Karyn opened up a web browser window in her shared space, and surfed to this world's Google. She scowled at the slow response time. "Hmm. I got google.com to open, but doesn't it seem kind of slow to you?"
Jon pondered a moment, and then smiled. "Ohh, I bet it's blazingly fast here, but we handicapped it."
"Huh?" wondered Karyn.
"We slowed down outside time with the ARDs, remember? We're clicking and surfing a thousand times faster than we normally do, and we're perceiving the netlag as taking a thousand times longer. It's really cool that we didn't have to wait..." Jon opened a calculator in his workspace and punched in some numbers. "...16 minutes or more for that page to open."
"Oh! Well, when you put it that way, I guess I can handle a little lag," she replied, mollified.
"Yup." Jon nodded. "Anyway, what are you looking for?"
"I need to find out what 'dressed up nice' means in this world," replied Karyn. "It might not be the same thing as Home."
Jon was impressed by how quickly Karyn navigated her way through the fashion sites targetted at their age group, despite the laggy response times. She might not do the fashion-plate thing normally, but there was no question she knew how. She expanded her shared workspace to cover the entire wall above Jon's bed. Soon, she had dozens of pages from catalogs and teen magazine sites open, and was simultaneously displaying several clips from current popular TV shows.
Karyn wondered aloud, "How are those clips playing normal speed if we're going 1000 times too fast? Shouldn't they be stuck just like Billy is outside?"
Jon already knew the answer. "They're playing using the computer chips built into our heads, which are also sped up by the ARDs."
Karyn nodded. "Makes sense. Well anyway, I think I got the answer I was looking for..."
