Faux-room

She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparant mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark.
The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living-room. A frame-grab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. She only knows Tarkovsky from stills, really, though she did once fall asleep during the screening of The Stalker, going under on an endless pan, the camera aimed straighted down, in close-up, at a puddle on a ruined mosaic floor. But she is not one of those maker's imagined influences. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut, Peckinpah... The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.
She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though ; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter. French footageheads have been unable to match it, in spite of countless hours recording pans across approximately similar scenery.
She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrack vacation, California, but when she opens his post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally.
She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.

hi Parkaboy. nt

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there. It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so conforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.

- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition