However, it won't remain so for very long. Neal Stephenson, writing SnowCrash eight years after Gibson's Neuromancer was released, steps from the lightly striated surface_only iconographics of the Matrix, into the volumetric velocity of the Metaverse. The Metaverse is no longer simple forms as signals of place, it has a fully functioning architecture and urban design. The Matrix was essentially unpopulated, mostly software sporting a few cowboys. The Metaverse is fully populated with avatars, the real_world using interfaces like we currently use telephones. Its estates, businesses, hangouts, not purely a domain of software agents anymore. It is heavily striated. And the monorail encircles its globe_like shape, the deepest scar of all.
The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. [It] is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly
Like an equator the Street and its monorail encircle the earth. Greater Circles are lines_of_flight used by pilots as they are shorter routes than straight lines. The Midgard Serpent mythically encircles the earth, in an oroborian belt. The longest line, the infinity loop, most cultures have incorporated this sign of the self_emasculating snake.
There are 256 Express Ports on the street, evenly spaced around its circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Each of these intervals is further subdivided 256 times with Local Ports, spaced exactly a kilometer apart.
Milestones are Roman roadsigns, waymarking a route. Roman roads in Britain are straight, and marked. Many are believed to be LeyLines, energy fields striating the planet, nexusing in places of significance. The most famous ley_line, the E_line, is said to encircle the earth, and many have traced its path across much of its circumference, through the Cerne Abbas Giant and 12 other locations in the south of England, Mount Everest and Uluru among other significances. Like trade_routes and market_cities, leys can be thought of safe routes between points, therefore striations, often occupying high ground and nodal at summits or intersecting ridge lines. These place often have had standing_stones or monoliths placed there, not only a milestone, but defensively sound, a wall to sleep with your back up against. High points were also used for signal_fires, lighthouses, drum signals, and now trig_stations and EM broadcasts. Richard Long's walks quote these lines and between lines, criss_crossing the land. We carry a stone for the cairn on the hill ... but we no longer know who it was for .. it no longer matters.
... But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be reminded that from the point of view of some people, including Dr.X, all of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more natural and human was the ever turning way, where you could never see round the next corner, and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy meditation.p113
Another kind of the geomythic centre is the omphalos, the centre about which the world turns or navel of the world. Example of this are Uluru again, the Dome of Rock in Jerusalem, from which Mohammed ascended to Heaven, the Omphalos at Delphi, the Rock of Gibraltar.
The rhizome; organism, organ, a skin. At once one and many, homogeneous, heterogeneous. Belinda/Boda, the xcabbber with the xcabber_map tattooed on her body, a living embodiment of place and space, Manchester. And her [un]lover, Coyote, dog_human_plant hybrid, a fatality of the becoming of a new, plant map, the rhizomatic xcabber_map, Persephone .."she has made for herself a map of flowers, and she is every street, every root, every road and every branch of this tangled map." Miranda, a network of nanosites, mapping her gesture into the media_network, a constellation of 'sites.
Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white light. taken together, they formed a sort of three_dimensional constellation of Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the [nano]sites that had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network - a new bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph and vascular systems.
Miranda Redpath is about to become a ractor, and actor in interactive media broadcast on a global network. The society she lives in is sustained by the Feed, lines of nanotubes, routed through existent buildings and integrated into the newer extruded buildings, supplying raw materials in the form of atoms and simple molecules, to matter_compilers. This network mimics the media network and the behaviour of airborne nanomachines, mites, which communicate locally [with lidar, light radar] and are distributed globally, forming a plasma of aware_air. Later, Miranda will enter the tribe of the Drummers, a synthetic phyle of semi_conscious people whose bodies contain specific mites distributed through bodily contact. Each person forms a node in a massive parallel computing system, much like the internet could possibly become. Most objects and concepts within the Diamond Age share this rhizomatic form.
The fens, water and land, not_water and not_land, in constant negotiation. A void, empty and full at once. Malevich's void. "a landscape which of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing." Peat swells and shrinks in harmony with the flow and ebb of the tides. Sometimes navigable, oft_times opaque. Initially striated with natural rivers, bogs, coasts and islands, for the past millenium, humans have been attempting a smoothing, a reclamation. A complex of ditch and dyke, cutting, pump and sump. Areas have shifted from variegated to smooth, rivers straightened, fens drained. At the same time, they have become more heavily marked than ever they were. The Fens of Waterlands are a psychological and dream spaces of multiplicities and remembrance, labyrinthine and coalescing.
Along the Fenland tracks, across the Fenland dykes, by willow holts and sallow clumps, by paths and short-cuts, and plank-bridges known only to us, being children of the Fens.
Perhaps we are the children of the fens, or perhaps it will be the children of our children. Place is in constant flux, striating, smoothing, coding de_coding, de_zoned, re_zomed. We see structure where there is only language, and use language to ignore pattern. Destiny walks his garden path, reading from his book of all_days, knowing and un_knowing. We stumble through life, near-blindness, speculating on pathways that extend beyond the border of our lives. They are myriad in their meandering.