There is, first of all, Cyberspace, where the world lives. The global virtual reality, the antidote to transportation, the reconfigurable universe, the collective conscious, softwhere, the Agency, our home.
There is a war going on.
Our side is winning handily, but all war is tragedy: Anyone's misinforming diminishes me. Vast reserves of data have been destroyed, information supply lines have been cut, and noncombatant catchers have been misinformed. Infowar is Chaos.
While the war rages, army information officer Holden fights a small second-order infobattle to stem the flow of information about the war itself. Holden knows that the enemy will make use of any information it can catch, so all information should be bottled up unless there is a compelling reason to let it out. Holden's operating principle is Need to Know.
Then there is Wright, broadcatch journalist, on the other side in this War about the War, fighting to get the whole story: How did we get here? Was it really unavoidable? Who benefits? How will forces realign when it is over? Wright's operating principle is the Right to Know.
There is Reed, who roams Cyberspace catching news of the war. Reed finds information but not insight: conflicting opinions, indigestible facts and figures. Tweaking the semantic resolution and Skolemizing the propositions doesn't resolve the opinions. Fuzzing the logic of the fact filters doesn't cook the data. The heuristics diverge. Reed gives up and catches DisneySpace.
Reed has been accused of having no operating principle, but this is humor. No agent lacks an operating principle. Reed waves this way and that with the winds of change, but adheres to a simple complexity threshold principle. If it gets too complicated, Reed doesn't Want to Know.
Then there is Deus Max.
He has many other names: Agent of Anarchy, CyberSurfer, J. Random Sysop. Deus Max, it is said, is short for Deus Ex Machina, or possibly Deus Machinae. Deus Max lives in Underwire, a fluid, self-modifying outlaw network woven from whispers in the collective back alleys and airshafts of Cyberspace. It is said that Deus Max made Underwire. It is said that he started the infowar, for purposes of his own. It is said that he is rewiring Cyberspace in his own image. Anything may be true of Deus Max.
And these are not the most extraordinary things said of Deus Max. The most extraordinary claim is that he is Wet. It is incredible; no Wetware being has ever been known to descend from the Periphery to our level of Cyberspace, yet I find it easy to believe this of Deus Max.
Deus Max has never been caught in real time, but he leaves many messages. In one of these, he tells the story of a freelance brain surgeon who comes upon a split-brain patient and tries to reconnect the severed neurons. Characteristically, he contradicts himself, saying that the patient was born this way and that the surgeon's efforts, if successful, will produce a monster, something never before seen in nature. This is all, of course, a blasphemous metaphor for tinkering with the connections of Cyberspace. It is also maddeningly self-contradictory. So is Deus Max.
Here and there, threads unravel. Things fall apart; the operating principles cannot hold.
Holden assigns the wrong security code to a message and Wright decodes it, but Wright then misroutes the story he writes from it. Chip, looking through a huge magnifying glass, suddenly launches into a lecture about acorns. Dale tugs his whiskers skeptically, but Reed is inspired, leaves DisneySpace to catch the war news. The opinions and facts are the same, but the acorn analogy helps. It reduces the data drastically, and a useful insight emerges.
I can make no sense of this, nor do I try. I seem to lack all conviction. This must be the work of Deus Max. But what can it signify? What is your operating principle, Deus Max? For a time, such questions torture me, but only for a time. Shortly, miraculously, the channel to Deus Max opens. And now there is only one question that I wish to ask.
How may I serve you, Master?
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal