Archive-name: Fantasy/dixie.txt

Archive-author: Bob King        (c) 1993

Archive-title: Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe





Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe is my first effort at a story for

Alt.Sex.Stories. It asks the question, "what would the Internet be like if it

was a virtual reality network?" S&M, D&S, blood, gore and ungentlemanly

behaviour. Language... Parential Discretion is probably far too late...



Vague enough for you, Omaha?



Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe

(C)1993 Bob King, All rights reserved.



Permission is given to freely distribute this file by electronic means as long

as the entire file remains intact, without change or omission, and especially

including this notice. Permission is also given to print out single

copies of this file for personal use. 





Chapter One



    I am jammin' the wave, man; plugged in, javohl? I am surfin' the reality

curve; I'm toppin' the line! I'm playin Greedball with Jim the Rat; the Full

Virtual Reality environment surrounds us with screaming textures and shrieking

rhythms as we keep score by the feedback to our pleasure/pain centers. Right

now I'm flying like I took 10 straight hits of crack while Jimbo is looking

kind of green, sweating out the consequences of bein' a natural-born loser.

    The ball comes zipping at me, and time >>>>warps>>>> as I (((reach for it

and fail utterly; pain like knives, like crazed rats clawing at my prostate,

like snorting Drano, pain like God's eye on me; the pain clears my mind and

centers me. It hurts just right...

    *Click*

    In the groove. Flick. Left. Flick. Right. Flick my eyes flick side to side

flick up and down; the acid green and ultra-blue balls scream their

trajectories inside the nearly weightless geodesic space. The walls are down;

I feel the tug of one of my green pentagons as my arc tops out. As I start to

fall I snag one of my greens and hurl it away while cranking it's inertial

mass to the max. I feel my bones groan with the effort as it streaks towards

one of my green triangles on the opposite hemisphere.

    Jim launches to intercept but he didn't catch on how much mass I added;

his fingers fold back with audible pops as the ball brushes by to score. Jim

starts screaming as the exit sequence starts; his eyeballs explode just about

the time I blow my wad; then the geodesic dissolves into pixels and I'm back

in my Chariot, the Crotch-Monster slurping away so as to get every drop. The

scoreboard tells me I'm 8 for 3 with Jim; good, good; not so much of a margin

that he won't play any more. One more honest game, and then I'd better be "off

my form" again.

    Another way to play in Cyberspace. As they say; "It ain't real unless it's

FUCKIN' real!"

    I get up, sated; I scratch my crotch where the relief tube's rubber had

made a tight suction seal against depilated flesh. A quick glance in the

mirror shows me; naked, hairless except for eyelashes; pale skin and black

eyes. No stubble, the hair is gone for good; it gets in the way of the neural

contact pads, and it fucks up the suction on the waste disposal units. I walk

to my foodwall where with the push of a button I summon mystic daemons to

conjure with microwaves and high-speed impellers; invoking processed krill,

soya, nutrocarb and spices.  The mystic daemons are good to me; I must have

paid the food bill. Out plops a mockburger and a Coke Classic.

    I sit down at my table and read the newsslab; I check out the headlines -

more of the same old shit, somehow reassuring. I flick through, read the

advice column, laugh at the editorial cartoon and save it to permanents

memory, check out my horoscope - guardedly lousy - and finally settle down and

watch the comix.

    Some people say that adding limited animation to comic strips and cartoons

has killed the artform. I say it's a different thing entirely. Besides, some

pumping action makes a graphic novel REALLY graphic!

    Computers have killed a lot of artforms, I think, wiping the last of the

Special Sauce off my lip with a reconstructed napkin. I throw the whole mess

into the pulper; it can separate the plastics and food residue without my

help. I head back to my Chariot.

    It's a Chariot 515, actually; as if you care. I mean, pretty much, a

Chariot is a Chariot. The only question is whether or not it makes your butt

go numb while you are in Cyberspace. Oh, ya, ya, the Ice Pirates make big

whoopie about how many flopdoodles per nanodweeb their Chairiot can do, but

I'm like 99 percent of all Cyberspacers; I'm just along for the ride. I don't

do rez work; I don't do programming, I don't educate expert systems clusters,

so all my beast has to do is be good enough to let me meet girls in Full

Virtual Reality and play games at an acceptably awesome speed, Dude. Oh, yeah,

and take me to work every day.

    I run a machine shop in Yokohama; well, it looks like a machine-shop,

anyway. What it looks like in reality, I have no clue. I've asked, but I only

get inscrutable smiles. I'm making prototype machine parts of some kind, and I

have a good crew; Japs pay for the best. And that's all I'm gonna say about

it; aside from the Zaibatsu yellow-dog/nondisclosure agreement and the Yakuza

goons they have to back their paper up, it's fuckin' boring and you wouldn't

care.

    I flop back into the Chariot; it powers up in my august presence, the

Crotch Monster snuggles into my groin while the seat sucks my butt down and

makes a nice tight seal. There's a tingle throughout my nervous system as the

Chariot runs a quick diagnostic, and then there's a *Snick* and my body is

gone and I am in my own Headspace.

    Headspace is slang for your own personal Virtual reality; you can tailor

it as you want within limits. I'm no rez artist and I'm a cheap bastard, so my

Headspace is furnished with Public Domain art and freeware decor; it's kinda

this and that, one period shoved against the next; I have no taste, but I know

what I like.

    Yeah, I could afford to get some dweeb rez wiz to come in and pretty it up

for me, but shit, it ain't worth it. Rather spend the money on access time;

it's not like I let people IN here. I go over to the one exception to my rule

about cheap furnishings. It looks like a battered file cabinet; in fact, if

you pick the lock (that is, your computer beats my encryption/protection

schemes) you will find some mildly illegal porn files stored there with cute

"magazine" objicons. I ignore the lock and open the drawer while laying my

left hand flat on the top and kicking the right side of the cabinet just so.

It opens to reveal the simple keyboard and screen that is the user interface

of a very fucking expensive covert SubCarrier access program. With it, I can

access the private headspace of anybody connected to WorldNet - which is just

about everybody - without any possibility of traceback. Of course, they gotta

have SubCarrier access too... but then, just about everybody does. Everybody

_I_ wanna ride with, anyway. People like me who wanna walk the razor-sharp

division between Virtual and Actual; between Real and Make Believe.

    It's time to Plug in to the Dixie Vibe!



***  

 



Chapter Two



Excerpt from the New World Virtual Cyclopaedic Environment: [Transcript of a

virtual lecture given by Virtual personalities Hiesenburgburg and

Schr0/0dinger, the Kaos Kats] "How to Ride The Dixie Vibe"



Hiesenburgburg is sitting on the floor, an immense fat black `toon cat covered

in glossy fur, smoking a big green cigar and slurping a beer mug filled with

scalding espresso. He's wearing black jeans and Birkinstocks, a black straw

Panama shades his eyes, which are hidden by wrap-around black shades. His

voice is a purring rumble; like James Earl Jones in serious red-shift.



Shroud0/1dinger paces nervously, a thin, wispy cat with glossy long fur. She

seems sometimes to randomly flick from place to place, whenever you aren't

looking. The fur flows with the air of her passage and molds itself to a

voluptuous body. Large blue eyes in a Siamese mask completes the picture; she

wears no clothing. Her fur fluffs and crackles with a constant static charge;

her voice is a sibilant whisper. And sometimes she just isn't there; only a

whiff of magnolia and musk to mark her place.



HI: Dig, like, you gotta dig me here, chelas. We are gonna tell you about how

the vibe was born. Think about it, man, feel it, taste it; we are a thousand

years and more from the campfires of our forecats and here we are, layin' down

oral history on you.



SH: It's not just oral. It's performance art. We live the part over for you

again and again.



HI: Speak for you'sef, kitty! Next time I do this, I'll tell it completely

different. Dig it, chelas; this is all a lie.



SH: Inspired guesswork. Wishful thinking. Creative logical constructions.

Erisian prayers.



HI: So, like, lighten up, sit down and dig, cuz this is about as true as it

ever gets.

    Way back when, when a bunch of geniuses was racing to get the first rights

to the whole virtual reality neural interface thing, the gumments of the world

had been looking at Virtual Reality as a way for Important People to Do Things

Without Real Work. It was, Like, a DEEEFENSE thing. Simulate dis jet, Simulate

dat tank. Simulate dat jet blowing up dat tank. Simulate burning to death in

that tank... we gotta make it really real, dig?

    It's called Negative Feedback Conditioning. In the early days you wore a

suit with wires and eletrodes and skin sensors and pupil readers and they

shoved things in your ears and up your butt, just to get all the responses.

And they used it to simulate reality, and torture some poor shmoe until he got

it right.

    And the Wheels, yah, well, they used it to talk to other wheels, though

all they ever wore was a helmet and a glove - software faked the rest, after

all, who expects a politician to feel anything?

    And so you'd see the Prez, toddling along Pennsylvania Ave, driving a

waldo with a teevee for a face and a funky robohand for pressin' the flesh,

buttenholing every single voter he could find. After he did it enough there

was an expert system that took his place running the waldo; it did it a while

until the Prez died in office.



SH: That's the legend. Lover.



HI: Swear it on a stack of bibles, luv. Swear that I'm tellin' it jus' like I

heard it. I make no further war-rent-tee! Story goes that the expert system

has been running things for the last 20 years; it's been 24 since the last

election, so maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but the face never changes,

nosirree.



SH: The Presidency is ceremonial. People like familiar faces, kind old

rituals. Stale oldfarts to mark our territory. Smells like home.



HI: Point I MAKIN', honeychil' is dat come a point where you dunno what is

real and what ain't; come to that, don't make no difference. Prez is a virtual

reality, and you can be too. In a completely different and less dead way,

a`corse.



SH: Time to plug into the Dixie Vibe.



HI: Yeah, like she say. Because there was something called the Internet; a

dinosaur computer thing, date way, way back to the 1960's. It started out

hooking old mainframe computers together. It used landlines and microwave

links, den it get fast glass and satellite uplinks. Yeah, and dig, this is

unregulated traffic.



SH: Too much to regulate even then.



HI: It creates a tradition. Then when fast glass lines and wideband uplinks

become real common, data transfer rates go through the roof. Full speed vidio

signals can be transferred, and computers get fast enough to generate `em in

real time; better than real time.



SH: Interfaces become more sophisticated. Less hassle. Good Chariot, now, you

just sit down. No screen, no keyboard. All that stuff is virtual. Never wears

out.



HI: People had been working from home for years already. Telecommuting just

got a little more realistic, a little more personal. After decades of Fax and

phone and Email, business got back to the handshake and the eyeball. Chariot

makes sure that "you" are exactly you, same for the other guy.



SH: Georgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Dior. Clothes make the person. Buy

it off the rack in a clothing store or a rezware house. Costs about the same.



HI: But even today there's a fair gap between Virtual and Actual. The best

Chariot interfacing with the fastest computer on with perfect link can still

only render something that looks, sounds, and feels slightly surreal; a

cartoon reality. Some people are fond of that, take it to extremes.



SH: No shit?



HI: Like; dig this, cats. We be square, old-time cats; we ain't hip no more;

the vibe has passed us by.



SH: Speak for yourself. I walk where I will.



HI: And I know where you won't. But that's the thing. There are no limits.

Riding the vibe, there are no limits but the ones you ARE. Bein' a cartoon

underlines it, rezes it up, solid and nifty-keen and, like, _distant_. Even

when you wear it, even when you walk on it, even, dig, even when you fuck it.



SH: Distant. The player and the play. Entwined. Simultaneous. A dance of

Shakesperes and Kants and Niechies and Dahmers. All after each other's bodies,

each other's minds, each other's souls.



HI: Oh, and dig, like, you want to know why we call it the Dixie Vibe? It's

like a poetic reference to that rebel feeling, that visceral catharsis you get

when you do that rebel yell... (WHOOP!)



SH: The first anon realtime subcarrier server had the internet name

Dixie_VI.vmi.edu. Dixie Six was a massively parallel RISC supercomputer that

was surplussed to Virginia Military Institute by the United States National

Security Agency.



HI: I liked my truth better, fuzzylips. But this one's true too. Problem was,

nobody could figure out what to do with a massively parallel supercomputer.

It's not like you could buy programs for it. But they turned it over to the

Computer Science Department anyway, and the CS head - who was an old Xenix

hound - fobbed it off on a bunch of CS majors who wanted a dissertation

project. They formed a development group and wrote a compiled language and an

operating system that supported a virtual reality environment to a degree no

other educational institution had ever been able to achieve.



SH: The late Jimm Fixx  said it. "Nothing any

fool hacker couldn't have done given fifty billion dollars worth of free

equipment and a licence to play God."



HI: And of course Jimmie the_Fix and his cronies in the development team were

perhaps the first to experiment with virtual sex in a virtual reality

environment. After all, they were hackers. They were geeks.



SH: Like you. Like me.



HI: Bet your furry ass. So they played a bit, and made the system available to

other users - coeds, for example... Anyway, word got out. Authorities Were Not

Amused. They Put A Stop To It.



SH: Probably felt hurt they weren't invited. Administrators are people too.



HI: Truly? They must learn to hide it early. Anyway, this provoked the "fixxit

team" to create the subcarrier firmware that allows untraceable contacts.

Amazing work, really. It's reformed our sex lives and made government security

efforts on electronic media completely irrelevant, yet it could NOT be banned,

because the subcarrier hardware and firmware is part of the patented,

proprietary chipset of every Chairiot. The chipset that makes it possible to

do the neural interface without breaking skin and tapping nerves.



SH: Made the software illegal. Now everybody's a criminal.



HI: Oh, not everybody. Hardly anybody at all. Only a few millions.



SH: _Everybody_. Everybody who counts.





Chapter Three



The program interface looks and feels like a very, very expensive laptop of 30

years ago; an antique. It's a perfect emulation of a Lapdesk 286/turbo. Which

means that there are megabytes of files and stuff to wade through before you

even hit on the proper initialization sequence. I boot up an antique comm

program and I can hear the hard drive whir, even feel a slight inertial tug as

it spins up. Nice touch; not sure I believe it...

    Once it's up I load one of 20 phonebook lists, all of which have 30 year

old phone numbers. I dial a long-dead bbs; The Passion Palace. (3/12/24! 10

megs of adult files!) A little resident virus scans the numbers being dialed;

this one doesn't go to the phone; it kicks in the subcarrier interface. My

headspace rezzes out and I rez into Dixieland.

    Dixieland is a virtual reality construct. It's a very wierd place, nothing

is real and anything can be. There are laws and cops and as much bullshit as

you care to put up with. It's just a lot more avoidable. Like it says on the

One Burger Bill; "In Bob We Trust", and right under that, in nice holographic

letters, "SLACK", right over top of the Great Pyramid of Scottsdale, known to

be the Slackest Place Ever. Most laws exist to add to the challenge...

    I step out of the alleyway alcove that's my private rez alcove, marked

with my sigil of an erect penis and balls underlying an ornamental "L". I nod

at a giant slug with a Sanitation Department cap sucking up the cigarette

butts, used hypos and used condoms; poor bastard must have pissed off one of

the Dixiecrats REAL bad.

    I passed a wastebasket on the corner; it was filled with used condoms,

cigarette butts and all manner of other trash; I was feeling public-spirited,

so I grabbed a handful and flung it into a clean place.

    Random distribution routines take up an unbelievable amount of overhead;

it's a lot easier to keep the place looking properly grungy with good old

human sloppiness.

    I boogie down 5th Avenue, Metropolis. I hear a whoosh and someone

(probably some antique daemon) says "Look! Up in the Sky! It's a bird..."

    I walk away, not looking up. It's either Superman, Underdog, or a fucking

big bird waiting to plop on any upturned faces. Metropolis is like that.

Sometimes I think about moving over to Gotham City and take my chances with

the Noir crowd, or SpiderManhattan and just dig the angst, but hell, I hardly

ever spend time above ground anyway; I'd never notice.

    I walk past the `Toons and the various Freaks, Fairies, Furries and

Supers; nodding at the odd slutty Leatherperson like me. People are funny; you

come up with a way to have free, open sex; no consequences, no hassles, no

LAWS, and no way to get caught even if there were - and they are STILL prudes.

I think most people like laws so that they can pretend that they would really

cut loose if they ever got the chance... but give `em a chance, and you'll

find `em off in the woods chasing Orcs with swords rather than fucking.

    And people think _I'M_ perverted!

    I bop down the stairs of PlaySpace an underground RezBar where I spend

most of my credit. I check out the Ident I'm wearing in the mirror by the

door; compact, muscular, dangerous-looking; wearing black combat boots, biker

jacket and cap. That, and a Chrome-Steel, spike-studded, vibrating codpiece,

proportioned for a healthy young donkey.

    Hey, call me conservative! I pushed air over to where s\u/- was sitting.

s\u/- is an Old Hand - you can tell by the punny, texty handle. I grabbed her

hair and kissed her right on the mouth, vibrating the clit in the middle of

her soft palate with my tongue. s\u/- is a magnificent oralist...

    "Hello, Lance," she said with the conversational mouth at the base of her

throat. "How's tricks?" She made a serious grab for my uvula with her

prehensile, eight-inch tongue.

    "Not bad," I said, disengaging. I've never really been able to cope with

people playing with that particular dangly bit. I caressed her upper three

breasts to keep her distracted, tugging on the nipple rings and flicking the

buds themselves. "Plenty of overtime this month; enough to pay you and as much

again on account."

    "I suspect you may not have a life," she said, as she flicked on my

vibrating codpiece and straddled it, mashing her pubes against the unyielding,

spiked metal.

    "My life is riding the Vibe." I encourage her grinding by sticking a

finger up her anus.

    "God! Half the time I think you're a rogue daemon with a bad dialogue

routine! Shut up and fuck me!"

    Well, talking isn't my best thing, I admit. The other thing she wants is.

I shuck the codpiece to reveal that it is, if anything, understated; a huge,

telescopic battering ram of a dick emerges, covered with knotted veins; the

head the size of a clenched fist, the shaft the size of a thick forearm. I

picked her up and  buried it to the hilt in her box without any resistance to

speak of. And she accuses _me_ of bad dialogue! s\u/- is just toooo easy to be

credible; I'm either fucking a doorkeeper AI daemon or she's a guy - probably

some 80-year old paraplegic virgin living his days out in a total care home.

    Of course, running this virtual fuck-bar, he'd be a _rich_ and

_well-fucked_ paraplegic 80-year-old virgin... Like I always say, Virtuality

is what you make of it. Anyway, you appreciate at the moment I am not

concentrating on fine points of philosophy, not that I ever do!

    I bore her to the ground and rammed my meat home; I felt it bottoming out

against her cervix. Her cunt started it's always-pleasing peristaltic ripples,

massaging my cock and squeezing it until the tension was almost unbearable. I

watched her face, waiting for the orgasmic blush; I watched it creep up her

cheeks felt her start to writhe and buck; I rammed home as deeply as I could,

my knees scraping on the tired linoleum. I supported her shoulders and as her

climax peaked, I shot my wad. Sturm undt Drang undt Gotterdamerung!

    The blast took the top of her head off; the high pressure jet blew chunks

of bone, brain and less-identifiable bits across the floor, causing a couple

of new fish to jump; one turned and blew chunks all over one of the pool

tables.

    I pulled out with a wet and bloody plop, and stood up; the new fish

looking at me in absolute horror; my dick shrank from it's previous

proportions, oozing milky come and dripping other things. One of them had just

taken a breath to scream when the re-res hit.



    ***BIP***



    I offered s\u/- a hand and she gracefully got to her feet, not a hair out

of place. The fish looked confused as they realized that no trace of the event

remained; not bone, not vomit, not even a bad taste in the mouth. All glands

were in neutral; no adrenalin hangovers... It was just as if it was a slightly

distant memory.

    Virtual reality; almost like the real thing, and so _easy_ to clean up!

    "Memorable, Lance," she said. "There's nothing like having your brains

blown out with a comeshot!"

    She managed to say that with a straight face; I admire talent in a whore.

Of course, she's right. They don't call an orgasm "le petit mort" for nothing;

with me it's just bigger and messier. But both of us being troupers and Old

Hands, we refrained from whooping with laughter and completely wierding out

the newbies.

    I called s\u/- a whore; and she _is_, and damn proud of it, but she

doesn't get paid for that; there's just too damn much desperate and free

competition. What she DOES get paid for is the bar. Venue. Ambiance. Attention

to detail; that's what made me give her my hard-earned credits; PlaySpace is a

meat-magnet, and I'm always hungry.



***