sub(Dom), a person who claims themselves to be submissive, but who secretly desires control over a dominant. In a tense final chapter, the avatar and his alt confront each other at the fourth annual PMPM awards ceremony (just after the first prize in the Two Prim Category has been announced as ‘Pine Cube Next To A Pine Cube’). A tremendous battle takes place, with Thomason emerging as the surprise victor (even he didn’t see it coming). Caroline falls instantly in love and the two take off together as fugitives from the PMPM community. In the epilogue, however, a brief glimpse of a shady observer of the two (whilst they consummate their passion in the novel’s only sex scene) leaves everything unresolved: is Thomason who we think he is and his account has just been hacked, or has something far more sinister been going on? For the observer is revealed in the last three lines as none other than The Stuff. Readers will be kept guessing through the sequel – More of The Stuff – and a disappointing resolution will be reached in book three – Knowing The Stuff – paving the way for a reboot of the franchise five years later, in which Thomason is redrawn as a much younger man with a talent for Italian cooking. The Affairs of Barnaby Bedsheet. Embittered by his RL love life, Barnaby embarks on a mission to bed as many SL residents as possible, only to discover that all twenty of them are in fact the alts of the same RL person. In an ironic twist, Barnaby
then finds out his SL account has been hacked and that nineteen other people are intermittently logging on as his avatar. Alternate title: Being Barnaby Bedsheet. Mission Unprimable. A crack team of five Second Life residents are hired by a mysterious organisation to penetrate an OpenSim (aka ‘The Other Side’) region and steal a top secret script codenamed ‘The Cat’s Claw’ (the function of ‘The Cat’s Claw’ is never revealed). On entering the enemy grid, the team must fool target avatars into thinking they’re in their familiar daily haunt (a lap dance bar with a perfectly textured sculptie water fountain, a detail that the expert builder on the team is unable to perfectly duplicate – he has a big tantrum at one point where he complains about having to go back to working with sculpties, likening this to building “by throwing lumps of wet mud at each other” – leading to a moment of tension when the chief bad guy goes for a walk around the fountain whilst he soliloquises about what the metaverse will look like under his new order). Just when it looks like the mission has gone without a hitch, the team are betrayed by none other than the guy who hired them in the first place (it turns out he’s one of those bloggers who’s been predicting the doom of SL for years and got fed up with all the waiting). All seems lost until the last few pages, when a confusing exchange establishes that the chief good guy suspected the double cross from the start and in fact defeated him three chapters ago.
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