HARD, SOFT & WET
the digital generation comes of age
MELANIE McGRATH

Dedication

for Alex and Daniel

Epigraph

‘I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly; ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’

LEWIS CARROLL,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

I: In Wonderland (CALIFORNIA)

II: Home & Away (LONDON)

Intermission (WIREDWORLD)

III: Lost in Space (SAN FRANCISCO, BOSTON, NEW YORK)

IV: Bonjour Tristesse, or The Unforgiven (ICELAND, ENGLAND, WALES)

V: Through the Looking Glass (BERLIN, PRAGUE, MOSCOW, SINGAPORE)

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Author's Note

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

all this began some time ago

I: In Wonderland

THERE’S NO EXPLAINING why Nancy and I have stayed friends over the years. We don’t have much in common any more. Not much you could put your finger on. But friends we are, strung together by our few similarities and by the thin, tough mesh of our small shared past.

The airport train unzips to let a couple out, then zips back up and hums away from the station, picking up speed and rediscovering its riff. Beating out the same syllables on its tracks: Am-er-i-ca, Am-er-i-ca. A squall of tunnel air scatters them. Am-er-i-ca. Am-er-i-ca. It’s been fourteen years since I first stepped out of the plane at San Francisco. Now I’m going back. Nancy will be standing at the barrier on the other side waiting for me. Nancy with the troublesome eyes, the air of insouciance, the panoramic humour. Nancy of the good dream.

Out on the other side of the tunnel the rhythm tugs on, a restless, sexy hiss of noise. Am-er-i-ca. Am-er-i-ca. Mad, fat, brave America. Am-er-i-ca. The sound of redwoods big as mushroom clouds, of cream soda cans trapped in cooler bags, of blanket smog tricked out as coastal cloud. Am-er-i-ca. A sway of pricking notes, like liquorice powder on the tongue.

We met in a borrowed apartment on Venice Beach. She was a couple of years older than me, nineteen I think, but assured and at home in herself even then. I thought she was the girl from Ipanema on loan to Los Angeles; tallish, with a swing of a walk and sharp brown hair. We watched TV together, roaring at the re-runs of The Partridge Family and after we were done laughing, we skipped down to the beach and played. She dazzled me. I hung on her words and practised their pronunciation. Bayzil, leeshure, parsta, lootenant. We had all the usual Anglo-American spats, who came first at what.

Later, Nancy’s brother saw me off at the Amtrak station and promised to catch up with the train on his motorbike at Santa Barbara or thereabouts. The last I saw of him, he was standing in a field next to the track, waving and smiling as the train sped by, too fast for him to be able to make out my carriage or me. He moved to Canada some years later, but I was always touched by that gesture. I was seventeen and everything was ripe with meaning.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, TUESDAY
Apple pie

Nancy was there at the barrier as I’d expected, her hair shorter and still beautiful, with tracings around the eyes. We rumbled along highway 280 into San Francisco, past the industrial centre, past the university and down into 19th Avenue, chirping like caged birds, our heads darting about and our tongues full of this and that. The city was looking just so in the afternoon sun.

‘When Brezhnev came, he asked if people had to pay an extra tax to come and live here,’ said Nancy.

‘Well it’s not cheap.’ We’d already stopped off for a long shot of latte. I’d noticed the prices of a few things.

‘No, but it’s pretty.’

And with the broad light showing off the pastel-coloured porches and bougainvillaea flowers strewn along 19th Ave, it was pretty. Fine and pretty.

As we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge I turned in my seat so as not to miss the view of the Bay with the Transamerica building shining like a chunk of Toblerone still wrapped in its foil and the rocky bubbles of Alcatraz and Angel Island. Coit Tower was murky red against the haze with Pacific Heights and Nob Hill behind and North Beach at the other side, the lot piled up against the hills as rumpled as a plate of pastel berries, or maybe a volcano cast in scumble glaze. I began to smile. The car tyres continued tocking over the metal stress bars of the bridge while Nancy and I fell silent and happy.

At Strawberry Point we dropped down onto the slip road and lost sight of the city. Fuddled with pride, Nancy turned to me and said in a choked-up voice:

‘Shall we get something to eat?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied in an instant. ‘McDonald’s apple pie.’

And now it is the middle of the Californian night, and I’m sitting on the bed in Nancy’s spare room listening to the crack of the cedar shingles and the distant mechanical blur of traffic running along the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Waldo tunnel. A sweep of light from a passing car flares against the books pinned up about the room. Four shelves on the history of science, two more on computing, a small collection of modern novels, software guides and a couple of teach yourself programming manuals, all smelling of must and chemicals.

Somewhere below the house, at the water’s edge along the rim of shingle, a nightbird caws.

America. Here I am once more.

FRIDAY

By the time I wake Nancy has left for work. A note in her familiar hand lies on the table:

‘Sweetheart. I’ll be back early so we can go for a walk in Muir Woods, OK?’

Muir Woods is my favourite spot in the whole of Northern California. It is where the Spanish moss hangs from the branches of thick red trees as old as gunpowder.

Over the past couple of years Nancy has been marketing software for a company in Marin. We’ve never spoken about it much. Our friendship isn’t based on long shared experience, but on some intangible, timeless affection. Whenever I think of my friend, I am haunted by those impressions of her that were first imprinted on my memory when I was seventeen. Sunny brown hair, a restless air and a wide confident swing. We don’t have to know much about the everyday run of one another’s lives, to love one another all the same.

Down in Strawberry Village at lunchtime my eye is drawn to the ‘$3.99 high-tech burrito special’ on offer at the local taqueria. A regular-looking burrito arrives: flour tortilla, beans, cheese, shredded lettuce, sour cream on the side.

‘What’s the high-tech part?’ The waiter looks at me darkly.

‘I don’t know, lady.’

He fills up my glass so hard that waves of iced water explode from the rim and wet the table.

Along one of the main trails in Muir Woods, just beyond the visitor centre, there is a slice of redwood tree with its age rings marked out in years of human history. Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America is marked on a ring about three-quarters of the way in, the Declaration of Independence is three-quarters of the way out and the American Civil War is so new that it’s almost set into bark. Each time Nancy and I have been out to Muir Woods together we’ve had the same conversation standing in front of that piece of tree. It’s a ritual. Nancy says something like: ‘Look at the huge gaps between markers until you get to the twentieth century, which is all backed up, like more has happened in the last hundred years than in all the other centuries combined.’ And I generally reply with some platitude like: ‘Yeah, it makes you think, doesn’t it?’

Dry weather has brought up the dust in Muir Woods, thickening the stems of bright sun bursting through the trees. A few jars wheeze under the canopy and the air is big in stillness.

‘This place feels like a contradiction of America,’ I say, as we meander along the river bank towards the mouth of the canyon. ‘So quiet, untouched.’ A small shadow falls over Nancy’s face. She stops in her tracks, gazing at the sky as though reading some message from an aerial autocue.

‘But this is exactly America,’ she says. ‘The America of the first frontier.’ She flips an insect from her arm. ‘Northern California is the one place where the old and new frontiers collide. It’s at the epicentre of every dream America ever had. The old frontier,’ she waves at the trees, at the key of light through the leaves, ‘and the new frontier a few miles down the road in Silicon Valley. The high-tech frontier of chips and virtual worlds.’ We wander on a few paces, locked in thought.

‘All those books in your spare room,’ I begin. Nancy waves the question away.

‘I haven’t read them all. I’m trying to keep up is all.’ She returns to her own bright thoughts. ‘You know, the first frontier was never some fixed thing. It was kind of mutable. First it was the Appalachians, then the Missouri, the Great Plains, then the Rockies. It’s the same with high tech. There isn’t a single technological frontier. The minute one boundary is crossed, the dream moves on.’

We stop at a tangle of furze marking the mouth of the canyon and prepare to turn back towards the visitor centre past the slice of redwood tree. I’m wondering why I chose to come to America now, with nothing particular to do and nowhere particular to go. I’m thinking that somehow, subconsciously, I must have sensed a new beginning here. And I must have felt the need to join in the game, to stake out some territory that might fill up the empty hours and the meaningless, shifting days of my adult life.

‘You know, Nance, I’d really like to be in on this new frontier, if that’s what it is. Will you teach me?’

‘Sure. I thought that was why you came.’

‘I don’t know why I came,’ I say, laying down part of the truth. ‘I just wanted to be in America.’

After supper, Nancy introduces me to her clippings box and pulls out a copy of an article she cut from some magazine a few months before.

‘What I love about all this high-tech stuff’, she says, handing me the paper, ‘is that no one really knows how the hell it’s all gonna turn out.’

The article is a list of all the technological predictions ever made in print. Marconi prophesying that radio would only be used for telegrams ship to shore, Alexander Graham Bell supposing the phone was destined for nothing more than piping concert music from one place to another. And in 1977 the Chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation saying: ‘There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.’

MONDAY

Nancy is back at work, leaving me time to think about the days just gone.

I spent much of the weekend taking my first frail steps along the technological frontier in Internet Relay Chat. Nancy said she’d show me how it worked if I made her a trifle, so we drove down to Strawberry Village shopping mall and picked up some eggs and spray-on cream and while the custard was still hot Nancy sat me down in front of her machine and instructed me which keys to press first to set the modem dialling out and then to access IRC.

‘IRC goes like this,’ she said. ‘You dial up a channel, like ham radio, and then you type in whatever you want to say to whoever else is on the same channel. You have to choose an online name, but it’s not called a name, it’s called a handle.’

I chose the handle Fish ’n’ Chips. Nancy said she’d watch, brown hair pinned back out of the way. And since I really didn’t know what I was doing, she started me off on the newbie channel, and told me just to type in whatever seemed natural to me, so I typed

<Hi everybody.

And within the wink someone with the handle Rosebud had typed back

<Hi Fish ’n’ Chips!!!!!

And it felt as though I’d made contact with some creature in another world. I clattered feverishly at the keys

<I’m new to this, smiling at the absurd, the really wonderful idea of Rosebud sitting at a desk somewhere distant, waiting those few miniature moments while her screen filled up with me.

<Hey, she typed, <this is the newbie channel. We’re all new!!!!!!

There were twenty-four of us on the newbie channel, each feeling about for an electric self as though made suddenly blind in an unfamiliar territory, equipped only with the feel of the keys and the breath of the screen. Nothing else to go on but discovery. It was captivating.

Nancy and I ate the trifle for lunch, although it wasn’t quite set and it wasn’t quite lunchtime. Nancy explained it all to me, every part of it; the bleeping din of the modem as it reached for another of its kind, the innocent pause while machines far distant exchanged their pleasantries, the secret switch of passwords, the blank blink of the cursor awaiting commands, the flim-flam of lights passing ones and noughts to and fro, and all of it winding up on the dumb, fixating screen, slave of keys and mice and human hands.

And as for the voices, Rosebud and Fish ’n’ Chips, as for the contact of one stranger to another, as for the chitter chat and the spread of words, well that felt something like the touch of spirits, the broad and speechless song of being human.

After lunch Nancy suggested we play around in a new virtual reality chat space she had heard about where you play a three-dimensional character and interact with all the other three-dimensional characters representing real people sat at real computer terminals just like yourself. We chose to be a fish with a Buddha’s face and we floated around until we found a room of other avatars, an artist’s mannequin, a witch, a disembodied smiley and a panda bear.

>Hi people, we typed, but no one answered. They were busy exploring the room with their avatars. Nancy and I took a look around ourselves, guiding the Buddha about with the mouse. Grey walls, a few posters hung on one of them and a fountain in the middle. Then Nancy instructed me to carry on while she went into the kitchen to fetch us some iced tea.

>Hi people, I typed, but still nothing came back.

‘Nance, am I doing this right?’

She wandered in from the other room, checked the screen.

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘I can’t get anyone to talk to us.’

‘I dunno, Sweetie, try again.’

>Hi people. Does anyone want to chat?

A message from the artist’s mannequin appeared.

>Hey, fish, cool avatar.

We drove out to Nancy’s office on the edge of Tiburon, a few miles round the peninsula from Strawberry Point, in a complex of offices housing high-tech businesses. Very smoked glass and chrome. We didn’t talk much about her job; she seemed satisfied just to have shown me where she did it. I think I must have bored her with my froth of new-found enthusiasm, because she remarked very dryly as we got back into the car that I’d have to be prepared to come down off the high in a week or two.

‘Bob was just like this when he first started.’

I didn’t ask who Bob was. Nancy has a habit of talking about people you’ve never heard of as though they were the world’s best friends.

Sunday was rainy. We stayed in and skimmed through magazines all morning. I discovered from an old copy of Scientific American that in 1946 a three-minute transatlantic phone call cost the equivalent of $600 and had to be booked two weeks ahead.

Later in the day, as a result of watching too much TV (though I don’t know why TV and not some other excess), the conversation got onto the subject of kids. I seem to get onto that particular subject a great deal these days. Thoughts about kids prowl about my head so often I sometimes feel as though my brain has sprung a brood. When I admitted as much to Nancy, she said:

‘It’s the age. You and I are an invincible brew of roaring hormones. I should know because I’m even older.’

‘But what I mean,’ I added, ‘is have you thought about, you know, actually having any.’ It was a stupid question. No woman reaches her thirties without turning over in her mind whether or not she might have children.

Nancy hesitated, crunching up her eyes to give her better access to her thoughts and stared through the TV.

‘You hear such stories, twelve-year-old rapists and I don’t know what. I’m not so sure I really understand kids these days,’ she said.

‘We don’t seem to like them much any more.’ I looked at the TV for a moment. ‘Why is that?’

Nancy shrugged and flicked back her hair. The rills around her eyes deepened, leaving tiny crevasses, like cracks opening up in drying clay.

‘I dunno. Envy, maybe?’ she asked in an exploratory tone. ‘When we were kids in the sixties and seventies there were so many worlds still to be invented or discovered or imagined whereas these days …’ She tailed off and we sank into a gloomy kind of Sunday funk, tucked up on the sofa together while the TV bled its way through prime time. Some sort of animal connection passed between us, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought of the children I might have, and wondered whether I’d ever comprehend the world they would inhabit, thirty years on from my own dimly recalled childhood, when colour TVs were still a novelty, and no one had ever heard of a VCR. Eventually I broke the silence.

‘You know, Nancy, if this high-tech thing really is the new frontier, then it’s the kids who are going to be settling it, not us.’

‘I guess.’ Nancy seemed suddenly to have lost interest in talking about kids. I wondered vaguely if I’d touched on some painful secret, but ploughed on regardless. ‘In twenty or thirty years’ time it’ll be today’s kids who will really be feeling the impact of the Net, the Human Genome Project and virtual reality and nanotech and all that stuff.’

I went to bed that night with the sense that some immense gate was opening up ahead of me. I knew I was about to pass through it and I hoped that when I did I wouldn’t find myself walled off from the world I’d left. I thought about the people behind the IRC handles Rosebud, the panda bear and the artist’s mannequin and wondered if I’d ever come across them again. As I was about to fall asleep, Nancy slid into my room clutching something to her chest. She sat on the bed, looked about her at the library of books and began to wonder in a wistful tone whether we were just part of some transitional generation, unconvinced by the old myths but incapable of absorbing the new ones either, condemned to cling on to a fifties B-movie future of personal commuter jet-pods, clingy silver suits and robot pets which we knew to be a fake.

I could tell by the droop in her voice that she was struggling not to believe her own predictions. She handed me the paper she’d been holding to her chest, a computer print-out of a name, a phone number and an e-mail address.

‘Hey, if you’re really interested in kids, you should visit this little guy. He’s the youngest kid ever to hang out in virtual reality.’

‘That’s sweet.’ I imagined a little boy in a baggy romper suit tumbling round in a set of VR goggles, and felt a sudden strong purpose and a sense of knowing.

‘Let’s hope so,’ Nancy said.

Sitting in bed in Nancy’s room, watching the shadows play about her books, I decided to give myself a mission. I would hunt down the future, starting with the everyday intimations of tomorrow – the games, gadgets and consumer fads – that were already an invisible part of so many young lives and I would work my way up to the networks, which will, in their turn, become a mundane part of the lives of those children’s children, and perhaps also of my own children. If digital culture was going to be the new frontier, I had an urge to become one of its pioneers, to comprehend it from the inside, to feel less like an observer and more like a participant. To be truly honest, I wanted to be sure there would be a future – of almost any sort.

WEDNESDAY
Click and something happens

Three days later I’m driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge towards San Francisco admiring the heaped up pile of the city stretched silver white across the bay. Streaks of sun are beginning to slice through the morning mist on the ocean side and the weatherman at KCBS radio has promised it’s going to stay sunny and dry until the weekend. Traffic stammers along at 19th Avenue, stop-starting and banging about for breath, before picking up speed south of the city and unwinding into two skeins at the exit to Silicon Valley and San Jose. America feels ordered and uncomplicated today.

Alex Rothman and his dad are expecting me the other side of lunchtime.

Twenty miles further on at Millbrae the mist is all burned off. By the time I’ve reached the Valley town of Redwood City I’m popping the first of the morning’s root beers and thinking about how the world must have been when I was three, the same age as Alex. I say must have been, because all I have by way of memory from that time are vague impressions of age-long days and months, spiked at regular intervals with odd intrusions of anxiety and our neighbour Mrs Ivan’s treacle toffee. I remember my dad buying me a clockwork duck when he won the football pools and I can taste the toffee apples Mrs Ivan made on fireworks night. But of the larger world around about I can recall almost nothing.

The events of the year spanning ’67 and ’68 when I was three passed me by. While the Paris uprisings raged, Woodstock rocked, Vietnam was plundered, my generation was regardless, too busy being fed and formed by our mothers and – maybe – our fathers too. Too busy with Alphabetti Spaghetti and Top of the Pops, the TV and David Cassidy and all our clockwork ducks and toffee apples.

So I wonder what Alex will remember of now, of this week, this month, this year, of this day even, in twenty years from now?

Somewhere in Palo Alto I take a wrong turn and end up driving around the suburbs before finding myself by some miracle back at Page Mill Road from where my directions begin again. With the map spread out on my lap I head west towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. Up at 6000 ft on Skyline Road a wispy grey foam appears to have crept back over the Valley, hinting at rain, but the radio weather reports continue to promise a dry day. I wonder if the mist might be a smog cloud spilled over from San Francisco or San Jose, if such a thing ever happens. By the time I reach Boulder Creek my head feels as thick as a plate of dumplings left to boil too long.

I explain to the man in the Boulder Creek General Store that I have a migraine coming on.

‘That’ll be a thunderstorm, I expect,’ he replies, wrapping a packet of painkillers in a brown paper bag with a missing persons message on it, then dumping the change on the counter. I mention that the weather reports are insisting it’s going to stay dry.

‘The two most unpredictable things in this world are weather and women,’ the man says, turning away.

Boulder Creek was a logging town until the Silicon Valley suits started moving in, and though it still has some of the tarry conservatism and pine-needle neighbourliness left over from those days, the racketing confidence of new money runs through its veins.

In the driveway where Alex lives a woman is loading bags into a station wagon. She looks up at me, wary, and gestures with her arm towards the porch but before I’ve reached the door a man has already opened it and ushers me in, muttering, ‘My wife is running into town to pick up some supplies because friends of theirs think there’s going to be a storm.’

Alex’s father, Peter, is one of those gently cumbersome, ursine men peculiar to North America; a biter on life, a big-eating, big-earning human Panzer tank. According to Nancy, he develops virtual reality software for financiers and the US military, through which connection they are on waving terms at industry parties. His job is to write code so complex that it can trick a person into imagining he’s moving through a stock exchange, or crouching in a bunker and surveying the horizon, when all he is really doing is processing data projected on to a screen and held fast in front of his eyes by a helmet.

Wasting no time on niceties, the human Panzer waves me into an armchair, surges over to a cupboard by the kitchen, dives in and comes up for air minutes later with a black strip of a thing trailing cables from its sides. Plugs it into a computer on the table.

‘This,’ he announces, ‘is a total immersion VR helmet.’

The thing in his hands shines like a black ball of insect eyes. He urges me to put it on. Inside the helmet a blue room rises. For a moment it feels as though I’m in a deep sea diving bell, listening to the steady purr of my breath and drinking in the first view of a newly discovered territory.

‘It’s great isn’t it?’ Peter tips me very gently with the ridged track of his palm. ‘Look, when you move your head, the computerized world of images inside the helmet moves with you.’ I glance down at the depths, and look up at the heights. All blue. Too blue to belong to for long. I lift the helmet from my face to find a little boy watching impassively, marking time in the way that children often do. This is Alex. A regular-looking three-year-old. Matt brown hair, Bermudas and a sweat shirt, nothing like the grinning future-creature I’d envisaged at the weekend. I’m shamefully disappointed.

‘So, Alex, buddy,’ says the father to his son, ‘say hello.’ He gestures towards me.

‘Hello,’ obeys Alex, inching forward. We cross gazes for a moment then I open with a question.

‘What’s your favourite colour, Alex?’ I’m imagining that it must be blue. VR blue. But Alex merely looks at me, turns tail and toddles back to his room. He returns with a Bart Simpson doll.

‘Bart Simpson, great,’ say I, taking the doll, ‘but you play with computers, too, don’t you Alex?’

The boy scampers back to his room. Returns with a Bugs Bunny wind-up toy. Winds it, sets it pacing and begins squealing in time with the clockwork.

‘Do you have any electronic toys you could show me, Alex?’

Alex contemplates, snatches Bart Simpson, flees back to his room. Five minutes later he comes running out clutching a Power Ranger.

‘Look,’ says Alex, sprawling on the carpet and using the Power Ranger’s face to shovel out some of the shag pile. ‘Cool.’

‘So it is,’ I chirp, then more sly, leaning down to whisper in the boy’s ear, ‘but I bet it’s not as cool as the games you play with Dad’s computers.’

Alex pushes my head away in disgust. The head incidentally which is booming along the temples in time with my breath and pulse.

Peter returns from putting away the VR helmet. ‘Alex first wore one of those things on the fourth of July 1992, when he was just over a year old. The youngest kid ever. He loves it. Navigates through buildings, whole star systems in virtual reality. Doesn’t even know the alphabet yet. Now, Buddy.’ Peter turns his attention to his son and lifting the boy onto his knee, silencing the squeals, whispers ‘tell us what you put on when you’re playing special games.’

‘A head-mounted display,’ returns the boy, unimpressed.

‘And what does that do, Bud?’ Peter backs up into his seat, then manoeuvres his body forward again at a different angle, as though he were the driver of some intractable piece of plant.

‘Oh, you know,’ the boy follows Bugs Bunny crawling across the carpet. ‘You get to see things, and when you move …’ Tails off.

‘Yeah,’ says Peter. ‘And what happens when you move, Bud?’

‘Uh, you get to see more things,’ confirms Alex, clambering down from his father’s lap and running away. He returns from his bedroom with a Tonka toy.

‘This is heavy,’ he says, holding it out for me to feel.

Peter shoots me a look of mock despair, mixed in with a chesty heave of involuntary pride.

‘I was thinking. A while ago a German film-maker guy came over and took some film of Alex wearing his virtual reality helmet. He was a baby then. We’ve got it somewhere in the den if you’d like to see it.’ He motors off, tagging Alex, who has discovered a bamboo cane and is waving it to make whizzing noises in the air. Peter finds the tape and fast forwards it to a shot of a baby, naked except for duvet-diaper and VR helmet, blind to reality, grappling with his hands for something in the virtual world behind his eyes. Peter giggles with recollected affection for the Alex that was, while the Alex that is prowls about the room, as yet a shadow of a person made bright with temporary definition.

Just then the wife bursts into the room, registers the video, smiles to herself and at Alex and shakes some dampness from her hair.

‘It’s raining already. I think it’s going to be some big storm. The forecasters are going crazy.’ She stares at me with a doubtful eye. I feel myself returning the look, and we catch each other’s eye, exchanging hints of competitive pride and a resistance to the other’s unoffered pity. Rain begins ticking on the window panes.

Alex, oblivious to all this, toddles about happily brandishing his bamboo cane. His father pulls him close, thundering into his ear.

‘Tell us how you use a computer mouse, Bud.’

‘I click and something happens. I click and something turns on.’ The mother retreats from the room and switches on a radio somewhere. Peter ignores the music and rumbles ahead:

‘Alex has been playing this game I wrote for VR, called Neo-Tokyo. Actually, we play together. You’re the renegade pilot of a high-speed police hovercraft, and you have to steer your vehicle through the city, shooting out billboard advertisements. It’s cute.’

‘Everything breaks,’ remarks Alex, unasked. ‘I shot a window and I shot a sign.’ He dismisses the light stick and climbs up into his father’s lap.

‘You were going everywhere, Dad, and you were shooting.’

‘Yeah,’ says the father.

‘And there were some bad guys and I got them.’ He looks up at his father for a reiteration but the father merely smiles and raises an indulgent eyebrow.

‘No you didn’t, Bud, there aren’t any bad guys in NeoTokyo, remember?’

‘Yes there are,’ says Alex, emphatically. ‘I shot them.’

I suddenly realize that my little game is going to be harder to play than I had first imagined.

Out on the road leading back east to Palo Alto, the rain is punching fierce cold fists, drumming at the windscreen and emerging in dirty great geysers at the side of each wing mirror. The radio hisses in and out of non-stop country hits, overlaying Kenny, Tammy, Dolly, Garth and the rest with the dim waves of a news flash from some other station announcing that a state of emergency has been declared around San Jose.

It’s times like these that an alternate reality would be really handy. And not just a blue VR room, either, but a place with substance, in other colours. You could plug into a beach there and wait until it’s all over. On the other hand, there is something so absolutely American about blustering, muscular weather like this that you’d have to be a fool to want to escape it. Great, roaring weather it is, as big as the forty-eight.

A captive stick begins to whirr its way round the front nearside wheel arch, spinning rainbowed water onto the bonnet. Underneath the chassis, the four low tread tyres skate along on a meniscus of grease and every so often the suspension bumps over fallen branches and other dead things, sending the car sidling towards the silt-laden river by the side of the road. I’m wondering whether I should stop at the first big town, find myself a pay phone and call Nancy, but I can’t make out any exits off the highway.

The police have set up a road block at Mountain View. I pull up and leave my headlights burning. A cop with a torch runs over, hunched against the rain. Leans into the car.

‘We’re about to close 101. There are some nasty holes opened up five miles north of here. Is your journey absolutely necessary, ma’am?’ Shouting against the beat of water on the blacktop.

‘I’m going home.’

‘And where is that?’ I consider how to answer this, think of Nancy.

‘Marin County.’ The cop lifts his hand to cut me short, shouts something into his cop phone, then leans back in again. A rope of rainwater bungees from his hat, blackening the upholstery.

‘When did you begin your journey, ma’am?’

‘At nine o’clock this morning, give or take.’

The cop checks in over the phone, waves me forward.

‘We’d have turned you back if you’d known there was going to be a storm, but we’re gonna let you go through this time ’cause no one saw this thing coming. Stick to the far lane and you’ll miss the holes. Go slow, now.’ I nod, and switch the window up. Only the weather seems to know its own future.

Nancy is sitting at her computer reading off her e-mail.

‘Some storm,’ she says, checking to see I’ve taken my shoes off. ‘Erica was saying that quite a few folks in Marin don’t have any electricity.’

Naturally I’ve no idea who Erica is, but in this case, it doesn’t matter.

‘How was Alex?’

‘Sweet. Normal. I mean, I don’t know, I haven’t really had time to think about it.’

‘I tell you,’ says Nancy, ‘Silicon Valley is like one big prototype-farm right now. Some kind of mutant factory. They’re turning out new patents down there fast as McDonald’s turn out burgers. Software prototypes, business prototypes, chip prototypes, even prototype kids.’

I snicker, expecting Nancy to join in the joke, but she surprises me by tossing out one of her super-serious looks:

‘You’d better believe it, Sweetheart.’

THURSDAY
Vote now!

The sun is back this morning, burning off the rainwater and leaving a crust of dried mud, twigs and storm debris on the blacktop of the 101 freeway running south from Marin. In the queue for the post office in Sausalito the talk is of the neighbours’ broken shingles and the sleepless night, and the air down at the houseboat pier fronting onto San Francisco Bay still smells as strongly of static cling as the upholstery on rental cars. And all this some four or five hours after the final lightning strike.

Nancy has given me a list of groceries to buy at Mollie Stone’s and a book – the first published guide to the Net, signed by the author, an acquaintance of Nancy’s from her college days. She makes me swear on a carton of Ben & Jerry’s not to lose it.

The inside of Mollie Stone’s feels more like a provisions cathedral than a supermarket. Along either side of the aisles sweet indulgences dazzle the nose and promises of edible heaven line the shelves. At the fish counter the whole of the sea bed from San Francisco to Patagonia lies outstretched and odourless upon its icy lilo. Trial titbits of this and that lie in wait round each corner to assault your senses and dizzy you into a purchase. A sales clerk lurks about to take your money while your eyes are still in reflex action. There are six varieties of sun-dried tomato, twenty-four styles of chocolate biscuit, spaghetti in seven flavours. In the fruit and veg section organic Guatemalan mange tout fight for space with Napa Valley chanterelles and things I’ve never heard of. There’s no lettuce, as such, only Batavia, Butternut, Beet leaf, Romaine, Radicchio, Rocket and Stone’s special selection, all ready to go. The whole store reeks of money. Northern California reeks of it.

Turning left at the end of the Oakland Bay Bridge I find myself in Emeryville, a strip of waterfront warehouses, malls, parking lots and golf driving ranges looking out over the black quays of Oakland to San Francisco. Mr Payback, billed as the world’s first interactive movie is playing at a specially converted theatre in the United Artists multiplex just round the corner.

A typical matinée crowd of truant teens, retired couples, students and lonely housewives beats about the ticket counter chewing popcorn and waiting for friends or for the start of their movies. Further inside the overactive air conditioning blows the smell of estery butter sauce out through a series of metal vents into the larger space of the foyer. TV screens show clipped versions of the new releases to a scattering of people sitting on the padded benches set around the walls. An atmosphere of quiet separation prevails, lending the building the genteel air of a public records office with all its dark secrets locked up in mysterious boxrooms off to the sides.

While my eyes are still adjusting to the shade in theatre five, six Chinese boys press past, heading towards the screen, murmuring, ‘Hey, cool,’ at their first sighting of the modified seats, each fitted with a joystick carrying three buttons in green, orange and yellow. I check my ticket, move down the steps to row L and settle myself into a seat behind the boys. The speakers begin to spew out soft rock numbers by Bread and Captain Beefheart. Within seconds of finding their places, the boys have already mastered their joysticks and are lost in a thick din of clicking thumb candy. Aside from myself and the boys, huddled together into two rows, the theatre is empty.

I sink into the velvet scoop of L14 with my coat about my legs to ward off the air conditioning, and position three of the fingers of my right hand on the green, orange and yellow buttons of the joystick in front to get the feel of it. Each button gives to pressure with a handsome poot and a wiggle of resistance.

‘Maybe it’s like the orange button is BLAM, and it offs the bad guy and the green just puts him in jail for life,’ speculates one of the boys, pounding his joystick.

‘Like, who, man?’

‘The bad guy, asshole.’

And the row of boys begins clicking as if their thumbs had evolved precisely for the purpose.

Voice-over and a red Testarossa on the screen: ‘The world is digital, fibre optic, cellular, but still there are assholes, jerks and scumbags around.’ Dissolves into the Title Sequence. The voice-over says ‘When you see the “VOTE NOW” message press the orange, yellow or green button on your joystick to make your selection. The film will then follow whichever selection wins the largest number of votes.’

Barely a minute in, before the stain left by the opening credits has fully faded from my eyes, the words ‘vote now’ appear in flashing dayglo, and an involuntary surge of adrenaline darts through my right hand speeding the fingers into a rise and fall. A multitude of clicks. I’m caught short by how much it matters to press down and win.

‘Vote orange, orange, orange.’ One of the Chinese boys in the row ahead is shouting. I can taste the concentration carried on his breath, the thrashing excitement, can feel the throb of clicks coming up through the fabric of the walls like some universal pulse.

The film slips seamlessly beyond the vote into the next act. A familiar smell of static rises from the seats. I’ve no idea exactly how I’ve voted, but it hardly matters, since it wasn’t so much a vote in any case as a series of miniature acts of incursion. Press, press, press, tap, tap, tap, click, click, click, the will of the flesh bearing down onto a lifeless ring of green and yellow buttons.

The high of the moment quickly passes and I’m left staring through the gloaming at the row of stiffened necks and knotted hands belonging to the boys in front. Whatever thin narrative is flickering across the screen is irrelevant. Only when the next ‘VOTE NOW’, the insistent call to arms, appears will our heads rock and our fingers bounce and the spells leak out from our bodies and animate for a few seconds the dead passage of the square of light ahead of us.

We don’t have long to wait, for within a matter of a few moments the words ‘VOTE NOW’ are flashing on the screen and my lungs begin to demand their breath in shallow shots, tapping out the rhythm of the next click, the next hammering vote, the clueless choice, the next small pulse of power that will electrify the web of nerves running along my arm and pull at the muscles of my right hand and finally set off the cushion of cells along my fingertips.

Thirty minutes after it first began, seven brain-dead people stagger out of theatre five into the foyer in a kind of ragged trance.

One of the boys says it was cool. Another says it was galactic.

Back at Nancy’s house I unpack the shopping in a daze, reminding myself to squirrel away a few of my more creative impulse purchases such as the slab of dried Greenland halibut and the packet of cream of tartar behind the tins in Nancy’s store cupboard. I’ll confess to my product promiscuity the next time I find her in a particularly good mood. Meanwhile, a few remaining extras will have to be consigned forever to a dark spot under the bed in the spare room. I’m not sure even Nancy would be able to forgive Japanese pickled strawberries and black finger fungus.

With an hour to kill before she’s due back I flip through Nancy’s manual of the Net, but soon find myself struggling for comprehension through the pile of abstract, dreary jargon: ftp, tcp, pop, ppp. I mean, what is all that? It sounds like radio interference.

FRIDAY

As she’s leaving for work, Nancy invites me to a talk on education and technology being held this evening in the Valley.

‘You’re interested in the future, right?’ she says.

‘Well, yeah.’ I look up, uncertain of her tone, but the expression on her face has already moved on.

‘Sweetie, education and technology are the ways the future gets made,’ she says.

And with that she jumps up from the table, swings back that clot of brown hair and transforms immediately into Nancy the software marketer.

‘Why don’t you go browse my clippings box? Also there’s a big crate of articles and whatnot in the garage.’

In the garage it looks as though the San Andreas fault exploded over everything. Where the clippings crate might be among the heap of basketball nets, broken toasters, project files, back issues of Cosmopolitan and Wired, and beaten-up old software packages is anyone’s guess. Eventually, following a half-hour excavation I dig out the box from under a fortress of old Vanity Fairs and flipping through the disintegrating leaves of newsprint read the following:

28% of teenagers are screen addicts, 24% grey conformists. Annual US spend on entertainment and recreation reaches $34obn, only $27obn for elementary and secondary education. $800m spent every year in US on TV ads to children. Deyna Vesey, Kidvertisers’ Creative Director, says ‘the general rule of thumb is, once a kid is three, you can go after them on TV.’

American kids under twelve spend $8.6bn, 13–18 year olds spend $57bn.

And so it goes on, an avalanche of abstracted facts, public opinion surveys, vox pop statistics, flow charts, graphic predictions, trend tables.

The Sausalito Library’s catalogue of books lists a handful of titles under the category ‘adolescence’, including:

The Power of Ritalin: Attention Deficit Disorder among Teenagers

Educating the Disturbed Adolescent

Suicide Among Adolescents

Coping with Teens

The Handbook of Adolescence, Psychopathology and Anti-Social Deviancy

It seems adolescence is treated as some kind of disease rather than a normal part of the human life cycle these days, but we feed on images of it still, like a flock of ageing carrion birds.

Nancy picks me up at six and we drive down to Mountain View for the education and technology talk. Inside the conference room at the Hilton a couple of hundred people in power suits with full shoulder extensions, sprayed hair and pigskin attaché cases flutter about with their business cards like tickertapers on VJ day. It’s all so eighties, somehow.

‘Where are the teachers, Nance?’ I ask, looking through the suits.

‘This meet is more for Valley types,’ says Nancy, fingering an Evian spritzer. ‘You know, software providers, consultants, techno-visionaries, wizards, that kind of thing.’

I flash Nancy one of my disgruntled looks.

‘I thought it was supposed to be about education.’

‘It is, but so what? We’re talking about a whole new technological revolution in the classroom. Kids won’t need teachers any more. They’ll need software supervisors.’

‘Jesus, Nancy.’

‘Look, Sweetie,’ Nancy is already moving off into the crowd, ‘I have to keep ahead, OK? It’s my job, if that’s all right with you.’

Nancy finds me after the talk.

‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I had to network. What did you think?’

We spin through the smoked-glass doors and out into the evening. The question bothers me, although I’m not quite sure why. A wave of defensiveness beaches itself at the front of my mind and I realize I’m reluctant to admit what I’m actually thinking, since it contradicts what I’d rather be thinking.

‘I dunno,’ I say by way of reply. ‘Ask me later.’

We decide to stop off for dinner at ‘the place everyone in new tech is talking about’, the Icon Byte Grill in the SoMa district of San Francisco, or Multimedia Gulch as it’s becoming known. Nancy, multimedia glamour puss that she is, was invited to the opening party, but it was so full of movie types cooking up white lines and special-effects deals that she couldn’t get inside the door. She had no choice but to turn around, go home and eat a tub of Ben & Jerry’s instead.

‘We’re going to have to go, Nance,’ I say, spotting the themed menu. ‘I refuse to ask for circuitboard chips, or whatever.’

‘Aw, c’mon,’ says Nancy, looking peevish. ‘It’s no big deal.’

‘I hate themes. They’re so, oh I don’t know, undignified.’

I hear myself whining to go to McDonald’s, like some sullen teen.

‘McDonald’s? Like McDonald’s is dignified?’

‘No.’ I’m stuck in some impenetrable psychological groove. ‘McDonald’s apple pie is though.’

This is the final straw for Nancy. Some weird, dark corner of her psyche launches into a white-hot diatribe about how little right I have to complain, and what a conservative little snob I am, and so on. Blah blah blah.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she says finally, calming down. ‘You’re in complete denial of the wave of change going on here. In any case, a touch of theming is like, so what? Big deal.’

To save the peace I cave in and adopt a humbled air. We agree to stay and Nancy orders for me, but the evening isn’t exactly what anyone might call a pile of fun. And I still think themed menus are ridiculous and humiliating. But one thing is for sure and that is whatever is awry between Nancy and me, a themed menu is the least of it.

SATURDAY
Completely pointless detail

Walnut Creek, California. No walnut trees and no creeks, only row after row of Contemporary Mediterraneans with yard pools and mulberry trees backed up along the suburban streets.

Nancy refused to come. Says she hates the suburbs. Strawberry Point, where Nancy lives, is not a suburb, despite looking suspiciously like one, but rather a spread of coastal brush with occasional urban fill-in. Personally, I don’t care what she calls home. I’ve nothing much against suburbs anyway. They appear bland, but that’s just surface skim. Underneath, they’re the same heaving mess of calamities and cock-ups as everywhere else. Besides, I have a little mission these days. To explore new worlds and seek out new civilizations. To boldly face the future, as it were.

And to that end I’m sitting in the Virtual World Entertainment Center on the main street in suburban Walnut Creek, waiting my turn to be entertained, and making conversation of sorts with my two new friends, Todd and Jim, to pass the time. Todd, a boy of about seventeen, thin and angular, with the jawline of SS officers in war movies, is doing his damnedest to impress.

‘C’mon, Todd,’ I say, faintly wishing I were somewhere else, ‘you’re too young to have been in the marines when they stormed Grenada.’

Todd appeals to the boy next to him.

Jim, six inches shorter and still ablaze with shyness, shrugs in a noncommittal way. ‘Whatever.’ And with that he dunks himself back in the Virtual Geographic League Battletech Manual lying on his lap.

Todd throws back his Coke, addresses himself to me:

‘So you’re a rookie, huh? First time?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Ha,’ laughs Todd, shaking his head. ‘Rookie!’

I smile back.

‘Yeah, ha,’ I say.

We sit in silence. A perky little grin spreads over Todd’s face, indicating a fresh idea for conversation.

‘Hey.’ He grabs my wrist, registers its small size then drops it, embarrassed. ‘Hey, see this flight suit?’ He smoothes an outsized palm across his chest. ‘Genuine Foreign Legion it is, I swear.’

I smile back and nod indulgently, thinking that if Nancy were in my place right now, she’d be having one of her fits about suburban militia enclaves full of inbred NRA types stashing away semi-automatics fast as Imelda M clocks up kitten heels.

‘I sent off for it in the Survivalist,’ continues Todd. ‘I wear it for luck.’

The Survivalist?

‘Listen,’ I scan the bar, trying to find an excuse to escape, ‘I think I’ll just take a look around.’

‘Yeah,’ says Todd, ignoring me. ‘This’ll be my fifty-fifth mission.’

‘No kidding?’ The Americanism tumbles from my tongue without anyone else noticing. It feels awkward and sly, like using a lover’s nickname for the first time, but good all the same. No kidding. Neat.

‘Hey,’ says Todd, pointing to his circle of bar snacks. ‘Want one of my Tesla Coil fries and some Solarian salsa?’

I’m not sure Virtual World Entertainment Centers exist as yet in Britain. But they will. In Britain and all over. Give it a year or two and there’ll be Virtual World Entertainment Centers in every major city from Uzbekistan to Angola. Since Tim Disney, nephew of Walt, and his partners took over the Virtual World Entertainment company a couple of years ago, centres exactly like this one have spread out over suburban America as fast as prickly heat, ‘and now constitute one of the peaks of the suburban entertainment landscape,’ according to Nancy’s memory of some article in Marketing America.

A strange sort of nostalgia pervades the room, running alongside the futurism. The walls are clad in fake wood panelling with brass wall lights; grim Victorian-style armchairs dominate a space presided over by yawing prints of Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Sir Richard Burton and Charles Lindbergh. Old-time heroes.

Back at the bar, Todd has turned his attentions to Jim. ‘I still say that the T6 is the übermech. People go out in Loki5s because they can’t handle the idea of hand-to-hand combat is all. The Loki5 is a chicken’s machine.’

I take up my stool again, feeling slightly foolish since it’s perfectly obvious that Todd and Jim are just two lonesome Joes looking for a life, like a zillion other teenage boys, and really not the crazed splatter-brats I’d momentarily imagined them to be.

‘What is a T6? And what’s a Loki5?’

Jim looks up from his manual, puzzled and faintly disgusted. Todd just gives me the eye and says:

‘Like, hello …?’ in a tone hinting at disbelief.

‘Well?’

‘Mechs, robots, you know, the things you fight in.’ He slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘Man. Rookies! Listen, all you need to know at this stage is to select a Loki5. They’re easiest to handle. Then remember to keep your crosshairs on the black spots and don’t go up the ramps.’

‘Why not?’ I ask, returning the gaze.

‘It’s dangerous, man,’ says Todd, raising his eyes to the heavens. ‘Read the manual.’

The year is 3050. Man has colonized the universe. The one great Star League has degenerated into a corrupt feudal society riven by petty rivalries. Life is cheap. War is constant. Mercenaries equipped with futuristic two-legged tanks called BattleMechs drift from planet to planet fighting for whoever offers the most cash.

Like the jousting tournaments of old, war in the 31st century has also been ritualized into sport. Mechwarriors from far and wide gather on the desert planet of Solaris VII to test their mettle against the best the universe has to offer. Now you can join them.

At the cash till, Andromeda, a qualified Virtual Geographic League Briefing Officer, recites the mission plan.

‘For nine dollars you’ll be entitled to a mission briefing where you’ll learn about your destination of choice, followed by translocation to a virtual world with a group of other adventurers where your mission will commence. After that there will be a full mission debriefing and a pilot’s log. It’s a total twenty-five minute adventure. From ten to a hundred missions, every tenth mission is free. Take part in three hundred missions and you can become part of the Inner Circle.’

‘Which is the bit where I actually play the game?’ I ask, pulling a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.

Andromeda looks uncertain.

‘You mean the mission?’

‘Yeah, which is the mission bit?’

‘It’s all an adventure,’ says Andromeda, handing me my ticket and a plasticized paper card. ‘Trust me.’ She advises me to choose a call sign for the mission.

The line of explorers requiring mission tickets begins to build up behind, forming a vaguely threatening mass.

‘Let’s see.’ Andromeda struggles to assist. ‘Variations on death are always popular along with pets’ names. Nexus 14, for example? Zombiewoman? Driller killer?’

My recent online adventures come to mind.

‘How’s about Fish ’n’ Chips?’

‘There you go,’ toots Andromeda. ‘We’ll enter you in the log …’ she types a few letters into a PC ‘… as Fish and … Chips.’

‘’n’ Chips.’

‘Sure, ’n’ Chips. It’ll be about forty minutes. Take a seat in the Explorers’ Lounge and you’ll get to meet some great people. We at VGL believe that one of the most satisfying aspects of interdimensional travel is the people you meet en route.’ Resigned, I hold my hand out for change. Andromeda shakes her head and waggles a finger.

‘Nine dollars for the adventure plus a dollar for the one-off pilot’s fee.’

‘Which means?’

‘You’re now an Associate Member of the Virtual Geographical League. Caveat Emptor!’

‘Right.’ I smile, vainly struggling with the creeping canker of disillusionment.

Back at the bar, Dave and Todd are still drinking Martian Coke and bantering over their Mech strategies.

‘The software aces at VGL Research Labs changed the rules so a Mech can be damaged if it bumps into a stationary part of the Solaris VII landscape, and not just if it impacts with another Mech. Did you read that in the stats report? Man, it’s gonna change free-for-alls forever,’ says Todd.

I resume my place at the bar and order a beer, and, remembering the Icon Byte Bar, some Tesla Coil chips and Solarian salsa from ‘The Briefing’ menu.

‘Listen,’ says Todd, turning to me, ‘They’ll put you with some other rookies, so you’ll be OK. I mean, you’ll get reduced to rubble a coupla times, but nothing you can’t survive.’

‘Want some advice from me?’ adds Jim. ‘Read the Battletech op manual, and when you’re in there aim for the black spots on the other guy’s Mech and don’t forget …’ he pauses to dunk another Tesla Coil chip in salsa ‘… experience is a man’s best teacher.’

Battletech team messages are pinned to a noticeboard in the pool room:

[TO] DON’T SHOOT

[FROM] CAPTAIN CRYBABY

[MESSAGE] WE ACCEPT YOUR 3 ON 3 CHALLENGE ON ONE CONDITION: WE PLAY 2 ON 3. US BEING THE 2. CALL 555 5173 AND ASK FOR JOHN. WE’RE KIDS, BUT YOU’LL STILL GO DOWN IN AGONIZING, MERCILESS FLAMES.

[TO] BLOOD ANGEL DEMISE

[FROM] CLAN GHOST TIGER

[MESSAGE] YUPPIE DEATH

WE THE MEMBERS OF CLAN GHOST TIGER WISH TO THANK BLOOD ANGEL DEMISE. SUCKS BE TO YOU SLACKERS FOR AN HONOURABLE AND FUN BATTLETECH MINOR LEAGUE TOURNAMENT.

In the hour or so since I arrived, the Virtual World Explorers’ Lounge has doubled its occupancy. More families, more kids, more packs of teens and more men with shiny heads and brown moustaches lining up obediently for their mission tickets.

Jim lends me his copy of the Battletech Operations Manual. Byzantine! Thirty-three different types of Mech robot to choose, each one with a specific armoury and a top speed and a heat quotient, four battle arenas drawn out on grids, notes on heat sinks and dissipation units, a stack of tables covering controls and weapons and tips on weapons configuration strategy, light and weather manipulation and heat management, and finally, a list of ten tips for rookies. Totalling forty pages of graphs and tables and handy hints amounting to complete hierarchies of knowledge. It could take a person a couple of months simply to absorb all this stuff.

Forty-five minutes later, Andromeda calls out my tag, along with six others, belonging to a party of two adults and four kids with handles Stallion, Princess, Animal, Warrior, Wad and Sakan. Stallion, Animal and Wad admit to having played before, but the rest of us are virgins.

‘Decided on your terrain and your Mechs yet?’ enquires Balthazar, our Virtual World Mission Briefing Officer.

‘Loki5s, Nazca-24,’ pleads Animal.

‘Anyone have any other preferences?’

And with that all six of us are shut into large black pods and left. My night vision’s so bad I’m still attempting to locate the joystick when the action starts and the screen lights up and I find myself rumbling around in the middle of a desert on another planet with a school of marauding robots. My instinct tells me to white out everything I’ve learned in the Battletech Operations Manual and concentrate on pumping the joystick. A spear of green pixel bullets whooshes through the screen towards the horizon and a robot lumbers into view from my right, the radar showing it approaching at full speed with ready guns. The adrenaline rises in my stomach, leaving behind it a faint tang of nausea. The robot is bearing down on me now, firing from machine guns in its arms. Green bullets trailing fiery electric tails begin to whistle past. Ferocious clicks on the joystick get me nowhere. The enemy robot remains undimmed. Making a strategic decision to run away I reverse and bang almost immediately into Animal, who deposits some green pixel bullets into my thorax and reduces me to rubble. An amber alarm throbs through the pod, but seconds later I have magically remorphed as a new Mech stashed high with lasers and am eager to pile back into the action. It’s plain bad luck that Princess reduces me to rubble again before I’ve had the time to engage my spatial co-ordinates and begin firing. The amber alarm begins to throb once more. I remorph stashed with lasers and give all I’ve got to what turns out to be a rock. A few moments later, some intriguing spots begin moving about on the screen’s horizon bar. The radar is blank. A red alarm begins to pulse. For a moment I am confused, then it occurs to me to check my co-ordinates which serve to prove that I have been travelling full speed in reverse for the last four minutes and am currently about ten kilometres from the battle arena. I push down hard on the throttle and head once more for the epicentre of the battle, the black dots on the horizon accreting into fellow Mechs, and I’m suddenly right in the middle of it all, opening my guns and pouring green electronic lead into anything moving. And then the lights come on and two seconds later I’m translocated back to planet earth.

Seven personalized copies of the mission debriefing scroll out of a printer back in the Explorers’ Lounge. Sakan wins with 2836 points, Stallion comes second with 2720. Fish ’n’ Chips scores –1. I appear in the battle log a total of three times. At minute 2:34 Animal reduced me to rubble, at minute 4:56 Princess reduced me to rubble, and on the third occasion, in minute 9, with two seconds of action left to go, I opened fire and punctured Wad’s right upper leg.

Todd and Jim have been watching the action on the Explorers’ Lounge screen.

‘You were totally remedial, man,’ says Todd, looking over my shoulder at the mission debriefing. That hurts, actually.

‘It was unbelievable. You weren’t even in the battle arena,’ adds Jim.

‘Look,’ I carp in my own defence. ‘I decided to take a break, OK? It’s a tactic.’

‘That is the fuckin’ lamest tactic I ever seen,’ adds Todd, turning back to his Martian Coke.

I discover the real flaw in my tactic some minutes later: it has left me buzzing but boastless. I have nothing to talk about. OK, I pressed a few buttons, fired a few shots. But with no approach, no angle, no line. Stallion by contrast, is talking himself up to a group of teens, and Animal and Warrior are standing at the pool table sparring over their respective performances with the particle projection cannon, and the only thing I’ve got to contribute is what it really felt like to be stuck behind a rock ten kilometres away from any of the action. I feel a sudden pang of loneliness. It’s suddenly clear how Buzz Aldrin must have felt as he watched Neil Armstrong thud onto the surface of the moon. Only now it’s too late do I begin to see that the real point of Battletech is the buzz and thrall of camaraderie clinging to the players after the main event is over, when the outcome is clear and none of it matters too much any more, those five or ten minutes of grand and shared intensity, the minutes for which all of us stood in line and drank tepid Martian cola and made stilted pre-mission conversation. Those five or ten minutes of fraternity, the tiny splinters of intimacy, the fleeting alchemical moments, which turn Tim Disney and his ilk into multi-millionaires.

SUNDAY

Nancy and I take a picnic up to Muir Woods. Rain has fallen during the night, softening the air and stirring up the smell of leaf mould. Nancy is wearing blue shorts which set off her hair and make her look a decade younger than she is.

We climb up the path through the woods towards the clearing, from where the Pacific Ocean is visible, creating the illusion of a tiny island of woods drifting unnoticed towards Japan.

‘Karin says …’ begins Nancy, gazing down at the leaf mould and forgetting her next thought.

‘Who’s Karin?’ I ask and she darts me a strange look, as if puzzled by my tone, then, realizing the question is genuine, shakes her head and waves it away. I’m touched by this habit of hers, this assumption that everyone leads the exact same life as she does, has the same set of friends, the same job, the same taste in food. It’s so intimate and self-involved and scatty, which three possibly contradictory qualities Nancy possesses in equal and lavish abundance.

‘I always think the weirdest thing about Battletech and all those geeky games’, she follows, changing the subject, ‘is the mountain of trivia you have to absorb to make any sense out of it at all. It’s such a boy thing. Lists and specs and reams of completely pointless detail.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ I try out another Americanism. ‘But, you know, once you’ve done it, there’s this amazing feeling of shared experience. I can’t really explain it. It’s like any ritual. Church, waterskiing clubs, trainspotting, whatever.’

Suddenly the trees fall away, and we are out on the grassy plateau, overlooking the ocean.

‘Sweetheart,’ says Nancy, adopting a wheedling tone. ‘About the other day, at the education and technology meet…’

I stop her with my hand, anxious not to spoil the atmosphere, and conscious also that whatever passed between us that day probably doesn’t brook too much explanation or analysis. But Nancy is eager to talk it out. She’s so Californian that way.

‘I mean, I think you’re right. Information isn’t the same as knowledge. You can fill every classroom in the country with a thousand computers and link them all up to the Net, and you won’t have taught anyone anything.’

‘Is that what I said?’ I don’t recall saying any such thing, though I remember a similar thought passing through my mind.

Nancy carries on walking along the plateau, gazing down into the water as if draining her breath from it.

‘Data doesn’t mean anything on its own. You have to be able to interpret it, relate it to the real world.’

We find a spot to sit, and pull out a couple of cans of Coke from our picnic bag. I try to drag Nancy away from the subject, introduce the topic of wildflowers, the sky, pretty much everything, but she won’t be drawn. Some nudging gobbet of resentment sticks in my breast. I’m not ready to be disillusioned, dammit. Give me hope.

‘You put future education policy in the hands of the computer industry and they’re going to come up with something involving truckloads of computers, obviously.’

‘Oh well,’ I say, blandly, ‘it’s early days yet.’

Nancy wheels round, looks through my eyes into the dark recesses of my head.

‘Why the hell are you trying to defend them?’ she says, voice suddenly dark with anger. I adopt an ameliorating smile. Them? Us? Them? By her own account. Nancy is one of them.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ I say, determined to protect my new-found future.

‘But the networks will be,’ cries Nancy in return. ‘They already are. In a year’s time you’ll hardly remember life without them.’

I’ve never seen her in this mood before, so hellbent on sabotaging her own bullish optimism, so bent on spoiling the game. It’s so unlike her. So un-American.

THURSDAY, FOUR DAYS LATER

Nancy has flown off to COMDEX, taking her mood swings with her, and leaving me in charge of the house at Strawberry Point. Yesterday, a tomcat came in through the open window and sprayed the kitchen herbs. Mint, flat-leafed parsley, chives all died, thyme survived. Driving out this morning to the plant nursery to replace them before the weekend I realized I hadn’t left the house since taking Nancy to the airport early on Monday. Not once. Three days and nights have passed without my collecting the mail from the mail box, or the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times from the driveway. Three days and nights without opening the door out onto the deck to watch the city across the Bay, without removing the trash, picking up the phone, taking a shower, sleeping in a bed. Three days oblivious to the squabbling din of the redwings in the cypress trees outside, oblivious to the breeze of traffic on the freeway, to the lazy slap of water on the pebble beach below, to the barks of the neighbour’s children, or the tickled hum of the air conditioning. Three days and three nights floating about in the weightless breadth of the network, almost a century of hours with only the owlish whine of the modem, the rushing of lights and the glow of growing words for company.

The first night after Nancy left, it must have been Monday, I pored through the Net manual but didn’t get very far. Towards dawn, though, I found a dissertation on a computer at Duke University in North Carolina and managed to download it to Nancy’s hard disk. It turned out to be someone’s thesis on genetic reprogramming, which made little sense to me, but the point was that I’d ventured out on the wires and captured something strange and brought it back undamaged and I felt the same satisfaction in that feat as I had in collecting caterpillars twenty years ago. Afterwards I slept for a while on the sofa, then rose again on Tuesday afternoon and made a pot of coffee. I must have been dozing on and off through most of that night, and by the morning I hadn’t accomplished much more than the previous day. A few more files added to the hard disk was all.

I passed Wednesday on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the WELL, a bulletin board and computer conferencing setup based in Sausalito. Nancy’s been a member since the electronic Pleistocene, about two years. It’s one of the things you do if you live in Marin, along with hot-tubbing and baking biscotti. She left brief instructions plus a list of WELL gods, the network VIPs, pinned up on the wall beside the computer, saying, ‘When a WELL god posts, people listen. Show respect, OK? But nothing tacky.’ So I passed the day – yesterday – typing out my respectful thoughts and considered pearls in the hope that others would read them and type their pearls and thoughts back in return. I dipped in and out of politics, music, the future. After a time I gathered sufficient confidence to begin my own discussion topic in the future conference, and by the end of the day there were twenty-three replies, twenty-three earnest, considered, respectful responses. There we all were, sitting at our keyboards, unknown to each other in any real-life way, chattering into our screens and feeling that each new word meant something beyond itself.

Too tightly wound to go to bed, I dozed for a while on the sofa and woke just as the light was beginning to break through the cedars outside. A pot of cold coffee was sitting on the table next to the computer, so I warmed the bitter brown liquid in the microwave and toasted a couple of muffins and ate my breakfast waiting for the computer to boot up and pass me back out into the dark space of the network, which was beginning to feel more substantial to me than the room around, and as full of enchantment and tricks as a fast-hand conjuror.

In the early hours of the morning, I circled the globe. A listing of stock prices in Singapore, software files in Rome, the welcome screen of the University of Pretoria information service, a dissertation archive in Hong Kong, four tourist guides to Queensland and New South Wales, some incomprehensible jargon housed at Lawrence Livermore, a list of new releases from EMI in London. And on around the world again, with the same perfect, fearful freedom a lone sailor must feel when out of sight of land, my only navigation tools a keyboard, a mouse and a set of instincts.

Eventually, I fell onto the sofa and slept without dreaming until nine, when I got up and made some more coffee. In a few minutes from now, I shall pull out the plug on Nancy’s computer and lock myself in the spare bedroom and sleep until the weekend. Otherwise, I’ll still be sitting at this table when Nancy returns, eyes buggled and stiff as a piece of metal soldered to the screen.

SATURDAY

Nancy says I should get in touch with a boy called Isaac, who runs the conference for children at the WELL. The word is that he’s the kind of person our kids – if we ever get around to having kids – might turn out to be. Another futuristic prototype, like Alex.

I’m relieved to say she has returned from COMDEX in fine spirits, having met everyone of any importance in software plus an old (male) friend to boot, who just happens to be living in the area and just happens to be swinging by for lunch tomorrow. Nancy emerges from her bedroom some time late in the afternoon, with a casual kind of air, humming some old James Taylor number. Neither of us remarks on the fact that she’s been locked up in there for four hours testing her outfits and teasing her hair into different shapes. Following a short inspection of the living room, she wanders into the kitchen and begins rearranging the jars of antipasti, the squid ink pappardelle someone gave her for a birthday present and sun-dried tomatoes in front of all the instant soup and chocolate pop tarts. Suspecting that three might be a crowd, I mail a message off to Isaac, asking if he’d mind a visit. A response arrives almost instantly.

>I’ll have to ask my mom.

And then a few hours later:

>Mom says it’s OK. We live in Long Beach.

‘How far is Long Beach from Marin?’ I ask Nancy, when the worst of the clatter is done.

‘Oh, a ways, about ten hours’ drive,’ she says, disappearing into her room and re-emerging with a brochure.

‘I just remembered. I picked this up at the trade show. The Fifth Annual Digital Hollywood Exhibition. “The Media Market- Place where Deals are Done™.” Thought it might interest you.’

So I flip through the first couple of pages and read:

‘Somewhere between the zirconia-obsessed and the hackers on the Net with electronic credit to burn, there is a mega world of virtual shopping and marketing in the ethernet. Some day there may be more retail dollars to be spent in the virtual marketplace than in the domain of the current retailing mall culture …’

‘It doesn’t even make sense,’ I protest, hurling the thing onto the coffee table, from where Nancy rescues it, saying in a firmer voice than ever she intends:

‘That’s why I thought you’d be interested in going, sweetie. Say, tomorrow?’

SUNDAY

The foyer of the ten-screen multiplex in Culver City, Los Angeles, is already full of teenagers just out of school, waiting for the late afternoon showing of Streetfighter – the Ultimate Battle.

I wander back into the mall, pick up a root beer and an apple pie in McDonald’s and sit myself next to an off-duty security guard with a face full of freckles and hands all knotted up like vine stems. We make awkward small talk for a while. He mentions that Culver City was recently voted the second most desirable neighbourhood inside Los Angeles city limits.

‘It just looks like a hatch of freeways joined by shopping malls to me.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ returns the guard, offended. ‘You should see this place for example, first thing in the morning. The folks from the Culver City senior citizens’ mall-walking club come in around ten. Perfect behaviour. It’s clean and quiet till lunchtime and then these mall rats –’ He gestures towards a group of teenagers lounging round McDonald’s drinking Coke. Two tough-eyed girls glower back – ‘begin drifting in and the whole atmosphere of the place …’ He holds his hands up to the heavens, then begins to twist a waxed burger paper into a candle, forcing it inside an empty carton of french fries. ‘I just wish they’d find someplace else to go.’

‘Like where?’ I say, trying to catch his eye. He looks up from his carton crunching and there’s meanness written on his face.

‘I don’t know, Tallahassee for all I care.’

I was seventeen when I first saw Los Angeles. Staying in a borrowed apartment in Venice, I spent my days boogie-boarding and watching TV and playing beach volleyball with Nancy. I thought everyone in California lived that way then. I was naive and I wanted to believe it.

A pay phone outside Footlocker.

‘Is Isaac there?’

‘Uh uh.’

I check my watch and see there is nearly an hour and a half before we’re due to meet. An almost inaudible sigh trickles down the phone line.

‘Are you his father by any chance?’

‘Stepfather, why?’ I explain that I’ve arranged to see Isaac later on.

‘That can’t be. Isaac had his mother drive him up to San Francisco last night on a business matter.’

I hang up. What the hell kind of fourteen-year-old makes last-minute twelve hundred mile round-trips on business?

WEDNESDAY

Isaac mails to say he’s very sorry not to have kept our appointment, but if I’m ever down in the Los Angeles area again …

SATURDAY
Brain machine

Nancy’s COMDEX friend Dave brings his brain machine and an ounce of crystal caffeine around. He says that crystal caff is the drug du jour among programming types, and I suppose he should know, since he is one, all the way from the Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the lightly sprinkled dandruff. After spending Sunday in his company, Nancy told him as sweetly as she could that in spite of the fact that his qualities were manifestly overwhelming, she wasn’t ready for a relationship just now (which is actually a bald-faced lie, albeit a tactful one), but she’d like to be ‘just friends’. I suspect the truth is she doesn’t think Dave is glamorous enough for her. Nancy is always chasing the unattainable at the expense of the possible, whether it be some greaseball zillionaire in a sta-prest suit, the state of permanent perfect happiness, or the latest must-have body-shape.

We set up the brain machine and toss a coin to see who goes first. The machine reprograms your moods by flashing a series of lights into your retina and changing the pathways of your neural impulses. I win the toss. Having selected my chosen mood – exhilaration – from the mood menu, I settle down on the sofa, cover my eyes with the special glasses and flip the on button.

At first nothing happens. Then, a few seconds later, some strange pulsing music starts up, followed by flashes of light which gather into a pattern of green helixes inside my eyelids. For a moment the whole thing feels like a bad trip, but the next I know, Nancy is tugging on my shoulder.

‘Sweetie, it’s time to get up.’

I remove the glasses from my eyes.

‘Did I fall asleep?’

Nancy nods. ‘Twenty-five minutes ago.’

‘That’s pretty amazing for an insomniac.’

‘Except you were supposed to be exhilarated.’

And then Nancy takes her turn, chooses ‘speed learning’, picks up a software manual and is asleep within seconds.

Later, we pipe a little caffeine while Dave tells us the story of his six-toed cat, Arnie, who is a direct descendant of an identical six-toed cat found stowed away on the Mayflower. After that we sit around in benign but awkward silence; then Dave, smiling, makes his excuses and gets up to go. He’s picked up the thought waves passing between me and Nance and feels excluded. Besides, there really is no follow-up to Arnie, the six-toed feline Pilgrim Father, is there?

SUNDAY

Unwelcome thoughts of home crowd round the breakfast table.

Sorting through Nancy’s clippings box I find the following:

1980s see 19,346 US teen murders, 18,365 suicides.

150,000 young Americans on missing persons register

20% teenage unemployment rises to 40% for African Americans

One in four young African American males in prison, on probation, parole

At lunch, an uneasiness sets in, somehow connected to Dave’s visit.

‘Don’t all those gloomy statistics about kids get you down?’

‘Uh huh.’ My friend pushes aside a half-eaten pop tart, takes some ice cream out of the freezer. It occurs to me that Nancy’s clippings are as much a part of Nancy as her fragile insouciance, whereas for me they’re just statistics strings.

‘So why d’you keep them?’

A bottle of olives appears on the table, followed by some Oreo cookies. She tries a spoonful of ice cream, an olive, a bite of pop tart. Looks unsteady.

‘Pandora’s Box.’ A muffled sound as the other half of the pop tart follows an olive. She scrapes some Oreo filling onto her teeth.

‘It’s my only weapon against the bio-clock. Just to concentrate on what a shitty world it is out there for kids.’ I watch her removing an olive stone and inserting a spoonful of ice-cream.

‘Nancy. You’re not …?’

‘Are you insane?’ she looks at me with her eyes in that crepey position. ‘I don’t even know a friendly sperm bank.’

I remind her of Dave.

‘Oh yeah, like the world really needs another programmer geek in diapers.’

‘That’s harsh.’

Nancy pauses to think for a moment.

‘You’re right. And anyway, it’s untrue. The world needs all the programmer geeks in diapers it can get right now.’

Muir Woods has become a weekend routine. At Nancy’s request a Japanese tourist takes a photo of us marking off the start of the digital age on the slice of redwood trunk, at the very edge where the bark begins to flake away. Climbing up onto the plateau, a weight of sadness falls. I look out over the ocean towards Japan, trying to think myself back to the blue of that wide water. Almost before I’m aware of it, salt tears have begun to scratch at my contact lenses.

It dawns on me that I’m not a part of the grand technological experiment that is Northern California right now, nor a part either of those older dreams it has come to symbolize. I don’t belong to the redwoods, to the frozen yoghurt stands or the piney air. I’ve found myself a project here precisely because I am not from here. There is so much about this new digital world that is alien to me, but utterly familiar to Nancy. I am deflated and left behind, made spare by the sheer pace and scale of the change. I feel like a dazzled rabbit caught in headlights, a mere witness to the ballooning din and flux that is digital America, a self-indulgent stand-in. And as I watch Nancy striding across the plateau towards the woods again, I see she’s given me a vivid fragment of her life to take away and make flourish somewhere else. And I’m overcome by the stillness of understanding. What Nancy has known for a while and has patiently waited for me to discover is that the time has come for me to return to England, though that is where I least belong.

II: Home & Away
LONDON, ENGLAND, SATURDAY
Lost in the blizzard of youth culture

Saturday night has begun early in the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus. Samantha, fourteen, breath as short as a running dog, scrapes back the rope of her hair and turns to say something. Behind her, in the belly of the arcade, a swell of pubescent boys fuels the games machines and fills the room with the jangle of defeat and Samantha’s words are obliterated in the greater noise.

Today I’ll come clean. I’ll confess. I feel lost in the blizzard of youth culture.

Samantha, Samantha, oh please tell me do.

How shall I be young again, as young and hip as you?

We break a path across the floor, unnoticed. Me under cover of her.

‘Chopping through the enemy,’ says Samantha. She is through to round four of the Streetfighter II South of England Turbo Tournament. The only girl. This is what it takes to rise through the ranks, according to Samantha: ‘Guts and loads of practice.’

We remove to a bank of Streetfighter consoles pitched up against the back wall of the arcade. Samantha leans into the central deck, opens her callused baby hands, flips the supple wrists, stretches the finger clumps and lets them fall onto the joystick like a final act of homecoming. She closes her eyes for a moment, entertaining some thought, then smiles.

‘Double-jointed, ambidextrous Streetfighting champion,’ she says of herself, not having won the championship yet, but having ambitions.

And so there I am, loading tokens into a Streetfighter deck, about to lose to some peppery girl almost half my age while she waits nerves akimbo for the call-up.

‘I’ve actually never played Streetfighter,’ I say, suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang.

‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Samantha replies. ‘But that’s all right.’ She winks at me and pushes her hair back again. ‘I ain’t gonna hammer you straight off. Wouldn’t be sporting, would it?’

Apparently Sam and I inhabit the same real-life world, but you wouldn’t know it.

Outside in the foyer a line of Streetfighter decks has been set up for the competition, alongside a sound system, a string of mikes and an outside broadcast unit. A computerized scoreboard hangs suspended from the escalator. About fifty kids, boys, are lined up along the row of decks, hands on joysticks, arms beating out the moves of the final leg of the third round. Behind a cordon another six hundred teens await their call-up for the fourth round. And behind them, so distant you can’t see their faces, another eight or nine hundred folk watching, tip-toeing to catch glimpses of their sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, stepsons, whatever.

A boy with pudding-bowl hair detonates from the shadow of the arcade, looks Samantha almost in the eye, mumbles:

‘I got fucking mashed, man, and now I ain’t got no more money.’

‘You see my pockets bulging, man?’ asks Samantha in return, hard, with her hands on her thighs, calluses pressed in.

‘This is my brother. Jez.’ Her eyes fill with mock impatience.

‘Sisterly love,’ grins the brother, hair part-concealing a face crazy with electric messages.

Sam and her brother came specially for the tournament, but Jez got knocked out in the second round by a Chinese boy from an arcade in Oxford Street. She hadn’t seen him since. She says he’s not a good loser, but it’s his own fault. He gets too cocky and doesn’t practise enough.

‘Why don’t you play and I’ll pay.’

‘Oh no, man, you don’t have to do that.’ Samantha’s voice sings high with guilty insincerity.

‘I can’t play anyway,’ I insist. ‘I’d rather watch. It’ll be like training.’

‘Wicked,’ says Jez, moving up to the console. ‘You going down.’ This from Jez, his right palm levitating over the start button, tongue coiled against lower lip in anticipation. ‘Which character?’

‘Ken,’ says Sam.

‘Man, you’re always Ken.’

‘I got the expertise.’ So Sam plays as Ken, the karate beach punk, and Jez plays as Blanka, the mutant Brazilian. Jez toggles the setting to a beach in America. Adrenaline drifts around them like heatwaves off sand. Jez raises his palm, holds the position as if startled into it, brings the force of his hand stamping down on start.

‘You dead man, dead,’ Jez’s voice twisted with the moment.

‘No, you dead, right?’ replies his sister.

A second’s stillness, like a snarl-up in a projection room, and brother and sister bear down on their joysticks with a series of spastic jerks and swings, closing in on the screen, elbows pumping like pistons. Jez flaps his tongue against his chin, then moves back from the console, eyes momentarily drifting across the room, but sightlessly, with a kind of narcoleptic thrill written on his face. Sam stays close in, rocks slightly. Two ghosts competing for the machine.

A boy wanders up from behind, comes to a standstill and fixes his stare on the deck. Jez, sensing his presence, chooses not to acknowledge the boy, maybe doesn’t know him. All over the arcade, pairs of stiffened kids are hanging over a console with an array of onlookers beside, by turns bored and in the thrall of it.

‘Spike it, give it some wellie.’

‘Combo Combo. Block, block, block.’ The boy uses his fists to scrub canals into the seams of his baggies.

‘C’mon, twist it, man,’ says Jez, keyed up and trying to control Blanka with a series of hops and piston movements.

Sam moves Ken in, charges Blanka with a close-range round-house kick. Blanka is in trouble.

‘Head butt him, Blanka,’ squeals the boy, thumping his thigh.

Too late. Sam and Jez slip from the console like drowned hands leaving driftwood.

‘I mashed you, man, first round over.’ Samantha leans back, unlocks her shoulders, breathes deep and smacks her lips in a sly way. Jez has had an idea.

‘Replay,’ he spits, wheeling round, glaring at the boy. ‘That boy fucking put me off. Unfair disadvantage.’

‘You just a bad loser,’ replies his sister.

‘C’mon, man.’ Jez holds his arms close to his chest, eyes grinning at me.

I shrug and smile off the appeal.

‘Replay, no way,’ says Samantha.

Round four opens with the star player, a boy from one of the Chinatown arcades with control-pad buttons for eyes, who has won all fifty of his games. A block of twitchy adrenaline he is, buoyed up with Coke. A couple of dozen nervous kids, Samantha included, scout the electronic running order, in search of their numbers, hoping they’re not pitched against Button-Eyes.

The constant flow of kids from the tournament consoles to the practice machines in the arcade leaves a matt stain from their sneakers across the linoleum. Sam’s number, 437, appears on the electronic call sheet.

‘You been to America?’ Jez has followed me out into the foyer.

I narrow my eyes to slits and nod.

‘Yeah, but I never met Michael Jordan, or Michelle Pfeiffer or Pam Anderson or Mickey Mouse or anybody anyone’s ever heard of.’ The words burn up in the acrid atmosphere of my remembrance. Whenever America is mentioned I feel sour and fondly protective, like a child forced to lend out a treasured possession.

‘Did you get a go on the Sony Playstation?’ Jez has not noticed my sullen mood. ‘They got them all over America.’

‘They’ve got everything in America.’ Jez ignores me, lost in some internal reverie.

‘I’m getting the import version’, he says. ‘The official English version’s bound to be slow speeds.’ Then, in a righteous gush of consumer patriotism, ‘It’s sick how they rip the English off with slow speeds.’

A queue gathers around one of the Streetfighter decks, and the boy in the baggies is there, egging on a teen combatant. It’s pretty quiet now. A party of Arabs sits in a row at the camel-racing booth. Next to them their bodyguards. Shift changes at the token counter. Brazilian hands over to Brazilian, smiles at the bouncer, heads for the black matt door in the black matt wall marked ‘Staff Only’ in black gloss paint. There is no sign of Samantha.

Jez is moving around in the small knot of people standing by the entrance to the arcade. Looking about for his sister, maybe. Seeing me instead, he flashes a wide, young smile and makes his way over.

‘You seen Sam?’

‘Nah, she’ll be all right,’ replies the brother.

Seven p.m. The smell of baking rises from the food court downstairs. Six hours after it began, Button-Eyes is declared Supreme Champion of the South of England Streetfighter Turbo Tournament, first prize a full arcade version of Streetfighter II Turbo. A DJ in Kiss FM uniform jogs onto the makeshift prize-giving podium, raises his mike, waits for the on-air cue from the sidelines. Tips the words out:

‘A totally wicked contest, man, completely MEN-TAL …’

‘Congratulations.’ The DJ pulls Button-Eyes towards the mike, peers down at a piece of paper. ‘Whasyername.’ He smiles and gives the boy a comedy punch.

It is seven thirty and the Streetfighter tournament consoles are open for the free use of whoever remains. Six and a half hours after the first closed their palms round their joysticks, a row of arms begins to beat in front of the screens, like fleshy pistons.

‘C’mon, I’ll buy you a McDonald’s,’ I say.

‘OK,’ says Jez. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

We elbow our way out of the arcade, past a floor of scaffolding with a sign announcing the opening of a new Battletech Centre, head down into Coventry Street. Jez opens the door into McD’s, immediately peels off to one side.

‘I’ll have a happy meal, £2.98.’ He wanders off to find a table in the family section. Not on the top floor where the youth go. Not with me in tow.

We sit and eat in silence for a while.

‘Did you know,’ I say at last, ‘that this part of London is known as the Meat-Rack?’

‘Nah,’ replies Jez, nodding at the mess of waxed paper and mayonnaise on the table in front of me, his face flushed with that smile. ‘Mind if I finish your fries?’

ONE THURSDAY
A lover’s eyes

England hasn’t changed much. The Common might be a little greener than I left it. The butcher’s shop has closed down, Blockbuster Video gone up in its place. There are a few nominal additions to the graffiti on the walls outside my flat. As from Tuesday next the tube train drivers will be on strike. A bomb has exploded in Earls Court, no one hurt. Otherwise England is as England always was, an isolated little piece of island washed up on its own dank shore.

I have changed, though. At least, America has changed me. I’ve bought an Apple Mac with the remainder of my savings, and it’s beautiful. A mysterious grey sarcophagus with magic innards. I’ve also got a modem and a subscription to the WELL. England and England’s concerns matter less. I can now be in the same place as my fantasies. America. A few clicks of the keyboard, a tumble of lights, an instant’s wait, and the new frontier comes rushing in toward me.

No one here appears interested in my impending conquest of the digital frontier. After some dark muttering about anoraks and computers the subject is waved away. Meanwhile, my life is becoming very altered. Friends are beginning not to bother to call, knowing that I’ll either be online, or be wanting to talk about being online. They think I’m vacant, pretty vac-ant. But I don’t care.

Also, I’ve met someone. Not face to face, but as good as. It began a few days ago in an idle moment. This is how it happened. I posted a short provocation on the WELL – a small uncommitted riff about the media being our chief source of shared values, and he, this someone I’m talking about, replied with a long treatise, the gist of which was that the situation wasn’t so bad because it at least implied that there was a shared set of values. And so it went on. We e-mailed back and forth exchanging our armchair philosophies and cod theories. A strange textual flirtation started up but the stranger thing is, I don’t know anything about him, except that his handle is Macadamia. He’s my souvenir of San Francisco, my memento. And yet, it’s as though I’ve taken the first step in a series of irrevocable steps towards another life, as you do the moment you first meet a lover’s eyes.

Last night, I e-mailed Nancy.

>I’m very taken with a nut, I said.

And she e-mailed back

>It’s a newbie phase, sweetie. Bob was just the same.

I found a small part of myself hating her for that, but I woke up this morning with the usual pangs, missing America and wishing we were walking through Muir Woods together.

Observation: Why is it that technology designed to be used by women is white, while technology designed to be used by men is black? The washing machine vs the VCR. The tumble dryer vs the remote control. Computers, on the other hand, are grey, which must be one of the reasons they’re so intriguing.

SATURDAY

I appear to have given up on the real world. At least, I am spending less and less time in it and as a result I find that it has transformed into a drab waystation for the satisfaction of what Mac calls ‘meat needs’. Food, a bed, a shower.

The most valued part of my day begins around six in the evening, which is morning in California, of course. And also, conveniently enough, when telephone charges fall. It ends at dawn. In between Mac and I compose our e-mail, argue through the finer points of this and that, draw our secret conclusions. We don’t talk about our lives, what we eat for breakfast. We don’t have lives as such to talk about right now, we only have survival tactics: sleep, drink, eat, shit. We don’t go in for revelation. We’re already far too intimate. We chew over the things that matter. The issues.

For example, is the real world binary or analogue? According to Mac, the binary world of 1s and 0s that the computer understands isn’t necessarily a description of real reality because real reality deals more in degrees of grey than in black and white. But then light grey is not-dark grey just as much as black is not-white. Which makes it binary. We considered this conundrum at our respective screens six thousand miles apart and came to the conclusion that we’d got ourselves into a loop. So I called it a day, which it was actually becoming, and fell asleep with sunlight beginning to warm my eyelids.

SUNDAY

I mention binary vs analogue to Nancy. She mails back:

> I’d check that off your list of concerns. It’s one of those typically recursive analytical things that nerdy types get all steamed up over.

That ‘been there done that’ edge to all her messages pips my wick. Plus, Macadamia is not ‘a nerdy type.’

The real world seems more lonely than before. Sitting here at my screen in England, I feel like a one-woman species.

MONDAY

Discovery! I am not a one-woman species. A home-grown electronic scene has been going on quite nicely without me all this time.

iD magazine runs a piece about a seventeen-year-old electronic musician, techno’s latest wunderkind. Eyes skulk out from the page in imitation menace. Puffa jacket expands the frame. I make a note to track him down.

SUNDAY, NEARLY A WEEK LATER

A suburban train trundling west. Daniel the wunderkind meets me at the station, dressed in an outsized hip-hop hooded coat. The same uncertain flicker on the face. The same aura of indifference.

‘Hello Daniel.’ I meet his eye.

‘Yeah, hahaha,’ he roars, refusing to hold my gaze, ‘let’s go.’ And with that, he marches through the station, strides across the road, speeds along a genteel street filled with cheap antiques shops and mock Parisian cafés, and swings into a long residential road, dragging me panting behind him.

We are standing in an Aladdin’s cave posing as a kitchen. The room is strangled in stuff: papers, envelopes, posters, pictures, milk bottles, flower pots, tins of floor polish, spare curtains, photos, books, ancient magazines, biscuits, scissors, drainers, pans, packets of crisps, flowers, fruit, memo pads, wine bottles, telephones, pencils on string, children’s drawings, hairbrushes, highchairs, napkins, drying cloths, fridge magnets, a bath sponge, the whole finished off by the smell of a warming oven and roasted garlic. Daniel’s mother appears, looking far away and harassed.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘That’s OK,’ I smile, ‘I’m sure Daniel can make it.’

‘No, actually, I can’t.’ Daniel contradicts me with an awkward sort of playfulness. ‘I broke the cappuccino machine, hahaha.’

‘I’ll have instant coffee then.’ Daniel reaches for the jar, tips it towards me for inspection and adopts a helpless air. ‘Uh, haha, Mum uses it to dye fabrics.’ The thin black crust clings to the bottom. A young woman walks into the kitchen, takes note of Daniel’s lost-boy look, says:

‘I’ll make the coffee, OK?’

‘OK,’ says Daniel.

Later, we’re sitting at the kitchen table cupping our coffee mugs. I ask:

‘Was that the au pair?’

Daniel throws me a strange look, catches my eye fleetingly, and, pretending he thinks the whole thing a joke, blusters: ‘Hahaha, that was my younger sister.’ Daniel has four younger sisters and no brothers. I guess that can’t be easy.

You wouldn’t believe the Daniel household existed unless you’d seen it for yourself. On the ground floor oak chests crammed into every corner, dolls, toys, rocking horses pressed against the windows, paintings, prints, posters on the walls, walls thick with layered paint and images, Turkish kelims fighting for space with knotted Persian rugs, cushions everywhere, never-watered plants clinging on to life, books, magazines from the seventies, goldfish in lime green aquaria. One storey up, angelic-looking toddler twins chasing from room to room followed closely by a six-year-old throwing dolls about, phones ringing, the sound of ascendant violins from the father’s study, more oak chests spewing bits of paper and embroidery from their stuffed drawers, a dust crust lying over everything.

We climb to Daniel’s bedroom on the third floor. Bed unmade, smell of skin, magazines in piles fanning out from every horizontal surface, posters of Orbital, snowboarding and computer games on the wall, in the centre of the room a home-made horseshoe consisting in keyboard, four-track and Atari computer.

‘So,’ says Daniel, fitting himself into a chair behind the horseshoe, ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear Bedroom.’

Bedroom is Daniel’s first and recently released album, the thing that got him written up in iD. He was sixteen when he made it. In his bedroom. He takes a copy from its jewel box, hands me the CD cover.

‘See that?’ He points to a red smear on the cover. ‘That’s my shit robot I had like when I was six, and that bit’s a piece of wall, hahaha, you’ll probably think it’s crap and yeah, so this is the first track, I like this bit where it goes …’

A resonant boom fills the bedroom. Daniel reaches down for the track skip button.

‘And then this is one, which I think’s shit, really, although Morris likes it, hahaha and listen to this track, “Underwater”, which has this wicked noise I taped in the toilets at school, and here’s …’ Each track in turn a throb, a series of sound pictures. Nothing you’d call a tune, quite. Daniel races through the tracks, two seconds per track, talking at ten to the dozen. He moves along his CD collection, extracting jewel cases, flinging them in the player. ‘So this one’s Wagon Christ,’ pulling them out again. ‘Yeah, listen to this MLO track, it’s really cool,’ casting them aside and moving onto the next. ‘And this bit by the Aphex Twin, wicked, better than some of his other stuff, hahaha, although I like him and this is David Toop who I’m gonna do some work with, but hahaha you’ll probably think it’s crap …’

‘Daniel,’ I say, looking up from the magazine I’m leafing through. ‘Why aren’t there any pictures of supermodels in your bedroom?’

‘I am not gay,’ says Daniel emphatically, his face developing a reddish glow which makes me feel as mean as a scalded dog. ‘Although I’m not saying it would matter if I was, except to my dad.’

‘Who’s Morris?’ I change tack while Daniel fights off his embarrassment, but at this he looks up momentarily, decides it’s a joke and giggles.

‘No, really,’ I pursue, ‘Who is Morris?’

Daniel is stunned. Uncomprehending. Speechless. I don’t know who Morris is? Mixmaster Morris? Morris of the mixdesk? Morris of the music scene? DJ Morris, top bloke Morris? Ambient techno’s own Mixmaster?

‘Not Morris as in dancing, then?’

Daniel ignores the jibe, or maybe just pretends he hasn’t heard it.

‘So,’ he says, blustery once more, ‘you’ll probably be wanting to see this really crap Yamaha keyboard, which my parents bought me for my birthday when I was like a kid, hahaha, and then this is the four-track, and this really cool keyboard, which is a Korg Wavestation and …’

‘Daniel,’ I say, ‘can we go and have some lunch now?’

Lunch turns out to be a benign chaos of toddler demands and counter-demands, mother organizing, au pair sister rushing about, curly haired six-year-old banging her spoon on the table, oven timer going off, kids wanting gravy, no potatoes, or potatoes and no carrots, more carrots, fewer potatoes, more orange juice, less meat. Daniel and his father sit in the midst of it all, unbowed. Phone ringing again, Daniel answering it, shouting through toddler cries:

‘Hahaha, yeah, can I ring you back? Thanks.’

‘Daniel doesn’t like my cooking,’ says the mother.

‘Yes I do,’ says Daniel.

After lunch Daniel makes a bold attempt to play me a few more selections from his CD collection, but I cut him short. I want to know where he made the money to buy his kit, which leads to a safari through Daniel’s magazine collection, featuring articles by … Daniel. Aged twelve he pesters his way to a job writing computer games reviews for Zero magazine, then moves on to a more serious role compiling a tips column in GameZone. At fifteen he’s making a mint.

‘In fact,’ he rallies, ‘I designed some games myself. They’re crap, but I s’pose you’re gonna want to see them, hahaha …’

I emerge from Daniel’s bedroom about two hours later, battered but unbloodied.

Whatever aching tangle or peaceful blue lagoon exists beyond the bloom in Daniel’s eyes he keeps hidden beneath a whirl of talk and action. Nothing of the real Daniel, whatever that may be, is available for public view save for a few minute and unconscious inflexions of his voice and body. Nonetheless, I have a sense that Daniel is about to become an important part of my little project. I request another meeting. ‘What?’ He exudes an air of puppyish hurt. I shake my head by way of reply, faintly bemused. Some small shutter closes over the chink in Daniel’s armoury.

‘I’m DJing at the Big Chill in a couple of weeks. If you want to go on the guest list, you’d better speak to my manager and say you’re from one of the papers, and thank you very much,’ says Daniel, cold as January wind.

I ring the manager and mention I’ve been round to lunch.

‘What a cacophony,’ I remark, in what I hope is an indulgent tone. The manager takes it differently.

‘Well how d’ya think I felt?’ he replies, sounding plaintive. ‘Sitting down to roast lamb and mint sauce with my client’s mum and dad? I’m a rock’n’roll manager for chrissakes.’

MONDAY

Early morning, wind hammering on the windows and the cat curling through my legs to remind me I haven’t yet got round to feeding it.

Thinking about Daniel, or maybe the electronic scene, I e-mail Mac:

>Hey, Mac, do you think it’s possible to make generational statements, or are generations created by the statements made about them?

He mails back:

>What do you have in mind?

I scribble down on a piece of paper all the generational clichés I’ve ever come across. It’s a long list.

>Well, the presumption that 15-25-year-olds have a totally relativist set of morals whereas all us older people are more absolute about things.

You tap out an e-mail message and play it back in your head and Bingo! It becomes the most profound, the most meaningful, the freshest thought you ever had.

>Actually it seems to me that pretty much *everyone* has a relativist set of morals, it’s just that *society’s* morals have traditionally been absolute.

I suppose it’s a silly fantasy of oneness, e-mail. But then again perhaps it’s not a fantasy. Perhaps, maybe. I don’t know yet.

I sit and think blanks for a while, then finish tapping in my note to Mac.

>Maybe the 15-25-year-olds feel that society’s mores have broken down and they’re simply less hypocritical than the rest of us. Or maybe it’s just that they haven’t learnt how to be full-on hypocrites yet.

No, it’s not the perfect communication, but it’s damned near. An imperfect kind of telepathy.

I leave the screen for a moment and fetch myself a can of root beer. Cat follows at a hopeful trot. Mac’s answer is scrolling up on my return.

>I’d go along with that. Younger people are less hypocritical, definitely. Oh wow, it’s just started to rain.:-)

I glance towards the window, notice twists of rainwater spiralling down the panes and whitened in the light of the desk lamp. Cat yells.

>Here too.

How weird.

>What else?

>Well, issues. When I was a teenager… I think back and do my best to stifle the memory … it was nuclear war and trades unions. These days it’s animal rights, anti-racism, ecology and homelessness. We didn’t really think about that stuff. Oh I don’t know. Things change so *fast* is all.

Animal rights. Cat’s begging has become so insistent I’m driven to leaving the screen and pouring him some Go-Cat biscuits. On my return I tap ‘A’ to send the mail, remember all the points I’ve forgotten to mention and open another e-mail file.

>The decline in trust - another generational cliché. Can’t rely on your education to equip you for a job, there aren’t any jobs, can’t rely on your parents to stay together because half of them won’t, can’t rely on care when care means weirdos and sex abuse, can’t rely on god and the church ditto, can’t even turn to that old teenage staple, sex, on account of AIDS. Or how about this? A generation used to the idea that the only power they’ve really got is consumer power. Disenchanted with politics, enamoured of product.

I tap in ‘A’ again and take myself off for a pee. No word from Mac on my return.

>Mac, hello, I’m talking to you!

Electronic silence prevails. I wait a little while, humming over my screen like a wasp circling a honey trap but no word arrives. Mac has taken on such a sudden and unexpected importance in my life and yet I’ve never met him.

TUESDAY

This is Mac’s eventual offering, paraphrased:

Even though the culture is ridden with premillennial tension the great thing about living at the end of the century is that there’s at least the theoretical possibility of being able to start out fresh. New beginnings, redemption, the Second Chance. So typically American.

WEDNESDAY

A disconcerting lunchtime revelation. Mac is not American. I suppose I should have noticed that he doesn’t spell like an American, but I was too busy making assumptions.

>Why didn’t you tell me before? I typed.

>The Internet makes national borders irrelevant. He typed back.

Somehow all this matters terribly. The beautiful edifice of projections tumbles. Macadamia the California nut is actually Mac a British human being … which makes me what? Some lovesick clown dreaming of California on a computer.

Dawn arrives, but I don’t sleep. I drift about in the pale half-life between unconsciousness and dreams.

FRIDAY

A ticket to Daniel’s DJ event arrives, along with his World Wide Web address. I spend ten minutes leafing through its two main sections, Boredom and Bedroom. Bedroom is the life story of his ambient techno album, Boredom is everything else that has ever happened to Daniel and is capable of being distilled down into two-sentence sound bytes and graffiti graphics. A lot, in other words.

SATURDAY
The moon is made of gorgonzola

Determined not to be entirely ignorant in the face of ‘the scene’ event tomorrow, I pass much of the day in Ambient Soho, Unity, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus and with a pile of NMEs, Melody Makers, iDs and Mixmags catching up on being young. Nonetheless, I feel like someone trying to swing. My one comfort is that at least I now know what ambient techno is. It’s aural wallpaper, slews of electronic sounds devoid of narrative. Future noyz. Geek pop. Which makes Daniel a geek pop king.

Four hours with the music press has taught me something else too: Geek pop kings make it big on the quiet. They don’t appear on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. Aphex Twin, the Orb, MLO, Muziq, Wagon Christ, Cosmic Baby – a bunch of egghead boys with tiny marble eyes and thin white features bounded by fuzzy hair and street style. Mostly they work alone, up in the teen-boy heaven of circuitry and kit control, remixing, remodelling, switching names as fast as record labels, in constant drift and flux; sampling, distorting, sequencing, dipping, cruising around the musical ether. Occasionally they collaborate – two tides of repressed testosterone converging in a sound wave.

Geek pop albums – Lunar 7, Electron Pod, Weimar Supernova – are named after bits of Germano-Japanese technology and scifi tropes, presented with sleeve notes quoting from French deconstructionist theory and The Brady Bunch. The albums are divided into quadrants and sectors, their tracks given numinously impenetrable titles. ‘Phragmal Synthesis Part 3’. ‘Nexus Techtronics’. ‘Tokyono’. ‘Space Warp Exodus’. Albums more like pieces of machinery, heavy with devices, levers, buttons, musical gadgetry, technical gewgaws, bytes and showy displays of novelty. Sometimes a secret track lurks beyond the album’s seeming end, causing entire Internet newsgroups to spring up in order to explore more fully the profundities of geek pop secret tracks, the digital generation’s equivalent of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ played backwards.

From ‘A Thousand Plateaux’, a geek pop manifesto, written by two French theoreticians, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

A musical consistence-machine, a SOUNDMACHINE (not for the reproduction of tones) one, that, molecularises the sound material, atomises and ionises and captures the COSMIC energy. If this machine should have another structure than the synthesiser, in that it unites the modules, original elements and working elements, the oscillators, generators and transformers and brings together the micro intervals it makes the sound process and the production of this process itself, audible. In this way it brings us together with more elements that go further than the sound material. It unites the contradicting elements in the material and transfers the parameters from a formula to another. The synthesiser, with its consistence-operation, has, a priori, taken the position of establishing in the synthetic decision: this is a synthesis of molecular and cosmic, of material and energy and no more of form and material, ground and territory. Philosophy no more as a synthetic judgement but as synthesiser of thought, to allow thought to travel, to make it mobile, and make it to an energy of the cosmos as one sends sound off to travel…

A reminder, incidentally, of a course in formal logic I took at college:

It is raining

It is not raining

Therefore Paris is in France.

And the moon is made of Gorgonzola.

SUNDAY FOLLOWING

The Big Chill. Daniel’s hair is plaited into embryonic dreads and stuffed into a multi-coloured woollen hat with woollen tube extensions running from its centre, giving him the appearance of a sprouted octopus at carnival.

Neo-hippies crash on sweaty mattresses caressed by the velvet pall of ganja smoke and Daniel’s ambient techno seepage. Chillin’. Overhead a video jock projects computer-generated images across the walls as Daniel mixes the Radio One Top 40 live into his set. The room so dark that, save for Hindu goddesses, mandalas dancing alongside dolphins, the sun rising in reverse, a tribe of faceless mannequins running through a perspectival tunnel, it might be a solitary cell or even a womb.

Across the corridor in another room technopagans flip through the World Wide Web and patrol the alternative spirituality channels in Internet Relay Chat, pondering the Jungian archetypes over leaden carrot cake.

And all this time Daniel is looming over his mixing desk, shaking his tentacles and mixing the Radio One Top 40 live.

Afterwards he says: ‘That was the first Radio One Top 40 ever mixed live into a set. Hahaha.’

I doubt anyone noticed Daniel making musical history, but that’s the way it goes.

TUESDAY

I phone the editor of iD on a whim.

‘Daniel, oh yes. After our piece about him appeared, he called wanting to write for us and he didn’t stop ringing until I’d given in.’

‘Guts.’

‘Yeah,’ the editor chuckles to herself. ‘Daniel is definitely a one-off.’

Memories of my late teendom include a tumble of hopeless crushes, Steppenwolf, Jaws, electro-pop, Saturday Night Fever, suicide bands. And a permanent rictus of raw and unrequited rage. All the usual teenage apparatus, in other words.

WEDNESDAY

E-mail from Mac, requesting my public key. Whatever that is.

THURSDAY

More discoveries. A public key lets Macadamia send an encrypted message. What message, he won’t say. Some time after midnight he forwards software called Pretty Good Privacy, along with a list of instructions which will supposedly enable me to generate some secret codes called keys.

Note: Though we both live in London, we work on California time. Like I said, we’re sadsacks.

>The US government has classed pgp as munitions. Exporting it from the USA is illegal, like running guns writes Mac.

I can’t imagine what he has to tell me that’s so secret. That he’s a hitman perhaps? A secret agent? Herpes carrier? Cricket fan?

In order to send or receive a PGP-encrypted message, I have to command the software to generate two keys, a public one which I can give out to Mac and a private one, which I have to keep to myself. The public key can only encode. It can’t decode. So the principle is that I send Mac my public key, he encodes his message with it, sends it back to me, and I decrypt it using my private key. If he sends the message via an anonymous mailer, a computer which removes all reference to his name and e-mail address, it’s almost untraceable and almost completely secure.

Oh well, however shocking or terrible the message is, I don’t care. Mac makes me laugh and I like the way his mind works and we’re only friends in any case.

A long paragraph of capital letters and keyboard symbols appears on the screen some time after two. I instruct the programme to decrypt and stand back. The hard disk light topspins on-offs. Symbols flip as fast as numbers on the propaganda boards advertising the savings you make by switching telecom companies. In America. Eventually, four lines of message emerge from the chaos, like Poseidon coming up to quell the sea. Line one: Mac’s real-life name. Lines two to four: his address and phone number.

>Mac, your name and number are in the phone book. I just looked them up.

Phone numbers? This isn’t the point of virtual life at all. The point of virtual life is to remain apart, distinct, ethereal, untouched by the mess of reality. The point of it is its sheer mystery.

>I won’t phone you, Mac, and you won’t phone me.

Sometimes people have to be told things they ought to know already.

TUESDAY
Britpop bands

First Tuesday of every month the Electronic Lounge meets at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The apparent pinnacle of the ‘underground’ e-scene.

Daniel is a regular, of course. I’m not, but I’m pretending to have checked it out a couple of times in order to avoid – can I say this? – the embarrassment of being uncool. Today Daniel is decidedly down. He left his new T-shirt on the bus. He has scrawled ‘I am in a bad mood’ in gothic letters on my notepad. I offer him a Camel by way of compensation.

‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t take drugs,’ he moans.

The Electronic Lounge is filling up with young people in extreme outfits. Platform shoes, kipper ties, fat glasses, trousers made of plastic. All part of the underground now. Just about everything is underground. Mainstream life is what happens to the characters in Neighbours.

‘Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?’ I discover a line from an Adam and the Ants hit on my tongue. Very early eighties. Daniel misses the reference (he would have been five) but his face blooms purple all the same.

‘Thanks very much,’ he says, avoiding my eye.

Over Coca Cola (Daniel) and Jim Beam (me) Daniel confesses he hasn’t had much of a love life for years. This takes me by surprise. Conventional wisdom suggests teens are hard at it from an ever earlier age. If you believed everything you read in the papers, you’d think the entire population under twenty had degenerated into a busy whirl of nymphomaniacs and prepubescent pervs.

‘You know what really pisses me off about that T-shirt?’ says Daniel, backtracking.

He sees someone he knows over my shoulder, waves at whoever it is.

‘No, Daniel, but you’re going to tell me.’

‘I got it in the sale at Slam City Skates. Reduced from, like, fifty quid.’ He begins rooting around in his bag, then pulls out a bar of chocolate and signals to someone else he knows.

‘What’s the worst thing you can imagine, Daniel?’ I ask, as a sort of comforter. ‘The very worst thing?’ Like losing a T-shirt not so bad, blah blah. A look of concentration falls over his face.

‘My parents break-dancing.’ He tinkers with a follow-up idea.

‘Or them having sex,’ he says.

Glancing over to the crowd gathering at the bar discussing techno, multi-media applications, the direction of narrative in computer game design. I feel suddenly overcome by the weight of my ignorance. It would be easy to write the whole thing off as trivial, but there’s something more enduring about the e-scene than that, which is to say that a tribe of under-agers in thrall to technology might really constitute the future in the making.

‘What I think I meant was, what’s the scariest thing you can imagine?’ I continue, attempting to draw Daniel back into some kind of seriousness. He picks up the change in mood.

‘My parents dying, I suppose. And growing old too quickly. Hahaha, it seems as though I was seven yesterday hahaha.’

And it seems as though I was seventeen. The screwy truth of the matter is that we speed through the years so fast we can hardly tell we’ve lived them. Even boys of seventeen worry about how to put the brakes on.

‘Do you know what really pisses me off?’ asks Daniel, readying himself to leave me in favour of his younger friends.

‘Quite a lot at the moment, I’d say.’

‘No, but what really pisses me off?’

I bite my lip and pretend to consider. Let’s see.

‘Uh uh, I can’t think.’

‘What really pisses me off is Britpop bands.’

WEDNESDAY

It’s been six months since I compiled my first e-mail at Nancy’s house in Strawberry Point.

THURSDAY

Apple Mac is in a parental mood and has imposed a curfew, allowing me to switch it on, but refusing to log me onto the Net so that I am effectively grounded.

My first impulse is to contact Mac, but, since the computer has crashed, I can’t send e-mail. I take to the manual, get no further than the index. Mac’s phone number lies on my mind like aversion therapy. Best sort the thing out myself.

So my next idea is to reach for the help button and tap in ‘HELP’. ‘This cannot be found,’ bleeps the Apple Mac. I do it again. The same message appears. Rationally speaking, I am aware that the computer either recognizes an instruction or it doesn’t. I know it can’t interpret. But this is a crisis. Why doesn’t the damned thing just do something useful? If it’s supposed to be so clever…

I try:

Internet

PPP

comms

help TCP

help Internet

and so on

Eventually I call up the company which sells me my Internet connection.

‘Is it a TCP error?’

Shrug.

‘We’ll send you the software.’

Go and boil your head, in other words.

FRIDAY

A floppy disk containing forty-two programme files arrives. No instructions. Most of the files appear to be compressed, so I have to decompress them before they can be used. But they haven’t all been compressed using the same compression software. Some are .hqx files, others .sea files, .sit files, .cpt files. Some of these I know to be self-decompressing while others require separate decompression software, which I don’t have. I can download it, but only if I can get online. And I can’t get online, because I can’t decompress the software files.

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