Right, okay, other ways of getting online.
The concept of Vurt feathers is used a lot in Jeff Noon’s novel. This passage is from a short story in Pixel Juice, Bug Compass:
“We’d read a whole lot about these Vurt feathers in the papers, how they were supposed to be the best recording medium ever, even better than fractal cassettes. How music sounded more than alive on them, how they contained the best games of all time, how you could record all kinds of knowledge on them, knowledge that nobody yet knew about, even. How you had to put them in your mouth, just to get the feathers to play back.”
The Noon worlds are never really explained but they’re utterly believable, and the feathers, as artefacts from those worlds, are believable too. How come? No answer, just a question.
The background image is from David Cronenberg’s film, eXistenZ. You make the link in the virtual world, at one part of the movie, by feeding a disconcertingly, squelchingly biological cable thing into a bio-port at the base of your spine. It has to be lubricated first. It glistens, it’s moist. The connector, in this scene, wriggles in. It’s kind of sexy.
And again, it’s way better than a sweatband round the dermatrodes.