The Illusionists Read Online Free Page B
Author: Laure Eve
knowledge, she thought, and resisted the urge to giggle. She felt Wren squeeze her to his side.
âNo,â she heard him say. âCome on. Letâs take a walk.â
CHAPTER 2
WORLD
CHO
Cho slid into Life, easy as thought.
It began, as always, with a feeling like listening to the opening bars of her favourite song.
A tingle.
A long, wavering note of anticipation.
A sudden, gentle rush.
Underneath, there was relief, crashing waves of warm comfort. And guilt that she had succumbed again.
It took its moment. There was always a boot-up time, a black lag from the surface Life that everyone used; the virtual reality that made trees appear and buildings look beautiful, made a fake sun shine in a fake sky. Surface Life took no time at all â the entire population of World was walking around in it, pretty much all the time.
But full immersion into Life stole a black lag from you. Some people hated that moment of darkness and nothing. Cho loved it. Anticipation.
They called it High Immersion Life, or HI-Life. In HI-Life, you could create and explore entire virtual worlds while your body stayed in reality where you left it, unresponsive, as if you were sleeping. You could hide yourself in a fairy land if you wanted to, or a house made entirely out of cheese. There was a place and a party and a game for everything, somewhere, no matter how strange.
But the one thing you couldnât hide was your identity. It was understandable. How would you know anyoneâs agenda in a virtual reality if they couldnât be tagged and recognised? There were many, many games and social simulations where you could cloak yourself in an avatar, a representation of you that would look as bizarre or as normal as you desired. But your identity remained the same. Anyone could see who you really were and what you looked like out of Life simply by accessing your profile info. There were no disguises.
Unless you were a hacker, of course.
Cho accessed her Life account. It pulled together around her, manifesting as a small, comfortable room. She had spent a long time buying Life products to decorate her room. It was a sanctuary. No one could access it save her. No one could see it save her.
It was, she liked to think, the absolute opposite of her bedroom in the real.
Spindly tables had tiny jewelled boxes scattered on their tops with nothing in them. Marble figurines of extinct elephants trumpeted at each other across swathes of red-and-gold glittered cloth. Five clocks hung on one wall, of varying sizes. One was completely transparent, so you could see the mechanisms inside it, but there were no cogs, just a series of tiny hammers poised above rounded nodes. On a table sat a group of interconnected glass candle holders, delicate and winding, and an old-fashioned set of scales. In a corner on the floor, eight marble balls clustered together on a little wooden plate, a couple of them as big as a fist. The kind of balls that looked like star systems or planets, with swirls and whirlpools of colour streaking their surfaces. There was a huge Chinese dragon by one wall, a deep mauve colour, carved and intricate and lovely and almost tacky but not in here, surrounded by this oddness, and it came up to the bottom of her ribs when she stood next to it. There was a thick glass jar of sand, and three keys â giant brass things that were heavy when she picked them up and played with them, which she liked to do. A telescope in one corner. To look at what, exactly? Yet she loved it. It didnât matter that neither the room itself, nor anything it contained, was real in a physical sense. It looked real. It felt real. That was the beauty of Life.
Fat icons hung in the air around her head, representations of all the games and social sims she had bought, all the shops she had an account with. They glittered and winked like jewels, enticing. She reached for one and it flew gracefully towards her. Apt because it was a flying game.
Her
âNo,â she heard him say. âCome on. Letâs take a walk.â
CHAPTER 2
WORLD
CHO
Cho slid into Life, easy as thought.
It began, as always, with a feeling like listening to the opening bars of her favourite song.
A tingle.
A long, wavering note of anticipation.
A sudden, gentle rush.
Underneath, there was relief, crashing waves of warm comfort. And guilt that she had succumbed again.
It took its moment. There was always a boot-up time, a black lag from the surface Life that everyone used; the virtual reality that made trees appear and buildings look beautiful, made a fake sun shine in a fake sky. Surface Life took no time at all â the entire population of World was walking around in it, pretty much all the time.
But full immersion into Life stole a black lag from you. Some people hated that moment of darkness and nothing. Cho loved it. Anticipation.
They called it High Immersion Life, or HI-Life. In HI-Life, you could create and explore entire virtual worlds while your body stayed in reality where you left it, unresponsive, as if you were sleeping. You could hide yourself in a fairy land if you wanted to, or a house made entirely out of cheese. There was a place and a party and a game for everything, somewhere, no matter how strange.
But the one thing you couldnât hide was your identity. It was understandable. How would you know anyoneâs agenda in a virtual reality if they couldnât be tagged and recognised? There were many, many games and social simulations where you could cloak yourself in an avatar, a representation of you that would look as bizarre or as normal as you desired. But your identity remained the same. Anyone could see who you really were and what you looked like out of Life simply by accessing your profile info. There were no disguises.
Unless you were a hacker, of course.
Cho accessed her Life account. It pulled together around her, manifesting as a small, comfortable room. She had spent a long time buying Life products to decorate her room. It was a sanctuary. No one could access it save her. No one could see it save her.
It was, she liked to think, the absolute opposite of her bedroom in the real.
Spindly tables had tiny jewelled boxes scattered on their tops with nothing in them. Marble figurines of extinct elephants trumpeted at each other across swathes of red-and-gold glittered cloth. Five clocks hung on one wall, of varying sizes. One was completely transparent, so you could see the mechanisms inside it, but there were no cogs, just a series of tiny hammers poised above rounded nodes. On a table sat a group of interconnected glass candle holders, delicate and winding, and an old-fashioned set of scales. In a corner on the floor, eight marble balls clustered together on a little wooden plate, a couple of them as big as a fist. The kind of balls that looked like star systems or planets, with swirls and whirlpools of colour streaking their surfaces. There was a huge Chinese dragon by one wall, a deep mauve colour, carved and intricate and lovely and almost tacky but not in here, surrounded by this oddness, and it came up to the bottom of her ribs when she stood next to it. There was a thick glass jar of sand, and three keys â giant brass things that were heavy when she picked them up and played with them, which she liked to do. A telescope in one corner. To look at what, exactly? Yet she loved it. It didnât matter that neither the room itself, nor anything it contained, was real in a physical sense. It looked real. It felt real. That was the beauty of Life.
Fat icons hung in the air around her head, representations of all the games and social sims she had bought, all the shops she had an account with. They glittered and winked like jewels, enticing. She reached for one and it flew gracefully towards her. Apt because it was a flying game.
Her
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