You're going to build me a new stick?''
I got the idea when you hypnotized me last night. Only I'd forgotten till just now. Ten fractal surf levels at a trillion sample points. We model that with an imipolex CA, we use a nerve-patch modem outset unit to send the rider's surfest desires down a co-ax inside the leash, the CA does a chaotic back simulation of the fractal inset, the board does a jiggly-doo, and ...''
`TSUUUNAMIIIIII!'' screamed Delbert, leaping up on the bench and striking a boss surfer pose.
Laidlaw and Rucker's world is closer to the cyberian sentiment because the characters are not politicians, criminals, or unwilling participants in a global, interdimensional battle. They are surfers, riding the wave of chaos purely for pleasure. To them, the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves – chaotic, maybe, but a playground more than anything else. The surfers' conclusions about chaos are absolutely cyberian: sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe. Like the first house musicians who came after Genesis P. Orridge's hostile industrial genre, dispensing with leather and chains and adopting the fashions of surfwear and skateboarding, these younger writers have taken the first leap toward ecstasy by incorporating surf culture into their works.
Laidlaw first thought of writing the story, he explains to me in the basement office of his San Francisco Mission District home, ''at Rudy's house, where he had a Mandelbrot book with a picture of a wave. I looked at it, and realized that a surfboard can take you into this stuff.'' Laidlaw rejects the negative implications of Gibson's hardwired world and refuses to believe that things are winding down.
"The apocalypse? I see that as egotism!'' Likewise, abandoning the rules of traditional structure ("plot,'' Laidlaw explains, ''merely affords comfort in a hopeless situation''), Laidlaw follows his own character's advice, and surfs his way through the storytelling.
"Get rad. Be an adventurist. You'll be part of the system, man,'' explains the character Zep, and eventually that's what happens. Like Green Fire, who on his visionquests must control his imagination lest his fantasies become real, Del accidentally sends too many thought signals through his surfboard/chaotic attractor to the nuclear power plant at the ocean shore and blows it up; but, as luck would have it, he, Zep, and their girl Jen escape in an interdimensional leap:
"The two waves intermingled in a chaotic mindscape abstraction. Up and up they flew, the fin scraping sparks from the edges of the unknown. Zep saw stars swimming under them, a great spiral of stars.
"Everything was still, so still.
"And then Del's hand shot out. Across the galactic wheel a gleaming figure shared their space. It was coming straight at them. Rider of the tides of night, carver of blackhole beaches and neutron tubes. Bent low on his luminous board – graceful, poised, inhuman.
"Stoked,' said Jen. `God's a surfer!'''
The only real weapon against the fearful vision of a cold siber-Cyberia is joy. Appreciation of the space gives the surfer his bearings and balance in Cyberia.
This is why art and literature are seen as so crucial to coping there: they serve as celebratory announcements from a world moving into hyperspace. No matter how dark or pessimistic their milieus, these authors still delight in revealing the textures and possibilities of a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events.
Toasters, Band-Aids, Blood
Comic book artists, who already prided themselves on their non-linear storytelling techniques, were the first to adopt the milieu of cyberian literature into another medium. Coming from a tradition of superheroes and clearcut battles between good and evil, comics tend to focus on the more primitive aspects of Cyberia, and are usually steeped in dualism, terror, and violence. While younger comic artists have ventured into a post-nihilistic vision of Cyberia, the first to bring cyberian aesthetics into the world of superheroes, like the original cyberpunk authors, depicted worlds as dark as they could draw them.
Batman, the brooding caped crusader, was one of the first of the traditional comic book characters to enjoy a cyberpunk rebirth, when Frank Miller created The Dark Knight Returns series in the 1980's. As Miller surely realized, Batman is a particularly fascinating superhero to bring to Cyberia because he is a mere motal and, like us, he must use human skills to cope with the post-modern apocalypse. The mature Batman, as wrought by Miller, is fraught with inconsistencies, self-doubt, and resentment toward a society gone awry. He is the same Batman who fought criminals in earlier, simpler decades, who now, as an older man, is utterly unequipped for the challenges of Cyberia.
Miller's Dark Knight series interpolates a human superhero into the modern social-media scheme. Commentators in frames the shape of TV sets interpret each of Batman's actions as they occur. Newsmedia criticism running throughout the story reminds the audience that Batman's world has become a datasphere: Each of his actions effect more than just the particular criminal he has beaten up – they have an iterative influence on the viewing public.
For example, a Ted Koppel-like newsman conducts a TV interview with a social scientist about Batman's media identity. The psychologist responds:
Picture the public psyche as a vast, moist membrane—through the media, Batman has struck this membrane a vicious blow, and it has recoiled. Hence your misleading statistics. But you see, Ted, the membrane is flexible. Here the more significant effects of the blow become calculable, even predictable. To wit – every anti-social act can be traced to irresponsible media input. Given this, the presence of such an aberrant, violent force in the media can only lead to anti-social programming.
The iterative quality of the media within the comic book story creates a particularly cyberian ''looking glass'' milieu that has caught on with other comic book writers as a free-for-all visual sampling of diary entries, computer printouts, television reports, advertisements, narratives from other characters as well as regular dialogue and narration. In addition, the comic books make their impact by sampling brand names, media identities, and cultural icons from the present, the past, and an imagined future. Comics, always an ideal form for visual collage, here become vehicles for self-consciously gathered iconic samples. This chaos of imagery, in a world Batman would prefer to dominate with order and control is precisely what cause his anguish.
In the Batman comics we witness the ultimate battle of icons, as Batman and Joker conduct a cyberian war of images in a present-day datasphere. They no longer battle physically but idealistically, and their weapons are the press and television coverage. This becomes particulary ironic when the reader pauses to remember that Batman and the Joker are comic book characters themselves – of course they would behave this way. They are their media identities, which is why their manifestation in the datasphere is so important to them. Their battle is a metaconflict, framed within a cut-and-paste media.
So poor Batman, a character out of the patriarchy (he is, after all, avenging the murder of his father), finds himself caught in a nightmare as he tries to control post-modern chaos. In Frank Miller's words, ''Batman imposes his order on the world; he is an absolute control freak. The Joker is Batman's most maddening opponent. He represents the chaos Batman despises, the chaos that killed his parents.'' Living in a comic book world, it's no wonder that Batman is going crazy while the Joker seems to gain strength over the years.