In the real world, I may be a loser that lives in a shack in the middle of the post-apocalyptic dust zone while everyone else lives in cool utopian pods in the FutureCity not two hundred yards away, but in the Metaverse I’m a criminal. The best damn virtual thief in the dust zone, to my knowledge.

“I’m gangly and my arms are far too long to pick up and interact with items normally in the normal world, but online that can only work to my advantage”, I chuckle to myself as I reach across the room towards my keyboard, effortlessly hacking into another mainframe as I sip on a chocolate milk from the comfort of a wheely chair located on the opposite side of the room.

I begin to chuckle harder as I siphon off the cryptocurrency-based savings of an 80-year-old woman, leaving her penniless. I leave my calling card on her desktop – an image file with the phrase “HAXD” and a discount code to a virtual pizza store I have a controlling interest in. It’s a no-fail business plan, because after a long day online getting your virtual assets stolen by me, your avatar’s gonna get hungry, and every cent she spends on digital pizza goes right into my pocket.

That 80-year-old lady may live in a state of eternal technology-induced youth that I alone among humanity do not benefit from, due to my cyber-punk political aesthetic and fear of doctors, but when she sees the way I’ve embarrassed her on my internet hacker blog, she may think twice about mocking me with her eternal beauty and lack of fear in medical contexts.

That reminds me, I’ve got a blog to run. We’re at nearly a hundred posts now, all by me, a mix of detailed accounts of cybercrimes I’ve committed and desperate pleas for free medical advice. The starred post ‘How to remove verruca using kitchen tools’ still has no replies. Dammit. I refresh the page. Still nothing. “Maybe tomorrow,” I whisper to my aching, besocked foot.

Only one thing can bring my cheer back, and that’s stealing virtual goods. I log on to FutureCity’s biggest art collection, and within seconds I’ve hit the motherlode. I hear a rumbling in the real world as a dust storm starts to swirl around my shack, but I barely notice it – with millions of dollars’ worth of digital art NFTs on the line, I’m okay with getting a little dust in my mouth.

“Nice try, bud, but you’ve been caught. Drop the freakin tokens.”

Shit, the web admin’s on to me. I try to log out, but there’s so much dust in the air now that it’s getting all over my keyboard and into my headset. I try to roll my chair over to my dust-proof computer closet, but the freaking wheel keeps getting stuck in the mounds of dust all over the floor. There’s no escape. 

My avatar is tackled to the ground and placed in a holding cell to await my virtual execution for NFT theft. The shack slowly fills with more dust as the online police ask for my last meal. My avatar’s mouth curls into one final smirk as I respond: “digital pizza, please.”