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A sysop’s work is never done: cleaning out cyberclosets is a thankless job

by Tom Dworetzky

I was at Land Oh’s, the sleepy oceanfront cafe and sushi bar south of the sewage processing plant, when in walks Flash, the system operator. The sysop slumps down, calls Oh for a double latte, bottled water, and tuna sashimi, pops a vita-celerator, and sighs deeply

“Want to talk about it?” I ask. “I’m a good ear.”

“I know you make scratch from selling tales out of school. Just change my name,” she says, “and buy me lunch.”

Flash hit this .com two days ago and clicked forum to forum looking for someone to let her drop code for the night and houseclean. But the forums in the brightly lit, high-priority part of town were flaming, and one after another they told her, “Sorry, we’re full. Try next door.” In the meantime her list of bug fixes was going out of RAM--the to-do list from hell.

Got to find a place to partake and do some work, or I’m gonna blow my partition, overrun my array boundaries, and crash, she’d thought. And a sysop who crashed while out on the net was gone forever; just so much shattered code splattered on a piece of bad memory waiting for the garbage collector to pick up, readdress, and recycle as available.

She’d worked the town forums and there was nothing for her there. The reveling cyberforms had laughed when she’d explained she had work, not just some need to chat, or Vsex, for God’s sake. No, they didn’t give a damn. Finally she wandered the Vworld map out of the town. There was one last lone light halfway up the mountain above the valley Maybe someone there had a few cycles to spare, at least room at the forum for another log on.

The two old cyberforms who answered the door looked at her and said nothing to each other. They had met in a virtual forum at the end of the infoexpressway almost 20 years ago. They had dreams of cyberglory. At first many joined the forum. They came to lead the talks and gathered volumes of E-mail that almost overwhelmed them. They would go for runs together for 24 and 36 hours, talking on the forum, speaking with each participant. But over time these interactions had faded, until finally they had only each other to talk, to. The net had passed them by They’d lost the membership in their forum. Mail stopped arriving. In the end they even gave up maintaining their interface.

Today no one talks, but appears in telepathic-holographic form projected directly into the minds of others on the forum. But the two old cyberforms lacked the baud and software to keep up with this. And so others drifted away from them.

Now into their intertwined nirvana came this dark shimmering form with a voice made of gravel and bits. Low and mechanical, unfailingly polite, Flash identified herself as the sysop and inquired if there was any space on the forum. Offering their meager software and the few priority credits they’d saved, they helped her jack onto the net at full power.

“Too many, people want too much of my time,” Flash said. “I’m flamed, totally. People are cyberpigs, leaving old backups and threads no one cares about. We’re always compressed. That’s why I’m here. If we don’t make space in this sector ASAP, the whole thing is going down. Let’s see what we’ve got then . . .” And with this, Flash brought up the usage map of the valley Forums all over town were churning with interaction. Only the little forum in which Flash now rested was dim and low. She started closing down forums, turning swatches of the virtual valley and its inhabitants into available memory. “It’s been just the two of you in this forum for how long now? Ten, maybe twenty flops? That’s a long time to let you have this space.”

“Must we leave each other?” asked the forms.

“You two cut me a break,” said Flash, initiating logoff. “If you ever dare to look each other up, here’re the addresses of your physical realities.” They hadn’t moved, not looking at each other, by the time the sysop finished logoff.

“Not exactly street legal, what you did out there,” I said to her

“Make room; no questions,” she replied. “Still, I can’t say whether they were who they seemed to each other or not. Everyone’s whatever they want on the net.”

Shifting in my chair, I spotted Oh coming out the door, heading our way. “Some favor,” I think. But I didn’t tell Flash; she was digging into her sashimi, and she was pooped.