Labyrinth Key

ONE DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH Cybernesia The annual Pilot's Festival was well underway at Don Sturm's and Karuna Drang's place, though their "place" was a DIVE a deep-immersion virtual environmentand their DIVE wasn't a place at all. Sturm and Drang weren't their legal names, either, and they hadn't physically cohabited for months. Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturm's morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasn't exactly "period." But blue hair was one of Don's personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadn't been able to resist. All around them, virtual party peoplelikewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century dragdanced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o- maniac, Medea ?rate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures. Normally Don's default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from viewonly to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst. Don/Thomas shook his head. "I know that's how they pull off their grand data exchanges," he said to Karuna/Sally. "And I'm sure what they're doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish they'd make use of a more subtle metaphor." Karuna/Sally laughed " 'To hack is to explore and manipulate'," she said, imitating Medea's lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. " 'To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, n'est-ce pas?' " Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary Warera tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunset's salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again. "You look preoccupied," Karuna/Sally said. "Even e-bodied, I can tell. What's on your mind?" "Just looking over what we've wrought," Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires' musical variations. "Not to say that it's overwrought, mind you. Just that the nature of this event is somewhat paradoxical." "How so?" "Well, it feels as if I've usurped a public event just to celebrate a personal success, and either way the celebrants don't know what they're celebrating." "Don, you have every right to celebrate! Prime Privacy Protocol is a winner. It's on its way to becoming the most popular encryption software in the infosphere." "Even if no one associates my name with it. . . ." "Yes, but you, 'Mister ObolHendrix, Howard V. is the author of 'Labyrinth Key' with ISBN 9780345455963 and ISBN 0345455967.