Yesterday, Watertower Station was a blank and nearly silent orbital station. Its color scheme could have been described as industrial, at best. Its thousands of walls, floors, and ceilings were an interchangeable gray save for the painfully orange warnings marking the areas where a resident might encounter dismemberment, asphyxiation, or various other discomforts. Not that its residents ever glanced at those warnings. No, they were too busy milling through colorless corridors in equally colorless utility suits, eyes and similar sense organs focused in the middle distance. There was very little sound on Watertower yesterday, just twenty-four thousand citizens and visitors from hundreds of species, all in mutual pursuit of silence but for the unavoidable: the sound of footsteps, wheels, treads, the rustle of utility suits, the occasional uncomfortably biological noise. Gray on gray on gray, silent as the void and nearly as interesting. That was Watertower Station, yesterday.
But this is today.
Today, Sarya understands. Today, Watertower Station is an eruption of light and color and sound like nothing she’s ever experienced. Everywhere her manic gaze falls, something leaps out at her—often literally. She forces herself to keep her mouth shut and does her best to avoid physically dodging away from every image that flits by. She touches the tiny Network unit at her hairline and taps the earbuds farther into her ear canals; she’s been wearing this thing for less than a Network Standard hour and already she’s utterly convinced. This is real, these projected images and sounds, and the gray walls that have enclosed her entire life are the illusion. She can’t even see them anymore; they’ve disappeared behind landscapes and artwork, behind hues and patterns and corporate slogans.
Goddess. She couldn’t remove her giddy grin if she tried.
She keeps to the tail end of her group as it threads through the labyrinth of Watertower Station, the better to gape uninterrupted. Not that she cares what a collection of strangers thinks of her. She is a transient here, a short-term transplant from a lower-tier class who was probably assigned to this particular field trip through some Network glitch somewhere. Why else would she be visiting a place where she can never work? But she’s here, and she has just as much right to be here as the rest of her temporary cohort. If they don’t like it, well—they are free to borrow one of her blades, as the Widow saying goes.
She does know a surprising amount about these people. Her knowledge is now amplified, extended into the near-infinite space of the Network, and her access is no longer limited to a few cubic centimeters of malfunctioning display. Now she is crowded by names and public biographies that appear next to citizens as soon as her eyes land on them. They drift as delicate scripts or heavy symbols, colored and/or animated according to their owners’ preferences, each adding to the greater cloud of color and light that is the Network. Even with her new unit’s efforts in tracking her gaze and fading items in and out of focus as it guesses her intent, she is very nearly overwhelmed.
That doesn’t seem to be a problem for the rest of the class, though, and she can’t help but wonder why. Maybe they’ve scaled back their preferences. Perhaps they’ve turned off ads or certain channels. Her old unit offered a way to do that, which was laughable because there was such a fine line between that and just turning it off altogether. But maybe she’s the only one who can see, for example, the stunning scene emerging from this row of storefronts. The swirl of miniature creatures bursts out of the advertisement, each darting through empty space like a tiny starship. She watches them circle her fellow students one after another like a single organism…and with absolutely zero effect. And then Sarya flinches as that cloud of tiny beings explodes into a brilliant ad in front of her:
[AivvTech Network Implants: The only way to experience the Network.]
A quick glance around shows her that no one else has reacted in the slightest, and that brings a grin to her face. So! Pure, full-strength, undiluted Network is too much for her classmates and they are forced to limit their intake. Look at her, though. Sarya the Daughter—poor, low-tier non-Networked Sarya—she can take its full brunt. She holds out a finger for the same virtual creatures to inspect, determined never to fall into the trap of apathy. She will be