Excerpt: Wake

prologue
the last broadcast

No money. No job. No girl. Take to heart his circumstances, O Reader, as you consider the following scene.

There was a poster. On a pale blue sky, chromatic whorls and colored oscilloscopes bled into each other like painted sound, and twined together in a dance of commotion inspired in the Artist and declared good by the Marketer. Before them stared a beautiful female face of flawless complexion. Her tilted countenance, which could have been any composition of races, bore a look of humorless melancholy and vague but careful introspection, or possibly a wandering thought after three exhaustive hours of photography and modeling. That wry indifference was the sublime look of cool and fashion, for however much the wardrobe and context might change, the physiognomy never does. At the edges of her cheeks and chin crept a criss-crossed graph of dim green lines, a matrix as unnatural as her perfectly edited features.

Above this ambitious apparition, bold black letters like stenciled graffiti, with paint splatters that defied the art, spelled out the word WAKE. Between her sharp chin and an urban skyline, seen as if from some distant hill with its man-made magnitude lessened by comparison to that woman and that swirling reach of sky, in that space blocky letters like those produced by a typewriter with a rotted tape, but in white, spelled out, “LEAVE YOUR WORLD BEHIND,” and below them, letters of similar composition but black and misaligned by the faux-unprofessional that prances as hip, there was written, “09.29.92.” A date! prophetic as Nostradamus or Aristander or Laocoon—but what do those numbers denote, and whence will they carry the faithful?

Below the poster and before it, behind a podium of clear plastic on a black metal stand, stood a man distinguishable from Patton only in his wholly different appearance. He was frail and mild with genius; short, but not one of those diminutive men who compensates for a poverty of stature with an expense of outstanding activity. He seemed coiled and compressed, with a nobility of control over his mental passions. That energy was beautiful to behold: not charismatic but humbling, not a diamond but a star. Then he sighed in long-contained exasperation tempered by mental fortitude, and said gently into the metal mesh of the microphone:

“Wake is not a simulation. The images and sensations are not generated by a processor or stored in flash memory. Wake is rather a mutual projection, a communal dream, created by the linked minds of those participating. It achieves, and really transcends, the verisimilitude that all virtual reality strives for. To the players that imagine it, the game is, in all appearance and physical function, real.”