On a computer, a BIOS is a Basic Input-Output System. All four of us virtually met on a computer bulletin board for writers called Powderkeg. Later, we met face-to-face and became friends.

Early one cold Toronto winter morning outside the Seven West cafe, we decided to try to describe or translate (in a literary form) what it feels like to communicate by computer. As part of this project, we set up a temporary bulletin board system on the fourth floor of the corporate headquarters of IBM Canada. We used IBM computers, IBM modems and IBM phone lines. All of us could call in at any time of the day or night and read or write in total privacy.

Our use of IBM equipment was cheerful, harmless, and completely unauthorized. And in the fine tradition of hackers everywhere -- we got away with it.

Trying to duplicate electronic communication with spoken words is like writing a song about a waterfall. We talked and typed and tried different techniques. In the end, most of what we kept was written online.

Between The Lines

It's the bit path that I see spreading across the horizon; it streams past the limitation of my eyes to cope, but the pressure of the neuron to scream down that road is backed up in my head. This is frustration: A heuristic network manifesting sentience and lateral processing, using the piled limitations of FONE CABLE to push the thought in... MAN. Language is the encryption; it's the between the lines meaning that creates the manifestation of communication in the bounds of THESE limits. Fuck. I am forced to lose the precision and beauty of the thought by encasing it in the language that is inturn striped of context... all so someone I probably don't even care about can *maybe* understand some way-gone metaphor that mixes stainless syringes with fast cars.

There's this magic between the lines; there's something about sitting on the border somewhere between Seattle and Toronto, between the lines, literally hinging the hope of communication on how effectively some phraseology imparts meaning between the lines... as in between the words between the minds; on the screen, on a scream; if it were, the sound would be hollow -- the virtual representation of what a sound may be -- what it may look like, in words, in pixels, in my mind. In this space.

This, now, is the manifest of the madness of the hope; the reach beyond the physical grasp of space, running THIS now, effecting the chain LATER, effecting the history of the present in an endless chain of global updates on the net, caught and casting. All in the name of the RUSH. Nobody is more elegant, nobody is faster -- the squealers and the pigs and the people at the telcoms... what can they do to a real runner, a player of NOW -- as in pieces excising the past and future for a revolution of the present supported by the infinitive; what may be, really when it comes down to the wire. As it always seems to. What the fuck may BE the limit of the possibility?

B.C.J.O

Quoting Brian in message number 1:
>>There's this magic between the lines; there's something about sitting on the border somewhere between Seattle and Toronto, between the lines, literally hinging the hope of communication on how effectively some phraseology imparts meaning between the lines... as in between the words between the minds; on the screen, on a scream; if it were, the sound would be hollow -- the virtual representation of what a sound may be -- what it may look like, in words, in pixels, in my mind. In this space.

Yeah. There's too much emphasis on the technology. Way too much. The ones who do lose at its hands burn blenders at the rate of three a life -- watch 12:00 o'clock flash on their VCRs until retinal burn forces tech on them as a psychological mark. Fiber-optics *can* be spun in a web tighter than spandex over cellulite. You can create micro-processors with more computing power than a thousand human brains and fit that micro-everything on the head of a pin. But that's not the deal. Not to me.

To understand the process is vital. To ignore it though leaves technology more vacant than a three tone man in a two tone mall -- it'll just stare at reality like reality is some kind of freak. It won't have reality to engage. Not without flesh and blood to do the engaging. That's the crux of the issue. That's what draws me in and makes me hard. You wrote of magic kindling in the space between Toronto and Seattle. Man, I've walked that path. Live-chatted with GADUNCAN@HALYCON.COM. Typing the 3000 miles back and forth. Instant connection between our finger tips. T.V. on in the background... Blue Jays@Mariners.Seattle. Fergie Jenkins 3000 miles away speaking Torontonian over a satellite, while Geoff and I argue the merits of uuencoding vs binhexing Mac binaries.

That's the magic. The poetry is our realisation that what we are doing is near as magic ever was to reality even 20 years ago. It lacks the random ambiguity of the spoken word: "sinovertan" -- what's that? Orally it's a slur of syllables which can be heard uniquely by an audience. Written on the screen it means one thing.

The poetry and magic of that pathway -- the four dimensional conversa- tion... THAT occurs in the minds of the author and the reader. Ambiguity can be spelled out -- carved out of grammatical symbols -- made to direct the reader: Sinovertan? -- Cinematan? -- Sinoberon? It's creative anarchy. There aren't enough rules to bind impulse yet. Probably never will be. The technology will always be there. Keenly unaware of reality. Reality is imposed on its keenness by me, you, Fergie... human flesh. Not silicon.

...Ian

Quoting Brian in message number 1:
> sitting on the border
> somewhere between Seattle and Toronto,
> between the lines,

There are no border guards here. No borders, no lines on a map, no rest stops, and damn few safety nets; this Internet is still a high wire performance. Not for the faint of heart. Or for cowards, too afraid to risk *appearing* fools.

Quoting Ian in message number 2:
> That's the magic.
> The poetry is our realisation
> that what we are doing is
> near as magic ever was to reality
> even 20 years ago.

I think of Arthur C. Clarke's idea: any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think of satellites, a Model T, the whisker of a cat on a young boy's crystal set...

That's where we still are, now; whispering close in the holy dark and looking everywhere with the wide eyes of novices. Like philosopher's apprentices turned loose in the master's lab; foolish enough to be playful, wise enough to risk getting burned. Or, should those be reversed...?

Quoting Ian in message number 2:
> The technology will always be there.
> Keenly unaware of reality.

Better to know it and learn to use it, than have it used on us like some blissfully ignorant lab rat. I'd rather be my own social experiment!!

Quoting Ian in message number 2:
> ... human flesh.
> Not silicon.

And let it have a human face. Seattle was trees, Nirvana, grunge, National Geographic articles, an old World's Fair medallion in a dusty drawer before. Last Monday night, we were *there*, making a machine in Seattle do what *we* told it to do. How many times have machines in other places fed you what *they* thought you wanted -- shoved that newspaper spoon down your throat? This is the menu for a much more naked lunch. Raw, unfiltered, high-fibre data. Pablum won't ever taste the same.

I live for the noise of the net. Amidst the electric hum of cold machinery, I hear a chorus of thousands of human voices and I can imagine thousands more human ears listening to the songs of Information and Communication. It's a paradox of the highest order. We break down the human soul to it's essence by piping it through silicon and fibre-optic cable. Here in the circus of circuitry, we can cut through the Meat (as William Gibson called it), through the physicality of gender, of race, of heritage, of class, of all the standards and barriers thrown up by society and it's media. We burn it all.

You are a voice. And the only thing that makes you real and tangible on the net are your words. We are all virtual beings clothed in the garments of our words. And our population abounds with all sorts: The Pure (whose words match the contours of his soul), the Wolf in Sheep's clothing, the Wizard of Oz, and even the Emperor and his new clothes. We have become our own tailor, our own seamstress, our own fashion consultant. And sometimes through thick or thin, like some overweight patron in a clothing store who insists she's still a size 5, we will force ourselves into the garments of our words.

The pogrom of the moment is the taste, gents. And whether the silicon tells you to wipe your ass or just makes it easer to cook a hotdog is irrelevant. The magic, now, is as it ever was; the predisposition of the organic elements to arrange and rearrange the inorganic elements in physicality, in space, in redefinition of reality all for the laughter of some intangible, some weirdness, some freak of nature, some mind. Magic isn't the meat directing the gee whiz of the machine; that's just child zooming the nursery floor with a-b-c building blocks -- that HE builds a gilded city, is just as real and the relative nature of these things is perhaps Ironic, but that too is the circular manifestation of Magic, of now, of the mind. These shreds of evidence that coalesce in micro-circuitry and building blocks and cartoons add to the trunk full of humanity; the toys of the mind, that is the genetic thread. It is the morality of calling the bluff of the con on death row with a pixel burst. The numerical impossibility of the human touch of morality. It's fucked in that there is no wonder in the action, only in the redefinition of imagination with the triumph of creation; every new fantasy redundant with the onset of the reality. The need to dream the big dream, the need to aspire to greatness, to write history -- man, THIS is the noble heart, the tender heart. That it is ruthless is the foundation of it's beauty.

When I see Seattle blow out the virtual horizon and I say: MAN! The fucking bus is TOO narrow, I don't care that we could make the processor swallow an inroad 64 bits wide; It doesn't matter. We are moulding the interaction of the intangibles of abstraction in circuitry that pumps electricity through the bus, allows me to watch as it pulls the switch and plunges the whole eastern sea-board into darkness. The sundevil guys, and the telcom guys, and the FBI guys, man they were all as potent as Fry-guys, and about as pretty to watch. They got the jitterbug blues down to a science at least. That they are chasing ME is the problem, that they would want to pipe their program down my throat and harness MY cpu. What do you think they would say if I told them about the numerical improbability of morality, of ethics and justice? What do you think they would say if I made them suck the barrel of my gun b4 I unloaded it into their throats? THAT is justice; ironic to be sure but much more colourful than failure.

And it's not the point anyway. Magic is the runner beyond the paradigm of light and dark, of the definition of what THEY want for the games of the toads and the stoolies. That I deny them the right to weave my fabric is a serious thorn in the side of people who dig the illusion of absolute control; I wrote their data-bases, and designed their circuitry; the monarch wants the palace architect put to death. We are young, and we know time. This is the problem. Fuck it. I'm sick of the shit, of the problems. I'm going to lobotomize myself. Come and get me when the machine finally wakes.

bRIAN

I'm not sure if it's an uncovering, or a building up. It happens in layers anyway, this process of knowing the human soul that throws levers and switches on the other side of the big machine. And it's done with words, like a kitchen knife sometimes: it pares away at the skin of an apple leaving the flesh exposed, then further on until only the core is left. Other times, words are like mortar and stone, solidifying the edifice of personality; and these structures often touch the sky.

(I wrote a poem about her name a long time ago. Something about the gentle breezes of infatuation.)

Eventually, I built her up from each word, like bricks, that appeared on the dusty black of a cathode ray display. She was a pillar in my mind. She stood among the people I knew and they were pillars as well. But hers grew slowly and I celebrated laying each brick down as the passage of time gave me more words to build her by. But I was impatient. Sometimes, in my eagerness, I'd fill her spaces with bricks I'd given myself, only to have to painfully tear them down later. She'd have none of that.

We travelled in disjoint time. Not linear at all. Long pauses apart caught her in a stasis, like a flashbulb captures a moving object in the dark and imprints it's image and location on the observer's eyes. But like every journey, we lost each other in the bandwidth, the noise of the networks, as other constructions happened around us.

I never did get to meet her.

Much later, when I wandered among the structures I'd put up in my mind, I noticed hers was the only one left unpainted.

Quoting Brian in message number 5:
>>...that He builds a gilded city, is just as real and the relative nature of these things is perhaps ironic.

Ironic? Yes. Tenuous? More so. As I see it, the reality of virtual information is in its inherent pre-defined condition -- virtuality.

See, you can build a gilded city... you can "modem love" with androgenous pixels straight to orgasm; but that orgasm will remain virtual if no one but you hears the pitter patter in the toilet bowl. It could be a dream. It is without an audience. But the semen in the bowl exists. You flush it -- hit send on your mailer -- and it's gone. Out from your plane -- out into the hidden plumbing system of copper pipes hinged together with lumpy soldering lead. Out through the network of phone lines and satellite uplinks to whatever virtual source is the destined receiver.

But what happens when Ma, Ma Bell busts through the door? Sees the cream on your hand? Virtual becomes tangible and you're caught red faced, white handed, your genetically coded dreams drifting on the stream toward the land bound cesspool called silicon lake.

And what happens if Ma Bell snips the cord? That one strand of fibre optic, too thin to rationalise? Your words will arc off -- lost -- forgotten. Unobservable save for electro-chemical interactions below binary logic? Absurdity! You'll be left -- throbbing head in hand -- not even the mailer daemon will have the power to bounce your words back to existence.

Quoting Patrick in message number 3:
> This is the menu for a much more naked lunch. Raw, unfiltered,
> high fibre data. Pablum won't ever taste the same.

Yeah, that's why I want to mainline straight from the source -- be a cerebral node on the information net. I don't want a waiter handling my info-food... takes too long. I want to lie with my brain open underneath the binary Slurpee. Jack in? Fuck it! I want to feel the pulse of a billion bits on my human heart, an infinite bus pumping input-output signals through me -- a techno pulse for a human mind. It's not a question of control so much as my quest to fulfil desire. Wanna be god? Get on the net. Heaven -- the tangible -- is the so called virtual space. More real than any other adulated idol -- cause it's not. It's a parallel to everything real: sentient and physical. It emulates it creators -- emancipates its flock.

...Ian

The whisker of a cat, delicately stepping across a crystal. Searching for other voices in the lonely human dark.

The voices are in my screen. They speak silence; no expressions, no tones. I cannot see their faces or look into their eyes. But they speak to me. I can reply.

It's safe, here; you can't throw a punch or pull a gun. And the safety of the net opens to everyone, the freedom to be who they are. As fully anonymous -- or as fully public -- as they wish.

We can only know each other by our words. The writer's heaven. and Hell.

Question: How can some silicon (a lump of fused sand), bits of glass and wire express the red beating warmth of the human heart?

Answer: We are dust, but your words are painted in light across my screen.

In the light of your words, I will carry on

shining

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