LL :: Volume 42 :: LR

But since a shelf is either above or below eye level, how do you see everything in your closet? Crouching down and standing up is tiring. Several options have become popular:

• Rotating two-sided shelves -- they work, but even with the gravity control, things tend to fall over when you flip the shelf. Besides, you still can't see both sides at the same time.
• Transparent two-sided shelves -- the most obvious trick.
• Mobius one-sided shelves -- both sides are used, but are joined continuously at the ends. If you look along the shelf, you see twice as much length as you expect -- extending into the wall -- and that's the "bottom" space. (Slide the shelf left or right if stuff is out of reach.) Problem: trapdoor spatial distortion requires a hypermass manipulator the size of a building. Impractical for home use.
• Vertical two-sided shelves -- you can put stuff on the left side or the right. Preferred solution.

Possible future expansion involves no shelves at all, just a space with zero gravity and a velocity damper, so things stay where you put them. This requires more development, however. Apparently, people really want shelves -- so they can line things up. Organizing free space is too hard to think about.

The recycling bin is an easy solution. Throw in any document, and it scans it (and then quick-burns the original). The bin does text parsing as well as image storage; and it supports the standard library toolset, so the document will be managed just like the rest of your Net space.

"So what?" you ask. "Everyone has a hand scanner." Yes, but the point is not to worry about scanning documents. If you want to save something, throw it in the bin. The paper vanishes, leaving you -- as it were -- with just the text. If you have a pile of documents, heave them all in. (They'll be tagged by date of entry and batch number, as well as your standard indices.) Not everybody wants to go paperless, but this way you can, regardless of the preferences of the people you work with.

Fortunately, the street fails to exist in a short-circuiting sense, rather than becoming an impassable wall. If you try to go around the block in one direction, you turn five corners; in the other direction, you turn only four before returning to your starting point.

(The two alleys that exhibit this effect are opposite each other, at the ninth block of Evlore. This seems to be for fundamental geometric reasons.)

No buildings front on the alley, so nobody seems to be inconvenienced by the situation. The refuse-collection drone programmers are mightily irritated, however.

Anagoraphobia: An enclosing dome of blank stone where the sky should be. (Ribbing or geodesic struts optional.)

Streets of Gold: Adds a bit of subtle sparkle to the ground around you. If you stand still, it shimmers slowly; if you move, your footprints send dim waves across the pavement.

The Heavens Where We Tread: The ground is wiped and replaced by a duplicate of the sky above you. Since distance still cues properly, it's like walking on a flawless mirror -- or just an invisible field-plane in space. The logic manages to plausibly interpolate parts of the sky that aren't immediately visible.

Day-Night-Day: Substitutes a bright blue sky for the sky at night, and stars for the daytime. Links to your rhythmic perception of bright light, not just visual imagery, so your wake/sleep cycle is cued properly. (But they still can't fake shadows effectively, so the bright blue sky isn't a sunny sky, just bright.)