The Alphaville Herald

I’M HAVING AN ALIEN BABY IN SL!

by Alphaville Herald on 12/04/05 at 7:05 pm

From the reaches of the Herald’s Science Fiction Desk, presided over by Budka Grosshomme, comes a cautionary tale of avatars, attachments, and what can happen when the firewall breaks.

In an amazing revelation, Zzyzzk Threadmore announced that she suddenly found her avatar pregnant when she logged on last week. “At first I thought it was just a bad case of lag – y’know, sluggish,” she said. But when the condition continued throughout her eight hour session online she realized that something else was seriously amiss.

An examination of her Thunder Red Zone Max III liquid cooled, 500GHz game machine showed that her motherboard and attachments were clean. “They should have been,” she said. “I paid a fucking fortune for that rig.”

Attention quickly focused on Second Life and the pattern of her activities there as the most probable source of the problem. “She could have downloaded it from one of the people that was there,” said Mark Temple, her temporary roomie and tech support guy. “She gets a lot of stuff from the guys she plays with up there.”

Zzyzzk bristled at the suggestion. “To hear him talk, it’s like I was doing nothing cybering,” she declared. “I do, but not all the time. Well, not regularly anyway. And never in the PG sims.”

Further investigation by this reporter found that Zzyzzk has been a frequent visitor to the infamous Sex City Unlimited sky box, where she had participated in several rock orgies, three foursomes, four threesomes, and numerous quickies, sometimes with non-humanoid avatars.

“Maybe it’s like, you know, a virus or something,” Zzyzzk suggested. The possibility of a reproductive virus running rampant in SL sent a shock wave through in-world entertainment venues. Many of the establishments have decided to temporarily ban patrons who cannot guarantee that they take adequate protective measures on their equipment. “The minimum is a virus scanner,” said Asante Quagmire, owner of the Petite Colon Dance Emporium. “Although I’d really prefer that everyone sat behind both a router and a firewall.” Asked how this would impact his dwell he responded “Dwell’s important but, hey, I gotta protect my patrons, right?”

Zzyzzk’s delicate condition was confirmed by Alexandria Linden who remarked after looking over the 22 million items, mostly jewelry and clothing, in Zzyzzk’s inventory, and her extensively modified avatar, “This is one pixelled up bitch, so it was hard to get down to her core. But yeah, she’s got about 2-3 Kbytes of illegal software in there. Damn if the little thing doesn’t look like a basic avi core.”

When asked what could be done about the situation, Alexandria replied, “Well, we could send her back down to a standard female av and let her start over again. That would mean we’d have to get rid of most of the enhancements and crap in her inventory – couldn’t tell which one did the dirty, if you get my drift. Better safe than sorry, I say.”

When approached with this possibility, Zzyzzk was taken aback. “That’s a pretty serious step. Hell, I’ve invested, like, five hundred hours to look this good and would hate to have to start over again.” Prior to the electronic conception, Zzyzzk had considering approaching Players magazine for “a spread, if you know what I mean,” she quipped.

The problem of what would happen to the incipient avi seemed to be of secondary concern to Zzyzzk. The activist group Rights for Unrezzed Beings (RUB), on the other hand, vehemently oppose Alexandria Linden’s suggestion. “This is murder, plain and simple,” RUB’s Lancer Latrobe said before a gathering of three other residents. “The nascent avatar has as much right to be rezzed as anyone else. If they do this to her, they can do it to the rest of us. I, for one, don’t want the Lindens to erase me as soon as I get a worm or virus. If they do it to Zzyzzk they can do it to you. I mean, there has to be a better way than killing.”

A brief poll of Herald readers indicate 55% favored the Linden’s recommendation, 20% opposed it, 10% were undecided and “just want to see what happens,” and 25%, mostly male, wanted to know Zzyzzk’s club schedule.

Meanwhile, Zzyzzk is still undecided about the tiny growth, now approaching four Kbytes. “I still have time,” she declared. “I mean, it doesn’t make me look fat or anything, does it?”