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Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe 2
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.
Chapter Two
Excerpt from the New World Virtual Cyclopaedic Environment: [Transcript of a
virtual lecture given by Virtual personalities Hiesenburgburg and
Schr0/0dinger, the Kaos Kats] "How to Ride The Dixie Vibe"
Hiesenburgburg is sitting on the floor, an immense fat black `toon cat covered
in glossy fur, smoking a big green cigar and slurping a beer mug filled with
scalding espresso. He's wearing black jeans and Birkinstocks, a black straw
Panama shades his eyes, which are hidden by wrap-around black shades. His
voice is a purring rumble; like James Earl Jones in serious red-shift.
Shroud0/1dinger paces nervously, a thin, wispy cat with glossy long fur. She
seems sometimes to randomly flick from place to place, whenever you aren't
looking. The fur flows with the air of her passage and molds itself to a
voluptuous body. Large blue eyes in a Siamese mask completes the picture; she
wears no clothing. Her fur fluffs and crackles with a constant static charge;
her voice is a sibilant whisper. And sometimes she just isn't there; only a
whiff of magnolia and musk to mark her place.
HI: Dig, like, you gotta dig me here, chelas. We are gonna tell you about how
the vibe was born. Think about it, man, feel it, taste it; we are a thousand
years and more from the campfires of our forecats and here we are, layin' down
oral history on you.
SH: It's not just oral. It's performance art. We live the part over for you
again and again.
HI: Speak for you'sef, kitty! Next time I do this, I'll tell it completely
different. Dig it, chelas; this is all a lie.
SH: Inspired guesswork. Wishful thinking. Creative logical constructions.
Erisian prayers.
HI: So, like, lighten up, sit down and dig, cuz this is about as true as it
ever gets.
Way back when, when a bunch of geniuses was racing to get the first rights
to the whole virtual reality neural interface thing, the gumments of the world
had been looking at Virtual Reality as a way for Important People to Do Things
Without Real Work. It was, Like, a DEEEFENSE thing. Simulate dis jet, Simulate
dat tank. Simulate dat jet blowing up dat tank. Simulate burning to death in
that tank... we gotta make it really real, dig?
It's called Negative Feedback Conditioning. In the early days you wore a
suit with wires and eletrodes and skin sensors and pupil readers and they
shoved things in your ears and up your butt, just to get all the responses.
And they used it to simulate reality, and torture some poor shmoe until he got
it right.
And the Wheels, yah, well, they used it to talk to other wheels, though
all they ever wore was a helmet and a glove - software faked the rest, after
all, who expects a politician to feel anything?
And so you'd see the Prez, toddling along Pennsylvania Ave, driving a
waldo with a teevee for a face and a funky robohand for pressin' the flesh,
buttenholing every single voter he could find. After he did it enough there
was an expert system that took his place running the waldo; it did it a while
until the Prez died in office.
SH: That's the legend. Lover.
HI: Swear it on a stack of bibles, luv. Swear that I'm tellin' it jus' like I
heard it. I make no further war-rent-tee! Story goes that the expert system
has been running things for the last 20 years; it's been 24 since the last
election, so maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but the face never changes,
nosirree.
SH: The Presidency is ceremonial. People like familiar faces, kind old
rituals. Stale oldfarts to mark our territory. Smells like home.
HI: Point I MAKIN', honeychil' is dat come a point where you dunno what is
real and what ain't; come to that, don't make no difference. Prez is a virtual
reality, and you can be too. In a completely different and less dead way,
a`corse.
SH: Time to plug into the Dixie Vibe.
HI: Yeah, like she say. Because there was something called the Internet; a
dinosaur computer thing, date way, way back to the 1960's. It started out
hooking old mainframe computers together. It used landlines and microwave
links, den it get fast glass and satellite uplinks. Yeah, and dig, this is
unregulated traffic.
SH: Too much to regulate even then.
HI: It creates a tradition. Then when fast glass lines and wideband uplinks
become real common, data transfer rates go through the roof. Full speed vidio
signals can be transferred, and computers get fast enough to generate `em in
real time; better than real time.
SH: Interfaces become more sophisticated. Less hassle. Good Chariot, now, you
just sit down. No screen, no keyboard. All that stuff is virtual. Never wears
out.
HI: People had been working from home for years already. Telecommuting just
got a little more realistic, a little more personal. After decades of Fax and
phone and Email, business got back to the handshake and the eyeball. Chariot
makes sure that "you" are exactly you, same for the other guy.
SH: Georgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Dior. Clothes make the person. Buy
it off the rack in a clothing store or a rezware house. Costs about the same.
HI: But even today there's a fair gap between Virtual and Actual. The best
Chariot interfacing with the fastest computer on with perfect link can still
only render something that looks, sounds, and feels slightly surreal; a
cartoon reality. Some people are fond of that, take it to extremes.
SH: No shit?
HI: Like; dig this, cats. We be square, old-time cats; we ain't hip no more;
the vibe has passed us by.
SH: Speak for yourself. I walk where I will.
HI: And I know where you won't. But that's the thing. There are no limits.
Riding the vibe, there are no limits but the ones you ARE. Bein' a cartoon
underlines it, rezes it up, solid and nifty-keen and, like, _distant_. Even
when you wear it, even when you walk on it, even, dig, even when you fuck it.
SH: Distant. The player and the play. Entwined. Simultaneous. A dance of
Shakesperes and Kants and Niechies and Dahmers. All after each other's bodies,
each other's minds, each other's souls.
HI: Oh, and dig, like, you want to know why we call it the Dixie Vibe? It's
like a poetic reference to that rebel feeling, that visceral catharsis you get
when you do that rebel yell... (WHOOP!)
SH: The first anon realtime subcarrier server had the internet name
Dixie_VI.vmi.edu. Dixie Six was a massively parallel RISC supercomputer that
was surplussed to Virginia Military Institute by the United States National
Security Agency.
HI: I liked my truth better, fuzzylips. But this one's true too. Problem was,
nobody could figure out what to do with a massively parallel supercomputer.
It's not like you could buy programs for it. But they turned it over to the
Computer Science Department anyway, and the CS head - who was an old Xenix
hound - fobbed it off on a bunch of CS majors who wanted a dissertation
project. They formed a development group and wrote a compiled language and an
operating system that supported a virtual reality environment to a degree no
other educational institution had ever been able to achieve.
SH: The late Jimm Fixx <Jimmie the_Fix@Dixie_VI.vmi.edu> said it. "Nothing any
fool hacker couldn't have done given fifty billion dollars worth of free
equipment and a licence to play God."
HI: And of course Jimmie the_Fix and his cronies in the development team were
perhaps the first to experiment with virtual sex in a virtual reality
environment. After all, they were hackers. They were geeks.
SH: Like you. Like me.
HI: Bet your furry ass. So they played a bit, and made the system available to
other users - coeds, for example... Anyway, word got out. Authorities Were Not
Amused. They Put A Stop To It.
SH: Probably felt hurt they weren't invited. Administrators are people too.
HI: Truly? They must learn to hide it early. Anyway, this provoked the "fixxit
team" to create the subcarrier firmware that allows untraceable contacts.
Amazing work, really. It's reformed our sex lives and made government security
efforts on electronic media completely irrelevant, yet it could NOT be banned,
because the subcarrier hardware and firmware is part of the patented,
proprietary chipset of every Chairiot. The chipset that makes it possible to
do the neural interface without breaking skin and tapping nerves.
SH: Made the software illegal. Now everybody's a criminal.
HI: Oh, not everybody. Hardly anybody at all. Only a few millions.
SH: _Everybody_. Everybody who counts.
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