Read Holy Fire for Free Online

uniform shade of cerulean. Much more of reality vanished, and Mia stood suspended in a swimming sky blue virtuality. Immersive virtuality—except, of course, for the solid floor beneath her feet, and the ceiling overhead, an insect-elbowed mess of remote locators, tracking devices, and recording equipment.
    The fabric curtain was woven from glass fiber, thousandsof hair-thin multicolored fiber-optic scan-lines. Following the cues from her false eyelashes, the curtain wall lit up and displayed its imagery wherever Mia’s eyesight happened to rest. Wherever her gaze moved and fell, the curtain was always ahead of her, instantly illuminated, rendering its imagery in a fraction of a second, so that the woven illusion looked seamless, and surrounded her.
    Mia fumbled for a jack and plugged in the touchslate. The curtain unit recognized the smaller machine and immediately wrapped her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree touchplate display, a virtual abyss of smoky gray. Mia dabbled at the touchscreen with her gloved fingertips until a few useful displays tumbled up from its glassy depths: a cycle tachometer, a clock, a network chooser.
    She picked one of San Francisco’s bigger public net gates, held her breath, and traced in Martin Warshaw’s passtouch. The wall faithfully sketched out the scrawling of her gloved fingertip, monster glyphs of vivid charcoal against the gray fabric.
    The tracing faded. The curtain unit went sky blue again. Nothing much happened after that. Still, the little tachometer showed processing churning away, somewhere, somehow, out in the depths of the net. So Mia waited patiently.
    After eight minutes, the tachometer vanished. The walls went stellar black, then leapt into a full-scale virtually rendition.
    Mia found herself in an architect’s office. There was a big desk in simulated wood grain, and painfully gleaming brass lamps, and algorithmic swirls of simulated marble. The chairs were puffy, overstuffed, and swaddlingly comfortable. Old people’s chairs. They were the kind of chairs that top-flight furniture designers had begun making back in the 2070s, when furniture designers suddenly realized that very old people possessed all the money in the world, and that from now on very old people were going to have all the money until the end of time.
    The virtual office, with some fine display of irony, had been designed to resemble the office of a civil architect. Architects who designed actual buildings, as opposed to those who built virtual structures, tended to be rather snobbish and pushy about their intimate relation to tangible physicality. The walls around her were all corkboards, chalkboards, crayons, drafting paper, and string. All very analog and tactile. There wasn’t a data screen anywhere in the place. Except, of course, that this entire virtual environment was itself a data screen.
    There was a serious mismatch between Martin Warshaw’s sophisticated memory palace and this randomly chosen and somewhat pokey little curtain unit. Against the rounded fabric walls, the corners of the virtual room looked quite nasty, with a stomach-churning visual warp. The simulation couldn’t seem to decide where to put the floor. Rims of flooring slopped up on the lower edges of the screen, like a swamped rowboat slowly going under.
    A simulated window in one wall showed an arty glimpse of a fake exterior garden, but the organic shapes within the garden were disastrous. The trees were jerky half-rendered blurs, a nightmare vision of x-rayed vegetation under alien sunlight as thick as cheese. The inside of the office boasted a virtual potted plant. Its big serrated leaves looked as stiff and lifeless as waffle irons.
    Mia turned in place, gazing about the virtual office cautiously. A massive framed blueprint hung on the wall to her left. It showed a vast multistory edifice—the ground-floor plans of the memory palace itself, presumably. The blueprints were lavishly annotated, in horribly blurred and tiny