Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff

dreaming?”
    â€œNo. It’s like what I thought you said virtual reality was like: like being wide awake in an imaginary place, with other people. But”—I pointed at the goggles—“it’s nothing like that, so now I’m not sure how to describe it.”
    But Julie, not the least bit discouraged, said: “You should let me introduce you to my partners.”
    Despite growing up in the bush, the Manciple brothers were no strangers to high technology. Their parents’ homestead was powered by a solar array during the summer months, and there had been a computer in the house as far back as 1975, when Dennis and Irwin’s father had ordered a build-it-yourself Altair kit through the mail. The brothers grew up with the Altair and the series of ever more sophisticated personal computers that came after it, and passed a lot of long winter nights programming—or sometimes, in Irwin’s case, tinkering with the innards of the older machines. Then in 1993, a shareware adventure game called The Stone Ship that the brothers had coauthored (Irwin came up with the story, while Dennis wrote most of the actual code) earned enough money to convince them to turn professional. They left Alaska and came south to seek their fortunes in the software industry, choosing Seattle over Silicon Valley out of fear that California would be too warm.
    Julie met them through her job at the physical therapist’s, where Dennis came for help with his back problems. By that point, late 1994, the brothers had been in Seattle for over a year with nothing to show for it. In spite of The Stone Ship ’s success, they’d been unable to interest any of the established software houses in their ambitious follow-up project, and having spent most of their money, they were starting to think about quitting and going home. But Julie, who was having her own career difficulties (she and the physical therapist had been dating for a while, and now they weren’t, and she was about to be fired and evicted in the bargain), talked them into founding the Reality Factory instead, taking her on as business manager, chief fund-raiser, and unofficial CEO.
    The brothers’ virtual-reality system was called Eidolon. Like Metropolis of Doom , it used a set of 3-D goggles, although, having been custom-designed by Irwin, the Eidolon goggles were more comfortable to wear and didn’t fog up so quickly. There was also a “data glove” that told the Eidolon software what your right hand was doing, whether you were pointing or waving or grabbing.
    It was better than Metropolis of Doom . The graphics were full-color, with solid, textured shapes rather than wireframe outlines. Instead of riding on a conveyor belt, you had complete freedom of movement—you could spin around, float up and down, slide backwards and forwards and sideways, all by gesturing with the data glove. And nobody was shooting at you: instead of a war-torn city, the world in the Eidolon goggles was a sort of playroom with toys, like a bouncing ball you could toss or bat around, and a magic mushroom that, if you poked at it, made violets and dandelions sprout up out of the floor.
    It still wasn’t anything like the house, though. The graphics were better but still more cartoon-like than real, and though you could see things, you couldn’t really touch them: poking the magic mushroom was like poking air. You couldn’t smell the flowers, or taste the water in the rubber-duck pond. The first time I tried Eidolon, you couldn’t even hear the ball bouncing—the goggles had stereo earphones built in, but Irwin hadn’t got them working yet. And the “free” movement could still be annoyingly sluggish or jerky, especially if you tired out the computer by making it draw too many dandelions.
    Also, I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of the whole thing was.
    â€œThe point is whatever the end-user wants the point to