Marisa lay down on a VR chair, fishing for the cable behind her. Just before she plugged it in she looked at Omar, eyeing him warily. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m in there.”
“I’m on your side,” said Omar.
“For the moment,” said Marisa, glaring at him. “That doesn’t mean we’re friends.”
She watched him a moment longer, then plugged the VR cable into her headjack. The world faded away, replaced by a simple menu: green glowing names on a plain black background, with a search function sitting dormant in the corner. She blinked on it, and entered the name Lal Muralithar.
That user is not found in the database.
“He’s not in here,” she said.
Omar’s response seemed distant and tinny, like he was speaking through a ventilation duct: “Try again. He’s starting to wake up, so maybe it’s done installing.”
She ran the search again, and there it was. Lal’s name. She hesitated a minute, then blinked on it . . .
. . . and suddenly she was back in the room, but instead of lying in the chair she was tied tightly down to it.
“Omar,” she shouted, “you triste mula! I’m gone for two seconds and you tie me up?”
Omar glanced at her, raising his eyebrow. “I’m assuming from the Spanish that you’re Marisa?”
“Of course I’m Marisa,” she said, “who else would I . . .” She trailed off, turning her head to look at the chair next to her. There was her body, limp and inert. She was in Lal. “Oh, that’s freaky as hell.”
Omar was watching her with a mixture of fascination and disgust. “You’re telling me.”
“Untie me,” she said. “The less time I have to spend in here the better.”
He knelt down, working the knots loose in the cables. Marisa shifted in the chair, trying to see her new body better. Everything felt different; her muscles moved differently than she was used to, and they felt more powerful. She looked down at her body, disoriented by the bizarre new shape of it: her waist wider, her thighs thicker, her breasts replaced by a smooth, flat chest. The sense of wrongness made her nauseated, and she looked away, closing her eyes.
“This is so weird.”
“You use other bodies all the time in Overworld,” said Omar. “This is no different.”
“This is monstrously different.”
“But it’s the same skill set,” said Omar. “All you have to do is walk across the room and access the DNA scanner—you can do everything else back in your own body.”
Marisa sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the chair. Lal’s body was taller than hers, and balanced differently; most of his height was in his torso, which made his waist bend in a way she wasn’t expecting. She stood up slowly. “They must have done this a lot to be so good at it,” she said out loud. “The things they did in Anja’s body, running through the streets like that—they must have practiced for months in other bodies, getting the technology right.”
“Sahara’s doing fine in Anja,” said Omar.
“Their body types are similar,” said Marisa. “Sahara’s a little taller and fuller, but not by much. Going from me to Lal is just . . . way too much.”
“Hurry,” said Omar. “They’re still fighting out there.”
Marisa nodded and walked to the biometric scanner, finding that it was, as Omar had predicted, easier than she’d expected. She gave it a thumbprint, a retina scan, and a pinprick blood sample. The display rotated, processing the data, then turned green. “I’m in.”
“Then get back into your body and finish this,” said Omar.
“Tie me back up,” said Marisa. “No, wait! One thing first.”
Omar raised his eyebrow. “Are you going to punch yourself in his face?”
“Tempting,” said Marisa, and blinked on Lal’s djinni interface. “I’ve got something so much better in mind. Saif, tenemos un pollito que comernos.” She sat back down on the chair, rearranging some of Lal’s software while Omar retied the cables. When the ties were secure Marisa blinked out, appearing back in her own body. She felt a moment of vertigo from the sudden shift in reference frame, then shook herself out of it and stood up. “Get Sahara out of there,” she said brusquely, walking to the computer equipment. “I don’t know what will happen if she’s in Anja’s head when the software gets erased.” Omar nodded, and Marisa went to work on the computers, using both her djinni and several of the keyboards at once—old mechanical models and standard touch screens, her one hand jumping back and forth in a dizzying pattern, working faster than she’d ever worked before. She found the antivirus database, dumped the Bluescreen code into it, and shouted behind her. “We clear?”