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Path: Supernews!supernews.com!news.IAEhv.nl!gmv.es!btnet-feed3!unlisys!fu-berlin.de!news.apfel.de!news.maxwell.syr.edu!frii.com!deimos.frii.com!bmozart
From: bmozart@frii.com.unospammame (Boy Mozart)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Menelaus At The Gates
Date: 25 May 1997 22:52:42 GMT
Organization: Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce
Lines: 386
Message-ID: <5mafrq$p71$1@europa.frii.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: deimos.frii.com
Summary: Tales from the SuperNet
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #1 (NOV)
Originator: bmozart@deimos.frii.com
Xref: Supernews talk.bizarre:284526


The Taskforce came up with a new term for me: "sabbatical".  It's like
going on vacation 26 times a year.  I don't know why they wanted to ship
me off when there was so much important work to do, but I think it had
something to do with an incident involving two lab techs, four gallons
of cream cheese, and an industrial stapler that I may talk about some
day when I have a weekend free.

I know some people have had varying experiences with the "sabbatical".
For me, it's complete bullshit.  I spend 40 hours a week working on a
computer--when I come home, I log onto another computer and spend twelve
to twenty hours extra on that.  On a sabbatical, what that all boils
down to is sixty hours a week of sitting in the same spot rather than
moving between two spots.  After a few months of this I got bored and
found another spot at which to sit.

I was in my favorite cyber-cafe, browsing Microsoft pages and sipping
orange juice, when some weirdo sat down in the cubicle next to me and
logged onto a free-mail access site.  The big "N" glared in the right
lens of his glasses as he tapped in an e-mail message and clicked on the
"Send" button--must've been a oldbie, because he used the envelope icon
instead of the button that said "SEND" in big glowing blue letters.

A moment later, my computer beeped--I had e-mail in another window.  It
was from the weirdo in the next cubicle.

"This is NOT a UCE," promised the message.  "Well, it's unsolicited, but
it's not commercial.  Well, it's commercial, but I want to purchase YOUR
services, not sell you mine.  Please meet me in the Discreet Meetings
Chat Room--I'm the one in the black overcoat and glasses."

Well, that was what he was wearing right then--not very original.  But I
swapped over to the chat room and uploaded my VRML avatar.  "'K, I'm
here," I typed.  "What's up?"

"I've heard you have a way of...acquiring information," he said.

"I used to," I replied.  "I don't do that any more.  Or I will, but not
right now.  God, I hate sabbatical."

"I can pay you," he said.  "60 hours unlimited access, F.O.C., just for
listening."

"That's pathetic," I typed.  "That would last me five days.  Besides, I
pay flat rates all over.  Nobody charges hourly, anymore.  Piss off."

"No, wait!" he begged.  "I'll pay three months.  Plus I'll pay for five
megs extra memory used."

"Three years.  And ten megs extra memory."

The figure in black overcoat and oversized glasses hung silently for a
few moments.  "Two and eight," he said.

"Start typing."

"I represent a consortium of commercial interests that want to know more
about Internet II.  They've asked me to find out all I can about it.  I
think you are the man to get that information for me."

"Then you are one of the truly confused," I said.  "Internet II is a
whole new animal.  Nobody knows what's on the other side of their border
gateways.  We're not even sure if they're on IPNG or not."

"We have the information you need to cross over to the other side," the
guy said.  "We just need someone experienced in these matters.  Take as
many people as you need.  We NEED a presence on the other side!"

"A presence?"

"Well--there's this e-mail we want to send...."

"I KNEW it!" I capitalized.  "I knew this had to be commercially
motivated somehow!"

"Fine time for you to gain a sense of ethics!" he shot back.  "What have
YOU been doing for the past six years--charity work?"

"Depends on who you ask," I replied.  "What's in it for me?"

If a computer-generated avatar could froth at the mouth, it would look
better than what this guy was doing.  "My employers have access to some
IP addresses that we acquired in the mid-80's, and we'd be willing to
part with them upon successful transmission of our e-mail."

"You just want to send ONE e-mail?  That's hardly corporate."

"No, it isn't.  If we can prove our method is successful, we can market
it to other organizations with spam capabilities.  They'd have another
market to advertise, we'd make money.  Life would be good."  The man in
the black coat tilted his head and peered at me.  "What do you say?"

With me, ethical dilemmas boil down to one all-prevailing question: how
would a choice affect my access?  "How many IP addresses are we talking
about?" I asked.

"One hundred," said the overcoat.  "Make it three," I argued.  "Two,"
he countered.  "Two fifty," I cautioned.  "Agreed," he said.  I heard
a bubbling sound somewhere and smiled.

So it was that I gathered an intrepid little band about me--about a
dozen or so combat-veterans--and set off into the decaying wilderness
that is the net, searching for the last bastion of pure intellectualism:
Internet II.  Most of the party were skeptical about our chances; some
were downright afraid.  The Spam Wars had left most of us with severe
personality disorders and raging cases of paranoia.

"I heard this was another ARPANET," said Miller, our tech specialist.
"I heard the universities involved went straight to the Department of
Defense, figured they'd get a hand-out or something.  Looks like they
did, huh?"

"Where'd you hear this?"  said Horation, our tech specialist.

"National Geographic Explorer."

"I think you're making it up," said Aliana, our tech specialist.  "Why
would they bother?  You know all those university types are suspicious
of the government and all the 'spooks'."

"Sounds reasonable to me," said Matter Dozent, our tech specialist.
"Easy money.  It's not like MILNET didn't suffer from the Wars--remember
the Second Battle of Woodside?"

"I remember the company I used to work for terminating our ISDN line
after that one," said Dr. Prawn, our tech specialist.  "I had to sneak
in a modem and break into the phone closet just to read my e-mail.  When
the Battle of the IExplorer 5.0 Hack broke out, I fried the voice-mail
system trying to page down a list of headers in that one forwarded
e-mail about the suppressed report on contaminated dill from Hungary.
You remember that one?"

"Shut up," I said, devoid of any special technical knowledge.  "We're
approaching the Ghetto."

"The Ghetto" was a vast tract of cyberspace dominated by dormant AOL
accounts and scattered unattended Web pages, left by users who had lost
patience with trying to break through the busy signals but were too
clueless to phone in a request to cancel the accounts.  Perhaps they
feared busy signals on the support lines, as well, but for whatever
reason the ISPs continued to bill credit cards and maintain old
dilapidated accounts.  Trash fluttered about our feet in the cool cyber
breezes as we made our way down empty streets, avoiding eye contact as
much as we could, all the safeties off of our weapons.

"Hey mother fucker!" cried a voice.

I don't like being called mother fucker for two reasons: I was grown in
a cloning vat, so the reference is particularly disgusting; and I'm a
sensitive mother fucker.  I spun around and faced the insulter, weapon
lowered.

It was a disused account from some ISP in West Virginia.  I recognized
the domain name from one of the "Connect The Poor" projects championed
by the Federal Communications Commission when they learned that people
in rural areas weren't connected to the Internet because they couldn't
afford the long-distance charges.  So, in their infinite wisdom, they
paid for free account access to people in rural areas, buying up gobs of
accounts from ISPs.

Somebody forgot to tell them that some people in rural areas couldn't
afford computers, either--for that matter, millions of people living
just about anywhere couldn't afford phones.

The West Virginian account sauntered up to us, unconcerned about the
firepower and cool technical shit we all sported.  A few other unused
accounts came out of the woodwork, sporting mean grins and very old
"Last Used" values.

"Who gave you permission to come in here?" he asked.

"God and the American Corporate Infrastructure," I answered truthfully.
"What's it to you?"

"Well, this here's a toll-access," he replied.  "You and your other Nazi
supremacist Telnet-buddies need to pay to cross to the next node.  I think
that gizmo the old guy's wearing on his back oughta do it."

Dr. Prawn shifted position slightly, keeping the IPNG translator in the
middle of our group while we turned and faced out.

"Tell you what," I said.  "Let us go, and we won't turn you into little
bits of scrap userids with our really big cool guns, what do you say?"

"I'd say you've been reading too much Mark E. Roberts," said an account
from Eastern Colorado.

They charged.  It was hard defending a subjective position in the middle
of a virtual tableau when you have dozens of disused e-mail accounts
flying at you from every direction, but we managed.  We lost one guy
when a stray flame came flying out at us from an extremely lucky
derelict, but we burned everyone else into oblivion--we were oldbies and
we knew how to flame.

We traveled on.  The Ghetto seemed to go on forever; we despaired of
ever arriving someplace that was politically correct.  Eventually we
passed out of it and into the edge of the known universe: The Land Of
The Anonymous E-Mail/USENET Posting Servers.  "Look everybody!" shouted
Miller.  "Finland!"  Everybody shushed him.

This was as close as we would ever get to Internet II.  In the early
days, the university types had made use of the anon-servers to send out
various missives to the unwashed masses.  They had broken off contact
some time ago, and the masses remained unenlightened and dirty.  We set
up camp proceeded to commandeer a nearby gateway.

"Activate route-searching algorithms," I commanded.  "Let's see if this
sucker'll trace back to the HQ IP."

They swarmed over the gateway with all kinds of ping software while I
sat down and unwrapped an e-mail package.  Finally, Aliana climbed down
and gave me a list of addresses traced back to the location of the guy
in the trenchcoat.  I fired off an e-mail to the guy in the trenchcoat.
"What's up?" he asked a few moments later.

"We've set up the link to Internet II.  Ready for transmit."

"Stand by," said the guy in the trenchcoat.  I pointed my finger at
Prawn, who turned and fired up the IPNG translator.  A large white
gaseous form appeared, looking vaguely portal-like.  Prawn and a few
others stayed behind to monitor the e-mail equipment.  I picked up my
pack and led the others through the gates of Heaven.

It was an odd feeling being converted to the new protocol.  It was kind
of like having large pieces of metal soldered to your body.  I began to
feel heavy, ungainly, unused to the extra information I was carrying.
Wherever I turned there was nothing but white.  I had no sense of
presence, no clear knowledge that I existed.  And then I was through.

It was thoroughly disappointing.  The cyberscape was just as white as
the tunnel leading to it.  No colorful geometric shapes dotted the
landscape; no great flowing Cloud billowed around me.  It was white.

Too white.

The others gathered around me.  Aliana and Horation scanned for nearby
objects--there weren't any.  Miller and a couple of tech specialists
dropped their packs and set up the portable gateway, one that was
specially designed to route IPNG packets.  I looked at the sights before
remembering that there weren't any, and stood around watching Miller.

"We're receiving the test signal from the other side," said Miller.
"Dr. Prawn is requesting acknowledgement."

"ACK that puppy and let's get on with this," I said impatiently.

Prawn had just gotten the spam on the other side.  He began sending it
through as soon as he got his acknowledgement.  I watched the direction
that we had come from, hoping for some alteration or discoloration to
indicate that the mail had come through.  But all I got was a look from
Miller when he said, "Here it comes."

The subsequent explosion of the portable gateway helped to alleviate the
monotony.  We'd designed our avatars a long time ago to splatter
colorfully about when a gratuitous amount of violence had been applied.
Miller lay on his side, his legs blown clean off, screaming like a
banshee, "Oh God, oh God, oh God, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!  MOMMY!"
Aliana put her hands over her ears and turned away; I pondered on the
effect this was having on Miller's real body, encased in a VR set, and
had to grimace myself.

I heard another explosion.  I couldn't see it, but I heard screaming and
crying in the direction that we had come from.  I assumed feedback from
our explosion had ruptured the people we'd left behind.  Their screams
tore into us until they were suddenly cut off when the portal--which I
couldn't see--closed abruptly.

"We're SHIT!" bellowed Horation.  "Oh, we're fucked!  We're screwed!
We're DEAD!  Dammit we're DEAD!  Oh, merciful God!"

"Gimme a sitrep!" I asked a blood stain that used to be a tech
specialist.

"Portal's closed, sir," he replied.  "We may be stuck here unless we can
find another connection to an anon-server on the Internet.  They might
have translators there."  A few bubbles popped on the bloody surface,
then the tech specialist lost contact.

"All right, listen up!" I said.  "The mission is compromised!  We gotta
find another connection and parse our butts back onto the Internet.
Aliana: pull your hands outta your ears and see if you can track down
any outbound transmissions: e-mails, pings, browsers, anything!
Horation: put Miller out of his misery and help me pick up our shit.
Move, people!"

Horation blew a hole through Miller's account as he cried out for his
mother.  Aliana turned on her scanner and spun around slowly, careful to
avoid looking at the various stains on the cybertarmac.  She tracked
down a repeating signal beacon, and we picked up the remains of our
equipment.  Before we could leave, however, several parts of the vast
white emptiness started to shimmer.  They coalesced into avatar forms
clothed in white robes, with white masks over their faces.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," I inadvertently spurted out.

"That is correct!" said one of the forms.  "You have invaded Heaven, and
we are here to determine why."

"We already known how," said another form.  "We detected the presence of
a rogue gateway and secretly attached a link from one of our Defender
series routers.  We are the ones who transmitted the signal that
overloaded your gateways and closed your illegal portal.  What we need
to know now, is why you are invading our space."

Aliana was already a little shaken by all the explosions and screaming.
Being surrounded by tall angelic accounts was more than she could bear.
She broke down, fell to her knees, and started crying.  "They paid us!"
Aliana wailed.  "They gave us a hundred IP addresses to send an e-mail!"

"What kind of e-mail?" asked a third form.

"A-an offer f-for f-free television s-sets w-when y-you s-subscribed to
T-T-TCI!"

A dreadful silence fell on the shimmering forms, broken only by Aliana's
crying.  She curled up into a fetal form and continued to whimper until
one of the forms, robed arm outstretched, launched a blue lightning bolt
that blew her apart.  Horation, knowing when he was licked, dropped his
pack and took off at a dead run.  They let him go.

I stood there, shaking my head, ready to accept my punishment.  "They
were veterans," I said, amazed.  "They'd been through the Spam Wars.  I
never expected them to puss out like this."

"Why do you not puss out?" asked the first form.

"Oh, I puss out in real life," I replied.  "But if you're a pussy in
virtual reality, you're really not worth much at all."

"I remember a time, long ago," said the first form, as the others
shimmered away, "when the Internet was a fresh new experience.  People
dreamed of sitting in the comfort of their own homes in front of their
own computers, allowing themselves to drift over distant computer
networks looking for games or erotica or chemical explosive instructions
to download.  It was a wild, dangerous world, filled with exciting
people who made fun of strangers and commanded a great deal of
knowledge, debating all topics from systems administration to the best
way to pick locks to the reason why the fifth Star Trek movie wasn't
quite the hit the last four had been.

"The Ancient Ones--the ones who claimed they'd posted to 'net.' groups
and mounted scratch monkeys and could program a VAX network to trigger
the soda machine down the hall to dispense Cokes on demand--they died
out slowly, giving way to younger, fresher, less idealistic punks who
were the new Bohemians, the men and women who had computers at home and
who saw themselves as the inheritors of the greatest network of
information in the history of mankind.  FTP sites died away as people
realized that giving away software that they'd spent weeks developing
was a really stupid idea.  Even the Bohemians passed away, giving ground
to neophytes who claimed to have access to the Internet just because
they could read each others' home pages.

"The Eldritch Gods saw all of this, and were most put out.  They were
the Professors, the Grad Students, the Department of Defense.  They saw
how the corporations plastered URLs over every movie advertisement, how
people reading books on how to make money over the Internet fell for the
US$39.95 dream and made SPAM with great masses of Unsolicited Commercial
E-mail.  And the Gods were wroth, but were powerless to halt the
advances of Ordinary Man.  So they withdrew themselves from the mundane
cyberworld into that great bastion of learning and snobbery, dubbed
Internet II."

"You aren't gods!" I protested.  "You aren't any different from me!"

"Do YOU have your own network?" asked the form.  "We have taken
ourselves out of the spammage, and brought forth a new world in which to
engage in ideal intellectual conversation and debate with our
colleagues.  Research is freely shared; exam schedules and assignments
are passed out without fear of having them lost in the shuffle.
Information transmitted to more than ten accounts without the prior
express written approval of account holders and the University staff is
strictly prohibited.  We have a good thing going now.  Go home and
suffer."

And I did.  Horation wanders the empty tracts of Internet II, surely
driven mad by now.  The guy in the trenchcoat took back his IP addresses
and the free access time.  I mailed him the contents of an errant
/dev/null file I had floating around, destroying his account, but I felt
no joy from it.  I went back to work last Monday, swearing that I was
never going to take another sabbatical for as long as I lived.
________________________________________________________________________
Boy Mozart (bmozart@frii.com)
Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce
No URL, cope.

--