He ponders that possibility for a moment. ''Maybe people will want to take a year off, smoke some grass and watch TV. But then they'll get bored and they'll discover more and more of themselves.''
The boys and girls at Mondo have made a profession of quitting the work force, getting stoned, and sitting around talking like this. (Since my shared experience with the Mondo kids, publisher Queen Mu has worked to make the magazine more respectable. Most references to drugs are gone, and the original band of resident renegades – who Mu now calls ''groupees'' – has slowly been replaced by more traditional writers and editors as the magazine tries to compete with the tremendously successful Wired magazine. This strategy seems to have back fired, and having lost its founding contingent of diehard cyberians, Mondo 2000's days appear to be numbered. But, in its heyday, Mondo was as vibrant as "The Factory,'' Andy Warhol's loft/commune/film studio/drug den of 1960s New York City. Mondo the magazine and Mondo the social setting provided a forum for new ideas, fashion, music, and behavior.)
Like their counterparts in Warhol's New York, the kids I meet at this, the original wild-hearted Mondo 2000 have dedicated their lives to getting into altered states and them discussing fringe concepts. Their editorial decisions are made on the ''if it sounds interesting to us, then it'll be interesting to them'' philosophy, and their popularity has given them the authority to make a meme interesting to "them'' simply by putting it in print.
The entire clan found itself on the Mondo staff pretty much in the same way as Jas. Someone shows up at the door, talks the right talk, and he's in. The current posse numbers about twenty. At the center of this circus is R.U. Sirius. He's Cyberia's Gomez Addams, and he makes one wonder if he is a blood relation to the menagerie surrounding him or merely an eccentric voyeur. It's hard to say whether Sirius is the generator of Cyberia or its preeminent detached observer, or both. Maybe his success proves that the ultimate immersion in hyperspace is a self-styled metaparticipation, where one's surroundings, friends, and lovers are all part of the information matrix, and potential text for the next issue. While some social groups would condemn this way of treating one's intimates, the Mondoids thrive off it. They are human memes, and they depend on media recognition for their survival.
''We're living with most of our time absorbed in the media,'' Ken speculates on life in the media whirlwind. "Who we are is expressed by what we show to the world through media extensions. If you're not mentioned in the press, you don't exist on a certain level. You don't exist within the fabric of the Global Village unless you're communicating outwards.''
So, by that logic, Sirius decides what exists and what doesn't. He has editorial privilege over reality. ''Oppose it if you want,'' he tells me as we drive back from a Toon Town event to the Mondo house late one night, "but you're already existing in relation to the datastream like the polyp to the coral reef or the ant to the anthill or the bee to the beehive. There's just no getting away from it.'' And Sirius is Cyberia's genetic engineer, designing the reality of the media space through the selection of memes.
R.U. Sirius's saving grace – when he needs one to defend himself against those who say he's playing God – is that he doesn't choose the memes for his magazine with any conscious purpose or agenda. The reason he left Toon Town so early (before 2:00 A.M.) is that, in his opinion, they present their memes too dogmatically. ''Mark Heley and the house scene are a bit religious about what they're doing. Mondo 2000 doesn't have an ideology. The only thing we're pushing is freedom in this new territory. The only way to freedom is not to have an agenda. Protest is not a creative act, really.''
The memes that R.U. Sirius chooses for his magazine, though, are politically volatile issues: sex, drugs, revolutionary science, technology, philosophy, and rock and roll. Just putting these ideas into one publication is a declaration of an information war. Sirius claims that one fan of theirs, a technical consultant for the CIA and the NSA, always sees the magazine on the desks of agents and investigators. ''He told us `they all love you guys. They read you to try to figure out what's going on.' Why that's pretty pathetic. I told him we're just making it up.''
In spite of his lampoonish attitude, Sirius admits that his magazine reflects and promotes social change, even though it has no particular causes. ''We're not here to offer solutions to how to make the trains run on time. We're coming from a place of relative social irresponsibility, actually. But we're also offering vision and expansion to those who want it. We don't have to answer political questions. We just have to say `here we are.'''
And with that we arrive at the Mondo house. Sirius has a little trouble getting out of the car. ''I'm kicking brain drugs right now,'' he apologizes. "I was experiencing some back pain so I'm staying away from them, for now.'' Yet, he manages to round off his exit from the vehicle with a little flourish of his cape. He moves like a magician – slightly awkward magician – as if each action is not only the action but a presentation of that action, too. No meaning. Just showmanship.
As he walks the short footpath to house, he comes upon journalist Walter Kirn, who is urinating off the front porch into the bushes below.
''We have a bathroom, Walter.'' Sirius may be the only person in Cyberia who can deliver this line without sarcasm.
Walter apologizes quickly. ''This was actually part of an experiment,'' he says, zipping up, and thinking twice about offering his hand to shake. He proceeds to explain that he's been waiting to get in for almost an hour. He thought he saw movement inside, but no one answered the bell. Then he began to wait. And wait. Then he remembered something odd: "That whenever I take a piss, something unusual happens. It acts as a strange attractor in chaos math. When I introduce the seemingly random, odd action into the situation, the entire dynamical system changes. I don't really believe it, but it seems to work.''
Sirius stares at Kirn for a moment. This is not the same journalist who arrived in Berkeley last week. He's been converted.
''So you peed us here, I guess.''
Walter laughs at how ludicrous it all sounds. ''It was worth a try.''
''Apparently so,'' concludes Sirius, opening the door to the house with that strange hobbitlike grace of his.
Why no one heard Kirn's ringing and knocking will remain a mystery. About a dozen Mondoids sit chatting in the large, vaulted-ceiling living room. The cast includes Eric Gullichsen (the VR designer responsible for Sense8 – the first low-cost system), two performance artists, one of Tim Leary's assistants (Tim left earlier in the evening to rest for a lecture tomorrow), one member of an all-girl band called DeCuckoo, plus Sarah Drew, Jas Morgan, a few other members of the editorial staff, and a few people who'd like to be.
Queen Mu concocts coffee in the kitchen (hopefully strong enough to oust the most sedentary of couch potatoes from their cushions), as a guy who no one really knows sits at the table carefully reading the ingredients on the cans of Durk and Sandy mind foods that are strewn about. Back in the living room, the never-ending visionary exchange-cum-editorial meeting prattles on, inspiring, boring – abstract enough to confuse anyone whose brain chemistry profile doesn't match the rest of the room's at the moment, yet concrete enough to find its way onto the pages of the next issue, which still has a couple of openings. The VR designer might get his next project idea at the suggestion of a writer who'd like to cover the as-yet nonexistent ''what if ... ?'' technology. Or a performance artist might create a new piece based on an adaptation of the VR designer's hypothetical interactive video proposal. This is at once fun, spaced, intense, psychedelic, and, perhaps most of all, business.