The spheres were rough today. That was the simplest way to describe it.

Were you to try to describe it in more detail, for a person who had not once floated atop the torrent of data nor submerged themselves within, you would be forced to use descriptions of storm-tossed oceans, tempestuous seas of ragged peaks and troughs, though these comparisons were shallow and false. The physical senses remained saturated with the same abstract imagery and weightlessness that the corps always induced, but the mind knew.

It felt as if the soul and body were being forced apart by the merest fraction of an inch, a jarring sensation that your body was not your own, that you were not you.

The technical explanation was simple; latency. Sometimes there was simply not enough bandwidth to maintain the hyper-fast connection speeds required for a full dive into the network. Latency at these times could be measured in whole milliseconds, a consciously imperceptible delay but subconsciously a very significant one. Neural pathways were rearranged too slowly, packets of data remained half-incomplete for whole moments, the time in the space between not knowing and knowing increased.

Keri was suffering lag.

The best thing to do in such a situation, as everyone knew, was to relax. The corps would handle any read/write errors, would ensure all information was parsed correctly before disengaging, and any attempt to intentionally analyse what was happening within your own head led only to a disconcerting and sometimes painful sense of confusion and loss.

The only problem was, she was hardly relaxed.

There was nothing about Kilgore. Nothing about any of these so-called ‘modders.’ Oh, there were the usual con-threads that carried stories ranging from ‘vaccines are nanobot experimentation in disguise’ to ‘Butchers took me to their base under the flat earth’[1], but nothing about anything like what she had seen or heard.

She went deeper, cancelling filters she had been barely aware she had. The Terminal learned, adapted and moulded search results to that which the user was most likely to wish to see, to experience, and it did so automatically. It had been doing so for her since the first time she had gone online, and there were thousands of these filters.

Still nothing on the modders.

There was, however, so much more here than she had realised, even within her own sphere. She began to feel slightly overwhelmed at the flood pouring into her head, even if it was only for a moment. The Terminal would not allow for the permanent retention of any knowledge Keri did not specifically tag; the flood was more like a half-recalled memory, like the faint whiff of a certain smell that transports you to some fleeting day from your childhood. It would fade from the mind without a specific order not to.

Now she did something she had not done since that same childhood. She shifted spheres.

Green. A sphere operating on the basic assumption that things must happen organically, where it was taken as a given that man could trim and guide progress, but with as light a hand as possible. A sphere where, uncommonly, technology was seen as something to be used only sparingly, and those who populated the sphere tended towards communal living in which people actually worked for each other. Meaningless jobs, generally, as regardless of individual opinions any large-scale manufacturing was fully automated these days, but jobs nevertheless. Keri had forgotten these communes existed.

Nothing about the modders.

She slammed through red, a curious mix of authoritarian thought and resentment of that self-same authority. The threads here spoke wistfully of a world of order and uniformity, where people did what they were told and kept themselves to themselves. They would have fitted well into the white sphere, Keri thought, if not for the fact that they spoke of any political entity or leader with evident distrust and loathing. Completely contradictory, she thought, seeing holes in the logic that demanded people behave a certain way whilst rejecting outright any measures that may ensure they did so.

Nothing about modders, though rather a lot about the right to mod yourself for self-defence. The most controversial topic here seemed to be regarding concealed-versus-open augmentations.

Keri had to admit she was stunned. She hadn’t realised such public debate about augmentations existed. She performed the incorporeal version of chuckling to herself over the futility of their arguments; no matter how they fought, such augmentations would be forever restricted.

…though she paused for a while to ponder the fact that she was at this moment chasing an augmented being.

The pink… Well, she wouldn’t be going back there in a hurry. That was just weird, she thought to herself, shifting hurriedly away from it. She didn’t think she would be able to look at a pony in the same way ever again.

She found something in the black. She didn’t think she had ever come to this sphere, not even during her teenage years when she had been finding her own place in the world. It wasn’t anything like she had expected.

Of course there were the tracts against the ‘hierarchy,’ long rambling analysis of the current situation and how exactly you specifically were suffering under it, along with the wordy, impenetrable tomes of data full of needlessly complex and abstruse language, but beneath all this was a surprisingly carefree atmosphere. It seemed as if, once members had got what they needed to say off their chest, they were happy to simply debate and analyse each and every point they had made, merrily following lines of logic that led them on a winding path away from the original topic. It was in one of these long winded exchanges that she found the clue.

It was a thread between a large number of different visitors: 216, according to her corps. None were active right now, but their earlier interactions were available for any to see. Her increasingly ill-focused search algorithms had pinged a previous iteration of a single contributor’s message.

Message boards did not work in the way they once had. The ancient, text-based form of board was a thing not even of distant memory. A modern message board was a far different beast, one composed of what were termed mind-states, though the term was too grandiose.

A user would leave a message in the form of select sensations, a memory or thought recorded by the corps at the point of creation. Not really words, not really language, this memory carried not only what the user consciously wished to convey but everything that went with it. The user’s attitude, their very emotions were recorded, and were updated each time the user logged back in and reviewed the thread. Each user, therefore, left only one message, but it was a message that changed with every response, and changed responses related to it in turn.

Someone had tried to delete what Keri found yet had been only half-successful. They would have been totally successful if Keri hadn’t known what to look for.

Whoever this user was, they sounded like a modder. This was evident in a brief exchange her algorithms placed as resembling something Keri remembered from her meeting with Kilgore.

…too many Standards, the remains of the message read, flickering in and out of existence. The lag was getting really bad. ...Moore’s law?... inevitable that technological progress continues… augmentation is the only future… control….

Keri swore to herself. There didn’t seem to be anything she could use. This had to be Kilgore, or at least someone like him. She knew of no one else who might use the terms “standard” and “Moore’s law” in the same breath.

She replayed what she could of the message, but there was nothing more. It had been almost entirely stripped of extraneous data as well. She wasn’t going to get any hints on a location from here.

But when she was unceremoniously dumped offline a few seconds later, she knew where they had to go.

[1] Things rarely change, they just mutate.