One of Us by Michael Marshall Smith

a few valiant creatures—bugs, probably—who have the courage to struggle through whatever nemesis we have wrought on Mother Nature, some alien race will land and do a spot of archaeology. And all they'll find, particularly in coastal areas, is layers of mirrors made from reclaimed floorboards with homespun wisdom etched on them with a soldering iron, or pockets of driftwood sculptures of fishing boats that rock when pushed, and the aliens will nod sadly among themselves and admit that this was a civilization whose time had indeed come.
    I quickly located Tid, the guy who'd parked my car, and gave him the usual ten-spot. I like to think this is a voluntary arrangement, showing great generosity on my part, but I suspect that without it I'd never find out where my car had been put. Tid's a small, disreputable-looking man who seems to live solely on M&Ms, but we'd always gotten along well enough. Money's like that: promotes straightforward relationships. This time I slipped him an extra twenty, and asked him to do me a favor, and then ran down to the parking lot under the building.
    The car was parked over on the far side, nestled into a dark corner. This was perfect for me, because I wasn't going anywhere. I got inside, set the alarm, and locked the doors.
    Most people go on the Net via their homes, obviously. Though my account was now billed to the apartment, I still had the rig in the car because over the last couple of years the car had remained the most stable environment in my life. I'd bought it after my first couple of months' work for REMtemps, and had it fully kitted out. As I accumulated more money, I upgraded and tweaked to the point where even I couldn't remember where all the wires were. Ripping the rig all out and reconstructing it in the apartment was one of those things I never quite got around to, like throwing away pens that didn't work properly. Or getting a life.
    The console in the car plays images directly into the brain, so I don't have to wear VR goggles. All I had to do was flip the switch, close my eyes, and be transferred to the other side.
    The light changed, and instead of being underground I was in my standard driveway home page, facing out toward a leafy residential district of smalltown America. I put my foot down and pulled out into the road. My netcar looks like a souped-up '59 Caddy, complete with retro fins and powder-blue paint job, but the engine characteristics are bang up-to-date. I don't mind driving fast on the Net, because of the in-built anti-collision protocol—in fact, sometimes I speed straight at other people just for the pure hell of it. It's especially fun if you come across one of those die-hards who refuse to get with the new metaphor, and insist on trawling the Net on surfboards. You see them occasionally, old hippies scraping along the road on boards equipped with little skateboard wheels, complaining about the traffic and muttering about the good old days of browser wars.
    I turned left out of my street and tore down the trunk lines for a while, then hung a right and cut up into the personal domain hills on the other side. You have to slog through a lot of cyber suburbia these days—family sites full of digitized vacation videos and mind-numbing detail on how little Todd did in his tests—before you get out into the darker zones. It used to be that you could type in a URL and leap straight to anyone's home page. But when they folded out into three-dimensional spaces and started to look like real homes—and their owners started spending actual time there—things changed. They wanted you to walk up the path and ring a doorbell like a civilized person. With most other places you can still just jump straight to the general district, but not where I was going—and the jams at the jump links are often so bad, you're usually better just putting your foot down and going the long way around. Thus what had started as an alternative reality ended up just being another layer of