Archive-name: Fantasy/dixie.txt
Archive-author: Bob King        (c) 1993
Archive-title: Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe


Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe is my first effort at a story for
Alt.Sex.Stories. It asks the question, "what would the Internet be like if it
was a virtual reality network?" S&M, D&S, blood, gore and ungentlemanly
behaviour. Language... Parential Discretion is probably far too late...

Vague enough for you, Omaha?

Pluggin' Into The Dixie Vibe
(C)1993 Bob King, All rights reserved.

Permission is given to freely distribute this file by electronic means as long
as the entire file remains intact, without change or omission, and especially
including this notice. Permission is also given to print out single
copies of this file for personal use. 


Chapter One

    I am jammin' the wave, man; plugged in, javohl? I am surfin' the reality
curve; I'm toppin' the line! I'm playin Greedball with Jim the Rat; the Full
Virtual Reality environment surrounds us with screaming textures and shrieking
rhythms as we keep score by the feedback to our pleasure/pain centers. Right
now I'm flying like I took 10 straight hits of crack while Jimbo is looking
kind of green, sweating out the consequences of bein' a natural-born loser.
    The ball comes zipping at me, and time >>>>warps>>>> as I (((reach for it
and fail utterly; pain like knives, like crazed rats clawing at my prostate,
like snorting Drano, pain like God's eye on me; the pain clears my mind and
centers me. It hurts just right...
    *Click*
    In the groove. Flick. Left. Flick. Right. Flick my eyes flick side to side
flick up and down; the acid green and ultra-blue balls scream their
trajectories inside the nearly weightless geodesic space. The walls are down;
I feel the tug of one of my green pentagons as my arc tops out. As I start to
fall I snag one of my greens and hurl it away while cranking it's inertial
mass to the max. I feel my bones groan with the effort as it streaks towards
one of my green triangles on the opposite hemisphere.
    Jim launches to intercept but he didn't catch on how much mass I added;
his fingers fold back with audible pops as the ball brushes by to score. Jim
starts screaming as the exit sequence starts; his eyeballs explode just about
the time I blow my wad; then the geodesic dissolves into pixels and I'm back
in my Chariot, the Crotch-Monster slurping away so as to get every drop. The
scoreboard tells me I'm 8 for 3 with Jim; good, good; not so much of a margin
that he won't play any more. One more honest game, and then I'd better be "off
my form" again.
    Another way to play in Cyberspace. As they say; "It ain't real unless it's
FUCKIN' real!"
    I get up, sated; I scratch my crotch where the relief tube's rubber had
made a tight suction seal against depilated flesh. A quick glance in the
mirror shows me; naked, hairless except for eyelashes; pale skin and black
eyes. No stubble, the hair is gone for good; it gets in the way of the neural
contact pads, and it fucks up the suction on the waste disposal units. I walk
to my foodwall where with the push of a button I summon mystic daemons to
conjure with microwaves and high-speed impellers; invoking processed krill,
soya, nutrocarb and spices.  The mystic daemons are good to me; I must have
paid the food bill. Out plops a mockburger and a Coke Classic.
    I sit down at my table and read the newsslab; I check out the headlines -
more of the same old shit, somehow reassuring. I flick through, read the
advice column, laugh at the editorial cartoon and save it to permanents
memory, check out my horoscope - guardedly lousy - and finally settle down and
watch the comix.
    Some people say that adding limited animation to comic strips and cartoons
has killed the artform. I say it's a different thing entirely. Besides, some
pumping action makes a graphic novel REALLY graphic!
    Computers have killed a lot of artforms, I think, wiping the last of the
Special Sauce off my lip with a reconstructed napkin. I throw the whole mess
into the pulper; it can separate the plastics and food residue without my
help. I head back to my Chariot.
    It's a Chariot 515, actually; as if you care. I mean, pretty much, a
Chariot is a Chariot. The only question is whether or not it makes your butt
go numb while you are in Cyberspace. Oh, ya, ya, the Ice Pirates make big
whoopie about how many flopdoodles per nanodweeb their Chairiot can do, but
I'm like 99 percent of all Cyberspacers; I'm just along for the ride. I don't
do rez work; I don't do programming, I don't educate expert systems clusters,
so all my beast has to do is be good enough to let me meet girls in Full
Virtual Reality and play games at an acceptably awesome speed, Dude. Oh, yeah,
and take me to work every day.
    I run a machine shop in Yokohama; well, it looks like a machine-shop,
anyway. What it looks like in reality, I have no clue. I've asked, but I only
get inscrutable smiles. I'm making prototype machine parts of some kind, and I
have a good crew; Japs pay for the best. And that's all I'm gonna say about
it; aside from the Zaibatsu yellow-dog/nondisclosure agreement and the Yakuza
goons they have to back their paper up, it's fuckin' boring and you wouldn't
care.
    I flop back into the Chariot; it powers up in my august presence, the
Crotch Monster snuggles into my groin while the seat sucks my butt down and
makes a nice tight seal. There's a tingle throughout my nervous system as the
Chariot runs a quick diagnostic, and then there's a *Snick* and my body is
gone and I am in my own Headspace.
    Headspace is slang for your own personal Virtual reality; you can tailor
it as you want within limits. I'm no rez artist and I'm a cheap bastard, so my
Headspace is furnished with Public Domain art and freeware decor; it's kinda
this and that, one period shoved against the next; I have no taste, but I know
what I like.
    Yeah, I could afford to get some dweeb rez wiz to come in and pretty it up
for me, but shit, it ain't worth it. Rather spend the money on access time;
it's not like I let people IN here. I go over to the one exception to my rule
about cheap furnishings. It looks like a battered file cabinet; in fact, if
you pick the lock (that is, your computer beats my encryption/protection
schemes) you will find some mildly illegal porn files stored there with cute
"magazine" objicons. I ignore the lock and open the drawer while laying my
left hand flat on the top and kicking the right side of the cabinet just so.
It opens to reveal the simple keyboard and screen that is the user interface
of a very fucking expensive covert SubCarrier access program. With it, I can
access the private headspace of anybody connected to WorldNet - which is just
about everybody - without any possibility of traceback. Of course, they gotta
have SubCarrier access too... but then, just about everybody does. Everybody
_I_ wanna ride with, anyway. People like me who wanna walk the razor-sharp
division between Virtual and Actual; between Real and Make Believe.
    It's time to Plug in to the Dixie Vibe!

***  
 

Chapter Two

Excerpt from the New World Virtual Cyclopaedic Environment: [Transcript of a
virtual lecture given by Virtual personalities Hiesenburgburg and
Schr0/0dinger, the Kaos Kats] "How to Ride The Dixie Vibe"

Hiesenburgburg is sitting on the floor, an immense fat black `toon cat covered
in glossy fur, smoking a big green cigar and slurping a beer mug filled with
scalding espresso. He's wearing black jeans and Birkinstocks, a black straw
Panama shades his eyes, which are hidden by wrap-around black shades. His
voice is a purring rumble; like James Earl Jones in serious red-shift.

Shroud0/1dinger paces nervously, a thin, wispy cat with glossy long fur. She
seems sometimes to randomly flick from place to place, whenever you aren't
looking. The fur flows with the air of her passage and molds itself to a
voluptuous body. Large blue eyes in a Siamese mask completes the picture; she
wears no clothing. Her fur fluffs and crackles with a constant static charge;
her voice is a sibilant whisper. And sometimes she just isn't there; only a
whiff of magnolia and musk to mark her place.

HI: Dig, like, you gotta dig me here, chelas. We are gonna tell you about how
the vibe was born. Think about it, man, feel it, taste it; we are a thousand
years and more from the campfires of our forecats and here we are, layin' down
oral history on you.

SH: It's not just oral. It's performance art. We live the part over for you
again and again.

HI: Speak for you'sef, kitty! Next time I do this, I'll tell it completely
different. Dig it, chelas; this is all a lie.

SH: Inspired guesswork. Wishful thinking. Creative logical constructions.
Erisian prayers.

HI: So, like, lighten up, sit down and dig, cuz this is about as true as it
ever gets.
    Way back when, when a bunch of geniuses was racing to get the first rights
to the whole virtual reality neural interface thing, the gumments of the world
had been looking at Virtual Reality as a way for Important People to Do Things
Without Real Work. It was, Like, a DEEEFENSE thing. Simulate dis jet, Simulate
dat tank. Simulate dat jet blowing up dat tank. Simulate burning to death in
that tank... we gotta make it really real, dig?
    It's called Negative Feedback Conditioning. In the early days you wore a
suit with wires and eletrodes and skin sensors and pupil readers and they
shoved things in your ears and up your butt, just to get all the responses.
And they used it to simulate reality, and torture some poor shmoe until he got
it right.
    And the Wheels, yah, well, they used it to talk to other wheels, though
all they ever wore was a helmet and a glove - software faked the rest, after
all, who expects a politician to feel anything?
    And so you'd see the Prez, toddling along Pennsylvania Ave, driving a
waldo with a teevee for a face and a funky robohand for pressin' the flesh,
buttenholing every single voter he could find. After he did it enough there
was an expert system that took his place running the waldo; it did it a while
until the Prez died in office.

SH: That's the legend. Lover.

HI: Swear it on a stack of bibles, luv. Swear that I'm tellin' it jus' like I
heard it. I make no further war-rent-tee! Story goes that the expert system
has been running things for the last 20 years; it's been 24 since the last
election, so maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but the face never changes,
nosirree.

SH: The Presidency is ceremonial. People like familiar faces, kind old
rituals. Stale oldfarts to mark our territory. Smells like home.

HI: Point I MAKIN', honeychil' is dat come a point where you dunno what is
real and what ain't; come to that, don't make no difference. Prez is a virtual
reality, and you can be too. In a completely different and less dead way,
a`corse.

SH: Time to plug into the Dixie Vibe.

HI: Yeah, like she say. Because there was something called the Internet; a
dinosaur computer thing, date way, way back to the 1960's. It started out
hooking old mainframe computers together. It used landlines and microwave
links, den it get fast glass and satellite uplinks. Yeah, and dig, this is
unregulated traffic.

SH: Too much to regulate even then.

HI: It creates a tradition. Then when fast glass lines and wideband uplinks
become real common, data transfer rates go through the roof. Full speed vidio
signals can be transferred, and computers get fast enough to generate `em in
real time; better than real time.

SH: Interfaces become more sophisticated. Less hassle. Good Chariot, now, you
just sit down. No screen, no keyboard. All that stuff is virtual. Never wears
out.

HI: People had been working from home for years already. Telecommuting just
got a little more realistic, a little more personal. After decades of Fax and
phone and Email, business got back to the handshake and the eyeball. Chariot
makes sure that "you" are exactly you, same for the other guy.

SH: Georgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Dior. Clothes make the person. Buy
it off the rack in a clothing store or a rezware house. Costs about the same.

HI: But even today there's a fair gap between Virtual and Actual. The best
Chariot interfacing with the fastest computer on with perfect link can still
only render something that looks, sounds, and feels slightly surreal; a
cartoon reality. Some people are fond of that, take it to extremes.

SH: No shit?

HI: Like; dig this, cats. We be square, old-time cats; we ain't hip no more;
the vibe has passed us by.

SH: Speak for yourself. I walk where I will.

HI: And I know where you won't. But that's the thing. There are no limits.
Riding the vibe, there are no limits but the ones you ARE. Bein' a cartoon
underlines it, rezes it up, solid and nifty-keen and, like, _distant_. Even
when you wear it, even when you walk on it, even, dig, even when you fuck it.

SH: Distant. The player and the play. Entwined. Simultaneous. A dance of
Shakesperes and Kants and Niechies and Dahmers. All after each other's bodies,
each other's minds, each other's souls.

HI: Oh, and dig, like, you want to know why we call it the Dixie Vibe? It's
like a poetic reference to that rebel feeling, that visceral catharsis you get
when you do that rebel yell... (WHOOP!)

SH: The first anon realtime subcarrier server had the internet name
Dixie_VI.vmi.edu. Dixie Six was a massively parallel RISC supercomputer that
was surplussed to Virginia Military Institute by the United States National
Security Agency.

HI: I liked my truth better, fuzzylips. But this one's true too. Problem was,
nobody could figure out what to do with a massively parallel supercomputer.
It's not like you could buy programs for it. But they turned it over to the
Computer Science Department anyway, and the CS head - who was an old Xenix
hound - fobbed it off on a bunch of CS majors who wanted a dissertation
project. They formed a development group and wrote a compiled language and an
operating system that supported a virtual reality environment to a degree no
other educational institution had ever been able to achieve.

SH: The late Jimm Fixx  said it. "Nothing any
fool hacker couldn't have done given fifty billion dollars worth of free
equipment and a licence to play God."

HI: And of course Jimmie the_Fix and his cronies in the development team were
perhaps the first to experiment with virtual sex in a virtual reality
environment. After all, they were hackers. They were geeks.

SH: Like you. Like me.

HI: Bet your furry ass. So they played a bit, and made the system available to
other users - coeds, for example... Anyway, word got out. Authorities Were Not
Amused. They Put A Stop To It.

SH: Probably felt hurt they weren't invited. Administrators are people too.

HI: Truly? They must learn to hide it early. Anyway, this provoked the "fixxit
team" to create the subcarrier firmware that allows untraceable contacts.
Amazing work, really. It's reformed our sex lives and made government security
efforts on electronic media completely irrelevant, yet it could NOT be banned,
because the subcarrier hardware and firmware is part of the patented,
proprietary chipset of every Chairiot. The chipset that makes it possible to
do the neural interface without breaking skin and tapping nerves.

SH: Made the software illegal. Now everybody's a criminal.

HI: Oh, not everybody. Hardly anybody at all. Only a few millions.

SH: _Everybody_. Everybody who counts.


Chapter Three

The program interface looks and feels like a very, very expensive laptop of 30
years ago; an antique. It's a perfect emulation of a Lapdesk 286/turbo. Which
means that there are megabytes of files and stuff to wade through before you
even hit on the proper initialization sequence. I boot up an antique comm
program and I can hear the hard drive whir, even feel a slight inertial tug as
it spins up. Nice touch; not sure I believe it...
    Once it's up I load one of 20 phonebook lists, all of which have 30 year
old phone numbers. I dial a long-dead bbs; The Passion Palace. (3/12/24! 10
megs of adult files!) A little resident virus scans the numbers being dialed;
this one doesn't go to the phone; it kicks in the subcarrier interface. My
headspace rezzes out and I rez into Dixieland.
    Dixieland is a virtual reality construct. It's a very wierd place, nothing
is real and anything can be. There are laws and cops and as much bullshit as
you care to put up with. It's just a lot more avoidable. Like it says on the
One Burger Bill; "In Bob We Trust", and right under that, in nice holographic
letters, "SLACK", right over top of the Great Pyramid of Scottsdale, known to
be the Slackest Place Ever. Most laws exist to add to the challenge...
    I step out of the alleyway alcove that's my private rez alcove, marked
with my sigil of an erect penis and balls underlying an ornamental "L". I nod
at a giant slug with a Sanitation Department cap sucking up the cigarette
butts, used hypos and used condoms; poor bastard must have pissed off one of
the Dixiecrats REAL bad.
    I passed a wastebasket on the corner; it was filled with used condoms,
cigarette butts and all manner of other trash; I was feeling public-spirited,
so I grabbed a handful and flung it into a clean place.
    Random distribution routines take up an unbelievable amount of overhead;
it's a lot easier to keep the place looking properly grungy with good old
human sloppiness.
    I boogie down 5th Avenue, Metropolis. I hear a whoosh and someone
(probably some antique daemon) says "Look! Up in the Sky! It's a bird..."
    I walk away, not looking up. It's either Superman, Underdog, or a fucking
big bird waiting to plop on any upturned faces. Metropolis is like that.
Sometimes I think about moving over to Gotham City and take my chances with
the Noir crowd, or SpiderManhattan and just dig the angst, but hell, I hardly
ever spend time above ground anyway; I'd never notice.
    I walk past the `Toons and the various Freaks, Fairies, Furries and
Supers; nodding at the odd slutty Leatherperson like me. People are funny; you
come up with a way to have free, open sex; no consequences, no hassles, no
LAWS, and no way to get caught even if there were - and they are STILL prudes.
I think most people like laws so that they can pretend that they would really
cut loose if they ever got the chance... but give `em a chance, and you'll
find `em off in the woods chasing Orcs with swords rather than fucking.
    And people think _I'M_ perverted!
    I bop down the stairs of PlaySpace an underground RezBar where I spend
most of my credit. I check out the Ident I'm wearing in the mirror by the
door; compact, muscular, dangerous-looking; wearing black combat boots, biker
jacket and cap. That, and a Chrome-Steel, spike-studded, vibrating codpiece,
proportioned for a healthy young donkey.
    Hey, call me conservative! I pushed air over to where s\u/- was sitting.
s\u/- is an Old Hand - you can tell by the punny, texty handle. I grabbed her
hair and kissed her right on the mouth, vibrating the clit in the middle of
her soft palate with my tongue. s\u/- is a magnificent oralist...
    "Hello, Lance," she said with the conversational mouth at the base of her
throat. "How's tricks?" She made a serious grab for my uvula with her
prehensile, eight-inch tongue.
    "Not bad," I said, disengaging. I've never really been able to cope with
people playing with that particular dangly bit. I caressed her upper three
breasts to keep her distracted, tugging on the nipple rings and flicking the
buds themselves. "Plenty of overtime this month; enough to pay you and as much
again on account."
    "I suspect you may not have a life," she said, as she flicked on my
vibrating codpiece and straddled it, mashing her pubes against the unyielding,
spiked metal.
    "My life is riding the Vibe." I encourage her grinding by sticking a
finger up her anus.
    "God! Half the time I think you're a rogue daemon with a bad dialogue
routine! Shut up and fuck me!"
    Well, talking isn't my best thing, I admit. The other thing she wants is.
I shuck the codpiece to reveal that it is, if anything, understated; a huge,
telescopic battering ram of a dick emerges, covered with knotted veins; the
head the size of a clenched fist, the shaft the size of a thick forearm. I
picked her up and  buried it to the hilt in her box without any resistance to
speak of. And she accuses _me_ of bad dialogue! s\u/- is just toooo easy to be
credible; I'm either fucking a doorkeeper AI daemon or she's a guy - probably
some 80-year old paraplegic virgin living his days out in a total care home.
    Of course, running this virtual fuck-bar, he'd be a _rich_ and
_well-fucked_ paraplegic 80-year-old virgin... Like I always say, Virtuality
is what you make of it. Anyway, you appreciate at the moment I am not
concentrating on fine points of philosophy, not that I ever do!
    I bore her to the ground and rammed my meat home; I felt it bottoming out
against her cervix. Her cunt started it's always-pleasing peristaltic ripples,
massaging my cock and squeezing it until the tension was almost unbearable. I
watched her face, waiting for the orgasmic blush; I watched it creep up her
cheeks felt her start to writhe and buck; I rammed home as deeply as I could,
my knees scraping on the tired linoleum. I supported her shoulders and as her
climax peaked, I shot my wad. Sturm undt Drang undt Gotterdamerung!
    The blast took the top of her head off; the high pressure jet blew chunks
of bone, brain and less-identifiable bits across the floor, causing a couple
of new fish to jump; one turned and blew chunks all over one of the pool
tables.
    I pulled out with a wet and bloody plop, and stood up; the new fish
looking at me in absolute horror; my dick shrank from it's previous
proportions, oozing milky come and dripping other things. One of them had just
taken a breath to scream when the re-res hit.

    ***BIP***

    I offered s\u/- a hand and she gracefully got to her feet, not a hair out
of place. The fish looked confused as they realized that no trace of the event
remained; not bone, not vomit, not even a bad taste in the mouth. All glands
were in neutral; no adrenalin hangovers... It was just as if it was a slightly
distant memory.
    Virtual reality; almost like the real thing, and so _easy_ to clean up!
    "Memorable, Lance," she said. "There's nothing like having your brains
blown out with a comeshot!"
    She managed to say that with a straight face; I admire talent in a whore.
Of course, she's right. They don't call an orgasm "le petit mort" for nothing;
with me it's just bigger and messier. But both of us being troupers and Old
Hands, we refrained from whooping with laughter and completely wierding out
the newbies.
    I called s\u/- a whore; and she _is_, and damn proud of it, but she
doesn't get paid for that; there's just too damn much desperate and free
competition. What she DOES get paid for is the bar. Venue. Ambiance. Attention
to detail; that's what made me give her my hard-earned credits; PlaySpace is a
meat-magnet, and I'm always hungry.

***