Running the Net

Okay, let's start with the basics.

First, you gotta know how to move around. That's easy. Each turn in the Net, you can move five spaces, no matter how big those spaces are. On the Net World Map. a single space is a thousand square miles. On a City Grid Map, a single space is about a dozen blocks. On a Subgrid Map (one square of a City Grid Map), a single space is roughly a few yards. No matter where you are, you still move five spaces per turn.

Howzat?? Look, chombatta, in reality, you're not moving at all - it's just your point of view that's moving. Think of it like you're sending out an eyeball on a long string. The eyeball travels, but you don't.

In the Net, things move fast. Speeds are measured in nanoseconds, not even sec-onds. We meat minds are turtles compared to the big systems and the Als. To get things down to a scale we humans can comprehend, the Interface program in your deck scales time down to match your per-ceptions. In real time, you may have just moved two thousand miles in one second. But you just perceive it as "teleportation" - zap; you're there. When distances are smaller, the Interface program slows things down so that you don't crash through the sides of some honcho's data fortress.

Five spaces per one second turn. It's the Law.

Second rule. All travel in the Net is done in straight lines. This means you go through the sides of a space, not the corners (see illustration). Sure, real people cut the cor-ners alt the time. But remember, you aren't really moving at all. The space you're not moving through doesn't really "exist", and even if it did, the perception of volume is a creation of the old I-G Transformations. So you play by the Interface's rules in the Net. Got it?

Okay, so now we're moving.

On the Net World Map, we move by going from one Long Distance Link (LDL) to the next. Say you want to go from Night City to London. You can't just teleport to London. No, you'll have to go through a series of short 5 square hops to get where you want to go.

You do this by locating the furthest Long Distance Link (LDL) within your five space range. From Night City, this means your options would be Salt Lake, Denver, At-lanta, Chicago, New York/BosWash, New Orleans and Havana. You couldn't jump the whole way; at five spaces per turn, you'd end up stranded in the ocean with-out an LDL to stop at.

So you jump from Night City to New York. From there, you can easily jump to Lon-don; it's five spaces exactly. But wait a sec... There's one more thing you need to con-sider. Security Levels.