Through Burn-Colored Glasses:
The History of the Net

by Francesca Davis, age 12, Mrs. Grover's 6th Grade Class, Cleveland, Ohio

The Net as we know it today started as a United States military experiment in the 1960s. What they wound up with, though, was nothing really impressive by today's standards, because my older sister sets up larger networks on weekends with her friends just to play games on. It did grow, though, and by the mid-1990s it was made up of several thousand computers in many countries around the world. Somewhere along the way, people started calling this network the Internet.

It was in the late 1990s that the Internet Boom occurred, and the thousands of computers turned into millions of computers. This was a really big thing, since before only geeks were using the Net, and now everyone was using the Net. The geeks thought this was going to make them cool, since now everyone was doing what they'd been doing. But they were still geeks, just geeks in the Net instead of in real life. As time went on, more and more services came to be available online. Services that were before carried on different wires all started to become digital and get carried over the Net. Telephones, television, bills, junk mail, even libraries, all of these things were now available on the Net. Which is probably why everyone wanted to have access to the Net all the time.

PADs (Pocket Access Devices) started showing up as early as 1999, but they were slow and didn't offer much actual content. It wasn't until a few years later that true PADs, as we know them today, started showing up. With a PAD, anyone can access all the services of the Net at any time, anywhere. PADs filled all the niches that had before been held by portable telephones, gaming devices, hard-copy books, portable televisions, newspapers, and many other older technologies. As a result, hardly anyone publishes anything on paper any more. It's just too expensive since everyone from my little brother in kindergarten all the way to my great granny has a PAD.

Almost no one thinks about the Net when they think about what comes over their PADs, though. Mostly, when people talk about the Net, they're talking about jacking in.

Used to be the only way people ever interfaced with computers was by typing on a keyboard (and Granddad tells me that his dad used to use cards with little holes in them, but I really don't understand how that worked at all). In time, the mouse was invented, and later voice tech came around, but all of these things were way too slow for some people. A man named Dr. Lang decided that the best way to interface with the computer was to send his thoughts directly into the computer, and for the computer to directly send its output to his brain. Some pages say that Dr. Lang's experiments killed 4 people and left more than a dozen in a permanent coma, but others say those are merely anti-progress lies and exaggerations.

Finally, in about 2012, he perfected the jack, and it was immediately a huge success. Early on, the jack required several risky surgeries, requiring the temporary removal of 75% of the skull, so that probes could be placed in different parts of the brain. Today the procedure is performed so often that it's very routine. A 5 mm hole is drilled behind the ear (they say they put it there so that it doesn't look bad), and extremely small auto-surgeons carry the necessary probes through that hole to where they need to go in the brain. A small amount of electronics is left around the hole, everything's cleaned up, and the next day, the patient is ready to experience full immersion.

One of Dr. Lang's early developments was the "squid" (I'm told the name comes from several old pieces of fiction that described similar devices), which allowed reading brain activity and playback of recorded experiences, but since this was not his goal, Dr. Lang considered it merely a trivial step toward his final goal. The squid was used for pre-surgery brain examinations in the early surgery days, and it was a couple years before one of the surgeons realized the possibilities of the device. Nowadays, the squid has been simplified to a simple cap with a single cable running from it, so people who don't want a hole in their head can use it instead.

There are two kinds of immersion available, full and partial. Full immersion is what you get with a jack, and partial immersion is what you get with a squid. In partial immersion, full experiences are available, it's just like you've gone to a whole other place and get to experience what's going on, but you don't have any say as to what's happening or what you do. It's like riding along in someone else's body. If you concentrate really hard, you can operate a keyboard while this is happening, allowing for a little bit of an interactive experience. People who can't afford jacks often use this method to use the Net, but because of the keyboard, they're considered to be really slow. Partial immersion, however, is almost completely safe.

Full immersion allows you to completely enter the Net, you experience everything in the computer as if it's happening to you, and you are able to affect other things in the computer. While under full immersion, a person's external senses are completely switched off, and it is impossible to communicate with them without jacking in. This completely interactive experience takes place at what they call the speed of thought. It's slightly faster than the real world, allowing for very strange time experience difference during long periods of immersion. A person can wake up, jack in, feel like they've spent an entire day in the Net, and be back in the real world in time for an early lunch. All of this is really wonderful, and it has changed our world, I think for the better, but it is not without its dangers.

There are two main concerns when using immersion: addiction and dump shock. Of these, addiction is probably the worse of the two.

According to Dr. Lindemulder, the absolute and utter escapism that immersion allows naturally leads to addiction. Under immersion, you can be whatever you choose to be, and you can do whatever you want to do, with no "real" consequences. This sort of freedom is so enticing that people have been known to spend days on end under immersion. It is much more common under partial immersion, mostly because a squid is a lot cheaper than an actual jack, and therefore a lot easier to acquire. An entire culture has evolved around this addiction. Addicts frequently have shaved heads (they claim they get a better signal from the squid that way, despite studies to the contrary) and are usually either really skinny or really fat, depending on their genetics and the quality of food they eat when they finally wake up from their dream world. The most ambitious "squidheads" (or "Netheads" or "Wire Junkies", etc.) aspire to get a real jack so they can get the ultimate interactive experience, doing odd jobs when they can manage to stay away from the squid and scrimping and saving until they can have enough to get a jack.

Because the outside senses are only mostly masked while under partial immersion, addicts are usually forced by hunger pangs to drop out of the Net every 10-12 hours to eat something. Unfortunately, those with a jack have their external senses completely switched off, so without some sort of external timekeeping method, or some sort of nutrition monitor or the like, many Net addicts have been known to die from lack of water, all the while enjoying the blissful escapism of the Net.

This, of course, all makes dump shock sound like no big thing, but people say it can really ruin your day. Normally, when someone jacks in, it takes a few seconds to get used to his or her surroundings and they can move on from there. Similarly, when they want to leave the Net, it takes a few seconds to close everything down and exit peacefully. If their connection to the Net is disrupted, either by someone yanking their jack plug out, or because something else on the Net caused them to dump out, they can suffer from dump shock. Usually, this consists of a minute or more of nausea and disorientation. Seems small next to the addiction problems, but any time it ever happens to my older sister, she winds up puking and swearing a lot. While my older sister is certainly not so bad off to be called addicted, it is the pastime of her generation. Our parents had the web, and their parents had television, and now this is our generation's medium. I'm too young to get a jack yet, but my sister has let me use a squid to experience what she sees in the Net before, and I can't wait until I'm 16. Daddy's promised me then I can get a jack just like Rachel did.

On the times when I've gone into the Net along with Rachel ("riding piggyback" they call it, I wear the squid and experience what she's experiencing, but she calls all the shots), she's taken me to some really neat places. The Net looks just like real life, but idealized. Since actual construction restrictions don't matter, buildings in the Net are built in all shapes and sizes. I've seen areas modeled after Ancient Rome, Victorian England, 1950s Illinois, and even someplace so surreal that it had buildings that would never stand up in real life, everything built at odd angles and such. That last place made my head hurt. Rachel says that's pretty common, and that people tend to stick with things that are anchored firmly in reality, so that people don't have a problem adjusting to the new environment. In the Net, I've visited a zoo that consisted entirely of animals that never existed in the real world, but were instead ripped from various pieces of classic fiction. I loved that zoo. I could spend days there looking at the dragons, the unicorns, the thundra beasts, the dewbacks, and all the rest ... I can't wait until I get my jack.