"In accordance with the requirements of the Extended Life and Self-determination act of 2035, and pursuant to the state's determination of guilt, the court remands you to the Federal Second Life Agency for processing"

Sounds like a lot of gibberish right? Extended Life? Self-determination? Sounds good right?

Yeah, not so much. Behind all the sunshine and lollipops labeling the politicians apply to their 'acts', what it really means is I've been sentenced to death. That's right, the big D.

When the geeks who played the online role playing games managed to make true virtual reality a...reality, well things got a little weird. I'm not a techno-geek, so the whole quantum computing, crystal matrix memory, artificial intelligence, yabada this, jabada that, doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it didn't take long for people to realize that if you died while plugged into one of the games, well you...left a copy behind.

Drove the churches nuts. I got a lot of laughs over that part of it, but I saw early on that the various governments were going to use this 'second life' as a means of trimming the excess population a bit. It was voluntary initially, and prisoners and a lot of the poor and indigent thought it was a great thing. Maybe it was for them, and interviews with their 'avatars' in the various game worlds made it sound great, but like everything else, this was open to a lot of abuse. The first one discovered turned out to be by one of the big Christian groups when they created their own world that was 'ruled' by their religious leader. He would log in, play god for a while, then log out. All those people who were living in paradise found out early on that godlike powers really mean 'godlike' powers when their living a digital life.

That was when the governments used 'True Death' as a sentence for the first time. Things got ugly, no doubt about that, but it led to the development of a multi-national agency that handled the creation of AI controllers for the worlds. I've served enough time in the military doing some really ugly things that I've lost any trust in the people who make decisions for the 'good of the people', so I had no doubt every government or big corporation in the world had their own little worlds hidden away to rule as they wanted.

But that's life, or in this case death. Privilege is power's child, and if you aren't that child, you don't start life with any power. I didn't, and I fought and clawed my way through life, raising a sister and caring for my mother until they were both killed in a stupid, pointless drunken traffic accident. I joined the military after that, nineteen, angry, and willing to do ugly things to ugly people. The day before I left for basic training I tracked down the drunk slob who only got an 'involuntary manslaughter' charge and suspended sentence, and unsuspended his sentence. I gave him the 'true death' with a baseball bat.

Not a nice guy am I.

Military life ended when I got thrown out for striking an officer. It happened in a combat zone, so it should have meant jail or worse, but the fact the officer was raping a local girl made the brass decide there might have been some extenuating circumstances. The Major I beat the crap out of was one of those privileged children, so the reason I beat him near to death didn't get put into the records.

So, thrown out of the military, no real job skills except shooting people, and an attitude that the psychological tests the employers made you take that seemed to indicate 'angry'. I put the job skills I had, anger and shooting people, to work for a surprising amount of time, but it eventually had to end.

So here I am, lying on a gurney, strapped down tight with IVs in my arm and a bucket load of wires on my head.

--

The transition into the digital world seemed to happen between one thought and the next, with me suddenly standing in a large, grey, square room that had ten huge round mirrors along the far wall, and the walls on my right and left. There was a desk sitting smack dab in the middle of the room with a humongous dude sitting in a chair on the other side from me. He had to be seven feet tall and was muscular beyond anything possible in the real world. I swear he must weigh five hundred pounds and probably hadn't been able to scratch his own ass in forever. Each of the ten mirrors had a woman standing beside it, though not all of them were actually human. I had never played online games before, but I'd read enough to recognize the whole elf, dwarf, orc, and other watchmacallits.

"Alright dickhead, gawking time's over" big and ugly said. His voice was surprisingly high, making me grin at the disparity. The scowl that appeared on his face said he didn't appreciate the humor and he stood up to be sure I could tell what a big man he was. I looked down at myself and found I appeared to still be me, six foot of white boy goodness, though I was now wearing some kind of medieval clothes. Leather boots, clothe pants and shirt, and a leather vest, all in earth tones. Looking back up I found big ugly standing in front of one of the elf women, and...I blinked to be sure, he was fondling her breasts. The look on the woman's face showed she wasn't appreciating the attention, but bugly just gave out a giggle (yeah a giggle...freaky stuff).

"Got a new one ladies" Bugly said "who wants him?"

He stepped to the next woman to my left, one that seemed to be maybe a mix of elf and human or something else, and began to fondle her. I sighed when he giggled again, realizing I was probably already dead anyway, and walked up behind him, planted myself firmly, and kicked him in the jewels from behind as hard as possible.

Huh? Worked the same in digital as it did in 3D reality. Bugly squealed like a pig and dropped to his knees, trying desperately to clutch himself, but finding his overly muscled arms didn't reach. The half-elven woman looked horrified as she stepped away from the big guy, then she transferred the scared look to me. Glancing around I found all the ladies looking at me like I had done something really, really bad.

I was shocked when Bugly reached around so fast I didn't even see him move, his hand wrapping around my throat and picking me up as he staggered to his feet. I was somewhat surprised to realize I not only couldn't breath, but I really wanted to. It hadn't occurred to me that being digital I would still need to breath. Holy crap, I wondered as I was struggling to pull his arm away, would I need toilet paper too? I might as well have been trying to break an iron bar as much affect as I was having on his arm, and he held me dangling over the floor until he recovered enough to say "Ok meat, you just did the dumbest thing in the history of the world. Guess who chooses where you go and what you do?" he gave me a leer as he turned, his arm still held straight out, until my back was to the mirror he was standing in front of "you just got a one way ticket to the land of the turd people" he giggled as he started pushing me into the mirror. I was pretty much choking to death at this point, but I was still aware of the cold feeling as my body passed into the freaking mirror.

"Have fun...priest" he giggled as he dropped me