Read Online Shepherd Moon: Omegaverse: Volume 1 by G.R. Cooper - Free Book Online Page B

from the street, and put her arm through his and her head on his shoulder. They walked in companionable, comfortable silence.
    As they approached the mall, he asked, “Where do you want to eat?”
    “You know my requirement. As long as that’s met, I don’t care.”
    “Mimosas, yes.” he turned left onto the mall, walked a block and took an outdoor table in front of a cafe. The table was in the sun. Anna took the seat facing the light. She pulled her feet out of her sandals and onto her seat, her toes wrapped over the front. She wrapped her arms around her legs, and rested her chin on her knees. She smiled at him.
    “What’s new?” she asked.
    “Nothing much,” he answered. The waitress, a lively Aussie named Kylie, arrived, greeted them by name. It was still too early for food, by half an hour, but they ordered drinks. They’d break their fast with a mimosa and a pint of porter while they waited for the kitchen to open.
    Anna continued, “ Something must be new! What did you do last night.”
    “Played a video game. A virtual world game,” he shrugged.
    “Tell me.”
    So he did.
     
    “How do you know he was real?” Anna asked, then finished the dregs of her second mimosa.
    Duncan finished chewing, then swallowed, the last bite of his eggs benedict. “What do you mean? Who was real?”
    “The asshole guy.” She picked up the ramekin that had held her goat cheese and thyme grits, ran her finger through it and then sucked off the residue. “The guy who yelled at you.”
    “I don’t follow,” he said. The waitress brought their third round of drinks, bussed their plates. Duncan turned to her, “Thanks Kylie,” then turned back to Anna, “What do you mean real?”
    “I mean,” said Anna, “how do you know he wasn’t part of the computer program, like your butler guy Clive.”
    He laughed, sipped the foam off his beer, “Well, for one, all of his friends apologized. I doubt the AI has that many levels of subtlety.”
    “Ok,” Anna curled back into the chair, stretched in the sunlight, “then how do you know your butler guy isn’t real?”
    “Are the voices in your head real, Anna dear?”
    She laughed. “Maybe. May. Be. You never know.” she tilted her head sideways, “Who knows how the universe decides to communicate to us. Or through us.”
    “Are you seriously getting metaphysical about a video game?”
    “Where does the universe end? Isn’t your cyberspace part of it?”
    “It’s just bits of information. Pulses of electricity.”
    “Maybe that’s all the universe is,” she sipped. “Maybe I’m an AI. Maybe you are. Maybe nobody is, even your Clive.”
    “Maybe you have had enough mimosas,” laughed Duncan.
    “Never!” she raised her glass high, then drained it.

Chapter 9
     
    Pune, Maharashtra. India
     

    Phani Mutha typed on the dingy keyboard in his small, dimly lit room. He stared at the monitor sitting on the table in front of him, at the boulder it displayed. He willed it to give him some sign of a vein or deposit of something, anything, he could sell. He hit the key again, spending some of his precious fuel to thrust his ship closer to the rock. He completed his scan. Nothing. Again. He changed his ship display from a mineral scan to a wider, broader navigational scan. His ship was inside the ringed belt around a blue gas giant, the fourth planet in this system. He chose the next closest, likely, moonlet, set a course toward it, and increased thrust. He maneuvered through the belt, past the small rocks unlikely to provide anything worth finding.
    Phani Mutha was a miner and he was a farmer; someone who made their living obtaining and selling virtual objects. He was also having a long string of very bad luck.
    This was after beginning his farming career with a lot of good fortune indeed. He’d bought the old computer after reading about others who made a good living selling game items to players in the west. He thought it sounded better than scraping by on what