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Nori watched the tiger pace. Trevor, Trevor fucking Orr. He was in a guild with Trevor Orr. Had been playing the Lands for years with Trevor fucking Orr. He should be amazed, ecstatic.

"And then there's David," Trevor said, throwing his arms in the air. "He's just actually the assistant to a corporate head, not one himself, Why did they all lie? What is it with everyone but you and me lying about who they are?"

"Excuse me?" Nori was pissed. "What the fuck do you mean, except for you and me? Trevor fucking Orr?" The tiger waved a hand dismissively, but before he said anything Nori was in his face. "Don't fucking dismiss me like the corporate elite you fucking are. You want to talk about lying? Talk about you, lying."

"It's not the same."

"Oh really? So because you're one of the elite, lying is what? Fucking acceptable?"

"I didn't try to make myself into someone better than I am, or hide my criminal past."

"Oh, I would just love to see what someone like you thinks is better than a fucking elite!"

"Nori, I didn't--" Trevor said, sounding confused.

"What? Did you think an Independent like me couldn't take playing with someone oh so important?"

Trevor sighed. "This is exactly what I didn't want to happen."

"If you didn't want me to find out who you are, you shouldn't have told me."

"No," Trevor snapped, "This 'I'm different than you' bullshit! I build the Pakesh ID so I could have a normal life, so I could play the Lands and not be hounded by half the world wanting me to fuck them and the other half wanting to fuck me! Before you start bitching about who I am, maybe you should try living as us for a while."

Nori moved his mouth, trying to articulate the absurdity of what Trevor said, but the words just wouldn't come. "Live as you?" The squirrel burst out laughing. "Spending my days playing the Lands, fucking anyone that I meet? Never having to worry about my families' business going under because some fucking elite keeps undercutting transport costs! Yeah, I'll take your life for a while."

"You think that's my life?" Trevor stared at Nori. "I work twelve to sixteen hours a day going after people who abuse the system! Everyone in my family works to keep our corporation running smoothly. Terry is juggling being a father with trying to keep the other corporations from ganging up on us, with old woman Vanguard and all the bullshit she pulled on us. Tuck's this close to mental breakdown on a good day. Do you want me to keep going? To list everyone in my family who does anything but work and fuck? Because I hope you have some way to fold time because we have bigger fucking problems right now!"

"Hey, you were the one ranting about how our friends had the gall of not being who they claimed to be, so forgive me for pointing out the hypocrisy here!"

"I wasn't--I'm not-- fuck," Trevor sighed. "I just don't understand why they'd do it. Well, other than Horace."

"You're going to have to ask them," Nori said. "Because I don't even know what lying you're talking about for Bobby or Horace."

Trevor nodded, and Nori went back to being impressed he was standing in front of an actual Orr. When Nishida found out he'd been in the presence of an Orr, she would flip.

"And that's why I've been Pakesh," Trevor said in exasperation.

Nori's ears folded back as he realized he'd been fantasizing about fucking Trevor, fucking an Orr.

"It only took you a minute from being angry to wanting sex."

"You're a great-looking guy," Nori said defensively.

"Sure, and you would have been that quick if I was just some guy who looked like this."

Nori sighed. "Okay, that's a fair point. But to also be fair to me, my emotions have been running kind of high, I got caught in a storm, my house got broken into, then I was chased through the island, attacked, kidnapped." With a gasp, he touched his neck. "They injected me with something. Fuck, was it some poison?"

"No, you're fine."

Something in Trevor's tone made Nori suspect there was something there, but another thought intruded. "Oh fuck, is this one of yours and the Vanguard's feuds? Did I get attacked because you turn out to be an Orr?" He didn't need those kinds of complications in his life, not now, not at any time.

Trevor shook his head. "You're walking around free because you know me, and that message you had on auto-send. You and me have escaped capture because I have access to Orr resources."

"You're the reason Tucker left his party," Nori said.

"You follow my brother's orgies?"

Nori glared at the pride in the tiger's voice. "My sister does. She interrupted me in the middle of having sex with this great guy to tell me about it."

"But yes, I was the one Tuck ran off to rescue. But no, this has nothing to do with old woman Vanguard. Bobby's the reason."

Nori sat as Trevor spoke. Bobby vanishing, the message they all received, someone posing as him, that someone being his own father, and now they were after the rest of the guild?

"What is this, a movie?" He asked.

"I wish."

"David and Horace?"

"As best as I can tell, taken, at the very least. Someone left a ghost of David in the system, and I'm worried that's to cover up his death. Old woman Vanguard might be a bitch, but the rest of the corporation does look out for its own. If they saw an anomaly there, they'd look into it."

"So they know now?"

Trevor shook his head. "I didn't tell them."

Nori glared.

"That's not because of the feud. I'm worried about how far Vanguard will go and what it means for Horace if he's just a prisoner."

"He's the one with the criminal past?"

Trevor stared. "Fuck, what did I say about Horace?" He closed his eyes. "Oh, Terry is so going to lock me up and keep me from having sex if he finds out I said that."

"Tell me what you meant and I'll promise not to say anything."

"Blackmail, really?"

"You can't tease a guy and not expect reprisal. You should know that, you're a guy too."

Trevor sighed. "Horace is a spy. I didn't find anything bad that he did, or that he works against Orr interests, but he's still a spy."

Nori studied the tiger. "Okay, I don't feel that's the kind of thing that warrants the outburst and the fear of not being able to have sex, but I'm going to let it go. Why do you think Horace is still alive?"

"He just vanished from the system. That was a few days ago. He was at Tuck's orgy, actually. It's going to be a bit before the system flags his absence as suspicious, and officially, he's an Independent too, so that might give them more time until the group his ID's connected to reacts, but my sense of things is that they're going to reconnect him before that happens, if only to reset the system and give themselves the time to work him some more."

"And you figure they would have done the same with David if they could."

"Yeah. He was the first they went after. Something might have gone wrong, David was pretty high in the chain, even if he was just an assistant, maybe he had safety measures in place. I can't know unless I dive deep, and this doesn't warrant the kind of risk doing that on the Vanguard system would entail."

"Your friends disappearing and maybe dying doesn't warrant everything you can do?"

"There are laws, Nori. Trevor Orr can't even look in Vanguard's direction without the old woman growling. Trevor Pakesh doesn't have the authority to do a search into another corporation's system. By the time I could get the authorization, considering Pakesh is still an Orr citizen, the sun will have burned out. But don't worry, I have someone looking into it. If he finds something relevant, he'll tell me."

Some corporate black ops, Nori suspected. His father would have a fit if he knew where Nori was.

"So this is about the message Bobby sent us," Nori said.

"Yeah, there's something in there the not-Bobby wants pretty badly, he was willing to kidnap me for it."

"Me too." Nori rubbed his neck. "But I don't know how urgent it is. One of them said their boss was willing to wait two years for it."

Worry flicked on Trevor's face and he wanted to ask what worried him, but Trevor asked, "Can you access your copy? From what the not-Bobby said, we'll need all of them to work out what's in them."

Nori reached for the shoulder strap, even if he knew his pack wasn't there. "I can't access anything right now." His arm was bare of his interface.

"I can get you an interface, don't worry about that."

"That's nice," Nori said dryly, thinking of the customization he'd done on his. He had a backup of the settings, but he'd still have to reinstall the exact copies of the apps he used, since a lot of the upgrades that had happened since had ruined them in his opinion. "But even with one, I can't get the files."

"Files? As in more than one?"

"Yeah, Horace got David's and then he sent them to me. So I have three of them."

"Yes! That is going to make things so much easier."

"But only if they didn't take my pack."

"What pack?"

"My travel pack," Nori said. "It's got my back up interface, but it's where I keep my drive. Unlike you," he continued at Trevor's confused look, "we independents don't have an Implant to store all the information we consider important." Worry crossed Trevor's face again. "So we keep that on a drive." He was going to ask what that was about. "Most people's drive is in their homes, hard-linked to their system, but I'm always traveling because of my job, So I've been carrying it with me since I was in my twenties."

"So where is it?" Trevor's eyes flicked left and right. "No pack was collected from where you were rescued."

Nori tried to remember. He'd put it down at the yard's office, but picked it back up. He never left there without it. He hadn't made it home because of being chased. But he'd put it down just before the chase started. Had he picked it up? He couldn't remember, so maybe. "Where they captured me." Right, he'd put his pack down because he'd been tired, and then it had been the chaos of trying to escape them.

"Where was that?"

Nori stared at the tiger. "How should I know? I couldn't see anything because of the rain, and they hacked my interface so it would guide me into their grasp instead of where I wanted to go." He chuckled. "You're going to have to play investigator if you want to find it."

* * * * *

"I don't play at it," Trevor grumbled as he entered his lobby. "It's a real job."

"What is?" Uncle asked, materializing next to him.

"Don't you know?"

"Clearly I don't. You were in a section of the tower I'm forbidden to go into."

"Since when do you respect that?" He established his Pakesh ID and stepped into the inspector's office.

"Since there's nothing overly important taking place there."

"Just Nori thinking this is 'pretend'." He opened a series of windows and hid their connections to the head office. "Tuck? Who do we have on the island still?"

"Err, no one?" his brother answered, his face appearing in one window. In the others, Trevor pulled as many views of Nori's island as he could.

"Why don't we have anyone there?"

"You do remember the tantrum Terry threw, right? Something about invading a sovereign territory?"

"We're not invading anyone, we went to rescue someone. There's a difference." He slipped into the island system through one of the nodes that connected it to the rest of the world and looked for any data on the time-period Nori was missing.

"The governing body there doesn't see it that way. They find out a corporate military shuttle is in their airspace and they tend to freak out. Then they call Terry, who explodes on me, and not in the covering me with cum way."

"How long until you have one back there?"

"You aren't hearing me, Trev."

"I heard you and Terry can buckle himself in a chastity belt for all I care. A friend of mine is in trouble, one almost certainly dead and the other missing. I need to get Nori's drive and that's in his pack somewhere on that island, so you're going to send someone there to help me retrieve it if you ever want to touch my ass again."

"I'm good with just you fucking me for the rest of my life."

Trevor pulled his attention away from the flow of information long enough to glare at his brother.

"I'm working on it!" Tucker hurried to say. "Man, I didn't know you were able to be this scary."

Trevor had a field of data, and it was more holes than anything else. That storm couldn't have been better timed to help Nori's pursuers. Not only had the island been mostly off the world network for the duration, but every electronic on it had been affected, no matter how well shielded they had been.

He knew the chase started at Nori's house. That was easy to find. It was on the island's registry. Finding Nori proved more difficult. Uncle had him as outside the house, on the other side of a street when he managed to break through the storm's static, but any camera around the house was offline. Possibly more the pursuer's doing that the storm, but the same result,

He broadened the search until he had a perimeter that registered working system, if intermittently, and looked through the imaged they'd gathered. Something had to have seen Nori as he ran. Something had, that was certain, but had it been working at that moment?

"Why don't we just homogenize the weather?" Trevor complained.

"There's this little something called the Cataclysm Act," Uncle answered, "which has a section that states that no corporation has the right to take any action that would have effects reaching outside its border without the approval of every other group that would be affected by it. Note the wording, group, not corporation. To establish weather control over the entirety of the world, we'd have to get every Independent nation to sign off on it. As it is, we can barely use weather control over our own territory because of how the effect will propagate."

"That's a bullshit clause." He had a handful of images that might, or probably weren't, Nori. Just shapes he thought were people in the downpour. "Why aren't you helping with this?"

"I figured you needed it to blow off steam."

Trevor stared at Uncle. "Fuck what I need. I'm trying to save my friend." He pointed at the field of data. "Find Nori's pack!"

A wave distorted the field and reconstructed into a double of the island's topography. A section zoomed, and a path appeared through it. Trevor looked for information that would confirm what Uncle was doing, but there was nothing, there was no picture, no data transmission, nothing.

He looked at Uncle, who simply tilted an ear.

And then it was obvious.

There was no data because it had been jammed, not disrupted. Trevor looked at the end of the trail, pulled the data on the location.

"Tuck, I have something. It's a block and half worth of buildings, but that's better than having to search the entire island." Silence. "Tuck, if you're busy fucking while I'm trying to save--"

"I'm here, and I'm not fucking, but Terry told a lot of people to get in my way, and the assholes are seeing what we did to rescue your friend as an attempt on my part to usurp their authority. Like I want anything to do with their authority," Tucker grumbled, "How is it that they always forget they forced this rank on me and then accuse me of trying to take over? It'd serve them right if I did take over. Take the entire military offline for a week and have this giant solar system spanning orgy, let see them comment on that."

Trevor looked at Uncle, who simply shrugged. "I can make sure enough personnel remain active no one will cause us problems."

"And they say I'm trying to take over," Tucker grumbled. "But I've got you a team, they'll be there in two hours, then I need to figure out a way to pull them off their current assignments if I'm going to pay them the way they want."

"And what do they want?" Trevor asked.

"Personal assignment to me for a month along with a few upgrades, I have no idea how I'm going to hide that from anyone who shouldn't know." A silence. "I'm waiting for you to offer your services, Uncle."

"And deny you the joy of personally screwing those people over? I wouldn't dream of it."

"I hate you," Tucker grumbled before terminating the connection.

* * * * *

"Yes!" The squirrel hugged the pack. "I missed you so much."

"I can leave, if you two want some time alone."

Nori grinned at the tiger. "You don't know what it's like not to know where your stuff is." He looked at the gear in Trevor's hand. "I have my back up in here."

"This is more recent."

"More recent doesn't mean better." He pulled the interface and the visor out of the pack, then the drive, a box the size of this hand, which was mostly shielding and armor around the small memory processor.

He put his visor on and turned the interface on.

"Nori, before you start," Trevor said, "that friend I mention wants to connect with your interface so he can copy the files."

"I'm not letting him in my drive. I don't care how much you trust him."

"Afraid he'll find your stash of home recording?" Trevor grinned.

"I'd be more afraid of the recordings I made of the guild parties, if I were you," Nori replied, smirking.

"I'm an Orr, Nori, we haven't done anything in the Lands I haven't done at home."

"There was that time in the ocean."

Trevor snorted. "Remind me to show you how we celebrated graduating from 0-G training."

The visor registered everything was green. "All joking aside, I'm not giving him free access. There's family business stuff in here. You guys should know about business privacy since you elites basically created it."

"Uncle?"

Another tiger appeared next to Trevor. He was older, a hundred-fifty, maybe, Nori thought. In a gray suit that had the feel of an antique to it. He lifted the visor, and the man disappeared.

"Hello, Nori. It's a pleasure to officially meet you." His voice was familiar.

"You're who told me to run."

"Uncle is," Trevor hesitated and looked at the other tiger. "An expert on information system. He's been involved in trying to figure out what's going on with Bobby."

"Okay. It's obvious you're already in the system here, so I'll warn you that even if this is a backup, it's got top of the line intrusion detection installed. You even think of looking into my drive and it will tell me."

"I won't, I give you my word. I'll only take the files you hand over to me."

Nori wasn't certain he believed him, since he had the know-how to punch through storm static and someone hacking his interface, but it wasn't like had another option. He put the interface on and tapped the access to his drive, which unfolded in his visor. The sensors in it registered both his hands as he moved them through the graphics, opening other compartments, or demanding new access to locked ones.

When he had a copy of the three files, which appeared as power crystals to him, he offered them to this Uncle--a silly handle if Nori had ever heard one--and the man disappeared with them.

"Now what?" Nori asked, putting his drive in his pack, leaving only the read function active. "I mean, I'd like to go home."

Trevor looked worried. "I'd prefer you stay here. There's no telling if they'll come after you again. I'm sort of under house arrest myself. The only way I can physically leave the islands is if I let my dad inject me with this whole suit of nanites that will record everything I do. Who I do it with and where we're doing it."

"Sounds like a Cassius movie script."

"He jumped on the idea when he heard about it."

"Right, you guys have been handling his movies for a while now. So you'd know him."

"Tuck's the one with the meaningful connection, but I've talked with him."

"That's cool, but about me staying here." He motioned at the simple room. "This was fine for the day, but just how long am I supposed to stay here?"

"Oh, no worries there." Trevor smiled. "Follow me."

* * * * *

Nori didn't know what to think. Of course, when Trevor said he was under house arrest on the islands, it should have registered how many islands were connected to the Orr family. Of course, he'd meant the Cisco Islands, but even if Nori had understood that he'd never have suspected he was in the corporate tower, located on those islands. Or that there would be a hotel in that tower, and that the hotel would be able to accommodate an Independent like him.

Then he'd been put up in the most luxurious version of such a room. Well, he was no longer entirely certain he was alive. This could be paradise.

Checking the network for news had reminded he needed to let people know he was okay. After the storms, it happened that people took a while to get back in touch, but he expected his family would be freaking out by now.

"Nori, where are you?" His father demanded. "Your sister went to your place to check in on you and found it broken into and you missing. We've been trying to get in contact, but your interface hasn't been registering on the network."

That would be because you're not looking far enough, father, Nori thought. "I'm fine. My interface got damaged during the storm." No need to give his father reasons to search further and find out where he was.

"I told you you should have let me send the car. Where are you? I'll send it now and bring you home."

"I'm at a friend's place. It's going to be a few days before I'm at work, but considering the mess the storm made of the island, it isn't like there's much for me to do there. I'll contact the transport ship and coordinate with the port for the more urgent stuff. I have access to the manifest and redirect or shuffle the contracts."

"And your house?"

"I'll contact the police. Father, I am an adult, don't you have enough grandchildren you can treat like children?"

His father was quiet. "I apologize, you are correct. I was just worried, with the storm, and you not getting in touch. It was a big one this time."

"I know. I'm sorry. I should have called." I would have, if I hadn't been unconscious when the storm ended or woken up in Orr Corp territory. The silence stretched.

"Well, I will let you go," his father said. "I'm glad you're okay. Don't let your friend keep you from doing the work you have to do."

Nori chuckled. "No worries there, you raised me to properly manage my time. Tell the others I'm fine, and that when I'm home, I'll bring the kids a treat." He disconnected and sighed. He hoped the Orrs had treats that were children friendly. Non-Orr children friendly, he reminded himself, considering how young an Orr citizen could be and have sex.

Nori got to his feet and took off the visor and interface, rubbing his hands in anticipation. He shouldn't do this, he knew that. This was going to ruin him for every other time he played, but...

He gazed on the slick suit on its stand. This was beyond top of the line. It was next-gen technology. He put it on, and it hardly felt it. It moved easily with him. He put the headgear on, a band that unfolded over his head. Unlike his state-of-the-art gear, he could fit this in his travel pack. It had its own sensor field detecting the room he was in to calibrate his motions in the virtual world.

The darkness lit up with a clear view of the suit's game room. Information appeared in front of him, the suit calibrating, with a requested for Implant connection flashing, then register an error and vanish. He was surprised a suit like this was designed to connect with an Implant, but so long as it didn't require one, he was fine.

He looked at his interface on the table and it lit up with the options he'd left open. He transferred his motion-to-command library and waited for the suit to integrate them. Once he received the all green. He clapped his hands twice to enter his lobby. Nothing here he needed to deal with right now, except. He accessed the game room's options and activated the motion field.

That was going to be amazing.

He switched to the room view, and he was floating in the middle of it. A perfectly calibrated gravity field, designed to keep him centered and according to the documentation, the suit would simulate ground impact, wind, and even fluid dynamics and sensations. This was going to be like being there. He was going to experience the Lands the same way people with Implants did.

He activated the portal to his lobby within the Lands, already going through the possibilities on who he'd play. He wanted someone with the least amount of covering. He wanted to experience sensations. Maybe he should just have sex, he thought, stepping through, and dismissed the idea. If he wanted sex, he had a building full of guys, and really, Trevor would probably say yes.

He wanted to play.

Reaching for the wall of his characters, Nori paused. He had a message waiting from Horace.