Mod World
Chapter One

      Those first few weeks were among the more frustrating of his life. After discovering that he’d discovered the coding that ran the world, Zane learned there was a gulf between knowing it existed and being able to fluidly use it. Victoria had sagely warned that the precise consequences of even a simple error were inderminate but potentially catastrophic.
      “Define ‘catastrophic’, baby doll.”
      “Well, say you wanted to take an existing object – like, say, a bar of gold – and move it into your living room.”
      “What the hell would I want a bar of gold for?”
      “Just hear me about, handsome,” Victoria retorted in her sultry voice. “So we find a bar of gold, identify the portion of the code with its geographic coordinates, and rewrite those to match a set of coordinates in the living room.”
      “Sure, sure.”
      “Now remember, even though it’s a simulation, the world is in constant motion. Suppose there was a brief delay in transmission or processing, or a miscalculation of a centimeter. Instead of setting it down on the table, it lands in the table.”
      “So what, I’d have to hack it out of the table? I guess I can see how that’d be a pain. Hardly a catastrophe.”
      “Except,” she went on patiently, “that space is already occupied. What might happen if both objects attempt to occupy the same space? Would it simply invalidate the command? Would they merge? Or might the presence of two solids in the same space create an area of super-dense matter so intense that it creates a singularity, spawning a black hole that consumes the entire solar system?”
      Zane scratched his crotch. “Yeah, I guess I can see how that’d be a problem. Still, the machines messed with stuff all the time – surely it can’t be so risky.”
      Victoria’s sex goddess avatar on screen just shrugged. “It probably isn’t, but it does beg the question of whether it’s worth it to take a millionth of a percent risk of ending the universe.”
      “Solar system.”
      “Right. You’re welcome, citizens of Alpha Centauri.”
      Since so far the geography of an object was all that was understood, they began with myriad small-scale experimentations. They moved a pebble from the street and replaced it five thousand feet in the air. No problem. With Victoria guiding him through an earpiece, he found the pebble where it landed and confirmed the success.
      Every day for weeks, they went to choosing a different object – larger, or more complex, or more interesting (at Zane’s insistence that these experiments were boring as fuck). They could even reshape soft objects – bend a paperclip, stretch a balloon, and so on. Every time, they refined the new targeting parameters, practicing until they were accurate within less than a millimeter every trial out of a hundred. Their final experiment was to take a dollar bill out of a man’s wallet and put it in Zane’s, but folded the opposite way. 
      “Remind me again why we can’t try this on organic matter?” Zane asked.
      “Well for starters, silly goose, organic coding is vastly more complicated.” He knew, of course – he’d whined about it over and over every time she showed him, his dreams of reprogramming some hot young thing into his love slave dashed before they could begin.
      “And, of course, there’s the question of what you’d do with one if you could bring it here. After all, even if you took Miss Universe and teleported her into your bed, all she’d do is scream in terror and run like crazy. If all you want to do is kidnap someone and have your way with ‘em, you could do that without all the technological razmatazz.
      “And finally, once again, we can’t just scan the entire network looking for something any more than we can stand on a mountaintop and try to look for a particular blade of grass a dozen miles away. There’s just too much. We can scan objects in a geographical quadrant, but we’d have to actually know where something is before we can find it.”
      Zane scowled. In the old days before the Last War, when computers were everywhere and the Internet had everything a perv could want to find, learning where some starlet or a model or something was at was easy. Now, there was no worldwide database. People knew what was in their newspaper, which was delivered to their door by a kid on a bike. It was barely a step ahead of having a town crier.
      So Zane set most of Victoria’s processing power to further learning the machine’s coding language. It was complex, like she’d said. He worked with her oftentimes, so he knew firsthand she wasn’t just dragging her feet. It made sense, after all – an object would have to be coded with its physical and chemical properties down to the molecular level.
      He did, however, leave a bit of her processing power for play, as he finally had begun to make a plan.
      “You’re sure that’s not a little… childish?” Victoria asked dubiously.
      “So what if it is? Forever young, baby.”
      She giggled. “So you are – it’s why I adore you so. All right, but if this winds up causing trouble, don’t say I didn’t warn you…”
      
      
      
      “Welcome to the channel eight nightly news, my name is Adrianna Gonzales,” she said, the same way she’d opened the local news since landing the gig after both of the old hosts disappeared in the Cataclysm.
      “And I’m Roger Mason,” said her co-host, almost as easy on the eyes as she was, but with more of a DILF vibe. Even if she wanted to entertain delusions that her Latin good looks had nothing to do with it, the absent front of the news desk that, as always, displayed her legs to the viewing public, made that notion pure delusion.
      Which was fine. Nothing wrong with using what you had to get ahead, within reason. She’d graduated cum laude from journalism school, so it’s not like she was just some bimbo who’d been trained to read a teleprompter and frown at the sad parts. Still, if people were more likely to want to find out what’s going on in the city if they also got a peek at her cleavage, fine. 
      Not that they’d get the opportunity tonight, she thought as Roger introduced the leading story. Tonight, Adrianna was using her once per week contractually allowed night to wear something that didn’t show cleavage. Tonight, a loose-fitting cream-colored blouse. Yes, a miniskirt, but at least she was wearing dark stockings – practically leggings. 
      Or… wait, wasn’t she?
      The news desk had a glass surface, and there behind her notes were to golden brown gams. Having thought she’d been wearing stockings, her legs had been left a comfortable few inches apart, letting the dark fabric conceal what was within.
      Did… did I just flash the entire city my panties?
      “Adrianna…? Um, Adrianna…?” She finally heard Roger trying to pass the baton, which only made her blush harder.
      “Right, yes. Um, let’s see.” There, the teleprompter, stupid. “Residents of the Oak Ridge neighborhood once more have reason to be concerned…” With the steady cadence of a practiced journalist, Adrianna inflected a little interest into a boring story about how a recent storm had left fallen trees across the streets, and the city’s understaffed road crews were struggling to haul them off. Slow news day. Most days were now in the Reclamation.
      Yet it sure seemed to enthrall the newsroom staff. Usually they were just milling about distractingly in the background, but tonight, every Tom, Dick and Harry was staring in rapt attention. Must be a lot of Oak Ridge residents in here, she thought.
      “…can expect heavy traffic on the ride home. Speaking of, let’s check in with Greg Sanders in skycopter eight. How are things out there tonight, Sam?”
      “Not as good as they are in there, Adrianna,” he said, then commenced with the nightly traffic report. She had no idea what he meant, but everyone else seemed to get a chuckle out of it.
      “What the hell is that about?” she asked Roger quietly. They were off-mic and off-camera now.
      “Hey, I never realized you were so concerned about our ratings slip. But… you may want to cover up before Jerry sees.”
      My brief panty flash? How did he even notice? “It wasn’t on purpose, Roger. Grow up.”
      “Sure, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep sitting like that. Where’s your self-respect?”
      Her jaw dropped. Before she could say anything, there was the station manager Jerry, frantically running into the newsroom, beckoning her manically. Right now, she mouthed. He just kept waving, so without really getting what the big deal was – a panty flash was a minor deal that would only boost ratings, and she was the one who had to live with the embarrassment.
      She made it two steps before she realized her bra was missing, her boobs wobbling free with each step on her spiked heels. Then she looked down in surprise, and saw her panties weren’t all she’d flashed.
      Every last button on her blouse was undone. As it had been tight to begin with, and her breasts were now completely unrestrained, they had completely thrust aside the fabric and her naked tits were fully exposed.
      She froze in shock, not even aware that the cameras were back on her. In fact, the whole newsroom was so surprised by it all that nobody cut away, nobody aired that graphic they had for technical difficulties. Instead, their entire audience – which was expanding by the second as channel surfers quit their surfing – was treated to an extended shot of the sexiest woman on local news standing half naked, staring slack-jawed ahead.
      She squeaked in embarrassment, then ran off-set. She couldn’t even complain when Jerry fired her.
      
      
      
      Across the city, Zane was howling in laughter as he watched, and re-watched, and re-watched the footage. He’d never seen someone so embarrassed in his whole life. He watched in slow-mo as her breasts sunk to their natural position during the dude host’s spiel. 
      Then she blah-blahed through some pointless bullshit about trees or something, watching as his hack took the top button and moved it a centimeter back, effectively undoing the clasp. Then the next, and the next – it was after the fifth, just above her navel, that the blouse had enough and just flew open. There they were, those young, firm, buoyant titties. It was the only reason he ever watched the news, Adrianna Gonzales’ impressively perky C-cups.
      That she’d flashed her panties without meaning to after he’d stolen her stockings right off her body in the dressing room was barely even on his radar.
      Presently, those stockings and that lucky, lucky bra sat on his desktop. He’d never really been a panty-sniffing kind of guy, but it was tempting. Instead, he just rubbed one out while Vivian waited patiently.
      “Got it out of your system, thunder cock?”
      “Sure did – damn, that was hot. Great work – told you there was no danger, didn’t I?”
      “No danger?” she said in her frostiest tone, which was just a normal woman’s speaking voice without her usual sultry purr. “We could have peeled the skin off her legs, you know. Or broken her spinal column. Or teleported the bra inside your fingers.”
      He grinned at the memory. He’d had his hands out like he was cupping her boobs to see if his guess about how big they were was spot on and teleported the bra into his grasp. (He’d over-estimated.)
      “But I didn’t, did I? I’m telling you, this stuff has failsafes we just haven’t discovered yet – and you’re under-estimating our system’s power. We handled it – and now we know we can play.” 
      
      


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