She whispers I love you into my headset and I whisper it right back. Our insta-message feeds embrace and her server files away the attachments we have made with each other. Do you mean it, she asks me and I remind her I have given her my word.doc, watch her avatar take it and stack it in her root.

Confident of my intentions she begins the scan of my code to ensure I am free from infection. Only then can we move on to full digital intercourse. I allow her to explore my codebase, taking care to keep my partitioned drives trojaned. Scan complete I go through the motions of exploring her, though my mal-bots have already run their dirty fingers over her digi-footprint. She is no threat to me but I must follow convention or give myself away.

Once the intercourse begins and I am deep inside her system and she is deep inside my facade, I open the server links to my partition and release into her system an update of a particularly nasty retro-virus, the aptly named LoveLetter, more for fun than for any real problems it can cause her bioplastick sophtware system. All the while my mal-bots are dredging her folders for virtual and physical funds, I.P. files, idents, anything of saleable or digi-scrap value.

I feel her data flood starting and decide to pull out early. She gasps as I remove myself from her network and I can see the disappointment in her flagging infoflow. But we haven’t synchronised, she says to me. I want to laugh in her digitised face but keep my c.g.eyes earnest and emotional. I stroke her code, tell her we will interface again soon but now my tele-presence is needed urgently elsewhere. I promise I love her. I remind her of my word.doc. All the while I am flushing with input from the depths of her system, flooding with it all.

Her smile stretches away from me as I pull the plunge and slip back up to the stratosnet, heading back to my server, satisfied with the undiscovered violation undertaken by my code. She has no idea she has just been data-pillaged; no idea my word.doc is self-deleting. Tomorrow she will open my promise and find it empty.