That was bad enough in some places. The shuttle pads at the Cape, where she’d said good-bye to Jeff. Las Vegas: knocked out, kidnapped, and raped while unconscious, then the rescue bloodbath. A bitter week in the Alexandrian Dominion, where being female reduced you to the status of a possession. Assault in New York. Spain, the Costa del Sol, warm winter sun and delicious sex—the paradise where she and Jeff caught the first worrisome hints that the world order was crumbling. Though no one thought of actual war, total war, that early.

Some places were quiet and pleasant; revisiting the Louvre, the Prado, the Salzburg Mozart Festival—or noisy and pleasant, like New Orleans and Rio during holidays. She walked alone through the Yukon tundra and joined millions in New Hong Kong.

She put a half hour each day in her schedule for this cybernetic journeying, one day to a place she had visited during her months on Earth, the next to a nearby one she had missed, as a kind of baseline for comparison. Nine tenths of the places were missing, but it was a big planet.

Most of her regular duties were shifted over to Gunter and Lebovski while she worked with Gail Bieda, a cognitive medicine specialist Morales sent up from PsychStat. Fortunately, the record of people’s past use, and misuse, of the machine was intact. It took only two days to sort them into three groups: those who could easily take an hour every ten days, those who definitely could not, and those who would need a slow adjustment.

Drawing on her own recent experience, O’Hara suggested they give everybody an hour on the machine regardless, but for some people, restrict a certain amount of it, or all of it, to the low-intensity mode O’Hara used in her Earth-tripping. That way, the amount of time one was allowed to use the machine wouldn’t become a status symbol. People could keep the actual information about their “VR level” secret, or lie about it.

Nagasaki and Sato okayed the plan, so O’Hara set up a standard message to put on every adult’s queue, explaining the situation and telling them what level they had been assigned. If they thought they’d been misclassified, they could take it up with PsychStat. The rest of the electronic paper-shuffling fell to Entertainment, trying to coordinate the work and leisure schedules of two thousand people, all special cases.