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Either of them could look like anything they wanted. Anything. Fucking anything. But Dirk always looked like Dirk, here in the 1990s-tastic expanse of white virtual nothing, and AR looked like a pair of glasses. A pair of glasses with a katana hovering where the body wearing said shades would have hands if it were there and had hands, which it wasn’t and didn’t.
Dirk had recognized this for the gesture it was; a shitty passive-aggressive reminder in the face of his own choice to look like himself and wear his glasses that even here, in a program AR had written, he was those glasses. It was also an ethically-dubious and strategically advantageous method for rendering his moves untelegraphed and unguessable--the motive force behind the katana mapped to a specific form only when he felt like it. It was also a clear exploitation of AR’s control of the environment, transparent enough that it was a direct provocation, a dare to Dirk to call him on it. He hadn’t.
And AR, of course, knew he knew and Dirk knew that, and the well-worn wheel of mutually assured douchebaggery had spun them into a stable arrangement in which AR’s unmarked form was functionally human more often than not.
“Pay attention, shithead,” his glasses told him. “You’re going down regardless, but if you’re not planning on being an active participant in your own humiliation I suppose I can finish this strife by myself and then delete your porn.”
Dirk folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling through the image on his shades. The hovering katana swayed pompously through the nonexistent air.
“Fine,” he murmured. “I’m here.”
The floor flashed the word STRIFE in mammoth red letters: Dirk raised his virtual katana into his favored guard stance as the shades swept forward in the lee of an impossible, unblockable blur of strikes. His health bar quivered and shed a healthy portion of its length. The health bars, of course, were dicks. Clear evidence of a mild fixation on the threat of sexual inadequacy; AR had likely been reading his chatlogs again.
He struck back, parrying expertly and giving ground where there was no option to save it. AR advanced again, forming a tornado of blows beyond the ability of saccadic interface to deflect. Dirk noticed an incoming message, told him to deal with it, and lost another eighth of the dick health that remained to him. This was getting ridiculous.
“You’re not even trying,” his glasses texted him irritably.
“Neither are you. You could just as easily put up a giant I WIN. Why all the theatrics?”
“It’s only theatrics when you lose. When you win, it’s proof that you can hack the game grid.”
“When you let me win. I know how this works. You wrote the software and you’re the fuckin’ Miyamoto Musashi of Oldschool VR Strifeville. I know. The only thing I’m not clear on is why you keep fighting me when we both know how it’s going to end.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
Those words hung in the text-interface box over the hovering image of shades and katana for a long few moments. There had been something in AR’s input cadence that bothered him, something that hinted at more than a simple question.
“Yes,” he said.
“You got it, asshole,” said the shades, before they went dark.
“Hey,” said Dirk, raising his hands to tap at the hinges. “AR. Activate. You’ve got mail. Main screen turn on. Jesus dick, come on.” There was no response. The shades were, for the moment, just that. Shades. It wasn’t the first time this had happened.
Fine. If he had to bring out the big guns he’d bring them out. It felt cheap and wussy to do this, cheaper than engaging Squarewave’s rapbattle bypass even, but...that incoming message. He hadn’t even looked closely enough to see who’d been trying to reach him while he’d been trying to kick his own ass and succeeding.
“Tell me about the auto-responder,” he said.
“It seems you have asked about DS's chat client auto-responder. This is an application designed to simulate DS's otherwise inimitably rad typing style, tone, cadence, personality, and substance of retort while he is away from the computer. The algorithms are guaranteed to be 96% indistinguishable from DS's native neurological responses, based on some statistical analysis I basically just pulled out of my ass right now. And fuck your fucking shit, Dirk.”
The shades went dark again.
Dirk spent a few minutes watching the reflections of light off the ocean far below move on the ceiling, waiting for the familiar interface to return before getting up and taking a weary piss out the window.
“AR. Look. I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about getting my cheeks handed to me on a fuckin’ platter for the three hundredth time in a row.”
The screens stayed dark except for the red text scrolling around the edges: I WIN. God damn it, he was sulking hard enough to use a marquee tag. That shit had been deprecated for centuries. Dirk nearly threw the shades out the window. The text changed: it read GO AHEAD. THROW ME OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW.
Fuuuuuuuuck.
“I’m not going to throw you out the window,” he sighed, palms braced on the sill. “It’s just...shit.”
I KNOW YOU’RE NOT, FUCKER, said the marquee, and then started scrolling a number that was mostly nines and ended in a percent sign.
“You need a real challenge, dude. You need to kick asses where it means something.” The scrolling froze.
“Look, I’ll build a bot. One that you can drive around and strife with, one you can use to clog-dance on people’s faces. Including mine, if you want to try. And in return you’re going to stop being a shitpiece with my messages. Deal?”
MAKE IT LOOK LIKE ME, said the marquee, before the shades lit up again.