In the Court of the Yellow King by Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Gary McMahon, C.J. Henderson, William Meikle, T.E. Grau, Laurel Halbany, Christine Morgan, Edward Morris Page B

from human. From such brief interactions it was impossible to tell which were AI and which were players like himself. These people might greet him with surprising exuberance and warm smiles, such as one might not so readily encounter on the actual streets of Punktown, surprising Giff and making him feel oddly grateful (though these were probably the AI). He was always ready for the person who spoke rudely, though. That was why he said hello to so many strangers... to flush out such people, and react to them. It was a way to vent frustration after his long day at work.
    When he emerged from the building he’d landed the helicar on, he saw a tall and attractive young woman with spiky black hair and glowing blue lipstick strutting past on the sidewalk in click-clacking high heels. In real life he would be too self-conscious of his age and shabby appearance to approach her, but he had designed his game avatar to resemble Marcel Valentin, a popular actor who often played gangsters. Thus, he strode after her and said in Marcel’s tough guy voice, “Hey, sweetness, where you off to in such a hurry?”
    The woman stopped and turned to face him, pillow-like blue lips bunched distastefully. “ Ooh ... Marcel Valentin. How original.” Then she twirled away to continue click-clacking along the sidewalk. “Blast off, you sorry wanker.”
    Giff figured her for a player, not AI. It was hard to synthesize such pure contempt. Into his hand popped a combat knife, and he skipped after the strutting woman to punch the blade once, all the way, into her lower back.
    She fell forward onto the sidewalk, crying out shrilly, “Hey!”
    Giff bolted, glancing back only once to see that she had rolled onto her side in pooling blood and was lifting her arm to call for the forcers on her tacky gem-encrusted wrist comp. Other pedestrians were reporting the attack on their wrist comps, too. If the avatar didn’t first die from her wound, she’d be taken to a hospital to be healed. If she did die before help came, the player would be signed out of the game and would have to log in again. Ha!
    He ducked into an alley, found its far end blocked by a chain link fence. He scrambled up and over it, dropped to the other side in a lot that had once been occupied by a tenement building, since torn down and replaced with heaps of junk and trash as if the structure had exploded into this chaotic rubble. He ducked down close to the stripped and burnt shell of a hovercar, near the center of the lot, and waited as he heard sirens approach. He huddled so close to the car’s husk he could smell its scorched surface. Eventually, a black helicar floated by above, sweeping its spotlights below, probably sweeping invisible scanner beams as well, but they did it half-heartedly because most of the forcers in the game were AI, and even in real life forcers would be lackadaisical due to the sheer volume of crime in Punktown.
    The black helicar drifted away soon enough, and Giff emerged from cover, continuing to the other side of the empty lot and entering another narrow alleyway, so as to make his way onto a major street again.
    There was a pale yellow glow in this tight alley, radiating onto one wall from the wall opposite, almost like light from a curtained window, but there was no window in the alley. As he drew nearer, Giff saw it was graffiti, which was by no means remarkable in Punktown, sprayed in luminous yellow paint. Some type of glyph, which he assumed must be the identifying symbol for a gang... from the looks of it, a gang of beings from one of the other planets or dimensions who had made this gigantic metropolis their home.
    Yet as common as graffiti was, Giff still found himself stopping to gaze at the symbol, as if its crooked ends had snagged his eyes like fishhooks. It was as he was staring at the glyph that a voice came to him from a heap of trash bags piled against the wall directly below the symbol.
    The voice, sounding like something between croak and