"persecution by some unnamed (gov't) agency"
"maybe hired assassins"
"lock-in trace"
--these lines suggest some delusions of persecution or grandeur or something, don't they? And sure, this is my teenage brain doing its solipsism thing, but still the obsession with data and tracking and information reads as troubling.
The more I look--even starting to look at the text bleeding through from the next page and wondering what is written there--I begin to see myself in Andrea's delusions. Even in her name.
Sure, the way I interpret this page is as notes for a novel. That's how Andrea sometimes talks about her perceptions and her comments about how the world works: as notes for a novel, so bizarre are they, and even she realizes it and understands the need to play it down at times. She thinks of all of this, when she talks to me about it, which isn't all that often anymore, since it's harder and harder to have any semblance of a relationship--she calls it material. And it's material here, certainly. She offers it up to me to do with what I will.
At least she's only on the outskirts of my life. If she was someone closer, a wife, a brother, a stepfather, or even someone geographically closer, it would be more difficult to extricate myself.
I think about our conversations as user interfaces (not quite GUIs--graphic user interfaces--but audio user interfaces, maybe). There's what's really going on in her head (and in my head), what we're aware that we're socially allowed to do and say and talk about, and our perceptions of each other, and the whole history of our interactions, and then there's what we say to each other. It's frustrating. It is as if there's no real way to communicate, to connect action to reaction. Maybe when we can control machines with our brains, as the scientists periodically promise, we'll be able to get beyond ourselves more easily. Or maybe Andrea and I should joint an online world like any of them, World of Warcraft, Second Life, whatever, and talk via our avatars, and that level of removal might help to maintain the buffer.
But let's go back to the novel there for a minute. These are "notes for a novel," but then there are lots of connections to my own experience, too, my computer criminality, my encounters with computer crime task forces, with shadowy organizations in the hacking world and outside of it, with people I only knew via what we typed back and forth to each other over modems, via our primitive avatars, our handles, whatever cool and nerdy selves we were able to construct. |
