Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (482 page)

“Once you’ve distilled something to pure information, it just can’t be reconstituted in a less efficient form,” the woman explains, smiling. There’s no warmth to her. A
less efficient form.
If that’s what she really thinks, he knows he should be plenty scared of these people. Did she say things like that to Bobby? And did it make him even
more
eager?

“There may be no more exalted a form of existence than to live as sentient information,” she goes on. “Though a lot more research must be done before we can offer conversation on a larger scale.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Do they know that, Bobby and the rest?”

“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,” says the younger man. He looks as though he’s still getting over the pain of having outgrown his boogie shoes. “The system’s quite perfected. What Grethe means is we want to research more applications for this new form of existence.”

“Why not go over yourselves and do that, if it’s so
exalted.”

“There are certain things that need to be done on this side,” the woman says bitchily. “Just because—”

“Grethe.” The older man shakes his head. She pats her slicked-back hair as though to soothe herself and moves away.

“We have other plans for Bobby when he gets tired of being featured in clubs,” the older man says. “Even now, we’re educating him, adding more data to his basic information configuration—”

“That would mean he ain’t really
Bobby
any more, then, huh?”

The man laughs. “Of course he’s Bobby. Do you change into someone else every time you learn something new?”

“Can you prove I
don’t?”

The man eyes him warily. “Look. You
saw
him. Was that Bobby?”

“I saw a video of Bobby dancing on a giant screen.”

“That
is
Bobby and it will remain Bobby no matter what, whether he’s poured into a video screen in a dot pattern or transmitted the length of the universe.”

“That what you got in mind for him? Send a message to nowhere and the message is him?”

“We could. But we’re not going to. We’re introducing him to the concept of higher dimensions. The way he is now, he could possibly break out of the three-dimensional level of existence, pioneer a whole new plane of reality.”

“Yeah? And how do you think you’re gonna get Bobby to do
that?”

“We convince him it’s entertaining.”

He laughs. “That’s a good one. Yeah. Entertainment. You get to a high level of existence and you’ll open a club there that only the hippest can get into. It figures.”

The older man’s face gets hard. “That’s what all you Pretty Boys are crazy for, isn’t it? Entertainment?”

He looks around. The room must have been a dressing room or something back in the days when bands had been live. Somewhere overhead he can hear the faint noise of the club but he can’t tell if Bobby’s still on. “You call this entertainment?”

“I’m tired of this little prick,” the woman chimes in. “He’s thrown away opportunities other people would kill for—”

He makes a rude noise. “Yeah, we’d all kill to be someone’s data chip. You think I really believe Bobby’s real just because I can see him on a
screen?”

The older man turns to the younger one. “Phone up and have them pipe Bobby down here.” Then he swings the lounger around so it faces a nice modern screen implanted in a shored-up cement-block wall.

“Bobby will join us shortly. Then he can tell you whether he’s real or not himself. How will that be for you?”

He stares hard at the screen, ignoring the man, waiting for Bobby’s image to appear. As though they really bothered to communicate regularly with Bobby this way. Feed in that kind of data and memory and Bobby’ll believe it. He shifts uncomfortably, suddenly wondering how far he could get if he moved fast enough.

“My
boy
,”
says Bobby’s sweet voice from the speaker on either side of the screen and he forces himself to keep looking as Bobby fades in, presenting himself on the same kind of lounger and looking mildly exerted, as though he’s just come off the dance floor for real. “Saw you shakin’ it upstairs awhile ago. You haven’t been here for such a long time. What’s the story?”

He opens his mouth but there’s no sound. Bobby looks at him with boundless patience and indulgence. So Pretty, hair the perfect shade now and not a bit dry from the dyes and lighteners, skin flawless and shining like a healthy angel. Overnight angel, just like the old song.

“My
boy
,”
says Bobby. “Are you struck, like, shy or
dead?”

He closes his mouth, takes one breath. “I don’t like it, Bobby. I don’t like it this way.”

“Of course not, lover. You’re the Watcher, not the Watchee, that’s why. Get yourself picked up for a reason or two and your disposition will
change
.”

“You really like it, Bobby, being a blip on a chip?”

“Blip on a chip, your ass. I’m a universe now. I’m, like,
everything.
And, hey, dig - I’m on every channel.” Bobby laughed. “I’m happy I’m sad!”

“S-A-D,” comes in the older man. “Self-Aware Data.”

“Ooo-eee,” he says. “Too clever for me. Can I get out of here now?”

“What’s your hurry?” Bobby pouts. “Just because I went over you don’t love me any more?”

“You always were screwed up about that, Bobby. Do you know the difference between being loved and being watched?”

“Sophisticated boy,” Bobby says. “So wise, so learned. So fully packed. On this side, there
is
no difference. Maybe there never was. If you love me, you watch me. If you don’t look, you don’t care and if you don’t care I don’t matter. If I don’t matter, I don’t exist. Right?”

He shakes his head.

“No, my boy, I
am
right.” Bobby laughs. “You believe I’m right, because if you
didn’t,
you wouldn’t come shaking your Pretty Boy ass in a place like
this,
now, would you? You
like
to be watched, get seen. You see me, I see you. Life goes on.”

He looks up at the older man, needing relief from Bobby’s pure Prettiness. “How does he see me?”

“Sensors in the equipment. Technical stuff, nothing you care about.”

He sighs. He should be upstairs or across town, shaking it with everyone else, living Pretty for as long as he could. Maybe in another few months, this way would begin to look good to him. By then they might be off Pretty Boys and looking for some other type and there he’d be, out in the cold-cold, sliding down the other side of his peak and no one would
want
him. Shut out of something going on that he might want to know about after all. Can he face it? He glances at the younger man. All grown up and no place to glow. Yeah, but can
he
face it?

He doesn’t know. Used to be there wasn’t much of a choice and now that there is, it only seems to make it worse. Bobby’s image looks like it’s studying him for some kind of sign, Pretty eyes bright, hopeful.

The older man leans down and speaks low into his ear. “We need to get you before you’re twenty-five, before the brain stops growing. A mind taken from a still-growing brain will blossom and adapt. Some of Bobby’s predecessors have made marvellous adaptation to their new medium. Pure video: there’s a staff that does nothing all day but watch and interpret their symbols for breakthroughs in thought. And we’ll be taking Pretty Boys for as long as they’re publicly sought-after. It’s the most efficient way to find the best performers, go for the ones everyone wants to see or be. The top of the trend is closest to heaven. And even if you never make a breakthrough, you’ll still be entertainment. Not such a bad way to live for a Pretty Boy. Never have to age, to be sick, to lose touch. You spent most of your life young, why learn how to be old? Why learn how to live without all the things you have now—”

He puts his hands over his ears. The older man is still talking and Bobby is saying something and the younger man and the woman come over to try to do something about him. Refreshments are falling off the tray. He struggles out of the lounger and makes for the door.

“Hey, my
boy
,”
Bobby calls after him. “Gimme a minute here, gimme what the problem is.”

He doesn’t answer. What can you tell someone made of pure information anyway?

* * * *

There’s a new guy on the front door, bigger and meaner than His Mohawkness but he’s only there to keep people out, not to keep anyone
in.
You want to jump ship, go to, you poor un-hip asshole. Even if you are a Pretty Boy. He reads it in the guy’s face as he passes from noise into the 3 a.m. quiet of the street.

They let him go. He doesn’t fool himself about that part. They
let
him out of the room because they know all about him. They know he lives like Bobby lived, they know he loves what Bobby loved - the clubs, the admiration, the lust of strangers for his personal magic. He can’t say he doesn’t love that, because he
does.
He isn’t even sure if he loves it more than he ever loved Bobby, or if he loves it more than being alive. Than being live.

And here it is 3 a.m., clubbing prime time, and he is moving toward home. Maybe he
is
a poor up-hip asshole after all, no matter what he loves. Too stupid even to stay in the club, let alone grab a ride to heaven. Still he keeps moving, unbothered by the chill but feeling it. Bobby doesn’t have to go home in the cold any more, he thinks. Bobby doesn’t even have to get through the hours between the club-times if he doesn’t want to. All times are now prime time for Bobby. Even if he gets unplugged, he’ll never know the difference. Poof, it’s a day later, poof, it’s a year later, poof, you’re out for good. Painlessly.

Maybe Bobby has the right idea, he thinks, moving along the empty sidewalk. If he goes over tomorrow, who will notice? Like when he left the dance floor—people will come and fill up the space. Ultimately, it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone.

He smiles suddenly. Except
them.
As long as they don’t have him, he makes a difference. As long as he has flesh to shake and flaunt and feel with, he makes a pretty goddamn big difference to them. Even after they don’t want him any more, he will still be the one they didn’t get. He rubs his hands together against the chill, feeling the skin rubbing skin, really feeling it for the first time in a long time, and he thinks about sixteen million things all at once, maybe one thing for every brain cell he’s using, or maybe one thing for every brain cell yet to come.

He keeps moving, holding to the big thought, making a difference, and all the little things they won’t be making a program out of. He’s lightheaded with joy - he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

Neither do they.

* * * *

Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc.

In the 1980s, a group of rebellious young writers set out to rejuvenate science fiction. Some of these writers knew each other, worked together, and called themselves The Movement. Others were doing something similarly different on their own, and when they went to conferences, mutual friends told them, You should really get to know these guys—using
guys
to refer to people in either gender, though Pat Cadigan was the only woman to join The Movement at this point. These writers soon were called the Cyberpunks. They used a lot of virtuoso pyrotechnics in their literary style, mixing the
noir
hard-boiled detective cynical prose of Raymond Chandler with scientific and technological terms from manuals describing the next generation of hardware and software. This gave readers a giddy feeling of a future unfolding around them, punctuated by abrupt shifts modeled on the jump cuts between scenes in the then-cutting edge medium of MTV music videos.

The contrast between the unreachable vast powers that
really
controlled things—multinational corporations—and the alienated individual on the street—usually the narrator or main character—seemed right to readers who had grown up in Marshall McLuhan’s “electronic village”: events were ultimately out of the control of the individual. Their generation had been told by Vance Packard’s study
The Hidden Persuaders
(1957) just how marketing media manipulated the consciousness of the man in the street. At the same time, real-world technology was inserted into people’s bodies, in the form of heart implants—the first artificial heart was implanted in 1969, and by the 1980s, this had become a relatively frequent operation—hearing aids, and increasingly biocompatible soft contact lenses. Cyberpunk fiction takes such devices to the next level: prosthetic arms with “real-limb” sensivity, artificial eyes that facilitate computer-brain interfaces through the optic nerve, and miniature but powerful hard drives inserted in the occipital ridge of the skull. All of this is shot through with a much moodier tone than earlier science fiction has, which is, after all, often narrated by a confident maverick scientist or a bold, capable space pilot. The narrator of many cyberpunk stories is the bitter, seemingly washed-up hacker or music-video synthesizer whose instrument is her brain playing its imaginings into the recording company’s consoles.

This group of writers had grown up reading Golden Age sci-fi in the pulps, they had seen science fiction in the movies, and they had seen it on TV (which they were the first generation to watch from a very early age). Tales of the strange, stretching their concepts of reality, could be seen in
The Twilight Zone
and
The Outer Limits
, both the Stone Age and the Future were available in the weekly animated series
The Flintstones
and
The Jetsons
, and, during the fabled Sixties, the New Wave of science fiction and its TV incarnation,
Star Trek
, as well as the theatrical releases of
2001: A Space Odyssey
,
The Fantastic Voyage
, and
Planet of the Apes all shaped their view of the genre as one where the setting could be in interplanetary space, within the human body, or on an Earth inhabited by civilized simians rather than homo sapiens. However, by the 1980s, when the New Wave had ossified into the Permanent Wave, this group of writers wanted to assert their own view of future reality in a way that departed from the Far Future optimism of the Golden Age and the dystopian bleakness of much of the New Wave. These writers’ view of the future was less that of a reality distinct from the present, than an extension of that present, in which computers were just starting to be made available for individuals to use in their own homes, in the form of Word Processors, but their fictional future reality was sped up on amphetamines and adrenaline to match the near-instantaneous speed of those computers.

Just as the cyberpunk authors looked to Japan as a leader in technological innovation and romanticized Japanese organized crime “families,” the Yakuza—or Yak, as cyberpunk authors affectionately abbreviate the term—cyberpunk had a reciprocal influence on Anime and Manga. The Manga, or comic-book, versions of
Akira
and
Ghost in the Shell
, influenced by the post-Apocalyptic and cyborgizing elements in cyberpunk, inspired the anime films
Akira
(1988) and
Ghost in the Shell
(1995) and their sequels, which have in turn gained devoted audiences in the United States.
Serial Experiments: Lain
(1998) was a Japanese television series involving an adolescent girl and her interactions with the Wired, a virtual reality highly influenced by the cyberpunk realm known as cyberspace, Artificial Reality, or the Metaverse. Its parallels to the simultaneous Pat Cadigan novel Tea from an Empty Cup are eerie in their synchronicity.

Cyberpunk was the first significant movement in science fiction to emerge since the decline of the New Wave of the late 1960s and 1970s. Arguably, the first published story in the subgenre was William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981), although the term “cyberpunk” itself originated in a short story Bruce Bethke wrote in 1980; his “Cyberpunk” was not published, however, until 1983. Gibson’s groundbreaking novel
Neuromancer
(1984) established that small group of writers who initially had referred to themselves simply as “the Movement” as the Cyberpunks, and established Cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction that soon penetrated literature, film, graphic art, video games, and the world of fashion. By the time the documentary
Cyberpunk
was released by Mystic Arts Video in 1991, the movement
qua
movement had diffused out into the culture at large, with original cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan stating in 1992 that cyberpunk was dead, reidentifying herself as a “technofeminist.” However, it was in 1992 that one of the most significant cyberpunk novels was published—Neal Stephenson’s
Snow Crash
. Then, in 1999, one of the films most heavily indebted to cyberpunk elements,
The Matrix
, was released, with two sequels appearing in 2003. Finally—and I use that word advisedly—a “Post-Cyberpunk Anthology,” Rewired, was published in 2007. For a movement that was first officially pronounced dead in 1986—by Vincent Omniaveritas, a.k.a. Bruce Sterling, in Cheap Truth, a cyberpunk periodical—cyberpunk is demonstrating a remarkable postmortem longevity.

The word “cyberpunk” itself was derived by Bethke from the Greek ⌡∑〉