The Pure Blue Ocean

I was fourteen when they started jacking us right into the systems. I went to a public school, and so I wasn’t able to get a Brainjack right away. I had to save for almost a year. I had seen the internet of course, the flat, low-tech pages written in HTML and XML, the languages of little children. What good would they be in the new world that direct neural contact with our machines would create? They were useless, and I was feeling useless too, left out of the revolution. I was not one of the saved. I was damned. It took me a year to save up the money to get a low-grade, bootlegged Brainjack from a meatball surgeon selling the things out of the back room at The Little Havana Smoke Shop. When the operation was over they gave me a small bottle of antibiotics and told me that if they didn’t work, to go to a legitimate hospital, but that I should keep my mouth shut about where I got the ‘jack if I knew what was good for me. Of course I knew. I wouldn’t have gone to them in the first place if I didn’t.

I didn’t have enough money to get a Console, the cheapest of the new machines, the ones that used the Brainjack technology. That would take me another two years, and a second trip to the back of The Little Havana, but already I was starting to get a picture of what awaited me.

I read every trade magazine, watched all the slick, glossy shows about hackers that network television produced. The information age was finally in full-swing. I thought of the growing network of machines as an ocean of information, a deep powerful blue, and pure as the driven snow, laid out waiting for me in the vast expanse of cyberspace.

When I finally got my console I wanted to quit my job at the restaurant where I worked selling noodles in cheap plastic containers to the poorer classes in Chinatown. I was smarter than that, though. I needed money for software, and I didn’t know enough about cyberspace to make money from it. I hadn’t even ‘jacked in yet.

When I got home from The Little Havana I could hardly contain myself. I rushed to my room, avoiding my parents, who had disapproved of my Brainjack to begin with. They said to leave all that fancy nonsense to the rich kids, and be happy with the computer we had. It was a five year old piece of junk running the last operating system Microsoft had released before it got bought out and assimilated by one of the really big corporations.

The Console was made by Watachi, and was three years old, from when the technology was first released to the general public. I carefully took the small flat rectangle from it’s plastic back. The matte black Console wasn’t delicate by any means, but I had worked too hard to have it damaged by simple carelessness. There was a mini-disc included with the Console, and I slid it into the machine’s drive, anxious to ‘jack in and see my pure blue ocean of data.

The Console powered up; a slim keyboard slid out of the front, and a small holographic image sprang up just above it. The hologram walked my through how to get the Console running. I took the small black plug out of the Brainjack’s socket, and put the Console’s interface cable into the resulting hole behind my left ear. Nothing happened. The hologram flickered again, and told me to initialize the Console’s user interface.

The world shifted. I don’t know if the hologram disappeared, but I knew that I would probably never need to use it again. All around me was light. And it wasn’t just the stunning azure I had seen in my dreams, but it was the whole spectrum of visible light flickering and flowing around me. The Watachi’s command programs appeared in the air in front of me, forming out of the raw light that made up the digital environment. I could feel tears running down my cheeks in the world of meat and bone as I watched the future unfold in front of me, a chrysalis emerging from its long slumber.

The world adapted to the technology even faster than I did, though I became immersed in it, neglecting my responsibilities in the real world. I wasn’t alone. The world was in chaos, borders were changing as information suddenly became the only currency that mattered. And when the Mondex system was finally world-wide...

We all watched as our dreams fell-apart. ‘Net security became lethal, corporations took over the systems. I watched as the ocean of my dreams degenerated from a free, innocent state to an iron regime of corporate and government bureaucracy, just like the meat world had been before the world of the Brainjack and the Console had even been imagined.

My pure blue ocean was a polluted mess. I could still feel the tears when I ‘jacked in, but now they weren’t tears of joy. They were tears of utter despair. I was a part of the glorious new future, part of the system of machines that were supposed to save us from fighting and lying and death, that were supposed free our imaginations and open up our minds to all kinds of new things. Borders were changing, blood was being shed, and my ocean was just making it easier.

You know what made me realize what was happening? It was when I logged into the London Public Library, and was flooded with advertisements from the Rider Corporation. Rider was like America Online from the ‘90s. Thousands thought that Rider’s services were the cheapest, easiest way to get connected, but they wound up being one of the biggest problems, flooding the network with pointless advertising and uninformed users with equipment that was sub-standard even when compared to my bootleg stuff. All the places in cyberspace that had once been popular for their intellectual discussions and high standards became breeding grounds for gossip and digital graffiti. The network elite went underground. My pure blue ocean was now a child’s toy, a kiddie pool.

How did I cope with this, the crumbling of my great dream? I did the only thing I could do. I couldn’t compete, I couldn’t head off the insane flood of the inane. So I made my choice. I ‘jacked out. Forever.

And that’s the closest thing I could get to a happy ending.