I know that it is a small and ugly room, not much better than my real-life 4 meter ferro-concrete cube. Whenever my few friends plug into my room, they get out as fast as they can and exclaim with disgust, "JoAnn, why is your room so homely and plain?"
Mom lectures me on it -- "Given the infinite range of possible metaphors for a cyberspace home base, why not create choose something infinitely beautiful and eternal which stands as a testament to the inner beauty of you, the creator?" Sounds like one of these insufferable pep-stims they make you endure in the Eds, eh?
I have nothing against beauty. My friend Tikki designed a room which is an ice planet, a brilliant interplay of blue and white veins that scatter and reflect the light of three suns she placed above her world. Cassandra's room is a lush world of green populated by the strange animals that she spends most of her time designing. I acknowledge their beauty. But I don't want my cyber-room to be beautiful.
The world is populated by 23.4 billion hairless, smelly apes, and a handful of scattered organisms that we have not yet stamped out of existance. Each person is allotted a 4-meter cube and a hearty daily 1,800 calorie diet of slimes. Personal contact is kept to a minimum since our cities can stand neither rioting nor more babies. Real life sucks, and no one in their right mind would care to dwell upon their real life. Which is why the net is everything to us.
The sensorium cubes installed in every room of the city let us surrender our real senses and dip into a cyberworld of fantasy and infinity. In the cyberworld we each can live in palaces, fulfill our every wish, have sex 5,000 times a day, escape our dreary lives. Most of my life has been spent plugged into the cyberworld. As kids -- and I know that at age 15, I'm still considered to be a kid, but screw that -- as kids, we are taught that the 'net brought peace to humanity because it demolished the barriers between races, cultures, and creeds. It allowed people to collaborate as never before to create fantastic advances in the sciences and arts. And it provided an outlet for visceral frustration.
Take a look at my room again. The walls are plain and lumpy. The space is cramped and small. The items in it don't belong together. For God's sake, it is tattooed with the words "This is Not a Safe Place." It is not a happy room, it is not the kind of room you'd expect a 15-year-old woman to live her life in. Why, why, why, would I choose to live in something so ugly?
I don't know myself... it's the same reason I hope to destroy and recreate this dreary world. I love chaos, I long for the love I will never have, I feel like the 'net has crushed our humanity and this room is an act of feeble rebellion, I want you to understand that who I am is a person who feels trapped and helpless. I've kept a handwritten (unheard of! most people wouldn't know a pen if it bit them on the ass) diary since I was 9, and yesterday I distilled the major points into a cyber-journal. My room is keyed to the various entries of this journal (which is on my bed).
Read the journal; learn about me.
Perhaps then you can forgive me for destroying the main Net that so many billions have hidden in for too long. (That's why, by the way, you are forced to use the archaic two dimensional interface to my room and my last notes.)