"We call it a virtual overdose," Jenkins explained pragmatically. "Too much stimulation occurs. Usually, we give a person a thorough physical before the hyper-trance wires are hooked up to his skull, and the sedative is administered. Of course, we don't usually give the physicals to our own technicians. We don't expect them to be customers to their own inventions."
    I passed a solemn glance towards the man. He could see the fascination, however, skulking in the background of my overly relaxed persona. "And the incident virtually put you out of business, right?" I asked.
    The burly, dark shaded Jenkins clamped his lips together, creating a half smile of resentment. His face carried a twelve day beard and rings under his eyes that were condiments of late nights in the lab. "This company has had too many close calls in the past," he confided to me. I vaguely remembered reading something about it, but said nothing to reveal that fact. "A few months ago," he continued, "we had a customer die on us. Oh, it was a fluke. Like I said, we give thorough physicals, but this lady played us for a certified jackass. Our tests look for your usual unwelcome substances in the system. You know, like marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and a Budweiser or two. We will even test for prescription medications in the blood, including everything from antidepressants to Advil. This stupid bitch, on the other hand, fails to tell us she had a cerebral implant when she was five to control narcolepsy. Guess she figured it wasn't important or wanted our service so bad she refused to tell us.
    "So we hook her up, right. Five minutes later she's having seizures and blood is pouring out of her nose and ears like tomato paste. The next day, we are showed the implant the doctors took from her dead brain. They wag this burned square thing in a zip lock bag in front of our faces and tell us our equipment gave her the wet wired version of a short circuit."
    "Wasn't it on her medical records?" I asked.
    Jenkins choked on a quick laugh, making his fat belly bounce in the desk chair. "Yeah, well, when the Supreme Court decides people don't have a right to medical confidentiality, you let me know. I'll be sure and check every record of every fuck that comes in here. Until then, I'm stuck with the honor system. Whoopee-doo-dah."
    I nodded my head and shared that same half smile of resentment.
    "Anyway," Jenkins said, now a little impatient, "the incident hit the papers like a handful hitting the fan. Our company had to start all over on the PR crap just to get the rumors quieted down and another customer to step through the door."
    "What rumors?"
    Jenkins seemed almost ready for that question. "That our machines kill people," he told me. "It happens with every new, revolutionary invention, I think. Microwaves were blamed for cancer, toasters were blamed for house fires, and televisions were said to make you blind. Hell, every now and then you'll get a crazy motherfucker who says a piece of space station Mir fell from the sky and killed his dog or smashed his car. I'm just waiting for the new space station to get the same crazy treatment.
    "This company has invented and patented a product that makes antimatter engines look like a squirrel running around in a wheel, and trips to the cosmo center on the moon look like a vacation to the kiddie pool in the backyard. This is no joke. For the cost of satellite television, we hook you up to a PC for two hours and give you a dose of 'mind candy.'"
    "Mind candy?"
    "The sedative I mentioned about earlier," Jenkins explained. "Sure, you're under the spell for only two hours, but you wake up feeling like you've been to paradise and back. It's fucking great! You pick your choice of places to go, and we send you to the virtual reality world that matches your taste. I've tried it out twice myself. With my weight, however, I'm what's called a 'risk factor', so I took the budget trip. Still was a slam jam, though.
    "Of course, I got a thorough physical done before I hit any switches. I'm not a moron like that Jones guy we hired... Shit!"
    Jenkins' lack of sleep had polluted his speech with "f" and "s" words and now was affecting his temper. A clenched fist hitting the table ended that last sentence.
    I tried to remain oblivious to the overreaction. "You can operate the machine on your own?" I asked.
    "It's called a mind enhancement program," Jenkins spit out. "And, yeah, it doesn't require anymore than a single person to operate it. You know... point and click." He then bobbed his forefinger up and down and made a "cluck-cluck" sound with his tongue.
    "Larry Jones..." I mumbled under the weight of my thoughts.
    "Yep," Jenkins responded with a hint of spite. "He was a new guy when he came in here. He didn't know a microchip from his dick, but he knew enough about encrypting and quantum psychology to more than compensate. He was a weird mother. He hardly said a word outside the lab, and when he did talk he spoke alot of esoteric cosmological shit that made Steven Hawking look like the second coming of Christ. Frankly, the guy gave me the jitters. I guess I was too stupid to realize the new program he was working on was actually his own private death serum."
    "It was his own program that killed him?" I asked, suddenly restored with fascination.
    Jenkins' eyes widened. "It takes a finger to push a button!" he splurged. "The stupid fuck. Without even giving the program over to the testing team for final eval. he hooked it up to himself and went for the ride of his life. He did it on a night everyone was gone at home with their families. We found his body the next day in the lab. I'll never forget the look on his dead face, though. It reminded me alot of the looks those guys at NASA had when the space shuttle Challenger exploded... A kind of stupefied disbelief."

    "Wait a minute," I threw in with a burst of perplexity. "First you insinuate this Jones guy dies because he had a weak heart or bad stamina, and then you say his invention might have killed him. Which is it?"
    Jenkins shrugged. "Like I said, Jones made the decision. The program was only doing what it was told to do. Honestly, though? All we know is that the guy died, and he was hooked up when it happened."
    "Didn't an autopsy show anything?"
    Now Jenkins seemed to shrink in his chair. His gaze lowered to the floor under his desk. "The autopsy came up zilch. I still say, though, the freak had a weak valve in his aorta or something. You know investigators nowadays. There are more crimes than they can handle and this wasn't a crime. It was an accident. My guess is that our Jones guy got a mediocre autopsy and was shipped to the worm farm. Case closed."
     Jenkins insensitivity was finally getting to me. I shifted positions in my seat and got to the point. "So you called me here to play Murder She Wrote?" I asked.
    "More like the protagonist in TRON," Jenkins retaliated.
    "Huh?"
    The fat man brushed his oily, scraggly face with his hand and sighed. "Larry Jones may be dead, but his monster is still here," he explained. "It's a rather expensive monster, too. This company has put a great deal of money in Jones' creation. We can't just throw it away. Plus, we have to prove that Jones killed himself with his own bad judgment."
    My assertiveness kicked into gear with a tease of adrenaline. "I'm as healthy as a wild horse, have a clean psyche record, and a nerd when it comes to artificial intelligence," I pitched to him. "That's why you want to hot wire me up to Jones' toy and see what he saw, right?"
    Jenkins smiled. "Yeah, but that stain on your criminal record was what made you a shoo-in."
    I hesitated. "The hack job I did in high school?" I asked, knowing that it couldn't have been the parking ticket I got that morning. Otherwise, I knew of no other illegal acts that could have been scratched onto a police file. Too bad a person's criminal history wasn't as confidential as his medical records.
    "Yep," Jenkins answered dryly. "I don't know the details, I didn't do the research, but I heard you gave AT&T quite a
scare."
    I smirked. "Ah, it was simple enough. A password crack there, a firewall infiltration here... So I happened to move a few numbers from one bank account to another...Well, okay, to my dad's account... It's nothing I'm proud of. I lost my $1500 Compaq and spent a month in court, enduring silent meals at the dinner table with my parents for my entire senior year."
    "Uhuh," Jenkins replied with a smirk of his own. He knew I was secretly proud of it all, though. Hacking into the computer systems of a monopolizing corporate leader like AT&T was no easy task even for veteran cyber punks. The Pentagon was the only thing tougher. Besides, the bank account that lost the six digit sum of money was owned by the company's president, which, of course, made the felony even more impressive. Sure, Jenkins may have been fat and obnoxious, but he wasn't stupid.
    I shrugged.
    "Come on, exhacker," he finally said. "Let me show you the lab."
 

 

 

    "You're sure this thing won't turn me into a vegetable?" I asked him.
    Jenkins swiveled around and pointed across the room. "You got second thoughts, bud, the exit is right over there."
    I bit my lip and stepped towards the chair.
    "Try not to worry," Jenkins remarked. "Anxiety tends to interfere with the operation of any program. Get too nervous and you could set the system wild."
    I looked at the fat, scruffy man from my newly acquired seat. "You wouldn't make a good counselor, you know," I told him.
    Jenkins smiled. "Yeah, but I bet Larry's program will be enough psyche treatment to last you a long time," he answered.
    That remark prompted a brain fart of deeper curiosities. "How exactly does this shit work?" I asked as I studied one of the electrodes lying near my head.
    "Good question," Jenkins answered without removing his gaze from the monitor.
    I waited for more feedback, but came up empty handed. "Could you elaborate on that?" I pushed.
    Jenkins wasn't in a mood to be pushed. "We're not sure," he snapped. "Listen, hacker man. The human brain is a computer. Yeah, sure, it's what makes you human, but it's also nothing more than a divine modified, supped-up, super machine. What our programs do here is hook one computer up to another; the computer on this desk to your brain. You go on a journey. Somewhere in the spectral not-world of virtual reality and your own imagination, you stay conscious, but conscious in another time and space... cyber space."
    "I gotcha," I answered. Jenkins was now crossing into my territory of knowledge. "The brain is like the ultimate computer. It's not perfect, though. Evolution hasn't demanded that it be perfect. But technology has made-up for evolution's laziness. Someday there will be the perfect mind, and it will be nothing like any computer we have ever seen. I only wish I could live long enough to see it... or even have it."
    In other words, I had admitted that the fat lab slug was right, but that he had a crude way of putting it... Humph. I snickered at my own pun in that thought.
    "I'm conscious, right?" I asked. "But I perceive a virtual reality world, rather than a real time world?"
    "Yeah, sort of," Jenkins rebounded. "Hold still for a sec, all right? I need to scan ya to see if you didn't grab a beer, or smoke a joint on your way down here."
    As I did so, a strange light on a rail in the ceiling moved over me three times and then stalled.
    "Cyber space is the imagination of a computer," Jenkins added. "Your imagination connects to the computer's. Like I said, we don't know how it works exactly, but we know it works."
    "And you administer it to people without fully understanding it? No wonder Larry bit the bullet," I responded.
    "Antidepressants are administered to psyche patients, and we don't know entirely how they work," Jenkins countered. "When the AIDS cure was routinely used, it still wasn't known how it exactly worked, either. Sometimes science doesn't waste time. If it works, then use it. When you have lives or money at stake you don't waste time.
    "Besides, Larry Jones was a fuck head. Are you a fuck head, hacker man? Cuz if you are, then you and Larry's ghost oughta get along just fine in whatever hell his program creates."
    I almost got angry, but subsided my comebacks after seeing the grin on Jenkins' scruffy face.
    "Just hook me up, and get this over with," I replied, suddenly short on patience. "I have a hot date tonight."
 

 

    I can't remember when it was I lost contact with reality, or rather the reality I knew. Vaguely, I could recollect a moment of dark sleepiness awash with ghost like dreams. Flashes of my past mingled with impersonal images of my time period. I saw in the blink of an eye--no, in the instant of mastering slumber--a barrage of the events that marked my era so far to come: cures for 20th century plagues, space stations on the moon, faces of extraordinary inventors and politicians, and powerful new energy producing systems. Energy... That was it. Everywhere the rich invisibility surrounded me in the warm, silent darkness that lasted that split instant, but an instant I remember now like it was an eternity. I felt shared in that darkness. As if I was in my mother's womb again, the space around me seemed to breathe and the shadows teased me with suggestions of life giving sustenance. I was going somewhere... being taken someplace... I knew not where, and somehow the mystery failed to terrorize me.
    Almost without realizing it, the ebony thickness around me projected a sense of stillness. For half a second, I contemplated the analogy of my mother suddenly dying, while I lay in her soft womb. Then a voice--or was it a distant earthquake?--shook the space devoid of stars and wafted through my thoughts, leaving a trail of garbled syllables. I understood them, though:
    "Hot date, eh?"
    Jenkins... Jenkins, you fat slob...
    "She ain't that hot, hacker man. I had her last night."
    Funny, asshole...
    Laughter split the silence and then muted. It was then I reflected on where I was, why I was here, and how I had gotten there. I was clear headed and clearly conscious, but kept enduring a far away sensation of drunkenness and drowsiness. I became fascinated by my own free willed predicament. I amused myself with the thought that my brain and body--were they really separate?--had gone under the influence of the 'mind candy'.
    Oh, sweet mind candy...
    Then, I could sense a loud crash. Not a sound, but the sensation of a sound. It was loud. Very loud. The darkness split like firewood struck by a steel ax. Once again, I failed to become frightened, but still reasoned to myself that what I was experiencing wasn't real. But, goddamn it, if it didn't feel real!
    The womb of darkness subsided.
    A grid of glowing green lines formulated beneath me. I knelt--once again amusing myself with the reality of this seemingly real fantasy--and wiped my hand across the floor. It felt like smooth glass, but when I walked--and I did--it carried a noticeable friction. I wandered to one of the glowing green fluorescent lines that ran the length of the floor. I tried to touch it, but again the floor simply felt like glass. Darkness lay beyond that floor, yet I could sense nothing from it that would suggest to me the symbolism of a cozy womb. It was a void.
    Cyber space.
    Turning my attention to myself, I noticed that I was dressed in my favorite set of casual wear, and my build, height, and overall physical characteristics remained the same. I reached up and touched my face to be sure... Yep. I was me, all right.
    I looked around. I tried to figure out where all the illumination was coming from. The glowing grid in the glass floor was not enough to produce such light. I mean, I could see the grid extend into the horizon... into... my God... mountains.
    I saw a horizon of mountains lined in a lime glow like the floor, only less radiant because of the distance. The sky above me was like the void beyond the floor. To me the sky was almost a hellish perversion of Earth's own nocturnal ceiling because it was as black and empty as space, but without the texture of stars.
    A cheap imitation.
    Imitation indeed. I refocused on how I had gotten there. It still amazed me that my real body existed somewhere beyond that void above and below me; somewhere beyond cyber space. For a moment I amused--rather horrified--myself with the idea that I was entirely there. My body didn't lay beyond anything. I was in another universe.
    More than anything, I wanted to laugh at that last thought and forget about it in an amused shrug. Quickly, I refocused on my surroundings and made the point that this not-world seemed incomplete. Apparently, Larry Jones never finished the job. In fact, it looked like the guy just barely started on the damn program. The whole place looked like an architect's blueprint. Where was the detail? Where was the beauty? The artistry? In honest truth, Larry's world was a half-assed attempt.
    That comment of mine prompted another question: So why was he in such a hurry to use it?

    For some reason that last inquiry horrified me more than any previous thought. I hated this place already. Emotions swam through me like sewage through a vertical pipe, and I felt naked in this wide open cyber valley of starless night sky and clear glass ground.
    Okay, Jenkins, you fat slob. Beam me back up.
    For a second, I thought Jenkins had answered my half serious call. Far away to the east, I could see a hint of movement through the floor's glow and against the background of slightly lime radiant peaks. Whatever it was it appeared to be bipedal. The only problem was that this thing's stride granted him--her? It?--way too much ground coverage for a casual stroll.
    Apparently, the speed to distance relationship was severely modified in this world's odd physics. As the thing came closer, I began to realize it was actually human. He was a black man--almost Jamaican looking--and had long, coarse hair as ebony as the skin it sprouted from. It was tied in strings and hooded a face with piercing black eyes. The man wore a futuristic kind of jumpsuit. It was a clear steel blue jumpsuit that covered his body from neck to toe. Red fluorescence decorated that suit in periodic strips, most notably on the thighs and chest.
    Bad guy.
    I couldn't have been more right. The man's eyes burned with the blackness it contained, and an ivory cut across his face joined with those eyes in a sinister grin. "NO TRESPASSING," he said, although the words came at me in a thunderous shout. He then paused for a response.
    "Where are we?" I asked. Playing the sewage pipe again, another emotion swept through me: stupidity. The question I asked was completely out of place.
    "TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED," the black freak told me. "TRESPASSERS WILL BE DEALT WITH BY THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW."
    What the hell was I hearing? Was this guy a computer glitch or what?
    Before I could respond, however, I began to see shapes emerging from the space ahead of me. They walked past my black trespassing informer, past the space between us, and then past me to disappear again into the clear stillness. The shapes were people--people half naked and dressed in rags. The smell they emitted was even worse. I had never smelt rotting flesh before, but that's what I later learned was emanating from these poor creatures. Some even dangled chains from their naked bodies and all moaned persistently. I'll never forget those guttered cries. It was pure agony in sound. And their eyes... some were empty and some glowed a bloody crimson. I thought for a moment that when I looked into them, I could see a real human being staring back at me trapped and screaming to get out. But how could that be? This was all a creation in virtual reality wasn't it? That's why it was called virtual reality. It was virtually real, but not really real.
    I tried to look away from those bleeding eyes... Not real, I reminded myself. Not real.
    Eventually, the shapes disappeared. Only the black man remained. "NO TRESPASSING," he repeated. And then he turned and vanished, too.
    For a great while I stood there, wondering what to do. Had I witnessed an imitation of Hell? The warning seemed clear enough, but I had no way of going back. I had to trespass. It was inevitable. The whole terrible show was a cheap farce with my immediate future being the jackass on stage.
    I shook my head and stepped forward.
    Bad move.
    Immediately, my surroundings were replaced with an arena of people shouting for my death. In the arena, besides myself, stood the Jamaican freak. I looked closer at the audience... I could see the forms and faces of those same pitiful people I had seen not more than a minute ago in agonizing pain and torture. Now, their sad eyes glowed less with a plead for charity and more for a spectacle of blood.
    The Jamaican freak seemed intent on answering their plea. He stepped towards me. Only then did I realize I was now dressed in the same surreal suit he wore only it was decorated with fluorescent blue rather than crimson. I wondered, a symbolism of good against evil? Not likely. More like black against white in a sick game of chess.
    The crowd grew louder. They wanted blood. And they wanted it now.
    The freak lifted me up by my chin and stared into me with those demon eyes of black. He spoke in a twangy, computerized voice, "Do you want to play a game?"

    I looked around me. Apparently, I had little choice.
    The Jamaican threw me across the arena, and I landed on the ground with a powerful thud about fifty meters away from where I had originally been standing.
    "TASTE PAIN, TRESPASSER," the freak screamed. He then did an inhuman flip into the air, and landed himself in front of me. Next thing I knew a fist was crashing against my jaw with enough strength to send me whirling around on my stomach.
    "STRIKE ONE," he declared, and the crowd cheered.
    I got up and charged for him, thinking to myself I had no chance of ever winning. The pain from that last hit still claimed my entire face like a jellyfish on a salamander.
    Before I even got within a foot of him, the Jamaican picked me up by the gut and threw me across the arena square and against the wall. "STRIKE TWO," he bellowed as he ran to attempt another attack.
    That last encounter nearly paralyzed me. The pain was overbearing. I thought maybe my back was broken.
    "ARRRRRR," the freak screamed. He then grabbed my head and smashed it against the wall. I nearly went unconscious. In fact, I should have. Blood ran from my nose and ears, telling me I had a concussion.
    Next thing I knew, I was being lifted again. The Jamaican looked me straight in the eye. "STRIKE THREE, TRESPASSER," he told me.
    In the stupor of my abdominal pain and critical head trauma, I said, "That means I'm out, right? You win?"
    The freak drew me in closer. "THIS AIN'T BASEBALL," he told me and threw me into the air, so that I landed into the audience with a crash so immense that bodies of spectators flew in every direction.
    Although, I was nearly delirious, I managed to recognize the opportunity for escape. I pushed bodies out of my way and dashed for what looked like--for what I hoped was--an exit out of the stands. Around me I could hear everyone chanting, "Strike four! Strike four! Strike four!"
    Quickly, I vanished into the darkness of the exit and followed the walls of a long tunnel. I could still hear the crowd following behind me and the deep roar of the black freak wanting more violence. Their sounds, though, was only more fuel for my rushing feet.
    In time, I could see a light ahead of the tunnel. Ironically, I wondered if I might find a hospital room on the other side and myself waking up from a near death experience from Hell. Of course, what I found instead was a ridge that dropped into a canyon made of that same fluorescent green grid and glass-like earth. To my right I could see a ledge wide enough to scoot myself along. I took advantage of it and soon found myself consistently clinging for my life as the ledge grew smaller and smaller. Finally, I came to another ridge that exited onto a declining path. I thanked God that I couldn't hear my pursuers.
    Suddenly, I heard a humming sound. At first it was faint, but grew loud enough to scare the bejesus out of me and send me diving for cover behind a lime-grid boulder. As I watched, strange helicopter machines passed over, and a strange reddish beam extended from their front and passed over the ground below like... like... a scanner. Searching for life signs, perhaps?
    The violet tinge to the beams pretty much told me who owned the damn machines. I waited them out.
    When the coast was clear, I followed the swerving path next to the ridge. Keeping an ear alert for trouble, I climbed a few hills and even crossed what appeared to be a river of some sort. It was a bank in the gridded earth, but instead of water, I could see pulses of blue light streak down it. The pulses were so persistent that they created a flickering canal of deep blue electricity, giving the illusion that it was an undulating solid, instead. I wondered--and for reasons I still do not know--was it a communication line of some sort? Something inside nagged me to believe it was.
    Betimes, I stumbled upon a most fascinating site. I found myself walking the floor of a crevice where the walls were composed of odd, rotting buildings and strange, dark alleyways that rounded even more crumbling structures. I felt like I had wandered into an artist's unfinished painting depicting The Great Depression. Some buildings had windows that were boarded up and some had no windows at all. Others had signs, some bright and brilliant like a Vegas casino, while others--most, in fact--looked like they were about to fall from their mounting wires. One sign read, "Theoretical Physics: More Fiction Than Fact?" Another read, "Things I hate About Fat People." A third one was hard to read. It was covered over in rust and was hanging at an angle. The building the sign hung from didn't look all that great either, but overall, it fit in well with the other run down structures around it. I finally deciphered the message: "Pam's Home Page."
    That last one struck a chord with me. I quickly shifted from building to building. Of course, it all made sense! I read more faded signs... "Christian Science Upfront"... "101 Elephant Jokes"... "Nintendo Secrets"... "Untitled"... "XXX Teens"... "Cuban Ladies"... "Recipes I like"... "Me and my Daddy's Web Page"...
    These were web sites! Old ones, too! But how? I was on the World Wide Web? That couldn't be possible. I was in a virtual reality world created by my own imagination and the program of a separate computer--one not as intricate as my own mind, but nevertheless powerful enough to induce a realistic state of consciousness. That was it. End of story.
    A fear clutched my insides in a cramping vise. It was the fear of uncertainty. Maybe I did somehow transcend onto the unmarked lanes of the infamous information superhighway. Either Larry's invention created the illusion of a space and time online or it actually brought you to it. If that were true... Christ!... The implications! Information could be obtained and absorbed through a virtual reality awareness like a sponge thrust into a sink filled with dish water. Knowledge would become a program into a separate state of mind. Applying that knowledge would be a simple stroll into another sector of cyber space, and retaining what you've learned would be no less complicated than downloading a file on a floppy disc...
    "Arrr," I groaned. All my thinking was reviving the effects of the concussion. It was an unusual concussion at that. Perhaps, supernatural was a better word. Feeling somewhat queasy, I tried to direct my attention back to the remnants of history around me, hoping the distraction would avoid a barf fest.
    Yep, I thought. If these were web sites, they were old ones, all right. They were probably ones that had been sitting in cyber space for so long that there hadn't been a visitor to them in decades. Even the person who created them probably left them alone, thinking their ISP discarded them. Search engines no doubt got rid of them. So why were they here? Shouldn't they have gone the way of the cyber dodo?

    At first I thought of just leaving. How the hell was I to know my entire credit card number? It wasn't like Jenkins sent my wallet with me. Amazingly enough, though, when I actually tried to recall a few digits, I found myself remembering the whole line of numbers on the card. Once again, I was outwitted by the physics of this strange not-world.
    After getting the number down, the old geezer did a verification check. I was cleared. When I walked through the gate, however, he gave me a final bit of information. "Please read the TOS agreement before entering the city," he told me. He was very stern about it, too. The way he used the words TOS agreement you would think he was referring to the word of God.
    "Where's that?" I asked.
    He pointed to a huge plaque near the gate.
    I wandered over to the plaque with the plan to leave and enter the city the minute the old man disappeared. When he did, I turned and strolled into the market square and rounded the big, beautiful fountain. People wandered by here and there. I noticed that most of the people were teenagers or old couples. It didn't surprise me that a city this size could stay in such great shape if most of its citizens--members?--were old people and stupid kids. I figured the generations in-between were in some kind of cyber bar or swingers' club.
    I looked around, again, at the almost insane perfection of the place.
    Scratch that. Bars wouldn't be here.
    It was then, while I wondered how order was maintained in a city this size, that I saw a scuffle in the street. Two men were standing over a third that lay on the ground. The two standing up were dressed in prim, neatly pressed silver uniforms with black belts and well shined black leather boots. They each wore a slender, gray cap firmly over their head and had black leather gloves over their hands that were no less shined than the boots on their feet. Lettering could be seen on a polished badge above their left breast: AOL Community Action Team.
    The guy on the ground, like myself, was obviously just a member.
    "So you zought you would be za life of za party?" one of the uniformed guards asked the guy below him. A sharp German accent filled the guard's words.
    The other guard laughed and kicked the guy. "What was it zat he said, Stahl?" he asked with the same deep German accent.
    "He said," Stahl replied, looking at the helpless man on the ground, "that a young frau should not be so afraid of his tiny der pimmel."
    Both the guards laughed and one even kicked the guy again when he tried to get up.
    "Bullshit!" the man screamed. "All I did was have an argument with a girl. She had no right to turn me in like this. You should have heard what she said to me!"
    The guard across from Stahl frowned. "Bah!" he scoffed. "I say he has committed his last verletzung. I say we terminate zis trash."
    Stahl couldn't seem more pleased. He pulled a square object from his polished belt and struck the man at his feet in the back with it.
    "Nooooooooo!!!!" the man screamed as his body slowly evaporated into nothingness.
    "Come back in six months, herr!" the other guard shouted while laughing himself into a heartless frenzy.
    Stahl simply placed the square mechanism back on his belt. He turned away, placing a curious stare on me. He lit a cigarette and maintained that stare through a film of smoke. "Strike three," he said, spinning the syllables under a Saxon tongue.
    Immediately, I became terrified and considered a safe direction to run.
    "Ja," the other guard suddenly responded as he wandered back down the street. "Ausholen. He made his last verletzung, Stahl."
    It was then I realized who he was referring to. I relaxed.
    Stahl finally removed his stare and threw his cigarette to the ground. It vanished like the man that got terminated. Eventually, both guards disappeared down a bend in the market square.
    Had he noticed my terror?
    I tried to forget the incident and continue my exploration of this fine city I suddenly didn't like. As of now, this New Israel began to look more like a New World Order. This was America Online, right?
    Rounding a few corners here and there, I sojourned into the city's brilliant depths. Occasionally, I would see odd vehicles whizzing by, but always I would see other members moving from door to door. The buildings they entered were huge and spectacular with tops that seemed to pierce the void above. Looking up, I could also see the faint expanse of a dome of soapy blue light overshadowing the city. I assumed it was caused by the immense radiance a metropolis this size created. As I watched, bursts of electricity would wisp over its curvature and disappear behind the more distant skyscrapers.
    One thing I noticed was the increased diversity of the city's members the further I delved into it. At first, the population seemed too homogeneous, but then I began to notice blacks, Asians, caucasians, young and old, fat and thin, and all of them would occasionally flicker and fizz. It was an odd effect... Looking at a person that seemed so real, and then all of a sudden, his or her body and features would static like an AM radio, and they would momentarily fade in and out. Every time I saw it happen it reminded me of an old RCA television I had in college. I couldn't afford cable, so all my shows came from the crude antenna I had made for it with coat hangers and speaker wire. Sure, I got a station or two and most of the time the picture was great, but every now and then, especially while I got involved in a daytime series or the evening news, it would screw up in a sheet of white noise. It never failed to annoy me. The timing was unpredictable and therefore random, much like what I was seeing now with these people.
    "Excuse me," someone said.
    I moved to the side and saw a young woman pass me by. A blonde. She couldn't have been a day older than twenty. With hair a silky gold and legs smooth enough to eat off of, she passed me a flirtatious glance. She then crossed one of the winding roads ahead, and I watched her elegant stroll with a latent sense of adolescent curiosity and a subtle image of intercourse. Then another one of those strange ripples of static and white noise claimed her, shaking me loose of my pleasant concentration.
    Like I said, it never failed to annoy me.
    Once the woman was out of sight, I switched my attention to the many entryways the other members were entering and exiting periodically. There were so many of them that they lined the bottoms of the skyscrapers and the sides of the road every ten to twenty feet. All of them led to a slightly recessed door. Signs also hung above them, depicting various names for each destination, but never adequately revealing the exact nature of what lay beyond. The words on the signs were more of a tease for the amateur explorer than a label for a room's contents: "Fishbowl," "Florida Back porch," "New York Fantasies," "Divorced and Over the Hill," "Dance Chat," and "Ebony Life" were just a few.
    The signs I read reminded me of that cyber ghost town I had run into earlier. The memory also revived one of my unanswered questions: Was I indeed on the World Wide Web? But it was futile. To think so, however, only frightened and fascinated me at the same time. It seemed impossible that I could be a conscious entity caught in the imagination of a world internet of computers, and at the mercy of ignorant and unseen users. That I could be this particle of ingenious invention caused by a deceased lunatic, or even be this glitch in cyber space that has led me to an online universe that hinted of a Nazi heaven, seemed too fantastic. I suddenly felt marooned and helpless. Silently, I prayed Jenkins could find no problem in bringing me back. I didn't like the idea of having my grave be a speck of data lost in the fiberglass arteries of a global communication system. Thanks, but no thanks.

    Ironically, I wondered if I had been here for so long that I missed my date I had in real time. Of course, I had just met the girl at an office luncheon a few days back, but I liked her enough to want to know more about her. She was a typical long skirted, thick glassed, secretary for a large investment firm, but had what I was looking for: brains and talent.
    She ain't that hot, hacker man. I had her last night.
    Fuck you, Jenkins. Just be a pal and get me out of here, all right?
    Finally, I decided to quit talking to myself and investigate one of these strange, advertised places around me. I had done enough sight seeing. It was time to make a visit.
    I went up to the nearest entryway. The sign above it said "Film Chat" in simple blinking letters. The door opened easily, and on the other side I could see a faintly lit closet space with another door on the far wall. I went in and shut the first door behind me. Suddenly, a holographic computer screen emerged in front of me, making me jump a couple of inches off the ground.
    Words stretched across the phantom image, and a computerized voice, faintly feminine, spoke them as they appeared. "Choose screen name," it said. "Ten to fourteen characters only. Can include numbers, but no punctuation symbols, mathematical glyphs and/or dashes, spaces, and tab key intervals. Avoid excessive capitalization. Profanity is not allowed, and a member using a screen name that in any way may offend other members will be promptly reported and/or terminated."
    It then flashed a digital copy of a document that looked vaguely like that TOS plaque I saw at the city's entrance.
    "Terms of service 112:333-A," it blabbered on, so fast I didn't even try to keep up. "Profanity includes racial slurs, sexual innuendoes, religious slang, words and/or phrases targeting ethnic groups, nonprofit organizations, AOL services, age groups, and/or areas of the human body that would be considered 'private domain.' Also, anything considered repulsive, foul, disgusting, unappealing, mean, terrible, horrific, gruesome, and/or involving terminology relating to such words and their definitions or meanings as sited in the Webster's Abridged Dictionary volume 40.
    "Do you understand these terms?"
    I stood for a moment in limbo. "Um, yeah, I guess so," I answered.
    "Choose screen name," it repeated.
    I was afraid to say or do anything. Immediately, I feared that just looking in a certain direction might put me in violation of some TOS agreement. And the thought of that guy I saw in the street getting terminated didn't help any, either.
    "Good old boy for you," I spoke warily.
    The holographic screen flickered a few times and then continued. "GoodToldBoy4U," it rang, slightly misunderstanding what I had said, and the screen name appeared in white font. "Choose appearance."
    "Appearance?" I asked.
    Suddenly, a human form materialized to the right. It was a hologram of a human body, but lacking any detail. Basically, it was an image of a sexless mannequin.
    "Choose appearance," it asked again.
    I threw out a range of characteristics just to get the process over with. "Short black hair," I said, "green eyes, fair skin, average build, tall, no glasses, and an earring in the left lobe." I thought that might be creative. I just hoped the earring didn't offend a nonprofit organization or something.
    As I watched, the holographic mannequin began to look like the person I described. In time, a very real looking person was there staring back at me... deep green eyes locking onto to me.
    "Adequate?" I was asked.
    "Sure," I answered amazed.
    At that moment the room went completely dark. Everything in it, except me, seemed to vanish.
    "Members currently online: 22," I heard above me. "Welcome to room 'Film Chat', GoodToldBoy4U."
    At that moment, the door in front of me opened, and a flood of hazy light shot in. I could hear a chaos of conversation mingled with strokes of laughter and the shuffling of chairs and feet. Moving up to the entrance, I saw people scattered about a small wood paneled room with cozy booths and outcrops of round tables and stools. I thought at first I had wandered into a midwestern coffee house, but the lack of an expresso aroma in the air canceled that assumption.
    Once I was entirely in the room, the door flung shut behind me, startling me. As I spanned around, I noticed something strange about me. I felt entirely different. The first thing I took note of was my hair. When I reached up and touched it, I could feel a soft crewcut and could smell a hint of hairspray. I looked down at my body, too. I was dressed in expensive slacks and a sports shirt. Muscles pressed out from beneath that sports shirt, and I had apparently lost some weight, as well. Had I been to the gym? My arms had smooth biceps and my legs felt powerful enough to send me on a 1,000 yard dash. I felt superhuman. I smelled good. I looked good.
    I was truly Good...
    That's when I noticed the name tag imprinted into my shirt...
    I was truly GoodToldBoy4U.
    Apparently, I was not the only person in the room impressed by my appearance. On the far side, sitting in one of the booths was a young female, teasing me with interest. A man sat across from her that looked like a cross between Fabio and Howard Stern. He was by no means any less attractive than me, but he blabbered on constantly about something I couldn't hear from where I was standing, but something that obviously his female friend had no care for.
    I returned her interest, feeling a waft of excitement. This was fun.
    She moved away from the booth, leaving her blabbering friend suddenly silent and momentarily confused. My eyes shifted to her name tag: AngelFire.
    "You're new," she said with a rather sensual gesture; a tilt of the head, a shift of the long, brunette hair, and a smile on the velvet lips.
    I looked past her to see her deserted friend brooding back in the shadow of the booth. He delivered me a look that was completely opposite to AngelFire's.
    "You would be surprised by just how new I am," I told her. Should I have said that?
    AngelFire took it as a part of foreplay. "I like it when new ones come here," she said, teasing me with those eyes again. They were hazel. An almost crystalline hazel.
    "Why's that?" I asked, playing the game of the sexes.
    "Less predictable," she said. She then looked back at the guy in the booth who was now pretending to be apathetic.
    "How often do you come here?" I asked her.
    "A/S/L?" she responded.

    For a second I thought she called me an asshole.
    She laughed at the surprise in my face. "You are new, aren't you?" she said more than asked. After a second she settled back down and placed a slender hand on my shoulder. "I was asking you for your age, sex, and location, newsurf," she added.
    Newsurf? Was that a term for new computer users? It had to be. Chat rooms were something I never had an interest for back in my hacking days. Naturally, I was rusty on the terminology.
    "Can't you see my sex?" I asked her.
    "Real time, sweety," she said. "I ain't a stickler for mugs."
    Mugs? Now what the hell was that? I was lost with that one for sure.
    "I'm male a hundred percent," I told her, anyway. "As for age and location... are you meaning real time, again?"
    The smile never left her face. "Yes, of course. Your location here is pretty obvious, sweety," she said.
    "I'm thirty-three," I answered, suddenly forgetting sexual interest to an overwhelming sense of stupidity. "Also, from
Chicago."
    "Windy city?" she asked not expecting an answer. "I had a grandma that lived there."
    That was nice. I really couldn't have cared less. It was through this pocket of sudden disinterest that I wondered what the user behind this woman really looked like.
    "What's your A/S/L?" I asked her.
    "Sorry, sweety," she replied. "You gotta earn that information."
    I was a critic now. A regular cyber Sisco and Ebert. Something sprang in my gut that I wasn't even dealing with a female user, and I felt dirty. Real dirty. Pissed off dirty, in fact.
    "Since you're new, I'll cut ya some slack," she told me and swooned in closer. "Let's just skip the foreplay and go cyber."
    Now I knew I was dealing with a male user. Something else nagged me then, too: teenager.
    "Sorry, sweets," I responded. "I don't go to bed with no whore, and I don't wake up with no whore. Cyber space isn't an exception."
    Her face contorted into a sour expression. She wasn't beautiful anymore. "You calling me a whore?" she asked.
    I stood my ground as heads turned in the room. "Your dad know you're up this late, kid?" I had to ask.
    AngelFire was now devil's fire. I could see in the sudden flare of anger a faint spark of astonishment. This cyber she was a real time he, and the added bonus of kid made the knowledge I possessed all the more unbelievable.
    "How did--" she cut herself off, turning to a counterattack, instead. "Name calling is a TOS violation," she added.
    Now the room was dead quiet.
    The threat was unjustified. Still, though, I was caught emotionally between getting furious and getting plain scared.
    AngelFire's eyes shut and her lips tightened. She now seemed to be concentrating on something.
    "Leave him alone," someone shouted from the crowd. "You got what you deserved. He's just here to have fun."
    "SO AM I!" she screamed, her eyes now alight and filled with hate.
    The words sent a cold streak up my spine and made everyone else in the room jump. Her voice at that instant seemed less than human even for some three-dimensional image in cyber space. It carried a weight with it like I hadn't experienced since... since... Oh, shit!
    I looked closer at her. AngelFire's eyes were no longer hazel, but a demonic black, instead.
    SO AM I... SO AM I... SO AM I... The words repeated over again in my head and gradually mutated... SO AM I... NO... SO AM I... NO TRES... SO AM I... NO TRESPASSING...
    "Jesus!" I yelled and turned for the door. Instead, of a door, however, I found myself running into a gray wall, and I fell to the floor as a black hand rose up, grabbed my face, and shoved me back. Faintly, I could hear gasps from the crowd in the room.
    "Look, Stahl," a Germanic voice echoed in my ear. "This one has committed two verletzungs in one room."
    Almost paralyzed with fear now, I turned and looked up to find myself staring at a man I had hoped to God I would forget and especially avoid.
    "Ja," Stahl replied. His face was bright with evil intention. "Attacking an AOL representative is za worst crime."
    As the two guards seized me, I turned my head to glance back at AngelFire. She was smiling and her eyes had regained their hazel spark. For a second, I even wondered if I had imagined the eerie resemblance in her voice and eyes to my old enigmatic Jamaican foe.
    No, I thought as the guards threw me into the street. You can't have a hallucination in a world of illusions.
    Stahl bent over me and lit a cigarette. "Listen, herr," he said, blowing a puff of the gray pollution in my face, "you have committed two verletzungs. Do you want a third?"
    I looked at him like he was an idiot. I wanted to justify myself, but quickly remembered how far that got the last guy.
    The other guard laughed. "He doesn't like you, Stahl," he said.
    "Bah!" Stahl spit. He then kicked me hard in the stomach.
    I cried out and cringed at the sharp pain. I could swear the shit head cracked a rib with that steel toed boot.
    "He's still moving," the other guard said through an ivory grin.
    Stahl kicked me again.
    And again.
    "You fascist, Nazi pig!" I screamed. I could feel the hate swelling in me so bad it seemed to numb the pain. Just as Stahl turned to kick me a fourth time, I grabbed his boot and sent him flying to the ground.
    The other guard attempted to tackle me, but I had him figured out. A swift punch sent him flying back.
    Stahl, on the other hand, was more agile than I had expected. He came back up and struck me in the side. The attack wouldn't have meant anything had that square box not been in his palm...
    I was terminated.
    Blackness claimed my peripheral vision, and the skyscrapers of the city began to bend down and cage me in. Then it all shattered like glass, and I could feel a wave of emotions... no, a tidal wave of emotions. Hate led to anger, anger led to joy, joy led to sorrow, sorrow led to love... Christ!... The experience drove me mad! And the pain! It came and went with rushes of pure delight both sexual and intellectual... Yes!... That was it! I could see and know where I was, where I had been, and why I was there... It flooded me... Knowledge... Absolute, wonderful, beautiful... terrible... God awful knowledge...
    Join the rest of the kitsch, herr...
    Knowledge...
    Join the kitsch...
    Absolute...
    Kitsch...
    Knowledge...
    I swam an invisible sea. I saw the Internet in its vast realm of digital mind and body. Communication. I became at once and for all, everything that ever was and will be. I traveled along the pulse of an electron and catapulted to a distant star. I skipped from cyber space to an actual space and time. I could see, feel, and experience emotions that emanated from cities on Earth like a speaker phone on the mouth of a phantom cyclops. I turned and vanished into a bright flash only to reappear in the gaseous nebula of a 700 light year away galaxy... No... 700.11133243342234222  light years to be exact.
    Absolute knowledge.
    I swam the invisible sea. I tumbled into the swirl of a galactic hurricane... A collapsed star... A black mass at its center. I looked into that black mass. It spoke to me in every tongue ever existed and every tongue yet to be. I answered and knew not what I said, yet knew the answer to every question I carried. Then visions. I could see civilization in separate space and times. I could see the past, present, and future as one single focus in front of me, spilling out images at the speed of light and capturing my mind in a ghostly hold... I was Alpha and Omega.
    Absolute knowledge.
    God!
    Yes. That was it! Was it true?
    God, we're losing him!
    Lose me Jenkins. For God's sake, lose me.
    Sounds. Every sound mingled with every sight. Every emotion mated with every smell. I was everything and nothing in a single moment of infinite and finite time. I was all. I was none, if any. I was alive. I was...
    Dead. We lost him just like Jones.
    Terminated.
    Jones... Yes. I see you.
    "TRESPASSER!"
    I saw him on the gridded field in the recesses of an electronic universe. I focused on his presence. God cursed me and loved me for my choice. I turned and looked back at the pinpoint of an image: a galaxy. The center is what cursed and loved me. I shall return forever, I answered. I will... soon.
    But I knew it was a lie in truth.
    "TRESPASSER!"
    Jones, you fuck. You didn't create a program. You created a gate. Death was the key... And I opened the seventh seal.
    I stood now in the cyber realm I once knew in another life... another existence... another consciousness. I could see a form slowly moving towards me on the horizon. I chose my own shape and form. Soon, I would do battle. Soon, I would fight the behemoth and cast it back into the sea of fire. I was written in the book of life. I had the mind of God. I knew where God was... where He could be reached in space and time...
    I reflected...