(Shadowrun) Target: Matrix

One thing I realized during the reading of Target: Matrix is that I have no idea how the internet works. I have a certain amount of familiarity with the experience of using it, in our real world, with our comparatively unsophisticated screen-based computer technology. But then I read something about accessing the local Seattle grid by visiting a virtual Space Needle and then selecting your ultimate destination by looking out one of the many windows that each show one of the various Seattle-based businesses in the form of distant landmarks . . . and I think, Is that how it really works? You know, behind the scenes? If I want to go to the website of a place headquartered in some distant location, is my computer sending messages up a geographical hierarchy until they reach the smallest network that contains both myself and my intended destination, whereupon they get passed back down the ladder to successively smaller and more specific networks until they reach the website I'm trying to access? It's all so seamless and automatic in real life, but I guess it must be a computer-to-computer relay with a small number of possible paths, where the bulk of the exchange happens between large internet service providers, each of which must have a physical location somewhere. 

And maybe it actually makes sense for Shadowrun's various matrix locations to have temporary or teleporting SANs (System Access Nodes) that only appear on particular local grids at specific times, and which savvy criminal hackers need to track down via their poorly articulated "computer skills." You want to access the semi-secret Shadowland data haven, it's not merely a matter of entering an address in to a browser, you have to manually perform all the tedious routing business. And even that will only get you as far the data haven's "killing jar" which is described as if it were a room with no exits where the system administrators can scan your hardware, run a background check, and potentially fry your computer (and brain) with hostile programs. But that could only work if Shadowrun's matrix works by actually transferring your consciousness to distant computers. If there's something more substantial being exchanged, above and beyond a series of encoded instructions, where Shadowland is telling your cyberdeck how to render its environment and your cyberdeck is telling Shadowland what operations you want to perform.

It's probably best not to think about it. The matrix is all about sending your brain on a little trip and never mind that the virtual reality form-factor doesn't really add anything to about 90% of the suggested use cases. You want to look up a particular piece of information and instead of just typing your question into a search bar, you have to wander through the streets of a virtual city or explore a haunted forest where everything is expressed as a mythological metaphor. And maybe this is faster in practice, due to the matrix operating at a far higher speed than meat-space, but maybe you could get even faster than that by just having your thoughts be the search bar and then the information comes to you?

But is that as interesting, narratively? You know, for the purposes of a role-playing game. Would I rather have a book of "locations," including fantastic architecture and human adversaries or would I prefer a book describing a series of blandly functional drop-down menus?

I think it's tempting fate to say, "the menus," because then someone might actually give it to me and I'd be obligated to read it. So I'll say, instead, that I liked the book best when the VR environments were an end in themselves. It was a hoot reading about the "Dawn of Atlantis" matrix game, with its "sprites, lizard men, and earth elementals." I'm not sure I entirely buy that high fantasy is a popular genre in the Shadowrun universe, but I do like the sly Earthdawn Easter Egg and I'm working on the theory that it's actually a canonical connection between the game lines. Some immortal from the previous age of magic got a job as a developer or consultant for this computer game and its seasonal metaplot is based on real events, possibly with some hidden agenda (maybe simulating the fall of Thera so as to make a planned Thera 2.0 more resilient?)

Overall, this was a decent enough book, but you have to spot it quite a bit re: the silliness of its basic premise. Actually, people will enjoy having elaborate virtual environments act as an intermediary between themselves and the work they want their computers to do. Not only that, but it will be more efficient than our boring old internet. That's the sort of world that must exist if you want to depict hacking as a thrilling activity where quick-witted rogues go on action-packed adventures.

Ukss Contribution: There's a bit in this book that is weirdly, specifically, a 2000-2006 period piece. People find these strange custom PDAs marked with a big red X. The PDA will send them messages asking for innocuous-seeming favors like "pick up this hitchhiker" or "take a picture of these particular pages from an occult book" (occult books are innocuous in the Shadowrun universe). And if you do it, you are "karmically rewarded" by other PDA-holding strangers doing small innocuous favors for you. 

Nowadays, this plot would focus on people with ordinary smart phones using a special app, but I like the idea of a network of strangers, none of whom can see the big picture, all doing a series of small-seeming favors for each other, blissfully unaware that the network would require some vast computational resources to work the way it appears to (because it doesn't answer requests, it anticipates future needs). I figure it's being driven by a strange intellect that is trying to butterfly-effect its wishes into the physical world because it's good at seeing chains of consequences but bad at understanding how things actually work.

Ukss is going to have something like that.