A warm, sunny not-sky shines rays of perfect blue over the canyons of not-Arizona. Deep and wide not-canyons carve through the not-landscape, like remnants of not-rivers long past. Zara is trekking along a steep outcrop, dropping beads of sweat onto the clean face, when she remembers she is late. Very, very late, she thinks, as she pops soundlessly off of the cliff, leaving her beads of sweat to dry under the sun.
Does the sun shine if no one is there to see it? Yes, but not for long. After a nanosecond or two, some garbage collecting routine deep in Zara's metaconsciousness deletes the whole sim, barely giving the droplets a chance to sink into the rock.
Somewhere else entirely, Zara is picking something to wear, running through her wardrobe while she floats in a simple, gray sim. Bodies, garments, and strange, custom modifications sift past her in a blur. She remembers some fondly, but hasn't worn anything really interesting out in a long time. That just won't do, she thinks. I never thought I'd be getting conservative, she ponders, settling on a fairly plain, human-average female dressed in a white dress, but letting it recombine just a little with a stranger creature from her past. It ends up with purple-tinged skin and folded white wings. She's not quite satisfied, but very late, so it will have to do.
Zara pings Grand Central, and finds an unoccupied entry point a short walk from her meeting. She rezzes there, flying instantly through thoughtspace, and popping into a little red phonebooth next to a café. A narrow street sits beyond the door, cobbled with well-worn brown and red stones. She steps through the door, checks the time, and nearly falls over.
Almost three minutes have passed since she rezzed into Grand Central. She does a diff to make sure, and it pings back two minutes, forty-nine point four four, so on. That can't be possible, she thinks, and does the diff again: one to the negative twelve seconds. That's more like it, she thinks, puzzled. That kind of thing simply doesn't happen in an unfederated space like Grand Central. She's very late, though, so she'll have to worry about that later.
Zara walks briskly down the cobbled street, slipping through a crowd of diverse creatures. She turns a corner into a larger plaza with a giant copper sphere at its center. Looming overhead is a gigantic, deep blue ceiling covered in ancient astronomical symbols, each moving slowly in some giant cosmic battle. Totally hopeless, she thinks, rushing through the plaza, her heels click-clacking on the worn stones.
After a few more minutes of scrambling through narrow side-streets and not a few more plazas, she finds herself in front of her destination: a tiny café set into the corner of a four-story curved stone building. She steps in, and the bustling street is instantly muffled to a murmur of white noise. A hostess sidles up to her noiselessly from a darker corner.
"Ah, hello Madame Acelera. How may I help you today?" Says the hostess confidently, doing a little bow. This place may be more than a little absurd, she thinks, but she can always count on their discretion.
"The booth in the corner, please. I'll have the usual."
"Of course, Madame. Right this way please," the hostess beckons with a flourish, and leads Zara past several curtained booths into a corner, opening the curtain. Empty.
Her stomach churns for a moment, before she shuts that sensation off. He has never been late before, not at least that she can remember. How very strange, she thinks, sliding into the booth. The waiter leaves her, closing the curtain, silencing what was left of the sound from the street to a hum.
What a very strange morning, she thinks, pinging Gabriel as a capuccino appears in front of her. She picks it up, and Gabriel opens a video link, his face appearing across the booth.
"Wow, hi Zara. I haven't heard from you in a while. How have you been?" Beams Gabriel.
"What the hell are you talking about? You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago." Zara asserts, pointing at the table.
"I really don't know what you are talking about, but we definitely need to meet up soon." Gabriel looks entirely honest, as always.
"What about our project? The link to Earth?" Zara asks, her confidence draining quickly.
"I haven't seen you in months, Zara. We dont have a 'project'. I don't know what you're on about." Gabriel makes a confused gesture with his shoulders. "A link to Earth? Do you mean that open source sim?"
"No, I mean the Earth, you idiot. I mean the rock you evolved on." Zara is losing her patience, too.
"Zara, you might want to go get yourself defragged or something. Take some time off. You look stressed" Gabriel says apologetically.
"Fuck you." Zara ends the call, and Gabriels sorry face vanishes from the booth. She sips her capuccino, wondering what the fuck is going on. First, it took her two minutes to actually rez into Grand Central, and second, Gabriel is either pretending to have forgotten the entire last six months, or someone made him forget. How can he pretend not to have heard of Earth, she thinks, opening up a list of syscalls, looking for data feeds and bandwidth to the outside. She blinks a few times, unable to find anything. She opens up an actual terminal, and tries accessing a plain visible-spectrum feed of Earth.
'ERROR, COMMAND VSFEED NOT FOUND' pings the console. This is looking worse and worse, she thinks, just as everything goes black.