Wednesday, October 2, 1991
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, Massachusetts, Earth

Fuller Laboratories, the computer science building, was the newest facility on the WPI campus. A curiously designed structure built into the side of one of the city of Worcester's several hills, it was ostensibly three stories tall, but it demonstrated its quirkiness by having entrances on three floors, none of which was the "first". On one side, its second floor was at street level; on the other, the basement. Around the corner, the loading dock actually opened to a subbasement.

Because it had a street-level entrance, the "basement" was finished like the rest of the building, in the sort of neo-McDonald's/lobby-of-the-Marriott style that was all the rage in new college building construction at the time. Only the subbasement had the proper industrial basement feel to it, with its plain tile floors, narrow halls, painted cinderblock walls, and dim little side rooms. Much of the space was given over to storage - storage of old computers, storage of replacement parts, storage of toilet paper, storage of the habitually unpresentable CS department maintenance guys.

In the five weeks or so he'd been on campus, freshman computer science student Ben Hutchins, who was rapidly coming to be known by his peers as "Gryphon" thanks to his username on the campus computer systems, had explored most of the back corridors and maintenance spaces of WPI's most byzantine building. It beat trudging back across campus to his tiny single room in the upper left corner of Morgan Hall. It certainly beat eating the food in the Morgan Hall dining commons. He'd made a few discoveries so far. The main one was that most of the doors down here were locked. Another was that there were a couple that weren't, and those were computer labs.

Well, "labs"; WPI called any room with a few computers in it a lab, up to and including the "Advanced Document Preparation Lab" up in the basement, which was really just a place for people who didn't have their own printers to go print out term papers from some gruesomely abused IBM PS/2s. One of the subbasement labs was the same kind of deal, except without the printers. The other, though... the other was interesting. It was full of old Digital Equipment terminals that the school didn't want sitting out in plain view any more - VT100s, one giant clunky VT120, some early-model VT220s, all with their beige plastic casings turning slowly yellow with age. It showed up on the campus network map as "cslantronix", presumably because the terminals were all connected to an equally ancient LANtronix comm server.

CSLANtronix was one of Gryphon's favorite labs for the simple reason that not many people ever used it - hell, not many people even knew it was there. You couldn't do anything with fancy graphics there, or print anything, but if all you wanted to do was check your mail, read some news, play around with a programming assignment, or shoot the breeze with whatever other gweepers might be on the system, it was hard to beat.

At around lunchtime, he ran out of things to do and had just about psyched himself up for the trip back to Morgan and the grim provender that awaited there. Resigned to his fate, he logged off, got up, and left the room. As he did, it occurred to him that turning left rather than right upon leaving the room would take him toward the corner of the building closest to Morgan Hall. If there was a stairway over there, he might be able to at least bypass the elevator ride and the trudge through the CCC lobby.

So he turned left and went around the corner. The cinderblock hallway was dimly lit from here on, and alas, there didn't seem to be a staircase, just a blank dead end. Sighing, he turned back - then stopped. On the wall he'd just passed there was a door he hadn't noticed before. The way the corner was arranged, it could only open into CSLANtronix, at a right angle from the main hall entrance, but in all the times he'd been in the lab, he'd never seen any other way in. The door looked a little odd, too. It was the same kind of door as all the others down here, a plain wood-veneered steel-core affair in a grey metal frame, with an L-shaped handle instead of a doorknob, but something about it looked... off. It was too perfect, too smooth-looking. Like a trompe l'oeil painting of a door.

Maybe that's what it is, Gryphon thought. He felt vaguely foolish reaching for the handle, half-expecting his fingers to touch a clever perspective painting instead of an actual locking device - but there was indeed a handle there, and it turned easily. The door swung open without a sound. Beyond, there was only darkness.

Gryphon blinked at this for a moment, then went around the corner and looked into CSLANtronix. Just as he had remembered it, there was no other door. Even if he'd managed to miss one before, it'd certainly be obvious now that it was standing open. What was more, it wasn't dark in there.

Confounded, he went back to the mysterious door, which still stood open on an impossible dark space.

... sure, okay, he thought, and went inside.

His footsteps echoed oddly, giving him the impression of a large room, but even with light coming in from the hallway behind him, he could see nothing.

"Hello?" he said.

As if in response, the door swung shut again.

"Wha - ?" he said, turning, but before he could even get turned around, light suddenly filled the space around him, almost stunning him after the darkness.

Slowly, Gryphon got his bearings again and looked around. It took him a few moments to recognize what he was looking at; it was a familiar enough sight, but being presented in such a radically new way that it just didn't click at first. He was, in effect, standing in the login screen of a DECstation, the anonymous grey stippled backdrop magnified and warped into a sort of mindbending moiré pattern by the three-dimensional effect, and hovering in the air in front of him was the familiar login dialogue box, username and password blanks topped with the station's hostname, all blown up to absurd billboard-like proportions. Below it, at hand level, hovered a VT100 keyboard connected to nothing.

"8thdimension," he read, then snorted with a half-contained laugh in spite of himself. Well, at least it fits the CCC naming convention, he thought.

Then, I wonder if I can log in?

So he tried. For a moment, it seemed like nothing was going to happen; then everything went blank again for a moment. Windows started appearing, floating in midair. The background changed to a tiled mosaic of the GweepCo circular G, green on black. A huge pair of cartoon eyes appeared in the corner, glaring down at Gryphon, moving to keep watching him as he stepped back from one of the several giant terminal windows.

Okay, he remarked internally. Memo to self: xeyes is kind of creepy when you're on this side of the screen.

With the background a little more regular, he could get a sense of how big the space was; the corners, where the image bent to conform to the shape, showed it to be a cube that was maybe 50 feet on a side. Much too big to have gone unnoticed inside Fuller Labs, even if the evidence of the door-that-did-not-lead-into-CSLANtronix wasn't enough.

"A totally virtual workspace. ... Huh! Hell of an MQP for somebody," Gryphon observed aloud to himself.

Then, surrounded by a phenomenon that every sense and instinct in his body told him was a patent impossibility, he did the only thing he could do.

Being a gweeper, he gwept.

It was surprisingly easy to get used to the interface. The HoloDECstation (as he immediately dubbed it) seemed to be partially thought-controlled, or at least to possess a well-advanced Do What I Meant interface; one merely pointed to windows and dragged them where one wanted them. Input from the keyboard went into whatever window one was looking at when one typed. Before long, Gryphon was in the zone, rocking along on a programming-class project he had despaired of getting his head around whenever he'd attempted it at the console of a regular computer. Hours passed unnoticed. Outside, the sun went down. His regular afternoon and evening haunts went unhaunted.

Gryphon would never be certain exactly what he'd done wrong. A normally accurate typist, he went so fast that when he did miscue, it often led to a cascade failure, a sort of train wreck of the fingers, as his recognition of the mistake lagged behind its consequences. In some environments - like emacs, with its vast array of bucky commands and unknowable hotkeys - this could occasionally lead to dramatic and impressive failures of intent. It was when he was trying to compile his programming assignment, he thought, but beyond that he could never reconstruct the event in enough detail to know for certain what went wrong.

All he knew was that an error message flashed onto the shell window he was using, there and gone too fast to be fully comprehended, and pow, everything went nuts. Things started crashing, the color map skewed into territory unintelligible to the human visual cortex, even gravity felt like it was starting to come away from its moorings. This time the error messages spilling down the shell window stayed long enough for Gryphon to read them.

cluless: panic: item not found
resetting device /dev/reality
cluless: panic: does not match
resetting to last known good
cluless: panic: last known good not found
cluless: panic: quadruple panic
cluless: panic: too many panics

He had no idea what any of that meant, but he had the distinct sense, as things shook and blurred and warped around him, that none of it could be good. He looked at his other windows, but none of them seemed able to offer any help. Two blank shells, a network traffic graph, a directory listing of part of the student-run Japanese animation FTP site... nothing of any use there.

A dialogue box popped into existence in front of the last window, its edges fuzzed with static. Gryphon was a little dismayed to see that, instead of an exclamation point or a bomb or even - strange as it would've been to see in a UNIX environment - the Sad Mac, the graphic icon in the corner appeared to be an exploding galaxy.

Gryphon had no idea what that meant, but it certainly sounded bad. He wasn't entirely sure it was OK, but since that was the only button and the universe seemed to be ending, he hit it.

As if in retaliation, the universe hit him back.

Blackness.



Thursday, October 3, 1991
Morgan Hall, Room 401

"Huh!" Gryphon remarked, springing awake and nearly propelling himself clean out of bed. Only his zipped-up sleeping bag (when, after this year, would he ever need Extra Long Twin sheets again? Efficiency, we must have efficiency) kept him from jumping fully up. As it was, it tangled him up pretty effectively, causing him to lurch sideways and end up on the floor.

"Ow," he remarked, then disentangled himself. Oh well, he thought, at least it's a single room. Nobody saw me do that...

He felt vaguely out of sorts as he trudged down the hall to the communal bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. For one thing, he couldn't remember what he'd done the night before, which was odd. Not so unusual for a lot of college students, he supposed, but since he didn't drink on the weekends, let alone Wednesday nights, he didn't think it could bode well. For another, everything just felt... strange, like the whole universe was just slightly off-axis.

Shaking his head, he went back to his room, dressed, made sure he had the right notebooks and junk in his backpack for the day's classes, and went downstairs. His course took him through the Wailing Door at the bottom of the dorm's north staircase, past the Snacktron and the back door into the DAKA kitchen (lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate), and into the Wedge. Nothing out of the ordinary here. At this hour of the day, there wasn't anybody around; the usual crowd was either asleep or in class. On a normal day, Gryphon would've been too. As it was, he had a couple of hours to kill before his first class.

He considered going to the gweepery out in the Lower Wedge entrance hall, but decided against it. For some reason, logging in just didn't appeal right now. He sat down in one of the usual Wedge booths, the mid-sized ones facing the Quad, and dug around in his pack for something to read. After a few moments' rummaging, he came up with a Battletech novel.

That's odd, he thought. I could have sworn I left these at home, and all I had here was... what?

He couldn't remember what he'd been expecting instead, and after a moment, the feeling faded and slipped away, like the memory of a dream on waking. Shrugging, he opened the book and started reading.

"Hey," a voice interrupted after a while. "Don't you have class?"

Gryphon looked at his watch. He'd lost track of time. It was, indeed, five minutes past the beginning of his 10 o'clock class.

"Bah," he said. "That's all I need is to walk into that class late. Better not to go at all."

"Jesus, Ben," his interlocutor grumbled. "You've been here for five weeks and you're blowing it already. Mom and Dad aren't paying 25 grand for you to sit in the Wedge and read books about board games."

Gryphon put down the book and eyed the person badgering him suspiciously. This was a girl about his own age, dressed in a blue windbreaker over a brisk and businesslike blouse and skirt. She had shoulder-length hair about the same color as his own and a stern expression behind aviator-framed glasses.

"... And you are?" he asked, but that only seemed to annoy her further.

"That's a new tactic," she said dismissively. "What's the thought process there? 'If I pretend I don't know my sister, she'll go away'?"

Gryphon blinked. "Since when have I had a sister?"

Putting her fists on her hips, the girl scowled at him. "Since about five minutes after you were born? What the hell is your problem?"

He opened his mouth to make some smartass reply about how, if that were the case, he figured he might remember something about it, when a sudden stabbing pain lanced through his temples, making him wince and cover his eyes.

The pain passed as suddenly as it struck; he lowered his hands, shaking his head, and said slowly, "... Uh... yeah. Whoa. Okay, that was weird." Looking up at his sister, he added, "Sorry, Vanessa. I don't know what... I feel a little... strange."

Vanessa snorted and sat down in the corner of the booth, folding her arms. "Stranger than usual," she qualified for him. "What time did you get to sleep last night? You didn't show up for dinner, nobody saw you all night. What were you doing?"

"I was... I was in Fuller," Gryphon said, as if that fact were just coming back to him. "Working on... my programming assignment."

"Well, that's something," Vanessa started to say, but before she could elaborate, he had bolted to his feet and grabbed her wrist.

"I remember!" he said. "Come on! You have to see this!"

"What? What are you - ow! Hold up! Jeez!"

He practically dragged her across campus, diving through the traffic on West Street like it was some kind of video game, making for Fuller Labs at something just short of a dead run. Eschewing the elevator, he led her all the way down the endless-seeming stairs that went straight down the side of the building's multi-level lecture hall, then down the side hallway leading to the fire stairs to the subbasement.

"Why are we going to CSLANtronix?" Vanessa wondered as Gryphon half-dragged her down the hall. "You know I don't like it in there."

"We're not. You'll see. It's awesome." He passed the door to CSLANtronix, rounded the corner, turned her to face the wall, and gestured grandly. "Behold!"

Vanessa beheld, then turned to her brother, deadpan.

"Wow," she said. "A wall. Outstanding."

Gryphon blinked, his expression of triumph collapsing into dismay. "What?! No! This wasn't here! There was a door!" Feeling the moment slipping away, the part of his brain he could never quite control automatically went for the movie reference. "Some kind of temple! I heard a voice say 'Zuul'!"

Vanessa looked at him as though he had two heads, both of them very small and empty. For a moment she was at a complete loss for words.

Then she said, "I cannot believe I shared a womb with you," turned, and walked away.

Gryphon stared at the blank wall where the HoloDECstation had been for several minutes, then shook his head and sighed.

Guess I better start looking for someone's closet to live in, he told himself glumly.