Chip Silicon’s real first name was Chip, on his birth certificate and everything, and his power was to control computers. Go figure. What are the odds?
Oh sure, his surname was Bailey, not Silicon, but nominative determinism can only take you so far.
Chip was famous among the Extras for two things, both of them pretty momentous.
The first was polycast, which used to be called social media, and before that chatrooms, and before that online communities, and before that the Information Superhighway, and before that nobody knew because who could remember that long ago? Polycasts in general were ubiquitous and infinitely variable, but Chip created the polycast that most of the Extras used: free, open, invincibly secure and perfect for their use. All the video and chat channels the Extras used to make themselves famous started with the polycast that Chip built. Among the tight-knit but frequently unravelled cloud of egos that was the Extra community, Chip was a hero. No, not a hero: a creator god, a founder. They called him Great Maker, after a running gag on a recently-remade science fiction series.
The second reason Chip Silicon was famous was because he died.
Well, they say died, but nobody ever found a body, so the use of the d-word remains in dispute. The facts, however, do not.
Chip was enjoying the company of a young lady by the name of Ann, a Long Tail Extra with the ability to appear to be in two places at once, provided those places were within arms length of each other. Not the most thrilling of powers, but she had fun with it. According to the gossip at the time, so did Chip: it’s amazing how much fun you can have with two of the same bed partner, apparently. Chip and Ann were exploring this fun in some detail in a hotel room in a certain very swanky Melbourne suburb when Chip disappeared. Not disappeared disappeared — he didn’t suddenly dematerialise or anything — but he got up, as the old song said, to wash his face, and he never came back.
Ann was either unconscious or under the influence of something other than Chip’s sparkling personality, so she had no idea what happened. She woke up, alone, in a hotel room that had been thoroughly trashed. Every item of furniture and every window was smashed, and the walls had huge gouges in them. Ann was uninjured, but there was a copious quantity of blood in the bathroom. The blood turned out to be ox blood, purchased from a Chinese popup street market stall by a man fitting no known description about half an hour before Ann woke, so the general feeling from the police and the Extras was that it was some macabre attempt to muddy the waters and throw the investigators off. Ann was interrogated and released, and Chip’s manager released funds from his extensive accounts to pay for repairs to the hotel room.
Chip Silicon was never seen again.