Terminal Point
an excerpt

The little waitress avatar had wandered off as Daniel scanned the denizens of the café again, a couple – one a man in a well rendered expensive looking suit, the other a woman appearing today as a Manga heroine complete with huge eyes, tiny nose and mouth and matching skirt - were sat across from each other apparently completely stationary, locked into privacy mode and betraying nothing to any other visitors to the site. A crowd of students were filling a the tables along one wall engaged in a heated discussion in Japanese, avatars from the classic dishevelled and scarf look popular in the 1990s to a range of characters escaped from a Nintendo game. One of them, impossible to tell its sex, represented by a cartoonish turtle sporting the same University scarf as several of the others was ignoring the conversation and poking its stumpy little front arms rapidly into the space in front of it, working feverishly on the interface to the pod only it could see. For a moment it made eye contact with Daniel and his firewall registered a flood of connection requests which it automatically and quietly declined. “Virus.” he muttered.
“Pardon?” For the second time in as many minutes he was startled out of reverie by a female voice. He looked round and down towards the floor and blinked at a couple of gorgeously shaped legs which led up to an equally exquisite midriff followed by a cleavage for which the term plunging could have been coined, framed as this body was by an outfit somewhere between a business power suit skirt set and an advert for Playboy. As his gaze finally reached the face of this wet dream avatar the overall ensemble was not spoiled by the high cheek-boned contours framing a pair of child bearing lips and topped with a pulled back pony tail which would be severe but for the sculpted escaped lock bouncing in front of her left eye.