"McHugh-VirtualLove" - читать интересную книгу автора (McHugh Maureen F)

MAUREEN F. McHUGH - Virtual Love

The thing I like best about VR is that you can do anything. Not just the obvious
things like murder someone or be an archaeologist in Peru, although that's fun
once in a while. But just when you're hanging out, meeting people, you can be
anything you want. I have twelve different personas. Some of them, like Lilith
and Marty, I don't use very often, but I like to know that they're back there
and if I want to be a vamp I can put on Lilith and go to a party, wear midnight
blue sequins to show off my fox red hair, drink virtual martinis -- did you ever
taste a real martini? Jesus! -- and sway my virtual hips all I want.

Being good in VR is a talent. When anybody can be anything, the competition for
attention can get pretty fierce. Everybody can have a perfect figure, perfect
legs, perfect hair, perfect lips, a wardrobe worth hundreds of thousands. You've
got to have an edge and the really great thing, see, is that it isn't money and
it isn't the genetic hand that mother nature dealt you and it isn't the
accidents of fate and disease, it's really all mind. Out there, dressed as
Lilith or Alicia or Terese, it's really pure energy, just the pure flame of a
mind burning like an electron candle. Electrons dancing in the light. And who
can tell the dancer from the dancer

Well, I can, baby, but you can't and that's really the whole point, isn't it?

I have a VR system in my place. It's not the best, it's a seated system, of
course. My gloves are second-hand. They're good gloves, British made, DNRs. My
helmet, I paid a lot for the helmet, you have no idea what that helmet cost.
It's a Mitsubishi, not the most expensive but definitely high end. It's light
weight, and that's important to me if I'm going to wear it for any length of
time. I put on the gloves and then the helmet and there's this moment before the
system kicks on when everything is black inside the visor and there's no sound
in my ears and I'm just floating there, suspended in the pre-virtual darkness as
if I'm about to be born. Just time to take a breath and then the feed hooks in.

I'm in the dressing room. It's a dingy little green room, like actors use to get
ready for a play. I can see the gloves on my hands, ruby red like the slippers
in the Wizard of Oz, but there's no face in the mirror which is exactly right
because I haven't picked one yet.

Once in a while I go out invisible. It's called lurking. When I was eighteen and
I first got full access to all the boards, including the adult boards, I used to
do it all the time. For a couple of years I didn't have a body, never talked to
anyone. I was just watching learning the local customs so to speak. I became a
connoisseur of people's personas. I could tell when the person was different
from the body they'd picked, when they were really just an eighteen-year-old kid
who was trying to pass for a thirty-five-year-old Cary Grant. What I really
liked was watching someone do it right, so you forgot that they weren't the
person they had put on and then there'd be a bit of stage business and I'd
think, "ah-hah, I see you." Because that was just what I would have done in
their place.