Here are the first two chapters. If you'd like more, please pick me up over on Amazon.
1
"It's going to be beautiful, Akari," said the astronaut, "and when you get here, you're going to help me build it."
Akari smiled. "Of course I am. I just can't believe my application was accepted."
"Believe it, cousin. You and I are going to make a world together. So, have you told Stacy yet?"
Akari looked at his feet. "'Kari, " he said, "she knows, right?"
"I...I haven't told her yet, no."
The astronaut scrutinized the young man. "You haven't told her you were accepted, or you haven't told her you applied?"
Akari looked up, a wry expression. "Alex, get out of my head."
"Hey, man, I can't help it if I can read you like one of Dade's books. We spent too much time together. Tell him, Uncle Dade. Tell him he's being stupid about his girl."
But I didn't tell either of them; not my sheepish son, not my nephew, whose image floated in space in the living room. As usual, I was working on something.
"Dad's gone dark, as usual," Akari said.
"Tell him when he gets back. You're going to have to close the distance between the two of you, because we're nearing relativistic speed, finally. You and I aren't going to have real time communication any more."
"That's all right," Akari said. "I'm used to talking to someone millions of miles away."
"Stow it, cadet. The brave citizens of the planet Lisarb," Alex went on, drawing himself up in a bogus pomposity, "will never stand for such self pity. As one of the chosen, you..."
"...are one of the best, the brightest, yeah, yeah, I read the literature. I still can't believe that Lisarb doesn't have the Overlay. It's going to be different, not having it."
Alex smiled. "I don't have it now, 'Kari, and living without a constant data stream is different. It's better. A lot better."
I couldn't hear them. I would find a recording of this much later, in the Labyrinth, and wonder. Had I been listening more closely, would things have turned out the same way?
2
There's something deeply disturbing about watching kids play hide and seek in plain sight of each other.
I was standing on the stoop, watching the fat kid, Tommy, crouching with that silly grin on his face, like he was trying to keep from bursting into piggish laughter, while his playmate stalked him, his eyes sweeping left and right, aiming directly at that grinning face, and not seeing it.
I focused my mind's eye for a moment, and pulled up flatland. I had a row of macros near the bottom of my workspace, fat kid still wobbling with silent giggles behind it, and I focused on the one called "Gradient". As the program started, the workspace, which only I could see, vanished and was replaced with a physical and visual analog that I'd designed to act as the program's control interface. Between the thumb and finger of my left hand, I felt tension, like a rubber band had been wrapped between the two, and I closed my hand, releasing the tension created by the band.
As I did that, a banner ad, like an animated billboard, faded from transparency, hiding Tommy from my sight the same way it had masked him from his prowling hunter.
Tommy knew that the billboard wasn't "real"; objects like that had to be rendered with a glow to them, like neon. Physically, were he to reach out to it, it would offer only the slightest resistance, spongy, so that he wouldn't lean on it, and fall into the street. Such rules were strongly enforced. And I should know; I was one of the people tasked with enforcing them.
Those rules were spongy. The overlay system that governed it all could hide anything within plain sight, and had very little compunction about doing so.
I could have deleted the macro, right then. I considered it. I'd never really seen the world without the interface, the corporate system I'd been tasked to defend, altering everything that I saw and heard.
I wish that I had. I wish that I'd hidden Tommy from myself and forgotten what I'd seen.
But I didn't, and we're all here now.