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Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe 1
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe
(C)1993 Bob King, All rights reserved.
Permission is given to freely distribute this file by electronic means as long
as the entire file remains intact, without change or omission, and especially
including this notice. Permission is also given to print out single
copies of this file for personal use. This file may not be desktopped without
the permission of the author.
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Chapter One
I am jammin' the wave, man; plugged in, javohl? I am surfin' the reality
curve; I'm toppin' the line! I'm playin Greedball with Jim the Rat; the Full
Virtual Reality environment surrounds us with screaming textures and shrieking
rhythms as we keep score by the feedback to our pleasure/pain centers. Right
now I'm flying like I took 10 straight hits of crack while Jimbo is looking
kind of green, sweating out the consequences of bein' a natural-born loser.
The ball comes zipping at me, and time >>>>warps>>>> as I (((reach for it
and fail utterly; pain like knives, like crazed rats clawing at my prostate,
like snorting Drano, pain like God's eye on me; the pain clears my mind and
centers me. It hurts just right...
*Click*
In the groove. Flick. Left. Flick. Right. Flick my eyes flick side to side
flick up and down; the acid green and ultra-blue balls scream their
trajectories inside the nearly weightless geodesic space. The walls are down;
I feel the tug of one of my green pentagons as my arc tops out. As I start to
fall I snag one of my greens and hurl it away while cranking it's inertial
mass to the max. I feel my bones groan with the effort as it streaks towards
one of my green triangles on the opposite hemisphere.
Jim launches to intercept but he didn't catch on how much mass I added;
his fingers fold back with audible pops as the ball brushes by to score. Jim
starts screaming as the exit sequence starts; his eyeballs explode just about
the time I blow my wad; then the geodesic dissolves into pixels and I'm back
in my Chariot, the Crotch-Monster slurping away so as to get every drop. The
scoreboard tells me I'm 8 for 3 with Jim; good, good; not so much of a margin
that he won't play any more. One more honest game, and then I'd better be "off
my form" again.
Another way to play in Cyberspace. As they say; "It ain't real unless it's
FUCKIN' real!"
I get up, sated; I scratch my crotch where the relief tube's rubber had
made a tight suction seal against depilated flesh. A quick glance in the
mirror shows me; naked, hairless except for eyelashes; pale skin and black
eyes. No stubble, the hair is gone for good; it gets in the way of the neural
contact pads, and it fucks up the suction on the waste disposal units. I walk
to my foodwall where with the push of a button I summon mystic daemons to
conjure with microwaves and high-speed impellers; invoking processed krill,
soya, nutrocarb and spices. The mystic daemons are good to me; I must have
paid the food bill. Out plops a mockburger and a Coke Classic.
I sit down at my table and read the newsslab; I check out the headlines -
more of the same old shit, somehow reassuring. I flick through, read the
advice column, laugh at the editorial cartoon and save it to permanents
memory, check out my horoscope - guardedly lousy - and finally settle down and
watch the comix.
Some people say that adding limited animation to comic strips and cartoons
has killed the artform. I say it's a different thing entirely. Besides, some
pumping action makes a graphic novel REALLY graphic!
Computers have killed a lot of artforms, I think, wiping the last of the
Special Sauce off my lip with a reconstructed napkin. I throw the whole mess
into the pulper; it can separate the plastics and food residue without my
help. I head back to my Chariot.
It's a Chariot 515, actually; as if you care. I mean, pretty much, a
Chariot is a Chariot. The only question is whether or not it makes your butt
go numb while you are in Cyberspace. Oh, ya, ya, the Ice Pirates make big
whoopie about how many flopdoodles per nanodweeb their Chairiot can do, but
I'm like 99 percent of all Cyberspacers; I'm just along for the ride. I don't
do rez work; I don't do programming, I don't educate expert systems clusters,
so all my beast has to do is be good enough to let me meet girls in Full
Virtual Reality and play games at an acceptably awesome speed, Dude. Oh, yeah,
and take me to work every day.
I run a machine shop in Yokohama; well, it looks like a machine-shop,
anyway. What it looks like in reality, I have no clue. I've asked, but I only
get inscrutable smiles. I'm making prototype machine parts of some kind, and I
have a good crew; Japs pay for the best. And that's all I'm gonna say about
it; aside from the Zaibatsu yellow-dog/nondisclosure agreement and the Yakuza
goons they have to back their paper up, it's fuckin' boring and you wouldn't
care.
I flop back into the Chariot; it powers up in my august presence, the
Crotch Monster snuggles into my groin while the seat sucks my butt down and
makes a nice tight seal. There's a tingle throughout my nervous system as the
Chariot runs a quick diagnostic, and then there's a *Snick* and my body is
gone and I am in my own Headspace.
Headspace is slang for your own personal Virtual reality; you can tailor
it as you want within limits. I'm no rez artist and I'm a cheap bastard, so my
Headspace is furnished with Public Domain art and freeware decor; it's kinda
this and that, one period shoved against the next; I have no taste, but I know
what I like.
Yeah, I could afford to get some dweeb rez wiz to come in and pretty it up
for me, but shit, it ain't worth it. Rather spend the money on access time;
it's not like I let people IN here. I go over to the one exception to my rule
about cheap furnishings. It looks like a battered file cabinet; in fact, if
you pick the lock (that is, your computer beats my encryption/protection
schemes) you will find some mildly illegal porn files stored there with cute
"magazine" objicons. I ignore the lock and open the drawer while laying my
left hand flat on the top and kicking the right side of the cabinet just so.
It opens to reveal the simple keyboard and screen that is the user interface
of a very fucking expensive covert SubCarrier access program. With it, I can
access the private headspace of anybody connected to WorldNet - which is just
about everybody - without any possibility of traceback. Of course, they gotta
have SubCarrier access too... but then, just about everybody does. Everybody
_I_ wanna ride with, anyway. People like me who wanna walk the razor-sharp
division between Virtual and Actual; between Real and Make Believe.
It's time to Plug in to the Dixie Vibe!
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