Some Science Fiction. For Variety.

This one is shorter than normal. I am posting two today (yesterday's is actually going to be a thing.)
I actually tend to try and keep these shorter, I'm just really, really bad at it.
So:
There had been, before the technology was actually created, a not insignificant amount of fiction dealing with the creation of perfect virtual worlds. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that very little of it had dealt with the subject well. People, as it turned out, were not at all prepared for the changes it brought.
The big change, as it turned out, was speed. The interface which hooked one up to the virtual world allowed one alter more than just the user’s senses. For example, if you shunted some of the processing outside the user’s natural biological hardware, you could speed up the user’s perception of time a thousandfold or more.
The consequences of such a change were predictable. Being able to do a decade’s worth of research in the afternoon after tea accelerated technological progress beyond all recognition.
As time went by, people who could afford to spent less and less of their time in the real world. Spending a day visiting friends outside of a computer, was not worth losing centuries for.
But there was a problem, and it was the obvious one. Hackers. Even in a broadly post-scarcity economy, people connecting their brains directly to the Internet was a temptation for a thousand reasons, from lust for power, to activism, to simple sadism. And even in a technological wonderland, the universal truth still holds - there is no such thing as perfect security.
Everyone knew a few tricks, of course - when the world is data, why would you not? But it was, ultimately, a matter of degree. People were, understandably, rather keen not to have their minds forcibly altered by strangers on the Internet.
The hackers, although they have communities for the purpose of learning and teaching, don’t tend to be a particularly organised force - in general, they act either on their own, or in small groups based on mutual interest.
Of course, it is traditional that in such a world, the government should be a tyrannical and oppressive force, opposed only by the hackers. But the government is, in general, a rather inoffensive (if outdated) institution.  Beyond the fact that their terms are still measured in real time, they do very little that is of consequence from day to day.
But that is where the Consortia come in. The Consortia are not governments, in the traditional sense. They are voluntary associations, headed by digital security experts, and concerned with data security. They are on the cutting edge of security research, keep backups of people’s minds behind an air gap, and are, in short, a counterbalance to the hackers. Most people are members of several.
People are not, in general willing to be without the protection that the Consortia provide. And access to digital copies of someone’s mind gives a certain amount of obvious leverage. The Consortia, therefore, are able to wield a degree of pseudo-governmental power over their members. Though the government may be for the most part inoffensive, the Consortia have to a large extent divided the population amongst themselves, and wield their power with terrifying efficiency.
The major conflict of the virtual world, then, is between the Consortia, and the hackers they oppose. The majority of people are broadly on the side of the Consortia, but the prevailing opinion would more accurately be described as a combination of apathy and an undirected loathing for the whole business.
But the virtual world is not the only one with which we need be concerned. For though the majority of resources are no longer limited, the development of an entirely human-free economy has been somewhat slower than expected. The building and maintenance of the high technology required to allow the majority of the world to live in a virtual world requires a certain number of workers who are not plugged into said virtual world.
Then, there is the group who are for moral or ideological reasons opposed to spending their entire lives in an artificial world. They are a diverse group, but few in number - very few people are willing to give up eternal life for principle, nor to forgo the numerous other advantages the virtual world offers.
Naturally, there is a certain degree of… animosity… between the eternal, godlike creatures who spend their lives in a world of their own creation, and those who are still stuck in the mundane world of matter and flesh. And, despite the security that people are sure to have around their physical bodies, more and more attacks are carried out against the machinery that houses the worlds in which the majority of the world.