No real viruses were used in the making of this fiction

2007-12-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

Night after night Victor walked the dense grid of Manhattan streets and then in the early hours set to work, surfing the deepest recesses of the blogosphere for weird learnings, conjuring up streams and skeins of code which he stirred, sifted, stitched and embroidered. His writings grew ever wilder, his searches more arcane and bizarre.

Every morning he took his laptop out to write in different cafes and bars across the metropolis, as if by tapping into their wireless networks he was making a fundamental connection with the city he inhabited. And it seemed somehow crucial to his mad endeavour that he wrote directly onto the web, strangely compelled to place his words straight into this extraordinary space where anyone could encounter them. He had begun to imagine a story as an ever-living thing, an intelligent, networked fiction which would tell itself to itself forever and ever.

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For days and nights he’d been glued to his desk engrossed in his writing and programming. It was Halloween and Victor escaped his gloomy apartment in search of diversion. Everywhere was loud music, dancing and laughter.

Old rock songs blared from a basement bar on Thompson Street, the barman smiled through the window at him from under his fright wig and rattled plastic chains; on Spring Street a headless corpse made a call on his cellphone as an Amy Whitehouse lookalike looked on; at the corner of Bleeker a human iPhone flirted with a miniskirted pirate. He tried to cross Sixth Avenue but Victor found himself trapped in a seething mass of revellers dressed as monsters, devils, superheroes, discredited superstars…

The atmosphere was friendly despite the crush but, feverish and exhausted from his long journey into living html, Victor was repulsed by these cheap parodies of horror, the hideous and lascivious in joke masks and costumes.

Soon he crept back to his room. That morning he’d completed the first version of an application based on software downloaded from some far flung website and installed it to work on his futile attempt at the self generating story.

Now he looked at his screen and leapt up screaming. Grabbing the laptop he smashed it against the wall.

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No real viruses were used in the making of this fiction