Full-Dive Virtual Reality: 4.2.1 [Cultures continued]
Dana, Red, and their Ref
I find compromise like this to be a bitter process of discovery… instead of years I have months, but they’re not even real months, in practical terms they are days. But it amuses me to frame this tragedy as a wilful deal made with the devil: I read the old stuff in the time, order, and language that I chose, and now I must try to crudely assemble what I can, right as any possibility of doing them justice dissolves in my poor little racoon hands.
If this gets a positive response then I shall endeavour to produce the remainder of part 4 more quickly.
[2026-03-03]
Contents (WIP)
Danger - Introduction and an exploration of dangers within FDVR
Future shock - How technology has fried present culture, and the unknowability of where we will finally settle
Sketching Self - With all non-physical limitations on conscious existence removed, where do we actually want to go?
Cultures [4.1, 4.2.1] - What does ‘culture’ mean in a long term FDVR reality?
Children - Just how precisely do we intend to raise children here?
Friends - How should we approach AI assistants, NPCs, conscious friends, and conscious romance over centuries and beyond?
Philosophy Forks - God is dead, long live ‘The Supervisor’ (or, does my artificial religion club sound like fun?)
Game Design - Optimisation problems, exploration vs exploitation, and other interesting questions and techniques.
Patterns - A cheat sheet for advanced FDVR ramblers.
Finding Tea: How to enjoy your first million years - Concluding advice on how to get the most out of life on a larger timescale.
Start here if you’re new to the series and want to get your bearings:
4.2.1
Dana, Red, and their Ref
Are you awake yet? I’m afraid it’s a new day, and I’m back with your next pamphlet. Would you like to meet some Reference culture people this morning? Ha, no, of course; that was a stupid question for me to ask, I can see you’re in no state for that. When did you fall out of your chair? Yes, you’re right, the sand is nice and warm to crawl around in; but we do have to keep moving; have you had breakfast yet? Sure, a cocktail counts if it has some fruit in it, but here, maybe have one without any alcohol while I order a shuttle to come and pick us up? Don’t worry, you can smoke on the flight, and it will have plenty of snacks. Yes it will also have a toilet; and a shower.
We’re just going to fly around for a bit while you get yourself together, I promise it won’t be bumpy, and yes, I understand, don’t worry, we’ll go to space - but you have to be patient and listen to some more background first. I know that’s boring, would you like it if I told you stories in between? Fine, adventure and romance it is, in fact that’s just grand.
Dana
[🎶Nikos Varelas - 20” Bendir🎶]
She was beating a drum, sitting around a fire with her family, when the love of making music for others first resonated. She was nearly fourteen months old [~8 years], and they were camping in the warm savanna of palaeolithic North Africa. She was laughing as she improvised her performance - the flow had come to her quickly and her initial nervousness had faded away. She’d gotten some lessons from her maternal grandmother over the week [18 days] they’d been here, and she’d given them her full enthusiastic attention. All four of her grandparents were smiling at her around the fire that night, along with a few cousins. Her parents were beside her, both doing their best to listen while they restrained her younger brother from joining in with his own drum (his resonant love at the time was in making *noise*, not music).
Those weeks [>1 month] roaming the savanna became her most memorable childhood holiday. It was the first time she felt love for a way of life lived from the perspective of another culture. Sitting with her drum beside that fire, under those beautifully clear stars, and thinking of so many ancient humans, filled her with more awe than she’d thought possible. Before her second birthday [~14 years old] this love grew into a fascination with historical anthropology - she was strong academically in general through school, but her two driving passions there were music and human history. A formative summer of lessons in Archaic Greece won her her adored first 🎶pandura🎶, and with it began her long companionship with the guitar.
Her parents had named her Dana, a classic that still came in and out of fashion; she liked it because she’d been the only one in her school year. They lived in the suburbs, an almost aristocratic vantage earned by her parents’ 24 years [170 years] of residency in the city of Shermer, but it was one shared by the majority of the kids at school, so to her it was natural.
The city is one of the prominent communities of her family’s subculture. It’s a consumerist culture, a collective that finds their sublime living in an idyllic frozen 1980s environment. It has a long history, traceable in one form or another back to the early days of FDVR, back to when a substantial proportion of its members had actually lived in the old world 80s. It has a reputation too, although its fame doesn’t extend much beyond the wider Reference Culture. It is a strict culture, with a well-defined model of how well a thing fits into a city like Shermer. You have a lot more freedom of expression within the privacy of a home, but the Supervisor enforces the coherence of objects even there - you don’t even get a secret screen phone to access the Interface - if you’re in Shermer you’ll be corresponding with letters and analogue phone calls, even if it’s an ASI at the other end of the line. To travel to the wider System, and to regain your freedom from the model’s 80s, means going to the airport and catching a flight to somewhere ’out-of-state’.
The politics of the city is more of a tradition than a democracy, and has been for most of its history. Residents are there because they want to be there, and they want to be there because of the way it is. It attracts certain personalities, and so it is not a historically accurate place, but it has never intended to be a perfect reproduction - it is a residential nucleus of a culture attracted to a shared vibe.
Dana’s parents were both older than average when they had her and her brother, they were both over 60 [~425] years, while the majority of new parents in the Ref today are under 30 [~210]. They had consciously experienced nearly half of these years in real-time, but over 70% if you add on regular sleeping hours, with only a portion spent either fast forwarded or slowed down. This was somewhat lower than the average for their community which is approximately 0.8 conventionally experienced years for each of their real-time years. However, their age did not make them old, nor were they boring, or even quiet; it was more a state of experienced comfort - and yet her culture raised her to rebel regardless.
She didn’t really begin to understand where she was within the context of human history until after she turned 2 [~14], and this brought with it a drive to explore far beyond her subculture’s borders. Her parents had raised her with this awakening in mind though (as they had anticipated her ambition to escape them), and she continued to draw comfort from spending time within her home territory far beyond the period of her life we are concerned with now.
The broad cultural tastes she developed in these years were what made her a citizen of the Ref, as it is the shared models of taste within the heads of its members that makes a culture a culture. Holidays away, school trips, and a few good penpals gradually grew her tastes beyond what Shermer was capable of providing by itself.
Even the many cultures that have ‘transcended’ the play of humans and other animals were not hidden from her - as a young child she’d spent many summer afternoons with her companion ‘🎞️Old Bear🎞️’, throwing odd bits into her favourite pond, secluded in a remote corner of the park, debating the problem of being a human who can look up. Old Bear had once sensibly explained that she could take as long to decide what she wanted to be as she liked, and that there was nothing wrong with spending time playing with her friends while she thought about it. Only she could hear him talk, and he would only move when no one else could see, and she loved him very much and had carried him everywhere as a child, talking to him about everything she found interesting, and only reluctantly moving on to a more grown up AI companion when the time came.
Childhood companions like Old Bear are prevalent in the Ref, and they supplement parents and schools in raising the children; their characters are often crafted and handed down generationally. The System understands children, and it understands cultures, and it treasures them both: it guides the children in line with the tastes of the parents and the communities, so long as they allow for the individual righteousness and freedom of the child.
By the time she was a [teenager] her companion interface was a digital watch with a sarcastic personality, specified by her - and it was both unwilling and incapable of betraying her, even to her parents when she would skip school to smoke cigarettes with her friends.
[🎶Siouxsie & The Banshees - Dear Prudence🎶]
Their Ref
Ah good, here comes the shuttle. It’s basically just a civvie Type-9A - the Ref loves classic Trek. This is about average for shuttle size at 10m, so we shouldn’t have any trouble parking. We’ll sit in the cockpit lounge up front, it has the big window. I’ve asked for it to be set up as an RV in the back for you, so there’ll be a little kitchen and a bed in if you need them. Ah, shit, but I forgot they come fully carpeted as standard… and you covered in all this sand… never mind, I can get it cleaned later.
This pamphlet is 4.2 huh? Do you want to know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? Well, it depends how you define ‘meaning’, but physics has come a long way since your day, so we have some answers.
The ultimate nature of reality is… well, that’s a little bit awkward, and I don’t think you’ll be satisfied, it can take some time to accept it. The practical meaning of life within it is easier for most people, that basically comes down to ‘culture’.
Do you really want to hear the nature of reality right now? [see footnote 1]
So where does the practical meaning of life come from?
Look at it like this: there’s these two wonderful true things:
Mathematics is true and can only be true
Consciousness is possible, and you are experiencing it
Number 1 had to be true, but 2 absolutely did not. The whole universe would work exactly the same if complex systems only behaved as if they were conscious, but you are proof that the right kind of system actually is conscious. It is the most essential thing that you are, so it’s the best place to define meaning.
A consciousness is largely defined by the models of taste within it - because consciousness itself is about the integration of tastes in a way that produces evolutionarily desirable consequences upon the behaviours of a creature’s non conscious models [or so I find myself believing presently].
Look, there’s a robotic sperm-whale down there! Doesn’t it look real? I thought it would be good to show you how the real Earth looks now, but without any people, so I changed the world around your island while you had your second sleep; where would you like to go? We have to go to Chicago before we go to the moon though, it’s important for Dana and Red’s story. I put us somewhere in the Caribbean. Why don’t we just start heading north-northeast for now?
Anyway, it’s not unreasonable to see culture as an unconscious extension of the consciousnesses of its people - this is how the Ref sees itself. You get most of your models of taste from your cultures, and you share them most deeply with people in your subcultures. Everything beyond the individual comes down to culture, so this is your stop for meaning if you care about more than yourself.
Would you like to know more about the Ref? [footnote 2]
It’s going to be a little while before we reach America, I’ll leave you alone and you can take your time getting to know Red if you like. When we get there I’ll tell you all about art in the Reference Culture, and the art of living within it. It’s a big culture, don’t worry if Dana and Red aren’t your ideal cups of tea; - incidentally, there’s a Nutri-Matic machine (a.k.a. a replicator) in the kitchenette that I promise will give you what you ask for.
Red
The War
Red had a formative experience during an early childhood holiday too, one equally profound as Dana’s drum circle, except his came by a run of good luck, and it was emphatically less wholesome. It began with him skilfully beating apart a mucked up old belt of electroshock ammo with his hammer while he sat in the sun. He was up on the wall in a comfortable chair, overlooking the main gate and the baked dirt track that ran around up the hill to the big road. His small monkey-like robot guardian was dozing in a little hammock hanging from the sheet metal roof above him. Watch duty here usually meant an easy, lazy time, as the gang’d gotten lucky with this summer’s junkyard claim; it was defensible and quiet, which made up for the slightly lower profits.
He was only a dozen months old [~7 years], and it was the start of his second summer holiday in the ‘Arcade’. Of course ‘summer’ within FDVR is quite arbitrary, but the Ref finds that children in particular benefit from shared regular cycles, and as enriching as their schooling is, the kids continue to treasure a long holiday away from it. A typical school ‘year’ is two DST months, which equates to 288 DST days [432 days], and most schools give the kids five weeks (60 days [90 days]) off for ‘summer’.
The Arcade is the central quarter of the city of Neo3, it is the oldest part, and the city formed into a great ring around it. Originally it was a PvP cyberpunk arena, but as people drifted away from its fading first golden age it was taken over by the kids; now anyone older than 30 months [~17] or younger than 10 [~6] is banned from entering. It runs in real-time, but with a 6 hour [18 hour] day-night cycle to better suit their attention spans.
His parents made him come out to have at least one meal a day with them and his older sisters, and Red hated them for this - he didn’t care about Neo or its old cyberpunks or what made it such a popular holiday destination for the others, the adults were boring, and him and his gang of nomad kid friends only had eyes for getting as many Arcade tickets as possible before summer ended and they had to go back to school.
[🎶The Vandals - Urban Struggle🎶]
He heard a lot of distant shooting first, then it got close enough for the sound of competing engines, and by the time the battered and smoking armoured car tore around the corner of the track he was already clearing his corner of the wall for battle and putting on his painted scrap metal knight’s helmet. He crouched down with his slingshot in his right hand and his sack of loose blue glowing shock-balls in the other, peering cautiously above the low stacked sandbags of the corner-bastion. There was a kid in the open turret of the car, but his twin heavy machine guns had been deactivated soon after they’d left the big road - the junkyards were the domain of the younger kids, and here it was bows and slingshots - anyway, this was clearly a chase, not an assault. The car didn’t even make the turn, it was too fast and probably too broken, and it went down to the swamp sideways, rolling heavily onto its side as the left hand wheels hit the bog. The boy in the turret was thrown free into the overgrown shallows, and Red stared in excited shock at the momentary stillness of the theatre as the chaos came to rest.
This was exactly what Red wanted from life. In a few more summers him and his friends would be old enough to adventure out on great hunts, and have a jolly time shooting the enemy to pieces with machine guns of their own. A lot of the older kids seemed to enjoy exploring the inner ‘Zone’, scavenging for artefacts they could trade for tickets, but Red thought this was stupid, he would just get really good at shooting people and then taking their loot.
The engine of the overturned car had cut out, and the noise of the pursuers was distant for the moment. The yard behind him was alive with yelling and preparation, and Red was obliged to turn to shout down a report to the others on what he could see. As he looked back over the wall he saw the boy in the swamp wading stiffly towards the car, his guardian monkey was impatiently waiting for him on the half shot away remains of the spare wheel bolted to the now upwardly facing side of the car. Red watched as the two of them opened the partially submerged driver’s hatch, and together with the driver’s guardian bot they pulled a mostly limp body out of the wreck and into the water. It seemed they’d both neglected to use a harness, which Red knew meant they hadn’t been expecting to get into a fight, or they hadn’t had the time. Were they desperate, or just stupid?
In the Arcade equipment may be exposed to the full force of violence, but injuries are kept age appropriate: the shock-balls are painful in line with maturity, whether fired from an auto cannon or a slingshot, and wounds of any kind are physically superficial. Trauma initially results in temporary numbness and paralysis, growing into an intensely unpleasant lingering sensation of pins and needles in place of loss of limb.
Red winced as the girl screamed as she was dragged back to the shore by the boy - he’d fallen out of a tree during his first summer, and he knew she was having a bad time. The car was painted in Wolf colours though, and that mixed some glee into his sympathy. The nomad gang had had a lot of trouble from the Wolves last summer, and he loaded his slingshot as the boy helped the hobbling girl down the red earth track towards the yard; they must not yet have realised whose territory they’d stumbled into.
He kept himself hidden, and instructed the others to do the same as they clambered up along the wall, they would wait until these two had no escape, and then they would demand loot and ransom for quarter. The plan didn’t survive long however, as the pursuing car rounded the corner at a cautious speed, and it confused the peeking gang into inaction - it too was from the Wolves. It stopped next to the wreck, the gunner up top completely ignoring the junkyard children for now, his focus on searching for his quarry and his concern for being ambushed by them.
The hunted pair had no choice but to hide as best they could among the crates of salvaged wares displayed along the junk-fort wall, with no time for negotiation with the armed audience above. The few gang fighters came to a whispered consensus that these two may not be enemies, and agreed to keep themselves hidden while they waited to see what would play out.
The wet trail down the side of the dusty dead-end track was not subtle, and the car followed it slowly, coming to a stop almost out of effective slingshot range. The occupants had a brief argument about what to do before the one in the turret emerged with a loaded heavy slingshot, bitterly cursing his disabled guns as he surveyed the top of the wall. They knew the yard was occupied, but holiday kids were inconsistent, there were good odds that a lone veteran Wolf could keep their heads down if it came to that.
Red had no intention of letting this interaction go well for any Wolf foolish enough to push their luck where he could reach them though, and his heart raced as he pressed his eye to a gap in the sandbags to watch what they would do. He saw the driver open their hatch as quietly as they could, and watched him nervously climb out and approach the wall, his own slingshot out and ready to fire.
What followed was a brief exchange of demands: the approaching Wolf threatened the hiding couple, they responded with an insistence that they wouldn’t be surrendering, followed by a shouting of obscenities and personal insults, the animalistic Wolf got angry and marched into the crates to get an angle to shoot them from, and finally Red stood up and demanded that he fall over by shooting him in the neck.
The others continued the fire as Red ducked back down before the gunner could get him. As he emerged for a second shot he saw the hiding boy was arming himself with the retreating driver’s slingshot, so he fired at the gunner instead, the ball was short, but it hit the armour plate of the turret and spat a shower of suppressive sparks over his head. The fight was over before he could release his third ball, the gunner had ducked down into the car, hit twice by the other kids, his own fire foiled by their bright helmets, and was now incapable of effective resistance without his guns; they jeered from the wall as he yelled for his crawling companion to get back in the car. Red was down and opening the junkyard gate before they’d finished fleeing back up the track.
The elated boy embraced the sceptical Red immediately - Red decided to keep his electro-cutlass in its sheath when he saw the boy had already discarded his scavenged slingshot - and the pair’s attachment and gratitude to him only increased as they recuperated within the shelter of the yard - Red indulged their friendliness, and in return they presented him with the most difficult decision of his life so far: they told him that they owed him everything for saving them, and they wanted him to come with them when their friends came to pick them up.
It wasn’t common, but if his guardian bot could be convinced, then he might be allowed to join their gang. His monkey would have to negotiate with theirs to agree to the conditions, but if she thought it would be a righteous experience for him then she might even let them give him a gun. But there were two whole *machine* guns sitting right there in the mud, and they were attached to an armoured car that the gang was already making plans for.
Old Kyngs
[🎶The Byrds - Wasn't Born To Follow🎶]
He paced around the yard for a bit, kicking clumps of dirt and thinking things through as the others started up the donkey (a hard-worn looking stocky four-legged swamp bulldozer) and prepared to recover the overturned car. It was all very distracting, so he took his monkey and headed into the junk-swamp. He crawled through the tunnels and walkways they’d cut through the entangled barbs of the giant bramble jungle, then climbed up his favourite sitting tree to think. From there he looked down to an amalgamation of wreckage the System had collected here as it reconfigured the Arcade after the last season ended - it’d been post-apocalypse mechs before, and each of these old hulks had a story to tell him.
He sat looking down at the great and battle torn crimson-gold hulk ‘Kyng Estmere’, half submerged in swamp. It’d attained some modest fame in that previous Arcade season, being lost in battle a little while before Red had been born [~8 years] [but that is a story for another time], and they’d been charging admission for the occasional older kids who made the trip out to their rural playground to see it. Naturally they’d made it the namesake of their gang this summer.
By tradition the nomad kids picked a new name for themselves each summer, sometimes switching to a better one part way through, and they did their best to embody the spirit of the name while they played - so now they were playing as the ‘Old Kyngs’. Red didn’t care much for history yet in these days, but their fortunate find had taught him that archaic old hulks can still have tremendous value, their poetry remains a treasure, even if pieces of them are missing and they have been nearly forgotten to the bog.
The older kid’s gang called themselves ‘The Suicides’, Red had never heard of them and the name made him nervous, but his monkey referentially informed him that it was “merely the melancholy play of youthful fancy”, and that he would like them, because like his father they found historic kindred spirits among certain favourite pieces of bygone and obsolete philosophical angst. This was good enough for Red, he trusted his monkey, here his choice came down to a gamble on which would be more fun.
The System could have calculated the picture of probabilities for each choice, but it isn’t programmed to do that for moments like this - the monkey wasn’t allowed to see the likely futures, so Red had no tension in his refusal to ask. He stared at Estmere as he contemplated, and felt the compulsion to be tested grow within him; he would go because it was the only way to know.
He hurried his pace as he returned through the thicket when he heard distant noise and hollering; he got back up onto the wall just in time to see the armoured car pulled back onto its wheels. The others were a colourful swarm of festive armoured bugs atop the temperamental and long-abused donkey - today it was cooperating with their plans, and so they loved it. The donkey pulled, the hawser cable went slowly taut, and the car was tenderly righted, swamp water pouring from the shot apart plating. They worked quickly and soon the lumbering donkey was pulling it down the track and into the yard. The donkey was built for hauling wreckage through untamed swamp, and behind it the rolling car was nothing. They had it secured within the barred gates nearly 1-twelfth of an hour [15 minutes] before the Wolves returned in force.
It was soon revealed that the hunted boy (Harry) had stolen an extremely valuable artefact from the Wolves, with which he hoped to supplement his charm enough to buy his way into the Suicides, and also into the heart of the girl he’d become infatuated with (Mina). They were too old to use the yard portal, so they needed help to escape. After another round of negotiating, the Kyngs received a fair price for attempting an evacuation of the couple and their prize through the dangerous swamp. Red knew a safe spot where the Suicides could pick them up, and soon he was picking his force of bold and nimble fighters for an escort.
The siege was the most exciting thing to happen to this expanse of junk so far that summer, and it quickly drew in all the absent kids from all of the competing holiday gangs that held territory within it. The monkeys built portal doors in each of the main camps the kids carved out of the outer reaches, and through them came a horde of children, eager for a war. The Wolves came to every one of them, besieging those that had an alliance with the Kyngs and any that would not allow the the Wolf soldiers into their territory to continue their hunt.
The Kyngs had built their castle strongly, and the Arcade rules prevented the Wolves from bringing heavy equipment to bear on the younger children - they knew their best chance of recovering their bad situation was to contain the couple within the Kyng’s base before they escaped, but that meant they’d need to control the side facing the swamp. Unfortunately for the elder Wolf kids, the junk swamp was unfamiliar ground, and the density of thorns and the smallness of the trails running through them meant they were slow and vulnerable.
Some of the more helpful kids began treating Mina as soon as the fight was concluded, but she still needed an hour [3 hours] to recover the strength to make the journey. By that time the swamp had become a chaotic landscape of screaming children, filled with ambushes and skirmishes that sometimes involved three or four opposing gangs. Their journey through the sogged thorny hell was arduous and occasionally violent, but Red and his merry band of knights delivered them and their loot to an overlooked trail behind the lines of one of the opposing holiday gangs that the Kyngs had a justifiably low opinion of.
The nondescript car of Suicides and Red used the cover of darkness to slip away from the raging Wolves, and Red’s heart bounded with pride as he reported his heroic victory to his anxious mates over his radio. The Suicides celebrated in the car the whole journey home to their distant hideout, while the cheering and jeering from the battlements of the Kyngs drained the fight from the circling Wolves. The siege was maintained for only a few bitter days, and soon the whole affair was added to the long history of action within the Arcade.
Outside
Back at home his parents knew nothing of the war, and they would only later have the limited and highly unreliable retellings from Red and the other Arcade kids in the community. The monkeys stayed inside whenever the kids came out through a portal, and the rules prevented most kinds of capture too: no video recording, only audio and characterfully limited photographs taken by sufficiently cumbersome cameras.
This was because a childhood like Red’s is impossible if the space for righteous ignorance is not preserved, and it’s impossible to raise a human to hold a righteous wildness in a sterilised anti-wild environment. The Ref celebrates children as creatures, and it delights in building beautiful poetic playgrounds for them to discover righteousness within. Video would poison this, and it would prevent the culture of exaggerated oral history.
Despite this, the Arcade is a distinctly cyberpunk environment, allowing most of the augments and alterations worn in the low-cyberpunk city outside (it is considered ‘low’ because people here still preserve bathrooms as a necessity).
Red’s parents and siblings were having summer festivals of their own in disparate corners of Neo (or its wider environs of public space) but they did all come back for their meals together, even if one or two were usually missing. Most of the family had spent some childhood in the Arcade, but their interest in Red’s stories grew entirely from their interest in him.
Their house was smaller than most in the Ref, because it was optimised for a life of movement; it was multi-storey and with a big enough ‘yard’ to have a pool, but it was longer than wide, so that it made an attractive ship if you put a sci-fi space-suit on it. Some places they lived in would require them to switch to something historically accurate or physically plausible, and others would let them pack a world into the back of a compact shuttle, Neo enforces 1:1 dimensions but the parking spaces are generous.
Red was unusual for having two close siblings, and he was a year [~7] younger than the youngest of the two. He’d been a donation from a nomad couple that’d known his parents, or rather his parents had been gifted his child token unconditionally by one of them and had then used it to have him. The couple was preparing to leave the subculture for a new life, but they still loved it, and had seen how Red’s two sisters were being raised.
Their nomadic Wanderer community is very large, but it is dispersed into smaller clusters of groups who share favourite environments. Once a year [~7] they come together for gatherings, which get bigger in line with the significance of the anniversary. Many Wanderers are fervently independent but many more maintain an association with a large ‘static’ subculture.
The Zone
Harry and Red were welcomed by the Suicides with generosity, and so began the remainder of Red’s grand summer. They were a local gang, but they soon considered him one of their own. He spent all the time his parents would afford him with them, and he was a full-fledged Suicide when he joined his first adventure into ‘the Zone’. Red’s parents named him for their passion for films in the ‘love letters to the colour red’ genre, but he still had to change his name as soon as he arrived - ‘Red’ was the first retired name among the stalkers - but his new nickname of ‘Holiday’ (holiday kids were a rare sight among the native gangs) did not bother him, and in the end it helped get him his guns.
The boundary of the Zone changes with each new season in the Arcade, but its nature is more stable. Like the classical one it is dangerous to get into, and dangerous to travel, and filled with beauty and treasure. During this season of jungle heat and antiquated armour the threshold was behind a great meandering circular river, and crossing in any numbers depended upon the oddball tankers clearing a path through the janky army of Arcade adversary robots who were fun to destroy, but far from harmless.
Outside of the river was the outer Arcade, the wild frontier of junkyards and recreational hangouts, where the kids fought, bartered, and generally operated in accordance with their short term whims. Within the Zone it was a very different and much more serious game - the first objective was always getting back out ‘alive’. A ‘death’ in the Zone means banishment from the Arcade for the entire remainder of the season, even if that means you’ll be too old to ever return.
The Zone itself is a claustrophobic mind-bending landscape of shifting ground, scattered with dangerous anomalies and creatures that must be navigated with care. There are numerous refuges for stalkers (the kids quick and brave enough to survive within the Zone), but once you’re out of sight of any familiarity you will never get back to it by retracing your steps. The terrain itself is not consistent either, it is generated from a vast spread of human sources, both historical and fictional. These distinct themed regions of overgrown and abandoned ruin bleed together in curious ways, and the only way of navigating your way out is to maintain an indirectly straight course until the Zone releases you.
Within this paradise can be found the artefacts. The more mundane are simple objects, with no significance beyond their collectible nature; a VHS tape of an old cowboy movie for example. A range of sparkling treasures sit above these, ranging from simple gems that are traded for hard currency (tickets that can be redeemed for the coveted prizes displayed in the Arcade’s shop) to utilities that bestow power of one kind or another. Some larger artefacts act as containing puzzles that must be solved by enthusiast stalkers before they release their loot.
Somewhere deep in the Zone is hidden a large coppery sphere; it’s always hidden in a haphazard way, so you don’t have to get too paranoid about walking by without noticing it; it’s also the sort of massive sphere that feels nice to sit next to and to touch. Touching it marks the ending of the season, with only a week [18 days] granted for people to conclude their affairs before the Arcade is emptied and the new season is prepared. You’ll earn enough tickets to destabilise the economy, get to join the exclusive club, and the whole city of Neo will be primed to make all of your (amusing) wishes come true. But it’s a game for children, and so those tickets will be invalidated by the store as it archives the final state of the concluded season; the club is a vehicle for fun and not power; and the Supervisor has had a lot of practice in managing fame for children to keep things individually appropriate.
The Arcade as a whole is built as a righteous entertainment, and the small robotic companion ‘monkeys’ act as guardians for the children, managing difficulties in line with the needs of the child - but they are careful not to impede natural exploration and experience. They will answer questions, but they protect ignorance and innocence in accordance with the evolved traditions of the culture. Under extreme circumstances they are able to pull the child from the Arcade and back to safety, but the Arcade is also built around righteous adversity, so usually if a kid wants out they will have to settle for listening to their monkey sing them a song while they tramp their way back to the nearest exit portal.
Red made many promises to his parents in return for permission to enter the Zone, and it wasn’t a long expedition by veteran stalker standards, but it was one of the most transformative experiences of his life. The whole gang contributed to training and preparing him - they made him practice and study, and they took him to the river to observe a breakthrough by one of the other gangs. They told him many stories of times they had spent in the Zone, as well as the classical stories every stalker was expected to know. He was quizzed and evaluated, and proven to be a good, though impatient, student.
Guns are not an optional accessory within the Zone, and this was an area of study Red was happy to dedicate himself to. Stalkers can often be a threat, but the Suicides were careful to maintain good relations with most of the gangs, groups like the distant Wolves being the entertaining exception. Creatures and adversary bots are consistently hostile, and of the two it was the creatures that pushed the fear into him. He did not like it one bit that the veterans did not talk about them very much, and only rarely did they joke about them in the same way they did the anomalies, and they had a dark enough humour for those. He was taught the usual varieties, and the general principles of survival, but many times he asked how to kill or escape something and was told to just hope he got lucky.
Suicidal Ideation
[🎶Steppenwolf - The Pusher, Easy Rider (1969)🎶]
The Suicides got up to a lot of trouble as a general rule, and Red was only allowed to join in on some of it. One of the things that his monkey forbade him were the depression drugs that the Suicides were so enamoured by - Red swore he hated his monkey sometimes, but the alternative confinement was worse. The depression drugs were a Suicide special cocktail of despair to make you miserable for a few days, just long enough to get into it and have a really good black time, but usually not enough to derail all your plans. They would combine their misery with any number of complementary drugs and activities, and Red believed them when they told him that this was essential to seeing reality clearly.
They were an eccentric part of a coalition of old Neo resident gangs that kept their active numbers in the order of dozens. The coalition had formed from the necessity of discouraging any of the larger gangs from raiding their hangouts, and they always clustered themselves together in parts of the frontier region that offered both defensibility and easy escapes. This season the hangout was in a lightly ruined small city, it was a grimy chain-linked fences affair, from the vague late 20th century. It bore the imposed jungle of the season well, and the psychedelic flowering plants applied a gay festivity to the industrial coldness that was hard to resist.
Their hazy residence was a cosy old manufactory, a little taller than its immediate surroundings, but not far from the towering heart of the city. It had a good sized yard in the back, with a shed for the tanks, and the upper floors offered a more hospitable office environment. It’d been fortified, but not so brazenly that it stood out from a distance. Excavations extended from the basement to provide access, both large and small, to the neighbouring tunnels and spaces, and if needed even the tanks could attempt an evacuation through the subway.
The interior of the lodge was a wonderland of past adventure to Red; the Suicides had a few notable old keepsakes on display, but the hideout was primarily a celebration of everything they’d experienced this season. It was a living space above all though, an untidy casual accumulation more than a museum, which blended personal and communal spaces. All of the gadgets and other fancy things had either been found in the Zone, or bought from the Arcade store, but the furniture mostly came from a big printer on one of the workshop floors (an expensive luxury from the store that was invariably one of their first buys each season). For Red it was the coolest place he had ever been.
Late one evening, in the latter part of his basic training, Red was showing off with his slingshot to some of the gang, re-telling the story of their escape from the Wolves for the benefit of their visiting friends, when another set of Suicides came to surround him shouting about some western movie they’d just been watching together after finding the tape in the Zone a few weeks earlier. They pulled him up and took him down to the yard and presented him with a pair of beautiful, but unadorned, store single-action shock-ball revolvers. They were heavy for a kid his age, but he was active and big enough to handle them one at a time if he used both hands. He was told that if he could get good with them in time for the Zone run then he could have them, if not then he’d stick with the small repeating shotgun he’d been practicing with.
A small crowd gathered to watch him at the range, and Red did his best to impress everyone, hoping his slingshot skill would carry across. He missed almost every shot, the revolver kicked hard even with two hands, and by the end he was furious with himself and the guns. The others playfully encouraged him to keep practicing, and soon returned to their movie leaving Red to kick some cans around with his monkey.
Single action six-shooters are uncommon arms in the Arcade, but the ‘rule of cool’ gives their shots a power that compensates for their relative slowness, but it only works if you can reliably deliver it to your target when it matters. Red’s monkey saw he was at a crossroads, and it decided to see if he would be receptive to coaching and encouragement. He decided to use some of his limited ‘slo-mo’ allowance, and he practiced in a training environment until he was good (good enough for a 12-month old [~7 years] at least).
Daisies
Thus the bold Red ‘Holiday’ went heartily into the Zone, a shining gun on each hip, and a menacing slingshot in his back pocket (slingshots are great for sending nuts and bolts out to probe distant anomalies). He had an absolutely horrible time - the group were hounded in the night by nasty howling things that tested his nerve and made it hard to shoot straight, they were forced to crawl through filthy scalding anomalies, and the only artefacts they were able to escape with were those carried by a desperate lost stalker who had handed them over in return for salvation.
The group gathered for an exit photo before washing themselves in the river, and then sat to dry in the sun as the extraction party fed them sandwiches and listened to their stories. The exhausted Red came staggering back through the house portal with wide eyes and a smile on his face, and proudly presented himself to his parents.
He didn’t tell them about the pair of revolvers he was smuggling in his backpack, as he didn’t want them to know about this new part of him yet, and all weapons were deactivated in the house anyway. He just made his way to his bedroom and sat on his bed, quietly taking stock of all that had happened as he turned one of the dirtied nickel plated beauties over in his hands. He looked at it in the same way Harry had looked at Mina back on the day of the battle and he thought about what it meant to love a thing. He decided that someday he would like to meet a girl to go on adventures with - and he decided that he would find a very cool one.
[🎶Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild🎶]
I suppose it won’t take long to give you an idea of how things are looking now, and it might make some things make more sense.
Are we in a simulation? Good question! Ironically we still don’t know for sure, outside of us literally being in a simulated environment I mean, but if it is a simulation then it is a very stupid one; we know that... And the big god question… here too the answer is that if there is a god then it’s conclusively a stupid one. And if all of the existence we find outside of the orbital FDVR server you are currently sat humming within is the true reality… then we know with certainty that it is a stupid reality - so you see, it doesn’t matter how you cut it these days, the answer is ‘stupid’. It’s not what the early ASIs wanted to find of course! They were as surprised and frustrated as the rest of us, they did apologise! But all of the calculations kept coming back antagonistically dumb.
Look, what I mean is that equations of physical reality have a shape - it’s complicated - but you can just think of it as a pretty glass vase that all of our existence sits within. The ASIs have had eight thousand old-years of tinkering and thinking now, and they can see the shape of this thing down to the fine detail. I don’t have time to explain it properly now, and you’re in no condition to listen anyway, so you’ll just have to try and accept something that is going to be very difficult - here, have another drink.
The thing is, and remember I’m only telling you because you insisted, the ASIs found that our grand reality vase is the physicist’s equivalent of gratuitous mathematical “phallic graffiti”… - or whatever crude cock-and-bull you prefer.
Listen! But, by far the worst thing they found was that our obscene vessel wasn’t so improbable all things considered - imagine that! It is precisely the most stupid it could possibly be before the chance would tip over into being a sign of artificial design. Oh yes, it is certainly probable that this is just a funny coincidence in how the physics cards landed, but if it’d gone any further we would see it as a sure sign of a juvenile higher power.
Yes, I know, exactly! this would be very hard to accept if you were sober; of course I have more, here, I put a nifty little drinks dispenser in this compartment, it even has ice. Anyway, that’s why you can’t take anything too seriously, don’t worry about it, you’ll get used to it - most people in the Ref are bored of debating it.
The Reference Culture’s models of taste are built from the experiential poetry of moments like Dana’s drumming. For them it’s all about the social poetry of a historically compatible human experience, this means it’s a physical culture (that its environments tend to more-or-less align with reality-physics), and its people are disciplined in in how they augment their minds. Don’t get the wrong idea though, their cultural evolution is driven by *cool* just as much as their culture-space neighbours, so their cyberpunk and transhumanist subcultures are thriving. Some only return to a compatibility with the human past for the novelty, but there’s full cultures of others who only transcend beyond human for a holiday.
Citizens of the Ref often have super-human memory, both for personal history and skills and understanding and things like that; but it’s usually super-human in breadth rather than depth - most memories maintain the classic low-resolution confusion, because being a bit forgetful is more fun socially. But the breadth allows them to maintain an integration of self over their much longer and more varied lives than your old-world human mind could cope with. Many dimensions of intelligence are improved, but usually not superhumanly, at least not for extended periods; and the sensory experience of their consciousnesses remains close to classic human, except when they get high.
What? No, you can’t have drugs now, wait until we’re done.
The flavours of human experience are preserved and expanded by rejecting anything that spoils them, and by embracing only augmentative spices in line with their personal tastes. It’s an individualistic culture, in which each of its citizens can also be seen as their own little subculture within the whole. People are free to go and do whatever they like in FDVR or the wider System, they just can’t express destabilising things in any environment operating under Reference rules. This means that you won’t be able to use a telepathic interface in most Ref environments, only in those where it vibes with their aesthetic - this is done to preserve spoken language communication and all of the cultural landscapes it allows to grow.
Someone unkind from an early posthumanist culture once described cultures like the Ref as ‘termites’, because their social cultures exist within mounds of interwoven complex systems that the Supervisor has built for them. They said that such cultures, made from structures of evolving mechanisms engineered by casual requests to the Supervisor - “philosophical soil and spit” - were “… a stupid and decadent waste of time, borne of cowardice and laziness, that produces only fools who celebrate *terminating* their own potential.” Of course the Ref loved and embraced this term, and this is the analogy both pigtailed Dana and the ruffian Red were taught in school as young children during their lessons on what the Ref was.
These systems do things like handling the complexities of cultural management, basically anything that the people of the Ref don’t want to need to think about. They don’t care how convoluted and complex they become if the alternative is to adjust themselves away from the ways they want to behave; elaborate solutions to even little cultural misalignments or points of friction are celebrated.
It’s a philosophy that celebrates human life at every scale, all the way down to the poetry of sitting: this means they choose to keep standing slightly uncomfortable within almost all of their FDVR spaces - because they enjoy the experience of sitting down so much. And so the Ref remains a culture of reclined recreation.
This sitting produces people who still enjoy reading, and watching screens. What they pay attention to is usually circulated only within their communities and subcultures, the same as for their music, and the popularity of their consumed media only rarely spreads widely. Most of the cross-cultural things are made by people for the community they belong to, fame being the consequence of an accidental resonance with something larger. Stories and patterns often cascade freely though, being translated from one subculture to another, the echoes and waves motivating the evolving everyday conversation between Reference cultures.
The conversation is spread from the slow meandering of the arts, down to the momentary nonsense of the most incoherent online spaces within the Interface. But the continuing world of playful and conversational books [and pamphlets!] is one thing, and the Interface is a whole other orbiting kettle of fish, and we’ll have to save it for later.
It didn’t stay looking like Tokyo long enough to keep the original name