From: mail_petro@uqvax.cc.uq.oz.au (PETER PETROFF, ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING)
Subject: STORY: Tuned In, Turned Off, Jacked Out (Troff.0)
Date: 26 Jul 93 08:56:32 GMT


     I've been reading the Chat for a while and I always wanted to actually
*contribute*. A lot of things have been happening lately, so (like I'm
really going to try and explain the reasoning) I figured I'd try to
contribute now.
     If I get no flames, I might try some more.
     If I get some GOOD comments, I *definitely* might try some more.
     Please excuse the seemingly depressing tone - they shouldn't all be
like this, but it fits the story here nicely (Story? What story? :-)
     Hope it pleases...

Copyright (c) Peter Petroff, Brisbane, Australia, 1993.

Troff.0:
~~~~~~~~
                      Tuned In, Turned Off, Jacked Out
                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     I'd had enough.
     What are you supposed to do when you're an okay jock, you know your way
around a Net and you can't get a job with a corp and you have no cash; when
you've just come into town and you know absolutely NO-ONE here; when you've
been dumped by a girl you *thought* you knew for almost two years -and now
it turns out she's a complete... she's total... she's real... she's a...
I'd used up most of my four letter words in the first week. I used up
everybody else's (which they'd kindly offered) when I'd heard what that
"person" and its little "friends" had been up to since. Ever since I'd
heard, I've been trying to figure out a way to recode my neurons and forget
the whole deal - difficult to do without deep-frying your brain and leaving
just enough for the cat's dinner.
     Like that matters now. It's another story. Really gruesome one too. And
it doesn't even fit in here.

     Maybe I ought to introduce myself.
     My real name hardly matters. Like people REALLY use *those* nowadays.
But I call myself "Troff". It's a word that has meaning in old computer
History: the name of a high-quality text-format utility; in an old semi-
formal computer language, it was a step-trace command, following the flow of
logic in a program.
     Kind of appropriate, really.
     About six years ago I was just another struggling amateur, trying to
get in on the cowboy hacker scene. Jeezus... I'd been DESPERATE. All my
early life I'd grown up on the stories and the legends of early computing.
My own collection, my pride and joy had kept me going even when I'd felt I'd
had enough:
     A *bound and printed* _PAPER_ copy of "The Hacker's Dictionary"; the
COMPLETE set of K&R(tm) action figures, still with ALL SIX U.S. Secret
Service(tm) figures, AND the free plastic whistle; the last can of
"Jolt"(tm) soda before they'd gone the way of all good soft drinks (no, NOT
down the S-bend, I mean Diet... well yeah, down the S-bend); a copy of the
invitation to the execution of the last surviving UltraSoft Windows(tm)
programmer; a fragment from the motherboard of the VERY LAST Macintosh(tm)
(remember them?) before the Moral Majority's sledgehammers got to it...
That and a WAY lot more, all packed away into hermetic... cost me almost
every last bloody digibit in my account too.

     They called themselves "The Foundation". That was it, just "The
Foundation", the shadowy Co-operative with resources like nothing I'd ever
heard of, and some agenda we weren't *meant* to hear of. They'd recruited us
from anywhere they could find... universities, colleges, trade shows...
anywhere with at least a *semblance* of respectability and talent to it.
The Foundation obviously had no idea where to get the REAL talent from.
Good thing too. Otherwise, I'd have NEVER gotten ANYTHING.

     They took us WAY back to the beginning - they paid for the surgery for
our plugs, they trained us in the use of just about EVERY single piece of
interface technology that existed; neuroplugs, 'trodes, gloves and
bodysuits, even *keyboards* (nobody used a mouse, we all still had *some*
pride...). We learnt the equipment, we used the equipment...
     Yeah, we kept the equipment.
     Moral, yes. Stupid, no.

     We were supposed to do this the University way - they'd teach us the
basics, even when it had no practical value whatsoever on the streets or in
the "Real" World. Two years of hardware, three years of software, mixed in
with a year of basic biology, cerebral anatomy and neurology; all crammed
into four years. We were meant to be the be-all and end-all of
cybercomputing, allround cyberheroes, trained to go out into the "field",
deal with ANY problem at all.

     Then we found out they were government backed. They wanted us to invade
Bulgaria's Nets.
     Bulgaria. Ills, that is. Ice pools. Virus stars.
     Bigger cesspools I have not seen outside a politician's office. Or my
ex-'s head, even. Hey, even *I* have more scruples than that.
     Ice is ice, sure. It's passive, it's active, it's dangerous, it's
totally lethal...
     But this was the first time we'd EVER seen ice that could kill you
while you were *unjacked*.

     Don't be surprised - NO-ONE'S ever heard of this stuff. It's stuff
they're still developing in Bulgaria - or WERE, until every major government
and corporation (and I mean MAJOR) decided to step in and "confiscate and
destroy this material for the public good".
     Which means everyone jacked in who likes to let your glove-fingers do
the walking had better watch out in a couple of years.

     Everyone knows how ice works - instructions order informational signal
currents shunted along the bus to the little wires leading into the deepest,
darkest regions of your skull. Trick the cyberdecks and computers into
feeding too *much* current into those wires - and you can kiss Kimba the
White Cerebellum's sweet little ass goodbye. Or you can have a computer
politlely ask your brain's autonomic system to send your lungs on a five
minute holiday, or explain the joys of complete rest to your heartbeat.
     But some bright spark (ha ha) had been listening to governments for too
long.
     You know how they decided nuclear war WAS acceptable when they came up
with the idea of "surgical strikes"? How you could nuke *just* a big
building instead of a small country?
     They figured out how to do it with the brain.
     Electrocute SMALL bits of the brain, not just the whole thing. That way
it's MUCH more fun.
     Pick a neuro-cerebral defect - want to simulate a stroke? Just jab a 5A
current into the grey matter - instant lesion in the tender parts of the
brain. How about cortical blindness or deafness? Aint NO cyber-ear or -eye's
gonna fix THAT one. Not when the glow-in-the-dark visual or aural centres of
your brain are responsible for the twinkle in your eye.
     My good man Bish Martin had the language centres of his brain shot to
electronic hell. Now he's running for local elections. Two guys both had
their hemispheres reached out and touched. The result was what the psych-
neurologists called "hemifield neglect" - they think everything's completely
alright, but their brains couldn't see anything on their right hand side. No
blank spot, they just don't even realise they're missing something.
     I TOLD them not to cross the street without us.


     Enough with the ancient history. The way we got out of that mess is
another story. I'll save it for another rainy day.
     The result was me - walking down the street, looking for a place to
move in to (I've got my computer and all my stuff waiting to move in),
refused another job at a corp because I couldn't produce a card telling them
where I'd been working for the last six years. I decided I'd only apply for
the corps that had SOME morals. The last one had some morals - so they
wanted to know what I'd been doing in those six years. And I'm REALLY gonna
go back to the Foundation and ask for references.
     Isn't THAT a funny one? A guy with morals and a sense of conscience
trying to stay afloat in a world like this.
     Maybe I should go freelance again? I can walk Nets pretty decently. I
can write some utilities. I've written ice, I've cracked ice. I can upgrade
my own deck. As a matter of fact, I have. Several times.
     But that's not what corps are looking for. They have their own highly
paid staff for that, don't they?

     And so I found myself walking down the street - Black boots, grey jeans
and a green jacket that still managed to keep me warm on a windy day (AND
hide my slimline deck). I'd heard that looking mean was the best way to get
yourself trashed in the street by Krome Krazies(tm), or someone so high you
could ask them about global weather patterns. Just look like you were
innocent, and even the Full Metal Jackets (and Legs, Chests, Arms and
Brains) would think you were more dangerous than a rogue aerobics instructor
on Speed.
     And when you're only five foot ten with dark brown hair that looked
like a mop in the wind or the rain, draped over a pair of auto-polarising
shades, how threatening can you look?
     Hey, if they want to think I'm dangerous, that's *their* business. Not
that they know about the hardware I have wired into my jacket.
     Unthreatening, yes. Stupid, no.

     The crowded buildings managed to hide most of the street from the rain
coming out of the dull-grey clouds in the dull-grey sky. People weren't in
evidence in the street. The smells of gas-, kero- or ethyl-based engines
were dredging a headache up from the uncharted territories somewhere near my
parietal lobe. The sounds of the street weren't getting into my head - I was
too busy trying to find some place to get out of the drops that WERE coming
down.
     And then I saw it.
     Someone like me, who grew up hearing about the great legends in the
History of Computing and Cyberspace couldn't have gotten by without hearing
of this place. Amazing deals had been made here... some of the most lethal
tricks of the trade had come here. Compared to THIS lot, I was the new
amateur.
     God, I hate that feeling.
     And so, exhibiting the masochistic part of my personality, I walked in.

     The sudden darkness, compared to the outside left me blinded and
confused for a moment. All I could see was the pale afterimage of the neon
sign outside the door, floating in front of me, failing to block the sounds
of some kind of music pumped through darkness-hidden speakers. The insistent
bass drum beat was regularly punctuating the aggregate hum of a dozen low-
toned conversations, and the smells of half a dozen kinds of types of food
and drink were competing with the trace elements of another half-dozen kinds
of monomers, polymers, enhancers and any number of rejects from the test
tubes of an organic chemist's labs.

     I took a seat at the bar, careful not to disturb the patrons already
there. I ordered a drink from the big guy with the big belly and the claw-
tipped plastic prostharm (old Russian model, the professional in me noted.
And I knew a bit about those Russian models too - "chyertovskaya dyela", I
think the Russian development engineers now called it. Force feedback,
otherwise he'd be crushing the glasses, I figured).
     And I waited for the pale green neon afterimage of the letters "C",
"H", "A", "T", "S", "U", "B" and "O" to fade away and quit burning my
corneas so I could get a better look at the barhugggers here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   Anybody who wants to use Troff (speaking in a literary sense, thanks) -go
ahead, my pleasure. I'm sitting in a bar in a city I've never been in
before, I could use a friend. Just:
     a) mail me first;
     b) don't kill me, I have plans.
     c)Rmdentify yourself as a friend before you shake my hand or touch my
jacket (I'll explain later).
     d) if Li, Ski, Tarren or any of the First Breed are out
there, how about coming back? Let's see what's new. Perhaps
one of you would kindly consent to showing me around the Chat?