A hacker sat at his PC late Friday evening. Computer magazines, programming books, and software packages lay scattered everywhere--jammed in overstuffed plain wooden shelf units, on the desk, on the night tables, on the loveseat, and on the king size double bed. The hacker, also known as Erin, was a tall skinny nerdy looking geek of about 35, wearing old jeans and an AOL tee shirt. He pored over numerous tattered and dog-eared books with such titles as, "The Brain-Computer Interface", and "Principles of Cortical Detection and Stimulation." He reached across his desk to grab a slice of pizza and took a swig of a can of Jolt Cola, then proceeded to make some changes to a program displayed on the screen of his computer.

He picked up an old bicycle helmet, which has been altered by the addition of all manner of small antennas and wires fastened all over the top of it. He grabbed a length of ribbon cable from under his desk and plugged one end into the helmet and the other end into the parallel port on the back of his computer. Standing up from the chair, he walked over to the bed and shoved the pile of books off onto the floor. Placing the helmet on his head, he lay down on the bed and went limp.

Erin sat at his computer nearly all day Saturday, keying in another program, this time poring over a journal titled, "Consciousness Explained."

He sat staring at the screen until Saturday evening drew near. With a sudden start, he let out a whistle! "Spot! C'mere boy! C'mere Spot!"

A small brown terrier came running into the room. "Good boy! Sit, Spot! Sit! Now, stay. Stay! Good boy!"

Erin placed his bicycle helmet on the dog's head. The dog collapsed to the floor in apparent slumber as Erin keyed something into the computer. The hard drive light flickered for several minutes then stopped. The dog opened his eyes and looked up at Erin.

Erin removed the helmet from the dog. "Here, boy. Want a doggie biscuit? Good boy!"

The dog ran out of the room attacking his biscuit. Erin lay back down on the bed and placed his helmet back on his own head.

Erin sat at his throne, his loyal dog by his side.

"Spot! Fetch!" He tossed a ball over to the far end of the throne room. The dog bounded after it and returned, dropping the drool covered ball at Erin's feet, jumping and barking excitedly. "Good boy, Spot! Real good boy!"

Erin stared into the screen, his chin resting in his palms with his elbows on the desk. His eyebrows shot up and he rapidly began to key in another program as the Monday morning sun started to rise. He checked his watch and jumped up out of the chair scrambling to take off his jeans while replacing them with a pair of dress pants. He pulled a dress shirt on over his tee shirt and ran out of the house as he grabbed a tie from his closet.

The workday at the hi-rise offices of Megatelco Corporation in Piscataway New Jersey began promptly at 9:00. Erin arrived early Monday morning. Of course he dreaded this day. It was his birthday, and there was no way of avoiding his Birthday Beating.

Birthday Beatings were the brainchild of Glenn. Glenn was a member of the team of programmers of which Erin was also a member. Erin had endured several Birthday Beatings so far. Often, they involve tossing the victim's overcoat over his head and giving him a gentle pounding. Women were not excused from the practice either. It was more of a psychological trauma than a painful one. Still it was unpleasant. Yet he dared not protest. The Birthday Beatings had the blessing of the immediate staff manager and the staff manager's District manager.

A few years ago, some chap, a Bernhard somebody, complained about the Birthday Beatings to a different staff manager other than his own, but under the same District manager--and he became the victim of a cruel practical joke. A few days after the allied manager went to the District manager to resolve the problem, the District manager called up his Division manager saying that he had overheard Bernhard making a bomb threat against the company. The Division manager called the police, duped into falsely accusing Bernhard of making the bomb threat. The innocent chap was fired and went through a bloody hell of an ordeal to clear himself.

Thus, Erin endured the Birthday Beatings.

The remainder of the workweek was uneventful, and Erin made little progress in his virtual world.

That Thursday, Erin decided to forego his forays into virtual reality and attempt a go at real reality for an evening. He browsed the personals and answered "Intelligent Woman Seeking Intelligent Man." He called up "Intelligent Woman" and they hit it off straight away. The following evening, Friday, he drove to her flat and picked her up that night and drove to a restaurant for dinner.

On the way there, she asked, "Would you mind stopping up ahead here at the betting parlor for a second. I want to pick up my State Lotto ticket. I buy one every day, you know."

He stopped, and she got her tickets. Continuing on the way to the restaurant, Erin explained, "The State Lotto is a tax on the ignorance of probability theory, you know."

"What rot is that you say? I just won $150.00 last week! A couple of years ago, I won $200.00!"

"But if you buy one ticket a day, you're paying $365.00 a year to win $200.00 every couple of years. Instead, why don't you put a dollar into an envelope every day, and when your numbers come up, take the money out of the envelope. I guarantee you'll win more than $100.00 or $200.00 every time your numbers come up."

"Why should I? It's the only way I can save money. What if I stop playing and my numbers came up? I'd lose hundreds of dollars. So don't tell me what I should do!"

"I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just pointing out that you're losing money playing the State Lotto. If you're doing it to save money and you enjoy the gambling part of it, you can at least break even by playing it like I've explained."

"How dare you tell me what to do! And how do you really know I'm losing in the long run, eh?"

"Because I can count! It's obvious! $365.00 a year to average $100.00 a year back is losing money. I'm just explaining that to..."

"I can't deal with this! Let me out! I'll find my own way home!"

"Don't be silly, I'll take you home."

"Stop the car right now, or I swear I'll scream out the window!"

He let her out and drove home, all the while muttering about so-called "intelligent" women.

Erin awoke early that Saturday morning. He made himself up quickly and drove down to the local shopping arcade. He stopped in front of "Exotic Pet Shoppy" and entered. He glanced at the kittens and puppies and tropical fish as he walked through to the rear of the store where the exotic animals are on display. He stopped in front of a large cage labeled, "Ixblat." Inside was a small chimpanzee. "May I help you, sir?" asked the young female clerk.

"Yes, please. How much is the chimp?"

"The chimp is eight hundred and fifty American dollars, sir, plus VAT. He's really cute. Would you like to hold him?"

"Yes, please!"

"His name is Ixblat. Hold him like this."

"Uh. He won't..."

"No, he won't! Though he'll need to wear a diaper if he were to be allowed to run around loose."

"What's your return policy? Just in case he doesn't take to me?"

She raised an eyebrow at him before answering. "You have thirty days to return him for a full refund. But we will check to see that he hasn't been abused."

"Okay, fine, I'll take him."

"Oh! Good! He comes with the cage here, and his toys, but you'll have to buy a bag of his food."

"That's fine."

"Good! Follow me up to the register, please."

Spot ran and hid when Erin brought the chimp into the house. Erin went and found him under the sink. "Don't worry, boy! The chimp will only be here for a few weeks!"

Once again, Erin sat upon his throne to address those who seek an audience with their king. One lone man in plain white robes stood before the throne, looking rapidly left, then right. "Speak to your king!" said Erin.

"Aaaaaeeeeeeeccchhh! Aaacch! Aaacchh!" The man jumped and spun around and ran over to one corner of the room. Erin jumped down from his throne and ran after him. "Ixblat, don't be afraid! It's just a game!"

Ixblat ran along the wall away from Erin. "Aaaaaaeeeeeeeech! Oooh! Oooh! Eeeeeeeeech!" Ixblat stopped to tear his robes off, and then continued running wildly around the throne room naked. After a few moments, he sat and started scratching his bum.

Lunchtime at Megatelco Corporation was from noon to 13.00. Gary got up from his terminal to leave for the cantina. As he walked past the cubes of his co-workers, he noticed Erin unconscious in his chair wearing a strangely modified bicycle helmet wired to a laptop PC on his desk. "Hey! Erin! Wake up! You okay?" Gary glanced down at another similar helmet, also wired to the PC, on the extra chair in the cube.

Curious as to what game his colleague might be playing, Gary sat in the chair and donned the helmet.

Gary suddenly found himself in the town square of a medieval village. The town was eerily silent except for a dog barking near by and the occasional screeching of monkeys off in the distance. One seemingly blind man walked through the square. "Hey! Hey you! Where am I?" The man ignored Gary and entered a side street. "Where are you going! Where am I?"

Gary looked around quickly. Seeing no other activity, he started to shout.

Suddenly, Gary was, once again, sitting in that Erin's cube back at the office.

Gary looked Erin in the eye. "What was that? Where was I?"

"What did you think of my virtual reality world, Gary?" Erin asked.

Erin deleted that sequence and restored Gary's mind from the first backup he made just before he reanimated him and went to meet him.

Erin ran a backup of his hard disk, labeled the USB thumb drive "Cyberspace," and placed the USB thumb drive in his little Sentry vault labeled, along with another thumb drive labeled, "Gary: original copy." He then walked out to his car carrying his pocket PC and an assortment of wire and ribbon cable. His car, an old yellow 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, had full-height bucket seats with the headrest integral with the back of the seat. He opened the hatchback and, with a pen knife, carefully cut out a large circle of the cloth from the back of the headrest. He carefully strung his wires and chips into the padding of the seat. He then fished the ribbon cable down through the inside of the back of the seat and out the bottom. The then neatly patched the back of the seat with another piece of cloth.

Scrunching down, he gingerly mounted his pocket PC underneath the seat and connected the end of the ribbon cable to one of its USB ports. He fished the power cable from his PC's 12 volt converter adapter under the carpet to the fuse panel and hooked it up. He also ran a wire from the PC's reset jack to a push-button he mounted on the left side of his own seat so that he could easily reach down and press it without stretching or searching for it.

He sat in the passenger seat and relaxed.

Erin stood from his throne and walked to the end of the huge throne room into the grand marquis of his royal castle. His humble servant, R-Gary, waited there ever eager to serve his king. R-Gary bowed as Erin entered. "May I assist you, your highness?"

Just before lunchtime at Megatelco Corporation, a group of people hung around the copier. "So where do you want to go for lunch today? I'm sick of cantina food."

"Let's go to Tumulty's Pub in New Brunswick. It's right on George street a few blocks from the train station. How about there?"

"That sounds good."

"Yeah, I'll go for that."

"Yeah, me too."

"Who's gonna drive?"

"I'll drive." Said Erin.

"You! How're you gonna fit all of us in that putt-putt of yours?" guffawed Glenn.

"I can fit all of you. No problem."

"Well, okay."

"Sure, let's go."

They walked out into the parking lot and got into Erin's bug. As always, Glenn took the front passenger seat. This morning, Erin had placed a boot disk in the pocket PC with a special program that he wrote just for this purpose. Instead of placing the subject in the cyberspace, it simply copied the subject's mind without him experiencing the cyberspace world in the process. As he started backing out of his space, he reached down and pressed his concealed reset button.

I saw Glenn twitch slightly a few seconds after he pressed the button, recognizing the mild spasm he, himself, feels whenever he jacks in.

Erin glanced over at Glenn. Glenn looked back, rubbed his head and said, "So Erin, " he said, "this car going to make it all the way down Easton Avenue?"

"Sure! It's never failed me yet!" Answered Erin.

"But aren't you tired of driving this antique? I got a great deal on my Hummer a few weeks ago!"

"Yeah, but that's only because you seem to like to collect accidents on your way home from Deadhead concerts. Your dealer knows by now that you're a guaranteed repeat customer!" Erin smirked.!

Glenn shut up. It almost came to blows the last time somebody commented on his accident record.

Erin drove out of the office park and stopped before entering the main boulevard.

Their lunch passed uneventfully and they all returned to work by the end of their lunch hour.

"Thanks for the ride," bellowed Glenn as they all climbed out of the bug to return to the Megatelco building.

Erin carefully removed that thumb drive from his car that evening after returning home from work and brought it inside. He plugged it into his desktop PC and loaded its contents into the cyberspace.

Erin tried a number of experiments. Starting each time from the original mind capture file, he animated Glenn in several different scenarios, and several different appearances. Sometimes Glenn woke after the accident on board an interstellar space ship, or in a high-tech underground bomb shelter. Once, Glenn woke in the body of a female. This resulted in severe emotional problems within days. Another time, Glenn woke in the body of a chimp. And one time, in a fit of cruelty, Erin merely allowed Glenn to float in that empty space for several months until he went insane.

As a result of his experiments with Gary and Glenn under different scenarios, Erin obtained some insight into the workings of the human mind--or at least the binary representation of one. He still could not consistently create a mind from scratch; only an unmodified copy of someone's mind would be a self aware continuation of that person's consciousness. But with the aid of a random mind generator program he wrote, he was eventually able to create minds which were halfway between mindless automatons and sentient self aware minds. Fully 99 percent of those minds were useless babbling morons, but that one percent turned out to be useful enough to serve his purposes. These cyber-people were not self aware sentient beings. They were still closer to adventure game computer controlled characters than to sentient intelligent people, but with the proper script they could fool someone, who didn't know they were in a cyberspace, into thinking they were ordinary, if somewhat dim, people.

His copy program also could capture a person's mental image of their own body, with all the birth marks, bruises, aches and pains, and other intimate details recreated, so as to be able to reproduce a virtual copy of that body that the virtualized mind would not be able to tell from the original.

One Wednesday evening at work, Erin was working late. He was about to leave when Maire, another programmer, stopped by his cubicle. She was about his age and height, fairly attractive, with long flowing black hair, emerald eyes, slender but with curves in all the right places!

"Hi!" Said Maire in a slight Polish accent. "I'm sorry to bother you, but I did something really stupid. I locked my keys in my car this morning and my husband won't get home till late. Everyone else has left, could you give me a ride home?"

"Yeah, sure Maire. I'd be glad to."

Erin drove her home, and then returned home himself in a state of exhilaration. He made certain to make several backups of the disk from his pocket PC before doing anything else. He waited until Friday to animate Maire's recorded mind in his virtual world.

Sidding in his bathrobe, sipping a Guinness, Erin watched the scene a few times on his LCD monitor from different angles.

Maire was floating in mid air, in total darkness, naked. When her consciousness was activated, she immediately began screaming and flailing her arms and legs. This only seemed to cause her to begin tumbling head over heels and she screamed even louder. After a moment, she stopped screaming, and waved her arms as though to stop herself from tumbling. She eventually succeeded.

She looked around, seemingly by swimming through the air, though Erin was certain that she could not be seeing any detail. It was totally black in all directions. There was, however, an undetectable dim even light source coming from all directions so that she could see herself, though dimly.

He saw her wave arms as though feeling the breeze, blow on her hand, and even pinch herself with an "Ouch!" She eventually allowed herself to go limp, and began sobbing.

After several minutes, a point of light appeared in the distance. Maire didn't seem to see it at first, but she was slowly drifting towards it. After several minutes, it became so close and bright that she couldn't possibly miss seeing it. She appeared to be watching it intently as she flew into it.

Working the mouse, Erin zoomed in and placed his virtual body laying on the beach a few yards from where he placed Maire's virtual body, both laying face down in the sand, naked. He activated her mind again and continued watching her from his monitor. She awoke and looked around. She seemed to notice Erin's naked body laying down the beach a little bit. She walked up to the base of the palisades which rose high above them. She then walked out onto the beach to the water's edge, and seemed to stare out at the ocean for a while. Too bad, he thought, there was no way to know what she was thinking. That would probably take more programming skill than he possessed. After a few minutes, she looked back at Erin's sessile body. She walked over to him and, kneeling, began to shake him vigorously. "Wake up, Erin! Please wake up!" He lay down on his bed and positioned the helmet on his head.

"Ohhhhh," moaned Erin, as he looked up. Maire immediately backed away wrapping her arms around her chest and pressing her legs together while crouching down slightly.

Erin looked away and said, "What happened to us, Maire?"

"I ... I don't know. I think we died. And this must be ... heaven ... or maybe hell..."

Erin paused here and saved the state of his cyberspace at this point, then continued.

Erin saved the state at this point. He lay awake all night planning where to lead this scenario.

During the night, a scream broke the silence. Birds, awakened at the alarm, burst into flight. Erin had climbed upon Maire's sleeping body, waking her. He raped her. She cried out pleading with him not to, but he penetrated her over and over again. Finally, spent and exhausted, he left her as she cried.

Erin deleted that sequence. At a conscious level, he knew that it was only a computer simulation, and not a real live woman he had raped. Still he was shocked that he had enjoyed it. He restored from the previous save.