If you want to find a friend, you log into the net and find someone whose interests match yours, or you skim to a place of public gathering. What most people don't realize is that the most you can get out of a friendship in virtual reality is a virtual friendship, an artificial construct that is as real and lasting as steam diffusing from a sewer vent. Why have one friend, who you can have another friend drawn from the billions on the net? Why bother to be yourself to your friend, when you can alter your projection to be whatever you wish you were? No one on the net is really themself on the net. There is always a layer of abstraction blocking personal contact.
Once in a while, a cyber-friendship blooms into love. The net is full of lovers, pairs or groups who project together to visit the same places. A really popular love-nook is the light gardens. These are spaces filled with organic creations of forms that shift and mutate according to the whims of the people in the garden. Lovers can share the act of creation with another person, and the forms in the garden are coded to react to the emotions of the projections in them. Some lovers get tired of the cyber-dating and frantic cyber-copulation, and they want the real thing. They travel across the real mundane world, meet in a dreary little café, then head up to a cube. The number of kids in the world testifies to the fact that this happens a lot. But after the initial rush, the initial excitement, the grey concrete walls close on the lovers, the glop they eat fails to arouse any interest in the real world, and they retreat back to the net. Lovers cannot sustain their love in this world when the fantasy world of perfection is so close. So they settle for a fantasy love, an abstract love, a love that cannot possibly exist.
The net that supposedly connects humanity only drives us further apart into our little cubes. The net is based on abstract forms. The metaphors we manipulate are prefect objects, the plutonic forms of real objects. We meet imperfect people in the net, we interact with them imperfectly, and ultimately we leave them in search of the perfect person we assume we will find in the net. The citizens of the net are horribly lonely and desperately clutch at one another as if to assure themselves of their own reality. They create gorgeous spaces, they are social, they are outwardly happy, but their effervescent narcissism betrays a fundamental fear of rejection and being replaced.
I once assumed the projection of Wendy, a 23 year-old knockout beauty whose identity I crafted. It helps to run around the net with a 21+ year old projection -- it opens a lot of doors. To make a long story short, I found a wonderful man, had a wonderful relationship, had lots of fun, and out of suspicion sent a listener bug after my dear sweetie. He was carrying on not one, not three, but 15 relationships at the same time
Another story:
I later went on a cyber date with a boy from my eds class, and after 4 minutes he decided I talked too much and he simply logged out of the net and modified his sensorium to block any projection of me. He erased me from his reality.
Another story:
My friend Tikki has a beautiful (cyber) room, and invited me to tour it. Her room is an infinite space that contains an amazing ice planet. Veins of blues and white cut across the surface, carving lines of infinite detail. She programmed fantastically violent storms to cut and carve away at the surface so it is constantly changing and re-forming. It is the product of countless weeks of labor, truly a work of art. But she has absolutely no interest in ever meeting me in the flesh, or interacting with me in any context other than room design.
Another story:
After another spectacularly unsuccessful date, I decide in a fit of angst that I hate all men. After a little though, I amend this: I hate everyone equally. I have been dumped and rejected too much; do I have to suffer this much? Are there some people who skim the net, find true love and true friendship? Is there a sane way to interact with people in this abstract realm? I am morbidly curious.
What I did was not very moral, but screw morality. I took my listener bug, gave it a search program, and mated it with a virus. I took this program to a cyber-bar where a lot of people I know hang out, and let it go. My listener bug then attached itself to the projection of the first person it came in contact with. Whenever this person interacted with another person, my bug copied itself and attached itself to that person, and so on. The bug was programmed to only replicate itself five times (otherwise it would grow beyond control and trigger net anti-virus phages). Well, after three days all my bugs flew home to me and dumped a summary of their observations to my terminal. In this way, I captured snapshots of the lives of about three thousand loosely related people. It became a hobby of mine to pick one of these records and skim through it, compressing three days of a stranger's life into three minutes of accelerated viewing time. I admit it was an immoral and voyeristic hobby, but I learned a lot. I saw that people have incredibly diverse lives, but the essential framework of their life stories are quite simple and banal. These strangers who I had spied on had played out the age-old sagas of love, betrayal, boredom, angst, and the like for me. But they played their roles wearily, like an actor who has had no sleep the night before and knows the audience won't even care. It was as if the interactions that define human life just weren't all that important on the net because everyone knows that everything is just an abstract lie.
I recognize a desperate look in the eye of these strangers, a look I see behind my own eyes: the look of unbearable loneliness.
Back to the original story:
"Damn," you think, "this girl is bitter and arrogant." Sure. I know I am. I'm only 15, I'm not even supposed to be dating. I'm supposed to be going through mad hormonal rages of puberty, developing insane crushes that evaporate in hours, if not minutes.
But please don't brush aside what I say. Deep down I know that I will never form a deep bond with anyone around me. I will never go out for a candle-lit dinner. I will never fall in friendship or love. Friendship in the traditional sense is dead, and "romance" is only a polite term for lust.
Lonely. I am horribly lonely. I can connect to anyone in the world to trade information, but I cannot form the bonds of humanity that I so desperately need.