Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [115]
Jamie had been loaded from an old backup—there was no point in using the corrupt file that Jamie had become, the one that had turned itself into a tree, for heaven’s sake.
The old world was up and running, with a few improvements. The foundation had bought their own computer — an old one, so it wasn’t too expensive — that would run the environment full time. Some other children might be scanned, to give Jamie some playmates and peer socialization.
This time it would work, Daddy thought. Because this time, Daddy was a program too, and he was going to be here every minute, making sure that the environment was correct and that everything went exactly according to plan. That he and Jamie and everyone else had a normal family life, perfect and shining and safe.
And if the clone program ever worked out, they would come into the real world again. And if downloading into clones was never perfected, then they would stay here.
There was nothing wrong with the virtual environment. It was a good place.
Just like normal family life. Only forever.
And when this worked out, the foundation’s backers — fine people, even if they did have some strange religious ideas — would have their own environments up and running. With churches, angels, and perhaps even the presence of God…
“Look!” Daddy said, pointing. “It’s Mister Jeepers!”
Mister Jeepers flew off the rooftop and spun happy spirals in the air as he swooped toward Jamie. Jamie dropped Daddy’s hand and ran laughing to greet his friend.
“Jamie’s home!” Mister Jeepers cried. “Jamie’s home at last!”
Sterling to Kessel, 2.7 April 1987:
“Cyberpunk’s carcass, now flopping under the beaks and jaws of the vultures and hyenas, will soon settle gently into the total artistic decomposition of the invertebrates and fungi…
“Perhaps the movement’s common denominators were simply too easy to trash. Outside the tiny circle of originators, no one seems to have taken its ideals seriously enough to write a major novel in the cyberpunk vein; they seem more interested in dressing up of standards with a gloss of c-word tropes…
Sometimes I feel that if we could get our hands around the neck of whatever it was that made us this way, we’d really have it made. Sure, there’s the rage, and It, whatever It is, should indeed pay a terrible price for making us like this… If we were really able to get hold of Whatever-It-Is, we ought to be able to talk intelligibly, at least to our contemporaries, in our own voices, and be heard and understood, and even, possibly, appreciated. I don’t know what that kind of fiction would look like, but it would be the ‘native literature of a post-industrial society,’ and it would look right, and feel natural, and we’d be happy with it.”
Kessel to Sterling, 8 May 1987:
“I’ve come to feel that wasn’t such a bad fate, to acknowledge that all our ladders start there, in our mundane existence… You talk about just this with your understanding of the rage at the mundane world that lurks behind all our futures, be they brightly painted or grimly sketched…. ‘Shouldn’t somebody pay an awful price for making you that way?’ Exactly. But…pure rage, although it will take you to places that are worth going to and that few have the courage to visit, is not a good long-term engine. There have got to be other engines.”
The Dog Said Bow-Wow
Michael Swanwick
It seems clear to us that Michael Swanwick is not only a PCP writer, but that he was publishing stories back in the ‘80s that might well have qualified him for the roster of original cyberpunks. In addition, he was also the most astute chronicler of the cyberpunk-humanist dustup. But Swanwick has always been one of science fiction’s most slippery writers; labels just will not stick to him. Or to the story that follows, a romp featuring two scam artists in a future that pushes cyberpunk to the edge of absurdity and yet maintains