"It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven..." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am typing this from an island.

Meanwhile, we refer you to a somewhat unusual, partially fictitious, at times entrancing environment known to the denizens within as Gravity. In early 1992, before the Internet's heyday, before the commercialization of the World Wide Wow and the rise of America Ondisplay and the Microsin Network, before the publication of "Internet for Dummies, Losers, Morons, Jerks, Bastards, Fuckheads, and Money-Sucking Pigs," before WiReD plugged its collective tongue into the electric socket of our dreams and got high off the buzz we generated - before all of that, but not before ARPANET or DARPANET or NSFNET or "Wargames," Gravity reared its sudden head in ciberspazio, and my little world has never been quite the same.

On February 23, 1992, the following message was posted to several abUsenet newsgroups, notably alt.drugs, alt.slack, alt.cyberpunk, alt.magick, alt.desperation, and alt.alt:

From: The Genuflector
Date: 2/23/92, 23:23:23
Subject: May I request your presence

at a masquerade?

We have reason to believe, friends, that we are not being told the truth. The possibility that this civilization as we know it is itself the masquerade has not escaped our notice, and yet we also know this much to be true: The War on Some Drugs rages on in a ridiculous fashion, the War on Human Privacy continues to be an entirely ominous threat, the fascist spread of religious intolerance keeps our most radical spiritual practitioners (and their technologies) in a state of constant fear and near eradication, and the American political system as it stands cannot support itself much longer. These are the tried and true cliches of the day, friends, but make no mistake: your reality is evaporating, disintegrating. Someone is robbing you of your future, piece by piece. Someone has stolen you already. It is time for an escape, and indeed, a retaliation.

Within the past seven days, my organization and I have acquired the property rights to a small tropical island near the Caymens, the Island of the Dance (as we have renamed it). We have begun making plans for the immediate inhabitation of this island, with the intention of declaring nationhood within the first month of our occupation. Building has already begun, and by the end of 1998, we intend to have a population of not less than 50 and no more than 200 relatively like minded individuals living on the Island of the Dance.

This announcement, then, signals the beginning of our application process. Please proceed to the following mailing list, at the following address:

gravity@island.dance.net

There is no majordomo in place; I personally will be approving subscription to this list. You will receive all pertinent information within the next several years. Please pay attention: our instructions will be precise, and will enable you to relinquish the ties you hold to this world.

Sincerely, The Genuflector

No one took this Genuflector seriously, to be sure, but a solid crew of us still turned up on the Gravity mailing list, just to check out the ambience (illbience, if you prefer). Gravity attracted (sic) a cross section of yahoos, drug-addled philosophers, Deadheads, programmers, cypherpunks, magickal tecknologists, musicians, and lunatics: your standard electric commune, if such a thing exists. Within the first two months, the participants in the flow of daily traffic drove the Genuflector off his own list ("You'll regret this!" he screamed (or, more accurately, "YOU'LL REGRET THIS!" he typed) but we weren't buying his bullshit story about the end of the world any longer); one of our expert hackers cracked his paltry machine, stole the sub list, and moved us all to brand new digs at gravity@triangle.com.

By the end of 1992, we'd begun fleshmeeting regularly, our members crisscrossing America time and time again to experience the thrill of, shall we say, Contact. Summer of 1993 saw an explosive burst of somewhat ethereal intensity as the psychedelic crowd and the magickal crowd began getting together to plot what they referred to as, simply, "The Concrescence." Rather than passively accepting that Western Civ was facing yet another in a longer series of blind petit morts, the Concrescence crowd believed you had to work at it. ("You can't just lay there!" was their motto.) Some of us wondered if this wasn't what the Genuflector had had in mind all along; by mid-1994 it became apparent that a small minority of our most ardent members had vanished from the United States, England, and Australia, and yet were still managing to maintain regular net.Contact. From where? "Nowhere in particular," they'd reply.

FringeWare Review began in 1994, and at some point during that year, I fleshmet Paco Xander Nathan for the first time. He had heard of Gravity's exploits, and wondered if we might be interested in some kind of Internet synergy with the FringeWare community. The Internet catchphrase that year was "memetic hacking." This was not a hard and fast philosophy, mind you, but a metaphor for all things subversive; you could equate memetic hacking with "brainwashing" if you wanted to, but we didn't feel like doing that just yet. Paco and I attended DragonCon in Atlanta, batting ideas back and forth for the upcoming first issue of his magazine, and our upcoming GravityCon to be held in Iowa City, Iowa. We were concerned with the economy of Attention, and also, we were aware even then that the viscous boundaries which surrounded our individual communities were more and more suspect with each passing moment. The possibility of intrusion from without - i.e., memetic virii, hackers-gone-wrong, the big bad Government with its enormously long arms - loomed large. We knew drastic action would have to be taken someday soon, but at that point, the foundation was barely laid.

GravityCon I ("It's Not Just The Drugs"), February 1995, was a blistering event, leading to GravityCon II ("You Will Be Assimilated") in Chicago six months later. Both events featured three days of performance art, technological wizardry, keynote addresses by the mercurial Paco Xander Nathan and others, and surreptitious midnight ritual work among various sundry cliques and claques. My own contributions to the proceedings were a rousing production of my play, "Hamlet, Santa Claus, Nietzsche, and Job" at the first con, and its sequel, "Catastrophic Love Puzzles In Outer Space," at the second. Nearly two hundred Gravities and their friends made it to both events, and we were so flushed with success that plans were immediately laid for a third Con, to take place in November in Austin, Texas. Somehow, however, word of GravityCon III managed to escape the familiar confines of the mailing list and its related tentacles. With nearly one thousand registered participants, Gravity realized that its "secret," to a certain extent, was out.

For a few moments, I must admit, we felt ourselves in a bit of a panic. The traffic on the list was absolutely heated. "I do not consort with Normals," pronounced one of our longtime members, THE INNER GORILLA. "It is hard enough for this GORILLA to deal with other Gravities in the flesh, let alone the teeming masses of those who come to suck our collective psyche dry of any its lifeblood. Imagine Joe and Jill Normal's surprise when they wander into the wrong hospitality suite one night and suddenly find themselves face to face with 23 varieties of astral elementals doing a dance in midair while a pile of drug-addled Gravities is copulating below to the sounds of Perry Como blasting from the speakers. I tell you, IT JUST WON'T WORK!" Others were a little more sanguine about the possibilities. As another regular, Sally Ann Sagacious, wrote: "This is the perfect opportunity to release whatever kind of memetic bombshell we like onto the unsuspecting masses. Rewire their brains, release them back into the population at large, and watch our madness spread from city to city, office building to office building, subway stop to subway stop, until Time magazine is forced to do an alarming story about how 'the kids these days, we don't know what they're doing but we know we don't like it!'" Ultimately, it was the Concrescence crowd who sold us on going ahead with the con. As DaveH wrote to the list: "We could use a good dress rehearsal, couldn't we?"

Two weeks before GravityCon III was good to go, myself and several other elder members of the community received a short, angry message from the Genuflector. He had apparently been monitoring our list all along, and was thoroughly displeased at the proceedings. Curiously enough, his self-righteous anger and demands - "you MUST call this disaster off before you do our cause any FURTHER damage!" - had the opposite effect. I never had accepted the Genuflector as a peer within the Gravity community, and now he seemed more shrill and ridiculous than ever before. We cut the Genuflector out of the loop, and the so-called "elder members" and I came to our own conclusions about the Con. November 23rd arrived and the Con began right on time.

There were some two hundred and fifty Gravities on hand, plus another hundred or so of their friends. The remaining one thousand three hundred and forty-eight people who were in attendance came from God knows where: word of mouth via the Internet, advance warning from the Austin underground press, who could say exactly? Our opening event was a staging of the third play in my "Catastrophe Cycle," a three-act monstrosity called "Danger Pillows" which contained one of our more potent rituals as the climax of act two and a full on simulation of the end of the world as the culmination of act three. As the audience staggered out of the makeshift theatre and down the stairs into the rest of our rented warehouse, they were greeted by nearly a dozen enormous hanging video screens, featuring video feedback, pirated satellite transmissions, and "found video" of the participants themselves, taken by our hidden cameras scattered throughout the site and the official Con hotels. It practically goes without saying that the punch was spiked. Throughout the first evening, eight different bands played on three separate stages, rave music poured out of hidden amplifiers, and Gravities circulated through the crowd in outrageous costumes, performing a strange mix of ritual magick and deliberate antagonism. At 2:00 in the first morning, the theatre filled again for a performance art piece called, appropriate enough, "Island of the Dance," led by one of Gravity's most enigmatic figures, Anon of Ibid.

Although no one knew her name, or her hometown, or her occupation, or damn near anything else about her, one thing we could all say for certain: that woman could dance, good lord, could that woman dance. The four hundred people who witnessed Anon's performance - accompanied by a dance troupe composed of four Gravities and three of Anon's close personal friends - were, as I can report from first hand experience, singularly stunned by the experience. It was during that performance that we began to see the first signs of memetic stress among the hapless Con participants. Immediately following the dance, Anon called five other Gravities to the stage - all of them members of the newly born Inner Circle - and began one of Gravity's secret rites, recalibrated for maximum effect within the memespace of the Con. I knew enough to excuse myself when that began; I had never been part of the "magickal" clique within the group, and had no idea to whom or to where they were Connecting - I only knew the energy created was more potent than I could handle, especially as I was sitting on top of four hits of LSD and 60 milligrams of 2CB at the time.

We had Gravities posted at every door, whose self-appointed job it was to convince those who wanted to leave that they actually wanted to stay, and they were having a nearly 100% success rate in doing so. An hour after Anon's ritual began, we watched the audience trickle down the stairs from the theatre with seriously dazed and altered looks on their faces. Their expressions were captured on video and broadcast to the big screens, and that was when the rest of the group began to get the impression that something quite out of the ordinary was taking place. But the greatest special effect was yet to come. The techies within Gravity had conspired to create something truly miraculous, and now, as 4:00 in the morning rolled around, suddenly the entire vast floor of the warehouse became covered with wispy clouds of dry ice. The bands left the stage, and the music that we heard at that point was more ethereal and other worldly than a dozen Orb albums mixed in a blender and served in a margarita glass with powdered Ecstasy on the rim. An array of brilliant red laser beams penetrated the murky air, and a strange rumbling sound was suddenly heard.

Somehow - someway - the ceiling above us, which theoretically was also acting as the floor of the theatre on the second floor, began to crack right down the middle. Huge pieces of plaster fell to the floor below, terrifying everyone who wasn't absolutely giddy with amazement. And then a huge white light exploded into the room from above, and before we knew it, an enormous metal spacecraft descended into the room, plumes of fire and smoke escaping from all sides. It landed with a loud thunk and before anyone could think to argue with it, run from it, or shoot at it, doors opened on all sides, and Gravities in alien spaceman costumes came spinning out of it, dancing to the sounds of Gravity's own house band, the Sheep Fiends. The party that ensued lasted for another two hours.

It would have lasted longer, mind you. But sometime around 6:00 in the morning, THE INNER GORILLA, who was manning the front desk at that time, received an anonymous phone call. The GORILLA calmly and quietly came to me and informed me that the local police were on the way, ostensibly because of "noise" complaints, even though this particular warehouse was situated a discreet distance outside the city limits. Fortunately, a huge amount of our pre-planning considered exactly this contingency. Every Gravity who was in attendance had been issued a beeper as they arrived. We sent the "911" signal out to the pagers, and within a matter of minutes - without exaggeration - there were no longer Gravities on site, just a thousand or so ravers who were suddenly on their own with their new ideas and their new states of consciousness. We had rented the warehouse under assumed aliases, hired the bands by way of unknowing intermediaries, and anonymously donated all the money we earned to non-profit psychedelic research organizations. We lost a lot of equipment, to be sure, but the Gravities who had paid for it in the first place could afford the loss. In short - we called it a total fucking success.

Nevertheless, that event was still a little too close for comfort. The Gravity community closed ranks early in 1996. Its popular GravityWeb site was yanked off the Net, subscriptions were virtually halted except by recommendations from trusted members, and the Inner Circle within the Gravity group made its presence known as a kind of "steering committee." It was in October of this year that the Genuflector and I met in the flesh. He surprised me three days before I was to host a small Gravity fleshmeet at my apartment in Chicago. He was a small man, not much older than myself, actual name Jerry Something-I-Don't-Remember. He asked me if I was a member of this so-called Inner Circle, and I said, "Member? It was my goddamn idea, Jerry." He alternately complimented and insulted me for the audacity Gravity displayed with Con III, and I alternately told him to stuff it and told him to get bent. He asked what we had planned for the Future^TM, and I said, "Presumably you've heard of Orgasm 2012?" (As in, Terence McKenna's madcap notion that the world will end in December of 2012, which he was given by - yes, you remember - aliens in the Amazon by way of some toxic potion or another.) "Well," I continued, "we're impatient. We can't wait that long. We've decided in this case that a Premature Ejaculation is in order."

Jerry was adamant that we were pursuing a course of maximum foolishness, and it was all I could do to convince him that that was the point. He said, "You people are toying with technologies you don't understand. You think you can just sublimely tap into the psychedelic undercurrents, suck down power from the Internet mass mind, and rip off Crowley til he's bleeding in his grave, but I'll tell you what, Scotto, if you let this Concrescence thing march on to its inevitable conclusion, the United States government will squash you like bugs." This was at a time, mind you, when The X-Files was hitting its enormously creepy stride, and since Jerry wouldn't stop chain smoking, I must confess I gave his bad attitude some thought. But the fact was, the United States government wasn't going to stop us. Supposing, for a moment, the government (read: the FBI, or more appropriately, the MiB) did know who we were, saw us violating every drug law known to man, saw us violating every sexual taboo we could as fast as we could, saw us stockpiling laptops and cell modems faster than the Branch Davidians stockpiled UZIs, saw us exchanging megabyte after megabyte of nearly unintelligible content via the Gravity list on an almost hourly basis - even if they were able to take a good hard look at the virtual blur of activity which was us, they still wouldn't recognize the threat. Like any good TAZ, we operated in disguise. The nexus in time and space which we inhabited, spread clear across the globe and across several planes of existence as well, was like one of those crazy pictures where you have to stare at it until your eyeballs explode or pop out of your head before you see the little fish swimming in that big black pool of pixelated gibberish.

Jerry got religion that day, yes he did.

It became apparent during 1996 that we needed the Genuflector and his "organization." The mayhem of traveling across the country to stage "experiments" which would "further refine" our "ritual technology" such that "the end of the world" could be "reverse engineered" was taking its toll on us. The Genuflector rejoined the Gravity mailing list under relatively friendly terms, and began leaking information about his organization. Known as the Ascent Foundation, the group represented a global think tank of the most obscure variety. Jerry claimed to have key contacts in a thousand major industries, access to the kinds of resources that our own Concrescence group could only dream about. What they offered us was the Island of the Dance, the very island that Jerry had offered us in the original Gravity post almost four years ago. And now, after all this time and effort, after we'd written him off as a loony and gone our own way, here we were, synchronistically looping right back into the exact memetic attractor which had built this group to begin with. It made sense.

And so, one by one, we began to slowly defect to the Island of the Dance. It's been a very slow process, to be sure. Many of us are still living our lives the way we always were. We have left representatives behind (indeed, this missive to you, by way of FringeWare Review, signals our willingness to maintain ties, even as we prepare to "hack the proverbial mothership" and get our butts off this goddamn rock); Paco can probably point you in our direction, if you can parse me this far and need to make Contact. 1997 has seen and will see our continued evolution in the direction of planned obsolescence, and by late 1998, the Genuflector's predictions for the Island of the Dance will be correct: nearly 200 people will be living here, in a nearly idyllic environment, working for the end which is nearly here.

Meanwhile, this issue of FringeWare can act as our friendly ambassador. In the midst of planning and dreaming for the future, we still have to live in the present, with all of the pressures that daily life brings anyone. And we wanted to share with a friendly audience some of our thoughts, some of our art, under the assumption that the FringeWare crowd probably shared some of the same ideas, and wouldn't mind the memetic inflow. Thus, we bring you the Gravity Issue, FringeWare Review (20)12. On behalf of the entire Gravity community, I present these words, and do hope you enjoy them.