After Grid

At first, no one thought that the current form of VR and bulky devices worn over the head or as glasses were anything but prototypes for the scaled-down version of what the fictional nanobots could erect and destroy inside the eye itself. It was considered science fiction and many futurists resisted the idea of using the liquid monsters to connect a person's core. In fact, any mention of the molecular machinery of any type had to be carefully worded and was regulated to the more serious realm of medicine and neuroscience. The idea that an LCD screen could form as easily as an eyelid and recede just as quickly with, well within the blink of an eye, was scoffed at and venomously disregarded as futuristic geek speak or worse, monster strong AI. Regardless, S0phie poured the liquid into her eye before Bailey could tell her anything more about what was inside the Visine bottle and finished the phrase “Bottoms up” before her now frantic and panic-stricken assistan...

"Up is down, down is ground and sky is where I look." Sophie mouthed the words in her mind as she stared out at the afternoon like sky. She wanted to get up, she had been wanting to get up for as long as she could remember. It didn’t seem as strange to her as she thought it should. She knew she was on the grid in After Life and part of her was still struggling to understand why she couldn’t wake up from this dream state . She struggled to recall how she had conjured up the login screen where she felt herself getting to this point, but could not get beyond the stage of remembering the white prompt on the dark gray screen. She concentrated on the bluish haze of what she knew was a virtual atmosphere and followed the line of sight and light that outlined the tops of the flowers in the meadow she had been laying in. She repeated the poem “Up is down, down is ground and sky is where I look.” Silence in a digital world is deafening, Sophie thought, and at that moment an...

Aire Xaris logged into her Afterlife account on the main grid and rezzed at the Welcome Center that she, Ruz, Sophie, and Slater had built together three years earlier only to find a barrage of IM’s flooding her Client. It took a long time for her avatar to load and she began the tedious process of clicking away all the message boxes and inventory offers off of her screen. Aire, which was actually an acronym for Animated Intelligence Representing Entity, was being operated by a real person named Beatrice Fontaine who controlled all of Aire’s actions and mannerisms with the click of a mouse. Aire was motionless when Beatrice came to an Instant message from Ruz which had been saved from the previous night. Beatrice, on the other hand, had gasped, dropped the mouse and was now shaking uncontrollably as her avatar Aire blinked and put her hand up to her waist as if to say, What’s your problem? Bea, as both her online and RL friends called her, had actually created that anim...

The sound of the Charney boys playing basketball on the road seeped into the cracked window of Sophie Sautereau’s bedroom. What began as a faint echo of a plastic ball against pavement slowly progressed into a fragmented dance of light, shadow, and sound arguing over a moment across her windowsill. The sound itself was bent somehow as if it were coming from the front of the house, and all Sophie could think was,  Thank God their mother had listened to her plea to get the boys to move that damn hoop from under her bedroom window and over onto George Leven,  which was on the other side of Sophie’s house and where a small patch of woods would muffle the sound a bit. She thought further and imagined that if she could get up and close the window, she wouldn’t be able to hear them at all. That very thought hung in her mind like the distant echo of young boys playing on the next street over and like a ball bouncing violently on the road, it became faint refraction of the da...

Ruz rezzed on the object named Don't F'ing sit here couch wearing his bunny slippers Slater, Ruz and Aire, making a splash in their "Special Saturday morning gear" Ruz, Aire & Sophie  Pink Pony Posse invades Black Horse Country Ruz & Sophie, Gull Gallery, Amante Island, second Life waiting for Slater to rez, Gull gallery  Raise your hand if you're an idiot! Ruz & Aire Amante island Ruz, Sophie, Aire, Slater We are so going to win that dance competition! Invisible Roller coaster ride required special head gear Air, Slater and Sophie Aire takes forum post and creates curtains out of it in Gimp sorry about your car Ruz Hot air balloon ride Paris, Saturday morning tour