Hard, Soft and Wet

And to that end I’m sitting in the Virtual World Entertainment Center on the main street in suburban Walnut Creek, waiting my turn to be entertained, and making conversation of sorts with my two new friends, Todd and Jim, to pass the time. Todd, a boy of about seventeen, thin and angular, with the jawline of SS officers in war movies, is doing his damnedest to impress.

‘C’mon, Todd,’ I say, faintly wishing I were somewhere else, ‘you’re too young to have been in the marines when they stormed Grenada.’

Todd appeals to the boy next to him.

Jim, six inches shorter and still ablaze with shyness, shrugs in a noncommittal way. ‘Whatever.’ And with that he dunks himself back in the Virtual Geographic League Battletech Manual lying on his lap.

Todd throws back his Coke, addresses himself to me:

‘So you’re a rookie, huh? First time?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Ha,’ laughs Todd, shaking his head. ‘Rookie!’

I smile back.

‘Yeah, ha,’ I say.

We sit in silence. A perky little grin spreads over Todd’s face, indicating a fresh idea for conversation.

‘Hey.’ He grabs my wrist, registers its small size then drops it, embarrassed. ‘Hey, see this flight suit?’ He smoothes an outsized palm across his chest. ‘Genuine Foreign Legion it is, I swear.’

I smile back and nod indulgently, thinking that if Nancy were in my place right now, she’d be having one of her fits about suburban militia enclaves full of inbred NRA types stashing away semi-automatics fast as Imelda M clocks up kitten heels.

‘I sent off for it in the Survivalist,’ continues Todd. ‘I wear it for luck.’

The Survivalist?

‘Listen,’ I scan the bar, trying to find an excuse to escape, ‘I think I’ll just take a look around.’

‘Yeah,’ says Todd, ignoring me. ‘This’ll be my fifty-fifth mission.’

‘No kidding?’ The Americanism tumbles from my tongue without anyone else noticing. It feels awkward and sly, like using a lover’s nickname for the first time, but good all the same. No kidding. Neat.

‘Hey,’ says Todd, pointing to his circle of bar snacks. ‘Want one of my Tesla Coil fries and some Solarian salsa?’

I’m not sure Virtual World Entertainment Centers exist as yet in Britain. But they will. In Britain and all over. Give it a year or two and there’ll be Virtual World Entertainment Centers in every major city from Uzbekistan to Angola. Since Tim Disney, nephew of Walt, and his partners took over the Virtual World Entertainment company a couple of years ago, centres exactly like this one have spread out over suburban America as fast as prickly heat, ‘and now constitute one of the peaks of the suburban entertainment landscape,’ according to Nancy’s memory of some article in Marketing America.

A strange sort of nostalgia pervades the room, running alongside the futurism. The walls are clad in fake wood panelling with brass wall lights; grim Victorian-style armchairs dominate a space presided over by yawing prints of Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Sir Richard Burton and Charles Lindbergh. Old-time heroes.

Back at the bar, Todd has turned his attentions to Jim. ‘I still say that the T6 is the übermech. People go out in Loki5s because they can’t handle the idea of hand-to-hand combat is all. The Loki5 is a chicken’s machine.’

I take up my stool again, feeling slightly foolish since it’s perfectly obvious that Todd and Jim are just two lonesome Joes looking for a life, like a zillion other teenage boys, and really not the crazed splatter-brats I’d momentarily imagined them to be.

‘What is a T6? And what’s a Loki5?’

Jim looks up from his manual, puzzled and faintly disgusted. Todd just gives me the eye and says:

‘Like, hello …?’ in a tone hinting at disbelief.

‘Well?’

‘Mechs, robots, you know, the things you fight in.’ He slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘Man. Rookies! Listen, all you need to know at this stage is to select a Loki5. They’re easiest to handle. Then remember to keep your crosshairs on the black spots and don’t go up the ramps.’

‘Why not?’ I ask, returning the gaze.

‘It’s dangerous, man,’ says Todd, raising his eyes to the heavens. ‘Read the manual.’

The year is 3050. Man has colonized the universe. The one great Star League has degenerated into a corrupt feudal society riven by petty rivalries. Life is cheap. War is constant. Mercenaries equipped with futuristic two-legged tanks called BattleMechs drift from planet to planet fighting for whoever offers the most cash.

Like the jousting tournaments of old, war in the 31st century has also been ritualized into sport. Mechwarriors from far and wide gather on the desert planet of Solaris VII to test their mettle against the best the universe has to offer. Now you can join them.

At the cash till, Andromeda, a qualified Virtual Geographic League Briefing Officer, recites the mission plan.

‘For nine dollars you’ll be entitled to a mission briefing where you’ll learn about your destination of choice, followed by translocation to a virtual world with a group of other adventurers where your mission will commence. After that there will be a full mission debriefing and a pilot’s log. It’s a total twenty-five minute adventure. From ten to a hundred missions, every tenth mission is free. Take part in three hundred missions and you can become part of the Inner Circle.’

‘Which is the bit where I actually play the game?’ I ask, pulling a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.

Andromeda looks uncertain.

‘You mean the mission?’

‘Yeah, which is the mission bit?’

‘It’s all an adventure,’ says Andromeda, handing me my ticket and a plasticized paper card. ‘Trust me.’ She advises me to choose a call sign for the mission.

The line of explorers requiring mission tickets begins to build up behind, forming a vaguely threatening mass.

‘Let’s see.’ Andromeda struggles to assist. ‘Variations on death are always popular along with pets’ names. Nexus 14, for example? Zombiewoman? Driller killer?’

My recent online adventures come to mind.

‘How’s about Fish ’n’ Chips?’

‘There you go,’ toots Andromeda. ‘We’ll enter you in the log …’ she types a few letters into a PC ‘… as Fish and … Chips.’

‘’n’ Chips.’

‘Sure, ’n’ Chips. It’ll be about forty minutes. Take a seat in the Explorers’ Lounge and you’ll get to meet some great people. We at VGL believe that one of the most satisfying aspects of interdimensional travel is the people you meet en route.’ Resigned, I hold my hand out for change. Andromeda shakes her head and waggles a finger.

‘Nine dollars for the adventure plus a dollar for the one-off pilot’s fee.’

‘Which means?’

‘You’re now an Associate Member of the Virtual Geographical League. Caveat Emptor!’

‘Right.’ I smile, vainly struggling with the creeping canker of disillusionment.

Back at the bar, Dave and Todd are still drinking Martian Coke and bantering over their Mech strategies.

‘The software aces at VGL Research Labs changed the rules so a Mech can be damaged if it bumps into a stationary part of the Solaris VII landscape, and not just if it impacts with another Mech. Did you read that in the stats report? Man, it’s gonna change free-for-alls forever,’ says Todd.

I resume my place at the bar and order a beer, and, remembering the Icon Byte Bar, some Tesla Coil chips and Solarian salsa from ‘The Briefing’ menu.

‘Listen,’ says Todd, turning to me, ‘They’ll put you with some other rookies, so you’ll be OK. I mean, you’ll get reduced to rubble a coupla times, but nothing you can’t survive.’

‘Want some advice from me?’ adds Jim. ‘Read the Battletech op manual, and when you’re in there aim for the black spots on the other guy’s Mech and don’t forget …’ he pauses to dunk another Tesla Coil chip in salsa ‘… experience is a man’s best teacher.’

Battletech team messages are pinned to a noticeboard in the pool room:

[TO] DON’T SHOOT

[FROM] CAPTAIN CRYBABY

[MESSAGE] WE ACCEPT YOUR 3 ON 3 CHALLENGE ON ONE CONDITION: WE PLAY 2 ON 3. US BEING THE 2. CALL 555 5173 AND ASK FOR JOHN. WE’RE KIDS, BUT YOU’LL STILL GO DOWN IN AGONIZING, MERCILESS FLAMES.

[TO] BLOOD ANGEL DEMISE

[FROM] CLAN GHOST TIGER

[MESSAGE] YUPPIE DEATH

WE THE MEMBERS OF CLAN GHOST TIGER WISH TO THANK BLOOD ANGEL DEMISE. SUCKS BE TO YOU SLACKERS FOR AN HONOURABLE AND FUN BATTLETECH MINOR LEAGUE TOURNAMENT.

In the hour or so since I arrived, the Virtual World Explorers’ Lounge has doubled its occupancy. More families, more kids, more packs of teens and more men with shiny heads and brown moustaches lining up obediently for their mission tickets.

Jim lends me his copy of the Battletech Operations Manual. Byzantine! Thirty-three different types of Mech robot to choose, each one with a specific armoury and a top speed and a heat quotient, four battle arenas drawn out on grids, notes on heat sinks and dissipation units, a stack of tables covering controls and weapons and tips on weapons configuration strategy, light and weather manipulation and heat management, and finally, a list of ten tips for rookies. Totalling forty pages of graphs and tables and handy hints amounting to complete hierarchies of knowledge. It could take a person a couple of months simply to absorb all this stuff.

Forty-five minutes later, Andromeda calls out my tag, along with six others, belonging to a party of two adults and four kids with handles Stallion, Princess, Animal, Warrior, Wad and Sakan. Stallion, Animal and Wad admit to having played before, but the rest of us are virgins.

‘Decided on your terrain and your Mechs yet?’ enquires Balthazar, our Virtual World Mission Briefing Officer.

‘Loki5s, Nazca-24,’ pleads Animal.

‘Anyone have any other preferences?’

And with that all six of us are shut into large black pods and left. My night vision’s so bad I’m still attempting to locate the joystick when the action starts and the screen lights up and I find myself rumbling around in the middle of a desert on another planet with a school of marauding robots. My instinct tells me to white out everything I’ve learned in the Battletech Operations Manual and concentrate on pumping the joystick. A spear of green pixel bullets whooshes through the screen towards the horizon and a robot lumbers into view from my right, the radar showing it approaching at full speed with ready guns. The adrenaline rises in my stomach, leaving behind it a faint tang of nausea. The robot is bearing down on me now, firing from machine guns in its arms. Green bullets trailing fiery electric tails begin to whistle past. Ferocious clicks on the joystick get me nowhere. The enemy robot remains undimmed. Making a strategic decision to run away I reverse and bang almost immediately into Animal, who deposits some green pixel bullets into my thorax and reduces me to rubble. An amber alarm throbs through the pod, but seconds later I have magically remorphed as a new Mech stashed high with lasers and am eager to pile back into the action. It’s plain bad luck that Princess reduces me to rubble again before I’ve had the time to engage my spatial co-ordinates and begin firing. The amber alarm begins to throb once more. I remorph stashed with lasers and give all I’ve got to what turns out to be a rock. A few moments later, some intriguing spots begin moving about on the screen’s horizon bar. The radar is blank. A red alarm begins to pulse. For a moment I am confused, then it occurs to me to check my co-ordinates which serve to prove that I have been travelling full speed in reverse for the last four minutes and am currently about ten kilometres from the battle arena. I push down hard on the throttle and head once more for the epicentre of the battle, the black dots on the horizon accreting into fellow Mechs, and I’m suddenly right in the middle of it all, opening my guns and pouring green electronic lead into anything moving. And then the lights come on and two seconds later I’m translocated back to planet earth.

Seven personalized copies of the mission debriefing scroll out of a printer back in the Explorers’ Lounge. Sakan wins with 2836 points, Stallion comes second with 2720. Fish ’n’ Chips scores –1. I appear in the battle log a total of three times. At minute 2:34 Animal reduced me to rubble, at minute 4:56 Princess reduced me to rubble, and on the third occasion, in minute 9, with two seconds of action left to go, I opened fire and punctured Wad’s right upper leg.

Todd and Jim have been watching the action on the Explorers’ Lounge screen.

‘You were totally remedial, man,’ says Todd, looking over my shoulder at the mission debriefing. That hurts, actually.

‘It was unbelievable. You weren’t even in the battle arena,’ adds Jim.

‘Look,’ I carp in my own defence. ‘I decided to take a break, OK? It’s a tactic.’

‘That is the fuckin’ lamest tactic I ever seen,’ adds Todd, turning back to his Martian Coke.

I discover the real flaw in my tactic some minutes later: it has left me buzzing but boastless. I have nothing to talk about. OK, I pressed a few buttons, fired a few shots. But with no approach, no angle, no line. Stallion by contrast, is talking himself up to a group of teens, and Animal and Warrior are standing at the pool table sparring over their respective performances with the particle projection cannon, and the only thing I’ve got to contribute is what it really felt like to be stuck behind a rock ten kilometres away from any of the action. I feel a sudden pang of loneliness. It’s suddenly clear how Buzz Aldrin must have felt as he watched Neil Armstrong thud onto the surface of the moon. Only now it’s too late do I begin to see that the real point of Battletech is the buzz and thrall of camaraderie clinging to the players after the main event is over, when the outcome is clear and none of it matters too much any more, those five or ten minutes of grand and shared intensity, the minutes for which all of us stood in line and drank tepid Martian cola and made stilted pre-mission conversation. Those five or ten minutes of fraternity, the tiny splinters of intimacy, the fleeting alchemical moments, which turn Tim Disney and his ilk into multi-millionaires.

SUNDAY

Nancy and I take a picnic up to Muir Woods. Rain has fallen during the night, softening the air and stirring up the smell of leaf mould. Nancy is wearing blue shorts which set off her hair and make her look a decade younger than she is.

We climb up the path through the woods towards the clearing, from where the Pacific Ocean is visible, creating the illusion of a tiny island of woods drifting unnoticed towards Japan.

‘Karin says …’ begins Nancy, gazing down at the leaf mould and forgetting her next thought.

‘Who’s Karin?’ I ask and she darts me a strange look, as if puzzled by my tone, then, realizing the question is genuine, shakes her head and waves it away. I’m touched by this habit of hers, this assumption that everyone leads the exact same life as she does, has the same set of friends, the same job, the same taste in food. It’s so intimate and self-involved and scatty, which three possibly contradictory qualities Nancy possesses in equal and lavish abundance.

‘I always think the weirdest thing about Battletech and all those geeky games’, she follows, changing the subject, ‘is the mountain of trivia you have to absorb to make any sense out of it at all. It’s such a boy thing. Lists and specs and reams of completely pointless detail.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ I try out another Americanism. ‘But, you know, once you’ve done it, there’s this amazing feeling of shared experience. I can’t really explain it. It’s like any ritual. Church, waterskiing clubs, trainspotting, whatever.’

Suddenly the trees fall away, and we are out on the grassy plateau, overlooking the ocean.

‘Sweetheart,’ says Nancy, adopting a wheedling tone. ‘About the other day, at the education and technology meet…’

I stop her with my hand, anxious not to spoil the atmosphere, and conscious also that whatever passed between us that day probably doesn’t brook too much explanation or analysis. But Nancy is eager to talk it out. She’s so Californian that way.

‘I mean, I think you’re right. Information isn’t the same as knowledge. You can fill every classroom in the country with a thousand computers and link them all up to the Net, and you won’t have taught anyone anything.’

‘Is that what I said?’ I don’t recall saying any such thing, though I remember a similar thought passing through my mind.

Nancy carries on walking along the plateau, gazing down into the water as if draining her breath from it.

‘Data doesn’t mean anything on its own. You have to be able to interpret it, relate it to the real world.’

We find a spot to sit, and pull out a couple of cans of Coke from our picnic bag. I try to drag Nancy away from the subject, introduce the topic of wildflowers, the sky, pretty much everything, but she won’t be drawn. Some nudging gobbet of resentment sticks in my breast. I’m not ready to be disillusioned, dammit. Give me hope.

‘You put future education policy in the hands of the computer industry and they’re going to come up with something involving truckloads of computers, obviously.’

‘Oh well,’ I say, blandly, ‘it’s early days yet.’

Nancy wheels round, looks through my eyes into the dark recesses of my head.

‘Why the hell are you trying to defend them?’ she says, voice suddenly dark with anger. I adopt an ameliorating smile. Them? Us? Them? By her own account. Nancy is one of them.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ I say, determined to protect my new-found future.

‘But the networks will be,’ cries Nancy in return. ‘They already are. In a year’s time you’ll hardly remember life without them.’

I’ve never seen her in this mood before, so hellbent on sabotaging her own bullish optimism, so bent on spoiling the game. It’s so unlike her. So un-American.

THURSDAY, FOUR DAYS LATER

Nancy has flown off to COMDEX, taking her mood swings with her, and leaving me in charge of the house at Strawberry Point. Yesterday, a tomcat came in through the open window and sprayed the kitchen herbs. Mint, flat-leafed parsley, chives all died, thyme survived. Driving out this morning to the plant nursery to replace them before the weekend I realized I hadn’t left the house since taking Nancy to the airport early on Monday. Not once. Three days and nights have passed without my collecting the mail from the mail box, or the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times from the driveway. Three days and nights without opening the door out onto the deck to watch the city across the Bay, without removing the trash, picking up the phone, taking a shower, sleeping in a bed. Three days oblivious to the squabbling din of the redwings in the cypress trees outside, oblivious to the breeze of traffic on the freeway, to the lazy slap of water on the pebble beach below, to the barks of the neighbour’s children, or the tickled hum of the air conditioning. Three days and three nights floating about in the weightless breadth of the network, almost a century of hours with only the owlish whine of the modem, the rushing of lights and the glow of growing words for company.

The first night after Nancy left, it must have been Monday, I pored through the Net manual but didn’t get very far. Towards dawn, though, I found a dissertation on a computer at Duke University in North Carolina and managed to download it to Nancy’s hard disk. It turned out to be someone’s thesis on genetic reprogramming, which made little sense to me, but the point was that I’d ventured out on the wires and captured something strange and brought it back undamaged and I felt the same satisfaction in that feat as I had in collecting caterpillars twenty years ago. Afterwards I slept for a while on the sofa, then rose again on Tuesday afternoon and made a pot of coffee. I must have been dozing on and off through most of that night, and by the morning I hadn’t accomplished much more than the previous day. A few more files added to the hard disk was all.

I passed Wednesday on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the WELL, a bulletin board and computer conferencing setup based in Sausalito. Nancy’s been a member since the electronic Pleistocene, about two years. It’s one of the things you do if you live in Marin, along with hot-tubbing and baking biscotti. She left brief instructions plus a list of WELL gods, the network VIPs, pinned up on the wall beside the computer, saying, ‘When a WELL god posts, people listen. Show respect, OK? But nothing tacky.’ So I passed the day – yesterday – typing out my respectful thoughts and considered pearls in the hope that others would read them and type their pearls and thoughts back in return. I dipped in and out of politics, music, the future. After a time I gathered sufficient confidence to begin my own discussion topic in the future conference, and by the end of the day there were twenty-three replies, twenty-three earnest, considered, respectful responses. There we all were, sitting at our keyboards, unknown to each other in any real-life way, chattering into our screens and feeling that each new word meant something beyond itself.

Too tightly wound to go to bed, I dozed for a while on the sofa and woke just as the light was beginning to break through the cedars outside. A pot of cold coffee was sitting on the table next to the computer, so I warmed the bitter brown liquid in the microwave and toasted a couple of muffins and ate my breakfast waiting for the computer to boot up and pass me back out into the dark space of the network, which was beginning to feel more substantial to me than the room around, and as full of enchantment and tricks as a fast-hand conjuror.

In the early hours of the morning, I circled the globe. A listing of stock prices in Singapore, software files in Rome, the welcome screen of the University of Pretoria information service, a dissertation archive in Hong Kong, four tourist guides to Queensland and New South Wales, some incomprehensible jargon housed at Lawrence Livermore, a list of new releases from EMI in London. And on around the world again, with the same perfect, fearful freedom a lone sailor must feel when out of sight of land, my only navigation tools a keyboard, a mouse and a set of instincts.

Eventually, I fell onto the sofa and slept without dreaming until nine, when I got up and made some more coffee. In a few minutes from now, I shall pull out the plug on Nancy’s computer and lock myself in the spare bedroom and sleep until the weekend. Otherwise, I’ll still be sitting at this table when Nancy returns, eyes buggled and stiff as a piece of metal soldered to the screen.

SATURDAY

Nancy says I should get in touch with a boy called Isaac, who runs the conference for children at the WELL. The word is that he’s the kind of person our kids – if we ever get around to having kids – might turn out to be. Another futuristic prototype, like Alex.

I’m relieved to say she has returned from COMDEX in fine spirits, having met everyone of any importance in software plus an old (male) friend to boot, who just happens to be living in the area and just happens to be swinging by for lunch tomorrow. Nancy emerges from her bedroom some time late in the afternoon, with a casual kind of air, humming some old James Taylor number. Neither of us remarks on the fact that she’s been locked up in there for four hours testing her outfits and teasing her hair into different shapes. Following a short inspection of the living room, she wanders into the kitchen and begins rearranging the jars of antipasti, the squid ink pappardelle someone gave her for a birthday present and sun-dried tomatoes in front of all the instant soup and chocolate pop tarts. Suspecting that three might be a crowd, I mail a message off to Isaac, asking if he’d mind a visit. A response arrives almost instantly.