What is the setting in the novel, Net Force?

The most important settings in Net Force are found on the World Wide Web: Cyberspace wasn't really like the old movies that had first depicted it.... But virtual reality constructs—VRCs—did use imagery to help a webwalker navigate the web.

The images could be almost anything a user wanted. There were hundreds of standard commercial overlays, from cities with freeways, to old Western towns, to space flights.

How the VRCs interconnect can be complex. For instance, when two people meet on the web, one could be using images of freeways to represent the programs and files he is using, as well as to represent his movements from one web site to another, while the other user could be using images of space flight for the same purposes. There apparently can be a brief lag time as the VRCs translate actions into images suited to each user's construct. Most of the time in Net Force the construct is that of freeways, with both Net Force investigators and youngsters such as Tyrone Howard driving automobiles (representations of programs for moving among web sites) in pursuit of the master criminal whose key mistake is to use the same automobile to represent his movements as he commits his crimes rather than devising new images that might let him sneak past the Net Force unrecognized.