Places

In both sensory and astral modes, a Web visitor employs her mind, not her body, in order to get results; because her traveling form is shaped entirely by consciousness, not matter, her meat means nothing here. You can be a standard-issue dungeon troll back in Meatspace yet look like Milla Jovovich’s hotter sister in the Web. Appearance, in the Digital Web, is most often whatever travelers want it to be.

Although holistic and Web-climbing visitors bring their physical selves into virtual space, the majority of people who spend time here remake themselves through the power of imagination. In truth, any traveler in virtual space can do the same thing – even physical bodies are made of information here, and information can be adjusted. Essentially, you can remix your appearance when you’re in the Web. All it takes is some imagination and – in all but the Web-climbing cases – a bit of computer skill.

Adopting small-“a” avatars called icons, netizens create the forms and faces they want to have. You could be an idealized version of yourself, a cartoon character, a puff of purple smoke, or whatever else you might want to become. It’s a lot like the video and computer games that let you customize your avatar to suit your tastes… and because so many netizens from the current generation grew up playing those games, the wild variety of older icons has given way, in most cases, to standardized arrays of customizable humanoid icons that look a lot like characters out of World of Woecraft, Rock Hero, or Grand Steal Auto. The graphics are better these days than they used to be, but the imagination quotient has dropped through the floor.

Thanks to Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, folks these days are used to the icon concept. Even Sleepers accept the idea of making a new self and identifying yourself as a Blood-Elf, Tauren, or badass war-panda. The powerful sense of identification between someone’s meat and her online persona has made it fairly easy for online gamers to project parts of their consciousness online. Thanks to popular media, it’s also easy

for them to imagine themselves as characters in a vast Matrix of virtual reality. In a perverse twist of fate, Technocratic toys have opened doorways of magical potential. Computers and the Internet have become indispensible elements of techno-culture, but that culture reverberates with magical – and magickal– ideas.

As I said, the Digital Web is a realm of pure consciousness. A traveler’s mind is her ultimate tool. A brawny, stupid dude is dead meat, so to speak, in this realm, whereas his nerdy Meatspace punching bag can become a virtual Terminator. In the Digital Web, wits and imagination, not agility and strength, make you all that you can be. No wonder it’s been the Otherworld of choice for geeky mages for the last quarter-century or so!

Like the Three Worlds, the Digital Web Zone is essentially infinite. Trying to map its ever-shifting expanse would be like trying to chart frost patterns on a window over the course of a winter – some spots last, most fade, and many of them overlap to form new patterns. That fractal comparison suits the Web as well; its reach is more like a cosmic god-net – a gleaming Indra’s Net in which each strand offers reflections of the others – than like any mortal geography.

That said, the Digital Web’s net-scape can be seen in three distinctly different forms:

• Virgin Web has yet to be set into form. Perceived as ghostly tendrils of uncanny pasta or cryptographic fog, such areas reflect the potential of virtual space. No matter how much the Web expands, there always seems to be virgin territory along its borders. According to theory, new users create new areas of Virgin Web because those newcomers have yet to feel they know its possibilities. So long as new folks join the Internet/ Digital Web experience, the theory goes, that Web will expand to accommodate them. If we ever reach a point at which everyone alive is online (an extremely unlikely event), then Virgin Web would probably disappear.

• Formatted Web springs up when someone claims Virgin Web. Spinning its potential into form, that Formatted Web becomes sectors (essentially websites) and conduits – corridors and teleportation pads that link those sectors together. The sectors themselves can be Free (for open access) or Restricted (with access closed except to certain protocols), with details as varied as the people who use them.

• Corrupted Web has been ruined by some disaster or abuse. Like a corrupted hard drive, such regions cannot be reformatted or employed – they can only be avoided. Avoiding them is a good idea, too. They’re extremely disturbing. In Corrupted Web, the net-scape skews or flickers, its original contours warped with nightmarish

surreality. Rooms become razored mazes; conduits become neon spaghetti. Nothing is permanent, safe, or reliable, and although that might sound like a fun place for a romp, a Corrupted Sector hosts vicious critters and a definite threat of de-resolution… a.k.a., digital death.