loaded, there is no main page, no music score, only a sound ambience, growing slowly louder, that Maxine recognizes from a thousand train and bus stations and airports, and the smoothly cross-dawning image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in advance of anything she’s seen on the gaming platforms Ziggy and his friends tend to use, flaring beyond the basic videogame brown of the time into the full color spectrum of very early morning, polygons finely smoothed to all but continuous curves, the rendering, modeling, and shadows, blending and blur, handled elegantly, even with . . . could you call it genius? Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch. A framed lucid dream, it approaches, and wraps Maxine, and strangely without panic she submits.
The signs say D EEP A RCHER L OUNGE . Passengers waiting here have been given real faces, some at first glance faces Maxine thinks she knows, or ought to.
“Nice to meet you, Maxine. Going to be with us for a while?”
“Don’t know. Who told you my name?”
“Go ahead, explore around, use the cursor, click anywhere you like.”
If it’s a travel connection that Maxine’s supposed to be making,she keeps missing it. “Departure” keeps being indefinitely postponed. She gathers that you’re supposed to get on what looks like a shuttle vehicle of some kind. At first she doesn’t even know it’s ready to leave till it’s gone. Later she can’t even find her way to the right platform. From the sumptuously provisioned bar upstairs, there’s a striking view of rolling stock antiquated and postmodern at the same time vastly coming and going, far down the line over the curve of the world. “It’s all right,” dialogue boxes assure her, “it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.”
Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself. According to Justin, Lucas is the creative partner in this. Justin’s the one who translated it into code, but the visual and sound design, the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins, all are due to Lucas.
Maxine locates at last a master directory of train schedules, and when she clicks on “Midnight Cannonball”—bingo. On she is crossfaded, up and down stairways, through dark pedestrian tunnels, emerging into soaring meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light, through turnstiles whose guardians morph as she approaches from looming humorless robots into curvaceous smiling hula girls with orchid leis, up to a train whose kindly engineer leans beaming from the cab and calls out, “Take your time, young lady, we’re holdin her for you . . .”
The instant she steps on board, however, the train accelerates insanely, zero to warp speed in a tenth of a second, and they’re off to DeepArcher. The detail of the 3-D countryside barreling past the windows on both sides is surely on a much finer scale than it has to be, no loss of resolution no matter how closely she tries to focus in. Train hostesses out of Lucas and Justin’s beach-babe fantasies keep coming by withcarts full of junk food, drinks with Pacific subtexts like Tequila Sunrises and mai tais, dope of varying degrees of illegality . . .
Who can afford bandwidth like this? She mouses her way to the back of the car, expecting grand vistas of trackscape receding, only to find, instead, emptiness, absence of color, the entropic dwindling into Netscape gray of the other brighter world. As if any idea here of escaping to refuge would have to include no way back.
Though
The signs say D EEP A RCHER L OUNGE . Passengers waiting here have been given real faces, some at first glance faces Maxine thinks she knows, or ought to.
“Nice to meet you, Maxine. Going to be with us for a while?”
“Don’t know. Who told you my name?”
“Go ahead, explore around, use the cursor, click anywhere you like.”
If it’s a travel connection that Maxine’s supposed to be making,she keeps missing it. “Departure” keeps being indefinitely postponed. She gathers that you’re supposed to get on what looks like a shuttle vehicle of some kind. At first she doesn’t even know it’s ready to leave till it’s gone. Later she can’t even find her way to the right platform. From the sumptuously provisioned bar upstairs, there’s a striking view of rolling stock antiquated and postmodern at the same time vastly coming and going, far down the line over the curve of the world. “It’s all right,” dialogue boxes assure her, “it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.”
Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself. According to Justin, Lucas is the creative partner in this. Justin’s the one who translated it into code, but the visual and sound design, the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins, all are due to Lucas.
Maxine locates at last a master directory of train schedules, and when she clicks on “Midnight Cannonball”—bingo. On she is crossfaded, up and down stairways, through dark pedestrian tunnels, emerging into soaring meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light, through turnstiles whose guardians morph as she approaches from looming humorless robots into curvaceous smiling hula girls with orchid leis, up to a train whose kindly engineer leans beaming from the cab and calls out, “Take your time, young lady, we’re holdin her for you . . .”
The instant she steps on board, however, the train accelerates insanely, zero to warp speed in a tenth of a second, and they’re off to DeepArcher. The detail of the 3-D countryside barreling past the windows on both sides is surely on a much finer scale than it has to be, no loss of resolution no matter how closely she tries to focus in. Train hostesses out of Lucas and Justin’s beach-babe fantasies keep coming by withcarts full of junk food, drinks with Pacific subtexts like Tequila Sunrises and mai tais, dope of varying degrees of illegality . . .
Who can afford bandwidth like this? She mouses her way to the back of the car, expecting grand vistas of trackscape receding, only to find, instead, emptiness, absence of color, the entropic dwindling into Netscape gray of the other brighter world. As if any idea here of escaping to refuge would have to include no way back.
Though
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