uthor’s Terminological Introduction
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading. Because I would not squander your attention, I’ve aimed to create a story with a seamless entry. But some of you have brought it to my attention that the journey from this world to the next is over-laden with strange new words. Now, a world must be unveiled gradually for wonder and mystery to lay hold of you, and I dare not rob you of that. But I can set you on your way, gently laden.
Vacs are the laboring underclass. Their bodies can be remote controlled by operators, also called integros. Lúcidos are a subset of vacs who lose their waking selves to the dreamspace, pulled until their only desire is to be lost. The Mind is the governing artificial intelligence: the fusion of a sentient internet with the personal minds of operators. Thickspace is where operators live, where bandwidth is thick and the Mind can more effectively read thoughts. Thinspace is where vacs live, where bandwidth is thin. Picto is the new permanent language that has replaced writing, slices of dream. Metemotions are meta-emotional content attached to picto-speech.
nThe Mindnet is the picto-based internet of operator minds, and the query daemon searches that internet. The human dreams of operators are harnessed to make the streamed visual experiences of humanity meaningful. The Mind pays special attention to emotionally-charged content, monitoring it for deviant or criminal activity.
For the insatiably curious and the hasty, a technological spec is contained in the Scientific Appendix that can be read in advance of the novel without doing immoderate harm to the pleasure of world-discovery. But be forewarned: it is exceedingly technical.
Yours,
Jeremiah Matthew John