What is the edge? ''The edge is the imaginary or imposed limit beyond which you're not supposed to go, says Russel. Where you'll get yourself really hurt. Pushing or testing the boundaries. Usually we find out the boundaries aren't really there. It's matter of putting yourself through the test of your own fear.''
Ron and Russel's comfortable suburban upbringing offered them few opportunities to test their tolerance for fear. The boys were forced to create their own edge in the form of behavioral games, so that they could experience darker, scarier realities. These edge games ranged from stealing things from school and playing elaborate hoaxes on teachers to assuming new identities and living in these invented roles for weeks at a time. Once, after taking LSD, Ron, Russel, and their friend Alan went to the mall to play an edge game they called ''space pirates.'' Ron and Russel played interdimensional travelers, and Alan, who was temporarily estranged from them for social reasons, played a CIA-like spy trying to catch them. By the end of the acid trip and the game, Alan was crying hysterically in his mother's kitchen, and the Post brothers had to decide "whether we were going to help Alan get himself back together from this and rebuild things, or let him crumble into the kitchen floor and become permanently alienated.''
Unlike the western border of the continent of Amarantis, to Russel and Ron the edge is no fantasy. Even Sarah Drew's abortion on acid could be called an edge game. The consequences of playing too close can be extremely real and painful. Ron spends as much time as possible on the edge, but he takes the risks seriously. ''If you fuck up on the edge, you die. Edge games involve real risk. Physical or even legal risk. Try this: Take a subway or a city street, walk around, and make eye contact with everyone you meet, and stare them down. See how far you can take it. You'll come up to someone who won't look away.''
Part of the training is to incorporate these lessons into daily life. All of life is seen as a fantasy role-playing game in which the stakes are physically real but the lessons go beyond physical reality. Unlike the characters of a cyberpunk book, human beings are not limited to their original programming. Instead, born gamers, humans have the ability to adopt new skills, attitudes, and agendas. They just need to be aware of the rules of designer reality in order to do so. Fantasy role-playing and playing edge games in real life are ways of developing a flexible character profile that can adapt to many kinds of situations. As Ron explains: ''The object in role-playing games is playing with characters whose traits you might want to bring into your own life. You can pick up their most useful traits, and discard their unuseful ones from yourself.'' One consciously chooses his own character traits in order to become a designer being.
Ron slowly slips into the Zen-master tone he probably uses with his students at the dojo. As the gamemaster, too, he serves as a psychologist and spiritual teacher, rewarding and punishing players' behaviors, creating situations that challenge their particular weaknesses, and counseling them on life strategies. Like a guided visualization or the ultimate group therapy, a gaming session is psychodramatic. Moreover, adopting this as a life strategy leads gamers to very cyberian conclusions about human existence.
''I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game,'' Ron says, waxing Jungian. "The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four-dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how seriously we take it, or how serious its consequences are.''
Ron's wife of just two weeks looks over at him, a little concerned. He qualifies his flippant take on designer reality: ''To play with something is not necessarily to trivialize it. Anything you do in your life is a role-playing game. The soul does not know language – any personality or language we use for thinking is essentially taking on a role.''
To Ron, basically everything on the explicate order is a game – arbitrarily arranged and decided. Ron and Russel have adopted the cyberian literary paradigm into real life. Fantasy role-playing served as a bridge between the stories of cyberpunk and the reality of lives in Cyberia. They reject duality wholesale, seeing reality instead as a free-flowing set of interpretations.
Again, though, like surfers, they do not see themselves as working against anything. They do not want to destroy the system of games and role-playing that defines the human experience. They want only to become more fully conscious of the system itself.
Ron admits that they may have an occasional brush with the law, but, ''we're not rebels. There's nothing to rebel against. The world is a playground. You just make up what to play today.''
These people don't just trip, translate, and download. They live with a cyberian awareness full-time. Unlike earlier thinkers, who enjoyed philosophizing that life is a series of equations (mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's observation that ''understanding is the a-perception of patterns as such''), or Terence McKenna, who can experience "visual language'' while on DMT, Ron guides his moment-to-moment existence by these principles.
''I'm aware that time is an illusion and that everything happens at once.'' Ron puts his arm around his young wife, who tries not to take her husband too seriously. "I've got to perceive by making things into a pattern or a language. But I can choose which pattern I'm going to observe.''
Role-playing and edge games are yet another way to download the datastream accessed through shamanic journeys and DMT trips. But instead of moving into a completely unfiltered perception of this space and then integrating it piecemeal into normal consciousness, the gamer acknowledges the impossibility of experiencing reality without an interpretive grid, and chooses instead to gain full control over creation of those templates. Once all templates or characters become interchangeable, the gamer can ''infer'' reality, because he has the ability to see it from any point of view he chooses.
''The whole idea of gaming is to play different patterns and see which ones you like. I like playing the game where I live in a benevolent universe, where everything that happens to me is a lesson to help enlighten me further. I find that a productive game. But there are other games. Paranoia is a really good edge game. Or one can play predator: I live in a benevolent universe and I'm the other team.''
That's probably why society has begun to react against designer beings: They don't play by the rules. Cyberian art, literature, game-playing, and even club life are tolerated when they can be interpreted as passing entertainment or fringe behavior. Once the ethos of these fictional worlds trickles down into popular culture and human behavior, the threat of the cyberian imagination becomes real. And society, so far, is unwilling to cope with a reality that can be designed.
PART 5
Warfare in Cyberia: Ways and Memes
Chapter 16
Cracking the Ice
Like a prison escape in which the inmates crawl through the ventilation ducts toward freedom, rebels in Cyberia use the established pathways and networks of our postmodern society in unconventional ways and often toward subversive goals. Just as the American rail system created a society of hobos who understood the train schedule better than the conductors did, the hardwiring of our world through information and media networks has bred hackers capable of moving about the datasphere almost at will. The nets that were designed to hold people captive to the outworn modalities of a consumer society are made from the same fibers cyberians are now using in their attempt to climb out of what they see as a bottomless pit of economic strife, ecological disaster, intellectual bankruptcy, and moral oblivion.