and then I’d have to move to one of the more modern facilities elsewhere in the city.

I waited for the door to slide closed, and began walking to the lift. I tipped my ballcap at the security guard on duty at the front desk. I pressed the call button on the lift, and when the doors opened, swiped my access card and selected my floor. On the way up, I checked my email with my AR glasses, and found nothing new of note. Just spam and some administration junk from social services. The lift was an older model, and it took forever to reach my floor.

On the way up, it made several stops, other people wearily filing in before getting off at the floors they wished to go to. Some of them I knew were affiliated with some nasty crowds from their gang tats, so I made sure to keep to myself and avoid notice. Fortunately, they left me alone. When the lift reached my floor, I exited the lift, walked to my apartment, and opened the door with my keycode. Slamming the door shut behind me, I took off my sneakers, pulled off my clothes, and jumped in the shower.

If there was one thing I could rely on, it was that running through a city as grim as this one was a great way to clear my thoughts and get my head on straight. But, even as I scrubbed myself off, trying to avoid thoughts about her, my mind kept turning back to Alice. Fuck me, I was in love. And that sucked.