Chat Line

"The future is already rooted in the present...it has happened..."

Spoken by Merlin in Excalibur

This work of fiction is structured in "episodes." Meetings take place in cyberspace, a medium, undreamed of until only a few years ago. The Internet is now so accessible that it constitutes a worldwide cultural phenomenon in its own right. Can the Internet be a surrogate for happiness? These episodes offer opportunities for reflection.

Chaste yet depraved. Passionate and ice-cold. Instructive yet foreboding. A now elusive, now indolent group of individuals moves and observes us from the cover of the names under which they present themselves to the rest of the world: Venus, a twenty-one year old cyber-siren from Michigan, whose naked thighs become the story itself under the dazzling shafts of light emitted by her monitor; Wheelchair, a would-be hacker from Hungary, wheelchair-bound after a road accident, constructs, through a channel for the disabled, an unexpected new life for himself and for someone else; Captain, a young Greek, obsessed equally by the imminence of history and military uniforms is the victim of a spiral of violence he creates to escape his dreary routine; and Wolf, an inscrutable minstrel of the chat lines is on the point of understanding a truth suspended halfway between virtual and real events.

The interplay of dialogue with the syntax of a language penned and punctuated by the imperious rush of the computer keyboard enables a new culture of the written word. The computer reveals itself to be a modern-day accomplice to men and women using the Internet to claim the sublime pleasure of seduction and to take a wild gamble on impossible truths and fate-confounding fictions.