The circuits Jo followed home were still fractured, still unsure, imitations of the zany route designated by the sysadmin map he had taken some four hours ago. Thoughts shuttled through him, concatenate, half sensible, occasionally making it up to his lips to form as syllables- some silent, some just audible through the city's persistent hum. What do I do now? came two or three times, and met with no reply. Then: Why doesn't the system know? And, when none of these questions met with an answer, all that was left was - Why? Why?

The morning's vision played uncomfortably through his body, struggled with its musculature: now and then a limb jerked out of turn, interceding in this barrage of thoughts as he gawped and gangled his way through human traffic. But the questions still came, unbidden and insistent. Punctured by each, the vision of that dead space in an empty and forgotten train station began to take on a new fragility. Just as the city's in/out gates ordained the correct path of Jo's body across its span, just as it offered resistance to his spasmodic deviations from that path, so the day demanded his story to be told in its own terms, demanded that its sublimity pass through the ligatures of its immanent rationality. So were the secrets of this space being talked out of hiding, emerging first as inchoate phonemes into the midday miasma, to bear themselves to the scrutiny of the world at large.

Under that scrutiny, with the last night's chemicals effervescing in his body and his awareness approaching parity with that of the city itself, not one aspect of the morning's spectacle held good. Doubts plagued the vision, and whatever the sysadmin might have contrived to reveal in it now appeared shot through by a growing sense of worthlessness, of banality. By the time his tortured route had taken him back to the womb of the Red Hole, Jo's vision was fractured; but still he clung to the skeins of it, hoped perhaps to resuscitate it over a couple of caps, with a couple of friends, inside. Stepping through the door he saw immediately that his chair was taken up with the long, sprawling, supine form of one of his punters, Slim: the man had clearly been there ever since Jo left last night. He was doggedly tapping time to the record deck in the corner, which, stuck on its last groove, was filling the room with bursts of white noise; phht, phht, phht; phht, phht, phht.

"All right mush," Slim grinned up at him from where he lay, "you look fucked." And when that met with no reply, "Heard about you getting your door banged down the other day. Bummer."

"I've seen it all, mate, I'm telling you," Jo returned eventually, and then, because Slim was looking comfortable, "get out of my chair. I've got to sit down." There was no argument. Somehow Slim's body slithered over the arm of the chair towards the floor, righted itself, and slouched into the adjacent one.

"There you go. No problem," the man said. And as if to demonstrate that there was no problem, he handed Jo enough money for a cap, and sat looking up at him expectantly. Jo handed over the little glass vial, and Slim did it straight away. "I won't stand on ceremony," he said with a knowing fatuity, snapped off the nipple and sucked up the vapour. Phht, Phht, Phht, went the record deck in the silence that ensued. Slim exhaled with a whoosh: "Where you been then?"

"Fucking let me tell you," began Jo, and related the morning's entire story, knowing as he did so that he was certainly putting it to death, but knowing too that he was dying to tell someone, anyone, who could help him kill the thing for good or resuscitate it properly. So no longer was it just bare phonemes glinting in the hard daylight: the 'dead space' became a narrative, bolstered by nods and grunts from Slim; out came the set of crumpled instructions, and the two talked over what Jo had seen ravenously, dissecting it piece by piece. Which punter traded the map in? Where did he get it from? What did it look like? What kind of drugs did you do in last night? And once they established, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the appalling quantity and absurd variety of drugs imbibed by Lo-Fi Jo the night before, both men conceded the final unverifiability of the whole experience.

"This is the problem," Slim pointed out unhappily, "weird shit does happen, but never when you're straight enough to decide whether it's real or not. You've got to.."
- "Go back there? I can't be fucking bothered. It took about four hours to get there last time."

"Well, I should go and talk to one of the minds about it, then," Slim returned. "Take the whole thing to the machine. You'll soon know if it means anything."

"How come?"

"Well they'll come banging your fucking door down again, innit?" laughed Slim, and Jo realised that what he was saying made some kind of sense. Talk to the machine, and If the bureaucrats came looking for his scrap of paper, he'd know that the vision was genuine, that it had some kind of worth. True, the dead space would have been destroyed, no-one else would be able to go there. But at least he'd know it was genuine.

That, then, was how Lo Fi Jo came, two days later, to be sitting in a booth at the council's consultation rooms, waving about his piece of paper and telling the face of a particularly dispassionate looking, because purely simulated, Ludwig Wittgenstein on the screen in front of him about his decomposing vision. He knew what he was doing here: trading in the existence of the 'dead space' for some answers from the network itself. He knew that the Wittgenstein was a transparent assemblage which, although it manufactured the illusion of identity, ran as a node within the system: all its information was passed through to the network at large. Thus Jo's confessional triggered, even as he spoke, the routines that would scrutinise his path through the city, discover the existence of the dead space and the blind-spot created by the sysadmin, and reduce the empty cavern to real-estate; knowing all this, he spoke on, completed his confession, waited for the machine's rejoinder.

"You have a question about this?" said the face on the screen after some time.
"Yeah," said Jo. "Like, what does it mean? Is it really an exit? That's what I'm here to ask you." There was a momentary pause, and then, with a rakish grin, the Wittgenstein said:

"You are asking about the significance of the gesture, its nature, and I'm inclined to answer you on those terms. You want to know if this is a genuine 'exit', as you put it. But consider how this notion of an exit gains its meaning: from the structure of this, the language of the city around you. This 'way out', this 'dead space' is meaningful only in the context of that which surrounds it; the terms of being 'outside' are always worked out against the picture of the world they seek to speak beyond. And isn't that the case here? For where has your exit led you except into a confrontation with the everyday?"
The Wittgenstein talked in this manner for a full hour, persuasively and passionately, convincing Jo moment by moment of the utter worthlessness of his vision, of its contingency on the structures of the city that it sought to deny bringing him to the realisation that had been gestating since his emergence into the sharp daylight that morning two days ago. "There is something amusing, is there not," the machine finished, unable to stop itself, "about your coming to something that only looks like Ludwig Wittgenstein to talk about something that only looks like an exit?" With that, it made a print out of its comments and bid him goodbye. In the full hour and ten minutes of conversation, the network had expended only a quarter of second of processing time: yet in that time, with the post-Tractatus Ludwig Wittgenstein as its mouthpiece, it had settled Lo-Fi Jo back into the consensus of the everyday. It had reduced his vision to smithereens.

But wasn't it, perhaps, worse still? What would Jo have thought if he had bothered to visit the dead space a month later, and found it still there, still operational, still passing unsuspecting citizens through its dank interior? He would have realised what the Wittgenstein, occluded as it was from some of the system's darker protocols, couldn't: that it was the network itself, in one of its higher accretions of identity, which created and maintained this space, and many others like it; the network that produced the maps signed 'sysadmin', the network that deposited those notes more or less randomly into the hands of the populace. And perhaps Jo would have asked, as he did on his path through town that morning, Why?, Why?, and eventually he might even have come to an answer. The network understood that, whatever the Wittgenstein might say, most visitors would perceive the dead space precisely as an exit, an incision into the continuity of the city. Did it not, then, manipulate these spaces to produce a myth which, passed from tongue to tongue, held up the simulation of a way out, which operated as a decoy to other, perhaps more dangerous, exits? Such an assertion could never be proved, it is true, and should be taken with the necessary pinch of salt; especially since it remains purely speculative: Lo Fi Jo never did go back to the tunnel, the system having convinced him of its uselessness, and his own logic of its demise. In his imagination, the dead space would remain, forever, merely the empty gesture of the sysadmin; damned by its partiality, a shot at something far fallen wide. All that remains to be said on the matter is that with Jo, or Jo's problematic take on reality - removed from the picture, the network's scattered myth making would certainly have proceeded unhindered. At the scene of the crime, things were going pretty much according to plan.

JJ.King [jamie@jamie.com]