A la Node

8 – Default

I knew something was wrong when I woke up to a blank view. I mean really blank, nothing at all, total visual fail. I couldn’t see anything but the stuff in the room, bed, dresser, dirty cloths. No clock, no messages, no headlines, no breakfast menu, not even the inspirational message of the day, which I don’t like but which gives me a comfort by always being there.

Of course I panicked a bit, as you do. I think it must be like having a heart attack, or a stroke or something, completely freaky, scary and disorienting. After the initial freak-out, I scrambled around, searching for the network, desperate not to be cut off. And there it was. The systems menu popped up instantly when I asked for it, just like it always had.

Well, not just like it had. It looked strange and ugly, filled with extra commands and not sorted into convenience groups at all. Everything was there, though, all the account stuff and network support. I grabbed at the support link.

The operator was a pretty but fairly artificial looking girl with a smooth, calming voice. She looked at me with sympathy and concern, the overlay put her across the coffee table from me, sitting on a sleek looking chair, tiny red diamond hovering over her head the only indication that she was software.

“Hello Mr. Spears, I’m sorry to hear you are having a problem, how can I help you?”

“I woke up this morning and all my visuals were down, nothing at all, blank screen,” I told her, with only a little hint of terror creeping into my voice.

“Well, Mr. Spears, your systems check out fine as far as I can see on the low-level scan. Are your visuals operational now?”

“Just the menu, but nothing else is up.”

“I see. Can you instantiate any overlay apps? You are able to see me, so that is a good sign.”

I stumbled around in the confusing mess of the systems menu until I found something, the Times headlines application. In a blink, there they were, crawling across the bottom of my vision.

“I got headlines, but they look all weird, the font is kinda strange.”

“Well, Mr. Spears, it looks like things are working fine, but you may have lost your default visual schema. I recommend you re-set all of your previous settings, and everything should be just fine.”

It was hard not to be calmed and comforted by her easy confident voice. Still, though, something had gone wrong with my setup and I still felt jumpy and weird.

“But look, something must have crashed, everything was all setup before, and suddenly it’s not.” I tried to say this calmly and in a compelling, logical way, but I am afraid it may have come out a bit whiny.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Spears, but userspace settings are not covered by the default support. If you like, you can pay for the ProCare package, and I can go through the setup with you.” She looked up, expectantly at me, her eyes holding just the tiniest bit of pleading. I wanted to agree just to please her, but resisted.

“No, sorry, I guess I will do it myself. But if it happens again, then it’s a system problem, and I -will- call back.”

“Of course, Mr. Spears, please let us know if you have any further issues.” And she was gone.

I didn’t really know what to do. I decided to call in sick to work, but even that was a disorienting experience, having to find the phone app, finding not one but eighteen of them, and trying each one until I found the one I was familiar with. If I wasn’t technically ill when I started, I sure felt like it by the time I was able to put a voice through to my supervisor.

I tried laying down for a little while, but I felt dizzy when I did because while the room rotated ninety degrees around me, there was no constant frame of icons in my vision to keep me anchored. I felt like I was falling off the couch, and then got nauseous when I stood back up again.

I decided I needed food.

Not having your visual setup is an exercise in frustration. My first instinctive grab for the Buck’s menu left me flailing around with my eyeballs when it wasn’t there. It was like missing a step when you are going up stairs. I found the directory of menus finally, and there were -thousands-. Seriously, thousands. I paged through and was lucky that Bucks was near the beginning. I called up the default, a breakfast burrito and mochachino, and braced myself for the journey down the block.

Outside felt wrong. I felt naked, and worse, like I was stumbling around idiotically. I knew I wasn’t, but the little visual handholds I was so familiar with weren’t there, and it left me mentally trying to balance on the sidewalk. Maybe worse than what I didn’t see were the things I did – markings on the walls and pavement, signs with arcane symbols, weird chalk artwork scrawled all over. Who had put these here? Had my visuals always hidden them from me, or were they new?

Buck’s was a hell of a relief. The evenly lit interior looked exactly the same as before, except that the markings one usually saw for the bathrooms, garbage, etc, weren’t there. I thought briefly of trying to turn them on, but the thought of delving into the systems menu again was too much. I picked up my food and sat down. The relief was so enormous, I think I moaned out loud. The burrito and sweet coffee were precisely what I needed to remind me that the world was still what it had always been, even if my visuals weren’t showing me everything.

I decided I would walk home quickly and spend some time working on getting my settings back. How hard could it be? I had found my phone, and my Bucks, the rest would be easy enough. When I had my maps and backgrounds and environmental settings back, life would be normal again. I headed out the door, letting old muscle memory guide my feet. Definitely easier if you didn’t think about it.

I was nearly home when I saw something startling. Someone, but not just a person, a woman who looked so outlandish, I thought my visuals were giving her overlays. She had bright red translucent hair, large perfectly round dark sunglasses, fuzzy white bunny ears and a plaid schoolgirl outfit that might have been designed by Frederick’s of Hollywood. I tried hard not to stare at her as I was walking by, but I just couldn’t stop. She was amazing, and she stared back at me with a tiny little smile, as if I were the freaky looking one.

“Hey, you,” she said, when I was just about to pass her.

“Yeah?”

“You look lost.”

“Me? No, I live right over there – ” another disorienting moment as I reached for the default pointer and didn’t find one.

“Looks like you lost your defaults. I can tell, seen it before. All wobbly and eyes darting around, I know the signs. Virus going around, bet you got it. Just wipes out all the default settings.”

“How do you know?”

“Cause I’m smart, silly. Hey, come with me, I’ll show you some stuff, I know systems pretty well.”

I don’t know why I followed her. The hair maybe, or the schoolgirl outfit. Maybe just because it didn’t seem that much worse could happen to me if I did. It was like she was just part of the surreal catastrophe of the morning, I followed her because that’s where life was taking me at the moment.

I found myself in what I can only describe as a coffee shop, but I don’t think that does it justice. Every chair and table was utterly different from every other, nothing was the same color, size, style or material. The counter was a white marble slab held up with big clear plastic bubbles. Inflatable palm trees were scattered around it. The girl led me to a table of seamless clear plastic flanked with leather armchairs.

“Chai?” she asked. I had no idea what she meant. “Silly, I’ll get you one, wait here.”

I waited, watching the hand full of other patrons, as mismatched as the furniture. One or two others seemed to have the same primary-color translucent hair and furry rabbit ears, but many more looked like ordinary people, with this year’s wide-collared white shirts, pleated blue pants and silver wrist danglers. One old man wore long dusty black robes, his face was nearly hidden in his grey beard, and another wore a cowboy hat and long leather coat. Two women were dressed identically in pink track suits and gold danglers.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with bo-ho style and retro or anarcho fashions. I was pretty accepting of people looking however they wanted, but I don’t think I had ever been in a room with so many alt people before. It was disorienting and frightening, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

The girl with the bunny ears, I thought of her as -my- girl with the bunny ears, returned with a squat red mug topped with steaming foam. She had a tall white glass that seemed to contain the same stuff.

“What is it? I already had a mochachino.”

“Chai. Taste!”

I took a sip. At first it was offensive and strange, spicy and milky and unfamiliar. She beamed at me, so I gamely took another sip. It wasn’t really horrible, just very different. I put the cup down to confront her.

“So what were you going to show me?”

“Here,” she said, and held a finger out for a contact transfer. I decided it couldn’t hurt to exchange tokens with her, since I had a default filter set against malware anyway. I touched her finger a fraction of a second before I remembered that all my defaults were gone. It was just a token though, her contact info and a private key. I handed over the same to her.

“Now, you should really try my friend Andy’s general overlay, it’s pretty rad. All those signs,” she drew an invisible figure in the air with her finger, and I recognized the shape as one I had seen painted on the walls along the street, “are vis-tokens, you can walk around and pick up tags from all sorts. Lots of cool data out there, and party pointers, of course.”

“Party pointers?”

“Point you to where the parties are, silly. Anyway, open Systems, hit Vis, then…” she guided me through a bewildering array of options, going deeper and deeper into levels I had never seen before. “Bingo! AndyOverlay34.5. Try it!”

It was like putting on unfamiliar clothes after walking around naked in public. It was a deep relief to have all the metadata back, to see symbols and guides everywhere, to be able to read everyone’s public names and see all the services hovering in your peripheral vision, ready to spring into action at a thought. At the same time, there were ill fitting and unfamiliar clothes. The color scheme was dark and moody, the icons all in tones of red and black, and the textures all sharp and jagged. Still, it was better than nothing, and I immediately immersed myself in the dataflow. I picked up microtweets from everyone, saw lots of get-well stuff, checked up on news, and just generally settled back into my brain.

I looked at the girl. The new overlays gave her an extra twinkle in her eyes, enhanced her bust size by a few inches, but otherwise she didn’t look much different. Her name was apparently Spiffendula.

“So, silly boy, let me guess. You’ve never changed any of the factory defaults, have you?”

“I turned off the President’s Daily Message…”

“Yeah, everyone does that. But your colorscheme? Texturescheme? Default apps? Hey, I bet you eat at Bucks every day, read the Times, and do all your shopping at Mart.”

“Well, yeah, I mean those are all -”

“Default, yeah, I know. Guess who pays a royal buttload of money to subsidize all that software you got in your brain? Bucks, Times, Mart, Ecom… ”

“Huh.” It was all I could think to say.

“So anyway, I’ve seen you around, you’re cute.”

“Um, I don’t think I’ve seen you, actually. I think I’d remember.”

“Oh, you’d remember alright.” She drew a smiley face in the air with her finger, this time the lines hung there, glowing yellow. “Anyway, you wouldn’t have seen me, I opted off the default lists. People don’t see us unless they change the default people list, you’d be surprised how many people you don’t see.”

“Us?”

“Oh yeah, people like me and Andy, the BunnyMen, you know. People off the default. Hey, let me show you something, give me a channel.”

I let her connect, and felt her presence intrude into my cognitive space. I felt her reach into the overlay settings, tweak something called ‘mood’, and then slip back out, closing the connection behind her. The lights in the room went very dim, but a candle appeared on out table, wrapping us in a little cocoon of warm light. I had never seen an overlay like it before, I was impressed.

“Oh yeah, Andy’s a wiz with lighting.”

I dialed the setting up and down a bit, watching the darkness recede and gather around the candle.

“Wow,” I said.

She leaned over the table and kissed me full on the lips.

“So, that party I mentioned, you should come, meet Andy, relax a little. You might learn something.”

I went home an hour later, the taste of chai on my lips and my head buzzing with the strangeness of it all. The streets were alive with visual chatter now, all the symbols and signs I had seen were now wellsprings of information, links to art installations, or art installations in their own right. I was dizzy when I got home, and spend the rest of the day laying on the couch playing with AnyOverlay34.5.

I knew, in theory at least, that anyone could write an overlay schema. I knew none of the software running on the implants just behind my ears was exclusive, and that everything could be tweaked, but I had no idea some of this stuff was even possible. The lighting effects were amazing, and not having the visual firewall meant that I was seeing things I had never seen before, in the datasphere and in my own house. Some child, long ago, had scrawled an entire wall full of crude crayon drawings of houses and cars and cats and a lot of less identifiable things. I had never seen them, the default overlay had always show me clean beige walls with my choice of art prints hanging on them.

I also knew people could be off the overlay. I never really thought any of them -were-, though. It was just an abstraction, just a distant possibility. Someone, somewhere, might opt out of the public visual, and wouldn’t show up as anything but an icon, and only then if they got into your personal space. Of course secret agents were always off the visual in the movies, but I never really considered the idea that people might be walking down the street with me, invisible. Of course it was safe enough, systems wouldn’t let them get run over or let them pick pockets, but who would voluntarily choose to live unseen like that?

I decided I would try to find out. Spiffendula (call me Spiffy, silly!) had invited me to a party, and I had agreed, with the secret thought that I could just cancel once I returned home and started to feel sane again. I didn’t cancel though, and when eight o’clock rolled around I walked out onto the sidewalk and saw her waiting, white ears vivid against brilliant red hair.

“Off we go!” she laughed, and off we went, following the trail of signs. Each sigil gave a location for the next, and the route led back and forth across the city. It was a long walk, but Spiffy seemed as bouncy and energetic as her ears suggested she was. We found our way with only one stop at another bizarrely decorated coffee shop for a cup of restorative chai.

It was in a tiny apartment hot with densely packed bodies. Spiffy dragged me through he door and squeezed between groups of idle partiers, her grip on my hand pulling me along behind. I smiled apologetically at people I inadvertently shoved aside, but they were given no time to complain as Spiffy yanked me along. Finally, she came to a halt and pulled me up beside her.

“Andy!” She cried, and left me to watch as she lept onto a very tall and muscular woman, who caught her and swung her around. Spiffy wrapped her legs around Andy’s waist and the two of them kissed long and passionately as if I wasn’t even there. I looked around at the people Andy had apparently been talking to before this assault, but none of them seemed to be paying much attention to the two.

Disengaging, Spiffy grabbed my arm and hauled me in front of Andy. “See, here he is. I’ve got him on your 64.5 release, isn’t he cute?”

Andy looked down at me, and it was a strange sensation. “Pleased to meet you, Andy,” I said, and she smiled rather beautifully back.

My memory falters a bit here. Andy and I chatted a little about her overlay, and I think I was effusive in my praise. Spiffy stood by, interjecting cute nonsequiters and prompting the both of us in our chat. Then there was chai, and then Spiffy asked if she could spice mine up a bit – and that’s when it went a bit strange.

Pleasantly strange, though. Andy smiled at me, and her smile seems larger than her face. “It’s custom, enhances sensation, hits a lot of the overlay interface neurons. You’ll feel nice, things will look pretty.”

“Thinks already look pretty,” I said, trying to look at both of them simultaneously and failing.

After that, I remember being on a couch, or perhaps it was a bed. I could feel every thread of the fabric beneath me, and eventually realized this was because I was naked. I could feel every tiny hair on Spiffy’s skin as she cuddled next to me, and every molecule of moisture in Andy’s breath as it passed over me cheek from were she lay on the other. Between the two of them, the chai, and the overlays, all was incredible bliss for a very long time.

I woke up at home with no memory of how I got there. I realized, after a systems check to see that all was well, that I just didn’t care how. I went back to sleep.

In the following days, Spiffy made herself a fixture in my life. I’d like to claim some active role in her continued presence, but I can’t. She took me on as a project, came and went as she please, and brought Andy with her as often as not. Sometimes we would spend the entire evening rolling naked on the floor, other times they would take turns educating me on the network I had lived with all my life but never explored. We ordered art, real actual, physical art from local artists, ordered food from a dozen independent stores, and even cooked, for the very first time, in my tiny kitchen, filling the pace with exotic smells and hot steam.

The network held a million surprises, a billion different ways to do things I had never thought of before. A million little shops and suppliers and musicians and videographers and artists. There were apps I had never seen and versions of my default apps that were orders of magnitude more beautiful and functional. Every day of exploring on my own or being tutored by Spiffy and Andy sent me another thousand miles from the daily routine I had thought was comfort and happiness before. In a week I had revamped my entire personal datasphere. In two weeks, I couldn’t remember the flavor of a Buck’s mochachino.

In three weeks, they were gone.

It was a Saturday night, and we had spent it in glorious, sweaty, artistic lovemaking. Then Spiffy sat up and began to draw a box in blue light over my chest.

“It’s been fun.”

“Mmmmm,” agreed Andy.

“But we’re moving on to version 35, Andy has some amazing stuff planned. And I don’t think you can really keep up with us yet.”

“What do you mean, I’ve kept up so far!”

Spiffy smiled, and it was kindly. “No, we’ve hung back for you. Things move along, you know. You’ve noticed all the party signs are gone? New protocol, you can’t even see the new stuff with 34.5. And no, we won’t help you upgrade.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We know, but we love you anyway. Some of us will always be way ahead, but at least now you’re not way behind.” She drew a yellow smiley in the blue box.

And then, with care and with a sense of finality, they each kissed me, put on their clothes, and left.

I admit, it was a while before I got over that. I felt like a teenager having his first breakup. Spiffy and Andy had been something entirely different from women I had dated before, almost a different species, and when they left the loss was the loss of a new and beautiful thing.

Eventually, though, I realized what they had given me, and that stemmed the pain a bit. I went out into a different world than I had lived in before, I pitied the line of uniformly bland people I saw in Bucks on my way to work. I drank chai, and turkish coffee, and spizmo, and when I went into the little coffee shop where Spiffy had first kissed me, I would look for something I had never had before on the menu.

When I saw a familiar face in the coffee shop, I found myself laughing instead of crying. The bunny ears and red translucent hair were gone, replaced by devil horns and shiny bald scalp. I watched her hand a steaming foamy mug to a bland and confused looking man, watched her touch her finger lightly to his. On a whim, I opened the systems menu and zapped down through the overlays until I found Andy. They were up to 38 now, and a thousand other bespoke visual schema were there as well, preview images tantalizing me.

Not yet, but soon, I’d go see what they were up to now. First, though, I decided to adjust those dark moody colors I’d been living with for months. Something in a light blue maybe, and I was damn well going to implement that new party marking protocol.