Officially it was called "United Cooperative Habitat Version 6.835" but everyone just calls it the Zone. Old media made it seem so clunky and scary to plug your mind into a machine and zip your entire conscience into a virtual world but now it's where most people work and it's about as mundane as it gets.
Aside from everyone being represented by avatar-ish figures ranging from custom models to celebrities dressed in animal onesies, it became the new norm pretty quickly. There's still plenty of IRL work and nobody's losing jobs to it, if anything the Zone's expanded the potential job market exponentially.
Doesn't mean it's any safer though, if anything you've got to be more cautious. There's been a new sweep of takeover-type bugs and it's not just people's credit cards that are being stolen - it's their bodies too. Someone's found a way to upload their own consciousness into "empty" (in other words, active) users and is just strolling off with their lives.
It's starting to get to the point where people will set up vocal password so that the second they log out of the Zone they're held at gunpoint by their own home systems and if they don't say the right words they get ejected right back into the Zone and the authorities are on them like flies on rotten meat.
I mean, it isn't too bad as far as solutions go but there have been cases where the original consciousness was destroyed so we're back to rotting meat stuck in a chair with an agro alarm system that won't let anybody in until the right password is said - even when the body's decayed to nothing but a visceral mess.
Aside from everyone being represented by avatar-ish figures ranging from custom models to celebrities dressed in animal onesies, it became the new norm pretty quickly. There's still plenty of IRL work and nobody's losing jobs to it, if anything the Zone's expanded the potential job market exponentially.
Doesn't mean it's any safer though, if anything you've got to be more cautious. There's been a new sweep of takeover-type bugs and it's not just people's credit cards that are being stolen - it's their bodies too. Someone's found a way to upload their own consciousness into "empty" (in other words, active) users and is just strolling off with their lives.
It's starting to get to the point where people will set up vocal password so that the second they log out of the Zone they're held at gunpoint by their own home systems and if they don't say the right words they get ejected right back into the Zone and the authorities are on them like flies on rotten meat.
I mean, it isn't too bad as far as solutions go but there have been cases where the original consciousness was destroyed so we're back to rotting meat stuck in a chair with an agro alarm system that won't let anybody in until the right password is said - even when the body's decayed to nothing but a visceral mess.
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