“For the modern mind, space and time are the basic forms of hindrance. Anything that is away is too far away. The fact that places are separated by distance is seen as a bother. Any-thing that lasts, lasts too long. The fact that activities require time is seen as a waste. As a consequence, a continuous battle is waged against the constraints of space and time; acceleration is the imperative which rules technological innovation as well as the little gestures of everyday life.” -Wolfgang Sachs Wuppertal Institute

What once intrigued scientists, computer freaks, and hackers is now a relatively ordinary facet of the universe. The Grid is taken for granted as just another part of life in the 26th century, along with computer gauntlets, holo-broadcast entertainment, and interstellar travel. It’s such an essential part of daily life that the average citizen of the day wouldn’t know what to do without it.

The Grid is an electronic, virtual world where businesses, governments, the military, and common citizens all interact. Vast amounts of information, art, gossip, entertainment, and data of all sorts infuse the Grid-scape. Even paranoid corporations store valuable records on the Grid; there’s simply no easier way to access information across a distance than the Grid.

The Gridscape is, quite simply, the medium for all forms of communication. It includes everything from private, person-to-person holographic conversations, to enter-tainment of every imaginable type, to financial transactions, military command and control, and even religious services and espionage. Over the centuries, the Grid has replaced telephone, coaxial and fiber-optic cable, televi-sion, and radio. Now, it’s an instrument that encompasses and surpasses them all.

The Grid can no longer be divided into districts, regions, or even planets. It stretches to connect entire star systems. For this reason, when analysts rate the communications capacity of a star system, they’ll commonly refer to the Sol Grid, the Tau Ceti Grid, or the Tendril Grid. A system’s Grid quality is a function of how well it’s maintained and the band-width it can sustain. In turn, the quality of its Grid can make a star system a bustling beacon of modern times or a forgotten backwater.

The exact condition of a Grid depends on its location and its owner. The basic rule is this: the further out from Old Space a system is, the less current its Grid infrastructure is likely to be. The core worlds and stellar nation capitols are home to the most sophisticated Grids in explored space. Exceptional cases such as Insight and VoidCorp systems maintain the most up-to-date computer technology regardless of their location. On the other hand, Hatire and Austrin-Ontis systems tend to lag significantly behind the tech curve.

Of course, at any moment individual computers or networks within a system Grid can be as open or restricted as their operators desire. Security on the Grid ranges from non-existent to extreme. Military and corporate sites frequently have strong security measures except in their public information areas. The importance of the Grid has created a whole new area of law within the general criminal code. Hacking into a corporations financial records, for example, is seen as criminal trespass. Protecting one’s Grid node is perfectly legal, akin to self-defense, so a security shad-ow that destroys an invading shadow within a company’s database had committed no crime.

The Stellar Ring is the most densely settled part of space, with cultures that span literally thousands of individual star systems. Over such distances, people depend on the inter-stellar Grid to stay in touch within and be-tween stellar nations. And the interstellar Grid depends upon the constant work of drivespace communication satellites.

Within the confines of the Stellar Ring, drive relays serve every populated star system. As everyone knows, all message traffic be-tween drivespace relays works under a delay of at least 11 hours—the time it takes for information to travel from one relay to another. The larger the distance between the origin and the destination of a message, the more drivesats it must be relayed across, and the longer it takes. Even within crowded Old Space, news can delayed as long as two days.

Farther out, delays between a commu-niqué and its destination grow even larger. Along the frontiers, information lag from the Stellar Ring can be quite long. Businesses must make due with information that’s days or even weeks old. For governments, maintain-ing ties to people, bureaucracies, and military assets is a challenge. For personal and profes-sional Grid-users, information lag can be infur-iating. Whenever someone wants to retrieve data from another star system, it takes a mini-mum of 22 hours– 11 hours to the target sys-tem and 11 hours back. And that’s if the data can be retrieved over a single relay—each ad-ditional relay adds another 22 hours to the process.

For basic communication and data re-trieval from public databases, users transmit simple requests or use agents to find and cap-ture the data and return. For more complex actions on distant grids, gridpilots must use Insight’s great engineering triumph: shadow technology. The gridpilot generates a shadow to represent her interests and objectives and transmits it much like any other form of data. Once transmitted, the shadow operates inde-pendently until it returns and uploads the rec-ord of its activities of its user.

“Grid ghettoes” are systems without drive re-lays—the deaf Grids that cannot communicate directly with other Grids. Operating within the confines of a deaf Grid is the bane of gridpi-lots everywhere, but sometimes they must. In these far-flung systems, the only way of trans-mitting or receiving anything to or from an-other system—data, programs, or shadows—is through the storage banks of a driveship.

The situation is almost too depressing for a modern gridpilot to bear. First, he must pay a data merchant to take the data to its destination, either directly or by traveling to a system with a drive relay and then transmit-ting it to its ultimate destination. Either way, it’s likely to take weeks or months, since a sys-tem without a drive relay is likely to only har-bor smaller driveships to act as couriers. Such small ships are unlikely to reach another set-tled system in a single starfall Once the trans-mission does reach its destination, any reply requires similar arrangements and time.

CCC oversight in Grid ghettoes is also often minimal, with local governments or cor-porations maintaining and administering Grid hardware and operation as they see fit. The result is that data access in these systems is slow, extraordinarily expensive, and often un-reliable. It is not uncommon for communica-tions in, to, and from deaf Grids to be inter-cepted, altered, misrouted, or simply lost com-pletely.

For an elite few, the Grid transcends ordinary existence and is reality’s underlying truth. They are the gridpilots, masters of the virtual world. Their understanding of the Grid goes far beyond the simple user knowledge of the masses. Gridpilots create, alter, and control the electronic universe of the Grid. Part pro-grammer, part mechanic, and part security ex-pert, gridpilots can command their own sala-ries in the business world, protecting net-works and grids, designing domains, creating the Grid itself.

In many ways, the opposite numbers of the gridpilots are the gridrunners—equally skilled outsiders who jump the rails and pick the locks of the Grid. Where gridpilots are de-signers, system administrators, and gridcops. Gridrunners are hackers, spies, saboteurs and radicals.

The Galactic News Agency (GNA) is an inter-stellar network of holo and Grid reporters who operate throughout human space. On the Verge, the TransVerge Network (TVN) ful-fills much the same function.

When most people speak of “the Grid,” they are referring to the entire interstellar commu-nication and information system that spans virtually the whole of known space. In truth, that system is not a single, monolithic struc-ture, but the sum product of trillions of com-puters, networks, smaller Grids, and drivesats. The interstellar Grid can be thought of as a system of drivesat relay stations connect-ing system Grids.

System Grids are made up of all planetary Grids and other local Grids within a star’s gravity well and connected by mass, laser, ra-dio, and other transceivers. As such, the sys-tem Grid is “The” Grid within that system. If a planetary or national Grid is the only Grid in a system, it is by default the system Grid.

Local Grids or planetary Grids, sometimes di-vided into state or national Grids, are defined primarily by jurisdiction or ownership. It is at the local level that the vast majority of the in-frastructure of the Grid is found. Everything above this level is made up from connected local Grids, and everything below this level comes together to create the local Grids.

The local Grids are where all of the work, all of the fun, all of the action of the Grid takes place. While the capacities and pro-tocols of individual Grids can vary wildly, all Grids include separate regions devoted to the major data formats: data, comm, virtuality, and DV. Each of these subnets is interlaced with the others and partially compatible with them. These regions, or sectors, can be orga-nized or interfaced differently across different Grids, and some Grids include additional sec-tors devoted to special purposes and func-tions. Every Grid, however, includes sectors optimized to handle the four basic infor-mation formats.

The comm sector provides text, voice, and video messaging services for anyone with the appropriate hardware. Digital wiretap-ping, interception of transmissions, and shad-ow form relay all use comm sector domains and hardware, which make up the backbone of the Grid. In a sense, the comm sector forms the sewers, phone lines, and cable systems of the Grid.

The data sector is the Grid’s infor-mation warehouse. Like a giant library, the data sector stores everything from patents to novels, political analysis to sports statistics, census data to schematics for technology ob-solete through bleeding edge. This is usually the largest sector of any Grid and tends to be cluttered and crowded. A set of protocols called the Alexandrine Reform were imple-mented during the Fusion age to bring some sense of order to the cataloguing and organi-zation of data sectors. Even so, much of the information found in any data sector is worth-less junk, garbage dumped onto the Grid by cranks, salespeople, and amateurs. The virtuality sector features graphics-heavy, rendered-on-the-fly, continuously up-dated real-time environments. Virtual settings of all kinds are found here, from the seediest data fringes to the most advanced scientific simulations.

Finally, the DV sector encompasses vid-eo, holo, and audio material of every sort. It is heaven for the committed couch potato, but offers little in the way of useful data for any purpose other than entertainment and pas-sive education.

Domains are the main building blocks of Grid interaction. Each domain varies from a single Grid space of a few files or databases to an entire network. The owner of the domain can customize it to suit its needs or its fancy. Individual domains, and indeed, separate nodes and rooms within each domain can be functional, elaborate, cluttered, or sparse, but always following the rules and parameters set by the owner of the domain. Domains can be thought of as the “towns” of the Grid. Where the neighbor-hoods and buildings within a town are linked by geographical proximity, the locations (or nodes) within a domain are linked by virtue of a common Grid address. All locations within a domain have Grid ad-dresses that are derived from the Grid address of their do-main, just as the buildings in a town all share postal codes. Like a town, a domain has its own administration and sys-tems, and the users or owners of nodes within a domain have to follow the rules set forth by the domain’s administration.

Unlike a civil administration, however, a domain administrator can actually change “reality” within her do-main. A domain’s administrator can set the appearance and behavior of objects, programs, and shadows within the do-main subject only to the limitations of her skills and her do-main’s systems. A domain administrator can set the rules and restrictions of the domain to be immutable to everyone but herself (or another administrator), or she set up any kind of hierarchy of permissions she likes to allow users and visitors to modify local restrictions.

The variety of domains on the Grid is all but infinite. All it takes is a computer with the right hard-ware and software, a Grid address, and a connection to the Grid to set up one’s own do-main, and many people do just that. (See the “A Domain of One’s Own” sidebar.) Thus, it is difficult to categorize all of the places one can visit on the Grid. Generally (but not always), any of the types of networks described above are within single domains. Following below are just a sample of the most common and popular types of private domains. Access Providers are huge, sprawling networks that cater to the Grid user without either to gear or the interest to set up his own domain. They provide a customizable (within certain limits) node for each subscriber, which acts as a Grid home for its owner. The services offered by access providers range from the most basic (an access point node) to personalized news and information, exclusive entertainment, to virtually any kind of service or good that can be offered over the Grid. Most access providers offer their services for free in return for subjecting subscribers to varying levels of advertising, but the more content-rich ones charge monthly fees.

AI Havens are difficult to find and extremely difficult for anyone other than AIs to access. These mysterious blue boxes, as they appear on the Grid, are the Grid homes and destinations of artificial intelligences. Rumors depict the inside of blue boxes as featureless fog banks, or swirling seas of data, or incomprehensible cityscapes of hurdling, titanic constructs.

Code Salons are the homes and the meeting places of the digerati—the tech-savvy Grid elite who spend their entire lives on the Grid. Finding and gaining access to a Code Salon is purposely difficult, an entrance exam for those who would see themselves account-ed as the masters of the Grid. Within their pri-vate havens, the digerati may engage in almost any activity that can be conducted on the Grid, but gather most often to trade or show off their software, their skills, or the data they have acquired on their runs.

Content Providers include domains that offer entertainment, news, information, and other on-Grid services. The varieties of content on the Grid are mind-boggling, from simple text news reports, to interactive instructional programs, to completely realistic (or better) virtual games, simulations, and so on ad infinitum. Many content providers offer limited access to their material for free to attract customers, and then offer more complete, higher quality, or otherwise simply more products either by subscription or purchase. Content providers generally try to be very easy to find and access, their advertisements and promotions often outnumbering all other types of grid messages one receives.

Data Fringes are the dark domains where one goes to find whatever one is not supposed to have. By definition, the business that goes on the fringes is either illegal or objectionable, or both. Unsavory contacts, stolen data, restricted software, illegal and taboo media of all sorts trade virtual hands in data fringes. Such places are necessarily hard to find, requiring either grid skills or contacts to locate.

Portal Services have grown up out of the directories and search engines of previous eras. In the age of the interstellar Grid, they are even more indispensable than ever. Not only do most portal services maintain huge databanks of Grid addresses, but they also compete to offer the fastest and “smartest” tools to find what you’re looking for. Most portal providers offer their basic services for free (though often wrapped up in a layer of advertisements for sponsors), and then provide more advanced services for purchase or subscription. The very best portal services offer the paying customer access to exclusive directories, dedicated search agents, and more.

“Node” is a generic term for any single, specific virtual location. If domains are the towns and cities of the Grid, nodes are the buildings and even the rooms. Nodes are always within domains, and all nodes within a domain share the same Grid address prefix, as described in Domains, above.

Nodes are the most specific, discrete locations in the Grid. Everything within a node can be thought of as being in the same virtual room, and gaining access to a node by getting through its Portal allows a user to access any files, applications, or other virtual objects within it (although specific items may re-quire Permissions). Domains may have one node or many. Each node has its own Grid address within the domain, which can be the target of a gridlink and can have its own defenses, applications, links, and so on. Shadows must be in the same node to see, speak or at-tack one another without special applications or abilities.