by Lou Anders
I stood on a street corner, listening to the clangor, and offered up my thanks to the surly dark artificial orange sky that digitopias are so infinitesimally few among the boundless realities.
And at the same time I felt a great rush of pity for the individual souls trapped here.
Souls?
Half-souls, quarter-souls, shriveled relics of souls, more like. Their only blessing is that they don’t recognize their trappedness, believe instead that their undiscovery of love represents the fullest freedom of them all. They’re prisoners who aren’t conscious of the cage’s bars, who look at the window of their cell and see just reflected a gray light that they believe is the world … and see nothing of the riot of colors and brightness beyond the razor-thin imprisoning glass they could shatter with a touch.
I turned away from the scowl of the angrily uplit sky, took a few paces along the sidewalk, and was in a field of bright green grass with my many husbands. I called out to them in merriment, and they grinned and waved at me, then began to walk toward me, singly or severally.
The insides of my thighs were already damp by the time the first one reached me.
I loved them, I loved my husbands, and they loved me, their wife. We always love each other.
And today, with the sun shining down upon us and the blue and yellow flowers bobbing their heads in the breeze that caressed the grass, we had a lot of lovemaking to do if the infinite realities of the polycosmos were to continue eternally to bring forth their blossom.
Pat Cadigan is the two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novels Synners (reissued in 2001 by Four Walls, Eight Windows) and Fools (Bantam Spectra 1992; HarperCollins UK 1994). Her next novel is Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine (Macmillan-UK). She is all wired up in North London and never, ever works without a Net. Better living through chemistry! Technology is our friend! And while we’re at it, fax your congressperson; save Internet radio!
AFTERWORD: LIVING WITHOUT A NET?!
Pat Cadigan
You’ve got to be kidding, I said. Write a story set in a world without a Net? But it wasn’t a joke. Which is too bad. When it comes to the Net, I can always use a good laugh.
The Net and I are locked in a struggle that won’t end until one of us goes down and stays down. And this time, it’s personal.
Trying to work out this tempestuous relationship has brought me to the brink of madness more times than the most difficult of my difficult relatives. Oh, for the simplicity of a science fiction universe. In a science fiction universe, when people invent stuff, it by God works and everybody just uses it. You don’t get malfunctions unless it’s absolutely vital to the plot. And even if things don’t turn out quite how everyone wanted, you still feel that you’ve lived through something significant.
Meanwhile, back in real life, there’s an upgrade going on that means over 60 percent of Company A’s subscribers won’t be able to pick up their e-mail for six hours (give or take a day); lightning knocked out the southeast sector of Cable TV Company B, including the broadband Internet service. If you’re out shopping or drinking between the hours of 4 and 6 P.M., allow extra time when paying the check by credit card—it’s rush hour and the charge-approval lines are so jammed under the influx of calls, it takes twenty minutes just to get a busy signal. Here in my study, right on my very desktop, my computer is suddenly insisting that the modem it’s been using all day doesn’t exist, never existed, and no one can prove otherwise.
But hey, lest we forget, the technology wasn’t always this good.
Recently, in my travels around London, my hometown-of-choice, I came upon the following symbols chalked on the side of a wall:
)(
Having spent the better part of the morning answering my e-mail, I thought at first that emoticons were stalking me off-line. However, the plate-o-shrimp law* was in effect; a few hours later, I was reading a news item about something called warchalking, which traces its lineage back to symbols used by hoboes to alert fellow travelers as to the hospitality and hazards of the immediate locale. But these symbols are for high-tech hoboes with cleverly designed hardware, functioning software, and instincts that tell them something’s in the air.
In other words, there are little pockets of urban territory where you can hitch a ride onto the Web courtesy of someone else’s network. Look, Ma, no wires.
Well, you can if you know how, and what to look for. So if you know how, and you see this,
)(
you’ve found an open node.
This is a very exciting development, I hear, which will no doubt help usher in the Golden Age of Wireless, twenty-first-century version. Talk to some of the more technoculturally tuned-in Big Brains (many of whom wrote stories for this anthology), and I’m sure they’ll be able to rattle off a long list of wonders that could come out of this, and I’d be tempted to bet money on a lot of them coming true.
But I know what else is going to happen: drive-by spamming.
The image I can’t get out of my mind is that of reading the news on my metallic red super-duper-PDA (I’ll get one someday) when suddenly the high-res color screen starts lighting up with offers for everything from surplus aluminum siding to Viagra in bulk. Along with, of course, come-ons for software guaranteed to lock out any drive-by spam as well as software guaranteed to confound any drive-by spam lockout.
And when I press DELETE, my super-duper-PDA has two seconds to inform me there isn’t enough memory to carry out that command before the screen catches fire.
Perhaps this comes out of a personal failing on my part. If I were a stronger person, all the bugs, the mysterious error messages, the page faults and the stack overflows, the crashes, the blue screens of death, the black screens of no-kidding death, and the uncounted multitudes of pages that go not found without warning or explanation (there must be millions of them by now) wouldn’t get to me like this. I’d just laugh them off. Well, I’m trying. But the Net is a lot more trying.
At this point, some techie somewhere is protesting that I’m indiscriminately mixing hardware and software issues with Net issues. Listen, I’m not confused or disorganized—I’m holistic. If you want all the parts to work together, you have to work with them as a whole unit. I mean, really—I suffered from math anxiety compounded by childhood exposure to the new math, but even I know you don’t do anything to one side of an equation without doing the same thing to the other side.
All right, I know what you’re thinking: We can see that you have issues, but what’s the Net got to do with it?
It’s like this: I’ve imagined some pretty wild things in my twenty-five years as a professional SF writer, and not all of it is directly attributable to things I did in my misspent youth. But when I was approached to come up with a story for a world without a Net, I had nothing to say.
I’ve spent decades imagining a world with a Net. I mean, a Net that works. I mean a Net that really works, the way useful tools are supposed to work. Yes, I know: it’s not a perfect world. That’s the truth—therefore, it isn’t even fiction, let alone science fiction.
Yes, I know—that’s not the only kind of science fiction there is. In fact, you’re holding a whole book of alternatives. But no matter how I looked at it, I kept coming to the same conclusion:
A world without a Net? Been there. Still there.
Could somebody please e-mail me when it’s working?
Lou Anders is an editor, author, and journalist. In 2000, he served as the Executive Editor of Bookface.com, an Internet company that provided books and short stories for free on-line reading, and before that he worked as the Los Angeles liaison to Titan Publishing Group. He has published more than 500 articles in such magazines as International Studio, Dreamwatch, Star Trek Monthly, Star Wars Monthly, Babylon 5 Magazine, Sci Fi Universe, Doctor Who Magazine, and Magna Max. He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact (Titan Books, 1996), and the editor of the anthology Outside the Box (Wildside Press, 2001).
*Discovered ca.
1983 by the weirdest character in Repo Man, which states that at any given moment, an apparently random thought entering a mind in the waking state will cause its three-dimensional real-world counterpart to manifest regardless of circumstances or location. This manifestation usually occurs within a time frame of anywhere between (roughly) thirty minutes and 120 minutes—although time periods as short as thirty seconds and as long as twenty-four hours have been recorded in cases of extreme hunger (the former, thus, “plate-o-shrimp”) and long-lost relatives/associates/nemeses (the latter, e.g., “I was just thinking about you …”).
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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