Online.

The night lights of Meycauayan Electric Town hang over the rusty ramshackle rooftops like dead fireflies; I slide my head into the warm cushion of the VR headset, and then I log in.

Ruby_7332 logs in too, the way she always does — in a maelstrom of blue-green pixels twisting into a tornado, each one a raytrace into her perfect avatar of a body. It starts from the bottom: her toes painted black like coals, building into her shapely legs and the harsh, sudden slope of her waist, then into her breasts, then her pink hair. Long, expertly modeled eyelashes blinking, each one with a wink of CG-bloom. I can already feel her skin through the haptics.

“What’s up, buttercup?” she cheerily asks, in an auto-modulated voice echoing the Hatsune Mikus of old. “Why the long face?”

“Long day, you know?” I reply. “I had to let go of a couple of employees. Budget cuts.”

She shakes her head, dislodges the neon clips that lay at the end of her braids.”Same,” she replies. “I’ve spent the whole day looking forward to seeing you. The new contracts are taking a lot of time to execute. They pay nicely, but, you know?”

It’s a lie, but it’s a lie we’re both aware of. I don’t really manage a software company. She doesn’t really do multimedia contracts. I haven’t told her that really, I’m just a lowly QA jockey who plumbs through an assembly line of factory code. I don’t know what she does. But it doesn’t matter; she holds my avatar’s — no, my hand — as we float through the infinite fractals of crimson gazebos in New_Shanghai::F2P::Server_243::RP-Only::Adult. Down, through the main street, into the alleyways, and up the stairs into my rented virtual space. She nibbles the back of my perfectly-rendered neck, as I wind the latch after punching in the auth tokens.

And then we’re inside, and then we’re on the floor, and then I feel my meatworld body sweat as she whispers to me, again and again, that I’m the best and I’m the best and I’m the best. No, I tell her. I tell her that she is.

—

Later on, we’re sitting, waiting for an ad to finish so we can resume watching a freemium cherry tree blossom display. I wrap my arms around her, and her face betrays cracks of something sad. “God,” she mutters.

“What’s wrong, baby?” I ask her. Her face twists, and then there’s nothing. It looks like she logged out. “Hey, Ruby. Are you okay?”

She’s logged out for a few more moments, and I’m stuck stewing on the by-minute price of our leased space. But then she comes back, with a sigh — the aggressive digital modulation in her voice not masking the fact that she is bothered about something. She twiddles her Shenzen-Perfect ™ fingers and gives me a wan smile. “It’s just…”

“It’s just…?”

“I think I’m starting to like you too much,” she whispers.

And there it is.

—

Offline.

And there it is.

It’s late night in Meycauayan Electric Town, and the city is hot and hungry and it consumes all. I walk through the late-night bazaars — the bicycle-towed food carts, stinking of charred, cooked meat; the sidewalk vendors peddling peeled green mangoes suspended in week-old rainwater. The taxi driver who dropped me off to the terminal is illegal — he is spreadeagled on the driver’s seat, fingers twiddling through the haptic controls for a pirated holo version of Pac-Man.

In a few moments, we’ll see each other for the first time.

The nerves pile up like heap-rot; this wasn’t my idea as much as it was hers. She told me: I want to see the real you. She told me: I want more than this. And a part of me does — a part of me wants to know what lies beyond the rendered, geometric hill. Perhaps something better. Perhaps something worse. But it’s too late now, as her passenger train finally makes its way through the platform, and then the doors swing open, and there is a flood of sweaty, human bodies-

-and then there is her.

She looks different. Shorter, wider than I thought. Her eyes bloom wide when she spots me; her face freezes, then she gives me a thin smile. We shuffle towards each other, unsure of what to do next.

“I’m Ruby,” she says.

“I know,” I reply. And then I force myself to give her a kiss.

—

Later on, we’re in my shoebox of an apartment, waiting for the air conditioning to finally kick in. She sits upright on my fold-out bed; her skin covered by a thick sheen of sweat, back turned towards me. The grime-caked neon of a noodle place next door bathing her shoulder blades in translucent crimson waves. I feel relieved that we’re not looking at each other.

It feels like an eternity, and I can’t find the words to start a conversation. It feels more difficult, more bare somehow. She fidgets nervously, plays with her hair idly, mutters to herself.

“It’s not…” she whispers. “I’m not feeling as good as I thought I would be.”

“I know,” I reply.

“I don’t feel good at all, in fact.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

We sit back for a while, watching the halogen streetlights filter through the bus smokestacks forever lining the road in front. I’ve seen her — no, her avatar — naked many times before, but she makes a point of covering up her hips with a blanket.

My fingers dart around in the dark, until my thumbs rest on the haptic controller pads of the VR headset. “Hey, Ruby,” I begin. “I got an idea.”

“Oh yeah?” she mutters sullenly.

“Let’s log in.”

And then she looks back at me, and I see a faint smile form at the corners of her face. She looks at me — really looks at me — for the first time, and that’s when I start to notice the calluses around her temples where the headset sat. Something suddenly overtakes me, and I try to lean in for a kiss. She pushes me away with a smile.

“No, not here,” she says.

—

The night lights of Meycauayan Electric Town hang over the rusty ramshackle rooftops like dead fireflies; we slide our heads into the warm cushion of the VR headset, and then we log in.