All around him, the signal core rumbled.

He tasted battery acid, endured the familiar symptoms of the shimmer, and emerged topside into a bright, perfectly calibrated Unison morning. Subcanopy ESC had never been bitmapped for insertion, so he was most likely directly above the brothers’ subway-tunnel home.

The entire city was silent and empty. As a new user, he had no Friends. Bland, colorless atmoscrapers loomed above him. His footsteps echoed as he walked past blank storefronts and stately corporate lobbies. The air smelled faintly of rice. He remembered Associate Garvey’s programming team arguing for weeks about the exact specifications of the new user smell.

After a long moment of contemplation—Unison would never look or feel this peaceful again—Ambrose accessed his Profile. The mirror appeared in his mind, splitting his perception of Unison into two distinct areas: the empty city around him that he could touch and smell, and the details of his new Account. He was suddenly able to sense aspects of the new personality that Ivor had implanted to avoid detection by UniCorp scans. Hopefully this mask would prove useful. He turned the mirror inward.

He was Adam Trevor, an aspiring pop singer in search of his big break. His interests included twenty-first-century music, furniture design, and apple picking in the New England Expansion.

Okay.

He chose to make this information public and tasted a hint of battery acid again. All around him, the city began to change. The faint rice smell became starchier and somehow closer, as if it were cooking nearby. Beneath his feet, the sidewalk rippled. Gnarled roots emerged, pushing the pavement aside. Dozens of tiny saplings sprouted from the bed of roots and rose past his knees. White petals popped open and blossomed radiantly before drifting to the ground, where they covered the patches of pavement that hadn’t been replaced by soft grass.

Ambrose walked between the thickening trunks as their branches stretched above his head. All at once, millions of green leaves sprang forth and quivered gently in an unfelt breeze. The noise—a faint rustling—sounded wrong. Too tinny and sharp. Ambrose made a note to forward the error to a Design Associate, then remembered that he no longer had access to his Admin Deck. He would have to ignore any system bugs he stumbled across. But maybe the rustling noise was specifically designed for Adam Trevor’s ears? This new ID was going to take some getting used to.

He stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. The rice smell had been replaced by something rich, sweet, and comforting. He snapped open his eyes to find that he was standing in the middle of a fully formed orchard. Through gaps in the overlapping leaves, he could see splotches of gray and blue, city and sky. Ripe red apples dangled from trees in clumps, in pairs, alone. He reached up, grabbed one of the loners, and yanked. The branch bowed and catapulted up as the apple popped free. He took a bite. Juice ran down his chin. It was perfectly delicious, even tastier than a BetterApple. There really was no substitute for expertly calibrated Unison food. Munching greedily, he made his way to the edge of the orchard and dropped the core into a pile of white petals.