Paul’s darkness is gone. In its place, he feels a kind of perfect light, bright and warm; a perfect idea—a perfect memory. The solipsistic visualization begins to shudder, but Paul, unperturbed, can’t help but laugh. There’s not a cloud in the sky.
GLOSSARY
Blue Zone: An exclusive urban area that dominates most of the old Los Angeles downtown and extends up the coast to as far as Malibu. Its eastern-most point is Deer Canyon Park in the Anaheim Hills. The Blue Zone is home to Outland subscribers, California’s elite, and tech-progressives. Residents of the Blue Zone are required to pay cypulchre maintenance fees as well as for the additional security services provided by the Outland Corporation’s Sentinels.
CLOUD: A wirelessly projected linear and non-linear virtual space where all of a user’s senses are available, with the possibility for cross-over and synesthesia. It is disparate from standard cyberspace and early-millennial VR in a number of ways. First, a user’s mind defines the [non]space as much or more than the CLOUD’s intrinsic programming and algorithms do. Second, the only limitations on the CLOUD’s size are virtual and hard memory; thus, it grows with every subsequent synchronized user. Third, it is far more centralized than cyberspace or the Net, granted the necessity of cypulchres and Outland broadcast towers. (The Outland Corporation can turn off the CLOUD and rain-out all of the subscribers in a matter of minutes, meaning heavy regulation is always a possibility.) Finally, minds and memories are plastic in the CLOUD, meaning that a user can track forwards or backwards through perceived time, re-experiencing past events or reliving another person’s life. Cyberspace, conversely, has the tendency to be linear and forward thinking—with forward acceleration serving as the only subversion of natural cognitive law.
Cypulchre: A bomb-proof tower that serves a dual purpose: house CLOUD subscribers’ memices, and simultaneously broadcast subscribers to the CLOUD and the CLOUD to subscribers. Some cypulchres in southern California also house the comatose bodies of long-term subscribers who’ve paid ahead for storage and nutrient injections. The term ‘cypulchre’ is an unofficial neologism (combining cyber and sepulchre), used by the masses in reference to these towers. The Outland Corporation, on the other hand, simply refers to these structures as Outposts.
Evap: An Outland CLOUD-subscriber who has synchronized with their off-board memory (their memex or exo-cortex) and an Outland broadcast tower, and consequently had their mind and active avatar conveyed to the CLOUD.
Heavplast: A super-strength polypropylene that is as resilient and as durable as steel, with a high melting point. Since it is malleable at the time of production, it can easily be extruded via a printer. It was mass-produced during the War of the Americas as a means of quickly building front-line bunkers and forward operating bases.
MAGLEV (stabilizers): Hybrid thrusters that simultaneously propel a vehicle using magnetic levitation and stabilize it with polarized energy bursts.
MAT-Trans (a.k.a. “Spirit Train”): Outland-owned and –operated transport ships that carry people and materials to and from cypulchres across California. The average size: 50 metres long with a wingspan of 12 metres. MAT-trans are capable of vertical take-off, and can stay airborne for up to four hours with a single charge.
Memex: An exo-cortex or remote brain. An individual’s brain could not possibly store all of the information encountered via CLOUD immersion, so a secondary storage unit is necessary. A memex, stored in an Outland cypulchre, once used, cannot be abandoned, on account of the difficulty in separating virtual cognition and data.
Monocle: A subtle, semi-subcutaneous, wearable computer with an optical display. Wearers can communicate with the Net, with other users, or with their personal computer interface, via language commands, eye movement, and intuition (the Monocle’s subdermal EEG electrodes decipher intent and translate it into code).
Noosphere: Teilhard de Chardin believed that, by participating and engaging in increasingly complicated and networked interactions with other human minds, we are ushering in a new stage of [planetary] evolution. Chardin also posited that we are developing, as a society, towards the Omega Point—the goal of history, and the zenith of consciousness. Within the context of Outland Technologies, noosphere denotes a hybrid mental- and cyber-space where minds can commune without the hindrances of linearity or subjective barriers. See also: CLOUD.
Outland Corporation: A multinational technology and communications company based in Los Angeles, California. Its estimated market cap is $500Bn. It was founded by Alduous Winchester, who willed the company to his son, Niles Winchester III. Unlike his father, Niles Winchester III committed Outland to cooperating with the US Military on a wide variety of secret projects, in exchange for monopoly protection from the federal government. Outland manages 90% of the southwestern United States’ wireless infrastructure, as well as all of the CLOUD tech in the region.
PIT: After San Diego was transformed into a pivot-point for the US Military, and Chula Vista was evacuated owing to blowback from the War of the Americas, refugees fled northwards. Owing to politics and paranoia, a great deal of these refugees were anchored in eastern Los Angeles, where low-income housing and poorer neighbourhoods were systematically converted into refugee camps. Over a period of fifteen years, the camp’s population quadrupled, but was prevented from expanding by partition walls designed to segregate the refugee population from the rest of the city. Instead, the refugees and those interned in the camps, built their communities into the side of the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the earth. The place name “PIT” initially stood for “People in Transition,” but has long-since been adopted as a new word, independent of its original meaning, preferred, instead, for its Biblical meaning.
PIT rat: A radicalized resident of the PIT.
Rain-out: An Outland CLOUD-subscriber who has been forcefully desynchronized, whether as a result of their subversion of noospheric law, their failure to pay synchronization and broadcast charges, their tampering with CLOUD or PILOT tech, or their loss of insurance coverage.
RIM: Those sectors, besides the PIT, where the majority of residents are not Outland subscribers. These areas are taxed and policed differently, and are populated by upper and lower middle-class reactionaries and moderates. A porous border separates the RIM from the Blue Zones, comprised of checkpoints and magnetic markers.
RIM tick: A radicalized resident of the RIM.
Map of the Greater Los Angeles Area
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