Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath
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.