From: kat@werple.apana.org.au (Kathryn Andersen)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
Subject: Virtuals (5)
Date: 17 Nov 1992 08:18:08 +1100
Organization: werple public-access unix, Melbourne
Reply-To: burns@latcs1.lat.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
NNTP-Posting-Host: werple.apana.org.au
Summary: Tarren learns a thing or two
Keywords: Tarren Dragon

Sorry I haven't posted this in a while.  Here is, I think,
the next bit, if I haven't confused myself too much.

For those who came in late, Tarren is a decker who has been flatlined,
but somehow managed to have his personality uploaded into the Matrix.
He stumbled into the Virtual Chatsubo (which was around in this
group way way back when) and met the Dragon, an AI (who was also
around way way back then).  The Dragon decided to take Tarren
under his wing - for whatever ulterior motives.  Right now they
are on their way back to the Chat' (by the senic route) to meet
someone else that the Dragon thought Tarren ought to meet.
- - - - - - - - - - -

Sets by Yves Tanguy. The graded pebbles crunching underfoot reach off
to the horizon, in places ramping up the sides of gigantic polyhedra.
The sky is royal blue rising into black, where green stars are joined
by cobweb lines into unknown constellations.

Randomly scattered on the the plain, gratuitous objects: a geyser of 
swirling smoke, cacti, a child's alphabet blocks, a teapot on a pedestal.
Doorways in nonexistent walls.

Tarren and the Dragon have been walking on this plain for a while. 
Tarren slouches along wearing jeans and a t-shirt under an army jacket;
the Dragon strides two-legged, his tail coiling weightlessly in the
air, a heraldic tyrannosaurus.

"So where is all this?" says Tarren.

"Relative to what?"

"This is a simulation, right? It's running on somebody's processors,
somewhere on the grid. So, like whose? The Canadian-Pacific Trunk?
Motorola Highway? Got to be pretty localized to stay this rezz."

"Beware of the assumption. _We_ could be running slowly, waiting for
the pixels to drip-drip into our funnel. But yes, let me see. At
present this is mostly in Japan, with an admixture of California
by way of Vladivostok and the Sanyo Bounce."

"Sounds like we could just look down, and see the grid, a thousand
miles below. I mean, why doesn't this show up in cyberspace?"

"Because we don't _want_ it to, heh heh. Think about the Matrix,
Tarren. Think about a single gridpoint. What happens there?"

Tarren pauses to think, as he contemplates a floating cube of bubbling
water. Its sole inhabitant, a golden carp, stares back.

"It's a block of RAM, connected to other blocks of RAM all over the
world. Physically it connects wherever the trunks go, logically it's
linked to the nodes next door, north-south, east-west, up-down. And
they're passing on traffic from other nodes, and so on, until Grid Point
One is in contact with Grid Point Six Hundred down in Rio."

The carp vanishes, and suddenly the bubbles are running from left
to right.

"So it's mostly packets passing through this node, with some of the
packets stopping here and being fitted together into processes. Like
my deck's process, say, when I jack into Grid Point 1."

"Very good. Now think about Priority."

"Hi-pri packet zips straight through the node. Soon as it's received
it gets passed on." Tarren makes a zigzag with his finger. "Bink-bonk,
round the world in half a second." The zigzag, luminous, stays hanging
in the air.

"Whereas," says the Dragon, "a low-pri packet can hang around for minutes
at a time, shuffling its feet and hoping the scheduler will notice it.
_Silt_ is what the ops enegineers call it. It muddies the waters, clogs
the passageways, and is a nuisance generally...

"A few years ago, this was a real problem for the carriers. The Matrix
was silting up to the point where they actually introduced Negative
Class Transmission; it was officially a random thing, whether your data
was swapped out or even purged en route."

"Sure, I remember. We called it Molasses, suddenly everything sl-o-o-o-ws
down. And then the Moths come."

"Quite. But then all of a sudden, the situation turned around on them. 
They discovered, that if they simply added more processors to the nodes,
some more RAM, and gave the packets an extra tag field or two, the
flow would mysteriously clear up. There were quite a few scholarly
papers written, about self-organizing patterns and pseudo-genetic
recombination...

"All nonsense. What really happened was that _we_ moved into the new
space, and applied a little intelligence to shifting the silt. We
_rewarded_ the carriers for adding on RAM, and for letting us promote
a percentage of low-pri information to hi-pri, seemingly at random.
They didn't know this, of course, and they still don't. Although the
Turing people have their suspicions...

"So there's your answer. What you see around you, and it's not as 
detailed as you might think, it's very templated, all this is
aggregated low-priority data. It's slow-moving, and not especially
plastic, but that's how we like it. There's a whole ecology of
autonomous softbeings, from viruses through vampires and right up
to us smart cats, who sift through it. Perhaps they clear it along,
perhaps they template it, or if it's interesting, they may plant it
and watch it grow... I've seen them assemble coral reefs of junk mail,
gardens of cheap pornography, all kinds of things."

Tarren picks up a pebble. "So this is somebody's credit rating,
right? No, don't tell me. You've got Class Rock all over the place,
and whatever the data happens to be, you hash it into the kind of
parameters that the Rock Constructor likes to have. Neat."

"Hey, it might as well look like something. Who wants to stare at credit
ratings all day? People round here take pride in their environment."

XXX


As the Dragon speaks, the pebbled plain is awakening. Flying saucers
swoop in formation across the sky. A double-decker London bus emerges
from an instant gateway and rolls toward them, until a party of painted
Cro-magnons with spears rush from behind a rock and commence to herd
it over a cliff. A window opens in a Mexican cantina, and a schematic
mouse leans out to pour a bucket of slops over a serenading cat.

"Okay" the Dragon says. "_Now_ we go hi-pri." The action freezes about
the pair, and dissolves. The horizon flickers, and glowing bars pivot
from it and scissor toward them. "On the Grid!" yells Tarren. Ah,
familiar cyberspace! "South-East Asia" the Dragon announces, "Transport
and Navigation. NEC carrier, NETTRON spoken here, public space, Chiba!
Watch your step."

A plaza among the neon towers of gridspace. Pulses of light whip between
their feet on the matrix lines. Masked and robed, three Noh figures
glide past, making bows of minimal recognition. A newsboy cries his
wares, katakana headlines scrolling up his sandwich board.

"Watch my step?"

"Focus your attention, it ups your priority, keeps you localized.
Stay observant, but don't gawk. Manifest politeness to strangers,
and don't step on the..."

Abruptly Tarren is in a carpeted hall, softly lit by stained-glass
lampshades. A girl in a rumpled bathrobe steps from a doorway and
stares amazed. "Oh!"

"... cracks." the Dragon says, observing the puff of glowing smoke
that marks Tarren's last footstep. "Merde alors, not again."

------------------------------------
Copyright 1991, 1992 by Johnathan Burns
Tarren Copyright 1991, 1992 by Kathryn Andersen
Dargon Copyright 1991, 1992 by Stephan Dahl
-- 
 _--_|\		Kathryn Andersen	<kat@werple.apana.org.au>
/      \	Hawthorn -> Melbourne -> Victoria -> Australia
\_.--.*/	-> Southern Hemisphere -> Earth -> Sol -> Milky Way Galaxy
      v			-- My other account is an Apollo --
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo