Ask about the bus

“Well, it's a good old bus, isn't it?”

After a little while the woods flanking the two lane road thin out and the bus descends into hilly farmland. The landscape makes you think of turn of the millenium Iowa - back before AgriMonsanto copyrighted most of the food products coming out of the state and turned it into one giant, licensed food processing plant.

Instead of industrial wasteland, you see smallish farmsteads, owned by families or small corporations, barns with fading red paint that contrasts with sun-bleached wheat fields.

It all seems so real.

Of course it could all just be elaborate window dressing. The potential size of an IVR Domain is determined by storage capacity, processing power, and network bandwidth, Sophie once told you. You figure something like Roissy needn't be that big - it's not like you ever got a chance to get out and explore Paris, so every little napoleon and scone in every corner cafe didn't need to be represented.

But you wonder how big a Domain could get.

You look down at your new body - your milky smooth breasts riding high on a narrow ribcage, the cotton of the sundress clinging to your curves. As you breathe in, your chest rises. You can feel your breasts shift, change shape slightly as gravity tugs them toward the center of this virtual Earth.

Little veins, bluish, pulsing just under your translucent skin. Tiny freckles, skin pores, each downy hair on your arms not only rendered, but sensitive to touch.

The hot vinyl of the bus seat feels exactly as it should against your hairless legs.

There's a little piece of wadded up gum pressed in between the chipped chrome tubing of the seat in front of you and the vinyl seat back - on which someone has magic markered “Vince loves Aimee”.

You have no access to anything outside this Domain. No way to change yourself back.

You have no external stimuli to break the illusion. You wonder what you've gotten yourself into.