Your parents decided that this walled community in the area north of San Francisco would be a relatively safe place to bring you up. Your physical community is part of a world-wide association that controls its own private network of satellites, super computers, and defense force. Although the individual communities are small and widely dispersed, the clout of the combined association on the Net is such that few dare to interfere with it directly. It protects itself from the outside with a firewall manned by its own private cyber-security force. This unit monitors all traffic entering and exiting the community for items of a dubious ethical, moral, or security-related nature. Like the physical environment, what you see through the Net also has a very limited horizon: a few carefully filtered bits of news, a few old Snoopy cartoons, and unlimited access to the religious tracts of Yawa Suru, the Association's spiritual leader.

You used to be able to converse with your cousins who live across the bay in Berkeley, in a community attached to a different association. Recently there has been some bad blood between the two associations, resulting in communications between the two to be severed. You know that your parents have passed some encoded e-mail back and forth with your aunt and uncle against the rules and at great risk.