telnet> lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888
Trying 192.216.54.2 ...
Connected to lambda.xerox.com.
Escape character is ^]
connect gash
***************************
* Welcome to LambdaMOO! *
***************************

Running Version 1.7.8p4 of LambdaMOO

LambdaMOO is a new kind of society, where thousands of people come together from all over the world. What these people say or do may not always be to your liking; as when visiting any international city, it is wise to be careful with whom you associate and what you say. The lag is approximately 7 seconds; there are 217 connected.

*** Connected ***

You yawn, rub your eyes, and officially wake up.

GashPad

A continually morphing zone in Deep Space Slime where cyberfeminists, data deviants and pathogenic vectors engage in pleasurable distractions of the virtual flesh and projected imagination. Exits: d to GenderFuckMeBaby’s Palace of Unparalled Cynicism, s to the SlimePit, w to Last Tango in Paris, n to HiveMind. A secret exit leads to the Puppet Quarter. You see a shimmering doorway here.

You have new mail (97) from YourPuppet.
@read 97
Date:    	Sat Jan 21 02:38:15 1995 AWT
From:    	YourPuppet 
To:      		GashGirl 
Subject: 	Changes to Home of the Puppet Mistress.

My Dear Mistress,

I see you were here 10 hrs ago. Your amendment to the room is a most pleasant surprise! To my dismay, I was at work when I read it. I had to sit there for some time for the obvious bulge and wet spot on the front of my pants to disappear before I could walk around without others knowing. This might be the LAST time I log in anywhere but home!

I look forward to what My Mistress has in store for Her Puppet. If you're accepting suggestions, could You add that You wipe YourPuppet's little face into the moistness in Your panties.

YourPuppet loves his Mistress.

Composing a letter to YourPuppet entitled "WetWear"

My Puppet

Stiff and wet at work - that's what you must expect if you *will* leave the Puppet Quarter and consort with mortals. Your Cruel Mistress wants you to suffer as it pleases her to contemplate your RL physical sensations seeping through the screen that connects us.

I remain Your Mistress here and on all MOOs

GashGirl

Journal #1
Years after losing my virginity to a Mac 512K doing time as a corporate geisha girl, I have slipped through the Cartesian reality grid into the clear violet haze of spiralspace. My project: to explore love, desire and subjectivity in the freefall zone of the Net.

Declaring "I am my own freak show", I slide through the luminous screen in search of my tribe. I lost my MOOginity in a virtual morgue with a necrophiliac vampyre when I was a young Guest. A profound experience and *far* more elegantly negotiated than the loss of my RL virginity to a surfie whose real name I never knew either. I haven't looked back from my night in the morgue; and the keyboard is constantly sticky.

An erotically reconstructed irreplicunt my biocode is being rewritten. NeT's better than any drug. Like speed it suppresses appetite. Like hammer it eases despair. Day dissolves like seratonin into night, time irrelevant beyond keeping rendezvous across different zones. I connect, I communicate, I dominate, therefore I am.

WELCOME TO THE MOO
MOO <Multi-user Objected Oriented> is the generic name for real-time virtual communities housed on the Internet. Deeply social spaces MOOs allow their inhabitants to develop characters, build intricate text-based environments, code objects which *do* things and interact in real time. The core database of any MOO resides on a server computer, users logging on from their homes, offices or colleges. To join one needs a computer, modem, terminal software enabling dial-up access to the net and an internet account. The original core code for MOOs was developed by arch- wizard Pavel Curtis at Xerox Parc in Silicon Valley. His research resulted in LambdaMOO, an environment now home to some 10.000 inhabitants (with a maximum of around 250 being able to log on at any one time).The code has been freely distributed <information wants to be free>, generating a proliferation of MOOs. It has been rumoured that Pavel declares Role Playing Games “the only relevant artform” as we approach the new millenium.

MOOssary
RL              	real life
IRL       	in real life
VL	virtual life
BTW            	by the way
netsex	sex on the internet 
MOOnogamy	virtual monogamy
MOOicide	vitual suicide

Journal #3
My character GashGirl <alias Gash> is a cyberfeminist dominatrix who resides in LambdaMOO, a sprawling populist environment attracting creatures of all persuasions. IRL I live in a small town of lies and whispers, so virtually I’m drawn to the those sites which offer the most people and anonymity. Like any immigrant I'm rapidly learning to code and communicate in order to move beyond survival to creatively explore this anarchic space.

look GashGirl

Virulent girl vector blasting heretically through iridescent spiralspace. Gash returns your gaze saying, I am my own freak show . . . She is awake and looks alert.

Carrying:
a severed limb 	Lips of an Angel 
the ghost of River Phoenix 	The Fatal Bodice
Baroque Armoire       	Ghost Girl
Contract of Submission 	un pantin d'amour 
A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century      	costume chest

look severed limb

Partially preserved from decay, the leg of a Guest possessed by one called GashGirl. A ... memento ...

Journal #5
Inspired byVenus in Furs, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's classic 19C text, I want a slave, an abject companion on my cybaroque journey through spiralspace. I've coded my desire for the curious to read, and the serious to respond to.

read Contract of Submission The conditions under which I accept you as my slave and tolerate you at my side are: You shall renounce your identity entirely. You shall submit totally to my will. Your body and your soul too shall belong to me, and even if this causes you great suffering, you shall submit your feelings and sentiments to my authority. I shall be allowed to exercise the greatest cruelty, and if I should mutilate you, you shall bear it without complaint. You have nothing save me; for you I am everything, your life, your future, your happiness, your unhappiness, your torment and your joy.

Journal #9
I've met somone who's interested in being owned by GashGirl. American, XY, 20s - more RL info than I need - anonymity is crucial to the enactment of a virtual Last Tango in Paris. This is happening MUCH faster than anticipated.

You say, "The relationship must be complex, as are ambiguities and oppositions within desire. The contract will reflect the individual desires running between mistress and slave."

B_is willing to negotiate on our individual desires.

B_ says, "I'm not comfortable with this 'slave' idea. There was slavery here for 400 years. How about I become your Toy or Pet. Maybe even your puppet? Somehow those are very appealing to me."

You say, "To own a puppet could be sublime . . . manipulated by strings which are intellectual rather than physical."

Journal #11
I am not sleeping or eating much. Friends notice that I can only talk if I'm in front of a screen. I've built 8 distinctive rooms for GashGirl, spending most of my time in Home of The Puppet Mistress playing.

Home of the Puppet Mistress
Spirited away you find yourself in a seemingly endless apartment; a fluid space, changing in response to the desires and imperatives of the Puppet Mistress. You enter La Chambre de la Belle Maitresse, an intimate room illuminated only by candles, 1000 honeycombed spires flickering 1000 promises of tender punishments. The air is fragrant, the brass bed scattered with pink, yellow and white rose petals.

The Mistress of the Revels is followed by Holly Tangle, Snatch and Claude, her devoted slaves, as beautiful as they are naughty. Dismissing her entourage, she calls for Her Favourite, Her Puppet, Son Pantin Cheri. A small form covered by petals is nestled in the crevice between the satin pillows. The Mistress uncovers Puppet, whispers something in his tiny ear, then wraps him in her silken panties, sticky from her thoughts of intolerable passions.

The Mistress of Detestable Pleasures grasps her captive plaything firmly by his ankles as she slowly raises her dress, exposing her creamy thighs, her dark pussy, her . . . Draped in warm, wet silk, Her Puppet waits silently for His Mistress's command. The Puppet Mistress takes her promises of the unattainable to a deeper level. Her Puppet, chained to her c-, has no choice but to follow.

You see Holly Tangle and Claude here. YourPuppet (enslaved) is here.

Journal #19
My Puppet has several size-related morphs to please me in unique ways. Powerless to resist or escape, he spends much of his day imagining himself chained to my c-, trapped in my panties, imprisoned in his tiny silver cage. IRL I am alternately ecstatic and despondent, mirroring the sensations of being in love. In VL I'm *always*in control.

Journal #20
My Puppet writes to me constantly, creating innocent filth for my delectation. This relationship of tender infamies consumes 100s of hours to maintain, so it is fortunate that I am one of the workshy imaginative poor, with plentiful time to invest. <The slacker cynic in the house mutters “The internet’s for losers” as he sees me jacking in <or out> at 8am> It amuses me that Puppet is a full-time worker <why do I imagine him to be in the military, a heavy medal Marineboy perhaps?>, spending his paid hours absconding to his virtual life in pantyland. I code myself as a renegade AI, an Aberrant Intelligence infiltrating the the tender tentacles of Big Daddy Mainframe, my decadent distractions causing subtle mutations in the the military/industrial

apparatus like a virus of the new world disorder.

Journal #23
The darker passions are as intense in this zone as they are IRL. Emotions are heightened when there is no body to cool down, only volatile mind, freed of corporeal casing and social inhibitors. A site of play for endless games of fantasy. Like a python I shed my socialised skin to emerge iridescent and curious. Hungering for prey, the cyberbitch has not learnt to share her freshkill.

Composing a letter to YourPuppet entitled "Disillusionment"

What inspired you to reveal your encounter with that bland slavegirl? Do you think it impresses me that others might want to play with you? Or that you satisfy your own curiosity in playing different games with others?

I refrain from details of irrelevant encounters or relationships here or IRL and expect the same of you. Learn to be discrete; it is your willing submission and devotion that inspires my tenderness and selective cruelty, nothing else. And it was a bad time for you to disconnect.

I feel like destroying everything. This is dangerous territory which we are exploring as the demons unleashed by desire stream out through our fingers, onto the screen, this screen through which we make our relationship.

GashGirl

Message 152:
Date:   	 	Mon Feb  6 04:16:57 1995 AWT
From:    	YourPuppet
To:      		GashGirl
Subject: 	My disconnect was unavoidable

I tried repeatedly to reconnect with no luck. I wouldn't have bothered telling you about the slavegirl, but she saw my page and asked in an interested manner who the "Puppet Mistress" was. THUS I felt that if you were to know of any little experiments of mine, I'd rather tell you than for you find out from elsewhere.

Believe me. What I did with her excited me as much as a handshake. I enjoy pleasing my Mistress and my Mistress only. You are the only puppeteer who pulls my strings. With others I am simply B_. Only one may treat me as Her Puppet.

wiggle . . . twist . . . squirm squirm ! YourPuppet

P.S. Have you found a suitable RL "puppet" to substitute for me when we are on-line together? I'm looking forward to knowing that some lucky object is being used by You in response to the messages I send to You on Your screen.

Journal #39
In a new age of electronic letters we write and rewrite the pornographic fairytale, casting ourselves in the image of the beloved's fantasies. The words leak through the permeable membrane of the screen, moistening our deterritorialized bodies without organs. For some it remains impossible to transcend the self/socially imposed limitations of gender and sexual preference. For others, like the 19 year old ‘straight white Dallas trash’, my virtual baby brother, it is an unparalleled opportunity to genderfuck, to discard the gender markings, familiar sexual repertoires and power scripts in an environment which can be as anonymous as one wishes it to be, in order to experiment with the shock of the new, disrupting the binary in beta test simulations which may be ported across experiential platforms to RL.

Message 154:
Date:    		Tue Feb  7 05:25:15 1995 AWT
From:    	YourPuppet
To:      		GashGirl
Subject: 	Your sleeping puppet dreams...

He dreams of waiting, all day, patiently, for his Mistress to return home. He dreams of his pain when You don't care that he's been hoping to please You all day. He dreams of receiving Your commands to attend to chores around Your home. He dreams of being chained, tied up, to Your body as a public or private piece of jewellry, Your own live trophy. He wants to bring himself up to the point of climax for Your viewing pleasure, never to defy his Mistress by allowing his climax to occur. Your puppet is always in a state of intense arousal, further impeding his efforts to exercise self-control. And yes, he sometimes experiences pleasant dreams of being banished to that dry, cramped orifice of Your body so furthest from Your heart, turned to the side of You where You show the least concern, yet Your little Heaven, Your c- which You so charitably share with him, is teasingly so near. He dreams in every way of You, his one Mistress. Your puppet loves You so much.

Journal #47
The contract between Mistress and Puppet is fluid, but RL details MUST be abandoned before entering the Puppet Quarter. "There are no names here" as Brando tells Schneider in Last Tango. What intrigues is knowing how My Puppet's virtual persona affects his RL self when he's offline. Like a scientist I want to test my hypotheses about disembodied passionate relations, trusting Puppet to answer my FAQs honestly.

Date:     	Wed Feb  8 08:32:06 1995 PST
From:     	GashGirl
To:       		YourPuppet
Subject:  	Re sending a photo of yourself

It makes no difference whether IRL you are beautiful, plain or extremely unfortunate looking, for you exist solely in my imagination.

Although I may be curious to 'see' B_ <insert Rname here> this could destroy everything. IRL my

lovers are usually beautiful as I'm desperately attracted to Beauty (but this can be so perilous). If I was to 'see' anything (and I MUST not) I'd MUCH rather see the scars where a bear clawed you (but I MUST not see, making them even more precious). The way your life has been inscribed upon your body fascinates more than the face you happened to be born with, beautiful though it may be. (And you have no idea of what I find attractive. My tastes are quite ... refined)

The moment I 'saw' you, you would cease being My Puppet, the thing that I own. You'd become 'a person'. What could I do that I haven't done 1000 times before?

I exist for you only in the spaces between words, on screens, on borrowed keyboards and stolen accounts. I steal your heart and claim it as my own. It will never be yours again. I force you in my cunt, I am heartless, even with your heart in my hand, your entirety in my cunt. I cannot see your face as your body has been engulfed in mine. There are no names here, no faces. Not until we tire of our game.

Your Mistress

Journal #214
Again and again I am destroyed by this love. My needs are great, my volume infinite, my boundaries supple. There is no sweat in spiralspace, the sheets remain perpetually clean. My virtual lover slips stealthily through the luminous veil as a thief of my heart. I cannot leave, enslaved as I am by my own desires.

It has been eight months since the The Puppet Mistress bid her Puppet farewell, his RL agent being shipped to the tundra where the net connexions were below zero. Since that time I have regularly net-dated a boy somewhere in Europe who is into ‘enforced feminization’ <I insist he dresses IRL for our online dates>; fallen utterly in love with an anarcho gender terrorist <FtoM pyschologically complex hybrid creature whose online persona is a wolf>; had my heart devoured by said beast after an intense fleshmeet in Amerika; and am currently exploring the phenomenon of the fatal embrace <or the relationship between the desire for death and the transcendence of the intolerable> in my new morph as a cyber serial killer, whereby I negotiate with willing victims who create their own contracts of demise.

Naturally I tag my games ‘work’ and justify the 1000s of hours I spend living online as ‘essential research’ for the erotic novella I am writing. I believe that the convergence of digital and communication technologies, and the proliferation of relatively cheap smart media which eventually finds its way to the streets <in other words, either through theft of all kinds or the establishment of access points in libraries, community centres, gradually <utopically?> filtering across first world/fourth world boundaries > offers people a radical new way of reconfiguring pysches and societies, a new take on the social which is about forming and nurturing 21stC communities of interest and ‘gift economies’ for the free circulation of ideas and information rather than maintaining 19thC nation states of inequity and the failed grand plans on which both capitalist and collectivist economies have been based.

GashGirl, April 1996
gashgirl@sysx.apana.org.au
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/gashgirl/

Tales from the Puppet Mistress: Scottish Fringe Film & Video Festival	 
© GashGirl, April 1996