One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith

find out where my car had been put. Tid's a small, disreputable-looking man who seems to live solely on M&Ms, but we'd always got on well enough. Money's like that: promotes straightforward relationships. I slipped him an extra twenty, and asked him to do me a favour, then ran down to the parking lot under the building.

      The car was parked over on the far side, nestled into a dark corner. This was perfect for me, because I wasn't going anywhere. I got inside, set the alarm and locked the doors.

      Most people go in the Net via their homes, obviously. Though my account was now billed to the apartment, I still had the rig in the car because over the last couple of years it had remained the most stable environment in my life. I bought it after my first couple months' work for REMtemps, and had it fully kitted out. As I accumulated more money, I upgraded and tweaked to the point where even I couldn't remember where all the wires were. Ripping it all out and reconstructing it in the apartment was one of those things I never quite got round to, like throwing away biros which didn't work properly. Or getting a life.

      The console in the car plays images direct into the brain, so I don't have to wear VR goggles. All I had to do was flip the switch, close my eyes, and be transferred to the other side.

      The light changed, and instead of being underground I was in my standard driveway home page, facing out towards a leafy residential district of small-town America. I put my foot down and pulled out into the road. My netcar looks like a souped-up '59 Caddy, complete with retro fins and powder-blue paint job, but the engine characteristics are bang up-to-date. I don't mind driving fast in the Net, because of the in-built anti-collision protocol – in fact sometimes I speed straight at other people just for the pure hell of it. It's especially fun if you come across one of those die-hards who refuse to get with the new metaphor, and insist on trawling the Net on surfboards. You see them occasionally, old hippies scraping along the road on boards equipped with little skateboard wheels, complaining about the traffic and muttering about the good old days of browser wars.

      I turned left out of my street and tore down the trunk lines for a while, then hung a right and cut up into the personal domain hills on the other side. You have to slog through a lot of cyber suburbia these days – family sites full of digitized vacation videos and mind-numbing detail on how little Todd did in his tests – before you get out into the darker zones. It used to be that you could type in a URL and leap straight to anyone's home page. But when they folded out into three-dimensional spaces and started to look like real homes – and their owners started spending actual time there – things changed. They wanted you to walk up the path and ring a doorbell like a civilized person. With most other places you can still just jump straight to the general district, but not where I was going – and the jams at the jump links are often so bad you're usually better just putting your foot down and going the long way round. Thus what had started as an alternative reality ended up just being another layer of the same old same old, operating on more-or-less similar rules.

      Humans are like that. Very literal-minded.

      I reminded myself, as usual, that I ought to visit my grandparents soon. Now was not the time. It seldom was. They retired to the Net six years ago, about two weeks ahead of the Grim Reaper. Bought themselves a scrabby virtual farm way out on the edge of Australasia. Net just before they died, and had themselves transferred. Unfortunately they were ripped off by their realtor, and the resolution is fucked. It's just polygons and big blocks of colour out where they live, and voices sound like they're coming through speakers which had an earlier life in a thrash ambient band. I guess I could phone them from out in the real world, but that gives me the creeps: too much like pretending they're still alive. They are – were, whatever – good people, and I'm glad that in some sense I still have access to them, but there are barriers which I suspect shouldn't be breached. We still don't know as much about the mind as we think we do, and there's something a little off about them now, as if the rough edges got lost in the translation. Show me a person without a bit of sand in their nature, and I'll show you someone a little creepy.