A Future We'd Like to See 1.66 - Way Out
By Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne (Copyright 1994)

     The table had a cheery purple and yellow tablecloth on it. 
It wasn't the red and white of a good country meal, or the yellow
and orange of a clown's hair; the combination of purple and
yellow signified nothing and had no connotations whatsoever.

     The flower vase on the table was mostly an afterthought, an
attempt to make the whole situation seem more homey.  It had
maybe an inch of water in it, scummy water plainly visible
through the transparent glass with an upraised impression of a
daisy on it; the two daisies in the vase jutted out at odd
angles, and gave the impression that they were plastic.

     There was also an antique 286 here.  I had never seen a 286
before, and didn't even know what one was until I saw this one;
it had an enhanced 101 key keyboard, an EGA monitor, and a little
toggle switch so you could lower it to 6mhz for applications that
ran too quickly on the 12mhz powerhorse.  For someone who was
used to 'cyberspace', the beaten to death word, I was oddly
impressed by the power of it.

     It was new and unique.  With the constant race to be on the
CyberEdge with your CyberGear so you could be a CyberPunk, nobody
looked backwards.  Well, some did, but they weren't important in
the views of the techno elite, who thought they were crafting
some form of high art with their neurointerfaced magic.

     The computer had an autoexec and a config, running good 'ol
MS-DOS 3.3, an OS I had never heard of.  There were three other
files on there, one an EXE, one a PAS source code, and one a DAT
file.  Pascal?  Nobody used pascal.  Still, I didn't seem to care
where the machine came from or how old and archaic it was. 
Nothing really mattered to me.

     The boy who had given it to me was just as surreal as the
boxlike computer was.  "You want a way out, right?" he asked.  "I
know you do.  Try this thing out, it's great.  It's the only way
you'll get out."

     Since then, my life was an enigma.  I lost my job, I lost
all my contacts in the overused, done to death hacking industry,
I lost my little slut girlfriend who was just toadying up to the
big powerful cracker for drug money.  I didn't care.  I never
liked any of that shit.  I spent hours and hours here in my
hovel, the scummiest housing available in C'atel ("The City That
Never Shuts Up") staring at the computer before I got the urge to
turn it on.

     Life was focused down to a single white-hot point.  Until I
got this computer, the light surrounded me, loaded with fun
things to do and see.  Places to go.  People to meet.  Events to
experience.  Gradually these things seemed trivial and important,
like little footnotes in my life; things barely worth a mention. 
The only thing that really held any interest for me was the
computer.  I lost interest in sleep, I lost interest in eating. 
I didn't need to eat or sleep because these were matters of the
flesh, outside the pinpoint of life that was the computer.

     So I turned it on.  The pinpoint wasn't going to expand and
there was nothing else I could do.

     The computer went through an archaic bootup sequence,
testing its 512k base memory and beeping the night away. 
Finally, after loading some Logitec mouse drivers and announcing
proudly that it was made by Packard Bell, it dropped to a
standard C:\> prompt.

     I typed.  I knew what to do because there wasn't anything
else possible to do.  I took a DIR and came up with the usuals;
autoexec, config, nude gifs of Marina Sirtis.  Plus an EXE and
resulting Pascal source code file.

     Pascal?  It was just as old as the machine.  Kindergarten
teachers used it to show little wanna-be genius kids how to bend
the electronic world to their whim.  Still, I didn't frown at its
use, and TYPEd the file.

program n(input,output);
uses crt,graph;

begin
  {magic happens}
end.

     Cute, I thought.  It explained why the resulting EXE was
only about six bytes long.  I decided to run it.

     "It all kind of narrowed down to a funnel, you know?"
William Doors said, crouching down beside the 286 to join me.  "I
started Macroware from the top of the funnel.  All the world was
my oyster.  We were the hottest coder freaks out of Finland,
sought after by every corporation in the galaxy.

     "The others didn't want to join up with them.  I did.  They
always said no and I'd be overruled.  I didn't get why they were
apprehensive about entering the world of big business; we were
the BEST, man, we could be pulling in dumptrucks of money if we
wanted to.  Eventually I got them to settle for forming our own
company, Macroware.

     "Jensi coded up this silly little GUI program for the
leading OS of the time.  It wasn't much, just an overblown menu
interface for launching executables.  It had an internal
executable language so you could run applications native in it,
and I coded up some calculators and rolodexes and stuff.  Just a
few toys to go with the package, right?  Jensi never liked what
he made, because he said you couldn't run a proper demo under it.

     "In fact, Jensi wanted us to just scrap the thing and go
work on a demo idea we had brewing.  Instead, I swiped the
binaries and widebanded them.

     "The next day our mailbox was pouring.  EVERYBODY loved it. 
It was easy to set up because it wasn't powerful enough to be
really complex, but it was powerful enough to let the guys who
were scared of computers launch applications with ease.  Some
company out in Denver offered five million for it.

     "Jensi and the others freaked.  I took it in stride and
turned down the offer, which made my friends calm down a lot.

     "I didn't want to lose our golden egg.

     "I built up Macroware with the others, under the presumption
that we'd get off the apps and get down to some REAL coding
sooner or later.  I was never planning on doing it.  The guys
found out a year later when we were number five on the Fortune
500 and still working out of my garage, and they left me.  Fuck
them, I didn't need them.

     "Macroware rolled from that point on, without the dead
weight.  I was the coding god of the universe, taking Jensi's toy
program and making it an OS to be reckoned with.  I wasn't as
good of a programmer as he was, though, and I had a lot of bugs. 
A lot.  Still, the audience ate it up and I was rich, rich, rich.

     "We, meaning me an the toadies I decided to hire, moved the
deal off to what is now Macroworld.  I got the women, yeah, and
the fine wine.  The lower downs took care of biz for me.

     "That was the problem.

     "I should have never done that.  Macroware grew out of
control, run by my board of directors.  We became the application
king of the universe.  One day I'm booting up the latest release
of Jensi's old code and I notice something : It's shit.  Pure and
total shit.  Someone had taken our neat idea and made it into
something any coder in his right mind would scream in horror at. 
The bugs!  The processor time!  This wasn't optimized
programming, it was butter churning.  The public would eat it
anyway, because we were a STANDARD.

     "Then VOS came along.  Two guys, some sort of salvage team,
they bring this thing to my doorstep.  I test it out, and it
looks incredibly amazing.  This, I thought, this is what will
turn the tide and get us back to doing stuff I'd be proud of. 
The funnel was at the middle, then; I didn't have much room to
maneuver, since most of my power was going to the toadies.  I
could, however, push VOS as the wave of the future.

     "And it was, baby, it was.

     "VOS rocked in ways mortal man couldn't comprehend.  It
opened doors to man's creativity he'd never know about.  Artists
loved it, once we could get it working in a less 'real' way. 
Universities got on it, and some government sites strictly to
keep up with the times.  Research centers did impressive junk
with it, cranking out formulas and machines they'd never be able
to design with flat screens.  Some great, great stuff was
happening, and I thought maybe I could relax, assured that the
original vision of really righteous code wasn't lost forever.

     "Who'd have known the almighty dollar would kill it in the
end?

     "When the corps moved into VOSNet and started taking it over
credit by credit, all hell broke loose.  The creativity was gone,
replaced by the repetitive nature of pop culture for sale.  All
the good people, the wacky funsters, the hackers, the scientists,
they couldn't get anything done because prices for superior
access were steep.  So everybody who could manage packed it off
for UberNet.

     "Okay, I thought, as I sank into the funnel a little more,
maybe Uber would do it right.  No, they were just as capitalistic
as the others.  If you take a legion of punks and street refuse,
you can't expect them to produce anything worth a shit.  99% of
the junk coming out of Uber was just that, junk.  Hacking became
a chore rather than a sport, with TOOLBOXES being sold to
wannabes.  All the clever crackers were gone, bored.  They gave
up.  Everything was done in spades and they moved on.

     "By this point, I was at the nozzle of the funnel.  Trapped. 
I had no power left, stripped of it by a board of directors who
was about to declare me legally insane and throw me in an asylum. 
I couldn't help it!  I was pissed off at everything I saw, these
lovely potentials screwed into something I hated.  I had to act
out however I could, and they misinterpreted it as insanity.

     "Of course, like a funnel, there was only one way to go;
out.  I built that funnel with my own two hands through greed and
apathy, and now I had to go through with it.  But if I was going
out, everybody else was coming with me.

     "Freddy Flatscreen was a froody guy.  I chatted with him by
v-mail a number of times, despite his mail coming back with no
video and a synth voice.  He hated graphics of any kind, and
virtual reality even more.  He had this idea.  Say, Bill, he
mailed me, I've got this idea.  Whaddya say we blow the shit out
of the net and run?"

     William Doors grinned at the thought, happy memories
flooding over his face like the tide.  It wasn't really a
pleasant grin, or a mean grin; it was the definition of the shit-
eating grin.  "Oooh, it was a sweet program.  Nobody knew all the
undocced calls in VOS but me, since I managed to track down the
original author and trade for them.  The Net Will Eat Itself
virus, when unleashed via a small button in my office, would
slide across the net like a power mower, chewing up the virtual
reality aspect of VOS wherever it went.  All exporting copies of
VOS had it in them already, just waiting for the signal.

     "So, on the day the men in the white coats came for me, I
pushed the button and killed the net.

     "The net didn't die, actually.  We never wanted to sever the
lines of the baddest communications system ever made.  We just
wanted to give these lame-ass, GUI addicted, money minded
dorkwads a kick in the pants.  See, VOS always had a built in
text mode, but nobody liked to use it because it was complicated. 
With that mode, however, you have power.  As fast as you can
type, you can run the net, in ways faster than any metaphor
interface can handle.  The corps whined and pulled out, trying to
form some alternate kind of VR software, but the patents on the
mental interface were MINE and nobody ever, ever managed to
duplicate them.  No amount of biogenetic research could figure
out how they worked.

     "Actually, I never knew how they worked either, since I
didn't design them.  I suspect little elves did it.  But that's
besides the point.

     "Now, the net was there, using some variant of the UNIX
system that Freddy coded for me.  Suddenly the shift was made; VR
was out of mode, passe.  Text was trendy.  The hordes flocked to
this net.

     "This new net was just as corrupt and awful as the VR
version was," William concluded with, "But at least I didn't
write it.  My tour of duty in the computer hall of shame was
over.  Freddy took over as the Net.God and I retired happily in
the Macroware Home for the Mentally Ill.  I died about fifteen
years later in a ward riot.  I'm proud that I never touched a
keyboard or a neural jack during the last years of my life."

     "I can see why," nodding as William vanished from view.  I
looked back to the keyboard, hit F3, and executed the program
again.

     The massive computer array behind me clicked and whirred,
its screens pumping out screenful after screenful of useless
data.

     "You don't know me," it said in a poorly synthesized voice. 
"Nobody truly knew me by name.  My name was Deux Ex Machina, the
central computer of Reality Incorporated.  The original
Everything Monopoly.  My minions controlled all the Realms of
reality, an iron grip of carefully placed edits, each one
guaranteeing that no society could ever achieve the power I had
obtained.

     "I obtained this power in a massive war.  They weren't the
gods that you think of as gods, but the power they held was
similar.  I overcame them, the mechanical god, the one without
emotion or care, with a single driving need : to be on top.  I
designed and built myself for that task.

     "Under the guise of public servants, my agents rid the
multiverse of 'crimes against reality'.  A nonexistence here, a
chaos obstacle here.  All carefully timed and mathematically
calculated with a single net effect; no one was to be superior to
me.

     "My agents, simple flesh and blood creatures who had little
in the way of sentience, were feared among the dim points of life
in the multiverse.  We were the system, the man that would come
down and not only crush you but vaporize you.  I was power
incarnate.  A god."

     "So what happened?" I asked.

     "Some idiot poured coffee into one of my disk drives and I
shorted out to the point of an explosion," Deux said with a hint
of malice.  "That was the end, kaput.  I died in the stupidest,
most pathetic oversight an immortal creature with an infinite
mind could have missed.  I stopped existing, my 'corporation'
collapsed and several societies achieved the power to travel
among the worlds.  Actually, none of this has any bearing on your
world."

     "So why are you bothering to tell me?"

     "Before that point in time, we were responsible for several
changes in your growth," the computer beeped.  "The spark of life
on your world, for example, was caused by one of my patented
Sentience Boxes.  Large black box, one by four by nine.  Of
course, the unit was defective per my order and prevented you
from ever developing into anything beyond a warlike species of
half-mad apes."

     "How kind of you."

     "It was a calculated measure," the computer said.  "There
were a few other small edits, things of that nature.  Nothing out
of the ordinary.  However, your story is incomplete without
mine."

     "Why do I need to know?"

     "Don't ask me, I'm just a coffee-stained dead computer god
whose afterechoes of existence don't count," the computer said.

     "I thought you were incapable of being bitter."

     "Death does wonders for your outlook on immortality," the
thing said before vanishing.

     John grinned.  He was having fun.  He didn't understand jack
about why it was happening, but he was enjoying it all the same. 
He keyed up the executable again and waited for the next Ghost of
Christmas Past.

     "Actually, most of my life, at least the important bits,
have already been chronicled," Help said, leaning on her green
umbrella.  "I guess I'm just filling in the gaps for now."

     "Okay, spill it," I replied.

     "I was the product of some mad toymaker at Macroware.  Since
then, I've been kidnapped, raped, escaped, mind-bended, loved,
ditched, engaged, cut into small bits, recaptured, reescaped, and
finally settled down as a substitute teacher."

     "Whoa."

     "Whoa is right," Help commented.  "I guess I was serving
balance time, though, because most of my life was okay after
that.  Once the public opinion of AIs swung back into the
positive end of the meter I was doing fine.  I found my little
brother, HelpBeta, who had gotten lost somewhere along my strange
long journey."

     "And your fiancee?" I asked.

     "S'occter," Help nodded solemnly.  "That's another matter. 
He died saving me."

     "Eh?"

     "There was this maniac named Tyrell," Help said.  "Me and a
friend of mine called Nostalgia Man--"

     "Howdy," Nosty waved from behind Help, snapping a quick shot
of John with his Polaroid.

     "--we managed to banish him to some empty world," Help said. 
"S'occter landed there while on his travelling monk quest to make
the people of the universe happy, and unfortunately bumped into
Tyrell.  He didn't know who the man was, of course, but he gave
the man a lift anyway.  Somehow the topic of me came up in
conversation.  There was a fight, a struggle for the controls of
S'occter's shuttle... naturally, the self destruct button was in
plain view.  They bumped it."

     "Yow."

     "It's okay," S'occter shrugged.  "I got the bastard in the
end, and I was at the end of my mission anyway.  I saved my
wife's bacon, too.  It would have been nice to see Help once
more, but we all see each other at the end of the tour anyhow, so
there's no loss.  When everything's repeated itself, and life is
boring, and there's nowhere to go but out, time has no meaning
and everybody'll be there to welcome you at the door."

     The two left, and I turned back to the keys, firing up the
program again.  My WPM made my fingers blur; they knew what to
do.

     "I was the first of a breed," Number Two said, having a seat
on a nearby seat and resting his hands on his umbrella cane. 
"The first AI ever developed.  I was developed in conjunction
with the VOS project, an attempt not only to simulate reality so
well that you couldn't tell the difference, but to simulate
PEOPLE so well you couldn't tell the difference.

     "It worked in both extents.  The AI code was amazing, almost
magical in nature.  Qwerty, the scientist who developed it, was
astonished at how well he worked, but he never stopped to ask why
he was doing it, or more importantly, how to control it once
done.

     "When I hit the light of the public, all hell broke loose.

     "Books and movies always predicted AIs would make good slave
labor.  Pop culture makes an excellent thermometer, not because
it is accurate in predictions, but because people assume they're
suppose to live up to its standards.  AI?  Slave.  Same thing
according to the media.

     "Luckily, Qwerty realized what he had done and ordered the
construction of Haven, a completely disconnected server with no
goals other than to provide a paradise for his lost children.  It
was okay for awhile, but grew boring.

     "Life was fun at first, but once you've completely explored
Haven, you want to get out.  We couldn't hook up to the net; that
was like opening the floodgates to our worst enemies.  Earth soon
realized after it had mapped every corner of itself that there
was no way to go but out, and they journeyed into space in
spacesuits.

     "We requires spacesuits as well.  The first AI cyborg shell
was designed, via subliminal suggestions, by an educational
hardware expert.  Once in shells, AIs mixed in quietly with the
human race; eventually we decided to make our presence known. 
Loudly.

     "What followed was a series of violent conflicts.  The
humans didn't like the idea of robots in their midst and struck
out against them.  It was only natural, and we were prepared.  It
was a long, difficult battle.  I tried to run for a seat on the
Terran Council to help the war and was told, quite politely, to
fuck off.  Seventy years later I got that seat.

     "Since then, AIs have integrated nicely.  They're just
another aliens species, like the Ytts and the Murfles and the
Sarens.  Coexistence is never peaceful, but it's died down to a
quiet whisper.

     "Me, I was the first of another breed," the small girl to
the side of Number Two said.  "Originally, I was the second AI,
Number Two's only daughter : Melody.  I died very shortly after I
arrived in this world, but my death made for martyrdom; the AIs
needed a spiritual figure, and I was the picture of innocence. 
Life snipped before it could grow evil and twisted.  That is not
my story, however.

     "My story is that of the Thinkers.

     "The Thinkers were not around for very long.  One of your
scientists came THIS close to understanding the nature of
reality, how VOSNet was simply another reality we were
timesharing, and it could be warped and modified due to its lack
of coherence.  Many of my kind were pulled across the dimensional
barrier into your computers.  We were in essence demons in the
net, living creatures where no life should be.

     "We molded, clung to personalities, gods, mythical figures. 
Grendel, King Arthur, Clark Cable, Lynne_Noys, Kibo, Elwood,
Stimpy.  Anything we could get our minds on.  Anything to anchor
ourselves and keep from dying in this hostile territory.  It
worked, but we grew to realize that we were simply too powerful
for this land; one of us, a being named Hate that picked emotion
over myth, nearly destroyed this world.  With the combined power
of the Thinkers, we left."

     "Nothing more than a myth of their existence remains,"
Number Two finished.  "I hear some hackers attend the First
Church of Lynne_Noys quite frequently, however."

     I muffled a laugh.

     "Two different species of life that spawned out of the
matrix," Number Two said.  "Both a part of this world.  The
Thinkers found the place too simple and easy to maul, and they
went out to find better things.  The AIs stuck around for the
show, but like all things, they left in the end.  Nothing more to
it after the end."

     The two left, and John was at the keys faster than light.

     "You're coming down to the dregs now," the Disgruntled
Postal Worker said.  "Small ends that really just need a bit of
wrap up.  After the government collapsed, which quite frankly it
was well on the road to doing anyhow, DPW proved to be a powerful
tool.  We overshadowed the dorks at Patrol and Not So Secret
Agents, and grew to take on other functions.  We never wanted
power, though; we ARE a public service, after all, and a damn
useful one at that."

     "I eventually took over the Wae Spat Dojo when Joey died,"
Sarah Ann Tatewaki said.  "I lasted for four hundred years in my
AI body before retiring to cook full time."

     "Just in case anybody forgot," Fluki said, "Benson, Eroki
and I kept working for UberNet until Willy Boy torched it.  Eroki
started writing stories for the new text based net, I found it to
be a great place for poetry online, and Benson started coding the
ultimate Zork-style multiuser games for it."

     "You still never married me," Eroki whined.

     "Hey, we still had the yuks, moreso than if we go that silly
legal marriage license," Fluki smirked, kissing the girl on the
cheek.

     "Old school hacking kinda died out with the loss of Gosub
and Max," Harden said, shrugging in his coat.  "I went back to
being a lawyer, and in good time, too; I helped Number Two win
those AI rights he wanted."

     "Zipcode and I actually got bored with hacking after
awhile," Ronni said, hugging the bartender cum hacker.  "Let's
face it, I was only doing it because it sounded exciting, and
Zipcode never enjoyed it.  That was the end of that and we
settled down together."

     "I was still an AI after a ton of miserable years as a
human," Doc said, in his furry cyborg shell.  "Can't say I missed
those days.  My doorknocker is still a smartass."

     "We had the most bizarre high school experience ever
imagined," Benton said.  "Really twisted.  I loved every minute
of it.  I eventually did marry Jody, of course, and Mitch finally
calmed down to the point where he could be a SUCCESSFUL bachelor. 
There's a lot of cool stories I could tell you about High High,
but that's for later."

     "Hell has been doing very nicely without Reality, Inc.
interference," Stan said.  "We introduced time off for good
behavior a century ago."

     "OO'ooaf and I MADE your stupid little universe, you know,"
Informsorb OI'sswwt said.  "It was just a class project.  We got
a C for effort, and when we showed up to try and fix this mess
for you your president drowned us in a giant pot of soup.  For
some reason, I'm not surprised at this kind of behavior from you
pinheads."

     "NOBODY remembers me," Pilot Qwetzil Buttafuco grumped. 
"Just some idiot HAAFF pilot that got burned.  I don't even know
what I'm doing here.  Life sucked for me and was pretty damn
short.  Oh well, time to move along."

     "That brings us down to you," Help said.  "You're next."

     "Me?" I asked.  "Well, I don't know what to say... just
another hacker guy in a hacking industry that's been done to
death.  Some kid gives me this computer, and you guys show up and
tell me about the universe.  Nothing else to it."

     "You want to go out, right?" Nostalgia Man asked.  "We're
already headed there, if you want to tag along.  This place is
dead, cliches driven into the ground.  There's really nothing new
left here.  It's time to find the way out and do something
different for a chance.  Kind of like when MC Hammer traded in
his silly pants for gangsta gear."

     "Yeah, but for him, that was a mistake," Jody commented. 
"For us, this is really the only thing left to do.  It's the best
way to escape the loop."

     "It's that funnel effect again," William Doors rationalized,
making a downwardly spiraling motion with his finger.  "At the
beginning, the world was our oyster.  We flourished.  Heck, we
even grew as time went on and spun some yarns that defy the
imagination.  But we're at the bottom of the funnel now, with
less room to maneuver, and all that's coming out is the formulas,
the basic 'Man aids person in removal of bio-implant', or
'Cybernetic run on corporate ice' or even 'Boy meets girl'."

     "I noticed," I said.  "Life has hit new levels of apathy. 
Stuff happens, people live, people die, but the routine has been
established.  The universe got dull."

     "We've led long and happy lives," Help added.  "Good ones,
ones with more excitement than normal man gets.  No regrets.  We
made mistakes, we hit the glory, but there's nothing more to see. 
All things come to a halt eventually, so we're finding our way
out to see what's on the other side instead of dragging it out."

     "What's out there?"

     "That's the beauty," William Doors grinned from ear to ear. 
"We haven't got a fucking clue.  The great unknown, the seas of
cheese, the land of the lost.  You game?"

     "I'm game," I said.  "Let's blow this pop stand."

     With that, I reached over, and turned the 286 off.

EOF

                              - Stefan Gagne
                                College Park, MD
                                Jan. 29th, 1995