William Dietrich: Getting back

He began to net-surf, skimming across a downloaded rush of tropical beaches, mist-shrouded mountain peaks, and adrenaline-jolting thrill rides. A dinosaur roared, an elephant trumpeted, and Napoleonic cavalry thundered into a smoky valley, his chair rocking slightly with the drum of the hooves. Women more impossibly beautiful than any he'd ever actually seen beckoned alluringly. "At Turner-Murdoch-Disney," an avatar-guide purred, "we promise the best in fantasy entertainment! Experience utter danger without the risk of real injury, exquisite sex without commitment or disease! Any time, any place, for any reason: as always, your securi-lock keeps your fantasies as private as your own mind! So come dream with us, with the aid of the finest actors and writers and technicians in the world…"

Yet nothing caught his fancy. He clicked restlessly, the usual vividness seeming flat and artificial. "Click 1-800-Companion," a program tempted, "because friendship can be bought…"

That one mocked him. Mona, I'm gonna… call 1-800? Pretty pathetic, Dyson, he lectured himself. My life spent in video half-lives more interesting than my own. Click, click, click, flick, flick, flick. Reality, then! The news was of rare, remote disaster that confirmed his own safety. The market twitched to tremors too faint to feel. Commentators excitedly recorded the linkages and breakups of celebrities he could never hope to meet. Economic indicators were up-everyone can win, all the time- but then they were always up under United Corporations. Or about to go up, or taking a breather after a sprint of upness. He skimmed like a skipping rock over the bloated bandwidth, numb from the predictability of it. Newer, better, faster. The more insistent the promise, the more his own world seemed to remain unchanged. There were fads, of course: quick, insistent, and forgotten until economically recycled by nostalgia and irony. His closets were filled with the detritus of fads. All closets were. All fads were global now.

He clicked and tapped, following the links his hacker pal Fitzroy had taught him. The web had grown so vast it was fundamentally unexplorable, unpoliced. Its sites outnumbered the population of the planet. It had become a gargantuan network of electronic rooms, corridors, passageways, and barriers: endless, tangled, secretive, and dreamlike. As deep and unknowable now as the human mind, a haunt of inner fantasy and murky rebellion. A descent to its cyber underground was like falling down a rabbit hole.

Had he found them or had they found him?

They'd come to him first, he remembered, but probably only after being alerted to his discontent by his e-mail whinings or his grousing to some co-worker who already belonged. It was hip to not take United Corporations seriously. So popping up on his wall out of nowhere one evening had come a single word that intrigued him:

Disbelieve.

Then an Internet address into a laborious maze with just enough irreverence to be tantalizing. There was a shadow net under the official net, he knew, a Hades of the skeptical and the unhappy. Its coding was breakable, to be sure, but it took the authorities time to find and break. The illicit nature of it was thrilling. But finally he'd come to some electronic doors that barred further descent.

Keep Out.

He cracked some code, made some end runs, guessed some riddles, and received a few half-baked conspiracy theories for his trouble. He was still too straight, bogged in the cyber underground's tar: the corporate drone, the hacker who couldn't quite hack it.

Frustrated, he called Fitzroy.

"What the hell do you want that garbage for?" the ex-cop had growled from his video wall. Fitzroy hacked code for a living now, making three times the money he'd earned policing it. He'd found Daniel floundering on the web once, offered some free advice, and then regularly milked him of money for one insistent need or another. "It's just a bunch of loonies. Rumors as news. Losers."

"They're different."

"So is a rehab ward for the morally impaired. You want to spend a month there?"

"Come on, Fitzroy, can you get me in or not?"

"I can get you started. Then you have to play along with their paranoia while they suck on your bank account. It's a scam, Dyson."

"I'm bored. I've heard rumors about these guys. They question things."

"Ask 'em how many answers they've got." But he sold Daniel enough passwords and puzzle solutions to get him in.

Daniel found himself in a gothic mansion of paranoia, an odd net-world of conspiracy theories, web-porn, unproven sex scandals, dark fantasy, irreverent satire, pseudo-science, alien abductions, and rambling political discourse. Garbage, Fitzroy had predicted. People who preferred to believe the bizarre over the mundane no matter how improbable. Links were constantly disrupted by authorities trying to police the net of trash and new cells opened up as fast as old ones evaporated. Postings were made by characters calling themselves Swamp Fox and Robin Hood. It was a game.

So Daniel surfed after his failure with Mona Pietri because he was more thrilled at being there- at being in- than with any information he was finding. "If everyone wins, how do we feel what it means to lose?" pleaded a posting this evening. "If this is heaven, where is hell?"

"Level 31," Daniel offered lightly, typing. "A Microcore help menu."

"Who is Satan?"

"Harriet Lundeen." Maybe someone would pick up the name and she'd flicker through a hundred conspiracy theories. The gorgon, unmasked. He laughed to himself.

"What if you could really fight evil, Daniel?"

He stopped at that. Who was this cowled figure looming on his screen who knew his name? You never used your real name in the cyber underground. He explored under the sobriquet Gordo, taken from an action toy he kept on his desk. Gordo Firecracker, nemesis of evil.

"How do you know my name?"

"I am a would-be friend."

Daniel paused. He was suspicious of would-be friends. He knew there were informants, spies, and censors who cruised the web, occasionally making an embarrassing arrest. Still, he was curious.

"Who are you?"

"I am Spartacus. I am Robespierre. I am Thomas Paine and Vladimir Lenin and Vercingetorix and Crazy Horse. We exist, Daniel. We oppose. The cyber underground is more than a toy. The world has gone into a coma and we want to wake it up."

He hesitated at that. There was an unspoken line between satire and treason, and this kind of stuff was subversive. Illegal. But kind of cool too. That's what he wanted to do, wake up. How secure was the encryption on this site?

"Are you brave enough to help?"

Yeah, you chicken, Dyson?

"Are you intelligent enough to care?"

Care about what? That was the problem, wasn't it, that no one cared about anything anymore. "Help with what?" he typed.

"Do you know what a truth cookie is?"

Ah. Software vandalism. "I've heard of them." A prank virus or a sophomoric Trojan Horse. Saboteurs slipped them into web products sometimes, like Microcore's. You ran the application and some illicit message popped up. Dumb stuff, mostly. Jokes, digs at the rich and famous, or kooky theories of oppression and malfeasance. Water cooler talk. But they worked like a kind of underground newspaper, the opposition's version of reality. The whole practice was more annoying than threatening to United Corporations. There were electronic screens to weed the junk out, and employees suspected of inserting a truth cookie or reading too many of them sometimes wound up being given an "opportunities transfer" to a lower level. Dangerous as hell, really, to play with this stuff. And fun to sneak looks at it.

"We need your help, Daniel. The world needs a truth cookie in your product. The world needs to wake up. We can make it safe, very safe. All of this is encrypted. Your electronic tracks erased. It's risk-free, if you trust us."