>>6330246You sigh, and raise your drink as he begins, then have a long sip. But you don't linger to hear him perform, instead, you kill the drink with a followup gulp, and make your way back to the main bar, hoping Vince will think you just went for another drink and got distracted. Instead, you set the glass down at the bar and tread past it, parting the bead curtain and entering the cyber-cafe.
The thin, rectangular room has one long table running down its center, with two dozen little cubicles, twelve on each side. They all have a holo-caster, a terminal, and a <span class="mu-s">cyber-visor</span> for those looking to access <span class="mu-s">The Deep</span>, a vast digital commons that occupies well over half of the current internet, hosting all manner of virtual environments for those willing to explore. It's a world inhabited mainly by AIs, the majority of which no longer serve any purpose in the real world, having been connected to drones or systems that have been offline for decades, even over a century in some cases. Among these artificial ghosts there are billions of human users - some conducting business, others wandering pleasure seekers. Plenty of them are addicted to this realm, and it isn't uncommon to meet a poor lunatic that's lost their grip on which world is real.
Personally, you don't care for <span class="mu-b">Deep-Diving</span>, the accessing and traveling of that artificial universe, and really don't even much care for the very notion of the Deep. It's been said that humans are capable of creating whatever they are capable of imagining, and it's been said also that they readily imagine Hell. To you, one versed in the supernatural more than most, there are certain disturbing similarities between this world that mortals have sculpted, and some of those that exist beyond their reckoning. Namely, the world of dreams, and the Hedge, of course, but also the mythic Underworld where untethered ghosts and gods of death reside (though you can't say you've ever visited the last of these three, despite having spoken to some that have). Fortunately, to contact one of your informants merely requires the use of a terminal and holo-display.
There are only five patrons here at the moment, all isolated from each other by at least a few cubicles, and all of them Deep-Diving but for one, an old Vietnamese woman in the corner, probably the same one you heard singing when you arrived.
>Cont'd 