"Do actors like to type that much?"
"Nope. There aren't a lot of actors anymore. Now it's the old hackers, the technical types who didn't like it when the net got user-friendly. Our motto is, Everything sucks but ASCII. All those faces on-screen made everyone too polite. The AcNet customers still like to flame and gender-surf and generally be assholes. They also stay here 'cause it's one of the last places with all technical users. It's a great place to pick up tips. But mostly, I make sure things stay animated."
"You talk to them?"
"I chat. I animate. When boring guys like Turbo and Action Jackson are on the line, someone has to provide some interest or everyone just signs off."
"You know these guys?"
"I know everyone. I'm on eight hours a day."
"So you're sort of like a host?" she asked.
"Not really. I'm what you might call a shill. They all think I'm another subscriber. Most of them think I'm a young NYU drama student named ME."
"ME?"
"That's my user name, anyway. The stupider the user name, the better."
She began to catch up with the frenetic pace of the text on the screen and saw snatches of conversation. It wasn't just one dialogue, however. Short exchanges from several different conversations were interleaved among each other. Each conversation moved forward, disappeared and was replaced by another, and then returned, having advanced a step in the meantime.
"You're talking to more than one person."
"I'm chatting with all of them. Look." His qwerting paused, and he pointed at the screen. "Each time I send, the computer takes me to the next conversant who's sent a message to me, the one who's been waiting the longest for a reply. It shows me the last thing I said to him, which I probably wouldn't remember otherwise, and his reply to me. I qwert in my response, and pow!" - he bent both thumbs at once, evidently the SEND function - "I'm on to the next one."
He started qwerting again. "I'm conversing with each of the four users who are on-line. A couple of them have separate conversations going with each other, but ME is the one holding their attention and, more important, keeping them on-line."
She bent closer to the screen. As she halfway listened to him, the babble on the monitor began to make sense to her. Turbo was definitely a man, and he was coaxing Freddie to reveal the breadth of his sexual experience. But it wasn't buddy-to-buddy talk. Turbo was flirting, making lewd puns with ME's call-name, but the humor had a straight sensibility. Then she realized the obvious: Turbo thought ME was female. Freddie was playing ME as a woman, a shy but curious young student. Freddie's responses to Turbo's suggestive queries were evasive but not dismissive. It was as if ME was intrigued by Turbo's leering questions, and was playing a coy game at the arm's length of the qwerty bracelet. ME tended to answer questions with more questions, and Freddie sprinkled her messages with wows and multiple exclamation points. She realized why Freddie kept his capslock key down. In addition to speeding his qwerting, the uppercase letters gave ME's correspondence the breathless excitement of an innocent.
Intercut with this dialogue were exchanges with the other three conversants. One seemed to have a faster response time than the others; almost every second message the computer prompted Freddie with was marked "C.C." Freddie said she was a woman. Her messages were filled with the misspelled homonyms of a speech recognition transcriber.
Either C.C. was telling ME about a pornographic fantasy she had entertained or she was a shameless liar. Her messages were long and rambling, and ended in the middle of sentences. Sometimes the dangling thoughts were completed in the next message, sometimes they weren't. Freddie barely read them before responding with over-excited filler like
TELL ME MORE!!! Or WHAT HAPPENED THEN???!!!
Freddie explained that Cosmo and Action Jackson were chatting to each other, so their messages to ME came less frequently. Cosmo, who Freddie figured to be a man, used New Age jargon and was playing old-timer to ME's youth. Freddie took more care with his replies to Cosmo, in which ME held forth on the emptiness of life. Freddie's fingers wove cliche after cliche of adolescent angst. He chuckled as he did so, seeming to enjoy wallowing in ME's existential swamp. Cosmo was hooked, tirelessly offering his hackneyed formulas to cheer ME up. Action Jackson and ME discussed baseball, and made fun of Cosmo behind his back.
Soon she was able to keep track of the four different sets of messages simultaneously, and she began to comprehend the conversations as if they weren't interrupting each other. She felt her mind splitting its attention as it adapted to the task of tracking four parallel lines of thought. At the same time, she saw that Freddie sometimes let ideas jump across conversations. Touching the screen with his good hand, he would highlight a comment from one conversant and send it to another. The meaning of the comment might shift when placed into another stream of context, but that seemed part of his intent. He used other techniques, almost too fast to see. Groups of words popped up when he struck any of the thick double row of function keys across the top of his handrest. They were apparently configured to deliver common phrases with one key stroke.
As the distinct personalities of the four conversants became clearer, she began to see a pattern in Freddie's responses. There was an easy grace with the way he dispatched Turbo's advances, always gently enough that the man kept on trying. From a screen full of C.C's ramblings, he could pick out and respond to a telling phrase in seconds, turning it around on her so that it drove her erotic narrative to new heights. Freddie assaulted Cosmo's New Age - serenity with ME's relentless depression, but Cosmo kept arguing, hooked by the dialogue.
Freddie's dexterity amazed her. She thought of all the lovers she had taken in her various shapes; men and women, gay and straight. The organic metamorphosis she used to remold herself for them suddenly seemed crude. Freddie was changing identities from second to second, re-creating himself constantly to play to the weaknesses and imaginations of his conversants. Her own encounters in her anonymous city had always been physical, visceral. She kissed her lovers, held them, penetrated and was penetrated, even tore them, as she had her attacker in the park. Her prehensile nervous tissue could breach the skin and mingle with another's in the sweaty, half-conscious aftermath of sex. The body shapes she took to perform these connections were as fleeting as the encounters, which only increased the intensity. But Freddie made the same anonymous, exquisite connections through the slender link of text on a screen - uppercase text only. There was a razorlike efficiency to it. He moved among the needs and frustrations of his conversants with a kind of inhuman lightness. It was as if in ME he became an omniscient, nameless confidant, effortlessly innocent and wise. She realized she was drunk.