by Indra Sinha
Hagstor, ducking the Necromancer’s first blow, shouted, ‘Wyrd, let’s make it a fight to the death. No fleeing. There are immortals watching, let them witness our pact.’
But Wyrd drew back with a frown and said, ‘I don’t make pacts with scum like you.’
As Wyrd spoke, he poised the mild unassuming rat and let it fly; but splendid Hagstor, never once taking his eyes off Wyrd, ducked and the murderous rodent flew past and crashed to the ground. Hagstor reached for his weapon, a finely balanced blade, chased with gold, whose honed steel was sharp enough to cleave the Necromancer’s helmet. But it had vanished. A few minutes earlier, XParrot the Ceased 2B Wizard had slipped upstairs with Jarly to a room where there were two more computers – how unwise ever to assume that a cybergypsy has only one – each with its own modem and telephone line. And while Jarly climbed into the glittering armour of Wyrd, XParrot made himself invisible and at the crucial moment spirited away Hagstor’s sword, so that when the Warlock reached for it, it was not there. Now, in the first moments of battle, the same invisible hand took up the fallen rat and restored it to Wyrd, who whirled it round by the tail, and slung it, poison teeth-first at Hagstor’s eyes. The Warlock jumped backwards, but the claws raked his cheek and drew blood. This opening exchange had told upon unarmed Hagstor. He was puzzled and angry about the loss of the sword. Caught without his f-key software he was forced to type, which, given a Warlock’s power, was little disadvantage, but Wyrd was beginning to seem no ordinary adversary. Hagstor was filled with doubt. Who was the friend Wyrd was revenging? And how had Wyrd regained the rat?
Now immortal XParrot spoke to Hagstor from a realm of high invisibility and said, ‘Hagstor, don’t worry. I’m watching out for you. If things get tricky, I’ll step in.’
XParrot spoke using the voice of the Archwitch Mehitabel and Hagstor was taken in. He thought that if he were in real trouble, the Archwitch would rescue him. Hagstor was trying to steal the rat from Wyrd, but Wyrd no longer had the rat. Instead he struck Hagstor with the longsword, a dreadful wound that caused the scarlet stamina to flow. Hagstor, amazed and furious, called out under his breath to Mehitabel, ‘There’s some trickery going on, give me back my sword.’ But from Mehitabel came no reply. Then Hagstor knew that he had been deceived.
As another violent blow fell on him, Hagstor said, ‘An immortal has played a trick on me. I thought Mehitabel was online, but I can see now that she is still on the settee next door. It’s not Wyrd I’m fighting, but an immortal. There’s no shame in fleeing this fight.’
But as he turned to run, Wyrd laid on him a spell of crippling that took his legs away. At that moment Hagstor knew he had lost. He cried out, ‘An immortal has deceived me. There is no escape and I must die.’ Then he gathered his courage and shouted, ‘So be it. I’ll die fighting and give you immortals a battle that will be remembered so long as there is a Shades.’
Even while speaking he stole away from Wyrd
the keen smoking blade, whirling it around his head
and gathering all his massive strength,
like an eagle that pierces the dark clouds
to seize a young lamb or cowering hare,
so Hagstor stooped, waving the savage sword;
but Wyrd rushed against him, mad with anger,
and lifting up his shield to receive the blow,
sparing his gold-hornèd helm, won in the lion’s
amphitheatre, stole back the sword and struck.
Noble Hagstor laughed aloud, reached to take it back,
but even as his fingers closed round the hilt,
its shining blade grew dark, the gleaming edge
was like a great comet fading in a night of stars,
the brightest star resolving to a gleam, malign
and deadly, from the fang of the evil-toothed rat,
which once more appeared in Wyrd’s mailed hand.
At the tender place where neck and shoulders part,
crazy Wyrd let drive the rat, its foul decaying teeth
sank deep into Hagstor’s neck yet clave not
the windpipe, that Hagstor might yet speak unto his foe.
And Wyrd shouted so that all the land could hear,
‘Hagstor, when you murdered Truffles, I doubt
you dreamed that any could avenge him, yet now
I’ve loosened your knees, I disdain to finish you
myself, but by a low and carrion creature
you will unseemly and dishonourably be despatched.
Then the lesser mortals flocked out to see the end of Hagstor. The dying Warlock, in his shame reduced to crawling away from his tormentor, knew now that Wyrd was Jarly’s and that Jarly had had help from an immortal. He knew that Wyrd was being played by Jarly in some other room of Gawain’s house, and that Jarly had Graeme’s Ripper program at his fingertips. Then XParrot brought on a low creature called Worryguts, with the rank of Explorer, one of the vilest in the land and Worryguts took up a woodsman’s heavy axe and with this blunt and rustic tool came to where Hagstor lay gasping his life out at the feet of Wyrd.
Then, strength gone, Hagstor of the flashing helm said,
‘I implore you by your life and knees and honour,
do not let this peasant slaughter me, take my life
yourself with a fighter’s weapon, give me a warrior’s death
and my friends will forgive you this act of treachery.’
But frowning in fury spoke pitiless Wyrd, ‘I’ll not stop him
from taking off your head; not if your friends bring here
and weigh out thy weight in gold; but these small folk
who hate thee shall look on and laugh.’
Then the seers and enchanters, all those mortals who had been oppressed by Hagstor’s arrogance, gathered round and clamoured at him, shouting and taunting. The assembled immortals, watching in silence, were aghast.
Thus in his dying spoke Hagstor of the flashing blade,
‘Jarly I know you well and prophesy what shall be,
if you do this, on you the wrath of the immortals
will fall on the day when Hellborn and Mehitabel
and the great Coder who made all things
and British Telecom shall destroy you utterly.
But even as he spoke Worryguts swung the axe
and Hagstor’s head flew from his body
and his soul fled shrieking to the underworld
whence none return, and to his corpse said Wyrd,
‘Lie there dead, Hagstor, my own fate I am content
to accept when it is determined by the Coder
and all the other immortals.’
Strange cries before dawn
The rumpus at Gawain’s roars on well into the small hours. It’s past four when I climb into the Land Rover and head south for Sussex. The night is brilliantly clear with stars flung across the night. It’s cold and after a few miles the heater blasting hot air in my face makes me drowsy. Shadows crouch in the hedges and leap out, catching me unawares. The road begins swimming away from me and vanishes into pools of darkness. I’m travelling more and more slowly, taking dream turnings, jumping awake to find the car sliding . . .
From troubled dreams I wake to strange hooting cries and calls and the sound of winding horns, blown as to rally troops in battle. I am pulled over in a lane, the nose of the car deep in a hedge, brambles raking across the windscreen. There is a clattering of hooves and clamour of dogs. I wake and look. The hunt is coming up behind me, hallooing along the lane. A huntsman with ginger beard comes past, in his bright red jacket, on a big white horse ankle deep in hounds. Following him are three more hunters in the pink, then ladies black-coated, white-jodhpured, cantilever-kneed – four of them, riding abreast, bringing up the rear. Yes, now their horses are jouncing past, haunches roaming, four plump bottoms rising to the trot in the dawn.
Dreamdancing
Having seen through Calypso, Morgan went on to greater things. First of all he grew older. Now when
he appeared, garlanded in flame, it was with the stern visage of a sage that he looked upon the world. He seemed a sadder, wiser man. But one day the spark rekindled in his eye: Dreamdancer had come to the land of Shades.
‘Bear, she is a really wonderful person.’
‘You said that about Calypso.’
‘I know, but Dreamy is different.’
‘How do you know?’
I am whirling through the Shades stratosphere, summoned to Morgan’s room, now renamed Morgan and Dreamdancer’s Cottage.
‘Didn’t this used to be Morgan and Calypso’s Hideaway?’
‘No need to rub salt in.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m over all that,’ he tells me. ‘In fact it seems weird to me that I got so tangled up with her.’
‘Easily done,’ I say, thinking of Calypso’s long legs under the grass skirt and the green moons of her eyes.
‘Oh I don’t regret it,’ he says. ‘And I don’t blame Cally. I guess I wasn’t the right guy. You know Bear, I’m really glad things went wrong with Cally, because it got me together with Dreamy.’
‘I was sitting on Shades,’ he says. ‘It was shortly after Gawain’s party. There was all hell breaking loose, quarrelling, rows, people fighting . . .’ (This era would become known as the First Wyrd War.)
‘Barbarella and Jarly were at it like cat and dog, shouting at each other about cheating and lying and god knows what,’ Morgan is telling me. ‘Gawain was trying to calm it all down, until Barb gave him an earful . . . I was sitting there and I said out loud “I don’t need this. I’m off.” And there was this other player there, a lowish level, who said “I agree, can I come with you?” ’
‘And this was Dreamdancer?’
‘Yes. And we went to my room and of course it was still called its old name, so she asked who Calypso was . . .’
‘And you told her?’
‘Yup. I told her. She seemed interested and sympathetic and before I realised, I was just pouring my heart out.’
‘And what did she do?’
He considers this for a while. ‘Hugged me a lot . . . She was very sweet about it. Said she understood what I was going through, because it had happened to her.’
‘Bear, she’s been badly hurt in her life. She was married to this guy . . . he drank heavily and was violent. He beat her. She couldn’t leave because she had a young son . . . Then she took her son and moved in with her brother . . . We talked and talked. We were on until dawn, just talking. She told me how she could see the sun coming up, over the chimney pots of Cardiff . . .’
Morgan grins. ‘I’m in love,’ he says. ‘There’s no doubt. I know what it’s like. It’s like with Cally, only more so. Much more.’
‘Morgan, are you even sure she’s female? You know as well as I do that most “women” on these games have testicles.’
‘She hasn’t,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the photograph to prove it.’
In the Goat and Compass, dingy as ever, smelling sourly of beer slops and stale tobacco, cigarette butts floating in yellow pools in the urinals – why on earth do we keep coming here? – Morgan has lined up two pints on the bar.
‘Okay, are you ready for this, Bear?’
With a proud flourish he extracts from the leather labia of his wallet a dog-eared polaroid: Dreamdancer, blonde, buxom – old fashioned word for an old fashioned girl – with just the face to melt a lonely heart.
Hacking the Coconet
‘I can hack the Fidonet, the JANET and the internet,’ says Jarly. ‘But tha, lad, tha’s trying to hack fuckin’ Coconet.’
The Coconet is the most powerful computer net in existence. It has one hundred and twenty times as many networks as the Internet has users. Each Coconetwork has around 10,000,000,000 processors directly connected to between 10,000 and 100,000 others, giving a number of internal connections approaching 1015 or one thousand billion. Every instant 10 million or more of its processors interact with each other. It would take a hundred years of supercomputer time to simulate what is happening in a tiny region of each Coconetwork many times a second.
At Gawain’s party two worlds, the one we call ‘real’, and the cyber-world of Shades, collided and became entangled. Such events seem so strange that you’d think they must be rare, like asteroid strikes on Earth, but they are not. Dozens of worlds collide daily in our lives, unnoticed. We compartmentalise experiences. Some, we say, are ‘real’, the rest ‘in the mind’. What we constantly forget is that experience is all in the mind. Events only seem to succeed one another, one after another. They actually occur simultaneously on many levels inside a multi-dimensional lattice that extends in directions for which Einsteinian space-time has no names. This lattice and the quadrillion links that channel its bizarre info-flows are described by Jarly, Bear and friends as the Coconet. Each Coconetwork runs on a human brain, a computer whose case is of roughly the size and hairiness of a large coconut. The limitless energy-filled space it generates has been known to explorers since the first sapient dawn: it is the human imagination.
Into the Vortex
Wyrd War One escalates. To whoever will listen, Barbarella insists that the murderers of Hagstor have gone unpunished.
‘Gawain planned it. He put Jarly and the Parrot up to it. They should lose their immortality.’
Gawain complains of character assassination (and does not spot the irony).
One night, Lilith says to me, ‘Bear, these hack and slay games are all very well for kids, but isn’t it time you considered something more challenging?’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘I think you’d enjoy real roleplaying.’
‘Isn’t that what we are doing?’
‘What happens on Shades, dear, whatever you decide to call it, is not roleplaying.’
‘Bear, have you ever roleplayed a female? And if so, did you actually feel any different?’
I think of Lorelei. My first female character. How strange it had been to step inside her loose-limbed body and zip myself into her fizzy personality (something I discovered, rather than decided, she possessed). It felt awkward, the shape and weight of ‘myself’, the way ‘my’ limbs moved. I was mortified every time some hormone-driven lad wolf-whistled or made a suggestive remark.
‘Did that happen often?’ Lilith asks.
Absolutely. Even though I was (at first) so gauche, so bad at it, the male players who rushed up to flirt seemed to accept without question that Lorelei was female. Yet they must have known that, at that time, hardly five percent of people on the net were women.
‘Ah,’ says Lilith. ‘The human need for self delusion. What I call roleplaying is the opposite. What did Lorelei look like?’
‘Fairly tall, blonde . . .’
‘Don’t tell me,’ says Lilith, ‘bright, amusing. Legs to armpits.’
‘Yup.’
‘Typical novice creation. The first time a man creates a female character it’s nearly always a fantasy pin-up – the sort of girl he’s being jacking off to since puberty, but never managed to pull. By bringing her to life it’s almost like possessing her, at last.’
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I’ll admit, she was pretty unsubtle. Fantastic figure, amazing tits, wonderful derrière obligingly encased in torn jeans.’
‘And how would she conduct herself, this Lorelei?’ Lilith asks. ‘I suppose you named her after the girl in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.’
‘As a matter of fact, no. More the mermaid. My Lorelei had a breathless laugh and talked very fast, in what I used to think of as an intelligent gabble.’
‘More stereotyping,’ says Lilith.
‘She’d giggle rather than chuckle.’
‘They all do that.’
‘So Lorelei got lots of attention,’ says Lilith. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Well,’ I reply . . . Well, there’s an undeniable frisson in causing heads to turn. ‘Well, at first maybe, but the novelty wore off. Male players were always offering help I didn’t want. They’
d tell me how to do things, as if I were incapable of thinking for myself.’
‘Were you propositioned a lot?’
‘There were a few lunkheads who seemed to think that because I was blonde and pretty, it was okay to make suggestions. Even with those who weren’t like that, I often felt patronised. Maybe I imagined it, but behind the flattery and compliments, I felt there was arrogance, a kind of contempt. It made me angry.’
‘Who felt angry?’ asks Lilith softly. ‘Bear? Or Lorelei?’
‘I don’t think I ever really was her. Germaine Greer says it’s impossible for a man to know what it feels like to be a woman.’
‘Flow does Germaine Greer know what it feels like to be a woman – other than herself?’ asks Lilith.
‘When you roleplay, you are the character,’ Lilith says. ‘There’s no script. You open your mouth and are surprised by what comes out. Your character has a life and friends of her own. You may not approve of what she gets up to, but it is not your business. We, the puppeteers, the mask-wearers, have a duty not to interfere, yet we must know our characters well, as well as we know ourselves. This is hard. Most of us have only the sketchiest idea of ourselves . . .’
‘I remember what it felt like to be murdered.’
‘The reason I am telling you all this, Bear,’ says Lilith, ‘is because there is another place, which is by invitation only. Just a few people who like to take things . . . further.’
‘Think of it as a small theatre group,’ Lilith says, ‘which creates, stages, improvises, performs and is simultaneously audience. It isn’t for everyone. Things have been known to get rather intense. We are very careful who we ask. The Vortex is a club joined only by invitation. Even then, acceptance isn’t certain. If the other members don’t like you they won’t “play” with you. So we invite only people we think will appreciate it and who can be trusted not to pass the number on to undesirables. Luna’s rules.’
‘Who’s Luna, Lil?’
