Better Worlds Await
This is the tagline VirtueLife has used for decades to entice the seething masses of unemployed to walk into any of their Virtualization clinics and leave the resource-starved Earth behind.
The procedure is a simple periphectomy. They’ll unburden you of your high-carbon-footprint body and place you into their high-tech storage jars, from which you can join the virtualized civilization living across fantastic and impossible worlds simulated to real-life fidelity through a sophisticated cloud server net… so long as you make your payments.
Horizon Now follows the story of Laura, a cultural outcast and under-appreciated designer who builds fantasy worlds for virtual billionaires. She has spent her life hoping to virtualize and join her sister in the expansive virtual landscape, but when she finally manages to do so, she gets caught up in the web of a clandestine military project which seeks to profit from the fusion of advanced AI with the human brain.
Horizon Now is a science fiction web-novel that is free online. It releases every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. An epub form of the novel will become available after the first Part is published.