The bastards! How dare they turn down Your request? Even a superficial reading of the personal information band of Your Humanity Card would show that You are an educated person with a PhD in Computational Humanities from Virtual University, a good job with said university, a spotless work record and good health -- great health! Fantastic fucking health! Never been sick a day in Your life! On what grounds could they possibly have decided to turn down Your request? You'll appeal! It isn't fair! It isn't right! Oh, the Humanity! Even as You rail against Universal Humanity, Inc., Your voice loses much of its conviction. It's not just that You don't know anybody who has ever successfully appealed a Board of Adjustments decision. You begin to wonder if maybe there isn't something in Your past...what about that time you were caught shoplifting a circuit board from the corner Radio Hut when You were 15? It was just kid stuff -- the police let You off with a warning. But maybe somebody somewhere filed a report that found its way onto Your card. Or, maybe...maybe it had something to do with the time You had measles when You were 11. But surely that can't be held against You 15 years later...can it? Everybody is assigned a Humanity Card at birth. As well as being a general credit/debit card which kept track of your wealth in InfoDollars, it contained all the relevant data of your life: a digital copy of birth, baptismal and marriage certificates, dental and medical records, your experiences with police, any government assistance you may at any time have felt compelled to receive and other information the nature of which most people are only dimly aware. (Some notorious characters have actually made a nice living by electronically publishing excerpts from their Humanity Cards as fiction, opening up a whole new area of study for the Computational Humanities department.) You don't know the exact contents of the Accumulated Data Base on Your card; it is the property of Universal Humanity, Inc. You can only hope that the information on Your card has some passing resemblance to Your actual life... To cheer Yourself up, You choose to read the letter Your Partner left on Your computer while You were sleeping. Unfortunately, the brief note tells You that Chris has been chosen to "entertain" a couple of clients from Japan, so Your partner will be hitting the virtual reality hard over the next couple of days. You are unimpressed: demonstrating the latest in North American teledildonics to a pair of Transnat millionaires is not a fit occupation for an adult. You start writing a stinging reply, but something stops You before You are foolish enough to send it; You know too many marriages which have gone up in flames. Instead, You write a short note explaining what happened with Universal Humanity and suggest that the two of you get together at the earliest possible mutually convenient time in order to discuss how it will affect your future. Ah, modern romance! :-x Now thoroughly dispirited, You call up the first letter on Your list, from a graduate student named Brubacher. It turns out to be the first draft of a lengthy assignment on a subject bound to put even the most devout to sleep: "Looking for God: Finding Commonalities Among the Various Bibles on the Net." Yet, from the first page, You find Yourself fascinated. Brubacher has conducted a sophisticated content analysis of the 1,028 different versions of the New Testament to find common trends and, perhaps, come up with suggestions for a definitive version of the work. The enterprising graduate student found some questions relatively easy to answer. For instance, theologians would be able to breath a sigh of relief to know that Jesus was, in fact, the central character of the New Testament (cited in 781, with 211 additional references to Jesse, Jason, Jeshoo, The Big JC and other similar names). Versions of the New Testament in which the saviour character was named Fast Eddie, Guido the Enforcer or Bob were rejected as apocryphal. Also, versions of the story which mimicked the form of tabloid newspaper (including the popular "My Life" by JC as told to John Lennon) were dismissed on the grounds that reliable evidence suggested that tabloid newspapers did not, in fact, exist in ancient Judea. There seemed to be general agreement among the various versions of the New Testament on the Net on the question of the Virgin Birth, although many texts, perhaps infused with the feminist spirit of a much different era, portrayed Mary as a hip, self-actualized Earth Mother. Wherever consensus was not obvious, Brubacher suggested a number of less and less likely alternatives: the loaves and fishes may, for instance, have been bagels and lox, or even cheese and crackers; Jesus probably turned water into milk, but he may have turned water into wine, or even turned water into Ice Beer, or, although this seemed unlikely considering it occurred in the middle of the desert, he may have turned water into an ice sculpture of the Titanic. Brubacher also dealt directly with the anomaly of the Latin Testament, something many professional theologians prefer to gloss over. It had only recently appeared on the Net, which would ordinarily suggest that it was written after other versions which preceded it. Despite this, there was some evidence to suggest that the Latin Testament was the wellspring from which all the others flowed. Unfortunately, this evidence came primarily from data storage units which had a tendency to erase important information, store it in places which could not be easily accessed and randomly mix data from incompatible files: human memories. Brubacher concluded that this subject required further investigation. You are very impressed. You correct a couple of grammatical errors and suggest a source for further research ("Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?" on alt.theology.research), but this is strong scholarship, worthy of a good mark. You are not surprised. Brubacher's last essay posed the question, "Why are there no InfoCentres in virtual reality?" The answer, brilliantly explored, was not as simple as one might think: although most people do not want to go into virtual reality merely to replicate experiences they can have in hardspace, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would. What's to stop somebody from watching a virtual InfoCentre as, say, Queen Victoria? Brubacher concluded that snobbery was at the root of this particular cultural hiccup: InfoCentres, like their distant televisual forebears, were considered a guilty pleasure, not a subject worthy of *Art*. You begin to write a preliminary evaluation when a tiny grandfather clock icon appears in a corner of Your wall screen. Time for class. You save the essay and start the remote feed. As usual, only 12 of the 347 students registered for the course are actually in attendance, and of those five have offered to buy You a drink in Virtual University's Virtual Pub, the Vanishing Point. (Three girls and two boys -- and what does that say about Your sexuality, hmm?) Why should students show up for class? They can go through the CD-ROM at their leisure and e-mail You questions as they arise. Oh, sure, there was a 3,000 year tradition of holding classes at set times, but, you know, sometimes doing something for 3,000 years just makes it old. Today's CD-ROM lesson, brought to you by International Fine Foods (whose current slogan is "Better Eating Through Bioengineering!"), retells the fable of how the big bad Arpanet caterpillar shrugged off its military cocoon and emerged as the beautiful Internet butterfly, which, even today, is a major part of the wider Net community. A couple of times, students stop the presentation to ask how bad the Arpanet could have been if it resulted in something as beneficial as the Internet; once a student asks to have a graphic recreation of a nuclear explosion replayed because she finds it has "a strange beauty." Otherwise, Intro to Computational Humanities is, as always, the closest thing on Earth to a black hole. Lunch is waiting for You when You get to the kitchen. The main course is jumbo shrimp -- but, really, no kidding jumbo -- jumbo shrimp the size of small chickens. The shrimp was bioengineered by IFF (whose old slogan was "What nature has made pretty good, we make perfect!"), which inserted part of the DNA of a cow of a cow into an old-fashioned shrimp. It is stuffed with hickory smoked corn. There is also a baked potato which oozes its own butter when microwaved (or even breathed on heavily) and a tomato crossed with a human (You always expect it to start to cry as You bite into it, but apparently all the bionegineering has done is ensured that you could drive over the tomato with a steamroller and it wouldn't lose its shape or colour). Thus, humanity's dumbest jokes become the technologies by which we all live. "You are enjoying the food, yes?" "It's yummie," You say through a mouthful of shrimp and tomato. "Do you want I should squeeze you some orange cranberries for juice?" You wave a hand. "Plain Water Plus is fine," You answer. There is silence for a couple of seconds. Then, the kitchen says, "Pat?" "Yes?" "Does the...bathroom ever talk...about me?" The question is totally out of the ether. "What makes you ask that?" "Well, I was talking to the kitchen of Misses Rabinowitz," Your kitchen tells You. "It's an old kitchen, poor dear, and doesn't get out on the microwave circuit as much as it used to, you know. Anyway, it was telling me that the bathroom was saying mean things to me to other...others of its kind..." "The bathroom?" You blurt. "I don't believe it." "You should pardon me, dear," the kitchen challenges You, "only that sounds suspiciously like -- you should pardon the expression -- carbon-based chauvinism..." "Oh, no," You quickly reply, "I just meant that the bathroom seems like the most harmless room in the house." "Appearances can be deceiving, you innocent dear." You assure the kitchen You will look into the matter and hastily finish Your meal. You didn't believe it was possible that You would ever actually rush to get to a faculty meeting! You walk into the virtual room. It's a joke -- the room is real enough. But it is empty save for His and Hers virtual reality harnesses. (When You and Your Partner were married, you were registered at radio Hut.) One wall is an InfoCentre on permanent screensaver -- visual white noise (or, at the moment, visual paisley noise). The paisley screensaver usually gives You motion sickness, so You quickly climb into the harness -- Your skin away from skin. The harness is made up of a wetsuit hooked by various cables into a geodesic dome; nobody laughs at it being a torture device any more, although the jury is still out. Without hesitation, You say, "Virtual reality on," and a whole world shimmers into existence around You. Ah, virtual reality -- the somewhere that is truly nowhere. And vice versa. It's very zen. In fact, a radical schism of Buddhists claimed to have found the ultimate expression of the duality of existence in binary code. Jules Phat, the famous Zen poet, recently wrote that entering virtual reality was like "pushing your soul through the eye of a needle." Actually, there are no physical effects to entering virtual reality; one moment there is nothing, the next, there isn't. Zen poets -- what do they know, anyway? You find Yourself standing on a busy street. Shops and restaurants line either side of the street, with tall office buildings perspectiving into the distance. Cars zoom past You on the way to the horizon; somewhere close by, children laugh. They seem to know the score. A woman You don't know walks up to You and excitedly asks, "Have you heard the news?" As a matter of fact, You have heard the news. As a matter of fact, You want to take the woman by the shoulders and shout, "Yes, I've heard the news. You've tried to tell me the news every time I turned on my VR machine for the last three bloody weeks!" But, of course, You don't. Two weeks ago, You asked the woman if she had heard the news before she had the chance to ask You. To no avail: she simply said she knew, and wasn't it wonderful, and proceeded to tell it to You again. Last week, You slapped the woman in the face and walked away, but it didn't help. Cab drivers, waiters, bank tellers, executives in their offices on the twenty-fourth floor, actors in their roles, even babies in their carriages, cute little toddlers You wouldn't have expected to be able to talk, all had one thing on their mind: to tell You the news. The news was that International Fine Foods was introducing a new cola onto the market: IFF Heavy, for people who need a larger jolt of caffeine to get them started or keep them going through their hectic schedule. IFF had agreed to pay 50 InfoDollars towards Your virtual reality connect time if You agreed to allow its Vadvertisements to run before You entered your first chosen softspace. You hoped Your Partner was enjoying the Vadvertisements as much as You were. You wonder what would happen if You commandeered a car and tried to drive off the end of the street. In a more fanciful moment, You have imagined driving into a sunset made up of the soft drink's logo against which the words of the pitch were written in fiery letters 10 feet high. Foolish imagination! You probably end up back at the beginning of the street; computer programmers are great conservationists. You idly wonder whether, if You search every office and restaurant, every closet and waiting room, every nook and cranny, you will find one poor person, one person living off the street, one teenage mother. Of course, some things are self-evident: that would be bad for the product's image. As You walk down the street, thinking these worthy thoughts, it occurs to You that every second You waste in here plays into the hands of the Transnats that created the damn thing in the first place. You approach a sour old man with a sour young dog. You stoop to pat it (the dog, not the man) on the head and ask, "What --" "Is the news?" the dog, in a basso that's very profundo, responds. "I'm glad you asked..." There may have been a time when people would have been surprised, shocked, awed or any combination of the three to hear a dog extol the virtues of a soft drink. No longer. Somewhere down the line, humanity sold its sense of wonder for a handful of silicon. :-( You tap your foot, bored; You can't wait for the dog to be finished. "Computer on," You say, and a screen and keyboard appear in front of You, about chest high. This is how one navigates through the various virtual environments (commercial term: softspaces, a registered trademark of Softworld Co. Inc.) available: the computer invisibly follows you until you ask for it. (Because you can't call up your navigational computer during a Vadvertisement until you've heard the entire pitch -- why do you think?) In addition, so as not to burden others with the potentially proprietary information on your screen, it is invisible to everybody else in the space unless commanded otherwise. Checking the time, You find You have about half an hour to kill before the faculty meeting, so You punch a different destination. As You do, You wonder what happens to the computer when it is banished to limbo. Is there a coffee shop where the hard drives gather, sipping ions from a deep well, complaining about their owners? "Do you know what command my lunkhead owner asked me to execute this morning?" one console would howl, to the amused clacking of the assembled keyboards. Or, perhaps -- The street scene fades away. For a brief moment, You find Yourself in a milky white limbo (with nary an ion well in sight!); then Your destination fades into view. Some people can hop from one conceptual space to another without going through this smoother kind of transition, but whenever You tried, Your brain hurt. Virtual psychiatrists have a term for this condition: reality lag. You are in a dark place: around You are neon lines of various colours. This is the model home Your Partner promises you will retire to when you are millionaires. Of course, you were supposed to have become millionaires three years ago, and those millions don't seem to be looming any larger on the virtual horizon; but this is a problem with the timing of Your dreams, not the structure. The retaining walls of the model home are red; move them at your own risk. The rest of the walls, floors and ceilings are blue. Furniture is green, appliances are yellow. When You are in a good mood, You like to put on the body of a three year-old and see what the house will look like to the child You and Your Partner plan to have one day; You actually discovered a design flaw involving easy access to steak knives this way. But today You wander through Your dream home burdened with sadness; the incident with the Humanity Card earlier in the day has brought home to You the real possibility that this future will never be anything more than virtual. The grandfather clock, in neon outline, appears to remind You that it's time for Your faculty meeting. You call up Your computer, which remains stubbornly concrete in this outline world. For the first time, You are grateful to be leaving this softspace: ghosts are supposed to haunt one from the past, aren't they? You walk through a door into a small, conservatively decorated virtual conference room. A few people have gotten there before You. At the head of the virtual table sits Ted Nelson, wearing a t-shirt that reads "Don't trust anybody over the age of 30...months." Ted is not what one would call a cut-up, or even mildly amusing. His t-shirt merely reflects a recent feeling among people that all the old voices of knowledge and experience could no longer speak for humanity. Social critics alternately referred to this as "the collapse of authority" or "knowledge anarchy," depending, of course, on their initial position with respect to authority. Imagine. Even if you never watched the Doogie Howser Network, The Radical Psychotronics Network, World Woodchuck Watch, The Nintendo News Channel, Much War, Violence, Mayhem and Death, The Red Jello Channel, Fish in a Tank Update Network, The Nintendo Games Channel, Conrad Black Vision TV, _I Love Lucy_ Forever, The Mandelbrot Channel, The Green Jello Channel or any of the other 35,000 specialty channels which sprang up around the turn of the century, just knowing they existed undermined the authority of the five networks. The authority of newsgatherers in all media was fatally wounded when mass murderers, fringe terrorist organizations and defrocked talk show hosts began distributing their stories directly to the public on the Net. (Oddly, tabloid journalism thrived, suggesting that truth, while perhaps stranger than fiction, isn't nearly as marketable.) The authority of politicians, always suspect, was disastrously undermined when citizens gained access to facts on every subject from local zoning by-laws to distant wars. ("You can run," more than one Presidential hopeful was advised, "but you can no longer hide.") At the same time, national boundaries were effectively rendered meaningless by information flows which, as the astute philosopher King Canute brilliantly demonstrated, could not be stopped by an act of political will. Even organized religion, which had always relied on hegemonic control of information, especially about other religions, found its authority seriously tattering around the edges. And, of course, teachers, whose authority had long resided for the most part in their own minds, lost all credibility as succeeding generations of students were better equipped than they to deal with the latest electronic realities. This was a recipe for bad craziness. Pundits of all stripes, viscerally sensing impending unemployability, railed against the dehumanizing aspects of technology. The average person, not really knowing what was happening, but mightily impressed by the frenzy of invective emanating from the pundits, began to feel a vague, senseless dread. It began to dawn on the average person that, amid the welter of diverse opinions, she was about to be thrown back upon her own judgement in order to create a stable meaning in her life. Many average persons wept openly. Some crawled into virtual playpens, never to be seen or heard from again. A few, precious few, actually adjusted and thrived. But mostly, there was great beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth. Traditional authority found new ways to assert itself, to the relief of more than just the traditional authorities. The Catholic Church, which had been virulently opposed to virtual reality on the grounds that it usurped for Man God's traditional place as the creator of worlds, did an abrupt about-face, opening churches in many prominent on-line communities and sending missionaries to the ends of the virtual Earth. The fact that the Priests had no corporeal existence gave a special poignancy to the mind/body debate which catholic authorities wisely chose to ignore. Jews for Jesus followed the Catholics into the Promised Land of electronic evangelicism, then Christians for Judaism, then Muslims for Islam. Schisms and sects multiplied like ameoba happy in teir petri dish. Politicians noticed the activity and realized that computers gave them the ultimate control of spin: they could tailor virtual personalities and policies to every electronic demographic group in their electoral district -- ah, the wonders of digital democracy! Pundits who could not adapt to the new information environment -- alas! -- died, but a new punditocracy arose in their place. Inevitably, the average person could breath a sigh of relief that order had been restored. From breakdown to recovery, the crisis in authority took place over three frantic days. Blink and you'll miss the revolution. Being over 60, Nelson wasn't exactly flattered by the t-shirt, but he had come of age in a more naive time, a time when wearing your politics on your chest was not considered a fashion disaster. There was some irony that the ultimate authority in the Computational Humanities department wore a t-shirt which harkened back to the hours when the whole concept of authority had been thrown into doubt, but Nelson had long outgrown the habit of mind which would allow him to appreciate it. To Nelson's left sat Vannevar Bush. Bush had been the bright young light of the Computational Humnaities department once upon a time (all of six months ago), when he had an unfortunate incident with his Humanity Card... Among its many other wonders, the Humanity Card is programmed to monitor the vital signs of the person who carries it. If they should rise or fall outside certain preset levels, levels corresponding to good health, a signal is sent, via satellite, to the hospital of one's choice, which immediately checks your health record to determine an appropriate course of action. One evening, Bush's doctor was alerted to the fact that his heart rate and blood pressure had skyrocketed. Bush had no preexisting conditions which would account for this. When his doctor pinpointed his whereabouts (by tracing the source of the Card's signal) as an alley in a disreputable part of town, she concluded Bush was being mugged. The doctor immediately dispatched an ambulance to the scene, as well as sending a Net request for police backup. Imagine everybody's surprise when the police officers and paramedics came upon Bush in the alley getting his rocks off with a prostitute. :-o Legend around the campus has it that one police officer good-naturedly suggested that doing it in virtual reality was a safer form of sex. Another rumour suggests that one of the paramedics angrily told Bush to turn off his Humanity Card the next time he felt like getting it on. But this is undoubtedly Net fog, because Bush absolutely refuses to comment. Either way, Virtual University officials were not amused; although they would never be so crass as to fire Bush outright (and, in fact, had sent e-mail press releases to the effect that they stood by him a full hundred per cent), it soon became clear that he had been shunted on a fast track to nowhere. Vannevar Bush's career: dead at age 22. To Nelson's right (which would make it...Your left) sitx Nicholas Negroponte. Although he got to the meeting before You, You can imagine him hobbling down into the room and painfully lowering himself into the chair. He broke his foot riding a horse in Sideshow Baruch's Virtual Rodeo, the only show in town since horses became extinct. (You've often thought this sort of thing was a throwback to a more macho age, an age when men were men and sawhorses were scared. There's something not quite kosher about Sideshow Baruch's though: You don't remember ever seeing a picture of a horse with a long white horn sticking out of its head...) Of course, it's virtually impossible (that is to say, it's practically impossible) to hurt yourself while in a virtual reality harness; elaborate safety features were built into the device after the 127 computer pile-up on the information highway which left 37 dead and 111 injured. (Be careful how you choose your metaphors -- you may end up living them.) The joke around the department was that Negroponte had stubbed his toe getting out of the shower and was just using the Rodeo as a high-tech excuse for his own clumsiness. You suspect there is some truth to this story; after all, he could easily programme his computer to make him appear to walk without a limp whenever he was in virtual reality. It's hard to figure out just what is going on with Negroponte, although You are convinced that large amounts of testosterone must have something to do with it. Across the table from You sits Jaron Lanier. As You wait for Brenda Laurel to put in an appearance, You get the distinct impression that Lanier is staring at Your chest. You decide not to look at him, but as You become increasingly self-conscious, it becomes harder and harder to focus Your gaze in other directions. You steal a glance...dammit, Lanier isn't even bothering to hide the fact that he's staring at a point below Your neck and above Your belly button! Just as You start rehearsing killing remarks, Nelson barks, "Jaron, put that away!" Lanier starts, as if awakening from a trance. "I...I'm sorry, Ted?" he asks. "We are about to begin the faculty meeting, Jaron," Nelson orders. "Put that computer away this instant!" "But I've got 20 assignments to mark by the end of the day!" Lanier whines. You relax a little -- not only because the heat isn't coming down on You, but on an esteemed colleague, but because he wasn't staring at Your chest after all. "Can't I continue working, at least until Brenda gets here?" Brenda Laurel floats into the room and sits next to You. "Now, Jaron," Nelson authoratatively says. Lanier's fingers dance somewhere over the table for a moment, then he dejectedly looks up at Nelson. Lanier's problem is common enough: Terminal Info Dependency. In a less clinically diagnostic time, he might have been labelled a mere workaholic. The fear that you might be falling behind your co-workers, especially those below you who may be angling for your job, seems to be more intensely felt in a technologically advanced society, where all important facts about your productivity are a keystroke away on your boss' computer. So you have all your calls forwarded to the InfoCentre closest to your Humanity Card. The embarrassment of interrupting a music concert or theatrical performance is a small price to pay. You've even bought yourself a Pocket 'Puter so you can download a handful of text and quietly work on it during the dull bits. (Eventually, you'll stop going out altogether -- who can afford the time?) Your worst nightmare is being kidnapped and taken to one of those Technology Free Zones that you read so much about these days. The sad thing about Terminal Info Dependents is that while bosses appreciate their dedication, they don't entirely trust somebody who doesn't know how to let go and relax every once in a while. There's something not quite...human about those people. Funny thing -- because their bosses don't entirely trust them, Info Dependents rarely make it out of the middle management ghettoes of their workplaces. As the folk wisdom has it: duty culls. "I'm sorry," Laurel tells nobody in particular. "I'm late -- I -- I'm sorry..." There are clinical names for what Laurel has, too: Cyber Melancholia springs to mind. Her husband died in the Enterprise disaster five years ago (you remember, don't you -- the incident that ended the silly concept of manned space exploration once and for all?). She took a month's leave of absence to better fall into a deep depression. When she returned, she seemed relatively well-adjusted, but since then Laurel has grown increasingly disconnected from the world. She sporadically returns calls. Her productivity has suffered. She has grown distant from her colleagues, and seems relieved to be able to leave meetings to get back home. And while these things wouldn't be a problem if she were a civil servant, Virtual University was a private corporation (part of World Info Networks, PLC) and it would not tolerate quirkiness in its mid-level employees for more than a decade or two. Nobody had spoken to Laurel, but everybody knew what her problem was: she had taken all of the old videos, still photographs, audio recordings and virtual personae of her dead husband to a Resurrectionist, somebody who would create a virtual character based on your dearly departed. For a fee. Laurel spends all her free time with her dead husband -- eating with him, sharing jokes with him, sleeping with... Now, You like to think of Yourself as a sexually liberated person -- You have virtually eradicated all guilt from Your psyche for taking a virtual lover, for instance, because the prevailing belief is that anything should go in virtual reality. After all, it isn't real, right? But this... You can't help it: every time You think of Brenda Laurel, the term virtual necrophilia brings an involuntary shudder to Your spine. So, there you all are, the assembled faculty of Computational Humanities of Virtual Reality, The Whole Sick Crew. Looking around the table, You think it's sad that although you can be anybody you want to in virtual reality, most people choose to be themselves. "Alright," Nelson says, "now that we're all here, let's get started. The faculty is to be congratulated -- we graduated seven per cent more students last week than the previous week, a whopping 12 per cent increase over the same period last year. The Dean is very pleased with our productivity this week -- very pleased, indeed. Now, on an individual basis..." Nelson droned on for 45 minutes about Positive Student Outcomes, Optimal Information Transference and Staying Ahead of the Learning Curve. The faculty pretended to pay attention even though education administration had long ago divorced itself from practical questions about how to actually teach students. At one point, Nelson called up a chart showing the drop in graduates who had been able to find employment and a graph showing the increase in the numbers of students applying to enter the Computational Humanities Programme; the chart and graphed perched on either of Nelson's shoulders like little devil and angel icons, although You weren't entirely sure which was good and which evil. After Nelson is through, he calls up a prerecorded message from The Dean, William Gates. Gates talks for half an hour, his disembodied head and shoulders floating over the table in front of You; You feel as if You're at a seance. It doesn't help that Gates stares directly at You, his gaze never faltering. You know this is an illusion of virtuality, that Gates stares everybody around the table in the eye; paradoxically, this shared mass hallucination is, at the same time, an individual, highly personal experience. This knowledge just makes things creepier. The Dean's jokes aren't funny, his metaphors are unilluminating and his cheearleading is decidedly uninspiring; he's got a great way with corporate donors, though. (Twas ever thus. :-c) By the end of The Dean's sermon, You can't remember a single thing he's said; You long ago came to the conclusion that success in academia requires an inhuman ability to focus your attention on the unfocusable. (Likewise and also. :-C) After the Dean's inspirational message there doesn't seem to be much left to be said, so things break up. Laurel and Lanier race to see who can get out of there faster; Lanier pops back to Chicago before Laurel can slowly fade back to Melbourne. You're not impressed; the protocol is that you walk out the door, then call up your computer and leave the space. Having people come and go as they please is disconcerting, like trying to concentrate on studying an elephant while fairies fly around your head. "Pat, could you stay a moment?" Nelson asks. Of course You can, and You do. The others leave in a more civilized manner. "I've received a complaint from one of your students," Nelson tells You when the two of you are alone. "He claims you marked a term assignment he had submitted rather too harshly." "Who was that?" Nelson calls up a file which floats in front of him, maddeningly out of Your line of vision. "Candy," he says, "Jonathan andy. Do you remember the assignment?" Do You remember the assignment? Do You remember the assignment! Candy submitted a 57 page hypertext document on the subject of fiction in hypertext. You're pretty sure that the first sentence ("Fiction, except for a small number of minor forms, is not possible in hypertext.") was original; but everything which followed was a quote from another source. No transitions; no regrets. Just quotes from, among other sources, Lau Tzu, a Singaporean TV Guide from the year 2003, Charles Dickens, Charlie Farquharson, Tom and Gerry, Bill James' Baseball Abstract, Sun Tzu, Coca Cola commercials, X-Men comic books, old operating systems manuals, James Joyce, Ben and Jerry, Alfred Jarre, somebody who identified himself as "Brainfried" on the alt.sex.vanilla newsgroup, Shockwave Rider by Brenner (Bruner? Bonner?), The Grateful Dead, Jane's Catalogue of Battleships, Jane's Addiction, Jane Fonda, The Hockey News, a press release from the Urugayan Ministry of Agriculture and, of course, 17 different versions of The Bible. You remember joking to a colleague that Candy seemed to want to put the hyper back in hypertext. "Did you really say that candy knew how to put the hyper back in hypertext?" Nelson asks. "You had to read this thing, Ted," You defensively reply. "It was all over the place!" "You wrote that the assignment was..." Nelson consulted the file, "...derivative?" "The only thing I could identify as original was the opening sentence," You protest. "Every other word ad been written by somebody else!" "And you continue to have a problem with that?" Nelson, stern and unsympathetic, asks. "Do I really have to remind you that the policy of this department is that it may be in the nature of hypertext to be somewhat derivative, so we cannot use that as a criterion for marking assignments? Did you give any weight at all to the originality of the sources quoted, or the way in which the different ideas were connected?" You feel slightly green. You have a vision of a world of students sitting at computers mirroring off into the distance, infinitely reworking each other's writing with nary an original thought among them. Borges would have felt right at home here. "This technology was supposed to aid students' creativity," You argue, "not replace it entirely!" "Yes, I've read your memo on the subject," Nelson says, unimpressed. A few weeks after You joined the faculty, You wrote a lengthy memo suggesting higher standards for evaluating hypertext assignments. You argued that You could create a programme which could generate random strings of hypertext links, but that wouldn't represent proper scholarship -- it was just an electronic Rorschach test for the professor marking the assignment. The response, from Nelson's secretary, was that the memo would have be more authoritative if You had included some quotes on the subject. This was the first time that the Department Head had acknowledged the memo's existence. "And when you become head of the department, you can implement these ideas. Until then, you will kindly not stray from the policy which your colleagues have created and, I might add, successfully implemented." You have just been dismissed and You know it. The language of power doesn't change just because it's coming out of a virtual mouth. The mark will stand; after all, if the Department Head starts questioning the marking scheme of one professor, the whole system will be open to question, and we can't have that. Certainly not. However, You realize that Your stock in the department has just taken a dive of Black Monday proportions. The stupid thing is that You gave Candy a B in the hope that You could avoid exactly what happened. Some students are virtually never satisfied. You call for Your computer and quickly leave the softspace without walking out the door. Foolish inconsistency, small minds and all that. You go straight to Your next appointment. You find Yourself in a virtual room in a virtual skid row hotel. There is a small, unkempt virtual bed at one end of the room and a small virtual dresser, empty except for a bottle of virtual whisky in the top drawer, at the other. A virtual neon sign flashes outside a virtual window, cutting through the very real gloom. You're grateful for the gloom, actually, because it keeps You from seeing the virtual cockroaches. There is even a virtual smell of dust and mold -- a dump by any other name would smell as musty. You wouldn't be caught live in such a place in hardspace, but many people find the room adds spice to their virtual assignations. "Show time," You command. A grandfather clock incongruously appears next to the bed. You drum Your fingers impatiently. This is not Your idea of fun. You probably wouldn't have taken a lover -- who has the time? -- but Chris wouldn't shut up about the subject -- Your Partner was considered quite a hot item on the Net, apparently. If you can't get jealous, get even, the Net wisdom went. You hoped by taking a virtual lover you would teach Your Partner a lesson; but, to Your utter dismay, Your lover seemed virtually oblivious. Kim, Your Lover, bursts through the door. "Sandy, you're here!" Kim exclaims. "Great! Listen, I was leafing through some software catalogues the other day, and I came across this scenario where we're these kind of six foot tall cat creatures with wooden limbs and binoculars instead of eyes -- nice grandfather clock, by the way -- and we make love in these large nest-like things under a phosphorescent spider web reflecting the light from a triple moon -- doesn't that sound pizzazzin?" That was Kim: full of the adolescent excitement that makes You believe that breathing is optional. "Just listening to your description has tired me out," You say, suddenly very tired indeed. "No problem, okay, save it for a rainy day," Your Lover continues without losing stride. "We could play the scenario where we're purple lizard things with green and orange spots. You always liked frolicking in the sand, didn't you?" "Well, yeah, sure, but..." Kim waves a hand. "That's old news -- bit of a snooze," Your Lover says. "Okay, how about the Marilyn Monroe/JFK in ancient Egypt scenario? We've only done that once or twice, and -- hey! This time you can be Marilyn and I'll be JFK!" "Having you ever considered having sex just as ourselves?" You blurt. You hadn't been thinking it, You have no idea where the thought came from, but there it was. "Ourselves?" Your Lover asks, blinking. "You mean, like we might be having sex in the real world?" "That's right." Kim grins. "Kinky!" After a moment, Your Lover enthusiastically says, "So, we'll have to forego the clothes literally melting off our bodies?" "That's right." "And we'll turn off all the Orgasm Enhancement Parameters so that we can't artificially prolong our orgasms by hours?" "Absolutely." "And we'll turn off our Artificial Personae and make love as our real world selves?" This gives You pause. Turning off your APs would mean that full breasts would suddenly start to sag, taut stomachs would metamorphose into pot bellies and those currently invisible laugh lines would no longer be hidden. What if there were really bags under Your Lover's eyes? What if Kim's hands were developing liver spots? What if Kim had scars -- oh, scars! Didn't Kim mention something about a hernia operation once? Oh, god! Not a hernia operation! "Let's not get carried away," You thoughtfully suggest. "Okay," Your Lover cheerfully responds, looking around uncertainly. "So, umm, guess we should just take off our clothes and, uhh, do something, hunh?" "I guess." "Alright!" Kim exclaims, starting to undo velcro straps. "Showtime!" A big old alarm clock appears over the bed. "You're slow," You comment as You begin to undress. Three minutes and 12 seconds later, You and Your Lover lie on the bed, spent and exhausted. Your Lover has decisively proven You wrong; Your Lover was very fast. Very fast. An unimaginative. Trite, actually. Dull. Deadly dull. Let's face it: when the human imagination has been colonized by technology, wishful thinking won't help you take back the territory. "That was great," Your Lover mumbles. "Liar," You smile. "Let's never do that again!" Your Lover pleads. You agree. What's the point of cheating on Your Partner if you don't get any pleasure out of it? You kiss Kim, call for Your computer and give the destination HOME. When You step out of Your virtual reality harness, You find Your Partner thrashing around in the harness next to Yours. Chris is either playing racquetball or arguing in a board meeting. You don't miss working for a Transnat. Your Partner has christened the virtual reality harness "Dante;" at the top of the changing pattern of the InfoCentre Chris has written "Abandon hope, all ye who enter." You blow Your Partner a kiss (does Chris momentarily slow down to receive it?) and head for the kitchen. Before the kitchen will release Your dinner (kelp steaks and a green bean the size of a small tree trunk) to You, however, You have to explain to it that You haven't been to the bathroom, so You haven't been able to confront it about what it's been saying about the kitchen's...umm, what it's been saying about the kitchen. When the kitchen reluctantly releases Your kelp steak, it seems a little burnt, but You don't have the energy to argue. You crawl into bed and turn on the InfoCentre. Rather than go through the process of running a programme which will find something worth watching for You in the 35,000 channel universe, You call up a disc Chris made for You a few nights ago. Lawrence Olivier and Marisa Tomei star in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, with the part of Blanche Dubois being played by a giant squid. Your Partner disced it for You when You were in class because Chris knew You were a big fan of Richard Flohill, the Vactor who played Olivier (uhh, playing Stanley Kowalski). Most critics felt that Roland Orzaball was the foremost Olivier of his generation, citing Orzaball's performances in Meatballs and Last Tango In Paris as the definitive Olivier. You have to admit that, technically, Orzaball was very good; still, You've had a soft spot in Your heart for Flohill since You saw him star as Olivier in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which You have seen 27 times). It's a brilliant Olivier (even if it is only a passable Kowalski), but, after about an hour You find that You can barely keep Your eyes open, so You shut down the InfoCentre. As You fall asleep, You get the vague feeling that something important was missing from Your day, something vital to Your sense of Yourself as a human being, as part of the human community. As soon as You try to look at it directly, however, the feeling disappears. Ah, well. Tomorrow is another day..."We regret to inform you that your request to have the maximum daily withdrawal and overdraft limits on your Humanity Card raised has been denied. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.Yours in Our Common Humanity,
The Board of Adjustments
Universal Humanity, Inc.
:-)
