They built a god. They’d been building a god since the sixties. They just didn’t know it. I’m sure there were a few who knew, people like Genesis P, the aging rattle and clank sex hippy of the cut and paste council. I was never into the Kit Pedler knew; though he downplayed it. For him it was more a “Man is dead, long live the super computer.” kind of thing.
Loebler was afraid and Madden died before some of his “projects” could be
I think it’s just Words
by Rudy Rucker
Images supplied by Rudy Rucker
I’m Zak, and I hang with this highly charismatic woman, Zik. We have a streamer show out of San Francisco. It’s called ZikZak. I’m the eye, and Zik is the star. She’s a natural, people can’t stop looking at her. Gestures, voice, expressions, phrasing—she reels them in.
Me being the eye means I wear a helmet with eight outward-pointing cameras, also a pinhead selfie cam aimed at my face. Our stream’s users are interactively immersed, that is, we’re sending them so much data that they’re in a reality bubble containing Zik and me. They can move around in our virtual space, and they can look any direction they please. Ambient eyeball kicks. They imagine they’re with us, a member of our posse.
Since I’m the eye of our reality bubble, the patched-together image of my body is fubar. Our streamware filters out this degraded geometry and replaces it with a textured wire-frame model of me. We use my live selfie stream for the model’s face. Not that I’m anything special to look at. A skinny single guy in his thirties. Sadly yearning for love. Never the right woman, never the right time.
Zik is the one the users watch. My hi-def cameras lock onto her. She wears a couple of pinhead selfie cams as well, filling in any bits that my cams don’t cover. Most of the users hang close to Zik—some of them watch her from an inch away. Not that she sees them. Read more “Fat Stream (Short Story)”