A man with an ink-stained shirt pocked had cornered Gemma Guimard. "So, I hear you're saying DOS is dead," he demanded. "What's the next operating system to replace it?" She smiled, touching him on the wrist. "You know, technology predictions are very difficult to make," she said. "I do them on an hourly basis. Come to my think-tank," she said. She gave him her new business card. Her think-tank was her old psychic's shop on Bleecker Street. She still counseled the occasional lovelorn fool, but she had gotten rid of the crystal balls and all the other mystic tschotchkas in the window. Replacing them, by felicity, was an old Tandy computer. She had dragged the old hulk off the street in a misguided hope it could help her itemize her credit-card bills, and although she could never get it to work it seemed to mesmerize people in the computer business. With its tiny built-in-screen and two floppy drives, since it had no memory on its own, it seemed to remind them of computers they had when they were children. "Come to my consultation office," Gemma said with a coaxing voice. "Or we could meet online. I'm setting up a lovely chatroom."

"You don't know what you're talking about," a man told Jason Jellyman. Jason had just been making a speech on how the Internet would end contagious disease, since people would be able to communicate without coming into contact or exchanging germy pieces of paper. Actually, he'd borrowed the idea from a piece in Wired magazine, and he thought for a second about insisting that it was Wired that didn't know what it was talking about. Instead he charged forth boldly. "But I have a RIGHT not to know what I'm talking about," he said. "The Internet gives me that right. Old-fashioned ideas of about who knows what they're talking about don't apply in the cyber-age. Anybody can speak, so anybody's an expert." "Excuse me," said a very short man, "but don't you publish Cyberswinger?" Jason nodded. "I'm the founder of the Internet Hair Advisor," the short man said. "It'll be a site people can go to talk about hair, and exchange hair advice." "How will it make money?" someone asked. "Well, we haven't figured that out yet," the man said. Jason drained his beer and went off to look for some pretzels. There were other hands in the room to shake, and long experience had taught him to drift away from a conversation before others drifted, annoyed, away from him.

Veda stood alone by the bar, drinking cheap wine out of a plastic cup. No one was talking to her. That was odd. Usually ugly men were more than willing to talk to a good-looking woman. There were plenty of ugly men here, all bragging about big disc drives and the power of their search engines. She looked at one man, and he looked away. She looked at another. He stared at her chest for a moment, and then looked away. Offended, she looked down at her own chest, and saw her name tag. She realized, suddenly, that it had nothing but her name on it. Everyone else's tag had the name of his company and sometimes his rank within it, so people could decide whether to look at him or look over his shoulder. She was headed back to the name tag table, determined to come up with something impressive to write on her tag despite her unemployed status, when she ran into Frederic. "She's here," Frederic said. "I wasn't even sure she was a real person, but I saw her, and she is real, and she's here." "Who's here?" Veda asked him. "Porno Pam," he said in his little voice.

Jason Jellyman standing by bar, staring at the idle mirrored disco ball over his head, and wondering where those balls came from, and if there might be a story in that. "Excuse me," said a man with large glasses. "Aren't you Jason Jellyman?" Jason nodded, tipping his head back to get the last beer in the bottle. "I'm the inventor of the Internet Leaf Finder," said the man. "You can type in the characteristics of any leaf, and it'll find out what tree it belongs to. It's for amateur botanists. " "How will it make money?" Jason asked him. "It doesn't matter - we have investors who will give us money." He hesitated. "I'd really like it if you'd write about me in Cyberswinger," he said. Jason looked into the man's big glasses and he saw his own reflection, his suddenly much bigger reflection.

"Are you sure?" Veda asked. They were looking across the room at a woman with wigged masses of fairy-princess platinum hair and giant, seemingly inflated, red lips. That was above the neck. Below the neck, she wore a track suit. "That's definitely her," Frederic said. "What you have to do," said Veda, "is tell her you're starting a powerful search engine for the X-rated sites. After all, you know all of them." She had seen Frederic surf. "Tell her you like her site, and you're going to make it come out at the top of all the searches." Frederic shook his head, terrified. "Tell her," Veda said.

"Aren't you that man who publishes that magazine?" "Cyberswinger," said Jason, still glowing from his earlier encounter. "Cyberswinger." "I'm Billy Dose, and I represent the Fragrance Warehouse of Schenectady," he said. "We're going to sell perfume over the Internet." "But you can't smell it that way." "No, but you can see the bottle," Billy explained. "A lot of people buy perfume based on how the bottle looks." "That's stupid," said Jason. "We think it will be a big success," said Billy. He felt utterly helpless. He needed this job, having already alienated everyone in the print advertising sales business. Privately, he wasn't sure anyone would ever really be able to sell things over the Internet. "It'd be wonderful if you could write us up in Cyberswinger," Billy said. Jason grinned at him. He had it confirmed, now. People wanted to meet him now. He was no longer the beggar, but the begged. "Buy me a beer," Jason said.

Library of Congress Copyright TXu 875-975

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