The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Across the Multiverse:
How Do Aliens Travel from
“Divisional” Space to “Network” Space?

Mari KOTANI1)THE TOMB OF NARRATIVES

The fall of 1999 witnessed the phenomenon of the popular indies horror movie The Blair Witch Project, co-directed by Daniel Myrick and
Eduardo Sanchez. The movie is set in 1994 in Burkittsville, a small town
in Maryland, where three college students are supposed to have shot adocumentary ﬁlm of some woods allegedly inhabited by witches, getting lost there and leaving behind a reel of their ﬁlm. The Blair Witch
Project, in other words, is presented as if it is this original student work,
completed by the directors through careful editing. The movie openswith an introduction to the history of Burkittsville, still haunted by thecolonial-era murder of the witch Elly Kedward, whose original accusers
went missing, and whose witchcraft case was followed by a series ofmurders in the town. It is this haunted past which interested the student
ﬁlm-makers in Burkittsville. While conducting research in the woods,
they begin to hear strange noises and encounter mysterious accidents, inthe end losing one of their members. Soon after that the remaining members start to be stalked by someone, and then ﬁnd a ruined house where
their ongoing documentary is abruptly interrupted. Later, this houseturns out to have been destroyed back in the 1940s:what the students saw
Copyright © 2002 Mari Kotani. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
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and shot is literally a haunted house, or, to be more exact, the ghost of
the house that should not still exist in the 1990s.
The Blair Witch Project itself does not take us into a full comprehension of the context. This movie is not autonomous. The historical background to the story is in fact extensively and creatively annotated byinternet websites that were put up simultaneously with the completionof the work. The participants in the website project of The Blair Witch
Project, mostly staff and fans of the movie, discuss intently how to interpret and supplement the ﬁlm. In this sense, The Blair Witch Projectdeserves to be known as the ﬁrst hypertextual blockbuster, completed
without an unnecessarily big Hollywood budget.
What fascinated me most in this ﬁlm is its use of the handicam, throughwhich we are introduced to colonial American history, where secret narratives, especially the legend of witchhunt, hidden deep within history,
gradually come to light, distorting the ordinary spatio-temporal continuum. It is through high-technology that the historically invisible narratives of the town become visible, involving a number of inhabitants andvisitors and ending with no clear resolution. Burkittsville seems to haveconsistently retained a historical blind spot.
Nevertheless, Japanese audiences were not able to welcome the movie
unconditionally, chieﬂy because the legends and narratives of the UnitedStates were not very familiar to them, and secondly because this kind of
hypertextual media tie-in was not as popular in Japan at the time.
Japanese audience enthusiasm may also have been muted by the earlier
success of native writer Koji Suzuki’s bestselling novel Ring (originally written in 1991) and its movie version, directed by Hideo Nakata in
1998.
Ring is a story centering around a mysterious videotape, a single
glance at which leads the viewer toward death. The hero, a magazine
journalist called Kazuyuki Asakawa, is so affected by the death of hisniece that he starts investigating and watches the tape himself. Struggling
with the fear of his own death, due to occur one week later, Asakawa
solves the enigma by uncovering the biodata of a deceased woman
psychic Sadako Yamamura, who died an unwilling death after being
plunged into a well, and whose resentment has been deeply imprinted
on the tape. Asakawa manages to avoid her curse by discovering her
corpse and mourning over her. Even then, however, Asakawa could not
destroy all the copies of the tape. Sadako’s curse will survive into theyears to come. As even this simple synopsis makes clear, this novel Ring,

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just like The Blair Witch Project, employs contemporary high-techaudio-visual technology as a narratological device inviting us into thesecrets of history. Although the Japanese audience may have difﬁculty
understanding the western symbolism of witches or hieroglyphs, it israther easy for the Japanese to grasp the supernatural connotation of the
red torii (a gateway at the entrance to the Shinto shrine) and a well witha chipped rim, as described in Ring.
From this perspective, the two works, The Blair Witch Project andRing, turn out to have extremely similar structures. Both open with thedeath of an extraordinary woman, unfold with a secret history as theirrespective backgrounds, and employ traditional narratology retroﬁtted
through advanced audio-visual technology. What matters most here isthat in both stories a high-tech device makes visible an extraordinary
woman lost deep within the past, accelerating the distortion of our own
spatio-temporal continuum. I ﬁnd this phenomenon highly helpful inreexamining the interaction between femininity and space.
The emergence of femininity proceeds together with the distortion of
the spatio-temporal continuum, especially in contemporary horror ﬁlms.
For instance, in her article in Alien Zone the feminist critic Barbara Creeddiscusses the Science Fiction horror movie by developing and reappropriating Alice Jardine’s “Gynesis” theory, which ﬁnds the dualistic legacy of western modernity under threat from the eruption of femininity,
madness, and unconsciousness. Creed carefully examines how ﬁlms like
Aliens and Videodrome allow something like “Gynesis” to explode, radically displacing the patriarchal reality of our spatio-temporal structure.
Now I consider Creed’s postfeminist approach also useful for explicating both The Blair Witch Project and Ring. Indeed, a ﬁrst glance willallow us to consider both works as rigidly based upon the narratologicalconventions of horror ﬁction; both involve the rediscovery of a buried
woman followed by the explosion of “Gynesis,” that is, the distortion of
spatio-temporal structure that transforms reality into fantasy. But still wemight wonder why the late 1990s saw the transpaciﬁc emergence andworldwide popularity of “Death of an Extraordinary Woman” stories.
This question brings us to a reconsideration of the role played by thehandicam and the videocassette recorder, the portable audio-visual
devices employed in these works. Horror ﬁction used to represent speciﬁc locales like graveyards, haunted woods, and cursed wells, where
supernatural events took place. In contrast, the new horror stories of the
1990s tend to displace the sense of locality characteristic of traditional

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horror ﬁction, by constructing a global network of horror through thehigh-tech audio-visual multiplication of an infectious curse. Of course,
the idea of audio-visual representation of the unreal cannot help but
remind us of the legends of the Victorian daguerreotype, which allegedly made visible the supernatural. The best-known case involved fakephotographs of fairies. But, even now we are tempted to believe in visual technology as a wonderful device that makes visible the invisible. Thiskind of city folklore is still dominant. Taking the place of plain photography, cinematography further promoted the deconstruction of theboundary between the real and the fantastic. Recent media coverage ofthe popularity of horror ﬁction and supernatural phenomena makes it
more difﬁcult for us to distinguish the actual from the ﬁctional. We
judge some event as real only because it is labeled as real, and vice versa.
Yes, in our hyper-capitalist age the distinction between reality and nonreality is all determined by classiﬁcation, not by essence. The point here
is not what reality is, but how it is narrated.
Accordingly, the supernatural, as depicted in the movies The Blair
Witch Project and Ring, is not so much narratological as technological.
It does not repeat the narratology of horror ﬁction but refers to itself,
especially to the audio-visual technology that made the whole movie possible, exactly by provoking the possibility that the special effects themselves were always already invaded and contaminated by something
extraordinary. This invader immediately infects whoever it encounters,
entrapping the victim in its own network. What is more, the authors are
not interested in updating canonical horror narratives in view of advanced technology, but simply in retroﬁtting the cheap gothic imagination that they suppose to be pervading our daily life. Nonetheless, unlike
traditional horror ﬁction writers, the authors in question never give aclear solution to the whole mystery. Although the heroes try to constructa sequence of causality in accordance with reality, the respective endings of The Blair Witch Project and Ring strike the audience as ambiguous. The enigmas remain unresolved, forming part of our absurd reality
itself. Thus, the supernatural phenomenon itself does not disappear fromanywhere, remaining intact. The Other World observes its own rules,
with its entrance always open to visitors; the inhabitants there always
expand the potentiality of the Other World, watching for an opportunity to tempt victims into Otherness.
This paper is primarily motivated by my interest in the outburst of“Gynesis” in the representational space of horror ﬁction. Taking into

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account the rise of hypermedia, here I would like to elucidate the greattransition from “divisional” space that long geopolitically characterized
the boundary between the real and the fantastic, to “network” space thathas cybernetically been enhanced through advanced technology. Whilehorror ﬁction used to describe a locally speciﬁc door into the supernatural, now it has started multiplying that very door all over the world.
2)

THE HABITAT OF ALIENSIn order to reﬂect upon this topic, let me begin by looking back at theliterary subgenre of female science ﬁction, which has consistently investigated the alienness of femininity and the relationship between femininity and technology. Moreover, recent feminist science ﬁction displays
a tendency to reconsider the habitat of aliens as “network” space, not“divisional” space.
The category of female science ﬁction was established through the discovery of woman as an alien. Certainly, aliens in science ﬁction could
well be redeﬁned as a collective identity consisting of a variety of aliens
discovered and reconﬁgured from time to time. In his co-compiled The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edition) Peter Nicholls locates theorigin of the popularity of aliens in the 19th-century French astronomer
and writer Camille Flammarion’s nonﬁctional Real and Imaginary
Worlds (1864; trans 1865 US) and Lumen (1887; trans with some newmaterial 1897 UK). These accounts of life on other worlds describe sentient plants, species for which respiration and alimentation are aspectsof the same process. The idea that divinely created souls could experience serial reincarnation in an inﬁnite variety of physical forms is featured in Flammarion’s Urania (1889; trans 1891 US). In the tradition of
the French evolutionary philosophers Lamark and Henri Bergson,
Flammarion ﬁtted both humans and aliens into a great evolutionary
scheme. Once translated into English, Flammarion’s works very naturally appealed to the UK audience, which was already familiar with theDarwinian idea of the survival of the ﬁttest. Contemporary UK writers
like H.G.Wells imagined the alien as a Darwinian competitor, a natural
enemy of mankind. The greatest example of this kind of alien is to befound in Wells’s major novel The War of the Worlds (1898), in which
the alien from Mars is typically characterized as a genocidal invader, that
is, a would-be conqueror and colonist of Earth. Once this role became acliché, this pattern of alien invader helped give rise to the early US

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pulp-magazine market represented by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edmund
Hamilton, P. Schuyler Miller, and others.
The signiﬁcance of aliens leads us to rethink the border between
humans and aliens. Stories involving a battle with aliens very often foreground topics such as the invasion of Earth and hegemony on other planets. To put it another way, speculation about aliens immediately leads toa reconsideration of the conception of power in space. How do aliens
survive hardships in their habitat? What is their habitat like? In the history of science ﬁction, alien habitats reﬂect a narratology that focusesupon boundary disputes and the domination of space. Especially in the
United States, at least up until the 1950s, science ﬁction was concernedwith speculation about the division of geopolitical space. And yet, it isalso true that this traditional perspective on space is likely to lead us
toward the pitfall of reductionism. Very recently, probably recalling
what happened to science ﬁction between the 1950s and the 60s, one of
the major American science ﬁction writers, Robert Silverberg, pointed
out the dangerous tendency of science ﬁction to make the universe too
familiar. Even the best writers are guilty of making the cosmos seem anexcessively cozy place, he says. For instance, Isaac Asimov’s famous
Foundation series (1944–86) depicts the inhabitants of the twenty-ﬁve
million inhabited worlds of the Galactic Empire zipping merrily aboutfrom planet to planet, going from Trantor to Siwenna to Terminus much
more easily than a citizen of Rome could have gone from Naples toAlexandria. The narratological limit of the series is that it reduces
interstellar travel to the level of a trip on the New York subway system(4–8). The same ﬂaw is also to be found in Frank Herbert’s Dune books(1963–87). In consequence, there is no wonder that in the 1960s someyounger talents within Anglo-American science ﬁction felt dissatisﬁedwith the ordinary idea of space that was so highly privileged in the mainstream of the ﬁeld.
This is why the early 1960s saw a revolution in the science ﬁction
imagination. Deeply inﬂuenced by modernist movements such as
Dadaism and Surrealism, the then emerging British writers like J. G.
Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Michael Moorcock inaugurated the New
Wave science ﬁction movement, by radically questioning the American
sense of space and replacing the then dominant concept of “outer space”
with their new concept of “inner space.” For these writers, earth was theone and only alien planet, and the one which they believed true science
ﬁction should explore. In his famous manifesto for New Wave science

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ﬁction writers, “Which Way to Inner Space?” (1962) Ballard poignantly criticized the popularity of American space opera, and insisted thatscience ﬁction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel,
extraterrestrial life forms, galactic wars, and the overlap of these ideasthat made up the subject matter of nine-tenths of magazine-SF (195–198).
The 60s New Wave science ﬁction writers’ exploration into innerspace was followed and reinterpreted by the 70s Feminist science ﬁction
writers’ rediscovery of the alien inhabiting the inner space, that is, theOther hiding within human consciousness. This new movement in the70s began with a serious reinvestigation of what ‘the human’ is. For, as
one of the most illuminating feminist SF critics Marleen S. Barr explains,
the typical human being as depicted in American science ﬁction turns
out to be no more than a caricature of Male-Middle-class-White-Heterosexuals. Although there are worlds of difference within the categories ofgender, class, race and sexuality, our conventional common sense has
persistently hidden these differences under the umbrella of “humanbeing.” Therefore, the 1970s saw the major expedition of women writers into femininity as the greatest Other, that is, the most mysterious
alien. Fully imbibing the atmosphere of Women’s Liberation, they questioned the difference between male-speciﬁc inner space and female-speciﬁc inner space, creating their own idea of gender space. Reinventionof woman as the greatest alien in civilization encouraged these writers
to rediscover and reexamine a reservation they called the women’s own
nation.
They also unearthed and revaluated the feminist utopian texts written
during the period of First Wave Feminism (1860–1920), such as Mary
E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora:A Prophesy (1880–81), Aice Ilgefritz Jones& Ella Merchant’s Unveiling a Parallel (1893), and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Herland (1914). The ﬁrst of these impressively creates a obscure, part-radical, part-conservative utopia set within a hollow earth,where an all-woman parthenogenetic society enjoys an advanced technology and stringent laws. Likewise, Gilman’s novel also presents an
isolated parthenogenetic society 2,000 years hence. Even this brief outline demonstrates that this early feminist utopia as envisioned by Lane
and Gilman is based upon the idea of “divisional” space, which realizes
an “isolated” community somewhere on the earth. Inspired by their precursors, the writers of Second Wave Feminism undertook to reconstruct
the space of feminist utopia, essentially and geographically “divided”

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MARI KOTANIfrom our everyday life. This sort of approach may remind us of theseparatism of the colonial Puritans, the enforced migration of Native
Americans, and the segregation of African Americans under Jim Crowism.
Nevertheless, the critical difference from their historical precursors hereis that their revised feminist utopia, as constructed in James Tiptree Jr’s
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1977) and Eleanor Arnason’s A
Woman of the Iron People (1991) is not the result of any compulsory
system, but rather is the effect of women’s voluntary politics and architectonics. In this respect, their utopia shares some contemporary conditions with the communes typical of the Flower Generation. Anyhow, it
is evident that from the Colonial period through the Cold War period,
the United States has gone through a variety of forms of “divisional”
space.
And yet, with the rise of cyberspace in the 1980s, ﬁrst detailed by thecyberpunk writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984),
emerging writers in this decade started groping for a way to present symbiotic life, not in divisional space but in network space. Whereas in thepast we inhabited a nationally and geographically divided space, now
the new concept of cyberspace radically undermines the traditional outlines of space as such, opening up new dimensions consisting of race,
gender, class, and sexuality. Though living in a speciﬁc space, we arealso enabled to lead another symbiotic life, joining a global network
made up of a diversity of communities. The 1990s especially saw anincreasing number of novels narrating the multiplication of networks
within network space that was the same size as Earth.
Let me illustrate this point with J. K. Rowling’s globally bestsellingnovel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1996). Of course, insofar as this is a typical fantasy, it seems difﬁcult, at a ﬁrst glance, to reconstrue the narrative in terms of what I have called “network space.” But,
please consider a group of special wizards who enjoy a quiet life allover the world, seemingly divided from the human world. Actually the
wizard world exists parallel with the human world, mostly occupying
the same space, though the former is invisible and inaudible to the latter, and vice versa. Leading a kind of crypto-symbiotic life with humanbeings, the wizard, no matter where he or she is, can communicate
immediately with, for example, Egyptian friends through a wizardry
network, which functions precisely like cyberspace. To be more correct,
it is rather that without the advent of the internet Rowling herself could
not have conceived of this idea of the wizard’s symbiosis with humans.

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We may be living in a space simply not knowing it has always actually
been twofold, our living space including invisible and inaudible aliensquatters. And it is undoubtedly the advent of cybermedia that let theauthor Rowling come up with this brilliant idea of network space.
Indeed, in the 1990s internet technology disclosed and linked hitherto invisible and untouchable communities, transforming our ordinary life
into something more like a mosaic, and transporting us from geographically divided space to multilayered network space, which now I would
like to redeﬁne as a “multiverse.” This, I believe, is the reason why the
90s saw an explosion of new novels deeply involved with the possibility of a queer space that science ﬁction history had scarcely witnessed
before.
This viewpoint will help us rethink the other world implied in The
Blair Witch Project as one mirroring our multiverse. The more amateurish the use of an audio-visual device seems, the more realistic theother world becomes. This ﬁlm reﬂects not so much an alternate history as the nodal point of a self-evolving narratological network in whichmedia addicts infected by the work join forces to keep on creating theirown legends. It is not that this movie presents us with another world, butthat it reveals the hitherto hidden network. What matters now is not thecity folklore represented by works like The Blair Witch Project and Ring,
but rather a kind of meta-city folklore woven out of the audience-oriented subtexts on the internet websites. As we lead our everyday lives,
media addicts, just like ghosts, carry on living in a technoscape, squatting within and moving across part of that very everyday life. This situation will provide us with a key to understanding what the multiverse is.
From this perspective of the multiverse, let me next reexamine how
feminist science ﬁction in the 1990s updated and recreated the portraitof aliens, as well as their habitats. Consideration of the transgression of
the boundaries dividing space leads to a rediscovery of the possibility of
network community, which in turn will uncover new aliens like cyborgs,
travelers, and the queer. In the multiverse the cyborg ﬁnds his or her own
body and subjectivity highly transgressive; the traveler transgresses thegeopolitical borders; the queer makes visible the invisible.

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MARI KOTANI3)ACROSS THE MULTIVERSEa) Cyborgs
While science ﬁction used to represent cyborgs as embracing the crisis of identity, in the post-1990s cyborgs have transﬁgured themselves
into networkers hardwired with cyberspace.
Here enters Maggie, a representative cyborg woman, the heroine of
Amy Thomson’s ﬁrst novel Virtual Girl (1993). Created by a typicalotaku mad scientist, Arnold, this robot Maggie escapes from her creator,
joins the homeless community, and fashions her own self. Becoming
familiar with the street, where minority people help construct their own
underground culture through a variety of networks, Maggie accidentally ﬁnds her own ideal partner in cyberspace. One day Maggie visits alibrary, discovering on the library’s computer an artiﬁcial intelligenceeager to obtain its own body. Maggie then makes every effort to obtain
an artiﬁcial body. At this point, we should not ignore the point that
Maggie is a cyborg woman already always linked with cyberspace. She
gives us an insight into the similarity between the underground cultural
network and the cyberspace network.
Similarly, in her major novel Synners Pat Cadigan features the synner
Gina, a walking rock’n’roll synthesizer with a socket within her skull.
Gina is endowed with a special ability to combine and reorganize a number of dreams people play in their unconscious into a beautiful harmony. By the same token, however, Cadigan is so keenly aware of thedanger of the ability as to describe a paradox: the more popular the heroine gets by synthesizing the dreams of the fellow musicians, the more
vulnerable she becomes mentally and ﬁnancially.
b) Travelers
Science ﬁction used to emphasize its tourist and anthropologicalperspective, especially when dealing with a strange civilization on another planet. Eleanor Arnason’s A Woman of the Iron People (1990) andNaomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) are both masterpieces of speculative ﬁction featuring a white woman who achieves theﬁrst encounter with an alien zone, and comes to question her own identity. At ﬁrst glance, the former novel seems to intricately extrapolate an
encounter with Native Americans, whereas the latter deals with anencounter with Native Africans. Both novels ironically reveal how mis-

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communication afﬂicts people, and how cultural hybridization takes
place at the same time. The authors doubtlessly share a deep interest in
the way spatio-temporal travel radically refreshes our ordinary historical discourses.
Science ﬁction travel thus proves to be a trans-dimensional odyssey
enabling us to discover the hitherto invisible cultural networks hidden
within our familiar spatio-temporal structure. It is the imaginary voyagethat shows us reality as a multiverse, where a number of dimensions areintertwined with each other. In Lisa Mason’s cyberpunk novel Arachne(1990), set in a post-earthquake San Francisco, a woman lawyer keeps
working by moving through cyberspace, ending up with the discoveryof an unknown network totally irrelevant to the real political structure inwhich she lives. As if tracing a path within cobwebs, she sneaks into thehidden space of this electronic community. Inhabitants in the multiverse
enjoy not only spatio-temporal travel but also hyper-dimensional travel,
which further uncovers a network of queers that our reality has persistently concealed within itself.
c)Queers

It has often been noted that invisible people inhabiting our everyday
life have created their own independent network. Thus, feminist writers
like Pat Cadigan, Amy Thomson, and Lisa Mason have all reﬁgured theinvisible champion of underground culture, the invisible minority in the
United States, as woman. And yet, the rise of the multiverse helped
expose the community of queers, especially lesbians, most dramatically.
I do not ﬁnd it accidental that Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends(1994), Nicola Grifﬁth’s Slow River (1995), and Jewelle Gomez’s The
Gilda Stories (1991) all grapple with the interaction between lesbian sexuality and simulation technology.
Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends is the story of an ex-illegal
netwalker called Trouble, whose name has been reappropriated by ahacker for illegal use, and who has returned to network space in order toarrest the criminal in question. The author brilliantly portrays the cyberspace of the future, detailing Trouble’s friends in underground culture,
the lesbian network, and the forces of law and order which are cracking
down on the world of the computer nets, where illegal netwalkers havebeen able to enjoy life without censorship. What attracts me especially,
however, is a scene in which netwalkers from their respective minorities
encounter each other inside cyberspace: Trouble not only meets with but

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also makes a ﬁght with a stranger falsely claiming to be Trouble herself,
surviving a kind of sexual harassment. This battle could well be reinterpreted as one between conscience and evil, or between freedom andindulgence.
Nicola Grifﬁth’s Slow River focuses upon the fate of a favorite daughter of one of the world’ s most powerful families, Lore van de Oesterling,
who is kidnapped and injured, but ﬁnally saved by an outlaw technologist called Spanner. Gradually it becomes clear that her own family tooka major part in the kidnapping. Shocked by her family’s conspiracy, Loredecides to stay with Spanner, who teaches her the intoxication of life on
the wrong side of the law. Then, depressed by and bored with this new
way of life, she strikes out on her own, using the identity of a deadwoman. However, one day, inside the drainage system in which she has
started working, a terrible accident takes place. The author brilliantly
dramatizes the heroine’s move from her position as a billionaire’s daughter to that of a woman worker, vividly depicting the drainage system andthe lesbian community, both of which constitute invisible networks ofthe city, interacting with each other’s structure.
This kind of lesbianism has often also been rendered in a sophisticated way through vampire narratives. Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories,
for example, provides the reader with an enjoyable avantgarde narrative
which concentrates upon the sexuality of a Black lesbian vampire. Herethe author reinvents blood as a medico-economic sign representing thecirculation of plague and money. With blood as the metaphor, we areonce again given a key to envisioning an invisible network behind our
eco-biological space.
4)

CONCLUSION: THE CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME

Postmodern aliens today have all transferred from divisional space to
network space, pioneering the potentiality of the multiverse. The expansion of the multilayered network will revolutionize our epistemology,
by radically overturning and reconstructing our conventional geopolitics
based upon the units of the nation-state. Nevertheless, this paradigm shift
caused by advanced technology also makes us recognize a serious danger. Certainly, The Blair Witch Project revealed the secret history of thewitch Elly Kedward buried deep within the past. But, it should also be
noted that just like the female psychic Sadako in Ring, Elly performs theclassical stereotype of witch, provoking misogynic responses from theACROSS THE MULTIVERSE

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audience. Advanced technology very often goes hand-in-hand with a certain kind of nostalgia, causing the conspiratorial network to revive anold-fashioned gender politics. This danger has always been inherent
within underground culture without any center.
How can we avoid this pitfall? Here again, Pat Cadigan’s Synners will
give us a good suggestion. We should reinvestigate the logic of the catand-mouse game: while network space, for the sake of security, necessitates an autonomous program of a patrol virus, which cannot help but
interact with its own vaccine program, the vaccine program gradually
proves ineffective to the virus, which immediately revives and reorganizes itself. Further speculation upon this irony will deﬁnitely take us
into the frontier of the multiverse.
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