Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

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      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, СКАЧАТЬ