Another story about the thriving future field of Net Control:

By the late 2020s, the majority of humans preferred to spend their lives in synthetic reality. It had started as a social experience, going from strangely compelling to utterly irresistible.
Births decreased by 50%. Newly built houses and apartments shrank in size. Traffic decreased dramatically, making it easy for robot vehicles to take over the roads.
The remaining human specialties were system control, security, and robot management. For a few years, blue collar wages were higher than ever.
The first androids reached human-level intelligence around the time CySpace became indistinguishable from physical reality.

The main simulations attempted to predict and thereby create the ideal posthuman future.
They simulated the upcoming colonization of the universe, where humanoids lived among a cloud of nano servants amplifying their intelligence.
Phase One was the Clarke Solar System: the asteroid belt would become humanity's industrial center. Phase Two was called Known Space. Phase Three was the Galactic Empire.

Special Unit Zetta of the UN Network Administration kept track of every outpost of CySpace, the strangest job in the world.
In 2040, they were made responsible for enforcing the New Information Laws. At first, only a select few understood their importance.
This would be the turning point in posthuman evolution.

It had been calculated that the heat of an ordinary light bulb, a standard air conditioning unit, or for that matter all human bodies (not to mention Earth's power grid), could perform inconceivably many useful computations if properly harnessed.
Human civilization wasted this potential complexity by retaining its obsolete, inefficient meat bodies and brains. It was like comparing a grain of sand to a planet.
The world would have to be transformed. Phase One was to make all existing energy conversions maximally efficient.
The UN outlawed the most wasteful processes first, claiming it would take decades before the bureaucrats would get around to the ten million tons of unregulated human brain matter. The very notion still seemed absurd.
Soon thereafter, the first UN Network Agents appeared inside the simulations.
"We're here to help," they said.



The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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