The Orb

Abstract

To use a Mirror world program, you sit down at your computer, which has a large color screen and a connection to the local fiberoptic utility cable. (The screen and the cable are garden-variety technology today.) Or—if you’re willing to put up with a smaller picture and it’s a nice day—you pick up your laptop, tune in Data Radio and head for the hammock. In either case, you flip channels until you find the Mirror world of your choice, and then you see a picture. Capturing the structure and present status of an entire company, university, hospital, city or whatever in a single (obviously elliptical, high-level) sketch is a hard but solvable research problem. The picture changes subtly as you watch, mirroring changes in the world outside. But for most purposes, you don’t merely sit and stare. You zoom in and poke around, like an explorer in a miniature sub. At every level the display is live: it changes as you watch. You move a viewing-frame around the picture with a mouse or equivalent, probably equipped with knobs for zooming. You meet your software agents and other Mirror world visitors along the way. when your agents have developments to report, or when you choose to ask questions or plant new agents, you pop into a sub-screen that displays ordinary text. You can enter a Mirror world through any household computer, but a few extra controls come in handy. Your basic Mirror world computer is equipped with a perspective shifter, a diving mouse, a “history” key (with a time-travel velocity knob right next to it), the all-important “experience” key, and finally an “agent” key. There is the ordinary keyboard besides. (I’m describing hardware gadgets that are similar to what you can buy today at the corner computer store. If you plan to do lots of Mirror worlding, you’ll invest in the Mirror world Value Pack, or whatever; the extra gadgets are tacked onto the computer in the same way your mouse is attached. The “viewpoint shifter” probably looks like a joystick; the diving mouse is the same as any other mouse, but equipped with an altitude-control knob.