The Illusionists Read Online Free PDF Page B

anyone in those places ever seemed to do, once they sat down with their food, was jack into surface Life and talk to each other there. Still, plenty of people went to eat places on their own, so she didn’t feel strange about sitting at a table by herself, even though those solitary people were never really alone – they were surrounded by people in Life.
    All in all there was hardly anywhere outside of Life to socialise, but that apparently didn’t bother anyone because socialising, in World, was arranged.
    According to Wren, everyone went to regular parties at other people’s houses, and held parties themselves in their own houses. You would be messaged the time and place for your next obligatory party, and attend or host you most certainly did; if you missed any, a black mark was put against your Life account. What having a black mark on your account meant Rue didn’t know exactly, but she understood that it wasn’t good.
    The great thing about the system, apparently, was that you got to regularly go to parties for free and, until you yourself were hosting, you didn’t have to organise a thing – your local government team did everything for you. They chose who went to which house and when. They chose who hosted and who didn’t. They chose everything, it seemed, very carefully. Rue thought this bizarre. No one else seemed to, though, so she filed it away as another custom she would have to get used to.
    Wren had promised her that today, finally, something would happen. He had been trying to arrange a meeting between Rue and his manager, Greta Hammond, for weeks. A meeting, at last. Something, anything, to stop the slow, spidery sensation of listlessness that often seemed to creep over her nowadays.
    Sat at Wren’s little desk, the box in front of her, Rue flicked through her Life account. There was a letter sat in her message box, and she waved one hand over it. Wren had shown her how to open her mail, but she still couldn’t get past the sensation that she was performing magic. The letter unfolded without her having touched it. She knew if she jacked out of Life, the letter would disappear. Everything she now saw would disappear, because it wasn’t real. But because enough people had decided that what they saw in one reality wasn’t necessarily more important than what they saw in another, the letter
was
real. It simply wasn’t real everywhere.
    The letter read:
    Vela Rue –
    I invite you to a meet. Wren has spoken so much of you and I am keen to see you for myself. Would today at fifteen hours be too short notice? Wren will show you to my office.
    Greta Hammond
    She had been told to expect as much from Wren, who had seemed a little short about the whole thing when he had mentioned it to her last night. Quizzing him never helped when he wasn’t in a mood to talk, she had learned. Nevertheless, fifteen hours was the time he had told her to be ready, so here she was.
    She followed the room link at the bottom of the letter. The link would take her to Greta Hammond’s location in Life. Touching it with her finger, she waited as the console flickered.
    There was that blackness again while she dropped into full immersion, and her body in the real went a little limp in its chair, her eyes peacefully closed. Funny how similar descending to full immersion felt to the place in between places, that space of nothing and creeping strangeness that she used to find herself in when she practised throwing her mind in lessons with White.
    It took a moment, but then the blackness passed, and there was Wren’s avatar, standing in Life, waiting for her in front of an ordinary-looking door.
    Wren was out on assignment and away from the house, and had only paused in his day to meet her in Life and introduce her to this Greta Hammond. Rue smiled at him, feeling her pulse skip in excitement.
    â€˜I told you fifteen,’ he said. He seemed anxious.
    â€˜I know it.