Docksiders
Helen began lecturing at Generika U, in their brand new shiny Gender Faculty. She was well liked by her students and the apartment was frequently full of youngsters, hanging on to Helen’s every word.
Sam and Veto were keeping an eye on their friends’ data. Cyberspace, meanwhile, had become everybody’s playground. Three dimensional solidity sent artists, architects and so on wild. It was damn near impossible to tell the difference between a game and a military battle and both of those things were taking place in there, out there, at any given moment. Technology had managed to reproduce the world with an accuracy that frightened some people and reassured others. Instead of talking about moving to outer space, people made real plans to move into cyberspace. The entire cryogenics industry failed almost overnight.
It became increasingly unpopular to speak out against the shift into cyberspace, but there was a hardcore and vocal core protesting it – the same breed who’d camped out at Greenham Common, who’d crewed the Sea Shepherd, who yelled peace at warmongers and later, picketed Coldplay concerts and Oxfam shops with placards reading, “Not in my name!” It was the sector that didn’t believe in any kind of control or colonisation, of anything, by anyone. It wasn’t a fashionable stance, this movement against the controlling whole of society and back to the individual, to smaller communities. Scar watched it with great interest and decided it was very probably doomed to fail.
The world’s major cities went online en masse and it became impossible to do certain things, talk to certain people, get all kinds of stuff done, unless you went online. People still lived out there, far from cities, with no net access at all, but nobody cared about their opinions, the media didn’t represent them any more than their governments did. Another passionate movement sprang up, one dedicated to getting everyone, everywhere online. Equal Tech for all, was their catchphrase. Scar had a feeling they would fail too, that there would always be outsiders, by circumstance or choice. The Not-in-My-Namers protested them too, dubbing them the Neo-Oxfammers.
Technology rolled on like a Katamari game, picking up everything it could as it rolled through society. It was easy to get people to conform and go online. Online had always been fun, far beyond its usefulness. Having recreated a huge chunk of itself online, of course society needed its needs met offline in the meantime. If they’d made the choice to morph completely, they needed their bodies wound down correctly while every other aspect of them uploaded. Medical staff made a fortune out of that.
Restaurants began to go bust as their clientele oozed off smoothly and stylishly into cyberspace. The pressure on transport decreased … you get the picture; everything changed.
Schrodinger’s Computer
Then the Not-in-My-Namers started blowing up power stations. It was a massively successful form of resistance, because even though online data didn’t seem to have been affected or lost, the notion of a permanent blackout terrified the technophiles. Global screenfeeds played interviews with those online “survivors” after the power cuts and philosophical debates around Schrodinger’s Cat were hauled out of universities and aired once again.
Scar, with her port completely healed over and offline since her trip to Japan, watched all of it with growing consternation. Her own choice was very simple; shift permanently into cyberspace, or remain perfectly offline. By then, Sam and Veto spent most of their time online, with enough offline systems in place to facilitate that without destroying them offline. Tokyo didn’t experience power outages, their tech all seemed invincible, indestructible.
Helen’s lectures went completely online, her class huge and global; student visitors to the loft tailed off gradually and then stopped altogether.
Down at Graff, the Jesus Lizard was still king, one of the few street artists who hadn’t made the jump into spraying cyberspace instead. Scar started hanging out there again, spraying sigils and eights, getting to know the subculture again. “Not in my name” became a ubiquitous tag; artists getting that up on billboards and walls using paint and light, geeks joining in to create locative art, jamming frequencies so that you’d see their work on almost any feed they hacked.
Power outages became routine in Generika – if you were online when the juice went off, you stayed online until it came back on again. The whole thing just replaced earlier commuter transport problems, had anything really changed? When Helen got stuck online, Scar would hover anxiously, checking her hydration, her bodily functions, monitoring readouts like a nurse. You sort of expected things to malfunction in Africa though, but when they blacked out New York for an entire day, the world paid more attention.
Nothing had freaked out America quite so much since 9/11 and even though it didn’t dominate world economy and media as much as Japan and China did, America still loomed large on global horizons. People began to panic.
Give the Consumers What They Want
Drug companies survived the shift just fine, by synthesising new products to support bodies while minds were online, to increase alertness – you name it, they made something to fix it or improve it. Supposedly. Psychiatry journals reported a sharp increase in Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder – Scar presumed society was merely suffering collective netsplit. Stress levels exploded as people handled entire lives on and offline.
At first, outcasts had escaped online and felt free. As the one plane echoed the other more and more, it didn’t feel quite as free any longer. Replication seemed complete – society had constructed a giant virus.
The Neo-Oxfammers kept connecting rural communities, the Not-in-My-Namers kept blowing things up. They also campaigned online, trying to lure people offline again. Despite the extremes, there seemed to be enough money somehow, to ensure that both “worlds” were sustained.
You Can’t Save the World
Seti didn’t work offline at all anymore. She coded and cloned genderno figures, animating them and unleashing them into cyberspace to attempt to make their presence felt amidst the rest of the line noise. It backfired badly. Cyberspace was only limited to the technology behind it and while an eventual crash seemed as inevitable as the sun’s implosion, everyone felt they probably had five billion years left and nobody worried very much at all. Seti’s creatures just got lost in it all, ignored or deleted by anyone who didn’t like them.
The city streets had grown quieter with the shift and then began to fill again as outliers drifted in to fill the gaps left by the migration.
Samanth0r: they’re dying
Helen: who?
Samanth0r: migrants. anyone in cyberspace without paid space or their own server, they’re letting them fade
Helen: who is??
Samanth0r: corporates man, who else?
Helen: so no money, no sponsorship, no immortality?
Samanth0r: exactleh.
Helen: how’d you know?
Samanth0r: check out insecure, it’s growing. gotta flip, but we’ll talk soon
Scar and Helen sat in front of the good old fashioned, flatscreen, one dimensional web that night and logged on to insecure.org; what they read wasn’t reassuring in the slightest. There were lists as long as military fatalities records there and an example of how onliners were fading back into raw data. Helen got to work on filtering the list, trying to spot trends and it didn’t take her long to pinpoint a particularly disturbing one. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she muttered and Scar looked over her shoulder at the spreadsheet. “Shit!” she agreed. “Whether this is a disease,” said Helen, “or whether it’s something contrived, this pattern’s terrifying.”
The list consisted of:
• people with criminal records
• people under a certain income level
• people with registered psychiatric problems
• transgenders
• intersexed people
• queers
“Freaking out will not help,” said Helen, as Scar hit the roof, “we have to talk to Sam again, we have to work this out.” Scar could only agree with her, but she felt as if her brain was trying to claw its way out of her skull. Helen uploaded her spreadsheet to insecure – responses were rapid and angry. Other people had analysed the stats with slightly different results, but only slightly. Whichever angle you looked from, the consequences were dire.
Hackers were working on recovering data, restoring the deleted souls, but of course, there was no chance of getting anybody back out of cyberspace once they’d made a complete shift from their body. You can’t, as they say, get toothpaste back into the tube.
The Following Actions Make Boring Television
Helen: you looked at insecure lately?
Samanth0r: yup 
Helen: any ideas?
Samanth0r: sent the info round like a virus, what else can we do?
Helen: can you guys code any protection against whatever it is?
Samanth0r: it’s not a virus, it’s the environment – it’s hard to explain. insecure d00ds trying to code safe space, but everything keeps shifting, it’s just … putting out fires, you know? fact is, nothing’s the same anymore
Helen: no solution then?!?!
Samanth0r: *shrug* ppl have to start looking after themselves hey. all we can do really is spread the info.
Helen: ok …
Human rights organizations picked up on the info pretty quickly and little pockets of outrage appeared. It’d be nice to imagine a global outcry, but let’s be honest, on the whole, people are busy surviving and the same old people always make a fuss, get involved.
And the more things change, the more they stay the same, thought Scar – but what can you do? You just have to keep trying anyway.
Charmageddon got a whole lot livelier again, the online threat drawing the community together offline. Scar found herself there more than usual too, talking and listening. The Queer Control panel got a whole new lease of life too, doing whatever it could to keep its members safe.
Aluta Continua
If you’re finding it hard to believe that everything so far happened in less than a year, just think about how fast your emails fly around and how often you see new cellphone models appear. Technology’s insanely fast; human beings – not so much.
Samanth0r: there’s a way, for some at least – Generika for one
Helen: tell!
Samanth0r: same answer lol, the TECH!
Helen: the tech?
Samanth0r: the tech. if enough of generika’s net base is still queer owned …
Helen: genius!
Samanth0r: everybody just got soft yo, forgot how to fight
Helen: it’s be *so* good to be allowed to forget!
Samanth0r: yeh … ppl are fuckwits tho.
The revolution was not televised. It wasn’t even a complete solution, but some well placed communications to the right people, in the right places, did at least ensure the withdrawal of whatever Generika’s unstated participation in the online genocide was, as well as boosting the stream of refugees to the city.
I’m starting to loathe this “novel” completely – not only does most of it seem unbelievable to me when I read it back, not to mention unbelievably badly written, but I just can’t seem to find a big enough happy ending. I don’t even know what the hell the end should be. “And they all kept processing oxygen ever after.” I’m vaguely back on target for the NaNo thing, but I am ready to chuck in the towel.
One of the casualties of the genocide, was Seti, who’d migrated online early, sent forth her genderno people and then quickly vanished without very many people noticing at all. The image of her and that of her genderno had become interchangeable already. Scar sometimes wondered if anyone else at all but her missed Seti the human being. She’d have been pleased with how her art lived on though. Even with some people deleting the figures as if they were a virus or a screensaver they’d fallen out of love with, that image had become iconic and hopefully somebody would always remember who started it all.
“Write it down, Scar,” said Ginger, “just write it all down.”
Nevada had repealed the Queer Marriage Act, yet again and Sam and Veto had lost faith in America entirely. Scar and Helen assumed they’d get married in Japan, but they were in for a good surprise – Sam was coming home to get married. She and Veto were still heroes in Generika – and South Africa, having renewed Mandela’s constitution, was once again the dichotomous place where you could very well end up murdered for being queer, but where the murder was at least illegal.
A magistrate would do the legal rites, then they and a few hundred close personal friends and no doubt some media too, would head out to the old naval base to celebrate on a grounded warship. “Only those two,” said Scar, shaking her head and Helen grinned, “Of course – they need a weapons-grade wedding!”
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