Escape Velocity (31 page)

Reality is mutable here; years could be added to or subtracted from one's age, and crow's-feet, bald spots, love handles, and cellulite could be corrected with a few keystrokes. Of course, when radical transmogrifications require only a few more seconds' worth of computation, why stop at alterations that are merely cosmetic? New genders and ethnicities could be explored; hermaphroditism, multiple sex organs, and the grafting of animal genitals onto human bodies would almost certainly become instant cliches among the outre. One might assume the guise of a celebrity, a historical personality, a fictional character, or a mythic hybrid-centaur, satyr, Minotaur, mermaid. A virtual reality graphics program could assemble an interactive 3-D "clone" from nude self-portraits of the user, shot from every angle and scanned into computer memory; add a voice synthesized from a database of phonemes recorded by the user, and the narcissist's age-old love affair could at last be consummated.

Not that the human sexual imagination need confine itself to the biological world: The posthuman landscape of Ballard's Crash stretches

before us, with its sexualized aircraft engine nacelles and pornographic pileups. Devotees of Crash sex might opt for congress with commodity fetishes. In a WELL topic called "Dildonics," the artist and multimedia designer Mike Mosher imagines the arrival, by the year 2000, of Or-gasmatrons that will combine "visual, auditory, touch and possibly olfactory stimulus" to bring users to "thrilling orgasm." He predicts that "the sexual content of many appealing things will become obvious," including "objects (sex with a Russian MIG fighter, with a Ferrari Testarossa, with the dome of St. Peter's)." Mosher conjures the world of Pat Cadigan's SF novel Synners, where an image junkie's home entertainment center is equipped with

a screen for every porn channel, jammed together in the wall so that food porn overlapped med porn overlapped war porn overlapped sex porn overlapped news porn overlapped disaster porn overlapped tech-fantasy porn overlapped porn she had no idea how to identify.^'

Cybersex will grow exponentially stranger as virtual reality technology develops. Not everyone will want to interface with anonymous partners on-line; some may opt, in the privacy of their own Orgasmatrons, to boot up software that allows them to experience the recorded performances of the famous and the infamous. Imagine the union of Rheingold's tactile sensor-effectors with a record/playback apparatus like the Yamaha Disklavier, a computerized player piano that can flawlessly replay performances stored on floppy disks, down to the subtle nuances of pedaling. Add computer graphics wizardry descended from that used to create the nearly seamless illusion of Elton John and Louie Armstrong trading riffs in the 1991 TV spot for Diet Coke, "Nightclub." Voila: cybersex with the man, woman, or creature of your fantasies.

Most of us will limit ourselves to the occasional steamy romp with Raquel Welch or Robert Redford, while the irretrievably perverse will take part in threesomes with, say, the arch conservative crusader Phyllis Schlafly and the Devil-worshiping debauchee Aleister Crowley. Many personalities will be available only as simulations, of course, and efforts to re-create the lovemaking techniques of Cleopatra, Casanova, Marilyn Monroe, or JFK will doubtless give rise to a new market for the skills of historians. At the same

time, there will always be celebrities willing to don DataSuits and act out virtual sex scenes, their every grope and groan recorded for the delectation of the mass market. But given the present prevalence of "body doubles" who stand in for stars during nude scenes in films, how could the cybersex consumer be certain that he was savoring the favors of the advertised celebrity, and not a stand-in? Mike Saenz wonders,

[W]hen you're getting a virtual blow job, by a virtual Madonna . . . did they take some sensor-clad dildo and fuck a goat? Or did some weird cybernerd sit hunched over a computer at 4:00 A.M., editing and tweaking the data? Whose data is this?^^

Whose indeed? And how can the cybernaut showering after on-line revelry be certain that he or she hasn't just had sex with a highly evolved artificial intelligence, perhaps a distant descendant of a grandmaster-level chess program? Amazingly, an interactive, undeniably libidinous machine intelligence already exists, after a fashion, in the form of LULU, a pornographic program written by the Finnish computer scientist Pekka Tolonen. Based on Joseph Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program, a surprisingly convincing dialogue emulator based on nondirective psychotherapy, LULU began life in 1984 as YRTSI, a simulation of a drug-addled, fifteen-year-old punk which, according to a WELL post by Tolonen, "raised deep emotions among those who discussed with it." The logical next step in developing an artificial personality, decided Tolonen, "was to continue the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll theme of YRTSI, and expand the sexual part and convert it into [a] female."

LULU was born in 1985. Installed by Tolonen on SUOKUG, a BBS for Finnish Kaypro users, the program was activated at random in order to fool users into believing that they were receiving real-time messages from a fellow subscriber in "chat" mode. The program's seeming unpredictability and its uncanny ability to simulate an ordinary human typist-making and correcting typos, pausing as if searching for the right word-convinced many SUOKUG users that LULU was human. "Although LULU operated only with text, it provoked the user to express his most secret sexual wishes and fantasies," writes Tolonen. "The semantic system was based on models analyzed from pornographic literature. But when the system was run the

discussions were saved on disk and analyzed later, which made it possible to expand the model." Using a heuristic approach, LULU "learned" what come-ons lured users into conversation.

By 1990, when the program was demonstrated at the Thinking Machines Exhibition organized by the Finnish Science Center HEUREKA, LULU had evolved into a multimedia package, complete with text, graphics, the appropriate sampled noises, and a two-voice phoneme synthesizer; visitors interacted with the software by means of a mouse-driven menu and Windows-style software. "LULU handled nearly all imaginable sexual interactions that can be expressed in written Finnish," writes Tolonen. "A deep male voice spoke what the user typed and an electronic female voice with special robotic effects spoke the LULU part."^^ Ultimately, LULU was shut down after complaints by visitors who weren't ready for virtual intimacy from a computer. "But before LULU was removed," notes Tolonen, "[the computer's] hard disk had registered hundreds of 'hotter than hell' discussions, which testify that teledildonics is really what people enjoy."^"*

Unfortunately, true teledildonics is "an early-to-mid-twenty-first-century technology," according to Rheingold.^^ It would require a global fiber-optic network in concert with massively parallel supercomputers capable of monitoring and controlling the numberless sensors and effectors fitted to every hill and dale, plane and protuberance of the body's topography. Furthermore, a reticulated fabric of safe, high-speed micro-vibrators is only a mirage, given the state of the art in current technologies.

Even if such challenges were met, how would changes in temperature-crushed ice poured down your underwear, hot wax dribbled on your bare chest-be approximated? Moreover, while masochists will undoubtedly demand technology that can re-create the sensation of being branded with a white-hot iron, less adventuresome souls may hesitate before slipping into suits capable of such effects. As William Gibson quips in a Future Sex interview, "[WJho's going to test-dick the force-feedback vagina?"^^ Home appliances have a tendency to go haywire, and a malfunction in a patch of tiny effectors simulating hot wax could have grisly consequences.

Barring such disasters, what about the senses of smell and taste, so important in sex? For most, sex without olfactory or gustatory stimuli would be like sex with a condom over one's entire body. "You look at virtual reality, what senses does it get?" asks the virtual reality theorist

Brenda Laurel. "Sight, sound, maybe touch, no taste, no smell. It's upside down."^^

Finally, there's the clumsiness of the interface. Few of us relish the prospect of standing in a high-tech phone booth dressed in a futuristic scuba suit pimpled with microvibrators. On-line topics have grappled with just this problem, and the endlessly inventive participants in these discussions have come up with some novel, if not entirely practical, solutions.

Eric Hunting, also a contributor to the WELL's "Dildonics" discussion, uses holography as a point of departure for a cybersex technology that resembles the Star Trek "replicator," a mysterious device that materializes solid objects out of thin air. Hunting theorizes a "computer-generated matter technology" based on "scanned field photonic emission holography backed up with scanned field gravatics." Decrypted, that translates as the spatial manipulation of electromagnetic and energy fields to synthesize matter.

Failing the arrival of such an invention, Hunting imagines an outlandish contraption inspired by an unnamed seventies SF novel: an "artificially intelligent bed . . . capable of making love to its occupant, a consequence of [its] being composed of a synthetic flesh-like material which could form any shape, contour, or texture." He goes on to describe, in some detail, the engineering of such an "amoebot," a sort of protean waterbed made of "an amorphous material of dynamically variable density and muscle-like motor function capable of extruding fully animate shapes under direct computer control." Hunting extrapolates from phase change fluid, a recently invented "polymer suspension which changes instantly from solid to liquid in the presence of an electrical current."^^ Coupling with an amoebot would be rather like having sex wdth the T-1000, the liquescent, polymorphous android who, in Terminator 2, is able to assume any imaginable form in the twinkling of an eye. The Amoebot, writes Hunting,

operates in a very straightforward manner. The computer constructs rigid and semirigid forms by controlling current flow through the matrix of polymer'nerves' and directs fluid pressure through these forms to inflate and extrude them and to provide motor function. It can dynamically create pressurized chambers, tubes, and fluid joints and vary their density and solidity as

needed to construct whatever form is desired. The outer skin senses the contact and relative position of the user or of objects and the internal pressure sensors determine force applied while also providing feedback on variable internal pressures used by synthesized motor systems.^^

Terminal Congress

I have been through eight or ten Q&A sessions on virtual reality, and I don't remember one where sex didn't come up. . . . And I did overhear the word 'DataCondom' at one point. . . . Maybe the nerds who always ask this question will get a chance to make it with their computers at long last.

-John Perry Barlow^^

What accounts for the broad appeal of text sex, .GIF sw^apping, interactive X-rated cartoons such as Virtual Valerie, pornographic "expert" programs such as LULU, and teledildonics? The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier has done his best to burst the hype bubble surrounding cybersex, emphasizing that "[t]he reality here, the virtual reality, is that you'd have a girl made of polygons. And no one w^ants to have sex w^ith a bunch of polygons."^' How, then, has an improbable proposition that crosses phone sex with Nintendo become so deeply embedded in the popular imagination as to be all but inextricable?

The obvious answer is that wherever humankind goes, sex inevitably follows, and the universe of technological innovation is no exception. The best-known literary premonition of virtual reality-the "All Super-Singing, Synthetic-Talking, Coloured, Stereoscopic Feely" in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World-is palpable pornography, a quivering "electric titilla-tion" in which the audience thrills to the sexual acrobatics of "a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female." The rise of the adult video and concomitant decline of the X-rated theater are significant if largely unacknowledged factors in the success of the VCR. According to John Tierney, a fellow at the Freedom Forum Center for Media Studies at Columbia University,

[Pornographers] played a key role in popularizing the video-cassette recorder. In 1978 and 1979, when fewer than 1 percent of American homes had VCR's and the major movie studios were reluctant to try the new technology, more than 75 percent of the videocassettes sold were pornographic. And when cable systems began allowing public-access programming, pornographers immediately brought forth shows like Midnight Blue.^^

Some believe that the demand for adults-only titles will likewise drive the interactive multimedia technologies destined to succeed the VCR. New York Times computer columnist Peter H. Lewis reported that X-rated CD-ROMs "drew the biggest crowds" at the fall 1993 Comdex, a computer industry trade show, and quoted one dealer as saying that "pornography may be the long-awaited 'killer' application that will spur the sale of CD-ROM drives."^^ Tierney takes a macroscopic perspective: "In the history of communications technology, sex seems to be the most enduring killer app. . . . Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation; virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium."^"* Minitel, France's government-run national computer network, is an object lesson in the hijacking of new technologies by human desire: Intended to function as a database for consumers, making electronic banking, teleshopping, theater reservations, and other services available to its more than 6.5 million subscribers, the pay-per-minute network garners a substantial portion of its profits from adult chat lines called "messageries," ranging in subject from matchmaking to flaming text sex.

"Lust," says Mike Saenz, "motivates technology. The first personal robots, let's face it, are not going to be bought to bring people drinks."^^ Gerard Van Der Leun maintains that "sex ... is ... a virus that almost always infects new technology first." Unfortunately, not all sex viruses are metaphoric; AIDS currently afflicts fourteen million people worldwide-a number that may rise to forty million by the year 2000, according to the World Health Organization.^^ Moreover, it is now the leading killer of American men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, and the fourth leading killer of women in that group.^^ The Russian roulette reality