Chatting for Dummies

B: What would you think if I told you that there was a sort of game, where the playing field is all of reality, and the winners get to shift the paradigm?

But that’s getting ahead of things. I typed in my e-mail address, and BigWig immediately disconnected. I shrugged, figured it was a dead end, and decided I should get some sleep. But before I did, checked my e-mail.

One message. Spoofed sender or a vanity domain. [email protected]. Single line of text.

Hillman lab. 7pm. One of the Spark10s.

My own e-mail address had nothing to do with Pitt campus. I had said nothing to indicate my location. The only thing that could have revealed it was my IP address from my IRC session. Of course all that would reveal was that I was using a Pitt dial-up login. Every year or so my friend group would assimilate a Freshman and convince them to give us access. Yeah, shitty, right? Of course by the time we needed a new login, the most recent one would have dropped out and been fully integrated into or gang of losers, so they would be fully complicit in seducing the next vic… er… volunteer.

Either way it was 8:30 am now, and if I wanted to communicate with BigWig tonight, I needed to get some sleep.

Seven PM found me freshly showered and sitting in one of the office chairs in the corner of Hillman Library’s computer lab. A Spark10, for those who don’t know, is a Sun Microsystems Unix workstation. Windows and Macs were great for playing video games or writing papers, but if you really wanted to do anything worthwhile on the internet, you needed shell access, and while that could be gotten from telnet on one of the commercial boxes, that was also adding a whole extra layer of latency, which could be eliminated by direct access to the network. Hence using a workstation.

I’d just secure shelled my way into my offsite account when I got a utalk request. Utalk is a real time chat program that runs on various Unix/Linux systems. When I say real time I mean that literally. Text is displayed exactly as it’s typed, when it’s typed. There’s no writing out a message then deleting it before you hit send. So I’m going to reproduce this from memory as best I can and I’m going to simplify it by delivering one line at a time. I may also be editing out some of my own idiocy in the process.

B: What would you think if I told you that there was a sort of game, where the playing field is all of reality, and the winners get to shift the paradigm?

W: I’d say you’ve been reading way too much Castaneda.

Yes. I’m a dick.

B: I can always disconnect now.

W: Sorry. I use sarcasm as a defense mechanism.

B: I know. I read the one paper you actually handed in when you were a student.

W: Ok. You somehow know who I am, where I am, and you’re some sort of computer wiz or you’ve been going through one of my old professors’ trash bin. But you also clearly have some sort of knowledge about what the fuck is going on, so I will assume that you truly believe in this game. So tell me about it.

B: It usually doesn’t work like that, but I like your sense of humor so here goes. This shit has been going on forever. There are some references to it going back to Sumer. The modern version started up in 1959, that’s about all anyone knows for sure. It doesn’t seem to have any sort of formal name. Players refer to it by which round of the game is being played. So far there have been six rounds since ‘59.

W: But what IS it? Assuming that I buy the existence of a game, HOW do you play it?

B: At least you’re asking the right questions. Unfortunately that’s all I’m willing to give you right now. I don’t know how secure your system is.

W: So what was the point of all this?

B: I’ll be there tonight at 11:30. Have a black coffee waiting for me. We’ll play pinball and talk.

[email protected] has disconnected

Well fuck me.

I got to work early that night and just kinda hung out, sipping coffee and wondering what I had gotten myself into. In about 2 hours I was going to meet someone from the internet who was either going to give me some answers or possibly **** me in cold blood. I carefully fingered my pocket knife and tried to focus on reading the copy if Richard Bach’s Illusions while images of my demise floated through my head.

At 10 I closed up shop, saw Gary and Blaine out, locked up, and got to work. I’d long ago learned that I could do most if not all of my job in the space of about two hours and generally spent the other six fucking off. Except the one time I worked on acid, which was the only time I hadn’t managed to clean anything but the Men’s room. I got the lobby and basement done pretty quickly and when 11:30 rolled around I was sitting at one of the tables nervously smoking and nursing a Kenya AA.

BigWig was not at all what I had expected.