by Bruce Bethke
UNCLE DAVE
Mom’s main squeeze when I was about fourteen years old. Of absolutely no biological relation to me, my sister, or anyone else I know.
GOOD DEAL, DEFINED
Actually, “Uncle Dave” boosted the TV off the tailgate of a delivery truck in a lonely alley, and I always thought it pretty tacky that he turned around and sold it to Mom.
* FLASHBACK * FLASHBACK * FLASHBACK *
April 22, 2004. Jack Burroughs emerges from the basement of the University Supercomputer Center after pulling an all-nighter, groggy from lack of sleep and astonished to find the campus mall full of Tree Huggers holding a rally. “It’s Earth Day!” he realizes with a start, “and more importantly, some of those Eco-Bunnies are really cute!” In a wholesome, long-haired, tie-dyed, blue-jeaned barefoot braless organic granola crystal-clutching New & Improved Age kind of way, if you’re into that sort of thing.
“I could be,” Jack decides as he watches a particularly perky pair of nipples bounce past. Seized by inspiration, he dashes back to his off-campus apartment, changes clothing, and returns to hang out at the fringe of the rally, hoping to attract female attention by the clearly brilliant strategy of wearing a t-shirt that says, “Save a tree. Eat a beaver.”
Within minutes, he is surrounded by an angry mob of Rodents’ Rights Association members, who tear the shirt from his back and threaten him with reeducation through cranial bone rearrangement. Jack is saved from injury only by the timely intervention of the campus police, who immediately handcuff him, throw him into a squad car, and drag him off to face the Hateful Speech Tribunal. Charged with Insufficient Diversity Appreciation, Advocating Violence Against Semiaquatic Rodent-Americans, and Sarcasm Directed At A Totally Humorless Group, by four o’clock Jack has been expelled from school, ejected from campus, and fired from his graduate research assistantship post. His student loan is transferred to a collection agency, his workfare contract is sold to a cutrate temp agency, and his home county Community Service Board is notified that Jack is now eligible for mandatory volunteer service.
All of which pisses Jack’s advising professor, Dr. Avram Mehta, off to no end, as Jack was actually working on an algorithm the professor had already illegally sold to three private-sector firms. Now Dr. Mehta will have to finish out the project with—[shudder]—undergrads.
CABLE TV
In 1998, satisfied that everyone who was going to get cable or a satdish had already done so, the FCC decreed that all televisions sold in the US were henceforth required to have a PAWNSHOP chip. Similar to an EtherNet transponder, this chip transmits the TV’s ID code and serial number back up the cable/satlink to the host system whenever the TV set is powered up.
At first pitched to the public as an antitheft device, then as a Nielsen-type survey instrument, PAWNSHOP is now rumored to have latent telnet multimedia capabilities the likes of which make civil libertarians wake up screaming for their mothers.
Fortunately, my Mom’s set is a 1997 model.
Oh, and did I mention my own ancient analog phone answering machine? There were three messages waiting. One was an ear-splitting beep from someone trying to send a fax to my number by mistake. The second was a computer-generated telemarketing call from a dating service, and it sounded like their machine and my machine really hit it off.
The third was a message from Gunnar. “Remember, the club. Tonight. 2300 hours. Be there. Aloha.”
I hit the erase button and didn’t give it another thought.
ANSWERING MACHINE
No, this is not another example of my fascination with retro tech. It’s more a matter of my having a mom who’s seen Colossus: The Forbin Project one too many times, and thus has forbidden me to leave my computer (and its perfectly good voice/fax/data filter) turned on when I’m not home. She’s afraid that one day it will sit up and say, “Cogito, ergo I’m going to take over the world.”
5: DISASTER SWINGS AND MISSES
“Wake up, Jack.”
Huh, what? I sat up with a jolt. Oh no, not again.
A yawn forced its way out. I blinked a few times, shook my head, and took a bleary-eyed survey of my situation.
Yep. Again. I’d dozed off facedown on the Formica, a cold and greasy quadrant of last Saturday’s leftover pizza still clutched tightly in my right hand.
“Wake up, Jack.”
Just beyond the pizza, a can of (no doubt) flat and warm soda. And a few inches beyond that, the HO scale boxcar I’d been working on when I had my little pang of conscience, popped Dress For Conformity into my ReadMan, and by pure coincidence set the boxcar aside to let the glue on the truss rods dry.
“Wake up, Jack.”
Speaking of my ReadMan, where was it? I let my gaze drift leftward until the ReadMan swam into focus, a few points off the port bow. It was in screen-saver mode: little Klingon warships chased adorable animated Disney characters across the flatscreen and blasted them into smoking, charred skeletons.
“Wake up, Jack,” the ReadMan said.
“Shut up,” I answered. It shut up. The flatscreen blanked, the drive hummed, and then it displayed “Chapter 7: Dressing To Fool Your Boss Into Thinking You’re Normal.” I must have spent upwards of thirty nanoseconds evaluating the strength of my desire to continue where I’d dozed off. “Screw it,” I said, as I dropped the slab of cold pizza on the table and wiped my greasy fingers on my pants.
VOICE CONTROL
Sounds cool, don’t it? Now imagine the university library in the week before finals, with 500 undergrads all muttering to their textbooks—and the books are answering.
“Bad command,” the ReadMan answered.
Ah, the wonder of voice control. “Close files,” I said as my mouth tried to get out another yawn.
“Bad command,” the ReadMan insisted.
The gadget wasn’t actually intelligent, of course. It just had rudimentary voice recognition and a rather limited set of verbal commands. I leaned in close to the audio pickup and enunciated very clearly. “Close the motherbiting files.”
“The motherbiting files are not open,” it answered with machine earnestness. “Would you like to review a list of the files now open?”
“No.” I gave it a few seconds to make sure it accepted that command, then said, “Close files.”
This time it liked the command and buttoned up everything relating to Dress For Conformity. When I was satisfied all was going well, I added, “Shut down.”
It paused. “Password?”
My own little wrinkle, thank you. Everyone passwords their startup processes. I also password my shutdowns. If you want to know why, ask me sometime about the semester Theta Chi fraternity had their pledges running through the university library shouting “SHUT DOWN!”
The ReadMan was still waiting for my password.
“Ken sent me.”
End of conversation. It beeped politely, ejected the CD and closed its operational programs. The last thing it said was a sample of Porky Pig: “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”
I leaned back in my chair, indulged in a slow stretch and yawn, and happened to catch a glimpse of my bedside alarm clock.
10:47.
“Shit!” Whatever sleepiness I had left, it vanished. I bounced out of the chair, ran to my desk, and whipped the dust cover off my computer. I’d had no idea it was this late. If I’d gone and slept through the few hours of actual fun in my life…
A large hairy spider was sitting on the keyboard. I slapped it away and jabbed the power button. The ceiling lights dimmed to brown; twin cooling fans whined to life like an F-21 getting ready for takeoff. “Warning!” the computer said. “Primary CPU boot in fifteen seconds!” I yanked on my lead apron, dropped into the bucketseat before the console, strapped on my videoshades and pulled on my audio headset. The computer was counting down the last seconds to primary boot. “Five! Four!”
Audio on! Video synced! All subsystems go!
“Two! One!”
Virtual tires smoking, cooling turbin
es screaming, the primary CPU boot fired, reality melted and ran down the walls, and I was blasting up out of my mother’s basement and onto—
The Information Superhighway.
* INFODUMP * INFODUMP * INFODUMP *
Let us take a moment here, while Jack is playing virtual chicken with a virtual UPS truck in the virtual right lane and rapidly running out of virtual merging ramp, to talk about what life on the InfoBahn is really like. Sure, you’ve read about it. Or you’ve seen it depicted in film and video. No doubt, you’ve even used the Net gateway on your online service to spend a few brief and expensive minutes in one of the virtual Potemkin villages, like VirWorld, or BitBurg.
The reality is a lot messier than that.
First off, you’ve got to understand that there’s this thing called bandwidth. No matter how cool the Net architecture is—and trust me, Net architecture is a way cool topic that can put most people to sleep faster than you can say “Transmission Control Protocol with Internet Protocol”—the amount of data that can be pushed through the Net in real time depends on how “wide” the data channel is. To do Net virtual reality in real time you need, at minimum, a bandwidth as wide as a TV channel. That’s wide.
Second, you’ve got to understand that the speed of light is not just a plot complication in a Larry Niven novel: when you get into the Net, it’s real, and translates to about 11.87 inches per nanosecond. You can actually measure continental drift by tracking the week-to-week changes in your New York-to-London Netpost times. (Try this at home, kids!)
Now, what these two ideas together mean to you, Joe Mundane, is that there is no way in low orbit or on earth that your commercial online service can be delivering genuine interactive multiplayer virtual reality across a wide-area network in real time—at least, not at the rates you’re paying. Instead, when you pop into BitBurg, what you’re actually getting is the base scenario downloaded to your local machine. (Why do you think they put you through that stupid and tedious “red carpet” routine? To keep you distracted while the download is in progress.) Once that’s done, all you really get in real time is text, primitive sprite movement commands, and telephone-grade audio.
What I get is another matter entirely.
But before we explore that, there’s one last point to remember about the Information Superhighway: it was built by the government, for the purpose of furthering commerce. Which means, just like real-world freeways, the parts of the system connecting suburbs to infomalls and government agencies are clean, well-marked, and well-policed. As long as you’re content to stick to the mundane routes and be a good little consumer, the Net holds no surprises.
Go wandering off into the wild parts—the sections that were built before the Feds stepped in—and you are just begging to get mugged.
Meanwhile, on the Virtual Freeway: some asshole yuppie in a shiny new Tempura was giving more attention to his phone call than his keyboarding, so I waited for a hole in packet traffic and then flipped him the bird as I blew off his doors. No quick lane change around a feed-capped redneck in a plodding IBM 4990 loaded with COBOL files; then a heart-stopping stab of the brakes and a sudden swerve right to avoid rear-ending some old balding hippie in a Mac 512. The geezer mouthed obscenities at me as I blew past. I flipped him the bird, too, poured on the electrons, and kept an eye peeled for NetCops.
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
As should be obvious, this description is a visual metaphor for navigating the Net using virtual reality tools. For those readers who are into 10BaseT, fiberoptic packet switching, and the Motorola Iridium satellite network, I have prepared a separate) document entitled, “How I Did It,” If you’re the sort of wanker who really gets off on a good man page, order your copy today by calling 1 -900-GET-A-LIFE.
Another glance at my real-time clock. 10:51. Shit, shit, shit. Gunnar’s messages had said to meet him at 11:00, and he was not the type to hang around waiting. I was cutting it way too close this time. Maybe…
I looked up in time to realize I was heading into the MECCnet interchange, and as usual, there were a bunch of junior-high gremlins dropping bricks from the overpass. (Herein lies the true beauty of doing Net virtual reality the way I do it. With wild high-compression algorithms, autonomous scan whiskers, and radical Netspam filtering routines; for lack of a better word I cheat my way around the bandwidth limit and see the unseen, hear the inaudible, know the unknowable. Actually, it’s rather a lot like doing Slaughter in audit mode.)
Which is to say, I spotted the little bastards before they spotted me, and dodged. Checking my rearview scan, I had the momentary pleasure of seeing the old hippie in the Mac get creamed by a rain of virtual cinderblocks and bowling balls, and blasted back to the real world in a flaming, cartwheeling, system crash. That poor, deluded, obsolete fool, trying to brave the superhighway in that crate…
SPAM
Self-Propelled Advertising Material. Originally used to mean an ad disguised as a legitimate Net-mail message, but now taken to mean all of that advertising crap your online service pipes into your computer while you’re connected. Filter out the spam, and you can virtually double your effective bandwidth.
10:52. I’d made it from the InfoBahn to the University Supercomputer Center in record time. Now the tricky part: I screeched to a stop in the USC online library, morphed into an undergrad, and tunneled into the administrative structure. Down, down—the U opens thousands of undergrad accounts every year, so security is pretty loose—down further, until at last I fell out of virtual reality and was working with plain text and my manual keyboard. Then a quick telnet over to the math department, where I poked around their system until I found an open outbound line, and an immediate telnet back to USC.
And voila. Jack Burroughs vanished. Spoofed away. Lost in the switchbacks; totally untraceable. What emerged from the depths of the University Supercomputer Center was something new, something beautiful, something virtually perfect.
Something named MAX_KOOL.
And now, kids, you know who I really am.
I walked out of the online library, climbed onto my virtual Harley-Davidson UltraGlide, and gave the starter a kick. She fired up with a sound like testosterone-soaked thunder, then settled down into a low, throbbing idle. I pulled on my black studded datagloves, checked my thick black hair in the handle bar mirror (it was perfect, of course), turned up the collar of my black silk shirt, and tugged back the sleeve of my black leather jacket, to check my (nonblack) virtual Rolex: 10:54.
Plenty of time.
Sunglasses on; cigarette lit; tilt the bike to the right to gel the kickstand up, then I stepped her down to first gear, gave the throttle a sharp twist, and popped the clutch. The back tire screamed with smoking delight.
MAX_KOOL was back on the InfoBahn. With places to go, people to meet, and most importantly, an appointment al 11:00, in the Marketplace of Ideas, with an arms dealer named Gunnar.
The Marketplace of Ideas is big. Way big. The biggest damned thing there is on the InfoBahn, short of BusinessWorld or FedNet itself. You can see it virtual miles away: huge discount price structures sprawling out across the datascape, soaring vertical marketing schemes reaching up to disappear in the haze of high-fashion advertising, and everywhere the banners, billboards, and spam, all trumpeting that world famous slogan:
“Just shut up and shop.”
The approach lanes were clogged with mundanes and newbies, as usual, all puttering over from CornholeNet or some such place for a night of online consumption and lowbrow entertainment. I stepped my nice factor down to zero and took the Harley right over the top of ‘em. Reminded me of kicking the fence at a turkey farm, the way they all stuck their heads up and looked around, gobbling to each other, dimly aware that something had happened. I rode into the parking structure and jumped off: the bike went around the corner by itself, up on the kickstand by itself, shut the motor off by itself.
Me, I checked my hair again, adjusted my black shades, and strolled on into Heaven.
M
UD
Multi-User Dimension: a chunk of virtual space in which users can meet and interact in real time.
That’s the name of a virtual nightclub, on the fourth level. Heaven. Most mundanes, they think the Marketplace of Ideas has only three levels: discount online shopping and “free” stuff on the first level, expensive online shopping and children’s games on the second level, and weird adult crap like Sexus and the Ranting Room on the third level. Of course, even the Marketplace sysops probably still think their infomall is a shining example of structured code and geometric expansion. I’ll bet it’s never even occurred to them that some of the loonies from .edu might sneak over, pry open one of their virtual broom closets, and take a ninety-degree turn up into non-Euclidean pace, to build a private, outlaw, MUD.
The result being, the mundanes can see the door to Heaven—just like they’re sort of dimly aware that I’m passing them by in the virtual hallways on the lower levels—but they don’t know what the door is, and they don’t know the knock.
I did. I knocked.
A big gorilla—literally, a big cartoon gorilla in a bowler hat; we lifted him out of some old movie—slid open a peep hole. “What’s da passwoid?”
I tilted my head back, took the cigarette from my mouth, and blew smoke in his face. “Ken sent me.”
The gorilla snarled, but opened the door. I stepped through, into the a-grav tube, and ascended.
To Heaven.
SMOKE
Actually, that pervasive haze in Heaven is not just atmosphere. Given the number of people who can be there, and the fact that they’re all moving (some on light-speed delays of .3 seconds or more), the thick and smoky “air” is critical to keeping your view point data down to a level that can be transmitted over the Net in real time. The way people seem to “swim into focus” at you is not an affectation; it’s an artifact of the way the Net VR routines download more detailed visual data as you approach a person or thing.