Places

Known dismissively as “sheep pens,” those Grid Sectors get Formatted to keep the majority of Sleeper net traffic from clogging up the Digital Web at large. Originally seen as glowing grids of lines and typeface (hence, “grid”), many of these regions have since taken on the dreamlike texture of CGI artwork. Although quite a few of them – especially the ones denoting office environments, industrial information, and so forth – retain that grid-like appearance from a netspace view, others – particularly gaming zones, social networks, and art communities – feature graphics that Hollywood would kill for. As the theory goes, people invest themselves in the Web… and so, groups of people – even Sleepers – who spend lots of time and energy here are rewarded with more impressive realms.

Even now, the majority of websites on the Meatspace Internet are Grid Sectors. They can grow vast, but their reality is pretty Constrained. That’s intentional. Grid Sectors have Restriction protocols that keep the majority of the sheep (sometimes known as bleaters) from wandering around and shitting all over Webspace. Awakened travelers can come and go easily enough, but it takes

a dedicated (or fortunate) Sleeper to hop the fence and go off elsewhere. By and large, folks don’t even know they can go elsewhere; they ping from Grid to Grid, never realizing there’s so much more to the Internet than the things they see on their screens.

Despite the original intent behind them, Grids make up the majority of shared space in the Digital Web. Sleepers and Awakened share company in such regions, where the Awakened netizens simply realize what’s really going on. To Meatspace bleaters, these Grids combine text and graphics to create a computer interface. Awakened visitors, on the other hand, can walk through those spaces, interacting with people’s icons as if they were sharing a room in Meatspace. Although the mortals interact through keyboards and headsets, visiting mages experience the Web as full-contact Reality.

As I’ve mentioned, virtual geography is changeable – now more so than ever before. The majority of Grid Sectors, though, include a variety of zones, including Warzones: gaming areas that are among the largest and most elaborate communities on the Web; FaceSpace, the various social media Grids, which look like tract housing made of pictures; the Wharchives, colossal libraries filled with ever-changing content; Trawlers, little virtual teleportation boats that skim the Web for information; InfoSpace, where blogs and newsfeeds appear as handbills with shifting text and illustrations, often flying around on virtual winds, getting stapled to posts, or being snapped up and slapped up with “sticky” glue to surfaces in other Grids; the Restricted Salons and Galleries where artists and bloggers meet and share their work with exclusive company; the Dream Theatres, where virtual memories play out for enthusiastic (and often obnoxious) audiences; Echo Chambers, where folks preach from virtual soapboxes and get swept up in amplified hysterias; the Pleasure Zones, drenched in cheesy sexuality for any taste imaginable; and many other Grids besides – all of them flickering with advertising space, flame wars, and the lambent glow of mortal egotism on a vast yet disconnected scale.