This post could almost just be a link, to a Wired article I just read, but that would mean missing out on the chance to say how this film made me a geek, like no other single influence. I mean, I could blame/thank the Commodore 64, the Apple II (and the Victorian Department of Education’s love of it), or my old friend Lance. I could give due credit to the nuns at my primary school who put me in charge of the school’s computers because I knew how to plug them in, or to the IT geeks of Korner who inexorably bent my directionless generalism towards computer science during my first year at Monash. It would all be somewhat untrue though: WarGames was there first and and is still the definitive influence. WarGames told an awestruck, terrified kid that computers were going to run the whole world soon, if we didn’t nuke ourselves first.

Still, the Wired article was cool. The stand-out points for me:

• The ‘Falken’ character in War Games was originally modelled on Stephen Hawking.
• The commander of NORAD, and the NORAD command center under cheyenne mountain (which later so dominated Star Gate) was based on the actual NORAD command center and then Commander, who spoke to the writers when they were writing the screenplay.
• The article points out that ‘Wardialing’, precursor to present-day ‘Wardriving’, was named so as a direct reference to that tactic’s appearance in War Games.
• There’s some rather nifty commentary from Cap’n Crunch and Kevin Mitnick.
• The tidbit that John Lennon, no less, was approached to play Falken, just before his murder.

A signal quote:

William Lord, Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command: It was a great movie! A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I’m wondering, “Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?” It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, “If it really can look like this, why doesn’t it?”

Last night my sleep was weirdly disturbed, the kind of sleep where it seems like one never actually goes to sleep, with plenty of muzzy uncomfortable memories of cracking an eye open to see the alarm clock saying something disturbing. I must have slept somewhat, because I was quite chipper when I actually got up.

The problem wasn’t the seeming insomnia though, it was the recurring stop-start nightmare:

Brain Transplants (including a small amount of spinal cord and the eyeballs) are commonplace. The surgical technology to do such a transplant has become so widespread, and so simplified, that some very scantily qualified ‘surgeons’ can perform it.

After the surgery, the only way to tell a ‘transplant recipient’ from the body-donor is that their eyes may look different, and may be quite inflamed and sick-looking due to being an imperfect fit in the new body’s sockets. The skull incision is hidden almost immediately by a slick plastic surgery technique.

At the same time, it’s extremely simple to keep a removed brain ‘alive’ in a jar of special oxygenated brain-nutrient solution. The brain in these circumstances has no sensory connections but vision, and that only straight ahead. You can see out of the jar, and you can think, and that’s it.

So, want a new body? All you need to do is persuade someone to swap, or to sign a statement agreeing that they want to be placed in a jar.

This isn’t (for some reason) about longevity or eternal youth, as much as it’s about the ultimate identity theft, the ultimate voyeurism, the ultimate sibling rivalry…

For the full effect, I’ll re-cast it with you, as I saw it:

Your partner comes home acting strangely one day. Their mannerisms are all wrong, and they keep staring at you with a really odd expression. They seem a little uncoordinated.

Slowly the reason for this dawns on you. You don’t know who the new person is, but for a long time they refuse to admit their crime, laughing off questions about where your partner is, and what state they’re in;
“I’m right here!”

Then your sibling comes to visit. You’re quite sure that they’re still the same person they always were, but they’re acting strangely too: they keep trying to get you by yourself, and they won’t show you what they’ve got in their hand. Your memory lapses: one moment you’re walking down a corridor, your sibling behind you, the next you feel numb and cold. You can see a dirty little room which has been pressed into service as a ‘surgery’. Beyond the glass you can see yourself, looking back in, with bloodshot eyes, lips moving but no sound coming out, that you can hear. In fact, it’s perfectly silent.

After a while, the other you leaves, in the company of someone you don’t recognise. They turn off the light, leaving only dim sunlight seeping in through some curtains.

Hours pass.  Days.  Weeks.
All you can do is watch, and think. You can’t even sleep.

Eventually, person who has your body comes back. They’re with the person who has your partner’s body. They both look terribly sick, grey and wasted, their eyes rimmed with flakes of dried blood.

One of them laughs bitterly, then holds up a notepad, one hand-written page at a time, on which they explain to you: The ‘surgeons’ have a secret. When they take your money, they fail to mention that the anti-rejection drugs only work for a month or so, at best. Then rejection slowly kills the new brain and the ‘donor’ body, in a massively painful way, over the course of several days.

They have come here to die, and all you can do is watch.

This takes several days.

…

Your partner comes home acting strangely one day….

E was somewhat disturbed when I woke her up to ask if she was the real one.

In response to Dave’s comment on my last post, I’m going to do something positive, rather than just bagging an out a fun-looking meme for being mythological in origin, like a grumpeh bastard.

1. JFS’s meme: (roughly) Take any one work from the ‘Big Read’ meme list, and either defend it or attack it.

Turns out it’s hard to take just one… I winnowed it down to a list of four, all in favour:

• Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• DUNE – Frank Herbert
• Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
• The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams

But after much agonizing I decided to go with Hitch Hikers, since it likely has the least pre-existing readership of any of these.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is a book which must still hold some twisted kind of record for being (if I can use the phrase without cringing) genre-defying. It’s surreal, arguably post-modern. It’s a gateway drug for those with an aversion to F&SF, despite also being an elaborate parody of the genre. This book is at least a third of the reason I did a major in the more self-absorbed parts of philosophy.

As Purplexity can attest, HHGTTG is a book you may even have read if you publicly proclaim that you don’t read science fiction books.

Suitable for a stunningly wide age spectrum. It was a (at least one, very strange and different) radio play before it was a book. Since becoming a book, it has also been an Infocom text adventure, another radio play, a BBC TV mini-series, a picture book, an online encyclopedia, some more computer games, some stage shows, a major movie, some comic books, an infinite number of cultural references, an online translation service, a radiohead song, an instant-messaging tool and a Google search result. It has been appreciated in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian, among other languages.

It’s a wonderful book, it’s not very long, and it won’t try to sell you anything.

I’m trying to be positive here, so I didn’t choose to rubbish anything from the list, but I probably wouldn’t have anyway: There are works on that list which I don’t like at all, but none I feel I have anything like the authority to criticise.

2. What highly awarded F/SF novels have I read? (in bold)

• Dune, by Frank Herbert (N65, H66)
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin (N69, H70)
• Ringworld, by Larry Niven (N70, H71)
• The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov (N72, H73)
• Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C Clarke (N73, H74)
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K Le Guin (N74, H75)
• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman (N75, H76)
• Gateway, by Frederik Pohl (N77, H78)
• Dreamsnake, by Vonda McIntyre (N78, H79)
• The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C Clarke (N79, H80)
• Startide Rising, by David Brin (N83, H84)
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson (N84, H85)
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card (N85, H86)
• Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card (N86, H87)
• Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis (N92, H93)
• Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman (N98, H98)
• American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (N02, H02)
• Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold (N04, H04)

ZOMG! So many breathtaking, awesome books in that lot!

I keep meaning to read The Disposessed, getting about half a chapter in and getting distracted by something shiny…

I have to admit though that like Dave, I haven’t read any of the four listed as awarded by teh brits:

• Take Back Plenty, by Colin Greenland (A91, B90)
• The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (A98, B97)
• The Separation, by Christopher Priest (A03, B02)
• Air, by Geoff Ryman (A06, B05)

Supposedly, this is the Internet Age. As near as I can tell, this means that a lot of people are spending an increasing fraction of their lives online, reliant on Teh Intarwebz for their virtual existence.

Today’s big thought: If people are living their lives online, the ‘conditions’ of their local part of ‘online’ (as well as the parts they’re travelling to) might be of interest. Things like:

• How high is the general tide of traffic at the moment?
• How much of it is encrypted?
• What sort of breakdown of types of stuff is out there today?
• Is it spamming today?
• What are today’s virus warnings?
• What ‘roads’ are closed, or expected to close, today?

You get the idea.

I’d pay handsomely for a service like this, if it were sufficiently widespread, independent and authoritative. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, especially since I so very little on the internet that’s actually sensitive to things like lag or selective shaping. I know people are interested because I see so much of this kind of stuff cropping up in the popular internet press, in a delayed, ad-hoc, patchy sort of way. What I don’t see is anyone making a serious widespread effort to synthesize it.

How would you do it? Methinks your hypothetical service would need a few bits and pieces:

1. Deals with the relevant agencies. There are already virus-monitoring and spam-analysis groups out there making a stab at this. Their input would be vital, at least to start with.
2. Lots of probes. Take a carefully built fast packet-sniffer/counter (careful not to breach privacy!) with open, publicly reviewed specifications. Make thousands of them, and pay every backbone operator on the planet to whack one on their main feed. These are your weather stations.
3. Analysts, both salaried ‘editors’ and freelance ‘reporters’. The black-hat (and grey-hat) community will always know their bit of ‘net better than anyone else. Sure, you can’t use their data, or acknowledge their methods, but their tips and insights are worth money. So long as you can reliably protect their anonymity, you can be certain that those insights are for sale.
4. Anchors and Producers. The Cory Doctorows of this world seem to have the knack of writing copy that people want to read. Google, for example, seem to have the knack of getting data to the people who want it, the way they want it. If you want your internet weather report to be read/seen/heard, you will need these things.

As usual, I hereby disavow all rights to this idea. If you want it, I will happily support your claim to have thought of it first. 🙂