Chimera: What exactly is the job?
Chatgod: Our world is a new one, and we feel our responsibility to our patrons keenly. We have decided that a monitor is required, someone to watch over the flock.
Chimera: The flock?
Chatgod: Many of the visitors to Babel are harmless; most are quite amiable. Several are outstanding yet vulnerable people, about whom we worry. Into this mixture, from time to time, wander the chaotic, the anarchic, and those who are touched with a streak of evil. This worries us, in a world whose format restricts us from being able to lock ourselves away from the undesirable element before it has struck.
I cannot be everywhere, at all times. I require someone I can trust to keep an eye out for problems, to smooth waters, and to report to me. Your handle, the manner I’ve seen you use when posting, and the time zone factor all lead me to believe you would be ideal for this job. I am offering you $15 an hour, seven hours a day, six days a week. In return, I demand secrecy, total secrecy.
You are not to discuss your job with anyone, not your family, not your friends. No one in Babel must know your true role. If you must account to anyone for your employment, you may say that you have been employed by a ‘Net server wishing to expand across the country, and that you do basic editorial work, some beta testing, some writing and content filler. Am I clear on this?
Chimera: Perfectly.
Chatgod: Good. This is a frontier, Chimera, a brave, new world. You are chosen to be a player in a game we are inventing rules to as we go along. Give me your time from 8:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m. and I will give you a new land. The requirements are empathy, compassion, and occasionally ruthlessness. Like a gardener, you must control infestation to allow for growth. You will be a gardener, a shepherd, a watcher. Will you join us?
A little voice inside me was saying “run,” but I wasn’t listening, I was drowning in those icy eyes. “Yes,” I posted.
This seemed to please Chatgod. For a moment, I thought he almost smiled.
Chatgod: Good. Tomorrow, my assistant, Alchemist, will contact you. He has been our sole monitor till now, and will continue while you are off-line. He will guide you in your role, and show you the various steps for watching without being seen. You report to him and he will report to me. Give him your name, address, and banking particulars, and your salary will be electronically placed in your account. Should you need to speak to me, I will always be a posting away. Courage, Monitor, and welcome.
The screen shimmered again, and once more I was looking at Babel as I had been used to seeing it. Although Carlin, one of my favorites, was cracking wise with some pretty funny material, I was too wound up to chat. I exited the room and went to bed, my head spinning.
3
Because I had a night job now, I allowed myself to sleep in. It might have had something to do with last night’s wine, as well. The morning sun had burned away my misgivings about Chatgod’s messianic impulses, and what remained was the exhilarating thought that this job would suit me to a T. Not only could I indulge my preference to sleep in regularly, but I could also continue to teach the on-line distance courses in the afternoons, do chores and even catch an early movie, and be on-line again by 8:00 for my shift as paid Peeping Tom. Of course, this allowed no hope of a social life, but since I wasn’t supposed to talk about my work, what sort of conversation cards could I bring to the table, anyhow?
I’d been finding the great smorgasbord of life pretty sparse these days. I’d broken off a serious long-term relationship at the end of the summer, and soon after that I’d got “sucked into the ’Net” (Denise’s term for my new passion), and the mildly flirtatious, anonymous friendships I’d developed in the chat sites suited my needs for the moment. Chatgod had implied that I would still be able to chat while on the job, so things seemed pretty well perfect.
I was just hoping I would get along with this Alchemist, the guy Chatgod had said would be contacting me this evening. From what I could gather, he was the only monitor at the moment and needed to take some time off. I was wondering how grateful he would be that I’d been hired. Folks tend to get a little turf-possessive at the best of times, and cyber seemed to multiply this effect.
To celebrate my new job, I French-braided my hair, pulled on my faded brown leather bomber jacket, and headed out to stock up on some supplies.
I returned from my expedition with two pounds of ground Kona coffee, the latest Rohinton Mistry novel, some strawberry licorice, and a box of multicolored recipe cards. It occurred to me I might want to start keeping track of some of the chatters. It was a technique I’d devised during my grad student days, and it had stood me in good stead through my freelance career. Mind you, I had a large box under my bed full of little packets of cue cards from old projects bound with elastic, the way some women have stacks of love letters, but that’s the price you pay for not being around when they were passing out eidetic memories.
After a hasty supper of pita stuffed with tomatoes and lettuce, at 7:30 I booted up my computer and, after checking my e-mail, clicked on my browser. I had seven or eight chat sites bookmarked, but my mouse was trained to aim for Babel, and pretty soon I was typing Chimera into the handle box, and choosing an icon to appear beside my name.
I’m not icon-loyal. While I think Kara and Lea probably would as soon leave the house without makeup as enter the chat room without their pink paw prints, and Virago was identified by his lightning stroke, I usually just opted for a dot, and color-jumped, depending on my mood. Tonight I picked red.
The East Coast crowd were out in full force, plus a couple of the Europeans I only had ever seen on weekend afternoons. Eros and Ghandhi posted some hellos to me, which was gratifying, and I blended myself into an ongoing conversation on whether garden gnomes were hideous kitsch or folk art. The topics that came up on-line never failed to amaze me.
I got caught up in things to the extent that the PM from Alchemist surprised me when it showed up at the top of my screen at 8:01. All it said was, “Come to Circle2.” I had to pull down the Help menu to recall how to enter a semi-private room, but soon I was looking at another screen’s wallpaper, this one a textured green. Alchemist was already there.
Chimera: Hi.
Alchemist: Hi there, Randy. I’m Tim. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Chatgod is awfully impressed with you.
I began to wonder what use Chatgod had made of my user ID, the only information he’d required of me. I knew that some of my freelance work was floating about on the ’Net, but I also knew that high-tech searches could turn up a lot more than that. I had a feeling Chatgod probably knew by now what marks I’d got on old piano exams.
Chimera: Well, Tim, I’m pretty raw at all this, I hope I’m not too much bother to train. *smile*
Alchemist: *laugh* You should have seen me at the beginning. Don’t worry, Chimera, you’ll be fine.
Alchemist seemed very friendly and walked me through the various aspects of the monitoring job. With a Root command, I could link into anyone’s PMs. I wasn’t to let anyone in the chat room know I was a monitor. Chatters were told to address concerns to a mythical person named Alvin. I would receive all Alvin’s messages, as did Alchemist and Chatgod, and in this way we could be contacted by the chatters. I learned how to determine a chatter’s ip address, which stood for Internet Provider and was made up of a series of numbers that detailed where the connected terminal was anywhere in the world. I also learned how to do “screen captures” for evidence of bad behavior. This meant that I took a still photo of the active screen for future proof of what had transpired. While logs were kept of all sessions, they were difficult to access, and not all PMs were logged. Alchemist warned me that these took a lot of memory and to use them only when absolutely necessary.
He also gave me a list of chatters to keep a close eye on.
Alchemist: Some of them are troublemakers, some are really too young to handle things on their own, and there are a couple whom Chatgod just wants an eye kept on. I think I’ll let
you decide who’s who, though, so as not to influence your opinion.
I jotted down the names, thinking they’d be the first I made cards for.
Alchemist: And that’s all. If there’s a problem you don’t think you can handle, contact me, any time. It’ll take me a while to change my sleep patterns, so I will probably be up.
So there I was, with a couple of handy-dandy commands, a list of people to watch, and a very nice guy as a co-worker. Could life get any better? Plus, I had strawberry licorice and the means to pay for it.
4
The next evening, Alchemist and I PMed each other for about a half hour before he logged off for the evening. I was feeling pretty edgy about my maiden voyage.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Don’t worry, Randy, you’ll be fine. There’s not too much going down today. Mind you, if Geoff L. doesn’t stay on his meds, you’ll have to toss him tonight! *grin* He was irritating some folks last night with the song lyrics he kept posting in blinking big font.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Thanks, I’ll try to keep things under control.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Just have fun, that’s the main thing. Ciao, Chimera.
I was on my own. I could post my own messages as Chimera, or I could post and receive messages from Alvin if I wished, although Alchemist had advised me to appear as Alvin only if there was trouble, since several women seemed to be enamored of the mythical Alvin and would clog my screen with PMs if I appeared unnecessarily. I could also read everyone’s PMs, which in a way struck me as rather fun.
I have a voyeuristic tendency in me, I’m the first to admit. My favorite time of riding the bus is in the evening, when lights are coming on in houses but curtains aren’t yet closed. I’ll stare into those little lighted boxes and wonder about the people who inhabit them. If I worry about it at all, I put it down to having a healthy anthropological curiosity, rather than any form of prurience. I mean, I’d never even seen a pornographic film, nor did I want to.
Alchemist had advised me to spend some time right away trying out the various commands I needed for monitoring. “If something ugly starts to happen, it happens quickly. You have to be on top of things,” he’d said. So, tonight I was obediently popping in to check on the various “Baby, I want you” messages that chatters were slipping into their conversations.
I’d participated in an interesting chat a couple of days earlier about the whole notion of cyber-relationships. Gandalf, someone I’d never chatted with before, was expounding on the tack that no one on the screen was real to him, that we were mere blips that he could obliterate with the flicking off of his computer. Fluff, one of the Babel regulars, a very intelligent and witty woman, was taking him to task for this attitude. Her reasoning was sound, for her. I really believed that she was, like she said, much the same in real life, or IRL, as she was on-line. To reduce her to a blip without feelings would be really reductive.
And yet, from the looks of things, no one seemed to take the risks of flirting too seriously. Innuendo bounced about like a squash ball in a very small court. Folks batted their eyelashes, bounced into people’s laps with abandon, and administered huge, wet smooches, all couched in asterisks. And those were on the open screen. Behind the scenes, cyber-wolves prowled, looking for women who wanted to participate in cyber-sex, and some of the women were just as craven, offering some outrageous propositions to folks they’d not spent five minutes chatting to. It was an education.
It was about 10:00, and I was making a second pot of coffee when I noticed Venita appear. This was one of the names on the list Alchemist had given me. I was curious as to why he hadn’t filled me in on the reasons for the names being on the list, but had to admit it was fascinating, the same way opening a new mystery novel can be compelling.
Venita was in a bubbly mood and didn’t wait patiently to join a conversation. I wondered why I’d never spotted her in Babel before, but that soon came clear. “I’m usually on at noon” she posted in answer to someone’s question if she was a newbie. “But I managed to wrassle a terminal this evening, and I am ready to meow.”
A couple of the regular stud muffins stated some feelers her way, but Venita had disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared. That was odd. I flicked the Root command on her name and saw immediately where she’d gone. She was neck-deep in PM land with someone named Theseus, someone I’d never seen before.
PM from Theseus to Venita: How’s my hot baby tonight? *evil grin*
PM from Venita to Theseus: Hi yourself, honey. I’ve been sitting here, all by myself, thinking about you . . . *looks deep in his eyes* getting hotter . . . and wetter . . .
PM from Theseus to Venita: Oh baby, touch me.
PM from Venita to Theseus: Baby, I love to touch you . . . to feel you getting bigger . . . and harder . . . *moan*
Sheesh. I was starting to wonder if this was some kind of joke Alchemist was pulling on me, to see if I could cut it as a monitor. I was feeling a bit unclean reading these PMs, but Venita was on the list and the list was my job. I cut and pasted a screen’s worth of PMs and kept watching, pausing for a few minutes to check what was happening on the open screen.
ZZBottom, another of the names on the list, had appeared. I checked who he was talking with and popped in to see some PMs, but he seemed to be focused on the fate of Da Bulls for now, so I returned to Venita and Theseus.
PM from Theseus to Venita: *pulls her onto his lap, straddling him* Have you been a good girl today?
PM from Venita to Theseus: *wriggles in delight* Oh yes, Daddy, a very good girl . . . too good . . . wanna see how good?
PM from Theseus to Venita: *puts his hands under her skirt* You aren’t wearing any panties . . . you haven’t been good today . . . Daddy’s gonna have to spank you.
Oh god. This was a bit too thick for me. I flicked back on to the open screen in time to see Geoff L’s latest musical meanderings. This was something I could deal with. I counted the number of times four-letter Anglo-Saxon words were used as verbs in the lyrics and cleared the screen and locked him out. He’d be back with another handle, as soon as he fought his way out of Netscape limbo, but I could keep an eye out for him, and avoid having to think about kinky Venita and her mysterious satyr.
Oh well, it was a dirty job but, according to Chatgod, someone had to do it.
5
My second solo night went a bit better. Alchemist stuck around for a while, and for some reason it was easier to read the more sappy PMs if there was someone else reading and joking in my ear about them. And he was funny and wittily caustic, without sounding mean. It was as if we were discussing the antics of tumbling, rowdy puppies, rather than oversexed lonely people with computers. For the first time, talking with Alchemist, I could understand the desire to meet up with cyber-friends irl.
I’d read about taking cyber-relationships into real time but had never before felt the urge. To tell you the truth, half the time, I felt as if I was living in a Flann O’Brien novel, where the characters the writer was creating came to life as he slept and rewrote their stories. Until now, I had been content to chat with no push to imagine the people behind the words. I had jotted down Alchemist’s (I couldn’t think of him as Tim) phone number when he had given it to me my first night of monitoring. Maybe one of these days I’d get around to calling him.
ZZBottom came on again shortly after Alchemist had left the building, and I pulled a green card for him. Call it intuition, call it having once shared a house with a compulsive gambler, but there were some things he’d said about the basketball games the night before that made me suspicious.
Sure enough, I caught some PMs that made me realize he was running a loose sort of bookmaking arrangement through Babel. No wonder Chatgod wanted him watched. I jotted down a few of the names he was connecting with. It occurred to me it might be sort of fun to play with lag times, when on occasion the computer program just seemed to hang for hours without refreshing, if he got into horse racing any time soon. There’s nothing like a
player’s inability to place a bet on time to make a bookie go out of business.
It was about 11:30, and I was thanking my lucky stars that Venita and Theseus hadn’t surfaced on my shift, when someone named Sanders appeared in the room. Maia and Vixen had been chatting about sofa cushion binding, but perked up and welcomed him into the fold. He seemed nice, a little diffident, but polite. Since nothing else was happening, I pressed my own handle shift, and Chimera came out to play.
Sanders: Hello Chimera. Are you another regular denizen of these hallowed halls?
Chimera: *smile* Yes, I suppose so. Welcome Sanders. What brings you to our shores?
Sanders: I have heard from far and wide that the best chat to be had happens at Babel. Tonight I had some time to search, and I found my way here. Is it indeed all they speak of? *smile*
Chimera: All and more. Babel is what you make of it, Sanders. *grin*
We all chatted for a bit, and he revealed himself to be extremely well-read, something that always makes me partial. I checked the user lists a few times, but it seemed that only Sanders, Vixen, and I were about, Maia having left earlier because she was in a different time zone.
This was chat at its best. Sipping good coffee, feet tucked up underneath you, exchanging witticisms with an intelligent man. I know someone who once said that everyone on the ’Net is a thirteen-year-old boy until proven otherwise, but I doubted that Sanders had seen thirteen for a while. Few thirteen-year-olds I knew could make a joke about Finnegan’s Wake, for example.
PM from Sanders to Chimera: Tell me something about yourself, to let me picture you accurately, unless that affronts your sensibilities. *smile*
PM from Chimera to Sanders: Dark eyes, dark hair, dark thoughts, long limbs, short attention span. *grin*
PM from Sanders to Chimera: Provocative picture *g* me—hair graying, middle thickening, heart young, mind wandering, eyes green . . .
The Monitor Page 2