Or for the newest cyber-game to be copied to the Californian mind, try Suicide Drive, and race a Formula 1 gleaming red Mitsubishi convertible at 200 kliks around the streets of Monte Carlo. Well there's no need now to get bruised and bloodied, let alone have a heart-attack before you're thirty. I'm cyber-drifting Pier 39 in the company of Star, a student from the local art college. He's introduced to me as an electronic artist who a year ago went on a field trip with his class to Pier 39 and never came back from the cyber-arcades. He calls himself an arcade cowboy, and from dawn to dusk plays the game.
Sex is disease, but machines are so clean.
He's my very first apparition of the third millennium. Now Pier 39 that night was a real fuzzy force-field. Big Daddies with babies strapped to their backs were hammering away at judo fighting machines. Well they looked over their Papa's shoulders at the flickering screens and you could almost feel the twitching of little fingers as they practiced their video machine strokes. Someone leans over and asks him in the middle of a frenzied game.