Double doubled doubled (part two)

Part two.

I of course have – as would any good metaverse detective– a veritable army of alts.  I have touse an Excel spreadsheet just to keep track of them: in addition to all the IDsand passwords, there's their gender, sexuality, appearance, age, attractiveness,species and identifiable personality traits to record.  Then there's the places they hung out in on previouscases and the names of key people they met (with one asterisk to denote if Ithey might be inclined to try to kill me if they ever met me in RL and two if Ihad sex with them).  I try not to takethem where they might be recognised.


Back in the office, Honeycomb Crumbled was answering byherself some of the questions my primary hadn't yet got around to asking, likeif she'd actually verified that some of the dancers at Dominoes were previouslyher guests at Frederick's.  It was nolonger an important question, since Cassandra and Trigger were now locked inslow dance number three across black and white tiles whilst an ad for Cialisplayed over the music stream.  Burnished,I decided, was a dead end – or would be after a half hour or so.  Whilst she arranged pose balls that requireda standing position from me for the next few minutes, I asked Cassandra whatwas so good about our new venue in a way I hoped made it looked like I wascalculating the probability of the move being a step closer to fuckingher.  After a fashion, she replied justthat there were more people there.  I putit to Honeycomb that sometimes all it took was just one or two people in theright moment to check some other place out – maybe a sim crash had occurred atFrederick's one evening and a couple had relocated simply out of impatience –and the subsequent movement of the masses was no more a conspiracy than theflocking of dots in those computer simulations of traffic flow. 
"I see I haven't yet convinced you of the malice in allof this, Mr Luck," she replied.  "Verywell.  Then I will tell you how I came toknow it.  I'd hoped not to have to tellyou this yet; I would have preferred you discover it independently so you wouldn'tthink me paranoid or a drama queen.  Thefact of the matter is, I'm the victim of a shake down.  There's a group going round extorting moneyfrom venues in the metaverse.  You paythem monthly and they ensure your reputation 'remains intact'.  I was approached a couple of months ago byone of their representatives.  And Irefused to pay, Mr Luck."
Metaverse extortion. Suddenly, this case was altogether more interesting.
Part three will be published on Friday...