Ambrose scarfed his toast in a few quick bites and brushed the crumbs off his chest. The particle sublimator in his bedroom’s filtration unit vaporized them before they hit the floor. He thought of his marble falling off the edge of the dairy farm and wondered if the Eastern Seaboard City Council (to which his father belonged) would ever install large-scale sublimators to zap falling debris before it crashed through the canopy and killed a few dozen people down in Little Saigon or Rio II. An instant Process Flow told him it wasn’t worth the money, but still …

He stepped into the closet, which contained a single black temperfoam skinsuit draped over a hanger. He tapped the suit with his palm to externalize the vast array of clothing options and instantly the room was filled with designer holo-fashion. He walked back and forth between the rows of floating, translucent ghost-pants and ghost-shirts, settling finally on a vintage, twenty-first-century navy blue suit and tie. He vapored the unselected clothes away with a flick of his wrist and pulled on the skinsuit, which clung gently to his body and looked, outwardly, just like the navy blue suit.

He turned to the doorway of his closet and said, “Reflection.”

The doorway became dully opaque, then glassy. He leaned in close and smoothed his wispy blond hair. It was the biggest day of his life, and he wanted to look less like a teenager and more like the businessman his father had raised him to be.

He dismissed the mirror and stepped back into his bedroom, where he popped a UniCorp BetterMint and took a last look around. This was the first morning in several years that he had not shimmered into the company’s Unison Workspace to begin his day. He felt a deep, anxious twinge in his belly at the thought of what he was missing and pressed his palms together. The hardcoded receptors closed the login circuit and sent a familiar tingle down to the tips of his fingers. He thought of his password—LenSucks—and felt the symptoms of the shimmer: the battery-acid taste most users chewed BetterMints to cover, the gummy tickle in the back of his throat like he was catching a cold, the brief weightlessness. Then pure joy flowed through him. Emotionally, shimmering was like going from a funeral to a tropical vacation in the blink of an eye.

Ambrose always noticed the enhanced light first, the way it sharpened the edges of his bedroom furniture and brought the room into perfect sparkling focus. It was as if his real life was lived behind a smeared lens and Unison simply wiped it clean. Many users described the experience as truly seeing their own surroundings for the first time. Others claimed it was like being a fully aware newborn. His bedroom didn’t disappear or change into some impersonal virtual lobby; early Unison quality-assurance tests had determined that shimmering into a drastically different place was disorienting and unpleasant. In theory, users liked the idea of logging in from their home and emerging suddenly into the Swiss Alps. In practice, this induced vomiting, headaches, and the sensation of having water up your nose.