An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
In a sense, the world you experience is still a virtual one.
The Virtual System has always been capable of tricking the mind, creating the illusion of smell, touch, and any other sensation that one might expect to feel. Seto just made your virtual senses portable and mapped them over visual and auditory input from the real world. So now you’re a string of computer code piloting an android, as opposed to of a string of computer code sitting around in a metal sphere collecting dust.
It’s a very convincing android, too. You only notice the gaps in its realism in little details. Like the way water beads and slides across your hands, behaving more the way it usually does on rubber than on skin. The fact that your hair doesn’t grow. Your inability to blush, or sweat, or eat, or cry.
And you really shouldn’t miss nuisances like that anyway.
(Listen this is the bEST Noa-centric fic I have ever read and there are so, so few of them to choose from).
