The DataNet is a worldwide interlocking system of servers, networks, fiber-optic cables, data and computing power that is larger and more intricate than any other communications network that has ever existed on Earth.
Everyone uses the DataNet, and most people have multiple possessions on their person that utilize the Net without the owner ever knowing. Smartlinks use it look up local conditions and calculate firing solutions, medkits access medical databases to analyze and diagnose injuries before recommending treatment, and your jacket uses it to detect when it’s time to do the laundry.
Deckers[]
Some people do more than simply soaking in information their gear gathers for them. They use the DataNet as a tool and a weapon. They glide through it, bending it to their will, making it dance and spin to the tune they call. These people are called deckers. Deckers are named for their cyberdecks; specialized, powerful, and highly restricted computers purpose-built for hacking.
Deckers play critical roles on runner teams. They open locked doors, muffle alarms, cancel security calls, unearth buried paydata, monitor things other team members can’t see, and keep the heat off long enough for the rest of the team to complete the run. In combat, deckers can take control of or destroy opponents’ weapons and gear.
They also play an important role in defense. Every other skilled team in the world has a decker running interference for them; if your team doesn’t, you’re vulnerable to whatever electronic havoc they decide to bring down on your head.
DataNet Basics[]
Everything in the DataNet is an icon: a virtual representation that allows a user to interact with something in the DataNet. Every object’s owner can choose what the icon looks like, within certain limits. An icon doesn’t just represent a DataNet object in an abstract way; it shows a user what it is and how to use it. The DataNet is programmed to give users a context to make it easier to work and play; if a tool is hard to use, it’s not much of a tool. There are designers and programmers who deliberately obfuscate an icon’s purpose with confusing design, but for the most part people like to know how they can use whatever object they encounter. Most DataNet locations require icons to match certain visual protocols.
For example, let’s say you are in the host for Dante’s Inferno. The Inferno is a popular nightclub with a presence in real-world Seattle, but it also has a host that looks the same as the physical club so that patrons from around the world can fly in for a visit at a moment’s notice. So you get to the club’s host, pay your cover charge with a quick transfer of credits from your account to the Inferno, and in a blink you’re whisked to your favorite spot in the club. In this case, let’s say you go to the fifth level to enjoy the iconography of angry, dead souls writhing to the beat in and under swampy water. You’re in the mood for virtual food, so you call up a menu. That’s a file, and Dante’s menu appears as a flaming scroll with a fancy script. The programmers and the Inferno know it’s something you’d want to read—and they want you to read it—so they make sure the icon looks like something you’d read, in this case a scroll. The flames feel hot and look bright, but they’re just virtual. If you were somewhere else, like say the Club Penumbra host, a nightclub with an outer space theme, it wouldn’t look like a flaming scroll, but it would still look like something you’d read (in this case, an astronaut’s log book).
The whole DataNet is like that. Everything is custom-crafted by its owners and is generally designed for intuitive usefulness. The other side of the experience is software. Some deckers don’t want other programmers telling them how their icons look, so they run software to impose their own visuals on their icons. The struggle to show what you want to show is only one of the battles you’ll fight in the DataNet. Most people, though, don’t bother to fight over iconography, and just let the designers of the DataNet win out.
DataNet protocols limit the relative sizes of everything to give users a standard experience they can share. Your one-to-one scale icon of a robot version of EuroCorp’s London Spire might seem cool, but if you’re talking to someone with an icon of a field mouse, communications won’t run smooth. To overcome this, avatars are kept between four and eight feet tall, so what you would actually end up with in the described conversation is a comically small skyscraper talking to a really big rodent, so you’re both approximately the same size. Files and devices are smaller than avatars, and hosts are larger (much larger in the case of big sites, like the Big Ten’s corporate hosts).
Virtual Visuals[]
The look of the DataNet depends on what grid you’re on, the programs you’re running, and numerous other factors. However, there is a sort of “base version” that forms the foundation of everyone’s DataNet experience.
In this base version, the DataNet is a black flatland under a black sky. This virtual plain is lit with the glow of the icon of your commlink, computer, or cyberdeck and the other icons around you, one for each device and avatar connected to the DataNet. The plain is a projection of the whole world made flat, so the icons get more and more sparse the farther out you look.
There are uncounted billions of icons in the DataNet, which could get overwhelming, but some background tech keeps things from getting out of control.
The first piece of assistance comes from your access device, which automatically filters out the least interesting icons, such as the virtual locations of every music player in the world. Instead, the DataNet will usually show you an icon for an individual’s personal area network (PAN), not every device in that network, though it makes exceptions for interesting or dangerous devices, such as a gun. Additionally, the farther away devices are from you in the real world, the dimmer their icons are in the DataNet; this is partly because your device figures the farther ones aren’t as interesting to you, but mostly because the connection is a bit slower due to the distance. DataNet gear renders far-off devices and avatars as dim, muted, or flickering icons. Also cutting down on the visual noise is the fact that some icons are deliberately hidden from view, such as locks and other security devices, baby monitors, maintenance monitors, and people who prefer not to be seen.
To understand the uses of virtual reality and how people balance the physical world with the virtual one, let’s look at some typical DataNet uses. Let’s say that you’re in your car, driving home from work, school, or wherever you usually drive home from. You let the car’s autopilot handle the driving and drop into VR to start dinner. Once you check into VR, your car, the road, and everything nearby drop from view, and instead you see the DataNet’s plane of stars. You think about going to your home node, and boom, you go, streaking forward like a comet. As you get close, you see all of the devices that make up your home network, and you head for the one that represents your fridge. The icon for the fridge looks like a small fridge, with a list of the food (which the fridge’s electronics automatically update with what’s actually inside it). You see frozen pizza on the list and decide to go with a frozen pizza. You then reach out to your stove’s controls (appearing as some dials over a warm, homey glow) and fire up the oven to pre-heat to 230°. It’s a bit nippy outside, so you set your drink dispenser (which you’ve made look like a beer tap in VR) to start warming the soy base, and since you’re feeling luxurious you hit the controls for chocolate flavoring. Still in VR, you zip back to your car, which cheerfully tells you that you’ve got another ten minutes, enough time to visit your favorite social networking host.
The most interesting locations in the DataNet landscape are the big hosts, which hover above you when you log on. No matter where you go in the Datanet, they’re always up there. One of the critical things to understand about hosts is that, unlike the devices in your house, they are not necessarily the representations of a specific device or location in the physical world. Hosts are part of the DataNet, rather than being a single device, so you can access them from anywhere without concern for the distance involved.
The next important thing to know is that the inside of a host is a lot different from the outside. For one thing, it’s often bigger on the inside than the outside. It’s also a virtual environment of its own, with clear boundaries indicating where it starts and the rest of the DataNet, for most intents and purposes, ends.
But let’s get back to the social networking host you decide to check into on your way home. The one you’re going to does not have any particular entry requirements, so you don’t have to endure the virtual equivalent of an entry line. You just zoom to the host, fly over the border, and you’re almost ready to go in. On the inside, this particular host looks like a classy perpetual cocktail party, with a sculpted look that swanky lounges in the physical world would kill to have. Before you go into the actual party, you enter a private changing room, where you can make your icon look more appropriate for the party. Maybe pick out a stylish black suit or a little black dress, then add a tie or neckerchief for a splash of color. Get the outfit and your virtual hair set, and you’re ready to mingle.
Or maybe a come-as-you-are sports bar is more your style. That host has booths for visitors that change size depending on the number of people in it, so they’re always full but not too cozy. Or possibly games are more your style, joining your friends for board games, or puzzles, or grand adventures. Or you could go to a cat fanciers’ clubhouse. Or a movie theater. Or a zero-G simulated spacecraft. The inside of a host is limited only by its owner’s preferences and imagination.
The Population of the DataNet[]
Every icon in the DataNet is one of six things: an avatar, a device, a PAN, a file, a host, or a mark. Occasionally, you might also see a datastream, a transfer of data that looks like a thin beam of flickering, multi-colored light. Datastreams are normally filtered out of your DataNet view because if they weren’t, they’d be the only thing you would see. If you want, you can dial back on the filtering, but the streams pass by so quickly that you can’t tell where they’re coming from or going to without snooping on whatever is sending or receiving them, and that would be illegal (and we’d never do anything illegal in the DataNet, right?).
Avatar icons often look like the people they represent, but there is a lot of variety to be had. Nearly any creature or animate object is fair game: animals, moving statues, fantasy creatures, steam-powered robots, zombies, aliens, and just about anything that can walk and talk. The DataNet protocols will stop you from designing an icon for your avatar that isn’t intuitively an avatar, so you couldn’t have an icon that is a dust speck, Greek column, or a cube, for example, and all avatars must be between four and eight feet all.
User Modes[]
When you interact with the DataNet, you can do it in one of three modes. In augmented reality, or AR, you deal with reality directly, and you use your meat body to interact with the DataNet through AR overlays. In virtual reality, or VR, your body goes limp and your only sensory input comes from the DataNet. Basic VR is cold-sim, meaning you interact with the DataNet primarily through sight and sound. In hot-sim VR, you have the full DataNet experience, involving all of your senses as well as your emotions. You can perform DataNet actions in any of the three modes.
Augmented Reality[]
Augmented reality allows you to see the DataNet if you like, either by creating a virtual window or display screen and viewing it like a camera, or by overlaying device and host information on your normal vision. Your persona can go anywhere in the DataNet using this view. You can even enter hosts, although your icon will appear laggy compared to a VR user in the same node.
When in AR, you do not take biofeedback damage, like from the attack of Black IC. If your attention is really focused on the DataNet, the GM may impose penalties to any Notice rolls to notice things going on around you in physical space.
Cold-Sim VR[]
In cold-sim VR, you're meshed with the DataNet through simsense filters. This means your brain is protected from dangerous signals, but it makes things a bit slower for you because all data is analyzed by your sim module before it reaches you. Your body relaxes and your physical senses are blocked, as though your body were asleep. You see the DataNet as though you were really there.
In cold-sim, whenever you take biofeedback damage, it is nonlethal damage.
Hot-Sim VR[]
Hot-sim VR is like cold-sim VR, only the filters are off. You are flooded with simsense signals that can even effect your limbic system, so you can not only see, hear, and touch the DataNet, but you can feel it. Hot-sim uses the same simsense signals as better-than-life chips, which makes it dangerous and even addictive, but you can't get a more intuitive connection to the DataNet.
When you are in hot-sim VR, you receive a +1 bonus to all DataNet actions, but any biofeedback damage you take is lethal.