Michael eagerly tore into the large box that had finally arrived after the longest three months of his life. He knew when he hit the preorder button that it was going to be a long wait, but it was still torturous.
He finally got the stupid hardened cardboard open having sliced through roughly a half mile of packing tape, and beheld his prize. It was the latest immersion helmet from Augmented Reality Corporation. It was pure genius in hardware. Something he could appreciate being into computers himself.
Michael made his living as a web developer, which was a fancy way of saying that he knew enough about Java and flash to make a fancy website. It really wasn't that hard. Ninety nine percent of all clients wanted the same thing. Smooth graphics, floating buttons, and scalped information.
Email addresses were the currency of the e-Business world, and Michael had developed a "cookie" that upon acceptance allowed the website to scalp the browser for their email address, and any other personal information they had saved.
Then he had developed a paid extension that blocked that information from being accessed via his cookie. Michael was particularly proud of his foresight in the idea. It had taken a few years for the news to get a hold of the story that people's information was being scalped; but when they came to him for an interview he admitted he shared their concern and told them about the app he had created.
The news station ran with it. Even posted links in their web page to his official app so people could protect themselves from the evil corporations. He went from villain to hero overnight. His bank account didn't mind either. If he was careful Michael had enough to retire on at a ripe old age of twenty six. Nah. He was going to ride this gravy train for all it was worth.
Of course that meant that he had to take vacation time for the launch of Iona. It was a nightmare to contact and schedule downtime from all his clients. The recent Windows patch was causing glitches in the cookie scalper, making all the emails show up as hotmail accounts. Of course all the websites needed to be updated manually.
It was tedious and boring, but it was a payday that allowed him to splurge on the new bio-integration system. The sparkly white helmet had a huge multi-mode fiberoptic cable coming out of the top. It was supposed to be over 1000x faster than the previous generation.
He hoped so, it had cost almost 1000x as much.
Michael wasn't taking any chances though. If he had to work to his dying day to afford the helmet he probably still would have bought it.
Michael quickly hooked it up to his custom Harrington Enterprises server rig. The Frankenstein of parts was the work of their mad genius. Inside that ugly stack of black boxes there were custom chipsets and stacks of gpu's that had all been soldered together into a monstrosity of processing power. The whole thing had then been overclocked and supercooled until it ran fast enough to keep up with the human mind.
Sure it was more power than he needed, but minimum specifications were for chumps.
Michael plugged in the umbilical, inserted the data crystal, and settled into his ergonomic gaming chair. It was cute to think how antiquated the idea's of the early pioneers of VR had thought about sustained VR dives. There had been a mad rush to develop the latest and greatest in long term human sustainment devices.
Massage chairs, immersion pods, nutritional bars and vitamin packs. An entire industry dedicated to a false premise.
C.P. Harrington was the pioneer, hence the Harrington Frankenstein, who had simply started overclocking computers to advance the speed in which they interacted with the human consciousness. The human brain is still the most amazing computer ever created and is capable of speeds that computers and AI can only dream of.
Soon the paradigm changed. It was no longer about how long can you sustain the human body during a dive. Now it was how fast can the computer run, to try and keep up with the brain.
LinkWorld was the first of its kind. It was the first game ever to run at 1.5x the speed of time. Eight hours in real life became twelve hours in the game. It was revolutionary.
