Even as the virtual universe shakes out its last death rattle, it becomes just as much a stage as the real world for heroism and reaffirmation of human spirit. Biff Mitchell’s latest novel shows how virtual reality imitates the real world – both for good and for bad.
“The Internet is doomed,” said author Biff Mitchell, speaking about his latest novel, The War Bug. “It’s being destroyed bit-by-bit with “premium” price tags, spam, spyware and pop-ups. And these are just the beginning of things to come.”
The War Bug is set 200 years in the future, when the Internet is divided into giant online city states owned by powerful corporate entities. The city states go to war, using weapons-grade viruses called WarWare, but they overdo it and bring a vast online universe spreading across the Earth and into space to the brink of destruction.
“The idea came from a course I took years ago at Ziff Davis University,” said Mitchell. “It was a course on building online communities. The focus was on turning the Internet into a bunch of cash cow communities, as though the entire Web was pointless unless you could squeeze a dollar out of it. I’m not against people having online businesses and making a living at it, but I took the cash cow viewpoint to the extreme in The War Bug and created a world in which big business gobbles up everything in its path and everybody else feeds on the crumbs. Pretty much like the real world.”
“In the book, there’s two worlds – the online world and the real world,” said Mitchell. “Both are prison-like. Step out of line in the real world and you risk becoming “included” (having your mind altered to make a happy consumer). Step out of line in the virtual world and you become excluded (your access to the Net denied), maybe even deleted.”
“In the center of this, Abner Hayes, a ‘virtual code geneticist’, has illegally given sentience to his virtual wife, Claire, and daughter, Cassie, who are kidnapped by the corporate moguls, or Powers, because they believe his virtual family contains the key to immortality in the real world. Abner has only hours to find them before the entire Internet crashes and they’re lost forever.”
He has one ally, the computer virus that caused the city states to go to war in the first place. “But even though the virus has been programmed to destroy everything in its path,” said Mitchell, “it has a keen sense of humor and it genuinely likes Abner. End of the world or not, there has to be a few laughs. If any of our SETI transmissions get through to an alien civilization, I hope it’s just one signal – a signal carrying laughter.”
“And, of course, there has to be heroism,” said Mitchell. “Someone has to rise to the occasion and do The Deed. Even though he’s online, Abner risks his life in the real world to save his family. Being online 200 years in the future means having your mind and body wired directly into an experience so real that if it crashes, it fries your brain. But Abner risks everything to travel through suicidal game worlds, carnivorous virtual landscapes, and wireless transmission lines spanning Earth, Mars and Jupiter – all the time dodging deadly cyber traps and murderous viral attacks. His body may be lying on a lounge chair in the real world, but in cyberspace, he’s Flash Gordon and Superman rolled into one. He’s a hero.”
“I think the kind of responsible behavior that virtual pets were supposed to breed in children would have worked better if the pets had been able to bite when they weren’t fed or petted,” said Mitchell. “That’s how it is in The War Bug. If you don’t take your online life seriously, it bites you.”
“Which makes it a shame,” said Mitchell. “Virtual environments would make wonderful training grounds for things like ethics and responsible behavior. Imagine a program in which you go into a world that’s so real you can taste it. You see a raggedy old woman drop her change purse on the sidewalk and hobble away. You pick it up and look inside. There’s forty bucks in it. You can give it back to the old woman or use it to play virtual games or eat virtual ice cream for the rest of the day. You choose the ice cream. Immediately, you shift to a program in which you have to live the old woman’s life for the next few days as she starves to death because she has no money for food. That’s the kind of online environment that might actually breed a better human being.”
“The more likely scenario,” said Mitchell, “is that you’ll get a virtual zap in the neck for choosing the wrong brand of sneakers. In the end, the folks with the most money will be able to pay for developing the most popular Internet applications and those applications will be designed to generate profit, not better people. At least, that seems to be the way it’s going now.”
“But who knows?” said Mitchell. “The Internet is a big place. There’s a lot of potential out there in the bandwidth. There’s the Open Source programmers struggling to create quality programs and offer them free. Maybe they’ll save the day. Or maybe peer-to-peer networks, with thousands of members creating and exchanging and growing their own content freely will rule the day. Who knows?”
“In the end,” said Mitchell. “What’s really important is how each of us works through whatever world we live in and the kind of person each of us becomes in spite of it. In that respect, I have a little more faith in people. That’s why I ended the book on a upbeat note. Cassie has always wanted to swim but been denied because of the so-called Reality Laws of the online world. At the end of the book, she gets her wish:
It was just like she’d dreamed it would be. It was the awareness of weightlessness. It was the sense of something with texture forming around all the parts of her but yielding with a long cool massage as she moved through it. She somersaulted and dove into it, then glided up and broke through the surface with a splash like a dolphin. She had no idea how this had come about, where the water had come from, or how she accessed the program for it, if indeed it were a program. She knew only that the glistening spray from her splash fascinated her as she settled in the water and watched it descend all around her in slow motion. She lay for hours, floating, feeling the coolness on her back, and she turned and felt herself sink before she thrust her body through the clear blue wetness of her dream come true.”
“There’s a lot of potential in the bandwidth,” said Mitchell, “a lot of possible routes other than the one leading to The War Bug. But that seems to be the one we’re taking.”
The War Bug is available directly from Double Dragon Publishing or from Amazon.com, Fictionwise, and EPIC. The author’s web site at biffmitchell.com lists other sellers and offers background information on the novel, along with interviews and reviews.
Biff Mitchell is the author of the world’s first laundromance, Heavy Load (Jacobyte Books, Australia). His second novel, Team Player (originally published by Jacobyte Books but soon to be released free by RSS), is a spoof on the IT industry based largely on his own work experience. He has two novellas published as Dollar Downloads by Echelon Press (US). His books of short stories (Clearings), a single short story (Still Life with Muse and Sax), and a book of poems (Gawdawful Poems) are available as free downloads from his web site and as free downloads for PDAs from Memoware.com.
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