Irina was leaving her apartment on a snowy day in January, as if her country wasn’t cold enough already. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t set her foot outside on a day like this, not that she left the safety and warmth of her apartment much during the winter season anyway. Irina had everything she needed, and would order food to her door when it ran out. Both takeout and groceries could be brought to her that way. It may be expensive depending on what she ordered, but she had no need to worry about money or a budget. 

Her parents paid for everything. They were bigwigs at the international pharmaceutical company Crauter Inc. Irina was their third child, so she’d never had much pressure on her to follow in her parents’ footsteps like her older siblings. Instead, she’d almost become the stereotypical spoiled rich girl. Almost. An unexpected turn on her path down that road had twisted her. She’d come in contact with people that were definitely on the other side of life compared to the people she had grown up around.  

She’d gotten her parents to buy her one of the more advanced VR set ups that existed when she was 14 years old. Irina used it without any supervision, and eventually found her way to the deeper, darker parts of virtual reality after figuring out the way based on the writings of others. Quite a bit of it was hidden or coded. There she stumbled upon the people that had made it their home after she returned one time too many. 

It didn’t take long for them to find out who she was, as she’d little knowledge of how to protect information about herself, especially from people with their experience. A naive and dumb kid at the time, she’d begged them to not stop her from using her VR which they’d threatened to destroy. Her set up may have been used by someone with a rather crude and basic understanding of it, but she should still have realized that wasn’t possible with the supposedly best system money could buy. 

Long story short, they made her carry out a few tasks for them claiming that it would prove whether they could trust her to keep quiet or not. Incidentally, each of those tasks included getting money from her parents to her new friends. Irina didn’t care much about the money, or lying to her parents. She wanted to know the individuals behind the avatars, what drove them and slowly she learnt more about the group. They became friends as the years passed. They showed her how to protect her real identity and use the VR in ways she hadn’t thought possible. She never got that great at using it for the highly advanced technical stuff, but she managed. The group stopped asking her to get them money to prove her worth too. Irina became an actual member in many ways. She took the nickname Asylum, a cool english word she thought sounded badass at the time. It stuck with her though, and at times she wished she could change it. It was harder to do than changing her own name when all the friends she had used it.

The group she’d joined was Abyss Mirror. It wasn’t the most well known cyber group in the world, even now years later, but fame was the opposite of competence in their work. They generally didn’t want the public to know they existed, though they had caused a few news articles through their time. They were supporters of free speech, transhumanism and hybrids in particular. Irina wasn’t a hybrid herself, and she didn’t have all that many cybernetic parts either compared to others. She had some modifications on her neck to easier plug into VR systems, and a few to make her better at using her expensive charged sword. She was more of an idealist who believed in a better future achieved through technology than someone who desperately needed it because they’d gone full hybrid or cyborg. The means used to get that future weren’t all that important in her opinion. People might die. Empathy had never been one of her strong traits.

While lost in thought with a hand on the sword under her orange cartoon fox jacket, Irina had made her way through the gutter to the bar Darkwire. She’d traveled through the gutter alone before, and gotten to the Darkwire safely. Her parents would each have had strokes if they knew she’d done it, but then that would be their reactions to a lot of her reality and they could always get medicine from the company, right? She didn’t hate her parents. It was just easier if they stayed out of her life like they’d always done, so she’d convinced them to buy her an apartment of her own. They were tools she used to get money, but they’d chosen that themselves. There was no way to make up for years of neglect now. 

Yet there were things she never wanted them to find out about her, which was the reason she’d come to a shady and smelly bar during the worst season. Irina was fairly certain that someone had her apartment on surveillance, and that someone checked the bills she handed to her parents each month. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it was hard not to be paranoid when you were aware that someone had made members of Abyss Mirror disappear. There were some packages she couldn’t have delivered to her apartment, and meetings she couldn’t do through virtual reality. Irina took a seat at a secluded table in the bar, and decided to wait ten minutes max.