Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon:. Zack Parsons

was that sort of moment that I always wish I had spent the time and money on those nunchaku lessons. And that I had brought my nunchakus.

      The room service cart arrived before I could roundhouse-kick Lonnie Saunders through one of the exterior windows.

      A skinny bald kid wheeled the room service cart up to the elegant table in the suite’s dining nook. He carefully arranged the champagne flutes in a semicircle around the centerpiece of a silver-topped dish of lobster tails. Bibs and condiments were provided on a separate tray.

      Lonnie tipped the kid well and then motioned me over to the table. He lifted the silver lid from the steaming lobster tails. I hate lobsters. I hate any crustacean. It’s the idea of eating what amounts to a giant sea bug that disgusts me. Normal bugs, fine, but I am not going to devour the guts of some oceangoing cockroach just because the government tells me it’s safe.

      I watched Lonnie lustily forking the fluffy white flesh from one of the lobsters. He would fork two or three butter-dipped bites into his mouth, chew for a few seconds, and then chase it down his throat with half a flute of mimosa.

      “Back in colonial days lobster was so cheap they banned feeding lobsters to inmates in coastal prisons,” I said, just to make small talk. “At the time it was thought to be similar to eating rats.”

      Lonnie slammed his fork down on the table and glared at me while he chewed and swallowed his current lump of crustacean meat. At length he warned me, “Don’t fucking do that, baby.”

      “What?”

      “Don’t bring that David Foster Wallace shit over here and ruin my lobster,” he said, and then pushed it away. “Rats? If only rats tasted like this. You’re a shitty brunch companion, Parsons.”

      It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that and it wouldn’t be the last.

      “I’m sorry!” I exclaimed, even though I wasn’t.

      “It’s all right, you’re just a clueless little baby. Let’s do this then. Let’s do some negotiating. What have you got?”

      “Well, I—”

      “Because I’ve got a contract that you signed, so keep that in mind when you make your demands. Think about that.”

      I did and I had. Lonnie’s suggestion about writing the book about the weirdos rather than the websites was actually pretty solid. Something along those lines had crossed my mind if, as a last resort, I was trapped into writing this infernal guide to the Internet.

      “I need a car,” I said.

      “No,” Lonnie said.

      “Just a rental,” I amended.

      “No,” Lonnie replied. “No car. No plane tickets. No gas allowance. If you need to go somewhere for this book you need to get there yourself.”

      “Recording equipment,” I said.

      Lonnie got up and walked into the bedroom. He returned with a Ritz-Carlton pen and pad.

      “There you go.” He slapped it down on the table. “What else?”

      “My hand, I—”

      “Hook or robot hand,” he said, and drained one of the flutes of mimosa. “Next.”

      “I get the feeling there isn’t going to be much give-and-take in this negotiation,” I said.

      “Yeah, you’re probably right,” Lonnie agreed. “Why don’t we call it a day? You let me finish my lobster and you go on and get started with your book. Sound good?”

      What a dick.

      “I need to get back to the hospital,” I said as I stood up.

      Something about the position of my arm and the way I was standing gave Lonnie Saunders a very mistaken impression about my body language. His hand shot out and grabbed mine in a powerful and friendly handshake.

      Blood exploded from the ruptured grocery bag and rained down on the mimosas and lobster tails. I let out a whimper and collapsed to my knees in agony.

      The flash of white hot pain I experienced in that moment proved to be cathartic. The choice was clarified by the pain. It was crystallized by the gore exploding out of my wounds.

      I would write the guide about the weirdos. I would write about the vores, and furries, and creeps who put themselves in fan artwork. I would endeavor to write the comprehensive travelogue and guide to the subcultures that make the Internet simultaneously wonderful and terrible. I would need to carefully observe and interview the people who have made those subcultures fascinating.

      It wouldn’t be a good guide to the Internet’s weirdos. It would be an awesome guide to the Internet’s weirdos.

      Before my adventure could begin I had to have a little talk with Doctor Lian about my robot hand.

      CHAPTER ONE

      The Matrix Retarded

      He’s intelligent, but an under-achiever; alienated from his parents; has few friends. Classic case for recruitment by the Soviets.

      —FBI Agent Nigan, War Games

      The Internet is a slippery creature that defies description and metaphor.

      Sure, the physical Internet can be defined. It can be described as routers and fiber optic lines, megabytes and gigabytes, bleeps and also bloops. That sort of description is too literal. By those rules you could claim a human is a bunch of meat and organs, but then a bucket filled with meat and organs also qualifies as human.

      It is the nature, the elusive essence, of the Internet that cannot be easily categorized. What the Internet means.

      Thousands of people with intellects vastly superior to mine have tried to describe the Internet. These are people with real college degrees, not the sort you buy for $49.99 from a “university” in a former Soviet state. Their degrees didn’t arrive in an envelope that smelled like salted fish and prominently featured a spelling of “master’s” that included a “k” and no vowels.

      Ted Stevens, the disgraced Republican Senator from Alaska, had a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA. That is an undergraduate degree and probably around ten IQ points on me. The brutal Darwinism of Alaskan politics ensures no fools ever hold office in that state. Yet, even a man as robustly intellectual as Senator Stevens once infamously warned of the Internet, “It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

      Thanks?

      William Gibson, one of my heroes, described the futuristic Internet of Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination” consisting of “lines of light ranged in the nospace of the mind.” Gibson’s neon-drenched cyberpunk prose always appealed to me, but that description of the Internet sounds like a bad ride on some spinning playground equipment after huffing glue.

      Gibson managed to come up with an extravagant and psychedelic version of dumb. For practical purposes the cyberspace portions of Neuromancer might as well have been a technical manual on how to send an e-mail written by Ted Stevens during a peyote-fueled vision quest. They definitely don’t get anyone any closer to understanding the reality of the Internet.

      The Internet is so slippery in large part because it is vast and ever-changing. Gibson might have come closest on the third try in Neuromancer when he referred to cyberspace as something of “unthinkable complexity.”

      Another nerd hero, racist horror author H. P. Lovecraft, used this technique frequently. When something was “too scary” or “too otherworldly” he would come right out and admit, “This monster is too scary and otherworldly for me to describe.” Lovecraft was dealing in impossible angles and colors from outer space.

      When a writer attempts to cover the topic of the Internet, he or she is dealing with an imaginary world distributed across millions of computers and created simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people. That