In the interstellar network, "going online" was completely different from being in cyberspace.
In cyberspace, you could feel the crush of "crowds upon crowds." Network viruses, personality fragments, rogue programs, emotion plugins, natural AIs, and all sorts of network monsters surged one after another. Even cyberhackers had to tread carefully. One moment of carelessness, and once a virus finished downloading, your physical body in reality would be taken over.
At that point, all you could do was spend money calling in reinforcements for a physical purge.
But in the interstellar network, Virtual Gravity's first impression of virtual gravity was: it was huge, empty, and the network signal was incredibly slow!
Generating a page with a virtual program was like using free wall-bypassing software to get over the firewall. It was so slow that it gave him a headache.
Light signals naturally traveled at the speed of light, while the electrical and chemical signals produced by the human brain could never match that speed. That was why network access pods existed.
One major function of a network access pod was converting light signals into simulated sensory signals that the human brain could receive.
From a certain perspective, a network access pod served much the same purpose as an interstellar space station. The difference was that one slowed things down, while the other sped them up.
But so what if it was the speed of light? Crossing a galaxy at light speed would take at least one hundred thousand years.
Although the interstellar space station had a local area network inside it, it was inevitably affected by interference from external signals.
For a hacker, that interference drastically reduced network speed. Virtual Gravity had no choice but to spend a great deal of effort editing network acceleration software to speed up his own