"Maureen McHugh - Virtual Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (McHugh Maureen F)

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

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

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

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

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

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