Warden

rooftops. They all carried payloads. Gizmo flew at roughly the same height, which seemed to be the regulated allowance for transport drones.
“Not all of the smaller drones are operated by the settlement’s AI,” Will said. “A few of the insect-sized ones you see above? They’re flown for leisure. Adults and kids alike use them to explore the city, or race. They piggyback on the settlement’s wireless network, allowing them to get a pristine HD video feed across the entire city. It can be a lot of fun, plus it’s a whole lot easier for a resident of Rust Town to get into Aradne by drone. With solar power, regenerative braking, and multiple drones in reserve, people can spend their whole lives inside their AR goggles, flying around. There are racing leagues. Exploration guilds. Tournaments. It’s a whole world of its own. Not all that different from those who spend their days in VR, in fact.”
Rhea watched as one of the transport drones descended, depositing a metallic bag in front of one particular container before taking to the skies once more. From the tantalizing smell emanating from that bag, she knew it held food.
One of the children snuck away from the others, obviously intending to snag the meal, but the container’s bulky door opened a moment later and an unshaven, shirtless man snatched up the metallic bag and slammed the door shut.
“There are also people who only interact through the world remotely via androids,” Horatio said.
“Yes,” Will said. “But that’s more a hobby for the rich. In Aradne, android roleplaying is quite popular—a lot of the people you’ll see walking around are synthetics. Some, like you, are cyborgs with their brains directly inside the units, but others are simply human beings at home, encased in full body motion suits, relaying their every movements to their personal androids.”
“Too bad we’re not going to Aradne…” Rhea said.
“Nope,” Will said. “If you’re really curious, you can watch a few videos about the city on VidTube. You do have a Net connection now… though to be honest, it won’t look much different than here, save for better looking buildings.”
She made a mental note to do that later sometime.
“I would recommend you be careful what you watch on VidTube as well,” Will said. “Start with the PG-13 streams. Newly wiped minds are very impressionable, after all. Not too far removed from the mind of children, in fact.”
“Except I’m not a child,” she said, a little more peevishly than she’d intended.
“No,” he agreed. “But you are naive. That’ll change, once you get hardened up to the real world. Videos won’t really help with that. They’ll probably give you the wrong impression.”
“But PG-13 streams will only shield her from the harsh realities of the world,” Horatio countered. “They’ll definitely give her the wrong impression, as you call it.”
“True,” Will said. “But that’s why I said to start with the PG-13 streams. She can move on when she feels ready.”
“I’m not sure how much time she’ll have to watch videos either way,” Horatio said. “You plan to take her to Master Bardain as soon as we’re done here, yes?”
“Yeah,” Will said. “But we’ll probably have a one or two night layover while Bardain trains her. Enough time for her to stream some videos, if she so chooses.”
“Somehow I have a feeling she’ll be too tired to stream videos…” Horatio said.
“Then she’ll learn everything she needs to know in the real world,” Will said. “From us. It’s probably better that way anyhow.”
The trio passed a group of children, who paused in their playing to watch Rhea and the others go by. She noticed that all of them were wearing glasses with small green lights active in the lower right of the frames.
She ran a quick Net lookup on those glasses, and the search results informed her they were a form of AR goggles. Cheap enough that nearly everyone could afford them, they provided non-cyborgs with the same HUD that she had built-in. The green light indicated that the goggles were actively recording. She wondered if the central AI that Will had spoken of was accessing those video feeds, too. Probably.
She also looked up the thin visor that Will himself wore above his eyes and discovered, unsurprisingly, that it was a model of AR goggles, too. It sat below his brow, just above the eyes, so that it could project augmented reality images directly into his irises.
She glanced at the children once more, who had returned to their playing. A small, insect-sized drone spontaneously launched from the glasses of one kid and hovered in front of them. The trio promptly segued into a series of ridiculous poses as the drone emitted several tiny flashes of light. Rhea performed another Net search and discovered that in addition to point-of-view recording, many AR goggles also came with built-in selfie drones.
Will took the lead and turned onto a wide, central street. Here, many of the lean-tos and cargo containers were open, with kiosks set up in front. Stands showcased various goods, with simple service robots ready to offer assistance. Usually there were humans lounging in the lean-tos behind, babysitting the robots. Sometimes the human proprietors manned the stalls directly.
Though obviously some kind of market district, there were still surprisingly few patrons about. However, a steady stream of transport drones made up for the missing foot traffic. These machines either landed at the different stalls or hovered directly in front of them. Service robots or proprietors would insert packages into the gripping appendages of the drones and the machines would promptly take flight again. There were also a few autonomous, six-wheeled ground vehicles on the roads, these tugging around loads too big for the drones to carry, such as a rotating vat of concrete in one instance, or a bundle of heavy metal pipes in another.
The autonomous drones and ground units would explain the lack of people. Why bother leaving the house when delivery drones could run your errands? With Net-enabled AR glasses, you could