Cyberia

Chapter 13

The Evolution of a Cyborg

Cyberia expresses itself as art and literature. Because Cyberia is still evolving, it is impossible to pin down a single cyberian aesthetic. The art of Cyberia is a work in progress, where the forefathers of each genre coexist and even collaborate with the most recent arrivals. The conflicts over which art and lifestyles are ''truly'' cyberian are less a symptom of divisiveness than they are an indication of the fact that this aesthetic is still in the process of unfolding. The artistic and religious debates between the TOPYs and the house kids like Jody Radzik arise because the different evolutionary levels of Cyberia all exist simultaneously.

While current state-of-the-art cyberians like Radzik or Mark Heley claim they have no agenda and believe they are acting against no one, their belief system was developed out of the ideas of people who did. Just as E-generation free-form love raves can be traced back to the radical ''be-ins'' of the confrontational sixties, house music and designer beings can be traced back to the arts and artists of a more admittedly countercultural movement.

As we attempt to determine exactly what it means to be a cyberian, and who is succeeding at it best, let's briefly trace the development of the cyberian aesthetic and ethic in music, literature, and the arts.

Anti-Muzak

Cyberians most often credit Brian Eno with fathering the cyber music genre. His invention of the arty Ambient Music paved the way for Macintosh musicians by taking emphasis off of structure and placing it on texture. These aren't songs with beginnings and endings, but extended moments – almost static experiences. Internally, Eno's music isn't a set of particular sounds one listens to but a space in which one breathes. Unlike traditional rock music, which can be considered male or active in the way it penetrates the listener, Eno's Ambient Music envelops the listener in an atmosphere of sound. Inspired by Muzak, Eno's recordings use similar techniques to produce the opposite effects. In September 1978, Eno wrote the liner notes to his first Ambient record:

"Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.''

Eno quickly gained popularity on headier college campuses and even inspired famous precyberian Ambient tripping parties at Princeton University, where each room of a house called the Fourth World Center would be set up with a different decor and Eno record. His was the ideal music for fledgling collegiate cyberians in their first attempts to synthesize new intellectual discoveries like the fractal and chaos mathematics with the equally disorienting psychedelic perspective. This uncertainty is precisely the territory of Eno's creativity.

"One of the motives for being an artist,'' he relates from personal experience, "is to recreate a condition where you're actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing.'' The image of artist-as-surfer was born, soon to be iterated throughout popular culture.

Eno speaks of "riding the dynamics of the system'' rather than attempting to control things with rules and principles – good advice for those who would dare venture into the dangerous surf of future waters, but even more significant for his use of new mathematics terminology as a way of describing the artistic endeavor. His musical compositions follow what he calls a "holographic'' paradigm, where the whole remains unchanged but texture moves about as individual timbres and resonances are altered. To some, the music appears as cold, neutral, and boring as a Siber-Cyberia. To others, it is a rich world of sound, bursting with boundless creativity and imagination, uninhibited by the arbitrary demands of drama, structure, and audience expectation. Eno epitomizes the art student turned musician, and, true to form, he refuses to shape his compositions around the skeletal structure of standard songwriting.

His recording techniques become as much his guides as his tools, and he ''surfs'' his pieces toward completion, cutting, pasting, dubbing, and overdubbing. His collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, best demonstrates his use of these techniques and was the inspiration for the industrial, house, and even rap and hip-hop recording artists who followed. Like the house song "Your Son is Dead,'' these compositions form an anthropological scrapbook, sampling voices and sounds from real life. The record jacket lists the sound bytes used in each song, which include a radio-show host, a Lebanese mountain singer, Algerian Muslims, and even an unidentified New York City exorcist. Each voice is layered over different percussive and instrumental tracks, sometimes modern sounds over tribal beats, or vice versa. The effect is a startling compression of time and culture, where the dance beat of the music is the only regulated element in a barrage of bird, animal, industrial, television, radio, random, musical, and human noises. The industrial noises were soon to become an entire genre of their own.

Eno has remained central to the creation of a cyberian aesthetic. He gives regular interviews to Mondo 2000 magazine and is often spotted at virtual reality events and house parties. His forecast for the future of his own and the rest of popular music mirrors the evolution of the computer subculture, which abandoned the clean lines of the Space Odyssey vision for the gritty, urban realism of Bladerunner and, as we'll see, cyberpunk books like Neuromancer. Eno says that the new music is ''built up by overlaying unrelated codes and bits and pieces of language, letting them collide to see what new meanings and resonances emerge. It is music that throws you off balance. It's not all tightly organized ... a network rather than a structure.''

Coyote 1

The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. ''Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founder Genesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently antibrainwashing style of songwriting than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle, was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sounds to deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:

"We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that, instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns and structures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''

Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called ''metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques were necessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds, and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using the computer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant – so much so that they considered it a "nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his sounds than he was in making any aesthetic statement through entertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.

The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into the effects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to ''decondition social restraints on thought and the body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important that listeners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram the audience in any way available.

For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak and the societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works and enjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures. Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls ''a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers – through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music – that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure that nurtures it.''

Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assault on programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: ''Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged. Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:

"We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now. You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing, which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''

Filtering Down to the Posse

Many musical groups in various corners of Cyberia took their cue from the industrial and early house eras. We link up with our own crowd in the form of a house band Jody Radzik promotes, Goat Guys from Hell. The guys in this group got to know one another at Barrington, a cooperative house for some of the most artsy and intellectual students at Berkeley. This was the sort of place you could easily find forty people tripping to Eno records or Psychic TV and, needless to say, a household the university was happy to have an excuse to shut down after one student committed suicide on the premises.

But even after their building was confiscated, a core group remained true to the Barrington ideals modeled after the philosophies of musical pioneers like G.P. Orridge. As the band GGFH first formed, they chose to use anti-Muzak recording techniques similar to those by Psychic TV, but for less overtly political purposes. The closer we get to today's house music and pure cyberian enthusiasm, in fact, the farther we get from any external agenda. To GGFH, the enemy is not the authorities, but the repression of the darkness within ourselves.

But as I sit at Pico Paco Tacos with GGFH members Ghost, a slightly scary-looking big white guy in black guy's rapper clothes, and Brian, a toonish, long-haired Iro-Celtic keyboardist, I learn that implicit in their sampling techniques are some strong points of view about our society. Brian (the Celt) takes a break from his veggie burrito to explain:

"We take American culture in all its fucked-up-ness, its expressions of violence and sensationalism of violence – and stick it back in its face. Our culture tries to suppress and repress the negative impulses and then people like Ricky Ramirez go off and do these sick things. Then the culture feeds on the sick things and trivializes or sensationalizes them.''

As a Spanish-language muzaky version of ''I've Got You Under My Skin'' plays on a radio in the kitchen, more tacos arrive, along with Jody Radzik, who begins to iterate his take on the band: "GGFH is the shadow of our culture. These guys are channeling the global shadow. Their album is a kind of Jungian therapy on a social level.'' Ghost shrugs. Brian nods, but doesn't fully agree:

"The guys that we're talking about are people like Ricky Ramirez, being sentenced to death saying, `See you at Disneyland,' or mass murderers at McDonald's.'' He swallows his food and continues in a more collegiate dialect: "The polar opposites in our culture are very interesting to us.''

Radzik's enthusiasm prevents him from allowing his prodigy to speak further. ''The more of a good person you think you are, the more of a model citizen you think you are, the bigger the evil shit you've got stored away back there. You can never purge it. You've got to accept it. You allow for it, and then it becomes harmless. The cultural repression of the shadow is what is leading to the high level of violence in the world today.''

The juxtapositions of these polar opposites – the post office order and chaotic bloody death, McDonald's clowns and automatic weapons, Ramirez and Disneyland – are the subject matter of GGFH. This is why their style, then, is correspondingly polar and depends on the cut-and-paste computer techniques that can bring disparate elements together. Melody takes a back seat to texture, and again we see musicians creating atmospheres and timeless moments instead of structured pieces with heroic journeys. The music has moved from an LSD sensibility to one of Ecstasy.

Likewise, Brian's composition process is a feel-your-way-through-it experience. He'll begin with a sampled sound, then tweak knobs and dials until he's developed a texture. Like Eno, he thinks of sound waves as currents to be surfed, and consciously gives himself over to the sound, working as a mere conduit for its full expression. ( The sound simply demands to be treated a certain way.'') But this Brian's surfboard is language and image from popular culture: "We find samples and cut-ups that fit with the atmosphere of the sound. We've got one that's very dreamy so we used a sample of Tim Leary saying `flow to the pulse of life.' Another is a real hard dance beat, so it has Madonna sampled saying `fuck me' – which I think is really cool because if you wanted to put Madonna into two words, `fuck me' is pretty good.''

Radzik can't resist making another comparison: ''It's like me! I've sampled all these different religions, and created my own belief system. That includes psychedelics.''

House music is never remembered for its melody but for a particular texture – that genre songwriters call ''the main ingredient.'' Like Eno, house composers start with the sound, then surf the system that forms around it. The songwriting process is not exactly random – it depends on the composer's taste and the samples he's assembled, but the machinery does take on a life of its own. Cyber artists like GGFH experience a kind of cyber journey as they create and layer a given piece. Although listeners might detect only one basic set of textures, each moment of the song can be decompressed like a DMT trip into any number of more linear experiences.

Climax

Sarah Drew, girlfriend of Mondo chief R.U. Sirius, is a house musician/performance artist who herself needs to be decompressed in order to be understood. The final frontier of house artist, she's a consciously self-mutated psychedelic cyborg. Eno developed the idea of music as a texture; Orridge exploited it; GGFH plays with it; Sarah Drew lives it.

"She just showed up at the door one day,'' recalls R.U. Sirius about Sarah's arrival at the Bay Area and the Mondo 2000 headquarters. "And I just said. 'Okay. Yeah. Looks good to me!' I guess it was a sexual thing.''

Sarah – a beautiful young woman from an extremely wealthy family – turned on to psychedelics and the notion of designer reality as a child. Her social status gave her the luxury and time to choose exactly who – and what – she wanted to be. By the time Sarah entered college, her life had become an ongoing art project. When she saw a Mondo magazine, she knew it was something she wanted to be part of – not simply to get on the staff, but to become Mondo 2000.

First step: to link her body with the brain from which Mondo emanates. Within a few weeks, she and R.U. Sirius were a couple, so to speak, and they lived together in a room in the Mondo 2000 mansion, publisher Queen Mu's cyberdelic answer to the Hefner estate.

We're at the aftermath of Queen Mu's birthday party. It is about three in the morning, and almost everyone is in the same altered state. The remaining guests include Walter Kirn, a GQ reporter doing a piece on Mondo, to whom Sarah is speaking in a psychedelic gibberish. The poor boy is having a hard time telling whether Sarah's trying to seduce him or drive him insane.

She's been talking about a past DMT experience, then suddenly she cuts herself off in midsentence and pins the journalist against the refrigerator, making a rapid ''ch-ch-ch-ch-ch'' sound while widening her eyes. Perhaps she is describing the frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame zoom-out feeling on psychedelics, when one suddenly experiences a broad and sudden shift in perspective. Or maybe she's pretending to be a snake. A few other heads turn as she looks into Walter's eyes, flips back her long brown hair, and, her mouth an inch from his, again spits out "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch''

One Mondo newcomer explains to the mesmerized New Yorker that Sarah means to express the feeling of many scenes receding suddenly and the accompanying realization of the kind one gets when he conceives an idea from hundreds of points of view at once. But the veterans know what's really going on: Sarah is a media personality. She's a multimedia manifestation of the magazine itself. She's leaped off the page. She's a house song. She's a human cyborg.

At about four o'clock, Sarah turns off the lights for the half-dozen survivors of the psychedelic excursion and plays a cassette of freshly recorded music called Infinite Personality Complex.

The listeners close their eyes and the stereo speakers explode with a vocal fission. Moaning, keening, and howling make up most of the sound, but it is so deep, so rich, so layered – or at least so damn loud – that it creates a definite bodily response. To listen to her music is to have the experience of your brain being dehydrated and reconstituted many times per second. ''Come inside my little yoni,'' her lyrics iterate over themselves. Somehow, Sarah Drew's music is the real thing. This is a woman on the very edge of something, and even if that something is sanity itself, her work and persona merit exploration.

By dawn, everyone has gone to bed except Sarah, Walter (who is no longer in this thing for the story), and R.U. Sirius, who watches the whole scene with detached amusement, utterly unafraid of losing his girlfriend to the journalist.

As Walter talks to Sarah, she manifests totally. Sarah is a magazine article. She ''groks'' what he says, making an mm sound again and again as she nods her head. This is not a normal, conversational acknowledgment she's making, but a forced feedback loop of rapidly accelerating mms – as if the faster Sarah mms, the more she's understanding, and the more she's prodding him on to explore deeper into the phenomenon he's describing. He's simply trying to tell her he's attracted to her.

But Sarah is a cyborg, and finally answers his question with a long discourse about virtual space. Our current forms of communication – verbal and physical – are obsolete, she explains. Someday she will be able to project, through thought, a holographic image into the air, into which someone will project his own holographic mental image.

"Then we would literally see what the other means,'' she borrows from Terence McKenna, "and see what we both mean together.'' It would be the ultimate in intimacy, she tells him, touching his arm gently, because they would become linked into one being.

The reporter has had enough. ''But wouldn't it be much easier to just fuck?''

Six months later, having moved to the next evolutionary level, Sarah recalls what she was going through in the Infinite Personality period. ''I remember I would reach into my mind and ... ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. It was the way I had of expressing what I was experiencing at that time. Sometimes I'm a very, very, very high conduit. It was like a huge information download.''

For Sarah, the relationship of DNA, computers, psychedelics, and music is not conceptual but organic. According to Drew, her Infinite Personality Complex served as a ''highly dense information loop.'' But, like her work, her own DNA was mutating – evolving into a denser informational structure. As an artist, she became capable of downloading the time-wave-zero fractal through her own resonating DNA, and then translating it into music. Meanwhile, she was also becoming a human, biological manifestation of the downloading process, evolving – like her society – by becoming more intimately linked to technology.

"I was becoming what you can call a cyborg. It was time for me to make that synthesis. In this kind of work, you are the becoming – not an artist separate from the medium. Then you can even be in multiple places at once. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!''

Artist as art object goes way back, but not artist as cyborg or information loop time traveller. The other particular advantage of becoming a cyborg is, of course, that it enables the artist to interact fully with her computer and other high-tech recording equipment. Sarah's current house project is an adaptation of the Bacchae, for which she's using an EMU synthesizer/sampler. She makes a moan or a whisper into a microphone that the EMU records digitally. Then she replays, overdubs, and manipulates the sounds with computers. Finally, she ends up with a house recording that, again, recreates a timeless, skinless sexual experience through computers.

"It starts out with soft, light sounds and whisperings, then moves into a sort of ecstasy. As it starts to build, the breathing becomes the rhythms, and the rhythms become the breathing. It's the sound of ecstasy happening. And I have a male, Dionysian figure, going into orgasm as he's being torn apart. And it ends up in a climax. All in five minutes.''

In addition, using the 3-D ''holographic'' sound techniques developed for virtual reality systems, Sarah creates a three-dimensional acoustic sound space where the audience can experience sounds as real, physical presences. The whispers seem to come from all sides. This is not just a "sens-u-round'' effect but a genuine cyberian effort in structure, style, and meaning. ''I'm talking about a holographic sense of presence and movement,'' she insists. "We can take people through time that way by creating a space with sound. It'll move people back in time.''

By creating a space with sound, Sarah makes a time machine in which she can transport her audience – not by bringing them into a different space but by changing the space that they're already in. The implication of her music is that time does not really exist, since it can be compressed into a single moment. The moment itself, of course, is Dionysian; orgiastic bliss is the only inroad to timelessness. Because Sarah creates her sound space out of her own voice and cyborg presence, she feels her music is a way of taking her audience into herself. Her ultimate sexual statement is to make love to her entire audience and create in them the bliss response.

Despite her flirtatious manner and flippancy about orgasm, Sarah takes human sexuality quite seriously. As several recording engineers carry equipment into Sarah's basement studio to mix the final tracks for her Bacchae record, she makes a startling admission: she'll probably perform with ''low energy'' today because she had an abortion yesterday. For lack of anything better to say, one of the engineers asks her how it was.

"I took acid before I went in,'' she says, "because I really wanted to experience it. It was a purge.''

To average ears, this sounds like intense, artsy beatnik nonsense, but Sarah's unflinching commitment to experiencing and understanding her passage through time has earned her recognition as one of the most fully realized participants in Cyberia. Everyone in the scene who knows Sarah – and almost everybody does – is a little frightened of her, but also just a wee bit in awe.

She is most definitely for real, and however bizarre she gets, everything she says and does is in earnest. Even her affectations – weird sounds, strange hats, pseudointellectual accent, and name dropping – are done innocently, almost like a child trying on costumes to test the reality of each. Sarah's life is absolutely a work in progress, and her pieces are indistinguishable from her self.

"To have an abortion on acid,'' muses R.U. Sirius the day afterward. "It hasn't seemed to affect her too much. It was intense, and she cried, but one of the things I like about her is she can have these incredibly intense experiences, and she expects them.''

The discontinuity training is complete. Cyberian music has evolved into a cyborg.

Chapter 14

Hypertextual Forays

The writers of Cyberia underwent a similar evolution. The literary culture of Cyberia began as a dark, negative worldview but later developed into a multimedia celebration of timelessness and designer reality. Today, the literature of Cyberia – like its music – has become personified by cyberians themselves, who adopt into their own lives the ethos of a fictional designer reality.

The Interzone

"Beat'' hero William Burroughs didn't start the cyberpunk movement in literature, but he foresaw it, most notably in his novel Naked Lunch (1959). Although written long before video games or the personal computer existed, Burroughs's works utilize a precybernetic hallucinatory dimension called the Interzone, where machines mutate into creatures, and people can be controlled telepathically by "senders'' who communicate messages via psychedelics introduced into the victims' bloodstreams.

Burroughs's description of the psychic interface prophesizes a virtual reality nightmare: Senders gain ''control of physical movements, mental processes, emotional responses, and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectrical signals injected into the nervous system of the subject. ... The biocontrol apparatus [is] the prototype of one-way telepathic control.'' Once indoctrinated, the drug user becomes an unwilling agent for one of the Interzone's two main rivaling powers. The battle is fought entirely in the hallucinatory dimension, and involves "jacking in'' (as William Gibson will later call it) through intelligent mutated typewriters.

Burroughs's famed ''prismatic'' style of writing – almost a literary equivalent of Brian Eno's Ambient Music – reads more like jazz than the narrative works of his contemporaries. Each word or turn of phrase can lead the reader down an entirely new avenue of thought or plot, imitating the experience of an interdimensional hypertext adventure. But as the pioneer of nonmimetic hallucinatory and even pornographic literature, Burroughs suffered condemnation from the courts and, worse, occasional addiction to the chemicals that offered him access to the far reaches of his consciousness. Unlike the cyberian authors of today, Burroughs was not free simply to romp in the uncharted regions of hyperspace, but instead – like early psychedelic explorer – as forced to evaluate his experiences against the accepted, "sane'' reality of the very noncyberian world in which he lived. The morphogenetic field, as it were, was not yet fully formed.

This made Burroughs feel alone and mentally ill. In a letter to Allen Ginsburg, he wrote that he hoped the writing of Naked Lunch would somehow ''cure'' him of his homosexuality. As David Cronenberg, who later made a film adaptation of the book, comments, "even at that time ... even these guys, the hippest of the hip, were still capable of thinking of themselves as sick guys who could be cured by some act of art or will or drugs.''

Burroughs's early pre-Cyberia, as a result, became as dark, paranoid, and pessimistic as the author himself. It was three decades before cyberian literature could shake off this tone. In the current climate, Burroughs has been able to adopt a more full-blown cyber aesthetic that, while still cynically expressed, calls for the liberation of humanity from the constraints of the body through radical technologically enhanced mutation:

"Evolution did not come to a reverent halt with homo sapiens. An evolutionary step that involves biologic alterations is irreversible. We now must take such a step if we are to survive at all. And it had better be good. ... We have the technology to recreate a flawed artifact, and to produce improved and variegated models of the body designed for space conditions. I have predicted that the transition from time into space will involve biologic alteration. Such alterations are already manifest.''

It wasn't until the 1990s (and close to his own nineties) that Burroughs gained access to other forms of media, which more readily accepted his bizarre cyberian aesthetic. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy; My Own Private Idaho) collaborated with Burroughs on a video version of the satiric poem ''Thanksgiving Prayer,'' which later appeared in freeze-frame form in Mondo 2000. But long before Burroughs had himself successfully crossed over into other media, his aesthetic and his worldview had found their way there.

Jacking in to the Matrix

Cyberpunk proper was born out of a pessimistic view similar to that of William Burroughs. The people, stories, and milieu of William Gibson's books are generally credited with spawning an entirely new aesthetic in the science fiction novel, and cross-pollinating with films like Bladerunner, Max Headroom, and Batman. Taking its cue from comic books, skateboard magazines, and video games more than from the lineage of great sci-fi writers like Asimov and Bradbury, cyberpunk literature is a gritty portrait of a future world not too unlike our own, with computer hackers called ''cowboys,'' black market genetic surgeons, underground terrorist-punkers called Moderns who wear chameleonlike camouflage suits, contraband software, drugs, and body parts, and personality imprints of dead hackers called "constructs'' who jet as disembodied consciousness through the huge computer net called ''the matrix.'' The invention of the matrix, even as a literary construct, marks the birth of cyberpunk fiction. Here, the matrix describes itself to Case, Gibson's reluctant cowboy hero:

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,'' said the voice-over, "in the early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.'' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. ''Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights ... receding...''

The matrix is a fictional extension of our own worldwide computer net, represented graphically to the user, much like VR or a video game, and experienced via dermatrodes, which send impulses through the skin directly into the brain. After years away from cyberspace, Case is given the precious opportunity to hack through the matrix once again. Gibson's description voiced the ultimate hacker fantasy for the first time:

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now–

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now-

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.''

The invention of cyberspace as a real place is the most heralded of the cyberpunk genre's contributions to fiction and the arts. William Gibson and his colleague/collaborator Bruce Sterling paint vivid portraits of a seamy urban squalor contrasted by an ultra-high-tech web of electronic sinews, traveled by mercenary hackers, digital cowboys, artificial intelligences, and disembodied minds.

These authors acknowledge the discrepancy between the promise of technological miracles, such as imprinting consciousness onto a silicon chip, and their application in a real world still obsessed with power, money, and sex. Their backs are the literary equivalent of industrial music, exploring a world where machines and technology have filled every available corner, and regular people are forced to figure out a way to turn these technologies against the creators and manipulators of society.

Contributing to the pessimistic quality of these works is another idea shared with the industrial movement – that human beings are basically programmable. ''I saw his profile,'' one character remarks about another. "He's a kind of compulsive Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object of his desire. That's what the file says.'' And we know that means he can't act otherwise. Characters must behave absolutely true to their programming, having no choice but to follow the instructions of their emotional templates. Even Molly, the closest thing to a love-interest in Neuromancer, leaves her boyfriend with a written, self-defeating apology: ''ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS.''

Like Burroughs's reluctant hero in Naked Lunch, Case's addictive personality is exploited by higher powers, and he must pay for the joy of jacking in by becoming an agent for a dark, interdimensional corporation. Also like Burroughs's prismatic style, the feeling of these books is more textural than structural. Like fantasy role-playing, computer games, or Nintendo adventures, these books are to be appreciated for the ride. Take the opening of Gibson and Sterling's novel, The Difference Engine:

Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.

A villa, a garden, a balcony.

Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes.

The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.

These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.

Her name is Sybil Gerard.

Like the characters in Fantastic Voyage, we move through a multitiered fractal reality, enjoying the lens of a camera, the dexterity of a computer design program, the precision of a microscope, the information access of an historical database, the intimacy of a shared consciousness, and, finally, the distance and objectivity of a narrative voice that can identify this entity by its name. The way in which we move through the text says as much if not more about the cyberpunk worldview than does its particular post-sci-fi aesthetic. Writers like Gibson and Sterling hate to be called ''cyberpunk'' because they know their writing is not just an atmosphere or flavor. While this branch of fiction may have launched the cyberpunk milieu, it also embodies some of the principles of the current renaissance in its thematic implications.

Even the above passage from The Difference Engine demonstrates a sense of holographic reality, where identity is defined by the consensual hallucination of a being's component parts. Similarly, like a DMT trip, a shamanic journey, or a hypertext computer program, reality in these books unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. A minor point may explode into the primary adventure at hand, or a character may appear, drop a clue or warning, and then vanish. Furthermore, these stories boldly contrast the old with the new, and the biological with the technical, reminding us that society does not progress in a smooth, curvilinear fashion.

Sterling's Schismatrix, for example, pits the technical against the organic in a world war between Mechanists, who have mastered surgical manipulation of the human body through advanced implant technology, and Shapers, who accomplish similar biological manipulation through conscious control over their own DNA coding. This is the same metaphorical struggle that systems mathematician Ralph Abraham has explored throughout human history, between the organic spiritual forces – which he calls Chaos, Gaia, and Eros – and the more mechanistic forces embodied by technology, patriarchal domination, and monotheism. In fact, Sterling's own worldview is based on a nonlinear systems mathematics model.

"Society is a complex system,'' he writes for an article in Whole Earth Review "and there's no sort of A-yields-B business here. It's an iteration. A yields B one day and then AB is going to yield something else the next day, and it's going to yield something else the next and there's 365 days in a year, and it takes 20 years for anything to happen.''

Just as these writers incorporate the latest principles of chaos math, new technology, and computer colonization into their stories and milieu, they are also fascinated by exploring what these breakthroughs imply about the nature of human experience. William Gibson knew nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer. Most of the details came from fantasy: ''If I'd actually known anything about computers, I doubt if I'd been able to do it.'' He was motivated instead by watching kids in video arcades: "I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt these kids were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: you had this feedback loop, with photons coming off the screen into the kids' eyes, the neurons moving through their bodies, electrons moving through the computer. And these kids clearly believed in the space these games projected. Everyone who works with computers seems to develop an intuitive faith that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen.''

Gibson's inspiration is Thomas Pynchon, not Benoit Mandelbrot, and his focus is human functioning, not computer programming. The space behind the screen – the consensual hallucination – is Cyberia in its first modern incarnation. Gibson and his cohorts are cyberpunk writers not because they're interested in hackers but because they are able to understand the totality of human experience as a kind of neural net. Their stories, rooted partially in traditional, linear fiction and common sense, mine the inconsistencies of modern culture's consensual hallucinations in the hope of discovering what it truly means to be a human being. Their permutations on consciousness – a cowboy's run in the matrix, an artificial intelligence, an imprinted personality – are not celebrations of technology but a kind of thought experiment aimed at conceptualizing the experience of life.

As ushers rather than participants in Cyberia, Gibson and Sterling are not optimistic about the future of such experience. Most criticism of their work stems from the authors' rather nihilistic conclusions about mankind's relationship to technology and the environment. Gibson's characters in Neuromancer enjoy their bodies and the matrix, but more out of addictive impulsiveness than true passion.

Gibson admits, ''One of the reasons, I think, that I use computers in that way is that I got really interested in these obsessive things. I hadn't heard anybody talk about anything with that intensity since the Sixties. It was like listening to people talk about drugs.'' The cyberian vision according to these, the original cyberpunk authors, is a doomed one, where the only truth to be distilled is that a person's consciousness has no spirit.

In a phone conversation, Bruce Sterling shares his similar worldview over the shouts and laughter of his children: ''If you realize that the world is nonlinear and random, then it means that you can be completely annihilated by chaos for no particular reason at all. These things happen. There's no cosmic justice. And that's a disquieting thing to have to face. It's damaging to people's self-esteem.''

Both Sterling and Gibson experienced the ''cyberian vision,'' but their conclusions are dark and hopeless. Rather than trashing the old death-based paradigm, they simply incorporate chaos, computers, and randomness into a fairly mechanistic model. Sterling believes in systems math, cultural viruses, and the promise of the net, but, like Bruce Eisner, he doesn't see technology as inherently liberating. "I worry about quotidian things like the greenhouse effect and topsoil depletion and desertification and exploding populations and species extinction. It's like it's not gonna matter if you've got five thousand meg on your desktop if outside your door its like a hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit for three weeks in a row.''

While they weren't ready to make the leap into cyberian consciousness, Gibson and Sterling were crucial to the formation of Cyberia, and their works took the first step toward imagining a reality beyond time or locational space. These writers have refused, however, to entertain the notion of human beings surviving the apocalypse, or even of real awareness outside the body. Hyperspace is a hallucination, and death is certainly real and permanent. Even Case's friend, the one disembodied consciousness in Neuromancer, knows he's not real: his only wish is to be terminated.

It has been left to younger, as-yet less recognized writers, like WELL denizen Mark Laidlaw, to invent characters whose celebration of Cyberia outweigh the futility of life in a decaying world. One of his stories, ''Probability Pipeline,'' which he wrote with the help of cyber novelist and mathematician Rudy Rucker, is about two friends, Delbert, a surfer, and Zep, a surfboard designer, who invent the ultimate board, or "stick'': one that, utilizing chaos mathematics, can create monster waves.

Dig it, Del, I'm not going to say this twice. The ocean is a chaotic dynamical system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Macro info keeps being folded in while micro info keeps being excavated. ... I'm telling you, dude. Say I'm interested in predicting or influencing the waves over the next few minutes. Waves don't move all that fast, so anything that can influence the surf here in the next few minutes is going to depend on the surfspace values within a neighboring area of, say, one square kilometer. I'm only going to fine-grain down to the millimeter level, you wave, so we're looking at, uh, one trillion sample points. Million squared. Don't interrupt again, Delbert, or I won't build you the chaotic attractor.''

You're going to build me a new stick?''

I got the idea when you hypnotized me last night. Only I'd forgotten till just now. Ten fractal surf levels at a trillion sample points. We model that with an imipolex CA, we use a nerve-patch modem outset unit to send the rider's surfest desires down a co-ax inside the leash, the CA does a chaotic back simulation of the fractal inset, the board does a jiggly-doo, and ...''

`TSUUUNAMIIIIII!'' screamed Delbert, leaping up on the bench and striking a boss surfer pose.

Laidlaw and Rucker's world is closer to the cyberian sentiment because the characters are not politicians, criminals, or unwilling participants in a global, interdimensional battle. They are surfers, riding the wave of chaos purely for pleasure. To them, the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves – chaotic, maybe, but a playground more than anything else. The surfers' conclusions about chaos are absolutely cyberian: sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe. Like the first house musicians who came after Genesis P. Orridge's hostile industrial genre, dispensing with leather and chains and adopting the fashions of surfwear and skateboarding, these younger writers have taken the first leap toward ecstasy by incorporating surf culture into their works.

Laidlaw first thought of writing the story, he explains to me in the basement office of his San Francisco Mission District home, ''at Rudy's house, where he had a Mandelbrot book with a picture of a wave. I looked at it, and realized that a surfboard can take you into this stuff.'' Laidlaw rejects the negative implications of Gibson's hardwired world and refuses to believe that things are winding down.

"The apocalypse? I see that as egotism!'' Likewise, abandoning the rules of traditional structure ("plot,'' Laidlaw explains, ''merely affords comfort in a hopeless situation''), Laidlaw follows his own character's advice, and surfs his way through the storytelling.

"Get rad. Be an adventurist. You'll be part of the system, man,'' explains the character Zep, and eventually that's what happens. Like Green Fire, who on his visionquests must control his imagination lest his fantasies become real, Del accidentally sends too many thought signals through his surfboard/chaotic attractor to the nuclear power plant at the ocean shore and blows it up; but, as luck would have it, he, Zep, and their girl Jen escape in an interdimensional leap:

"The two waves intermingled in a chaotic mindscape abstraction. Up and up they flew, the fin scraping sparks from the edges of the unknown. Zep saw stars swimming under them, a great spiral of stars.

"Everything was still, so still.

"And then Del's hand shot out. Across the galactic wheel a gleaming figure shared their space. It was coming straight at them. Rider of the tides of night, carver of blackhole beaches and neutron tubes. Bent low on his luminous board – graceful, poised, inhuman.

"Stoked,' said Jen. `God's a surfer!'''

The only real weapon against the fearful vision of a cold siber-Cyberia is joy. Appreciation of the space gives the surfer his bearings and balance in Cyberia.

This is why art and literature are seen as so crucial to coping there: they serve as celebratory announcements from a world moving into hyperspace. No matter how dark or pessimistic their milieus, these authors still delight in revealing the textures and possibilities of a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events.

Toasters, Band-Aids, Blood

Comic book artists, who already prided themselves on their non-linear storytelling techniques, were the first to adopt the milieu of cyberian literature into another medium. Coming from a tradition of superheroes and clearcut battles between good and evil, comics tend to focus on the more primitive aspects of Cyberia, and are usually steeped in dualism, terror, and violence. While younger comic artists have ventured into a post-nihilistic vision of Cyberia, the first to bring cyberian aesthetics into the world of superheroes, like the original cyberpunk authors, depicted worlds as dark as they could draw them.

Batman, the brooding caped crusader, was one of the first of the traditional comic book characters to enjoy a cyberpunk rebirth, when Frank Miller created The Dark Knight Returns series in the 1980's. As Miller surely realized, Batman is a particularly fascinating superhero to bring to Cyberia because he is a mere motal and, like us, he must use human skills to cope with the post-modern apocalypse. The mature Batman, as wrought by Miller, is fraught with inconsistencies, self-doubt, and resentment toward a society gone awry. He is the same Batman who fought criminals in earlier, simpler decades, who now, as an older man, is utterly unequipped for the challenges of Cyberia.

Miller's Dark Knight series interpolates a human superhero into the modern social-media scheme. Commentators in frames the shape of TV sets interpret each of Batman's actions as they occur. Newsmedia criticism running throughout the story reminds the audience that Batman's world has become a datasphere: Each of his actions effect more than just the particular criminal he has beaten up – they have an iterative influence on the viewing public.

For example, a Ted Koppel-like newsman conducts a TV interview with a social scientist about Batman's media identity. The psychologist responds:

Picture the public psyche as a vast, moist membrane—through the media, Batman has struck this membrane a vicious blow, and it has recoiled. Hence your misleading statistics. But you see, Ted, the membrane is flexible. Here the more significant effects of the blow become calculable, even predictable. To wit – every anti-social act can be traced to irresponsible media input. Given this, the presence of such an aberrant, violent force in the media can only lead to anti-social programming.

The iterative quality of the media within the comic book story creates a particularly cyberian ''looking glass'' milieu that has caught on with other comic book writers as a free-for-all visual sampling of diary entries, computer printouts, television reports, advertisements, narratives from other characters as well as regular dialogue and narration. In addition, the comic books make their impact by sampling brand names, media identities, and cultural icons from the present, the past, and an imagined future. Comics, always an ideal form for visual collage, here become vehicles for self-consciously gathered iconic samples. This chaos of imagery, in a world Batman would prefer to dominate with order and control is precisely what cause his anguish.

In the Batman comics we witness the ultimate battle of icons, as Batman and Joker conduct a cyberian war of images in a present-day datasphere. They no longer battle physically but idealistically, and their weapons are the press and television coverage. This becomes particulary ironic when the reader pauses to remember that Batman and the Joker are comic book characters themselves – of course they would behave this way. They are their media identities, which is why their manifestation in the datasphere is so important to them. Their battle is a metaconflict, framed within a cut-and-paste media.

So poor Batman, a character out of the patriarchy (he is, after all, avenging the murder of his father), finds himself caught in a nightmare as he tries to control post-modern chaos. In Frank Miller's words, ''Batman imposes his order on the world; he is an absolute control freak. The Joker is Batman's most maddening opponent. He represents the chaos Batman despises, the chaos that killed his parents.'' Living in a comic book world, it's no wonder that Batman is going crazy while the Joker seems to gain strength over the years.

This is why the experience of Miller's world is more like visiting an early acid house club than reading a traditional comic book. Miller initiates a reexploration of the nonlinear and sampling potential of the comic-book medium, pairing facing pages that at first glance seem unrelated but actually comment on each other deeply. A large, full-page abstract drawing of Batman may be juxtaposed with small cells of action scenes, television analysis, random comments, song lyrics, or newsprint. As the eye wanders in any direction it chooses, the reader's disorientation mirrors Batman's confusion at fighting for good in a world where there are no longer clear, clean lines to define one's position. The comic-book reader relaxes only when he is able to accept the chaotic, nonlinear quality of Miller's text and enjoy it for the ride. Then, the meaning of Batman's story becomes clear, hovering somewhere between the page and the viewer's mind.

Even more grotesque, disorienting, and cyber-extreme is the work of Bill Sienkiewicz, whose Stray Toasters series epitomizes the darkest side of the cyberpunk comic style. The story – a mystery about a boy who, we learn, has been made part machine – is depicted in a multimedia comic-book style, with frames that are include photographs of nails, plastic, fringe, packing bubbles, toaster parts, leather, Band-Aids, and blood. This world of sadomasochism, crime, torture, and corruption makes Neuromancer seem bright by comparison. There is very little logic to the behaviors and storyline here – it's almost as if straying from the nightmarish randomness of events and emotions would sacrifice the nonlinear consistency. In essence, Stray Toasters is a world of textures, where the soft, hard, organic, and electronic make up a kind of dreamscape through which both the characters and the readers are moved about at random. As Bruce Sterling would no doubt agree, an accidental or even an intentional electrocution could come at any turn of a page.

Finally, though, cyber-style comics have emerged that are as hypertextual as Miller or Sienkiewicz's, but far more optimistic. Like the characters of Marc Laidlaw and Rudy Rucker, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are fun-loving, pizza-eating surfer dudes, for whom enjoying life (while, perhaps, learning of their origin and fighting evil) is of prime importance. They are just as cyberpunk and nonlinear as Batman or the Joker, but their experience of life is playful. While the characters and stories in the subsequent films and TV cartoons are, admittedly, fairly cardboard, the original comic books produced out of a suburban garage by Eastman and Laird are cyberpunk's answer to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Four turtles, minding their own business, fall off a truck and into a puddle of ooze that turns them into human-size talking turtles. They are trained by a rat to become ninja warriors, and then they go on an interdimensional quest to the place where the transformative ooze originated. Throughout their adventures, the turtles maintain a lighthearted attitude, surfing their way through battles and chases.

The violence is real and the world is corrupt, but the turtles maintain hope and cheer. The comic itself, like the Toon Town atmosphere, is a sweet self-parody, sampling nearly all of the comic-book-genre styles. But instead of creating a nightmarish panoply, Eastman and Laird use these elements to build a giant playground. Challenges are games, truly evil enemies are ''bad guys,'' and the rewards are simple – pizza and a party. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series offers the only optimistic response to a nonlinear and chaotic world: to become softer, sweeter, more adventurous for its own sake, and not to take life too seriously.

Signal Compression and Mind Expansion

The multimedia quality of cyber comic books spills over into cyberian video production, which has begun to reinterpret its own dynamic in relation to the fantasy games, novels, and comics. While these media borrow from video's quick-cut electronic immediacy, videographers now borrow back from the cyberpunk style and ethics to create a new graphic environment – one that interacts much more intimately with the viewer's body and consciousness than does the printed page.

At any Toon Town house event, television monitors throughout the club flash the computer-generated imagery of Rose X, a company created by Britt Welin and Ken Adams, a young married couple who moved Petaluma, California, to be close to their mentor, Terence McKenna. Global Village enthusiasts, they hope their videos will help to awaken a network of like-minded people in remote regions throughout the nation. Their vision, inspired in part by McKenna, is of a psychedelic Cyberia, where techniques of consciousness, computers, and television co-evolve.

Like McKenna, Ken and Britt believe that psychedelics and human beings share a morphic, co-evolutionary relationship, but they are quick to include technology in the organic dance. As they smoke a joint and splice wires in their garage-studio (where else?), Ken explains the video-psychedelic evolutionary model.

"Psychedelic experiences are almost like voices from your dream state. They call you and they seduce you. People are also constantly seduced by psychedelic techniques on TV that have to do with fluid editing and accelerated vision processing. People love that stuff because it strikes them in a very ancient place, something that spirals back down into the past for everybody whether or not they're using psychedelics. It's there already."

Like MTV videos that substitute texture for story and quick cuts for plot points, Rose X videos work on an almost subliminal level. Meaning is gleaned from the succession of images more than their linear relationship. Viewers process information moment to moment, thus the amount processed increases with the number of cuts, even if the data is less structured. Rose X takes these techniques a step further by intentionally appealing to the viewer's ability to experience a kind of morphic resonance with the patterns and data flashing on the screen. Even their subject matter – their most popular videos are talks by Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham – is intended to awaken dormant zones of human consciousness.

Britt, a perky, dark blonde with a southern accent, pops in a "video collage" and details her take on the relationship of technology, psychedelics, and consciousness. The images swirl on a giant video screen flanked by banks of computer equipment and wires. It's difficult to figure out the difference between what's around the screen and what's being projected onto it.

"We work in a psychedelic state when we're able to. And then we have a different relationship to our technology. We're into a concept called `technoanimism,' where we really think of technology itself as an animistic dynamic that filters through the individual machines, bringing an overspirit to them – an animistic spirit that's way beyond what humans are comprehending on their own level."

Britt, like Sarah Drew from the music world, has developed herself into a cyborg. Both women unite with their technology in order to channel information they believe is new to humanity. Just as house musicians start with a sound, then go where the sound takes them, Britt allows her video and computer equipment to lead her into artistic discoveries. "When you are functioning at a high psychedelic level and you go into a cyberspace environment, you lose your parameters and you find yourself entirely within the electronic world. It breeds its own surprises."

Unlike most men in the cyber-arts scene, who tend to think of themselves as dominators of technology, Ken, like Britt, strives to become "one" with the machine. "Our video-computer system's set up to ease us into a level of intimacy where we can use it in a transparent sense. If I enter into a trance relationship with it, then it ends up having a spiritlike existence."

Rose X's current project, a feature-length video called Strange Attractor emerges out of their interest in the relationship of technology to organic interdimensional consciousness. In the story, a reversal of the Adam and Eve myth, Rose is a "strange attractor" – a person who, through lucid dreaming, can access the vast network of artificial environments normally entered through computers or virtual reality. On one of her journeys into cyberspace, she befriends another strange attractor – a young man who has gotten lost in the consensual hallucination. Her task is to rescue this lost soul by getting him to experience his body – through virtual sex – or his spirit – by getting him to eat a psychoactive apple. On the way, she is helped by an interdimensional sect who use organic methods to access Cyberia, and thwarted by an evil race of authorities, who hope to curd interdimensional travel and trap the human race forever in its earthly, single-dimensional reality.

The battle is typically cyberpunk, but here the forces of chaos are the good guys, and those who put a lid on interdimensional travel are the bad guys. The good guys are true cyberians, who use ancient techniques, psychedelics, and computers in a nondiscriminatory cybersampling of whatever works. Britt and Ken believe Eve was right, and that had Adam followed his own impulses rather than God's orders, everything would have been okay.

Unlike earlier voyagers like Burroughs, Britt embraces the ambiguous impulses that can feel so unsettling:

""Westerners tend to try to suppress them and ignore them, probably out of fear of insanity. If there are voices or beings in your mind that you don't seem to have any control over – that can be a terrifying prospect.''

Similarly, rather than be afraid of technology's influence over them, they lovingly embrace their machinery as an equal partner in the race toward hyperspace. The printed, ''official'' version of Britt and Ken's psychedelic and technological agenda equates the experience of drugs with the promise of technology and the lost art of ecstasy:

Strange but efficient organic forms appearing and disappearing resemble visions before sleep when two worlds touch. This is computer video signal compression. Like peyote, like psilocybin, silicon has songs to sing, stories to tell you won't hear anywhere else.''

Likewise, the Rose X company is true to cyberian ideals of tribal, open interaction – new garage-band ethic based on pooling resources and hacking what's out there. Britt trained herself on the Amiga Video Toaster after she convinced her employer to buy one. Ken bought his with money from an NEA grant. But even without elaborate social hacking, the Video Toaster's low cost makes it as available now as a guitar and amplifier were in the sixties. The device links the personal computer to the television, giving the viewing public its first opportunity to talk back to the screen. Britt explains enthusiastically: ''Look how many bands got formed since the Beatles.''

Low-cost guerrilla production techniques have also led artists toward the cut-and-paste aesthetic. No longer concerned with making things look ''real,'' videographers like Ken and Britt do most of their work in postproduction, manipulating images they shoot or scrounge. Like house music recording artists, their techniques involve sampling, overlaying, and dubbing. Ken is proud that his work never tries to imitate a physical reality and is especially critical of filmmakers who waste precious resources on costly special effects. Video art in Cyberia is cut-and-paste impressionism. Just as comic-book artists include television images or even wires and blood in their cells, videographers include pictures of the Iraq bombings, virtual reality scenes, and even old sitcoms.

"We're much more like a cyberpunk comic book. We don't want it to look like it takes place in a natural setting. We want it to all be self-contained in a conceptual space that's primarily videographic – like virtual reality. It'll be the reality of the imagination. We've quit trying to mimic reality; we try to mimic our imagination, which is the root of all reality anyway.''

Again, the final stage in the development of a cyberian genre is the designer being, mated both with technology and with psychedelics in the hope of creating a new territory for human consciousness. But what the designers of the new literary milieu may not realize is that around the world, thirsty young minds absorb these ideas and attempt to put them into effect in their own lives. The fully evolved cyberian artists aren't making any art at all. They're living it.

Chapter 15

Playing Roles

Ron Post, aka Nick Walker, is a gamemaster and aikido instructor from suburban New Jersey. In his world, fantasy and reality are in constant flux. Having fully accepted ontological relativism as a principle of existence, Ron and his posse of ''gamers'' live the way they play, and play as a way of life. It's not that life is just a game, but that gaming is as good a model as any for developing the skills necessary to journey successfully through the experience of reality. It is a constant reminder that the rules are not fixed and that those who recognize this fact have the best time. Ron, his "adopted'' brother Russel (they named themselves after the comic-book characters Ron and Russel Post), and about a dozen other twenty-something-year-olds gather each week at Ron's house to play fantasy role-playing games. Like the psychedelic trips of the most dedicated shamanic warriors, these games are not mere entertainment. They are advanced training exercises for cyberian warriors.

Fantasy role playing games, unlike traditional board games, are unstructured and nonlinear. There is no clear path to follow. Instead, the game works like an acting exercise, where the players improvise the story as they go along. There is no way to ''win'' because the only object is to create, with the other players, the best story possible. Still, players must keep their characters alive, and having fun often means getting into trouble and then trying to get out again.

Ron's game is based in GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, by Steve Jackson; it is a basic set of numerical and dice-roll rules governing the play of fantasy games. In addition, Jackson has provided ''modules,'' which are specific guidelines for gaming in different worlds. These modules specify realistic rules for play in worlds dominated by magic, combat, high-tech, even cyberpunk – ''module that depicts the future of computer hacking so convincingly that the U.S. Secret Service seized it from Jackson's office believing it was a dangerous, subversive document.

I meet Ron and Russel at Ron's house, which is next to the train overpass in South New Brunswick. It's the kind of day where everyone blames the sweltering heat on the greenhouse effect – too many weather records are being broken for too many days straight. The gamers sit on the front steps of Ron's house with their shirts off, except for the two girls. The group defies the stereotypically nerdy image of role players – this is an attractive bunch; they don't need gaming just to have a group of friends. Ron smiles and shakes my hand. His build is slight but well defined, which I imagine is due to hours of aikido practice. His hard-edged, pointy face and almost sinister voice counterbalance his quirky friendliness. He laughs at the cookies and wine I've brought as an offering of sorts, recognizing the gesture as one of unnecessary respect. He hands off the gifts to one of the other gamers, and as several begin to devour the food (these are not wealthy kids), Ron takes me upstairs to his room.

On his drafting table are the map and documents for Amarantis, the game Ron spent about a year designing for his group to play. It's a world with a story as complex as any novel or trilogy – but one that will be experienced by only about a dozen kids. Amarantis is a continent that floats interdimensionally – that is, the land mass at its eastern coast changes over time. It could be one civilization one year and a completely different one the next. The western coast of the continent is called the ''edge.'' It's a sharp drop into no one knows what – not even Ron, the creator of this world. He'll decide what's there if anyone ventures out over it. The "tech level'' of this world is relatively low – crossbows are about as advanced as the weaponry gets, but there is magic. The power and accuracy of magic on Amarantis fluctuate with what Ron calls the ''weather,'' which refers not to atmospheric conditions but to the magical climate. The world is of particular interest to the IDC (the InterDimensional Council, which regulates such things), whose members recognize it as a nexus point for interdimensional mischief. Amarantis also has metaphorical influence over the rest of the fictional universe and even on other fantasy game worlds. What happens here – in a fractal way – is rippled out through the rest of that universe's time and space. If the IDC can maintain decorum here, they can maintain it throughout the cosmos.

Ron wants me to play along today, so we must invent a character. I am to enter Amarantis as an IDC cadet, who has escaped the academy via its interdimensional transport system. But first we must create my character's profile. My strengths and weaknesses are determined by a point system out of the GURPS manual. Each character has the same number of total points, but they are distributed differently. The more points a character has dedicated to agility, for example, the more tasks he can perform which require this asset.

During play, rolls of the dice are matched against skills levels to determine whether a character wins a fight, picks a lock, or learns to fly. If a character has spent too many points on wit and not enough on brute strength, he better not get cornered by a monster. GURPS has come up with numerical values for almost every skill imaginable, from quarterstaff combat to spaceship repair. Players may also acquire disabilities – like a missing arm or an uncontrollable lust for sex – which gives them points to use elsewhere. As in Neuromancer, characters must behave according to their profiles. Ron rewards players who, while maintaining their weaknesses, still manage to play skillfully.

For all the mathematics of character creation, the playing of the game itself is quite relaxed and chaotic. When Ron and I emerge from his bedroom we find today's players sitting in the living room, shirts still off, ready for action. Ron sets up a table for himself in the corner with his map, a notebook of information, and a box of index cards for every character in Amarantis.

What's going on here, essentially, is the creation of a fantasy story, where game rules and character points dictate the progression of the plot. A player thinks up an idea and is allowed to run with it as far as he can go until a conflict arises. Each character has an agenda of a sort, but these agendas do not get satisfied to the point where the game can end. For example, an agenda might be to extend the power of a large corporation, to destabilize the government of a city, or, as in my character's case, to spread goodwill throughout the universe.

Ron declares my arrival: ''Suddenly, in a blaze of light, a large metal obelisk crashes through the floor of the stage. Smoke and sparks fly everywhere. The obelisk opens to reveal ...'' And there I am. After I excuse away my arrival as a space-surfing accident – which no one believes – Russel, who plays a corporate businessman, invites everyone over to the Bacchic temple, a religious organization and megacorporation, to join the revelry already in progress. When we go there, Russel proceeds to seduce the young dancer (whose show I interrupted) with the promise of career advancement. As he takes her to his bedroom, I wander around the castlelike church. I hope to steal Russel's prize possession: a flying dragon.

Rolls of the dice decide my fate. The other players, especially Russel, watch on in horror, powerless: his character is in bed with the dancer and can't hear or see me even though the real Russel can. Other players worry for me – they know things about Russel's immense powers that I don't. But my character has a weakness for taking risks, and, disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm for my message of peace and harmony, I feel my only choice is to head straight for the edge and thus either certain doom or certain awakening. I find the dragon in an open courtyard. If I can get it to fly I'll have an easy getaway, but the creature is unbridled. I use my skill of resourcefulness – ''scrounging'', as it's called in the game – to find a rope to fashion into a bridle. I roll the three dice – two 2's and a 1. The other players moan. I'm a lucky roller, and the dice indicate that I easily find the rope. But the hard part is flying the creature. My dexterity is the skill that Ron pits against the dice. He calls this task a "D minus 8'' – very hard. I need to roll a 10 or lower to succeed. I roll a 9. Amazing. Players cheer as gamemaster Ron describes the wiburn taking off into the night. I use the stars to navigate west, toward the edge. Russel stares at me from across the room and chills go up my spine. He reaches for the GURPS Magic Module to find a spell to get his dragon back ... and to destroy me. He plans on using corporate/church money to hire a powerful professional wizard.

''Is the Wizard's Hall open this late?'' he asks Ron.

I look at Ron, who smiles knowingly at me. He had advised me to take ''magic-protection'' as a strength, and I reluctantly had done so. Thanks to Ron's insistence in adding this feature to my character, none of Russel's spells will work on me. I'm on my way to the edge.

FRP's (fantasy role-playing games) are surprisingly engrossing. They share the hypertext, any-door-can-open feeling of the computer net. And, like on a computer bulletin board, FRP's do not require that participants play in the same room or even the same city. Play is not based in linear time and space. A character's decision might be mailed in, phoned in, enacted live, or decided ahead of time. Also, there is no ''object'' to the game. There is no finish line, no grand finale, no winner or loser. The only object would be, through the illusion of conflict, for players to create the most fascinating story they can, and keep it going for as long as possible. As with cyberian music and fiction, role-playing games are based on the texture and quality of the playing experience. They are the ultimate designer realities, and, like VR, the shamanic visionquest, or a hacking run, the adventurer moves from point to point in a path as nonlinear as consciousness itself. The priorities of FRPs reflect the liberation of gamers from the mechanistic boundaries imposed on them by a society obsessed with taking sides, winning, finishing, and evaluating.

Edge Games

These kids are not society's unwitting dropouts. Indeed, they are extremely bright people. Ron and Russel met at a school for gifted yet underachieving high-schoolers in the Princeton area. They were smarter than their teachers, and knew it, which made them pretty uncontrollable and unprogrammable. Their brilliance was both their weakness and their strength. Because the subjects in school bored them, they turned to fantasy games that gave their minds the intellectual experience for which they thirsted. Of course, their elders never understood.

''Parental reaction is negative towards anything that teaches kids to think in original or creative ways,'' Russel reflects. "Playing the games is an exercise in looking at different realities – not being stuck in a single reality. It gives you courage to see how you're following many rules blindly in real reality.''

Russel explains his childhood to me as we share a shoplifted cigarette beneath the train overpass. He has learned that the rules of this world are not fixed, and both he and Ron live according to the principles of uncertainty and change. Like the heroes in a cyberpunk novel, they are social hackers who live between the lines of the system and challenge anything that seems fixed. When Russel is hungry and has no money, he steals food from the supermarket ... but he doesn't believe he'll get caught. Geniuses take precautions that regular shoplifters don't, I'm told, and survival to them becomes yet another ''edge game.''

What is the edge? ''The edge is the imaginary or imposed limit beyond which you're not supposed to go, says Russel. Where you'll get yourself really hurt. Pushing or testing the boundaries. Usually we find out the boundaries aren't really there. It's matter of putting yourself through the test of your own fear.''

Ron and Russel's comfortable suburban upbringing offered them few opportunities to test their tolerance for fear. The boys were forced to create their own edge in the form of behavioral games, so that they could experience darker, scarier realities. These edge games ranged from stealing things from school and playing elaborate hoaxes on teachers to assuming new identities and living in these invented roles for weeks at a time. Once, after taking LSD, Ron, Russel, and their friend Alan went to the mall to play an edge game they called ''space pirates.'' Ron and Russel played interdimensional travelers, and Alan, who was temporarily estranged from them for social reasons, played a CIA-like spy trying to catch them. By the end of the acid trip and the game, Alan was crying hysterically in his mother's kitchen, and the Post brothers had to decide "whether we were going to help Alan get himself back together from this and rebuild things, or let him crumble into the kitchen floor and become permanently alienated.''

Unlike the western border of the continent of Amarantis, to Russel and Ron the edge is no fantasy. Even Sarah Drew's abortion on acid could be called an edge game. The consequences of playing too close can be extremely real and painful. Ron spends as much time as possible on the edge, but he takes the risks seriously. ''If you fuck up on the edge, you die. Edge games involve real risk. Physical or even legal risk. Try this: Take a subway or a city street, walk around, and make eye contact with everyone you meet, and stare them down. See how far you can take it. You'll come up to someone who won't look away.''

Part of the training is to incorporate these lessons into daily life. All of life is seen as a fantasy role-playing game in which the stakes are physically real but the lessons go beyond physical reality. Unlike the characters of a cyberpunk book, human beings are not limited to their original programming. Instead, born gamers, humans have the ability to adopt new skills, attitudes, and agendas. They just need to be aware of the rules of designer reality in order to do so. Fantasy role-playing and playing edge games in real life are ways of developing a flexible character profile that can adapt to many kinds of situations. As Ron explains: ''The object in role-playing games is playing with characters whose traits you might want to bring into your own life. You can pick up their most useful traits, and discard their unuseful ones from yourself.'' One consciously chooses his own character traits in order to become a designer being.

Ron slowly slips into the Zen-master tone he probably uses with his students at the dojo. As the gamemaster, too, he serves as a psychologist and spiritual teacher, rewarding and punishing players' behaviors, creating situations that challenge their particular weaknesses, and counseling them on life strategies. Like a guided visualization or the ultimate group therapy, a gaming session is psychodramatic. Moreover, adopting this as a life strategy leads gamers to very cyberian conclusions about human existence.

''I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game,'' Ron says, waxing Jungian. "The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four-dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how seriously we take it, or how serious its consequences are.''

Ron's wife of just two weeks looks over at him, a little concerned. He qualifies his flippant take on designer reality: ''To play with something is not necessarily to trivialize it. Anything you do in your life is a role-playing game. The soul does not know language – any personality or language we use for thinking is essentially taking on a role.''

To Ron, basically everything on the explicate order is a game – arbitrarily arranged and decided. Ron and Russel have adopted the cyberian literary paradigm into real life. Fantasy role-playing served as a bridge between the stories of cyberpunk and the reality of lives in Cyberia. They reject duality wholesale, seeing reality instead as a free-flowing set of interpretations.

Again, though, like surfers, they do not see themselves as working against anything. They do not want to destroy the system of games and role-playing that defines the human experience. They want only to become more fully conscious of the system itself.

Ron admits that they may have an occasional brush with the law, but, ''we're not rebels. There's nothing to rebel against. The world is a playground. You just make up what to play today.''

These people don't just trip, translate, and download. They live with a cyberian awareness full-time. Unlike earlier thinkers, who enjoyed philosophizing that life is a series of equations (mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's observation that ''understanding is the a-perception of patterns as such''), or Terence McKenna, who can experience "visual language'' while on DMT, Ron guides his moment-to-moment existence by these principles.

''I'm aware that time is an illusion and that everything happens at once.'' Ron puts his arm around his young wife, who tries not to take her husband too seriously. "I've got to perceive by making things into a pattern or a language. But I can choose which pattern I'm going to observe.''

Role-playing and edge games are yet another way to download the datastream accessed through shamanic journeys and DMT trips. But instead of moving into a completely unfiltered perception of this space and then integrating it piecemeal into normal consciousness, the gamer acknowledges the impossibility of experiencing reality without an interpretive grid, and chooses instead to gain full control over creation of those templates. Once all templates or characters become interchangeable, the gamer can ''infer'' reality, because he has the ability to see it from any point of view he chooses.

''The whole idea of gaming is to play different patterns and see which ones you like. I like playing the game where I live in a benevolent universe, where everything that happens to me is a lesson to help enlighten me further. I find that a productive game. But there are other games. Paranoia is a really good edge game. Or one can play predator: I live in a benevolent universe and I'm the other team.''

That's probably why society has begun to react against designer beings: They don't play by the rules. Cyberian art, literature, game-playing, and even club life are tolerated when they can be interpreted as passing entertainment or fringe behavior. Once the ethos of these fictional worlds trickles down into popular culture and human behavior, the threat of the cyberian imagination becomes real. And society, so far, is unwilling to cope with a reality that can be designed.