I haven't been in a chatroom in ages.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit it; the last time I went in a chatroom was almost a decade back, in 1996. It was a sluggish little TNG chatroom, filled with people who refused to believe that, yes, Kirk would hand Picard his head. I distinctly recall signing out in disgust, looking out the window, and heading out to start my Christmas shopping. She still has the scarf.

Anyway, when I tried to get back into it, out of boredom, I went to Mr. X.

Read more..."Let me get this straight," he said, rolling back in his chair. "You haven't touched a chatroom in over nine years?"

"Yes."

"AIM?"

"No."

"Messanger?"

"No."

"SMS?"

"What?"

"No." He pauses, and I swear he's smiling behind his steepled fingers. "Things have changed a bit."

"How so?"

He hands me a box. It contains a headset, a few discs, and a mildly terrifying amount of wires. "Hook this up to your computer. Then...we'll talk."

Well, that was forboding.

After a half-hour of sweating, grunting, and cursing, I had the thing set up. It was evidently a prototype device, and somehow managed to accelerate my humble little Dell far beyond the system specs. I figured the headset must have a processing unit of its own. Despite the thought of a heatsink inches from my brain, I put it on.

Nothing but darkness.

I turned it on.

My desktop popped up. The mouse was over to the left, and as I realized I had no idea how to work this thing, I began to follow it with my eyes. It promply slid off to the left. I returned my eyes to center, and the cursor followed.

It was kind of like what happens when you're lying awake at night in a dim room, and you see spots off to the side. You try to follow them, but they just skate off, the faster the more you chase them. An interface based on eye-tracking was stupid, and if I wasn't using a probably-stolen prototype, I would write in to comp-

Firefox opened itself and navigated to the company's contact page.

Oh. Not eye tracking. Mind-reading. Google, search for .MU2 chats. I randomly selected one, and the main chat program opened itself.

A furry tavern. How original.

My avatar was set to the default grey model. I went into the editor, and reconfigured it into the character I had drawn over twenty years ago, back when I had wanted to grow up to be a furry. Back before that could be acheived in nine monthly payments of $1999.99 each.

Aside: some might say that direct mind control would make it easier to create. Bull. It takes just as much skill as real media, except without the physical effort; I ended up using the pregenerated models and modifying them slightly. It's kinda like putting a small child in front of an easel with some paints; unless they know what they're doing, all that you'll get is a mess.

A slimmish wolf walks into a bar.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the avatars had a curious pattern of diagonal yellow and black stripes around their crotches. Some of the females even had it at their chest. Some were bigger than others. Was it a rendering glitch? I pulled up the menu, and found that the content level was set to "G", and the stripes were actually the "Censored" texture. I flipped it to the maximum setting, then exited.

And froze. Please don't make me describe it.

One male, mistaking my trembling for horniness, walked up to me, his

massive black length*

tipping over tables and knocking small paintings off the walls. He approached obliquely, as walking directly forward would've slowly pushed me out of the door.

"You want to yiff?" he said.

"Excuse me?" I said. I knew what the word meant, but by left brain had mostly shut down, leaving only protocol.

He leaned in closer. "Do. You. Want. To. Yiff?" To my horror, several arteries on his member began to pump. The sim lagged slightly.

"No! I don't want to have simulated sex with you! I don't understand why you feel the need to have such a huge cock! Have you ever had sex? Bigger!=better! You'd need a seperate arterial system for that much blood! That's as big as the rest of your body twice over! What are you compensating for?" I grab him by the shoulders. "Did mommy beat you? Did uncle tommy touch your no-no place? Tell me! I can help!"

I don't suppose I was thinking too clearly.

He produced a FF-style masamune out of thin air, and tried to run me through with it. Since this was a safe sim, all it did was push me back. Wide-eyed and staring, my avatar leapt back several feet and crouched, snarling predatorially. I can hear laughing.

"You're out of line!" says a frightened lamb, her junk quietly dripping somehting I don't want to think about onto the floor.

"You're out of order! You're ALL out of order!" I yell, flinging my arm out in front of me. Throught the digital sweat-or is it tears-falling into my eyes, I see an ice-pale herm teleport in. This, I found out later, was the mod. She focused on me.

"Kill the excluder," she says, in tones like glaciers. Everyone in the room unsheathes their weapons and begins advancing. My avatar backs up against a wall. I squeeze my eyes shut, and hurredly go through the logout motions. They're frozen; the mod jammed me in. With a guttural cry, I rip the power cord from the headset.

The darkness is silent, but for the laughing.

My wife had gotten home sometime during my little mise-en-scene, and recognized what I was doing immediately; the school she teaches at has them classified as contraband, and there had been a surge in them lately. She turned on the monitor to watch, and her amusment grew as she observed, leaving her literally ROFL.

"What...what was that?" she managed to choke out. "Did you just quote a line from A Few Good Men?" And she started laughing again. I looked at her sourly.

"It's not funny," I said, wiping my face with my handkerchief. "I was seriouly taumatized, and not thinking clearly. I may require therapy." And this, for some reason, set off even more paroxysms.

"Why weren't you shocked and awed by that stuff?" I continued, when she finally subsided.

"One," she said, wiping tears from her eyes, "I deal with those every day. Two, I work at a public school."

*That's not my interpretation. That's actually an object description. His e-penis was large enough to be classified as a seperate model. It had its own fluid dynamics.