Game of Death by David Hosp

Can’t we just look up who he is on the system?’
    I shake my head. ‘The system isn’t designed in that way. One of the things that we promise our users is complete anonymity – particularly when it comes to the LifeScenes.
Without that assurance, no one would use the site.’
    ‘How do you provide that anonymity?’
    ‘It’s complicated. When you sign up, you give your name and basic information, including credit-card information if you are going to use any of the pay services. At that point,
you’re assigned an internal identifier by the system, which is a series of letters and numbers that only the computer can recognize. That identifier changes every ten minutes, and the system
overwrites the previous identifier. The system keeps track of each user’s activities by category, not by specific action – so it can tell that you’ve used email, or that you have
Skyped or been in a LifeScene, but because the identifier for your actions is overwritten, the system has no record of what you specifically did on the site. This provides a much higher level of
security and anonymity than on a normal site.’
    ‘How so?’ Killkenny asks.
    ‘Take a normal site, like Google or Yahoo. Say you use their email system, and you delete an email. That email is never really deleted. It can almost always be found in the system and
identified with you. Most people don’t really understand that. On our system, the email technically still exists – because data is almost never fully destroyed – but because of
our encryption and the shifting identifiers, it can never be traced back to you.’
    ‘How about if someone hacks into the system to crack the algorithm?’
    I shake my head. ‘Not possible.’
    Killkenny mulls this over for a moment. ‘Is there any way to trace
De Sade
by the LifeScenes themselves? Can you search for elements in the LifeScenes – feathers, for
example – that would lead us back to him?’
    ‘No,’ Yvette answers.
    ‘How can you be sure? Have you tried it?’
    ‘It doesn’t work that way. When someone creates a LifeScene, it doesn’t exist on our servers – it’s not stored here. The servers make the tools and the software
available, but the data for a user’s specific LifeScene actually resides on their own computer server. So even if we had things to search for, there’s nothing on our servers to search.
The only time the LifeScene is accessible by us is when the user is actually in it. The LifeScene is inoperable without interacting with the NextLife software.’
    ‘But you can access it when he’s actually in a scene?’
    ‘We can GhostWalk through the interface with our system, but we can’t access the code for the individual’s LifeScene,’ I say.
    ‘Does he know you’re watching him?’
    Yvette and I look at each other. The tracking that we do is not only against our users’ expectations, but there are also questions about the legality of the practice. ‘He
doesn’t,’ I admit.
    ‘Can you track the signal back to him when he’s on?’
    ‘No,’ I say.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘The system is designed to obscure the IP address of our users.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘Every computer that connects to the Internet has an IP address and a computer identifier that is used to find it. When you “access” a website, what you are really doing is
sending a request from one computer to another to send back the information on the webpage you’re trying to access. In order for the information that’s sent back to reach your computer,
there needs to be identifying information. That’s true whether it’s a laptop or a smartphone or whatever. Our servers are set up so that the signals are routed through several dummy
sites that obscure the IP address, so it can’t be identified once the data is sent.’
    ‘Yeah, but those are the company’s servers, so they could reprogram them to identify the IP address if you wanted to, right?’ His cop eyes bore into me.