by Kirton, Bill
When he got home again, his first impulse was to pull the plug on all of it, wind up the company and let other MMORPG creators be responsible for fracturing daily reality. The technology was advancing ever more rapidly and they would soon be able to go even further than the levels of realism Joe had created. The clumsy use of the keyboard as the interface between manipulators and avatars had long since been replaced by speech and headsets. Many programmes had dispensed with hardware altogether. But the various dimensions were moving closer together and even overlapping. Some headsets were already using electroencephalography to chart brainwave patterns; wearers only had to think of doing something and the avatar would respond. Joe had already written algorithms which could identify and react to neural activity. Players could clip on biofeedback sensors so that the program could respond to their pulse rates, stress levels and biometrics.
It amounted to the avatar becoming a genuine extension of the person, the sort of fusion that Joe had frequently seen between avatars and their manipulators. Already, beta versions were out there in which avatars could interpret their creators’ gestures, facial expressions and vocal modulations and react accordingly. There was one on trial which used ultrasonic waves to give the sensation of pressure, which meant in essence that you could touch your three-dimensional, holographic avatar.
The more Joe thought of it, the clearer it became that avatars were the real reality. They had none of the constraints of mortality, were not prone to degeneration, needed nothing to survive except an electrical current. He remembered how he’d been affected by the letter about brunch, and also how he’d enjoyed films such as Tron and Avatar, in which the human actors actually became avatars. Joe was being forced to reconsider his whole scale of values. His original idea had been to liberate people from the limits of their ordinary lives, but he’d only managed to achieve that by suppressing the liberty of the avatars themselves. The co-existence of the two alternative dimensions he’d identified became more and more disorientating.
The logical outcome of the decision he’d made, during his stay in the Vermont cabin, to focus exclusively on AD in isolation began to form one day in May. After breakfast he put on his headset and logged on. He wanted to try to rediscover the special thrills of his early days as Ross, so he went back to the ranch he’d originally built and the things he’d installed in it. Everything was as he’d left it and it brought a nostalgic smile to Joe’s lips.
He harnessed his unicorn, rode it through the lava flow, left it tied up outside the Sistine Chapel while he ducked inside to perform a caesarean operation on a wolf he’d met the previous evening in Chicago. It didn’t go smoothly but the wolf was grateful. On the way back to his ranch on the plateau, he stopped briefly to release a tree elf from a rock in which she’d been locked by a guy with one silver wing sticking out of his forehead. She was grateful, too. The day had started well and Joe’s seemingly perpetual anxiety was eased by the familiarity of it all and the glowing memories of those early excitements.
When he got to the ranch, his neighbour Gerry, a homosexual giraffe whose aspirations to be a DJ had so far been wrecked by the fact that he had no microphone or deck, was outside, doing his Tai Chi.
‘Hey Gerry,’ said Ross.
The giraffe ignored him as he moved his neck slowly from one side of his garden to the other. Ross stepped back as it hovered over him and, yet again, plummeted off his footpath to the floor of the ravine six thousand feet below. He always used to do that. Back then, it had been tedious; now it just made him smile. He got up, dusted his jacket down and flew back up. For maybe the hundredth time, he made a mental note to move the path away from the edge.
Inside, Derek, his stone gargoyle, was sweeping and dusting as usual. His welcome greeting sounded hollow.
‘Good morning, master. What is your pleasure?’
In those early days, before voice activation, Ross had smiled as he saw the words come up on the screen. Then the boredom had set in and he’d given him various answers.
‘World domination.’
‘Sex with a mushroom.’
‘Peanut butter with nipples.’
Derek had no sense of humour. His reply never varied.
‘The master has excellent taste.’
But he did keep the place spotless. All Ross’s original BDSM machines were lined up against the wall of the dining room, gleaming, ready for the day when he’d have someone strapped to each one for his proposed penetration party. All but one were still unused. On the seventh one along, Reggie smiled and tried to wave but, as usual, his smile froze as blood oozed from his claw where it chafed against the steel cuff which held him upside down in the frame. Dear old Reggie. Still there, after all this time.
In the real world Reggie was a fund manager, trading millions of dollars every day. In AD he was a dark grey rat. He was one of the first people Ross had met when he logged on to check the freedoms it offered. Reggie, on the other hand, had joined to be a slave. He was disappointed to find that Subs and Doms treated one another as equals. His desire was to be someone’s property, to be degraded as often and as viciously as possible. He’d begged Ross to collar him but Ross had refused – which had made him even more attractive to Reggie. Eventually, to shut him up, Ross had strapped him to the sphincter excavator and left him there. Ross couldn’t even remember how long he’d been there. Reggie only logged off when he had to focus on a particularly important contract or fill in his tax returns. Ross went up to him, gave the excavator the extra three turns that he always used to in the past and listened to him scream. But somehow, the fun had gone go out of it. He’d seen so many things since that had seemed interesting that it felt tame, pointless.
He logged off and, with the sky a brilliant blue and the sun warm, he decided to walk to work instead of taking the transit. It turned out to be a revelation. He knew there were some regions of AD that scared people. Apart from the obvious places, where the most extreme Gorean rituals were enacted, or where colleges had set up psychological experiments to induce paranoia and generally dislocate visitors’ psyches, there were locations where war was perpetual, where innocent visitors were trapped and tormented by grunting demons. There were even places of sweetness and light where fairies danced around your head as their manipulators were stripping you of all your virdollars and emptying your cache. But you could always beam away or, in a worst case scenario, log off. Their bullets and lances and voices might spear through you, spread your pixels over the known universe, but you always got reassembled and you could still dance a sexy tango with a snow leopard, even with an axe embedded in your skull.
Today Joe was all too aware that normal life never offered such escapes. This walk in the May sunshine reminded him of the limitations he had to tolerate. He knew that the world was a pretty foul place – he watched the telecasts, read the blogs. He knew that kids were stabbing and shooting one another and total strangers, just for fun. He knew that getting bad grades at college frequently triggered the conditioned reflex of collecting some armaments and wandering back into class to take out the professors and some of your ex-classmates. Equality was a fairy story which they still kept telling but which no-one believed. And you didn’t have to look far to see that it was way too late to do anything about saving the actual planet. He knew it all, felt sad but frustrated about it, and yet he accepted it. Just like everyone else.
But it had become personal. All his obsessional thinking about AD had dislocated his normal perceptions. He actually started looking at people, and he was surprised at how varied they were. Where were all the perfect, beautiful creatures he’d become used to? Where were all the acres of female flesh on show in the cleavages and bare midriffs he saw everywhere when he wore the headset? Why were there no gossamer princesses or knights on blindingly white stallions? And walking took so long. At one point, as he was crossing the road, he said to a black Labrador beside him, ‘Where d’you go for fun around here?’
The woman holding its leash looked at him
and tugged it away. Joe concentrated on the swaying hips of another woman walking in front of him. She had long auburn hair and tight trousers. A reflex made him flip his finger on a non-existent control pad. He wanted to know more about her, wanted to bring up her information on the side bar. But this wasn’t AD. He’d never know her mystery. She, the Labrador, its mistress – they all stayed locked in their privacy, giving no hints of the tumbling thoughts and desires they were pursuing.
And Joe felt a sudden loneliness. All these people around him, and none of them knew anything about the others. The weight of that lack of knowledge was overwhelming. There were no names, no identifying labels, no way of knowing their interests or the packs to which they belonged. Their ignorance of one another, their terrifying isolation felt very threatening. It was a sense of alienation that he never experienced as Ross.
He slipped into a shop to buy some e-tabs and surprised the girl at the checkout by staring at the area just below her waist, waiting for a menu to appear with its ‘Transfer funds’ box highlighted.
‘Something wrong?’ she said, folding her skirt more tightly around herself.
‘Sorry,’ said Joe. ‘I was miles away.’
He fumbled his card into her machine and, feeling the beginnings of panic, decided to go home. He needed to restart the day, rediscover who he was.
He swallowed an e-tab and felt its warm fog rise inside him as he walked. But the strangeness of this world still disturbed him. There were no people with tails or fur, no vampires, no-one riding round on rocket-fired aerojets. Most people looked nondescript, even ugly. The streets and houses were drab – and it took so long to get anywhere. It was horrible.
As soon as he got back, he rushed into his lab, put on his headset and logged on again.
‘Good morning, master,’ said Derek. ‘What is your pleasure?’
Ross sighed deeply and settled into his chair.
‘You are, Derek,’ he said.
‘The master has excellent taste.’
Joe looked closely at him. OK, he was made of stone, he had horns and a forked tail, but there was a definite twinkle in his eye. He was so much more real than the woman with the Labrador or the sullen girl in the shop. The sense of belonging that filled Joe was palpable. He knew that he had to change his way of being.
24 transition – part two
Ross checked his dial-ups to see if Xeno was online. He was. Xeno Paradox was the name Joe’s friend, Nathan, had given to his main avatar. The scepticism he’d shown that long ago night in the bar when Joe started talking about the attraction of virtual experiences had long since been discarded. Nathan had become an AD enthusiast and was always willing to try out new programs and advances.
He worked as an animator for an independent film maker and he and Joe had originally met when they were working on a French thriller with a fake supernatural theme. At first, as well as going out for a drink after work, they’d spent lots of time together online. It was only when Nathan decided that he wanted his avatar to be a stag and run with the deer that he and Joe had drifted apart in their AD incarnations. In the real world, however, they were still close.
Ross pressed the send button and said, ‘Xeno. I need to talk.’
After a pause, Xeno’s antlered head appeared in a frame top right.
‘Hey Ross,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘I made up my mind. I want to try the meld.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Xeno. ‘Not the bloody meld again.’
‘No, listen. I’m serious. I should have done it ages ago. You still willing to help?’
‘When?’
‘I’ll need a while to set it up. We never got round to doing a full test last time.’
‘OK, when?’
‘Give me a week. I’ll call. We’ll do it here.’
‘OK. I think you’re a crazy bastard, but what do I know?’
He winked, tossed his antlers and disappeared. Ross beamed his unicorn onto the path, climbed onto its back and began to fly over the plateau. As the air streamed past his face and the two suns warmed him, he felt better and allowed the excitement of what he was going to do to begin to sparkle in his head.
Towards the end of the week, Joe called Nathan over to show him the progress he’d made.
‘Impressive,’ said Nathan as he looked over the electronics spread across the mother board on Joe’s workshop bench.
Joe shook his head.
‘Not sure it’ll work,’ he said. ‘Too many compromises.’
‘OK, tell me what you’ve done,’ said Nathan. ‘The new stuff, I mean.’
‘Well,’ said Joe., ‘you know I’m using nano-technology principles to adapt Newtonian theories of motion and circumvent quantum irregularities.’
Nathan was used to this techno-speak. It meant nothing to him but he indulged Joe.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Still sounds more like philosophy than physics though. The marriage of mind and matter. They’ve been talking about that since Plato.’
‘Exactly,’ said Joe. ‘“Talking about it”, not “doing it”. It’s time to make it real.’
‘Take me through it,’ said Nathan.
Joe smiled and began the guided tour of his machine. It was just a small, undistinguished brown box arranged beside a row of his computers and yet it carried his potential release into full virtuality.
‘See how simple it is,’ said Joe, running his fingers over its components. ‘Just five ordinary USB connectors linked to the graphics and sound cards and directly to the diatronic input fibulae of the integrated sublateral motherboard. I couldn’t make up my mind at first whether variable periodontic immuno-suppressants would prove more stable in an oscillating solid state environment than chromosomal sub-species embedded in a multi-dimensional Carpathian gel. They’re more convenient but critically inviolable if they’re kept in suspension.’
‘Whatever,’ said Nathan.
Joe picked up the ends of three small cables.
‘And this is all I need to connect with it,’ he said. ‘Three neural micro-sensors – heart, pre-frontal lobe and cerebellum.’
He lowered his head to show Nathan the bare patch of scalp which he’d shaved that morning, ready to apply the sensor.
‘So when’re you going to test it?’ asked Nathan.
‘Right here, right now,’ said Joe.
‘You’re crazy.’
‘No, Nathan, the rest of them are crazy. I can do this. I want to do it.’
‘OK. Your funeral,’ said Nathan. ‘But I’m not throwing the switch.’
‘No. I’ve set it on auto for that,’ said Joe.
He pointed at the long glass observation panel in the wall.
‘I’ve set the videcam up in there. It’s on the same circuit. You’ll get the images I see. Just make sure it runs when I log on. Use the manual override if you have to.’
They went through to the other room. The small silver videcam sat on its tripod on a table beside the observation panel. On its screen they saw the chair, the bench and the machine.
‘See? All set,’ said Joe. ‘Shit, if there was any sense in this world, there’d be rows of monitors and Nobel prize winners all sitting here now. This is the breakthrough, Nathan.’
Nathan shook his head.
‘Yes it is,’ said Joe. ‘We’ve been getting closer and closer to it. I’ve just gone that extra step. This’ll be a historic record. The first actual fusion of the real and virtual worlds.’
‘Or a snuff movie,’ said Nathan.
‘Trust me,’ said Joe. ‘Ready?’
‘No,’ said Nathan, ‘but I know that makes no difference. Let’s do it.’
Joe smiled.
‘Just a few minutes first time. Then you can make the trip,’ he said.
With Nathan muttering ‘No chance’, Joe shook hands with him and went back to the other room. Nathan saw him walk into shot on the videcam and attach the electrodes to his chest, his forehead and the shaved patch on his scalp. He checked readings on
his screen, looked across to the hatch and gave the thumbs up sign. Then he put on his headset and pressed a key on his control pad.
Ross closed his eyes, feeling the currents starting to drive through him. He was standing among the pixels, sensing them form into avatars – beautiful people, grotesque monsters, animals cute and obscene. For years he’d watched them, controlled their destinies, witnessed their evolution; it was time to become one of them. Joe’s world was dull. He craved excitement, novelty, unpredictability, he wanted Deek’s freedoms, he wanted to be Ross. As the pulses of electrons quickened, he felt the tingling of the connection and a pulling at his flesh. He corrected slight distortions in the visual input channel and held the arms of his chair. He felt small convulsions in his wrists – brief, unimportant. His eyes were now open but his vision blurred and blackened. More pulses of electrons flooded his brain, replacing his heartbeat with a new mindbeat.
In the other room, Nathan saw the jerking reflex motions on the videscreen and bent to look more closely at the image and the readouts beside it.
Slowly, Ross’s eyes cleared and the colours returned – bright, more vivid than before. He was sitting in the Vermont cabin. Through the window he saw a dinosaur stroll by, swatting at a time machine that buzzed around its head. There were no more pulses. He looked around, taking in the details, saw himself in the mirror – thick, black hair, sea-blue eyes, twenty years younger than Joe. He touched the table at which he sat, felt its polished depth. Rocked back in his chair and put his feet up, excited, basking in his new body, his new life. It had worked. He was free. He’d made that magical transition from his own world to AD. At last he was an avatar. He’d achieved the ultimate fusion, shed his mortality, left behind his flesh to start the adventure of being part of eternal cyberspace.
‘Ross.’
It was a woman’s voice. He turned his head. She was standing at the door, a flawless, beautiful vision. He breathed deeply. This must be his partner. She walked quickly across to him, her undulating hips promising so much for the nights to come. Why had he delayed so long in making this transition? He’d always known that it was possible. He smiled up at her.