Read Online Deus X by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page A

really being inside.
    Even with the dreadcap, all you’ve got is 360-degree color stereoscopic vision and omniphonic sound. Not that I’m complaining, man, sight and sound of the Other Side is more than enough.
    On this side of the Line, you’ve got what’s left of the so-called civilized world gorked nonstop into the Thousand and One Nights of the entertainment environment while the waters rise up to their asses and the Greenhouse sun fries what’s left of their brains.
    Nor do the entities on the Other Side profess to be happy campers. Their meatware templates sign them up for an eternity of postmortem bliss that sounds like heaven to the expiring meat, full choice of access to a thousand channels of interactive entertainment, and all the data banks you can eat, but once inside, it wears thin pretty fast. With nothing but sight and sound, without taste, or smell, or kinesthetic sensation, there’s no real there there, and even plugged into the interactive porn channels, not quite a real you.
    To hear most of them tell it, existing as a program on the Big Board, if you exist at all, a subject of endless electronic angst, is a pale shadow of personhood in a disneyworld limbo, where the big thrill is trying to dream up a new way to mindfuck yourself into believing that you’re real.
    Up popped the Main Board Menu, the standard circle of simple animated icons flacking for theirenvironments—Friendly Phil the Phone, the Stock Market Bull, national leaders or animals of various jurisdictions, the whirling globe of the news environment, Gossiping Gertie, the Dancing Bear of the entertainment environment, Sexy Sally—no expert system level programs allowed up here on the even electronic playing field of the table of contents.
    The De Leone program had been running on the proprietary Vatican com-net when it evaporated from the hardware, which, according to Cardinal Silver, was a sealed network that never interfaced with the Big Board, bristled with state-of-the-art pinkerton programs, and couldn’t be hacked.
    Sure it was. In reality, of course, there’s no such thing as a sealed com-net. If the terminals don’t communicate by phone lines, they communicate by sat-links, and wherever there’s a switching system, there’s multiple access to an expert system level entity susceptible to manipulation by higher-level programs.
    It was conceivable that some human agency had pirated De Leone’s software, but even if there
was
mere human perversity on the downloading end, that human pervert would have had to conjure with some entity more perverse still to have gotten past the Vatican pinkertons.
    De Leone’s successor entity had to have been lifted via the agency of some denizen of the Other Side, if, of course, it hadn’t simply been wiped by same.
    I had to access a level I could talk to, persuade some entity to walk me deeper inside, below, or above, if you prefer, the free human access level, where the deed must surely have been done.
    I pointed at the icon for Heaven’s Gate—deco Greek temple gate with cartoon angels flitting around inside—snapped my fingers inside my right glove, and was there.
    Beyond the icon was a stylized green hillside under a phony flat blue sky, syrupy harp music gave you insulin shock to hear it, Pearly Gate that looked like a cheap plastic version—the natives’ idea of a transcorporial joke as a sleazy menu environment for the interface to the dearly departed. The space inside the gate was a mess of rose-white clouds that kept breaking up into pixels, resolution no better than 400 by 280, more of the same.
    When they first tried to make the Big Board dumb user friendly with cute cartoon animals, favorite uncle sims, and licensed images of dead media stars to take you by the elbow and walk you through, the software behind them was moron expert system stuff, closed loops with finite repertoires.
    But when the marketers moved in with corporate spokesprograms, sales personalities, friendly