>From: dmr@roadkill.Stanford.EDU (Daniel M. Rosenberg)
Subject: [ Untitled ]
Date: 17 Oct 91 00:04:54 GMT


[ No title, first draft. ]

	It was late on a Tuesday afternoon in the autumn when the ceiling
tile above Hisp's desk moved, and everything that had gathered up over
the previous years in his life manifested itself as sudden change.

	The upper middle class considered Suburban Maryland to be one of the
less desirable places to live and work in the Sprawl by the people
in Hisp's office. The zinc sky was just a bit more diffuse and
featureless, the public "parks" a bit more lifeless. The plazas were
demilitarized zones between malls and office jungles, with no comfortable place
to sit, paved in dimensions too huge and bleak for a casual stroll.
	Hisp was middling management -- a regional sales supervisor for
the research products group of a multinational known (this week) as
Hoescht-Beckman.  He lived alone, and worked in an office demarked by three
five foot high pressed-wood partitions despite his place in the corporate
hierarchy. He came home from work around 9 each night to fall dead asleep
on the mattress in his two room apartment set back a few feet from the
old county road, lulled to a seemingly dreamless sleep by the muted
passing of aircars.

	One mustn't think Hisp's life was featureless. Especially not for
an early twenty-first century American sarariman. He did, however,
consciously avoid the garish pleasures of the simstims and most
recreational pharms. Such entertainment was once scorned by people of
his socioeconomic standing, but eventually accepted over the course of a
decade, perhaps for lack of anything to do -- or perhaps because people were
having a harder time fingering out better things to do.

	Hisp spent much of his day jacked in, traveling through cyberspace to
manipulate and evaluate specs, to summon up models, to sculpt data. To his
officemates, he was a bright blue dot, moving back and forth from one
virtual file cabinet to the next between short jaunts to manufacturers,
customers, and researchers. The atmosphere was festive, moving among the
spritely Chinese lanterns of his co-workers.

	To an extent, Hisp lived through his work, fulfilling his
appetites by gorging on sales calls, spec sheets, and group meetings.
One could become passionate about one's work, given the proper context.
	His embrace of his work led to Hisp's rapid promotion up the ranks,
and a significant amount of indulgently lazy bitching among the other people
in the office who had the time to think about such things.
	Office politics didn't concern Hisp, and, in this respect, he was
about as close to an innocent as could be found in a multinational, the Sprawl,
or anywhere.

					*

	"Morning, Hisp."
	"Morning, Margaret."
	Margaret disappeared. (Or her pruple sprite blinked to elsewhere.)

	Margaret Tse was the eldest child of wealthy parents -- bright,
attractive, sociable, and rather intensely neurotic. She spent three hours
each morning getting dressed, trying on and discarding clothes. An hour of
that was in or around the shower -- fifteen minutes of adjusting the water,
and forty-five minutes of second-guessing whether or not she had remembered
the second iteration of shampooing. She worked in the next cubicle over.

	Margaret reappeared.
	"Umm, Hisp, I was wondering if you had gotten around to calling
the ARES-Tacoma people back yesterday."
	Margaret annoyed Hisp by calling him only by his last name, and
including him in her schedule of things to repetitively double-check.
But Hisp liked her.
	"Hisp?"
	Hisp annoyed Margaret by pretending not to hear her whenever she said
something he didn't feel like responding to. But, she liked /him/.
	"Nng, hmm? Oh, umm, I believe I did."
	Hisp blinked twice. Margaret momentarily flattened her construct
in return.

They continued the morning's work in silence until the noon lunchtime jack-out,
when Margaret left to double-check her the locks on her aircar and Hisp
needlessly plowed through some paper requisitions. Hisp zoned out.
One part of him continued to do work on its own, crook the phone between
his shoulder and jaw, smile back at Margaret when she came back and
turned around in her chair with her phone tucked cutely under her cocked head...
the other part of him left, went upward, then forward, over Margaret's
cublicle, left at the men's room, over the top of the fire escape and out
over the streets, over the beach, over the darkening bay.

					*

	Little Wing was a kid who got his name from a mother far too
involved with adult contemporary radio when she was growing up in the
slums of the Sprawl. He was a wannabe street samurai, and a runt. This was
Monday. He knew tomorrow was Tuesday.


[ Comments welcome. ]

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From amethyst!noao!asuvax!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!stanford.edu!Csli!roadkill!dmr Thu Oct 17 16:38:34 MST 1991
Article 644 of alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo:
Path: amethyst!noao!asuvax!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!stanford.edu!Csli!roadkill!dmr
>From: dmr@roadkill.Stanford.EDU (Daniel M. Rosenberg)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
Subject: [ Untitled, pt. 2 ]
Message-ID: <1991Oct17.225729.930@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 17 Oct 91 22:57:29 GMT
Sender: news@Csli.Stanford.EDU (CSLI News Service)
Organization: The Very Large Software Company of America
Lines: 96


[ Part 2, (not yet titled) ]

	The difference between cyber-reality and meat-reality was
the consequences of thought. When Hisp thought "Check Dynaflow spec-sheet
for mass spectrometer equipment," it happened in cyberspace; but when
he forgot he was in the "real" world, he would find himself staring at a
computer screen or file drawer and wonder why the information didn't
up and zoom out at him.
	Cyberspace didn't look at all like meat-reality. Cyberspace was
blackness punctuated by colored points and forms of light. Meat-reality
was an endless indecision of flowing forms and melting edges.
Cyberspace responded where meat-reality ignored you. So why, Hisp thought,
was he confusing the two?

				*

	Little Wing was a militarized street urchin looking for an in.
He'd stolen his deck (a specimen of Ono-Sendai, with some added
markings) from his mother's boyfriend, who had gotten it himself under
even more suspicious circumstances, involving -- he was told -- gang wars,
prison, and revenge killings. Wing worked out of the Reston YMCA,
looking for work. He wasn't very good at the game yet, so
the otherwise unattractive tapered-'H' of Hoescht-Beckman was the
relative opportunity of a lifetime for him, considering.
	H-B was looking to get rid of its file cabinets, judging by the
preloading of the expanded cyberspace software that was loaded but
not active in their local node. The new stuff was supposed to flesh out
cyberspace to be more than barely functional darkness punctuated by
light. Even this late in the game, most companies relied on some extent
on paper and Post-Its. The expansions were supposed to move the homeyness
into the electronic realm, but apparently the point was lost on the designers.
The stuff was often left functional but uninstalled.

	Some corporate MIS guy had left the factory passwords on the
entry hooks of the thing, probably thinking there was no harm in
leaving the new programs unprotected given that
they weren't connected to anything else yet. Default passwords, however,
were common street-knowledge.
	Little Wing jacked in, and headed toward the battleship gray H,
registered himself as a software tech, and raised a pinging, glowing rectangle
that demanded authorization, and included the usual threats beneath the
login fields.
	Wing entered a string of sixty-four zeroes, and convulsed with
glee when he "heard" the affirmative bell chime. He found himself staring
down from a decidedly non-virtual ceiling grid onto the bald spot of
a jacked-in white sarariman.

					*

  	Hisp drifted. The bridge over the bay shone in the moonlight. Or
darkling evening sun dropping through the haze. It didn't matter. The
perspective turned and swung up, then lurched sharply and steadied to a
straight heading. An inventory count he'd been in the middle of buzzed
in the background, but Hisp, accustomed to constant work, didn't notice
the absurd daydream. It was totally in the present -- it just /was/. He
didn't have to worry here; worrying had no meaning in this context.
	A sailboat skimmed the water below. Hisp ignored it. A gull wheeled
toward the shore. He ignored it. Water sprayed upwards. Hisp enjoyed it,
but paid it no real attention. He noticed there were no buildings on the bay --
an obvious observation, but striking nonetheless compared to the claustrophobic
packed-in architecture of the Sprawl, where concrete gave way to tarmac,
and steel yielded only to more steel with a few inches in between along
the entire seaboard. Gypsum and indoor paint and sheetrock provided the
vistas for the workers and dwellers of the Sprawl. The sunlight shone through
tinted windowwalls, the breezes came from vents.
	But no one had figured out how to suffocate the water.
Not yet. Hisp liked it.

					*

	Margaret glanced over at the jacked-in figure in
the chair. Accustomed to seeing Hisp's movements jerky and involved
white at work, she started, then smiled at his uncharacteristic serenity.
What was that devil up to in there? And what was with the gypsum
all over his hair?

					*

	"This is N-S-F-E Radio 5, Baltimore. Traffic brought to
you by RST Security, manufacturers of the most powerful deterrent home
protection devices allowable by law. Sal, you out there?"
	"Good evening, Rick. Westbound seven has a radio pylon down near
ground 95, BAMA cops suggest you avoid the whole area. Usual congestion
otherwise, especially the sea corridor. Of course."
	"Of course, Sal."
	"But the bay sure is pretty tonight, eh Rick?"
	"Hoo boy, Sal, you know you aren't supposed to be buzzing
those sailboats.  Next traffic at 2030, stay tuned, we got some
Christian Death here for ya."

[ Comments welcome. Lo, any acknowledgement, actually. ]

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