ONE
DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH
Cybernesia
The annual Pilots Festival was well underway at Don Sturms and Karuna Drangs place, though their “place” was a DIVE a deep-immersion virtual environmentand their DIVE wasnt a place at all. Sturm and Drang werent their legal names, either, and they hadnt physically cohabited for months.
Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturms morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasnt exactly “period.” But blue hair was one of Dons personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadnt been able to resist.
All around them, virtual party peoplelikewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century dragdanced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o- maniac, Medea ?rate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures.
Normally Dons default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from viewonly to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst.
Don/Thomas shook his head.
“I know thats how they pull off their grand data exchanges,” he said to Karuna/Sally. “And Im sure what theyre doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish theyd make use of a more subtle metaphor.”
Karuna/Sally laughed
“ ‘To hack is to explore and manipulate,” she said, imitating Medeas lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. “ ‘To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, nest-ce pas? ”
Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary War–era tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunsets salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again.
“You look preoccupied,” Karuna/Sally said. “Even e-bodied, I can tell. Whats on your mind?”
“Just looking over what weve wrought,” Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires musical variations. “Not to say that its overwrought, mind you. Just that the nature of this event is somewhat paradoxical.”
“How so?”
“Well, it feels as if Ive usurped a public event just to celebrate a personal success, and either way the celebrants dont know what theyre celebrating.”
“Don, you have every right to celebrate! Prime Privacy Protocol is a winner. Its on its way to becoming the most popular encryption software in the infosphere.”
“Even if no one associates my name with it. . . .”
“Yes, but you, ‘Mister Obololos, youre the one who made it happen.”
“Maybe that anonymitys a good thing. The law enforcement types are getting really shrill in condemning it. Today there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times that accused P-Cubed of catering to the privacy interests of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. The consensus seems to be that its primary users will be drug dealers, terrorists, organized crime, and pedophiles”
“along with about a billion other ordinary citizens. Come on, dont let it get to you. Nobody falls for that shtick anymore.”
“Maybe. But thats not really whats bugging me, you know? Its this shindig, this construct.”
“And your point is?”
“This whole virtual space is called Cybernesia. But what is Cybernesia, really? A space thats not a place? An event without a time? Both?”
Sally/Karuna frowned, then gestured, and a palmtop oracle appeared as a first edition of Samuel Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language.
“Herelets consult the word of a higher authority. The great dictionaries and encyclopedias refer to Cybernesia as ‘the semipermanent archipelago of “pirate islands” located in the net. Or this: ‘DIVEs whose stability amid chaos is created by the same forces that produce the turmoil around them. Kind of like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Islands offshore, neighbors to the conventional continents of the infosphere. Freer spaces, like the Bahamas or the Florida Keys. Good enough?”
“I guess itll have to be,” Dons faux Jefferson said with a shrug, “but what has me most worried is this program you wrote, that lets everybody here fuse their own separate islands into a single, temporary continent. Doesnt that change the rules? Or break them outright? What if weve altered the structure of the infosphere to such a degree that we come up on the authorities radar? They might check into it, and find out that Im the one who put together P-Cubed . . .
“Are we putting everybody here in danger?”
“Honey, Id never be naive enough to tell anybody, ‘You think too much, ” Karuna said with a wicked little smile, “but sometimes the life of the mind”
“is a pain in the ass. I know.”
“Snap out of it!” she said, smiling and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, a whisper of electrons brushing his face across the void of simulation. For an instant Don deeply missed being with her, until he remembered the painful last months of their romance. “Quit pattern-phreaking and enjoy yourself a little.” she persisted. “Look how well the partys going. That patch you wrote for the clouds looks great, and no matter what you say, the breakthrough that allowed everybody to fly their islands here was a work of genius. Straight out of Gullivers Travels! You should be proud.”
Don/Tom allowed himself a small, reluctant smile, but he still worried. The flying islands were just an expansion of the Besterian jauntbox program, really. Besterboxes allowed participants to step fluidly from one virtual reality to another, but no one had used the tech to combine such large and disparate elements into a single mass beforenot even temporarily. Despite the fact that things were going well, he wondered what complex and unpredictable dynamics might be generated by the impromptu experiment they were conducting.
The Jed Astaires launched into their rendition of “The World Turned Upside Down”a march played by Cornwalliss troops when they surrendered their arms at Yorktown in 1781. Don/Tom looked up at the clouds again. A new, perfectly pyramidal island flew toward them.
Odd. Everybody who had been invited had already shown or sent their regrets. A party crasher? Or was this some unintended side effect of toying with Cybernesian dynamics? He hoped it wasnt the infocops, come to bust their party.
No sooner did the island land in the bay and fuse with the rest of the temporary Cybernesian continent than the pyramid opened and some sort of holographic broadcast filled the sky. As if the entire world were, in fact, a stage, two characters appeared.
Don frantically searched his infosphere links, even checking Cybernesias South American backup servers in Tri-Border, in an effort to determine what the hell was going on. As he searched, his guests watched a gun-toting parachutist land in a garden among the clouds, listened to the parachutist and his paramour exchanging banter overloaded with allusions. The Cybernesia party ground to a halt.
The intruder-program and its characters morphed chaotically into heavily armed superscientists casually talking shop amid attacks by ninjoid commandoes.
Dons searching yielded no answers.
“Isnt this simulation a bit unusual, honey?” Karuna/Sally asked Don. “This doesnt seem like you.”
“Its not me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Im not doing it. In fact, Im trying to jam the holo-cast. Block the signal, somehow.”
“Any luck?”
“None whatsoever.”
In the sky above, Biblical garden imagery collided with laboratory milieu. Don, meanwhile, attempted to filter the broadcast out of Cybernesian virtuality, but found himself thwarted at every turn.
In the intruder holo-cast, high-tech death accompanied talk of “wellness plagues” and population-ratcheting. Speculative scientific scenarios were punctuated by explosions.
Soon the pair who had crashed his party were caught up in a chaotic, apocalyptic maelstrom of eclipsing suns and rumbling thunder. Nightmarish fighter aircraft screamed above, firing missiles and dropping bombs in a battle among the clouds.
“Great sim-within-a-sim!” said a Medusa-haired Medea ?rate, sidling up to Don and Karuna in the party zone. “A bit anachronistic, though, isnt it?”
Don frowned. Medea was e-bodied in a manner entirely too buxom, especially since, in meatlife, “she” was purported to be a skinny, crotchety old South Asian named Indahar Marwani.
Yeah, right, he thought. How much did any of them really know about the Ambiguous One?
“As I was just telling mlady here, Im not doing it.”
“Then who is?” Medea asked. Something rang false in the way she intoned the question.
“I dont know. It may be an unanticipated effect of our having joined these islands together.”
“Ho-ho.” Medea laughed. “You mean the pirates have been pirated? How rich!”
In the chaotic world among the clouds, the man and woman ran and leapt for cover without even bothering to pause in their philosophical conversation.
“Wait a minute!” Karuna said to Don and Medea. “I think I know who the male character is! I recognize the underlayment. Its that guy, whats his nameLok, or Kwok. The one who contacted us about the deep hack. The work we did for him is what gave me the idea for the island-merging software.”
Above them, the eclipse of the intruder-sun in the intruder-sky deepened. Lightning forked down out of distant clouds.