Read Netlink for Free Online

to be human in the first place. There was an entire subculture given to experimenting with deliberately alien and outrageous body forms, humans in the guise of aliens born of fantasy. That sort of thing had long been common enough in ViReality links, where a person could assume any desired persona online. With Naga Companions as fashion accessories, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy had escaped the world of ViRcommunications and entered the real world.
    What, Katya wondered, was going to be next? It didn’t seem as though things could change much more, though she imagined that neolithic-hunter-gatherers must have felt the same way about cities, pottery, and agriculture.
    Change, she knew, was the one constant of humanity.
    A tone sounded and she turned from the viewall, just as a door slid aside and Kara entered the office. Katya felt a thrill of pride; her daughter looked so erect and sharp in her Confederation grays. The pride, though, was darkened somewhat by fear. God, I don’t want to lose her.
    “Hi, Dad, Mums,” she said. “I got a flash you guys wanted to see me.”
    “Yes, Kara,” Vic said. “Come in and sit yourself.”
    “You ought to know,” Kara said as she took a seat, “that the simulation AI killed me in the last run-through just so I could check out and come up to see you. So I hope this is worth it!”
    Katya heard the banter in Kara’s voice but couldn’t feel much in the way of amusement. Her daughter had “died” in a number of these operation ViRsims lately. She could so easily die for real in the actual mission. Especially with this new mission rewrite.
    “Some new orders are coming through for you,” Vic said. “Direct from Confederation Military Command itself.”
    “What… new orders?” Kara leaned forward, obviously interested.
    “ConMilCom has accepted Skymaster. In full.”
    “Thank God! It took them long enough, didn’t it?”
    “There’s more,” Katya added. She felt curiously detached as she spoke the words, as though it were someone else entirely who was speaking. “They’re asking you to volunteer for the slot.”
    “Strictly volunteer,” Vic added. “And I for one wish you would turn it down cold.”
    “Gok, no!” Kara said. “This one’s my baby! If anybody’s going into the Kasei Net, it’s going to be me!”
    And Katya had been certain that Kara would say exactly that.
    Every world inhabited by Man had its own computer Net, a meshing of all of the computer systems running all of the business, finances, data storage, and communications of an entire planet. Technically, each world’s Net was linked to the other worlds, space stations, even ships in that system, though the time lag engendered by the speed of light could drastically slow the exchange of data over interplanetary distances. And across interstellar distances, of course, communication from Net to Net could only be through the physical transfer of data, by storage devices transported aboard starships. With typical interstellar travel times limited to about a light year per day, New America, for instance, was almost fifty days’ travel time from Earth, and a single exchange in a conversation, there and back, took over three months.
    For any given world, the local planetary Net was of supreme importance for everything from keeping track of trade balances to coordinating local defense forces. Usually, the system’s principal military node was located at synchorbit, where it could tie directly into the traffic control systems that monitored and directed ship traffic arriving at and departing from orbit.
    “Ops was assuming you’d want to go,” Vic was telling Kara. “I must say, you were… eloquent.”
    “Your sim results on Operation Sandstorm were even more eloquent,” Katya added. “Enough said?”
    Kara grimaced. “If there’s a way to pull Sandstorm off without sending in more striders… or without the Skymaster option, I sure as hell can’t see it. We’ve tried,