had brought her laptop back for repair. While he had worked on it, Roman had pried into every corner of her life, accessing all the personal information, the photographs, the online purchases she had made. It had revealed a person almost as lonely as he was. Somehow, without the mediation of any kind of technology, Roman had somewhere found the courage to ask her out. They had recognised a kinship in each other and they had seen each other for a few weeks.
But the truth, the cruel irony, was that Roman had found her physically repulsive. Because she, too, had been fat.
And if there was anything Roman found unappealing in a woman, it was too much weight.
He had put it from his mind. They clung to each other for companionship, and sex had never been something that either of them seemed to be interested in, so it made it easy for Roman to dispel his abhorrence of her fatness. That was until the night they had gone out to the cinema together. They usually met at the American fast-food bar that was roughly equidistant for their respective apartments, but that night they had arranged to see a film. A group of youths had spotted them and followed them, staying a few metres behind and laughing. Roaring with laughter and mocking them mercilessly, ceaselessly; making vulgar jokes and disgusting remarks about their size. The youths had tired of it eventually, but only after the damage had been done. After the film Roman and Elena had said goodbye and both knew they would never see each other again. It was obvious from the look that neither could keep from their gaze. A look of mutual disgust.
After that, Roman disengaged more and more from the real world. It had been about that time that he had given up the job in the computer store. He had despised the customers for their ignorance and stupidity and his attitude towards them had become increasingly hostile, so hostile there had been complaints; and, in any case, he was earning five times as much illegally in the evenings. If he quit his job, it meant he could spend even more time working on his fraudulent activities. It also removed the imperative to leave his flat every morning.
Roman looked at his profile page on Virtual Dimension. The fiction within a fiction. He had given himself an English name, Rick334, invented a completely false biography for himself, downloaded someone else’s photographs from elsewhere on the web. Someone slim, handsome, blond. He had extended the fiction by basing his Virtual Dimension avatar on the stolen face and body. The rules were that you only allowed people to view your ‘real’ profile after you had known each other for some time within the virtual world of New Venice, the impossibly beautiful city at the heart of Virtual Dimension’s fantasy universe. He had let Veronika534 see his profile and she had allowed him access to hers. They both lived in Hamburg, bringing the possibility of a real-life meeting close. Dangerously close, as far as Roman was concerned. Roman had worked out that it was no huge co-incidence that they shared the same home town: Virtual Dimension attracted people from around the world, but Roman had guessed that, to live up to its promise of ‘consolidation’ of virtual and physical realities, it must analyse the geographical origins of your IP address, grouping people according to their real-world geography.
Of course, Roman could have circumvented this. He had a dozen ways of connecting with a region-non- specific IP address, and his illegal servers allowed him to hide behind other people’s registered details but, whenever he was on Virtual Dimension, he used the same, non-dynamic and geographically accurate IP address. It was, unbelievably, actually legal and registered to his real home address. He used it for Virtual Dimension and nothing else and, in a way, this allowed him to demonstrate a perfectly legal means of connecting with the internet that was free of any association with his fraudulent activities.
He pushed his heels against the floor and his massive bulk, supported in his custom-designed chair, glided weightlessly and settled in front of another monitor. He logged into his internet account through a telecom company in Buenos Aires, which took him to a secure online banking account in Hong Kong, which transferred euros from an account in London, which in turn were traded for dollars in New York. There were some minor difficulties, but nothing that took more than fifteen minutes to circumvent, by which time he was five thousand dollars richer. The account he had stolen from actually had a balance of more than six and a half million, and he could just as easily have emptied it as taken the humble sum of five thousand, but that was the way Roman operated. Investigators would realise that, if the transaction was fraudulent, then the account could as easily have been emptied. It therefore wouldn’t make any sense to believe that it was fraud. They would spend months sorting through accounts to try to pin down what had happened to the five thousand. In the end they would decide they were spending more on the investigation than had been taken. It would be dropped and they would change the security settings and tighten their monitoring.
Roman would not hit that account again. He took a little, often, from many. Unconnected frauds that could only be linked to him if an investigator had full details of all of the unconnected accounts into which he deposited the money. And, of course, because he was working across national boundaries, it was often more than one agency, each with limited jurisdictions, that did the investigating.
Occasionally he would get a bad feeling; he would intuit that his pilfering was perhaps being seen as part of a larger-scale operation. So, every now and then, Roman would steal a second sum from the same account; a slightly larger sum to suggest a thief growing in confidence. Then, hacking into the bank or corporation’s personnel files, he would deposit the graft into the account of some hapless accounting clerk. Roman never gave any thought to the personal suffering, the human injustice created by his actions. To Roman, these were not real people. They were pieces of information. An employee number and a bank account. Data floating like plankton in a cybernetic ocean.
Not real people. Not the real world.
He realised that a thread he had been following had unintentionally led him into the San Francisco headquarters of an environmental technology company. He withdrew as quickly as he could, covering his tracks as he did so. Roman never hit companies in the United States or in Russia. It was not that he had any affection for these nations, it was just that the American FBI was notoriously sophisticated — and tenacious — when it came to tracking down hackers and fraudsters. If you accidentally hacked into a company which supplied anything to the massive US military complex, then the FBI would come after you wherever you were in the world.
And the Russians… well, with the Russians you never knew who you were really stealing from and they had the best hacker talent of any country. Between them, the Americans and the Russians had the best cybercops and cybercrooks on the planet. It was best to stay well away from them.
He pulled out of the American company. After another fifteen minutes he had enriched himself by another six thousand. Euros this time, and from a British airline’s pension fund.
Roman always moved his funds about, sometimes for months, redistributing them, consolidating them, then redistributing them again, before eventually placing small amounts into the various German bank accounts to which he had direct access. He was planning to build a new computer that would be faster than anything he had at present; probably faster and more powerful than anything any cybercop would have. He needed to transfer enough to his credit-card account to cover the purchase of two SATA-interface HyperDrive Fives. It was a much larger sum than he usually liked to transfer at any one time, but he needed the drives.
After he was finished he shut down his equipment, which took some time and was not something he always did. There was more risk of system problems on restart and, of course, it stopped him taking immediate action if one of the many possible law-enforcement agencies came knocking on his door. But he liked to let the hardware cool every now and then. And he always kept the electromagnet ready for use whenever needed.
He half shuffled, half waddled through to the kitchen and took a family-sized bag of snacks back through to the lounge, settling himself into the permanent depression his body had made on the sofa. He switched on the TV and watched an item where a woman wanting to go back to work had to get some old granny from Bavaria to teach the husband how to do the housework and keep their flat clean using environmentally friendly but traditional materials. Lemon juice, vinegar, that kind of stuff.
‘Why?’ snorted Roman contemptuously at the TV before muting the sound and picking up the cellphone from the coffee table.
He examined the phone. A good one. A Nokia 5800. Web-enabled, integrated satnav.
Roman didn’t know why he had stolen it. He had been sitting in the cafe having lunch when she had come in and sat at the table next to him. He tried not to stare at her, but he couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she was: dark hair, large dark eyes. Tall, slim, elegant. She was the kind of woman who would never give someone like Roman a second glance, unless it was a look of disgust. Yet she was exactly the kind of woman he desired; the only kind of woman he desired. The opposite of Elena.
But it wasn’t her beauty that he remembered most. There had been something about the woman in the cafe — about the way she moved her eyes and the way she sat — that had disturbed him. He could have sworn she had
