The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 by Larry Niven, Nancy Kress, Mercedes Lackey, Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, C. L. Moore, Tina Gower

backup of everything on it!
    Too bad for Al. He was getting his friends back! Whatever it took, that’s what he’d do.
    As he passed two good-looking young women, he heard:
    “Hot!”
    “Wotta hunk!”
    He grinned but ran faster. At least this new body stuff was working out. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
    * * *
    As he crossed the main room of his tiny one-bed/one-bath apartment, Marcus suddenly realized he could hear and, what’s more, sense what was going on in the server he’d mounted in the small closet.
    Wow! The powers of his virtual body had also been transferred to his physical, real-world body. He waved his fingers and a virtual terminal floated in the air in front of him.
    Cool!
    There was a crackling at an empty power socket. He waved at his friend, electricity. That was not new; he’d always been able to communicate with it.
    He grinned at the glowing air terminal. It reminded him what one of his professors in tech school had been fond of saying: “Computer science is ninety percent theory and ten percent magic.” Marcus was sure now the ten percent was a whole lot larger than that. And he was the wiz! It was a good feeling.
    But that good feeling vanished almost immediately. Everything he now had would mean nothing to him if he couldn’t save his three friends. Gwen, Oscar, and even Bill—they were all he had.
    Waving his fingers at the terminal, Marcus made certain his server was still secure, the backup virtual reality program still ran, and all was in order for a rescue mission.
    Then he slapped his head. He’d forgotten to grab his virtual reality helmet! But …
    He opened the closet door. It just felt right , so he dived into the one open USB socket on the front panel and slid into the server. Two virus-chomping trolls were sitting on empty data containers, playing cards. They looked up at his entrance.
    “Oh, hiya, Boss,” one said. “All’s secure.”
    Marcus nodded, clapped them on the shoulders, and motioned them to go back to playing. (Even software needed some relaxation.) He walked over to another data container and sat down to think, creating another virtual terminal.
    A couple of ideas came. He implemented one of them, bringing up Oscar’s virtual body configuration script. The old man had wanted to be the same down here as in the real world, but that was not working out too well. Marcus’s fingers flew as he beefed Oscar up, giving him youth, muscles, various powers, including all the Shaolin temple Kung Fu routines. Marcus was very proud of those. You do a Bruce Lee on a nasty piece of software and it stayed down.
    He then compiled the configuration file. He might not be able to easily find where Oscar was, but his virtual body regularly checked its configuration, and whoever was holding Oscar was going to have a surprise on their hands.
    While he was at it, he set up a configuration file for Bill too. If Al threw him in a computer, there would be two mighty warriors, both yearning for Al’s blood. Four, of course, counting him and Gwen—if only he could find her computer and modify her config file. It was now obvious to him that Al was her boss and the VR software they had was the early version Al had ripped off from Bill. Lot of improvements since then!
    Now for the second part. None of this would probably work unless he could find and get into Al’s computer, which was surely locked down and strongly protected against that very thing happening, but he had an idea.
    Gwendolyn Louise Baker’s address was easy to find, and not far away at all. Closer than going back to the shop and probably safer, since Al did not know about her computer. She’d told him that. Besides, as he’d already decided, he needed to update her virtual reality software.
    “Be alert, guys,” he said to the trolls and dived out the USB port.
    * * *
    His open spell worked on her apartment door and his friend, electricity, kindly disabled the alarm system for him. He slipped in and relocked the door.