Most users were not too adventurous; for them, the VR was a whole-body, whole-mind go-anywhere machine. It was the only contact most people would ever have with Earth, vicariously traveling to arctic wastes or the Grand Canyon, the busy hives of Calcutta or Tokyo; soaring over fields of grain or through coral reefs. There were stock fantasy scenarios, too—harems and battlefields and laboriously reconstructed historical events—and the possibility of virtual time travel, since there were crude VR recordings nearly a century old. Of course most of the Earth cubes represented an equally irretrievable past. Calcutta and Tokyo, like Paris and London, were now inhabited only by handfuls of doomed children.

O’Hara found the Earth cubes unbearably depressing. The Luna and Mars ones were interesting visually but not sensually, since a space suit was no novelty. She liked the feedback mode, spectacularly confusing in its synesthesia—smelling colors, tasting sounds, muscles bunching into surreal impossible distortions, the body everting itself through mouth or anus and reverting slippery back again—and though she could see why some people would find it a nightmare, she emerged from the state completely relaxed, wrung out.

John had never tried VR and had no desire for it, but Dan shared her inclination toward the weird random abstraction mode, and they’d often schedule a half hour in parallel, wandering together through a shifting turmoil of light and sound that would crystallize into nearly real, or at least solid, landscapes, and then melt into chaos again. Mirror lands and cloud islands and flaming icescapes. One time Dan let O’Hara join him in a visit to the harem, where they learned something about the limitations of parallel wiring. O’Hara found the viewpoint interesting but her projected penis had no more feeling than a dildo; she participated in his orgasm but felt it only from her ankles to the soles of her feet. For an hour afterward she couldn’t walk without giggling, her toes curling up.

MEETING OF MINDS

O’Hara was supposed to meet John and Dan at the Athens lift fifteen minutes before the meeting. A little nervous, she was early. Evy came down and said the men would be late, as usual. The women went back up one level to get coffee and tea from the dispenser, which overcharged Evy by a dollar.

“This is a bad sign.” She showed O’Hara the card. “Our lives are in the hands of people who can’t keep a coffee machine working for one week?”

“Just inflation,” O’Hara said. “A little experiment designed to make us more productive.”

“I’ll call Maintenance.” She started to sip the tea but blew over it instead. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”

“Hope so. With an economist in charge, anything could happen.”

Evy nodded seriously. “You shouldn’t have voted for him.”

“Right.” She looked around. “I haven’t been up here since they put down the flooring. Makes your eyes hurt.”