The rain in the "Stitched" Seattle didn’t just fall; it hissed as it struck the flickering edges of reality.
I stood in the middle of a street that was half-asphalt and half-memory. To my left, a sleek, self-driving Mag-Lev car was wedged into the front porch of a 1990s split-level ranch house that had manifested out of thin air. To my right, a Starbucks sign was being slowly overgrown by the pixelated, glowing vines of the Nursery.
But I couldn't feel the rain. I couldn't feel the cold.
I looked down at my hands. They were translucent, the color of a weak television signal. I could see the cracked pavement through my palms. By giving my "Physicality" to the Real Elara—the girl in the hospital bed who was now the living battery for four billion souls—I had become a ghost in a world that
