Bleeding Edge

7

Maxine finally gets over to Vyrva’s one evening to have a look at the widely coveted yet ill-defined DeepArcher application, bringing along Otis, who disappears immediately with Fiona into her room, where along with the Beanie Baby overpop she keeps a Melanie’s Mall, with which Otis has become strangely intrigued. Melanie herself is a half-scale Barbie with a gold credit card she uses for clothes, makeup, hairstyling, and other necessities, though the secret identity Otis and Fiona have given her is a bit darker and requires some quick costume changes. The Mall has a water fountain, a pizza parlor, an ATM, and most important an escalator, which comes in handy for shoot-out scenarios, Otis having introduced into the suburban girl idyll a number of four-and-a-half-inch action figures, many from the cartoon show Dragonball Z, including Prince Vegeta, Goku and Gohan, Zarbon, and others. Scenarios tend to center on violent assault, terrorist shoplifting sprees, and yup discombobulation, each of which ends in the widespread destruction of the Mall, principally at the hands of Fiona’s alter ego the eponymous Melanie, in cape and ammo belts, herself. Among fiercely imagined smoke and wreckage, with generic plastic bodies horizontal and disassembled everywhere, Otis and Fiona kiss off each episode by high-fiving and singing the tag from the Melanie’s Mall commercial, “It’s cool at the Mall.”

Justin’s partner Lucas, who lives down in Tribeca, shows up a little late this evening, having been chasing his dealer through half of Brooklyn in search of some currently notorious weed known as Train Wreck, wearing a green glow-in-the-dark T-shirt reading UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.”

“We don’t know what Vyrva’s told you about DeepArcher,” sez Justin, “it’s still in beta, so don’t be surprised at some awkwardness now and then.”

“Should warn you, I’m not too good at these things, drives my kids crazy, we play Super Mario and the little goombas jump up and stomp on me.”

“It’s not a game,” Lucas instructs her.

“Though it does have forerunners in the gaming area,” footnotes Justin, “like the MUD clones that started to come online back in the eighties, which were mostly text. Lucas and I came of age into VRML, realized we could have the graphics we wanted, so that’s what we did, or Lucas did.”

“Only the framing material,” Lucas demurely, “obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known around my crib, God.”

“The further in you go, as you get passed along one node to the next, the visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then just vanishing uncredited. Adding to the veils of illusion. You know what an avatar is, right?”

“Sure, had a prescription once, but they always made me a little, I don’t know, nauseous?”

“In virtual reality,” Lucas begins to explain, “it’s a 3-D image you use to represent yourself—”

“Yeah, actually, gamers in the house forever, but somebody told me also that in the Hindu religion avatar means an incarnation. So I keep wondering—when you pass from this side of the screen over into virtual reality, is that like dying and being reincarnated, see what I’m saying?”

“It’s code,” Justin a little bewildered, maybe, “just keep the thought, couple geeks up all night on cold pizza and warm Jolt wrote this, not exactly in VRML but something hypermutated out of it, ’s all it is.”

“They don’t do metaphysical,” Vyrva flashing Maxine a smile falling noticeably short of fond amusement. She must see a lot of this.

Justin and Lucas met at Stanford. Kept running into each other within a tight radius of Margaret Jacks Hall, which in that day housed the Computer Science department and was affectionately known as Marginal Hacks. They primal-screamed their way together through one finals week after another, and by the time they graduated, they’d already put in weeks of pilgrimage up and down Sand Hill Road, pitching to the venture-capital firms which lined that soon-to-be legendary thoroughfare, arguing recreationally, trembling in performance anxiety, or, resolved to be Zenlike, just sitting in the traffic jams typical of that era, admiring the vegetation. One day they took a wrong turn and wound up caught in the annual Sand Hill soapbox derby. The roadside was lined with bales of hay and spectators who numbered up in the low five figures, watching a streetful of homemade racers barreling downhill at top speed toward the Stanford tower in the distance, allegedly powered by nothing but the earth’s gravity.

“That kid over there who just spun out in the fifties spaceship rig,” Justin said.

“That’s no kid,” said Lucas.

“Yeah I know, isn’t it that Ian Longspoon dude? The VC we had lunch with last week? drinks Fernet-Brancas with ginger-ale chasers?” Another of their regrettable lunch dates. Most likely at Il Fornaio in the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, though neither could remember now, everybody got kind of hammered. Toward the end of it, Longspoon had actually begun to make out a check but seemed unable to stop writing zeros, which soon ran off the edge of the document and continued onto the tablecloth, on which presently the VC’s head came to rest with a thump.

Lucas reached stealthily for the checkbook and saw Justin making for the exit. “Wait, hey, maybe somebody’ll cash this, where you going?”

“You know what’ll happen when he wakes up. We’re not gonna get stuck paying for another lunch we can’t afford.”

It wasn’t their most dignified moment. Waiters began hollering urgently into little lapel mikes. Beach-tanned technocuties at distant tables who’d scanned them with interest when they came in now turned away scowling. Truculent busboys splashed uneaten soup on them as they sped past. Chuchu in the parking lot, briefly having considered keying Justin’s ride, settled for spitting on it.

“Guess it could have been worse,” Lucas remarked once they were safely out on 280 again.

“Old Ian sure ain’t gonna be happy.”

Well, here he was now at the soapbox race, a perfect opportunity for them to find out how he did feel, and somehow the partners only kept slouching further down behind the dashboard instead. They thought they knew from intimidation, but at this point they hadn’t yet run into any of the finance providers in New York.

Maxine can imagine. Silicon Alley in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn’t expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn’t escape Maxine’s notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in “network effects” kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons than a speed freak with a Nintendo 64. Who was less innocent here?

Scanning Justin and Lucas for spiritual malware, Maxine, whose acquaintance with geekspace, since the tech boom, had grown extensive though nowhere near complete, discovered that even by the relaxed definitions of the time, the partners checked out as legit, maybe even innocent. It could’ve just been California, where the real nerds are supposed to come from, while all you ever see on this coast is people in suits monitoring what works and what doesn’t and trying to copy the last hot idea. But anybody adventurous enough to want to move their business from out there to New York ought to be warned—it would be unprofessional of Maxine, wouldn’t it, not to share what she knows of the spectrum of hometown larceny. So she kept finding herself, with these guys, slipping back and forth between Helpful Native and its more sinister variant, the kvetchy, spoon-waving source of free advice she lives in terror of turning into, known locally as a Jewish Mother.

Well, as it turns out, no worries—Lucas and Justin in reality are smarter cookies than the Girl Scout type Maxine was imagining. Somewhere back in the Valley, among those orange groves casually replaced with industrial campuses, they came to a joint epiphany about California vis-à-vis New York—Vyrva thinks maybe more joint than epiphany—something to do with too much sunshine, self-delusion, slack. They’d heard this rumor that back east content was king, not just something to be stolen and developed into a movie script. They thought what they needed was a grim unforgiving workplace where the summer actually ended once in a while and discipline was a given daily condition. By the time they found out the truth, that the Alley was as much of a nut ward as the Valley, it was too late to go back.

Having managed to score not only seed and angel money but also a series-A round from the venerable Sand Hill Road firm of Voorhees, Krueger, the boys, like American greenhorns of a century ago venturing into the history-haunted Old World, lost no time back east in paying the necessary calls, setting up shop around early ’97 in a couple of rooms sublet from a Website developer who welcomed the cash, down in the then still enchanted country between the Flatiron Building and the East Village. If content was still king, they got nonetheless a crash course in patriarchal subtext, cutthroat jostling among nerd princes, dark dynastic histories. Before long they were showing up in trade journals, on gossip sites, at Courtney Pulitzer’s downtown soirees, finding themselves at four in the morning drinking kalimotxos in bars carpentered into ghost stops on abandoned subway lines, flirting with girls whose fashion thinking included undead signifiers such as custom fangs installed out in the outer boroughs by cut-rate Lithuanian orthodontists.

“So…” some presentable young lady spreading her upturned palms, “warm and friendly here, right?”

“And after the stories we heard,” Lucas nodding, gazing amiably at her tits.

“I was in California once, I gotta say, you go out there expecting all those howdy-there vibes, it comes as a shock—talk about entitled? suspicious? Nobody here in the Alley’s about to snoot you the way you get snooted by those folks in Marin. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not Well people, are you?”

“Hell no,” cackles Lucas, “we’re as sick as they come.”

By the time the tech market began its toiletward descent, Justin and Vyrva had enough squirreled away for a down payment on a house and some acreage back in Santa Cruz County, plus a little more in the mattress. Lucas, who’d been putting his money in places a bit less domestic, flipping IPOs, buying into strange instruments understood only by sociopathic quants, got hit way harder when tech-stock enthusiasm collapsed. Soon people were coming around inquiring, often impolitely, after his whereabouts, and Vyrva and Justin found themselves overditzing to deflect the unwelcome attention.

“Come on.” Leading Maxine up a set of spiral stairs to Justin’s workroom, an obsessive clutter of monitors, keyboards, loose discs, printers, cables, Zip drives, modems, routers, the only books visible being a CRC manual and a Camel Book and some comics. There’s custom wallpaper designed to look like a hex dump, in which Maxine out of habit searches for repeating cells but can’t find any, and some Carmen Electra posters, mostly from her Baywatch period, and a gigantic Isomac steampunk espresso machine in the corner, which Vyrva keeps calling the Insomniac.

“DeepArcher Central,” Lucas with one of those may-I-introduce armwaves.

Originally the guys, you have to wonder how presciently, had it in mind to create a virtual sanctuary to escape to from the many varieties of real-world discomfort. A grand-scale motel for the afflicted, a destination reachable by virtual midnight express from anyplace with a keyboard. Creative Differences arose, to be sure, but went strangely unacknowledged. Justin wanted to go back in time, to a California that had never existed, safe, sunny all the time, where in fact the sun never set unless somebody wanted to see a romantic sunset. Lucas was searching for someplace, you could say, a little darker, where it rains a lot and great silences sweep like wind, holding inside them forces of destruction. What came out as synthesis was DeepArcher.

“Whoa, Cinerama here.”

“Cute, huh?” Vyrva switching on a gigantic 17-inch LCD monitor, “Brand new, retails for about a thousand, but we got a price.”

“You’re assimilating.” Maxine meantime reminding herself that she has never had a clear idea of how these guys make their money.

Justin goes to a worktable, sits at a keyboard and begins tapping at it while Lucas rolls a couple of joints. Presently remotely linked window blinds close their slats against the secular city, and the lights go down and the screens light up. “You can get on that other keyboard over there too if you want,” Vyrva sez.

A splash screen comes on, in shadow-modulated 256-color daylight, no titles, no music. A tall figure, dressed in black, could be either sex, long hair pulled back with a silver clip, The Archer, has journeyed to the edge of a great abyss. Down the road behind, in forced perspective, recede the sunlit distances of the surface world, wild country, farmland, suburbs, expressways, misted city towers. The rest of the screen is claimed by the abyss—far from an absence, it is a darkness pulsing with whatever light was before light was invented. The Archer is poised at its edge, bow fully drawn, aiming steeply down into the immeasurable uncreated, waiting. What can be seen of the face from behind, partly turned away, is attentive and unattached. A light wind is blowing in the grass and brush. “Looks like we cheaped out and didn’t bother to animate much,” Justin comments, “but look close and you can see the hair rippling too, I think the eyes blink once, but you have to be watching for it. We wanted stillness but not paralysis.” When the program is loaded, there is no main page, no music score, only a sound ambience, growing slowly louder, that Maxine recognizes from a thousand train and bus stations and airports, and the smoothly cross-dawning image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in advance of anything she’s seen on the gaming platforms Ziggy and his friends tend to use, flaring beyond the basic videogame brown of the time into the full color spectrum of very early morning, polygons finely smoothed to all but continuous curves, the rendering, modeling, and shadows, blending and blur, handled elegantly, even with… could you call it genius? Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch. A framed lucid dream, it approaches, and wraps Maxine, and strangely without panic she submits.

The signs say DEEPARCHER LOUNGE. Passengers waiting here have been given real faces, some at first glance faces Maxine thinks she knows, or ought to.

“Nice to meet you, Maxine. Going to be with us for a while?”

“Don’t know. Who told you my name?”

“Go ahead, explore around, use the cursor, click anywhere you like.”

If it’s a travel connection that Maxine’s supposed to be making, she keeps missing it. “Departure” keeps being indefinitely postponed. She gathers that you’re supposed to get on what looks like a shuttle vehicle of some kind. At first she doesn’t even know it’s ready to leave till it’s gone. Later she can’t even find her way to the right platform. From the sumptuously provisioned bar upstairs, there’s a striking view of rolling stock antiquated and postmodern at the same time vastly coming and going, far down the line over the curve of the world. “It’s all right,” dialogue boxes assure her, “it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.”

Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself. According to Justin, Lucas is the creative partner in this. Justin’s the one who translated it into code, but the visual and sound design, the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins, all are due to Lucas.

Maxine locates at last a master directory of train schedules, and when she clicks on “Midnight Cannonball”—bingo. On she is crossfaded, up and down stairways, through dark pedestrian tunnels, emerging into soaring meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light, through turnstiles whose guardians morph as she approaches from looming humorless robots into curvaceous smiling hula girls with orchid leis, up to a train whose kindly engineer leans beaming from the cab and calls out, “Take your time, young lady, we’re holdin her for you…”

The instant she steps on board, however, the train accelerates insanely, zero to warp speed in a tenth of a second, and they’re off to DeepArcher. The detail of the 3-D countryside barreling past the windows on both sides is surely on a much finer scale than it has to be, no loss of resolution no matter how closely she tries to focus in. Train hostesses out of Lucas and Justin’s beach-babe fantasies keep coming by with carts full of junk food, drinks with Pacific subtexts like Tequila Sunrises and mai tais, dope of varying degrees of illegality…

Who can afford bandwidth like this? She mouses her way to the back of the car, expecting grand vistas of trackscape receding, only to find, instead, emptiness, absence of color, the entropic dwindling into Netscape gray of the other brighter world. As if any idea here of escaping to refuge would have to include no way back.

Though she’s on board the train now, Maxine sees no reason to stop clicking—she clicks on the hostesses’ toe rings, on the chili-glazed rice crackers in the Oriental Party Mix they bring, on the festively colored toothpicks which impale the chunks of tropical fruit on the drinks, you never know, it could be the next click—

Which eventually it is. The screen begins to shimmer and she is abruptly, you could say roughly, taken into a region of permanent dusk, outer-urban somehow, no longer aboard the train, no more jolly engineer or bodacious waitstaff, underpopulated streets increasingly unlit, as if public lamps are being allowed to burn out one by one and the realm of night to be restored by attrition. Above these somber streets, impossibly fractal towers feel their way like forest growth toward light that reaches this level only indirectly…

She’s lost. There is no map. It isn’t like being lost in any of the romantic tourist destinations back in meatspace. Serendipities here are unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen.

She senses dope smoke in the air and Vyrva at her shoulder with coffee in a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER. “Holy shit. What time is it?”

“Not that late,” Justin sez, “but I think we should log off pretty soon, no telling who’s monitoring.”

Just as she was getting comfortable.

“This isn’t encrypted? Firewalled?”

“Oh, heavily,” sez Lucas, “but if somebody wants in, they’ll get in. Deep Web or whatever.”

“That’s where this is?”

“Way down. Part of the concept. Trying to stay clear of the bots and spiders. A robots.txt protocol is OK for the surface Web, and well-behaved bots, but then there’s rogue bots who aren’t just ill-mannered, they’re mighty fuckin evil, the instant they see any disallow code, they home right in.”

“So better to stay deep,” Vyrva sez. “After a while it can get to be an addiction. There’s a hacker saying—once you’ve gone Deep, never get back to sleep.”

They have reconvened downstairs at the kitchen table. The more loaded the partners get and the more smoke in the air, the more comfortable they seem to grow talking about DeepArcher, though it’s hacker stuff Maxine has trouble following.

“What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”

“The crazy shit VCs used to go for,” as Justin recalls. “Back then, ’98, ’99, some of the places they were putting their money? You’d have to be a lot weirder than DeepArcher to even get them to raise their eyebrows.”

“We were almost too vanilla for them,” Lucas agrees. “Our design precedents happened to be pretty solid, for one thing”

According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.”

“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”

“At random.”

“At pseudorandom.”

To which the guys have also added designer linkrot to camouflage healthy pathways nobody wants revealed. “It’s really just another maze, only invisible. You’re dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on… an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”

“But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”

“Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and… no wait, that’s something else…”