EPISODES OMNI 1, OMNI 2, AND DIVE CONTAIN MATURE CONTENT! IN PARTICULAR, FRANK DISCUSSIONS AND DEPICTIONS OF THE POSSIBILITIES OF CYBERNETICALLY ENHANCED SEXUALITY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
INTO THE DRINK
Megan laid her physical body down on her couch and minimized her brain’s connection to it so she could fully inhabit her proxy in the spiral. She closed her proxy’s eyes as she felt the stream of the spiral engulf her. She curled into a ball and slowly floated along, warm and suspended, like she was back in the womb. She could feel other proxies all around her, bumping into her and squeezing past her. It reminded her of a water park “lazy river” ride from her childhood. She relaxed and her proxy expanded into the stream until it started to tingle, a sign that she had stretched her body beyond the comfortable limits of her brain’s proprioception. She contracted a bit so that she was only a little uncomfortable, to gently stretch her brain’s interpretation of her physical senses.
She opened her eyes and saw threads of light of every color spinning off in all directions, serving as leads to nodes that she might find attractive. She couldn’t fully differentiate her body from the surrounding “fluid,” which was entirely composed of other people’s amorphous, globlike proxies. She could just barely make out the largely transparent outline of separate proxies, each of which served as a node in itself, functioning as the very medium through which flowed all of the sensory experience in the spiral.
The abstract nature of her surroundings was a homogenized mix of the many possible sensations vying for her attention. The sound and soothing hum of calming music pulsed through her in waves. She swayed to the music, resonating with it, and felt the music passing through her to the proxies surrounding her. It was like resonance in Crain Slain, except more intimate and more cooperative. Like most proxies in the stream, she had chosen to be active, but anonymous. This meant that no one could determine who inhabited her proxy, though its limits were clear, and the nodes and sensations she was experiencing were being actively broadcast to those around her.
Megan was mildly disoriented from the lack of absolute direction inside the stream. There was no up or down, or even “outside” to the spiral, with its many streams intertwining and feeding off of each other. She felt a gentle force floating her slowly toward node 2501, her given destination, which she could see in the far distance as a bright point of light. This gave her a sense of direction in the seemingly endless sea of shared experience that was Indra’s Net.
As she swam along, Megan felt currents, representing paths to the nodes around her, tugging on her and enticing her with their sights and sounds to take their detours. She picked a random thread and moved toward it. The calming music she had first heard was slowly replaced by a lofty classical piece. She didn’t like it, so she gave it some resistance by swaying out of sync with it. This muted it for her as well as dampening its flow through her to the people around her, making it just slightly less prominent to her neighboring divers.
She picked up a thread broadcasting Japanese pop. She naturally swam through the stream and found it easy to follow the thread currents, which gradually brought nodes and their attendant sensations into focus, first as a preview and then as a port of entry into any given space.
DANCE!
The first distinct node she found was a piece of the Omni play floor, which was dancing to the J-pop song she was following. She swam toward it and her abstract dive proxy seamlessly transitioned into her regular body as she stepped onto the floor and started dancing. She had fun with the space’s playful light show which wrapped beams of light around the dancers, accentuating their motion. A new song started, but it was kind of lame, so someone introduced a different music feed.
At first Megan could barely hear it, but in a few moments everyone was dancing to it, resonating it into prominence and dampening the old song until it was almost gone from the floor. Megan tried to continue dancing to the old song, but found herself out of sync with the other dancers, so she gave up and adopted the new song.
The new music feed was from a popular Indra’s Net contributor named Carrier l0st. She was an “orchestrator,” which meant she was a highly respected node coordinator. Orchestrators were granted special rights to introduce prominent extracts, modify certain sets of nodes, and police the tagging system. Carrier l0st was known for her excellent musical taste, and her music broadcast was regularly adopted into a variety of nodes. Megan favorited the feed so that associated nodes would be displayed more prominently as she spiralled toward 2501.
There were screens all around the dance floor showing nodes that might be of interest to the dancers. They displayed other dance spaces, orgies, a music video for the song that was currently playing, and a variety of games adapted for divers. Megan’s attention was captured by a wild car chase on one of the screens, occurring in some game world called “Hot Pursuit.” She jumped through the frame and hovered over the cars as they wound their way through busy streets, hitting pedestrians and evading the police. She dropped down into the passenger seat of one of the cars to get a closer look at the action.
Driver: Hey there!
Megan: Oh, I didn’t know you would see me. I’ll go.
Driver: No, stay! I’m feeding for a reason.
Megan: Cool.
Megan rode along until the car fell off of a bridge and exploded, sending her flying down a street. Getting up and brushing herself off, she noticed that the music from the dance floor was still playing in the distance, leaving a trail for her if she wanted to return. There were people dancing all over the street and on top of buildings. The space was a virtualization of a physical street in Los Angeles, and was available as an overlay for the people there, as well as being a dance space on Omni’s play floor. Megan didn’t like the music playing there, so she muted it and walked down the street.
Everywhere she looked there were links to nodes of every kind, created by free association using her preferences and the preferences of dancers in the street. Doors along the street linked to art shows, bathhouses, interactive stories, restaurants, graffiti advertising psychedelic experiences, fashion shows, poetry readings, and philosophy clubs.
Picking something at random, Megan wandered up to a theater playing a kung-fu film. The entry fee, according to the theater’s info, was to kick the first person she encountered inside. She entered the rather large theater to find its audience in a free for all battle, and blazing fires consuming a good part of the theater. She kicked the first woman she came across, who returned the favor by putting Megan in a headlock until someone tackled both of them. Megan struggled out of the pile and found a relatively peaceful corner of the theater to sit down and watch the movie.
On screen was an epic kung-fu battle being performed live on top of a beautiful mountain range. The screen was a portal to that space, so Megan jumped through the screen and hovered over the fighting, darting around to get the best view of the action. Some audience members, who had wandered into the film and grown bored with it, donned wingsuits and jumped off of nearby cliffs. But the mountain in the space wasn’t comprehensive, so they ended up looping around and buzzing over the fight scene repeatedly. The kung-fu fighters got irritated at this and “paused” the movie to shoot arrows at the wingsuiters, who started trying to drop rocks on the heads of the actors. Soon it was an all out brawl between the actors and the audience.
Megan was disappointed at the interruption of the story and teleported back to the dance floor she had first materialized in. But now it was filled waist deep with jello, and there were more people naked wrestling there than dancing. It wasn’t her scene anymore, so she dove back into the stream after having her fill of jello.
She followed Carrier l0st’s beat past a church broadcasting a gospel song. She stopped outside of a club playing her music, but there was a six minute wait to get in. It was designed to weed out the fickle, and it worked on Megan, who floated along. She brought up a list of nodes linked to Carrier l0st’s feed. She popped into the most interesting one near to her, a copy of the Louvre Museum, in which people were dancing and “improving” works of art. She danced and manically leapt through the halls of the Louvre, enjoying the graffiti, some of which was quite clever. After a few songs, she returned to the stream.
Of the innumerable nodes branching off in every direction she looked, one caught her eye and she swam to check it out, despite it being listed as a “Bog” node. It was some sort of puppet show, being put on in a small shack. Megan was blasted by icy cold air as she entered. Her legs fell asleep as she walked to one of the many empty chairs. She found walking with numb legs to be surprisingly difficult, and clumsily bumped into one of the audience members, who was too busy staring raptly at the show to notice. She took a seat. Feeling, in the form of pricks and needles, returned to her legs. It was a sensation that her plant had never produced before, as she had not been inclined to actively explore the more unpleasant possibilities that the plant offered.
The dolls bounced along on their strings and at first it seemed like a simple children’s play. But then there was a subtle turning point. The antics of the dolls grew strange and the fragile strings grew taut with their tiny pullings, their tiny limbs straining against the puppet master. As it went on, something about the show made Megan feel ill. There was a stench in the air, but that was only part of it. She thought the sickness was a physical component to the show, like her numb legs had been, but she checked and the space wasn’t directly causing her feeling of sickness. There was just something deeply unnerving about the violently convulsing puppets.
Megan closed her eyes, floated free back into the stream, and filtered away “Bog” related nodes, though she bookmarked the puppet node with the intention of returning to it one day. That would turn out to be a mistake.
Megan looked around for something to cleanse her sensory palate from the ickiness of her last experience. Her SIS had registered that she had watched some gay men dancing earlier, and presented a gay bathhouse, blaring techno, as one of the next immediate options. She floated into the men’s section, which automatically changed her proxy into a male version.
Despite her inexperience with having male genitalia, she was tempted to participate in the sexual aspect of the orgy, as there were so many cute, super friendly men having such a good time. But she just danced and admired the sights instead. The speed of the techno’s beat grinded in sync with the men’s pace to encourage them, not that they needed the help. After a few songs, she peeked into the lesbian half of the bathhouse, but it wasn’t as interesting to her, so she moved along.
Her next stop was a BDSM space on Omni’s play floor, brought up because she had previously paid attention to it on the table in Omni. It was a restricted club, but she didn’t want to be an active participant anyway.
Plant users could give incredible control over their bodies to those they trusted, with the ability to instantly snatch it back if they needed to. This led to some pretty extreme practices. The plant could almost eliminate pain, which could be useful for emergencies and chronic medical conditions. It could also generate pain and discomfort to a degree, within its stringent safety limits. But this pain was not enough for some masochists. Instead, using mixed states, they would subject their physical bodies, under the control and authority of their dominants, to practices that would cause them pain. This included self-flagellation, sitting in uncomfortable positions, nipple clamps, and just about everything else imaginable. This required self-discipline, since they could use their plants at any time to reduce their suffering.
Megan sampled some of the pain on display. There was a female proxy being lashed by a whip that shot red lightning all over her body. Megan adopted her sensations, sending a strange, buzzing ache sweeping over Megan’s body, making her cringe. She stayed with it for a good half minute before turning it off. The plant’s safety limits stopped short of being able to generate something unbearable, although it could cause enough hurt to seriously suck. Still, the more discomfort Megan experienced from the plant, the less she was afraid of it. Negative sensations from the plant were certainly realistic, but unlike natural suffering, they didn't mean that something was wrong with her body. Suffering was now something she could choose to safely experience, opening an entire world of unpleasant, yet in some cases intriguing, sensations that she would have normally avoided.
Megan tried out the sensations from nipple clamps, some light biting, random static electric shocks (which she did not find sexy at all), and some expertly used ice before reaching the limit of her curiosity.
She stopped and watched a few fights (and subsequent sexual conquests) at a sex arena linked to the BDSM club. It was set up so that audience members could try strange and rare foods while they watched- mostly insects and endangered species. Megan enjoyed a few chocolate covered ants while she was there. Also available were approximations of the effects of the stings and bites of various animals and insects, though the plant’s pain limits mitigated the more extreme ones. Lactating, topless female proxies wandered through the crowd, offering their breasts to anyone who wanted to drink human milk in the natural way.
Megan floated on and briefly peeked at a space catering to more unusual tastes. It featured things like feeds from physical cameras and other sensors in bathrooms (and toilets) for those looking to explore “the call of nature” more intimately.
She also passed by a simulation of the aftermath of a civil war battle, complete with a “game” where divers played doctors, amputating limb after mauled limb. Passing relatively close to the space, she still caught some of the stench of gangrene and dead bodies that emanated from it. Worse was the screaming of wounded horses as soldiers put them out of their misery.
Megan remembered that the Crain Slain concert would still be ongoing, so she ported there to watch it for a bit as it was nearing its climax. Crain still had a good lead and looked likely to win. While she hadn’t paid the fee to be active in the game, Megan still resonated with Crain’s song, sending it out in small waves to her fellow spirallers as they passed by her.
Megan left and floated along toward 2501 again. Her proxy felt bulkier. Someone had glommed onto her, because of her feed from CS or from traces of her earlier adventures in the spiral, which her neighors could easily peruse. She felt suddenly self-aware, and accelerated downstream, dislodging and losing whoever had linked to her.
PORTENT
The next node that caught her attention was some sort of game featuring one lone player fighting insane odds. Dressed as a biker, he traveled at breakneck speeds on a rocketcycle, deftly maneuvering around horror-themed obstacles as they popped up in the road- everything from zombies and floating eyes to large flying scorpions. His path was particularly littered with hideously mutated babies which were constantly jumping up at him. He expertly cut them down with a machete in his right hand while steering with his left. The occasional baby made it to his body and viciously bit him before he could smack it off. In the first minute that Megan watched he had slaughtered more than 50 babies.
It was funny because they were babies. It was OK because they were evil.
Cars made of undead flesh began leaping at him from other lanes, attempting to devour him with their decaying, jagged-toothed mouths. Megan was impressed with how expertly he dodged them, though he was slowing as more and more babies were getting through and latching on to him. Then the road ahead shot straight into the sky. The biker stopped exactly at the edge of the wall and started climbing it, using small holes in its surface. The node indicated that this climb was designed to be slightly less difficult than the biker had previously achieved in a rock climbing game, although now he had evil babies crawling up the wall with him and digging their talons into him, trying to weigh him down, but not directly attacking his hands or feet.
Having watched for several minutes, Megan was granted the right to control one element in the game at a time. At first she took control of one of the babies and used it to pull other babies off the biker, but then she figured out she could temporarily deepen individual hand or footholds, so she started strategically helping the biker climb. She noticed that other observers were responsible for many of the babies tormenting the biker. Not quite sure what she was involved in, she floated away from the node.
ETHEREAL
She followed a lower energy thread and found herself sitting in someone’s living room, listening to a discussion between a "techno-pantheist" and someone who held a “naturalist” opinion.
Pantheist: The mindscape of humanity is expanding freely now that we can create and inhabit worlds limited only by our imaginations.
Naturalist: But so much of it is base and distracts from people’s real lives and spirituality. People are abandoning reality to live in virtual fantasies.
Pantheist: It may be virtual, but it’s as real as the physical world. Our actions Outside have real consequences. If you hug someone in full immersion, both of your brains experience it as if it was physical. The human connection is just as real, and our abilities to express ourselves and communicate are ever expanding Outside.
Naturalist: But people just end up worshipping their own warped creations. God’s will is evident in nature, not the artificial nonsense of ridiculous games.
Pantheist: The thing you experience and call God is there for everyone, spread throughout all of existence, including virtuality. Human beings are part of nature too, and the best parts of our wills are in harmony with the ultimate divine principles of love and unity. What is happening Outside is the newest evolution of God’s presence in the material world, merging our minds with the endless abundance of pure information.
Naturalist: But that merger distorts the natural human form, of both our bodies and our minds.
Pantheist: What matters isn’t our particular form, but the minds using it. New forms allow us to diversify our identities and the ways we communicate and interact with other people. Virtuality enables intercultural exchanges and cooperation, uniting us through new levels of empathy. But it also encourages individuality by allowing anyone to create entire worlds of their own. Virtual worlds have allowed the development of ways of life, through true participatory cultures, beyond the comprehension or prediction of pre-Outside cultures...
Megan might have stayed to listen if she hadn’t become captivated by a particularly colorful poster in the room. She set a recorder to copy the feed from that living room so she could review it later, and hopped through the wall into a new node. It was a field covered by mounds of multi-colored clay paint, which people were shaping into forts, weapons, and strange animals to ride. The colors were more intense than the physical eye could relay to the brain, as the plant bypassed the eye’s rods and cones, which would have become overstimulated by the vivid landscape.
The space was also filled with delicious scents. Megan saw people eating the clay, so she consumed different colors and found they were desserts- cheesecake, fudge, birthday cake, honeycomb, strawberry taffy, and tapioca pudding. The taste was better than physical food, again because of the plant’s ability to directly stimulate the cranial nerves innervating the tongue, bypassing taste buds which could potentially tire. But the virtual food did nothing to sate her hunger or increase her blood sugar , so she took a break from the dive to get a physical snack.
Megan returned to her dive proxy and frolicked through the field. She got hit in the side of her head by a ball of paint as she passed through a “paintball” fight between two forts. She took refuge in one of the forts and joined their side in the battle, taking bites out of the balls of clay before throwing them. Every once in a while, a thrown ball would explode like a grenade, taking out part of a fort and sending proxies flying in every direction. It was great fun, but she had to be moving on if she was ever going to get to 2501. A few people in the fort had perused Megan’s path and decided that she was interesting enough to follow her wake through the stream. Feeling more relaxed and less self-conscious, Megan no longer minded the glomming.
She had been in the spiral long enough that she noticed nodes she had shown interest in before, but had bypassed, again appearing in the distance, off to the sides of her path. She looked at a visualization of her path through the streams of Indra’s Net and saw that it actually did resemble a spiral of sorts, but she figured that “spiral” also referred to the way she had been psychologically drawn into the free flowing experience.
She looked through a few of the more exotic nodes nearby before finding a “ghost dance,” which was prominent on Omni’s play floor. It was a somewhat experimental exploration of passive versus active engagement with dance and music. Megan became a pure observer, passively inhabiting her proxy as her ghost danced in sync with the beat of the music. Being a passenger in her own body wasn’t too unnatural until she felt vibrations rising up through her chest, then through her throat, and her proxy began singing with the music. It harmonized and improved her natural singing voice, but it still sounded like her.
She tried to struggle against the dance, but her proxy controls were cut off so that she was trapped as long as she inhabited her proxy in that space. Realizing that this was the entire point of the node, she relaxed into the increasingly surreal experience. She was dissociated from her body, yet she closely identified with its every motion. Keeping the tactile sensations from the dancing, she changed her view to be above her body. Megan had always felt weird watching recordings of herself, but this was far weirder. It was both liberating and creepy to watch her body respond to the music just as she would have.
After dancing for a few minutes, the space allowed her some limited control over her proxy, and she started playing with her body like it was a doll. She sent it jumping from one spot to another, sped it up and slowed it down, introduced flourishes to her dance, and changed the timber of her voice. This gave her a fresh, more objective perspective on how she appeared to others. It was like “Megan” was a character, based on a lifetime of inhabiting her physical body, which had been her almost sole proxy to the world until recently. She was starting to see that the personality of “Megan,” while it fit her very well, was not the absolute truth of who she was at her core. However useful and well crafted it might have been, it was still a sort of mask.
After a while, her body started to feel tired and her leg muscles burned a little, simulating the usual limits of her physical body. Megan enjoyed it, as it was reminiscent of pushing her limits in jogging, of reaching a point where her body would take over by itself while her mind wandered. At that point, if she paid attention to her body as it went along, she could see that subconscious processes were doing almost everything for her, from adjusting how her feet fell on the ground, to avoiding obstacles, to managing her pace. Her conscious mind only stepped in occasionally, to decide less subtle things like which route to take or to change songs if she was listening to music. In that way, her physical body was as much an autonomous robot as her dancing ghost was.
She turned off her body’s tiredness and burning muscles so she could focus on analyzing her style. She continued tweaking her dancing from a distance until she couldn’t fully recognize the motion as her own. She became tangentially aware that several people who had glommed onto her were now experiencing her proxy’s sensations just as she was. It was like she had been hollowed out and become a shell that anyone could inhabit, but her dissociative state made it so the presence of strangers in her body didn’t bother her, or feel like an invasion of her privacy. If anything, she felt just a sliver of responsibility to keep them entertained. The ghost now active in her proxy was based on the aggregate recording of her dancing style, so it was an intimate part of her. But it was only a small part, and something she was willing to offer up for the enjoyment of others.
Megan left a copy of her proxy dancing on the floor and entered the stream again. Her self-consciousness had faded away entirely, as if she had left “Megan” behind on the dance floor. She had been assuming that everyone perceived her as she perceived herself, but now realized that even her own self-perception was not so clearly defined. Instead of picking threads based on how she thought she should, she started flowing with the stream, moving toward the sensations that appealed to her and turning away from the ones that didn’t. It didn’t matter where she went, because everything was interesting, and she could leave the instant she had become saturated with a node.
Megan sampled some of the pain on display. There was a female proxy being lashed by a whip that shot red lightning all over her body. Megan adopted her sensations, sending a strange, buzzing ache sweeping over Megan’s body, making her cringe. She stayed with it for a good half minute before turning it off. The plant’s safety limits stopped short of being able to generate something unbearable, although it could cause enough hurt to seriously suck. Still, the more discomfort Megan experienced from the plant, the less she was afraid of it. Negative sensations from the plant were certainly realistic, but unlike natural suffering, they didn't mean that something was wrong with her body. Suffering was now something she could choose to safely experience, opening an entire world of unpleasant, yet in some cases intriguing, sensations that she would have normally avoided.
Megan tried out the sensations from nipple clamps, some light biting, random static electric shocks (which she did not find sexy at all), and some expertly used ice before reaching the limit of her curiosity.
She stopped and watched a few fights (and subsequent sexual conquests) at a sex arena linked to the BDSM club. It was set up so that audience members could try strange and rare foods while they watched- mostly insects and endangered species. Megan enjoyed a few chocolate covered ants while she was there. Also available were approximations of the effects of the stings and bites of various animals and insects, though the plant’s pain limits mitigated the more extreme ones. Lactating, topless female proxies wandered through the crowd, offering their breasts to anyone who wanted to drink human milk in the natural way.
Megan floated on and briefly peeked at a space catering to more unusual tastes. It featured things like feeds from physical cameras and other sensors in bathrooms (and toilets) for those looking to explore “the call of nature” more intimately.
She also passed by a simulation of the aftermath of a civil war battle, complete with a “game” where divers played doctors, amputating limb after mauled limb. Passing relatively close to the space, she still caught some of the stench of gangrene and dead bodies that emanated from it. Worse was the screaming of wounded horses as soldiers put them out of their misery.
Megan remembered that the Crain Slain concert would still be ongoing, so she ported there to watch it for a bit as it was nearing its climax. Crain still had a good lead and looked likely to win. While she hadn’t paid the fee to be active in the game, Megan still resonated with Crain’s song, sending it out in small waves to her fellow spirallers as they passed by her.
Megan left and floated along toward 2501 again. Her proxy felt bulkier. Someone had glommed onto her, because of her feed from CS or from traces of her earlier adventures in the spiral, which her neighors could easily peruse. She felt suddenly self-aware, and accelerated downstream, dislodging and losing whoever had linked to her.
PORTENT
The next node that caught her attention was some sort of game featuring one lone player fighting insane odds. Dressed as a biker, he traveled at breakneck speeds on a rocketcycle, deftly maneuvering around horror-themed obstacles as they popped up in the road- everything from zombies and floating eyes to large flying scorpions. His path was particularly littered with hideously mutated babies which were constantly jumping up at him. He expertly cut them down with a machete in his right hand while steering with his left. The occasional baby made it to his body and viciously bit him before he could smack it off. In the first minute that Megan watched he had slaughtered more than 50 babies.
It was funny because they were babies. It was OK because they were evil.
Cars made of undead flesh began leaping at him from other lanes, attempting to devour him with their decaying, jagged-toothed mouths. Megan was impressed with how expertly he dodged them, though he was slowing as more and more babies were getting through and latching on to him. Then the road ahead shot straight into the sky. The biker stopped exactly at the edge of the wall and started climbing it, using small holes in its surface. The node indicated that this climb was designed to be slightly less difficult than the biker had previously achieved in a rock climbing game, although now he had evil babies crawling up the wall with him and digging their talons into him, trying to weigh him down, but not directly attacking his hands or feet.
Having watched for several minutes, Megan was granted the right to control one element in the game at a time. At first she took control of one of the babies and used it to pull other babies off the biker, but then she figured out she could temporarily deepen individual hand or footholds, so she started strategically helping the biker climb. She noticed that other observers were responsible for many of the babies tormenting the biker. Not quite sure what she was involved in, she floated away from the node.
ETHEREAL
She followed a lower energy thread and found herself sitting in someone’s living room, listening to a discussion between a "techno-pantheist" and someone who held a “naturalist” opinion.
Pantheist: The mindscape of humanity is expanding freely now that we can create and inhabit worlds limited only by our imaginations.
Naturalist: But so much of it is base and distracts from people’s real lives and spirituality. People are abandoning reality to live in virtual fantasies.
Pantheist: It may be virtual, but it’s as real as the physical world. Our actions Outside have real consequences. If you hug someone in full immersion, both of your brains experience it as if it was physical. The human connection is just as real, and our abilities to express ourselves and communicate are ever expanding Outside.
Naturalist: But people just end up worshipping their own warped creations. God’s will is evident in nature, not the artificial nonsense of ridiculous games.
Pantheist: The thing you experience and call God is there for everyone, spread throughout all of existence, including virtuality. Human beings are part of nature too, and the best parts of our wills are in harmony with the ultimate divine principles of love and unity. What is happening Outside is the newest evolution of God’s presence in the material world, merging our minds with the endless abundance of pure information.
Naturalist: But that merger distorts the natural human form, of both our bodies and our minds.
Pantheist: What matters isn’t our particular form, but the minds using it. New forms allow us to diversify our identities and the ways we communicate and interact with other people. Virtuality enables intercultural exchanges and cooperation, uniting us through new levels of empathy. But it also encourages individuality by allowing anyone to create entire worlds of their own. Virtual worlds have allowed the development of ways of life, through true participatory cultures, beyond the comprehension or prediction of pre-Outside cultures...
Megan might have stayed to listen if she hadn’t become captivated by a particularly colorful poster in the room. She set a recorder to copy the feed from that living room so she could review it later, and hopped through the wall into a new node. It was a field covered by mounds of multi-colored clay paint, which people were shaping into forts, weapons, and strange animals to ride. The colors were more intense than the physical eye could relay to the brain, as the plant bypassed the eye’s rods and cones, which would have become overstimulated by the vivid landscape.
The space was also filled with delicious scents. Megan saw people eating the clay, so she consumed different colors and found they were desserts- cheesecake, fudge, birthday cake, honeycomb, strawberry taffy, and tapioca pudding. The taste was better than physical food, again because of the plant’s ability to directly stimulate the cranial nerves innervating the tongue, bypassing taste buds which could potentially tire. But the virtual food did nothing to sate her hunger or increase her blood sugar , so she took a break from the dive to get a physical snack.
Megan returned to her dive proxy and frolicked through the field. She got hit in the side of her head by a ball of paint as she passed through a “paintball” fight between two forts. She took refuge in one of the forts and joined their side in the battle, taking bites out of the balls of clay before throwing them. Every once in a while, a thrown ball would explode like a grenade, taking out part of a fort and sending proxies flying in every direction. It was great fun, but she had to be moving on if she was ever going to get to 2501. A few people in the fort had perused Megan’s path and decided that she was interesting enough to follow her wake through the stream. Feeling more relaxed and less self-conscious, Megan no longer minded the glomming.
She had been in the spiral long enough that she noticed nodes she had shown interest in before, but had bypassed, again appearing in the distance, off to the sides of her path. She looked at a visualization of her path through the streams of Indra’s Net and saw that it actually did resemble a spiral of sorts, but she figured that “spiral” also referred to the way she had been psychologically drawn into the free flowing experience.
She looked through a few of the more exotic nodes nearby before finding a “ghost dance,” which was prominent on Omni’s play floor. It was a somewhat experimental exploration of passive versus active engagement with dance and music. Megan became a pure observer, passively inhabiting her proxy as her ghost danced in sync with the beat of the music. Being a passenger in her own body wasn’t too unnatural until she felt vibrations rising up through her chest, then through her throat, and her proxy began singing with the music. It harmonized and improved her natural singing voice, but it still sounded like her.
She tried to struggle against the dance, but her proxy controls were cut off so that she was trapped as long as she inhabited her proxy in that space. Realizing that this was the entire point of the node, she relaxed into the increasingly surreal experience. She was dissociated from her body, yet she closely identified with its every motion. Keeping the tactile sensations from the dancing, she changed her view to be above her body. Megan had always felt weird watching recordings of herself, but this was far weirder. It was both liberating and creepy to watch her body respond to the music just as she would have.
After dancing for a few minutes, the space allowed her some limited control over her proxy, and she started playing with her body like it was a doll. She sent it jumping from one spot to another, sped it up and slowed it down, introduced flourishes to her dance, and changed the timber of her voice. This gave her a fresh, more objective perspective on how she appeared to others. It was like “Megan” was a character, based on a lifetime of inhabiting her physical body, which had been her almost sole proxy to the world until recently. She was starting to see that the personality of “Megan,” while it fit her very well, was not the absolute truth of who she was at her core. However useful and well crafted it might have been, it was still a sort of mask.
After a while, her body started to feel tired and her leg muscles burned a little, simulating the usual limits of her physical body. Megan enjoyed it, as it was reminiscent of pushing her limits in jogging, of reaching a point where her body would take over by itself while her mind wandered. At that point, if she paid attention to her body as it went along, she could see that subconscious processes were doing almost everything for her, from adjusting how her feet fell on the ground, to avoiding obstacles, to managing her pace. Her conscious mind only stepped in occasionally, to decide less subtle things like which route to take or to change songs if she was listening to music. In that way, her physical body was as much an autonomous robot as her dancing ghost was.
She turned off her body’s tiredness and burning muscles so she could focus on analyzing her style. She continued tweaking her dancing from a distance until she couldn’t fully recognize the motion as her own. She became tangentially aware that several people who had glommed onto her were now experiencing her proxy’s sensations just as she was. It was like she had been hollowed out and become a shell that anyone could inhabit, but her dissociative state made it so the presence of strangers in her body didn’t bother her, or feel like an invasion of her privacy. If anything, she felt just a sliver of responsibility to keep them entertained. The ghost now active in her proxy was based on the aggregate recording of her dancing style, so it was an intimate part of her. But it was only a small part, and something she was willing to offer up for the enjoyment of others.
Megan left a copy of her proxy dancing on the floor and entered the stream again. Her self-consciousness had faded away entirely, as if she had left “Megan” behind on the dance floor. She had been assuming that everyone perceived her as she perceived herself, but now realized that even her own self-perception was not so clearly defined. Instead of picking threads based on how she thought she should, she started flowing with the stream, moving toward the sensations that appealed to her and turning away from the ones that didn’t. It didn’t matter where she went, because everything was interesting, and she could leave the instant she had become saturated with a node.
There was no way to lose her path in Indra’s Net, so Megan was free to lose herself.
Several people were still glommed onto her, passively following her trail. She felt utterly exposed to the spiral, but also invincible. The mask which she normally wore for the rest of the world had been lost somewhere along the way, or perhaps she had just become comfortable wearing it as a mask, and not identifying with it as the ultimate truth about who she was. Her layers stripping away, Megan could become anything she wanted, if only for a time. But she was growing tired, as she had been diving for two and a half hours. So she decided to visit one more node and then accelerate to join the others at 2501. She picked the weirdest one immediately available to her, labelled with an intriguing pun: “Sex Is A Human Rite”
THE FLESH THAT LOVES
The node was a giant pool composed entirely of amorphous proxies. It was the ultimate snuggle party, with sexual aspects for those so inclined. Megan had heard of this type of space before and didn’t hesitate in diving into it. There was no sight or sound native to the space, only touch, though Megan continued grooving to Carrier l0st’s music. Her proxy felt expansive, but not stretched out in an uncomfortable way. She melted into the pool and was delighted by the snug warmth that embraced her.
Several people were still glommed onto her, passively following her trail. She felt utterly exposed to the spiral, but also invincible. The mask which she normally wore for the rest of the world had been lost somewhere along the way, or perhaps she had just become comfortable wearing it as a mask, and not identifying with it as the ultimate truth about who she was. Her layers stripping away, Megan could become anything she wanted, if only for a time. But she was growing tired, as she had been diving for two and a half hours. So she decided to visit one more node and then accelerate to join the others at 2501. She picked the weirdest one immediately available to her, labelled with an intriguing pun: “Sex Is A Human Rite”
THE FLESH THAT LOVES
The node was a giant pool composed entirely of amorphous proxies. It was the ultimate snuggle party, with sexual aspects for those so inclined. Megan had heard of this type of space before and didn’t hesitate in diving into it. There was no sight or sound native to the space, only touch, though Megan continued grooving to Carrier l0st’s music. Her proxy felt expansive, but not stretched out in an uncomfortable way. She melted into the pool and was delighted by the snug warmth that embraced her.
She no longer had a distinct body, as the usual limits of her skin seemed to disintegrate. The experience was somehow more comfortable than her own skin. It was all the best parts of being in a jacuzzi, but more relaxing as there was nothing for her to do but slosh around and snuggle within what was essentially one huge proxy composited from the extended shared forms of hundreds of people. Any given area of her proxy was shared by multiple other people, as comfort dictated. In the flesh pool, comfort was supreme.
She “splashed” herself about and felt the numerous other people surrounding her on all sides splash back and snuggle up next to her. She moved around as quickly as she could and was reassured that she couldn’t hurt or annoy anyone. Everything was smooth and soft and every surface was lubricated in just the right way. She relaxed even more and felt her remaining sense of her own body breaking down and dissolving. There was beauty in the breakdown. Her body lazily spread through the pool, snuggling within the flesh of countless others. It was almost as if most of her body was being gently massaged by dozens of hands. There was an almost sublime sensuality in it, combined with a feeling of peace and belonging. This was a space where all were accepted without question or even unique identities, as normal methods of discrete communication were entirely absent. No proxy in the pool could talk, had a face, or could even communicate nonverbally. You were simply part of the pool. All were equal there.
She “splashed” herself about and felt the numerous other people surrounding her on all sides splash back and snuggle up next to her. She moved around as quickly as she could and was reassured that she couldn’t hurt or annoy anyone. Everything was smooth and soft and every surface was lubricated in just the right way. She relaxed even more and felt her remaining sense of her own body breaking down and dissolving. There was beauty in the breakdown. Her body lazily spread through the pool, snuggling within the flesh of countless others. It was almost as if most of her body was being gently massaged by dozens of hands. There was an almost sublime sensuality in it, combined with a feeling of peace and belonging. This was a space where all were accepted without question or even unique identities, as normal methods of discrete communication were entirely absent. No proxy in the pool could talk, had a face, or could even communicate nonverbally. You were simply part of the pool. All were equal there.
Megan’s proxy didn’t have its sexual elements active, so she was missing out on the sex aspect of the pool. The deeply sensual experience was enough for her. She relaxed the restrictions on her space and felt someone slip “inside” her proxy. It was a strange sensation. It was like they were wriggling around inside her skin, or perhaps like they were mutually embracing each other, with maximum skin contact between them, both front to front and back to back. Megan playfully wrestled with the other diver. It was slippery and kind of fun, and not as creepy as she would have expected, despite knowing that the other person was probably getting sexual pleasure from it.
She considered making her erogenous zones active, but decided to leave that for another time. She left the node and examined it using a visualization tool to help her get a feel for how people were having sex in the space. Megan looked out over the sea of flesh. Individual proxies were not clearly defined, but she could now make out the movement and rough outline of hundreds of interlocking tentacles, protusions, orifices, mouths, and such, and could see that many proxies were fitted inside each other. They flowed back and forth and around and through each other’s proxies, sharing proxy spaces and their related sensations freely with each other. There was a great deal of rhythmic thrusting and other motion that she could only imagine as sexual. Tentacles seemed very popular. They wrapped around and snaked through large areas, what had to be multiple people’s proxies at the same time. People were pouring themselves into each other, filling up and mixing with each other’s proxies.
It was pure mass sex. It was truly anonymous, completely comfortable, and utterly easy.
It looked as though any attempt at sexual activity instantly resulted in the relevant parts of your proxy being paired with compatible parts of other proxies. There was no way of telling who you were having sex with, much less the number of people they were actively engaged with. Functionally, you could be “kissing” one person, penetrating another, being penetrated by yet another, while others kissed or caressed other parts of you.
Megan jumped back in for a moment, made her mouth’s senses accessible, and started trying to “kiss” around her. It was strange, since there wasn’t exactly the same definite feedback she normally would have received from the presence of a mouth, but she soon felt herself making out with someone. She didn’t like how they kissed, so she turned away and was making out with someone new. Their mouths came together and their two tongues merged and split and intertwined in ways that made it impossible to tell one mouth from another, as the two proxies shared much of the same mouth space. The kiss tasted of strawberries, a flavor that Megan’s SIS preferences had introduced for her. The kissing stopped the moment she was no longer actively engaging with it, and her mouth returned to the fuzziness of the pool.
Megan checked the info for the node. Stimulation of anything sexual, including having orifices of any kind penetrated, required active engagement by all parties, so no one could force anything on a person in the pool who wasn’t enthusiastically responding to it.
She came out of the pool and swam downstream in the spiral toward the meeting place. She noted that the flesh pool experience was being actively shared by many proxies in the spiral stream, which experienced the snug belonging throughout the abstract flow, even if many of the proxies surrounding them weren’t aware they were being snuggled with.
She realized that the flesh pool node had only appeared when she was about ready for it. That is, after she had participated in other, somewhat related nodes. There were programs that helped guide people through these sorts of experiences, but she had gravitated to more and more ethereal nodes as she went along, naturally losing her inhibitions along the way. She felt a little proud of her increasing boldness.
Her absorption in the flesh pool had drawn all sorts of fascinating new threads to her. Now unashamed of her presence in the spiral, she was amazed by the entire spectrum of human experience spreading out before her, beckoning her to become absorbed into every part of it. The myriad possibilities of Indra’s Net had become more and more compelling to her as she was drawn through the spiral and as she responded more and more openly and honestly to which possibilities were most attractive to her.
She had quickly developed a sense of kinship with her fellow divers. Their very proxies, after all, served as the medium to the nodes she had enjoyed. Each person’s proxy reflected all of the nodes they were experiencing or had experienced, sharing their personal tastes with the general flow. Megan could only peripherally perceive most of the vast amounts of content they linked to. It was exciting to know that she could turn in any direction and find threads leading to spaces she would never have encountered on her own, and might never encounter again- scenes of beauty, madness, erotica, and horror.
She had no idea how many hundreds or thousands of people she had shared spaces with and influenced by her simple presence and preferences. She was overcome by the sense of connection she had to all of the people whose names she would never know. And yet they didn’t feel like anonymous strangers, since they were sharing so much with each other. But it was time to meet with her friends. Megan noted a mod that turned the stream into a water slide. She activated it and had a blast as she experienced constant acceleration taking her faster and faster down the ultimate water slide, looping around and around, all the way to 2501.
2501
Megan splashed down deep into 2501’s crystal clear ocean. She jumped out of the water and hovered over the waves. It was the best virtual aquarium she had ever seen. It had filters to fill it with sea life from the modern era, as well as from any desired prehistoric period. Megan flew over the water, dragging her feet just under the waves. She felt gentle pressure guiding her to shore, and there she found Sam’s group sitting in lounge chairs on the beach, along with thousands of others.
Megan flew to one of the seats and started sunbathing. Virtual sunbathing, while healthier than physical sunbathing, was one of the things that virtuality couldn’t quite capture.
Thomas: Hey Megs. How was your trip?
Megan: Fantastic. I’m exhausted.
Thomas: And probably a little sore too.
Megan: Yeah.
Thomas: Your brain’s not used to bodily distortions. There are exercises to help with that.
Megan: It’s getting easier. It was awesome.
Thomas: And you don’t even have a fully featured agent to pilot an optimum course for you. Or once you establish an identity compatible with Indra’s Net, you can use the “serendipity” option, which is pretty neat.
Megan was still listening to Carrier l0st. T tuned into her feeds and nodded in approval to the music. He traced her dive back through the spiral.
Thomas: You found some interesting stuff, especially for a first time diver.
Megan: I don’t know why, but this one node stuck with me more than the others. There was this biker slaughtering these demon babies and...
Thomas: That was Rainbow Run.
Megan: It looks like fun.
Sam: Uh, Megan, what do you know about Rainbow Run?
Megan: Just what I saw at that node. I might go try it sometime, broaden my horizons.
Thomas: You’re not ready for Rainbow Run.
Megan: I mean, just to try it. Just for fun.
Sam: You should listen to T about this. Rainbow Run’s not really about fun.
Megan: Well, whatever it is, it looks intense. There was something about the way the game kept pushing the player.
Thomas: That is an excellent observation. Rainbow Run is a devious game. It reads players and tries to throw them off course and get them to quit. RR will stretch your mind in inventive ways and get you to think about the role you play in games. It takes extracts from game worlds all over Outside and mixes them together to push your boundaries in some pretty magical ways. It’s always getting smarter too. If you want, I could train you for it.
Megan: Train? Like, in what way?
Thomas: Fighting, sensory control, zen, mental endurance, sexual combat, training combat ghosts, controlling multiple proxies, and such.
Sam: You’re not talking about the infamous “crash course,” are you?
Thomas: Not necessarily?
Megan: Why am I getting an uneasy feeling?
Sam: Because you’re smart and know something about how crazy T is.
Thomas: If you train with me you can quit at any time, no big deal. It wouldn’t hurt to try, right?
Sam gave T a wary look.
Thomas: I mean, it will hurt. But you’ll get over it.
Megan: Why not? I’ve waited too long to explore Outside properly.
Thomas: Good! Then we start tomorrow.
Sam: [text >Megan] Just don’t go to Hero/Dragon with him and it should be OK.
Megan: [>Sam] I will remember that.
The group exchanged recordings of interesting experiences they had encountered in their dives. T linked the group to a high energy dance floor where everything was seemingly made of fire, as well as a recording of a Hyper Grind game he had just won. Keen linked to an excellent and remarkably fancy restaurant. Sam showed off her adventures as she attempted to understand the culture of a weird “space colony” that was in its 3rd year of experimental development. Mike shared an educational rpg node that taught basic chemistry and physics through its magic combat system. Pawn brought up a node designed to simulate sensory hallucinations to amplified drugged states and T took a sample of it before diving into the ocean to catch a ride holding onto the fin of a 40 foot megalodon.
Megan: You know, I expected there to be more griefers.
Sam: Believe me, there are plenty, but you wouldn’t see many with your settings. Omni and Indra’s Net are free and open, but the automatic tagging system and the orchestrators do a good job keeping the experience troll free for those that don't want to deal with that crap.
Megan: I’m impressed by the quality of everything I encountered. It’s amazing what people will create just for the sheer act of creation.
Sam: For that and for the social standing, and to showcase their talents. And for sex, of course.
Megan: Man, if I wasn’t tired, I would go back in right now.
Sam: Don’t feel hurried. The spiral isn’t going anywhere, although it’s constantly changing. Indra’s Net is vast and infinite, for all intents and purposes. You could wander it forever and never experience the exact same space twice. Depending on how you set it up, it’s both an ADHD wonderland and a great place for meditation.
And there was much fun had at the beach.
Next- Episode 09: Community - Megan's training begins & a visit to the party that never ends.
She had quickly developed a sense of kinship with her fellow divers. Their very proxies, after all, served as the medium to the nodes she had enjoyed. Each person’s proxy reflected all of the nodes they were experiencing or had experienced, sharing their personal tastes with the general flow. Megan could only peripherally perceive most of the vast amounts of content they linked to. It was exciting to know that she could turn in any direction and find threads leading to spaces she would never have encountered on her own, and might never encounter again- scenes of beauty, madness, erotica, and horror.
She had no idea how many hundreds or thousands of people she had shared spaces with and influenced by her simple presence and preferences. She was overcome by the sense of connection she had to all of the people whose names she would never know. And yet they didn’t feel like anonymous strangers, since they were sharing so much with each other. But it was time to meet with her friends. Megan noted a mod that turned the stream into a water slide. She activated it and had a blast as she experienced constant acceleration taking her faster and faster down the ultimate water slide, looping around and around, all the way to 2501.
2501
Megan splashed down deep into 2501’s crystal clear ocean. She jumped out of the water and hovered over the waves. It was the best virtual aquarium she had ever seen. It had filters to fill it with sea life from the modern era, as well as from any desired prehistoric period. Megan flew over the water, dragging her feet just under the waves. She felt gentle pressure guiding her to shore, and there she found Sam’s group sitting in lounge chairs on the beach, along with thousands of others.
Megan flew to one of the seats and started sunbathing. Virtual sunbathing, while healthier than physical sunbathing, was one of the things that virtuality couldn’t quite capture.
Thomas: Hey Megs. How was your trip?
Megan: Fantastic. I’m exhausted.
Thomas: And probably a little sore too.
Megan: Yeah.
Thomas: Your brain’s not used to bodily distortions. There are exercises to help with that.
Megan: It’s getting easier. It was awesome.
Thomas: And you don’t even have a fully featured agent to pilot an optimum course for you. Or once you establish an identity compatible with Indra’s Net, you can use the “serendipity” option, which is pretty neat.
Megan was still listening to Carrier l0st. T tuned into her feeds and nodded in approval to the music. He traced her dive back through the spiral.
Thomas: You found some interesting stuff, especially for a first time diver.
Megan: I don’t know why, but this one node stuck with me more than the others. There was this biker slaughtering these demon babies and...
Thomas: That was Rainbow Run.
Megan: It looks like fun.
Sam: Uh, Megan, what do you know about Rainbow Run?
Megan: Just what I saw at that node. I might go try it sometime, broaden my horizons.
Thomas: You’re not ready for Rainbow Run.
Megan: I mean, just to try it. Just for fun.
Sam: You should listen to T about this. Rainbow Run’s not really about fun.
Megan: Well, whatever it is, it looks intense. There was something about the way the game kept pushing the player.
Thomas: That is an excellent observation. Rainbow Run is a devious game. It reads players and tries to throw them off course and get them to quit. RR will stretch your mind in inventive ways and get you to think about the role you play in games. It takes extracts from game worlds all over Outside and mixes them together to push your boundaries in some pretty magical ways. It’s always getting smarter too. If you want, I could train you for it.
Megan: Train? Like, in what way?
Thomas: Fighting, sensory control, zen, mental endurance, sexual combat, training combat ghosts, controlling multiple proxies, and such.
Sam: You’re not talking about the infamous “crash course,” are you?
Thomas: Not necessarily?
Megan: Why am I getting an uneasy feeling?
Sam: Because you’re smart and know something about how crazy T is.
Thomas: If you train with me you can quit at any time, no big deal. It wouldn’t hurt to try, right?
Sam gave T a wary look.
Thomas: I mean, it will hurt. But you’ll get over it.
Megan: Why not? I’ve waited too long to explore Outside properly.
Thomas: Good! Then we start tomorrow.
Sam: [text >Megan] Just don’t go to Hero/Dragon with him and it should be OK.
Megan: [>Sam] I will remember that.
The group exchanged recordings of interesting experiences they had encountered in their dives. T linked the group to a high energy dance floor where everything was seemingly made of fire, as well as a recording of a Hyper Grind game he had just won. Keen linked to an excellent and remarkably fancy restaurant. Sam showed off her adventures as she attempted to understand the culture of a weird “space colony” that was in its 3rd year of experimental development. Mike shared an educational rpg node that taught basic chemistry and physics through its magic combat system. Pawn brought up a node designed to simulate sensory hallucinations to amplified drugged states and T took a sample of it before diving into the ocean to catch a ride holding onto the fin of a 40 foot megalodon.
Megan: You know, I expected there to be more griefers.
Sam: Believe me, there are plenty, but you wouldn’t see many with your settings. Omni and Indra’s Net are free and open, but the automatic tagging system and the orchestrators do a good job keeping the experience troll free for those that don't want to deal with that crap.
Megan: I’m impressed by the quality of everything I encountered. It’s amazing what people will create just for the sheer act of creation.
Sam: For that and for the social standing, and to showcase their talents. And for sex, of course.
Megan: Man, if I wasn’t tired, I would go back in right now.
Sam: Don’t feel hurried. The spiral isn’t going anywhere, although it’s constantly changing. Indra’s Net is vast and infinite, for all intents and purposes. You could wander it forever and never experience the exact same space twice. Depending on how you set it up, it’s both an ADHD wonderland and a great place for meditation.
And there was much fun had at the beach.
Next- Episode 09: Community - Megan's training begins & a visit to the party that never ends.
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