Part 28 (1/2)
Entrances must occur in specially designated ”gateway zones.” This is to prevent users from projecting to unauthorized locations, into the middle of a wall, or into some other obstruction. Most homes, businesses and public places these days are equipped with gateway zones that allow apparition onto the multi network, but it is not uncommon for restricted or sensitive locations to limit gateway zones to a central location.
A user must be standing on a specially designated red tile square to enter the network. If that physical contact is interrupted, the connection is immediately cut. Given the obvious security risk of leaving one's body unattended, multi squares typically occur only in private residences or in heavily guarded public locations (multi facilities).
One can exit the multi network instantaneously from any spatial coordinate. Under pressure from the Prime Committee, the network administrators also developed a special device called a ”disruptor” to allow authorities to cut multi connections. The Defense and Wellness Council later augmented the basic disruptor design to allow certain bio/logic code to flow into a multi projection.
MULTI AND COMPUTING POWER.
Multi technology relies on the fact that complete verisimilitude of experience is not necessary. Often the network can take advantage of common experiences stored within the brain and from them compile a representative sample. Take the example of a multied user walking barefoot on a field of gra.s.s. The network does not take up unnecessary bandwidth and computing power determining the position of each blade of gra.s.s and calculating its effects on the user's foot; it is deemed sufficient for the network to provide a reasonable facsimile of the sensation. Randomness algorithms ensure that the simulated sensations do not feel repet.i.tious or calculated.
The network also maintains fluency and transmission speed by taking a number of practical shortcuts. For instance, the multi network does not relay visual information for anything the user is not focusing on.
Users of the multi network understand that their experience is only a simulation, and that occasionally the simulation will differ from reality in its details. As the technology has progressed, these differences have become smaller and smaller, to the point where the typical user cannot reliably distinguish between virtual environments and reality.
APPENDIX F.
ON THE.
FIEFCORP SYSTEM.
Rarely in the history of human enterprise has there been a more controversial ent.i.ty than the fiefcorp. Conceived as a means to empower workers, many now complain that it has become an instrument of social ills.
HISTORY.
Fiefcorps were made possible by the actions of Par Padron, who spent most of his tenure as Council High Executive battling big business. Padron believed that governmental regulations and tax structures had come to favor larger companies, creating a climate in which smaller entrepreneurs could not succeed. Over the years, he succeeded in leveling the playing field among businesses and in democratizing the Prime Committee.
It was this latter action that triggered a populist resurgence on the Committee several decades later, and the subsequent votes to approve the business structure known as the fiefcorp. In order to spur innovation, fiefcorps were given substantial tax breaks during their initial decade of existence. In order to spur employment, the fiefcorp structure was modeled after the feudal master-and-apprentice relations.h.i.+p of ancient times.
Although the beginnings of the system were chaotic, the rapid formation, innovation and dissolution of fiefcorps soon contributed to a beneficial effect known as ”carbonization economics.”
CARBONIZATION ECONOMICS.
The short time window of reduced taxation, combined with low startup costs, made fiefcorps a hotbed of innovation. Small companies were encouraged to come up with new ideas and bring them to market quickly. A fiefcorp master could bring in a number of apprentices, pay them only room and board to start, turn a very good profit in a few years, and then sell off his a.s.sets before taxes increased and start again. If the master needed additional funding to get the company off the ground, he could seek that money from the secondary market of capitalmen at relatively low interest rates.