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Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe
Chapter One
I am jammin' the wave, man; plugged in, javohl? I am
surfin' the reality curve; I'm toppin' the line! I'm playin
Greedball with Jim the Rat; the Full Virtual Reality environment
surrounds us with screaming textures and shrieking rhythms as we
keep score by the feedback to our pleasure/pain centers. Right
now I'm flying like I took 10 straight hits of crack while Jimbo
is looking kind of green, sweating out the consequences of bein'
a natural-born loser.
The ball comes zipping at me, and time >>>>warps>>>> as I
(((reach for it and fail utterly; pain like knives, like crazed
rats clawing at my prostate, like snorting Drano, pain like God's
eye on me; the pain clears my mind and centers me. It hurts just
right...
*Click*
In the groove. Flick. Left. Flick. Right. Flick my eyes
flick side to side flick up and down; the acid green and
ultra-blue balls scream their trajectories inside the nearly
weightless geodesic space. The walls are down; I feel the tug of
one of my green pentagons as my arc tops out. As I start to fall
I snag one of my greens and hurl it away while cranking it's
inertial mass to the max. I feel my bones groan with the effort
as it streaks towards one of my green triangles on the opposite
hemisphere.
Jim launches to intercept but he didn't catch on how much
mass I added; his fingers fold back with audible pops as the ball
brushes by to score. Jim starts screaming as the exit sequence
starts; his eyeballs explode just about the time I blow my wad;
then the geodesic dissolves into pixels and I'm back in my
Chariot, the Crotch-Monster slurping away so as to get every
drop. The scoreboard tells me I'm 8 for 3 with Jim; good, good;
not so much of a margin that he won't play any more. One more
honest game, and then I'd better be "off my form" again.
Another way to play in Cyberspace. As they say; "It ain't
real unless it's FUCKIN' real!"
I get up, sated; I scratch my crotch where the relief
tube's rubber had made a tight suction seal against depilated
flesh. A quick glance in the mirror shows me; naked, hairless
except for eyelashes; pale skin and black eyes. No stubble, the
hair is gone for good; it gets in the way of the neural contact
pads, and it fucks up the suction on the waste disposal units. I
walk to my foodwall where with the push of a button I summon
mystic daemons to conjure with microwaves and high-speed
impellers; invoking processed krill, soya, nutrocarb and spices.
The mystic daemons are good to me; I must have paid the food
bill. Out plops a mockburger and a Coke Classic.
I sit down at my table and read the newsslab; I check out
the headlines - more of the same old shit, somehow reassuring. I
flick through, read the advice column, laugh at the editorial
cartoon and save it to permanents memory, check out my horoscope
- guardedly lousy - and finally settle down and watch the comix.
Some people say that adding limited animation to comic
strips and cartoons has killed the artform. I say it's a
different thing entirely. Besides, some pumping action makes a
graphic novel REALLY graphic!
Computers have killed a lot of artforms, I think, wiping
the last of the Special Sauce off my lip with a reconstructed
napkin. I throw the whole mess into the pulper; it can separate
the plastics and food residue without my help. I head back to my
Chariot.
It's a Chariot 515, actually; as if you care. I mean,
pretty much, a Chariot is a Chariot. The only question is
whether or not it makes your butt go numb while you are in
Cyberspace. Oh, ya, ya, the Ice Pirates make big whoopie about
how many flopdoodles per nanodweeb their Chairiot can do, but I'm
like 99 percent of all Cyberspacers; I'm just along for the
ride. I don't do rez work; I don't do programming, I don't
educate expert systems clusters, so all my beast has to do is be
good enough to let me meet girls in Full Virtual Reality and play
games at an acceptably awesome speed, Dude. Oh, yeah, and take me
to work every day.
I run a machine shop in Yokohama; well, it looks like a
machine-shop, anyway. What it looks like in reality, I have no
clue. I've asked, but I only get inscrutable smiles. I'm making
prototype machine parts of some kind, and I have a good crew;
Japs pay for the best. And that's all I'm gonna say about it;
aside from the Zaibatsu yellow-dog/nondisclosure agreement and
the Yakuza goons they have to back their paper up, it's fuckin'
boring and you wouldn't care.
I flop back into the Chariot; it powers up in my august
presence, the Crotch Monster snuggles into my groin while the
seat sucks my butt down and makes a nice tight seal. There's a
tingle throughout my nervous system as the Chariot runs a quick
diagnostic, and then there's a *Snick* and my body is gone and I
am in my own Headspace.
Headspace is slang for your own personal Virtual reality;
you can tailor it as you want within limits. I'm no rez artist
and I'm a cheap bastard, so my Headspace is furnished with Public
Domain art and freeware decor; it's kinda this and that, one
period shoved against the next; I have no taste, but I know what
I like.
Yeah, I could afford to get some dweeb rez wiz to come in
and pretty it up for me, but shit, it ain't worth it. Rather
spend the money on access time; it's not like I let people IN
here. I go over to the one exception to my rule about cheap
furnishings. It looks like a battered file cabinet; in fact, if
you pick the lock (that is, your computer beats my
encryption/protection schemes) you will find some mildly illegal
porn files stored there with cute "magazine" objicons. I ignore
the lock and open the drawer while laying my left hand flat on
the top and kicking the right side of the cabinet just so. It
opens to reveal the simple keyboard and screen that is the user
interface of a very fucking expensive covert SubCarrier access
program. With it, I can access the private headspace of anybody
connected to WorldNet - which is just about everybody - without
any possibility of traceback. Of course, they gotta have
SubCarrier access too... but then, just about everybody does.
Everybody _I_ wanna ride with, anyway. People like me who wanna
walk the razor-sharp division between Virtual and Actual; between
Real and Make Believe.
It's time to Plug in to the Dixie Vibe!
***
Chapter Two
Excerpt from the New World Virtual Cyclopaedic Environment:
[Transcript of a virtual lecture given by Virtual personalities
Hiesenburgburg and Schr0/0dinger, the Kaos Kats] "How to Ride The
Dixie Vibe"
Hiesenburgburg is sitting on the floor, an immense fat
black `toon cat covered in glossy fur, smoking a big green cigar
and slurping a beer mug filled with scalding espresso. He's
wearing black jeans and Birkinstocks, a black straw Panama shades
his eyes, which are hidden by wrap-around black shades. His voice
is a purring rumble; like James Earl Jones in serious red-shift.
Shroud0/1dinger paces nervously, a thin, wispy cat with
glossy long fur. She seems sometimes to randomly flick from
place to place, whenever you aren't looking. The fur flows with
the air of her passage and molds itself to a voluptuous body.
Large blue eyes in a Siamese mask completes the picture; she
wears no clothing. Her fur fluffs and crackles with a constant
static charge; her voice is a sibilant whisper. And sometimes
she just isn't there; only a whiff of magnolia and musk to mark
her place.
HI: Dig, like, you gotta dig me here, chelas. We are gonna
tell you about how the vibe was born. Think about it, man, feel
it, taste it; we are a thousand years and more from the campfires
of our forecats and here we are, layin' down oral history on you.
SH: It's not just oral. It's performance art. We live the
part over for you again and again.
HI: Speak for you'sef, kitty! Next time I do this, I'll
tell it completely different. Dig it, chelas; this is all a lie.
SH: Inspired guesswork. Wishful thinking. Creative logical
constructions. Erisian prayers.
HI: So, like, lighten up, sit down and dig, cuz this is
about as true as it ever gets.
Way back when, when a bunch of geniuses was racing to get
the first rights to the whole virtual reality neural interface
thing, the gumments of the world had been looking at Virtual
Reality as a way for Important People to Do Things Without Real
Work. It was, Like, a DEEEFENSE thing. Simulate dis jet, Simulate
dat tank. Simulate dat jet blowing up dat tank. Simulate burning
to death in that tank... we gotta make it really real, dig?
It's called Negative Feedback Conditioning. In the early
days you wore a suit with wires and eletrodes and skin sensors
and pupil readers and they shoved things in your ears and up your
butt, just to get all the responses. And they used it to simulate
reality, and torture some poor shmoe until he got it right.
And the Wheels, yah, well, they used it to talk to other
wheels, though all they ever wore was a helmet and a glove -
software faked the rest, after all, who expects a politician to
feel anything?
And so you'd see the Prez, toddling along Pennsylvania Ave,
driving a waldo with a teevee for a face and a funky robohand for
pressin' the flesh, buttenholing every single voter he could
find. After he did it enough there was an expert system that took
his place running the waldo; it did it a while until the Prez
died in office.
SH: That's the legend. Lover.
HI: Swear it on a stack of bibles, luv. Swear that I'm
tellin' it jus' like I heard it. I make no further war-rent-tee!
Story goes that the expert system has been running things for the
last 20 years; it's been 24 since the last election, so maybe
it's true, maybe it's not, but the face never changes, nosirree.
SH: The Presidency is ceremonial. People like familiar
faces, kind old rituals. Stale oldfarts to mark our territory.
Smells like home.
HI: Point I MAKIN', honeychil' is dat come a point where
you dunno what is real and what ain't; come to that, don't make
no difference. Prez is a virtual reality, and you can be too. In
a completely different and less dead way, a`corse.
SH: Time to plug into the Dixie Vibe.
HI: Yeah, like she say. Because there was something called
the Internet; a dinosaur computer thing, date way, way back to
the 1960's. It started out hooking old mainframe computers
together. It used landlines and microwave links, den it get fast
glass and satellite uplinks. Yeah, and dig, this is unregulated
traffic.
SH: Too much to regulate even then.
HI: It creates a tradition. Then when fast glass lines and
wideband uplinks become real common, data transfer rates go
through the roof. Full speed vidio signals can be transferred,
and computers get fast enough to generate `em in real time;
better than real time.
SH: Interfaces become more sophisticated. Less hassle. Good
Chariot, now, you just sit down. No screen, no keyboard. All that
stuff is virtual. Never wears out.
HI: People had been working from home for years already.
Telecommuting just got a little more realistic, a little more
personal. After decades of Fax and phone and Email, business got
back to the handshake and the eyeball. Chariot makes sure that
"you" are exactly you, same for the other guy.
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SH: Georgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Dior. Clothes
make the person. Buy it off the rack in a clothing store or a
rezware house. Costs about the same.
HI: But even today there's a fair gap between Virtual and
Actual. The best Chariot interfacing with the fastest computer
on with perfect link can still only render something that looks,
sounds, and feels slightly surreal; a cartoon reality. Some
people are fond of that, take it to extremes.
SH: No shit?
HI: Like; dig this, cats. We be square, old-time cats; we
ain't hip no more; the vibe has passed us by.
SH: Speak for yourself. I walk where I will.
HI: And I know where you won't. But that's the thing. There
are no limits. Riding the vibe, there are no limits but the ones
you ARE. Bein' a cartoon underlines it, rezes it up, solid and
nifty-keen and, like, _distant_. Even when you wear it, even when
you walk on it, even, dig, even when you fuck it.
SH: Distant. The player and the play. Entwined.
Simultaneous. A dance of Shakesperes and Kants and Niechies and
Dahmers. All after each other's bodies, each other's minds, each
other's souls.
HI: Oh, and dig, like, you want to know why we call it the
Dixie Vibe? It's like a poetic reference to that rebel feeling,
that visceral catharsis you get when you do that rebel yell...
(WHOOP!)
SH: The first anon realtime subcarrier server had the
internet name Dixie_VI.vmi.edu. Dixie Six was a massively
parallel RISC supercomputer that was surplussed to Virginia
Military Institute by the United States National Security Agency.
HI: I liked my truth better, fuzzylips. But this one's true
too. Problem was, nobody could figure out what to do with a
massively parallel supercomputer. It's not like you could buy
programs for it. But they turned it over to the Computer Science
Department anyway, and the CS head - who was an old Xenix hound -
fobbed it off on a bunch of CS majors who wanted a dissertation
project. They formed a development group and wrote a compiled
language and an operating system that supported a virtual reality
environment to a degree no other educational institution had ever
been able to achieve.
SH: The late Jimm Fixx
said it. "Nothing any fool hacker couldn't have done given fifty
billion dollars worth of free equipment and a licence to play
God."
HI: And of course Jimmie the_Fix and his cronies in the
development team were perhaps the first to experiment with
virtual sex in a virtual reality environment. After all, they
were hackers. They were geeks.
SH: Like you. Like me.
HI: Bet your furry ass. So they played a bit, and made the
system available to other users - coeds, for example... Anyway,
word got out. Authorities Were Not Amused. They Put A Stop To It.
SH: Probably felt hurt they weren't invited. Administrators
are people too.
HI: Truly? They must learn to hide it early. Anyway, this
provoked the "fixxit team" to create the subcarrier firmware that
allows untraceable contacts. Amazing work, really. It's reformed
our sex lives and made government security efforts on electronic
media completely irrelevant, yet it could NOT be banned, because
the subcarrier hardware and firmware is part of the patented,
proprietary chipset of every Chairiot. The chipset that makes it
possible to do the neural interface without breaking skin and
tapping nerves.
SH: Made the software illegal. Now everybody's a criminal.
HI: Oh, not everybody. Hardly anybody at all. Only a few
millions.
SH: _Everybody_. Everybody who counts.
Chapter Three
The program interface looks and feels like a very, very
expensive laptop of 30 years ago; an antique. It's a perfect
emulation of a Lapdesk 286/turbo. Which means that there are
megabytes of files and stuff to wade through before you even hit
on the proper initialization sequence. I boot up an antique comm
program and I can hear the hard drive whir, even feel a slight
inertial tug as it spins up. Nice touch; not sure I believe it...
Once it's up I load one of 20 phonebook lists, all of which
have 30 year old phone numbers. I dial a long-dead bbs; The
Passion Palace. (3/12/24! 10 megs of adult files!) A little
resident virus scans the numbers being dialed; this one doesn't
go to the phone; it kicks in the subcarrier interface. My
headspace rezzes out and I rez into Dixieland.
Dixieland is a virtual reality construct. It's a very wierd
place, nothing is real and anything can be. There are laws and
cops and as much bullshit as you care to put up with. It's just a
lot more avoidable. Like it says on the One Burger Bill; "In Bob
We Trust", and right under that, in nice holographic letters,
"SLACK", right over top of the Great Pyramid of Scottsdale,
known to be the Slackest Place Ever. Most laws exist to add to
the challenge...
I step out of the alleyway alcove that's my private rez
alcove, marked with my sigil of an erect penis and balls
underlying an ornamental "L". I nod at a giant slug with a
Sanitation Department cap sucking up the cigarette butts, used
hypos and used condoms; poor bastard must have pissed off one of
the Dixiecrats REAL bad.
I passed a wastebasket on the corner; it was filled with
used condoms, cigarette butts and all manner of other trash; I
was feeling public-spirited, so I grabbed a handful and flung it
into a clean place.
Random distribution routines take up an unbelievable amount
of overhead; it's a lot easier to keep the place looking properly
grungy with good old human sloppiness.
I boogie down 5th Avenue, Metropolis. I hear a whoosh and
someone (probably some antique daemon) says "Look! Up in the
Sky! It's a bird..."
I walk away, not looking up. It's either Superman,
Underdog, or a fucking big bird waiting to plop on any upturned
faces. Metropolis is like that. Sometimes I think about moving
over to Gotham City and take my chances with the Noir crowd, or
SpiderManhattan and just dig the angst, but hell, I hardly ever
spend time above ground anyway; I'd never notice.
I walk past the `Toons and the various Freaks, Fairies,
Furries and Supers; nodding at the odd slutty Leatherperson like
me. People are funny; you come up with a way to have free, open
sex; no consequences, no hassles, no LAWS, and no way to get
caught even if there were - and they are STILL prudes. I think
most people like laws so that they can pretend that they would
really cut loose if they ever got the chance... but give `em a
chance, and you'll find `em off in the woods chasing Orcs with
swords rather than fucking.
And people think _I'M_ perverted!
I bop down the stairs of PlaySpace an underground RezBar
where I spend most of my credit. I check out the Ident I'm
wearing in the mirror by the door; compact, muscular,
dangerous-looking; wearing black combat boots, biker jacket and
cap. That, and a Chrome-Steel, spike-studded, vibrating codpiece,
proportioned for a healthy young donkey.
Hey, call me conservative! I pushed air over to where s\u/-
was sitting. s\u/- is an Old Hand - you can tell by the punny,
texty handle. I grabbed her hair and kissed her right on the
mouth, vibrating the clit in the middle of her soft palate with
my tongue. s\u/- is a magnificent oralist...
"Hello, Lance," she said with the conversational mouth at
the base of her throat. "How's tricks?" She made a serious grab
for my uvula with her prehensile, eight-inch tongue.
"Not bad," I said, disengaging. I've never really been able
to cope with people playing with that particular dangly bit. I
caressed her upper three breasts to keep her distracted, tugging
on the nipple rings and flicking the buds themselves. "Plenty of
overtime this month; enough to pay you and as much again on
account."
"I suspect you may not have a life," she said, as she
flicked on my vibrating codpiece and straddled it, mashing her
pubes against the unyielding, spiked metal.
"My life is riding the Vibe." I encourage her grinding by
sticking a finger up her anus.
"God! Half the time I think you're a rogue daemon with a
bad dialogue routine! Shut up and fuck me!"
Well, talking isn't my best thing, I admit. The other thing
she wants is. I shuck the codpiece to reveal that it is, if
anything, understated; a huge, telescopic battering ram of a dick
emerges, covered with knotted veins; the head the size of a
clenched fist, the shaft the size of a thick forearm. I picked
her up and buried it to the hilt in her box without any
resistance to speak of. And she accuses _me_ of bad dialogue!
s\u/- is just toooo easy to be credible; I'm either fucking a
doorkeeper AI daemon or she's a guy - probably some 80-year old
paraplegic virgin living his days out in a total care home.
Of course, running this virtual fuck-bar, he'd be a _rich_
and _well-fucked_ paraplegic 80-year-old virgin... Like I always
say, Virtuality is what you make of it. Anyway, you appreciate at
the moment I am not concentrating on fine points of philosophy,
not that I ever do!
I bore her to the ground and rammed my meat home; I felt it
bottoming out against her cervix. Her cunt started it's
always-pleasing peristaltic ripples, massaging my cock and
squeezing it until the tension was almost unbearable. I watched
her face, waiting for the orgasmic blush; I watched it creep up
her cheeks felt her start to writhe and buck; I rammed home as
deeply as I could, my knees scraping on the tired linoleum. I
supported her shoulders and as her climax peaked, I shot my wad.
Sturm undt Drang undt Gotterdamerung!
The blast took the top of her head off; the high pressure
jet blew chunks of bone, brain and less-identifiable bits across
the floor, causing a couple of new fish to jump; one turned and
blew chunks all over one of the pool tables.
I pulled out with a wet and bloody plop, and stood up; the
new fish looking at me in absolute horror; my dick shrank from
it's previous proportions, oozing milky come and dripping other
things. One of them had just taken a breath to scream when the
re-res hit.
***BIP***
I offered s\u/- a hand and she gracefully got to her feet,
not a hair out of place. The fish looked confused as they
realized that no trace of the event remained; not bone, not
vomit, not even a bad taste in the mouth. All glands were in
neutral; no adrenalin hangovers... It was just as if it was a
slightly distant memory.
Virtual reality; almost like the real thing, and so _easy_
to clean up!
"Memorable, Lance," she said. "There's nothing like having
your brains blown out with a comeshot!"
She managed to say that with a straight face; I admire
talent in a whore. Of course, she's right. They don't call an
orgasm "le petit mort" for nothing; with me it's just bigger and
messier. But both of us being troupers and Old Hands, we
refrained from whooping with laughter and completely wierding out
the newbies.
I called s\u/- a whore; and she _is_, and damn proud of it,
but she doesn't get paid for that; there's just too damn much
desperate and free competition. What she DOES get paid for is the
bar. Venue. Ambiance. Attention to detail; that's what made me
give her my hard-earned credits; PlaySpace is a meat-magnet, and
I'm always hungry.
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