Alien Landscapes 2 Read Online Free

friends. Her only remaining connection to that past existence had been severed. Tara decided she didn’t really want to go visit Fizzwilly and commiserate with him.
    Preoccupied, she found a table surrounded by the kitsch safari atmosphere. She sat under a stuffed zebra head this time, looking up at its placid face, striped black and white, as if a black horse and a white horse had somehow merged imperfectly. It reminded her of Chandler and herself.
    Resting her chin in her hand, she keyed in her order and stared at the gaudy decor, wondering if any of it was real, or if it had all been manufactured as props. She decided she didn’t care: with as much time as she spent jacked in with Chandler to a virtual universe, reality had earned a different meaning for her.
    Waiting for her food, Tara pondered how her life had changed, admitting how much more involved she was with Chandler now, an inextricable part of his work. Tara had dreamed about this . . . but she wasn’t sure this was what she had had in mind. She had grown together with him, but at the cost of part of herself.
    The server interrupted her reverie by bringing her meal. She cut into it with her steak knife, but stopped short when she saw blood pooling on the plate. She turned to the menu pad and called up her order, staring at the words she had keyed in. She looked at her steak again.
    The Porterhouse was grayish on the outside, and a rich, cold red at the center.
    #
    “—and then we’ll stop,” Chandler said, his eyes pleading.
    As Tara looked at him, she caught an image of the gaunt, middle-aged man again, riddled with self-doubt and the fear that he would be unable to complete the job he had taken on. “Just help me finish this one,” he said. “You’ll enjoy it. I promise.”
    Tara turned away, uneasy and afraid to meet his eyes. “Tell me again what’s wrong,” she said.
    Over the past week or so, she had refused to jack in at all. Spooked by the growing evidence of the crumbling barrier between their personalities, she had decided to back off, worried about the danger of using the prototype splitter.
    “I don’t know what’s wrong with it!” Chandler lashed out on the verge of panic. His eyes glittered in a silent plea. She had never seen him look so helpless. “It’s missing something at the heart. Without your help it’s only a shell. I’m falling flat on my face.”
    He reached out in desperation and clung to her hand. He hadn’t done that in a long time. “Please?”
    As the refusal died in her throat, Tara realized how drastically their needs had changed, as if they had swapped insecurities. Chandler needed to become more a part of her, and she retreated, trying to build barriers and maintain her own soul.
    But as she looked at him grasping her hand and silently begging, she saw the man who had stood beside her when her bright future had been stripped from her, who had let her share in his growing success and giving her a new chance. She saw him redefining his company to include her, asking her to become his partner in everything.
    “All right,” she said. “We’ll make this one our masterpiece, a final flash of glory. Then we’ll stop. You’ll be on your own from now on.”
    “Sure,” Chandler said with obvious relief. “It’s for a whole shopping mall. It’ll be really big.”
    Tara went to the wall jacks, wondering why he would think that the size of the implementation had anything to do with her decision to help him.
    She carefully mounted the viper fangs of the jack cable into the socket in the back of her head. Rushing and fumbling with his own socket, Chandler linked up. They plugged into the splitter, and both swam down into the virtual world.
    He took her to Mount Olympus.
    Chandler had chosen the assignment to pique her interest, since in her student days she had traveled through virtual Greece, visited the ruins of the Parthenon, the Acropolis, statues of Apollo and Athena.
    Tara looked around under the