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The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland

A portal-shaped account of the early internet: a seductive otherworld where names transform, gifts dissolve, time slips, and every visit risks leaving part of the self behind.

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Cross the Threshold
Take a Name
Accept the Gift
Lose Time
Find the Way Home

Cross the Threshold

The family room is dark except for the CRT. The Gateway fan pants; warm plastic and dust thicken the air. I lift the receiver, dial, and hear the modem's metallic cry. The sound and the room's walls mark a border: here is my body, there is the electronic elsewhere. Three doors resolve inside the screen.

Answer the modem-song: I cross on the screech. Distance collapses without my body moving. The noise becomes my ritual threshold, and I carry its last pulse as a faint way back.
Mark the wall socket: Before entering, I touch the unplugged socket and memorize the cold wall. One ordinary object remains outside the glamour. I carry a homeward tether.
Wait for first light: I enter as dawn outlines the desk. The portal loses none of its promise, but I keep the color of the physical room with me.

Take a Name

The chat room will not admit a body, only a handle. I ask whether usernames merely announce us or create new selves. In this place, other people become text and I can become a voice in somebody's head. The cursor blinks beside NAME. Whatever I type will travel farther than my face and may feel more real than the self at the desk.

Use my given name: I carry family history and bodily consequence across the border. Strangers may still misread me, but the name keeps pulling the screen-self toward home.
Become starling97: A second self opens its eyes. Starling97 can speak, flirt, and roam where I cannot. Each success gives the handle more weight.
Enter as nobody: I arrive as a pure point of view. It feels like freedom from the body; it also makes the body easier to forget.

Accept the Gift

A private message opens like a hand beneath the hill. The otherworld offers what ordinary life withholds: presence without proximity, transformation without consequence, pleasure without limit. Fairy gifts always ask for something in return. Food may not nourish; gold may become dead leaves; an archive may contain everything while telling the truth unreliably.

A perfect online friendship: I accept the feeling of being chosen. The bond changes my life on-screen; whether it can survive outside the portal remains unanswered.
The infinite archive: I accept every saved message, page, and image. The library feels absolute and dreamlike. I will need judgment to tell record from caricature.
Decline; knot the cord: I leave the gift glowing where it appeared and tighten my tether to the room. Refusal preserves a boundary, though the invitation follows me.

Lose Time

The room has become an AOL chat, then a glade, then a dance whose music never ends. My legs go numb. Sweat leaves a shine on the mouse; the fan labors beside me. Online, every reply promises another. Outside, hours accumulate without texture. Fairyland's old rule becomes the internet's: join the dance and mortal time continues without you.

Stay for the next reply: The next reply produces another. Nine hours fold into one electric night, and sunrise arrives before I notice hunger or sleep.
Follow every blue link: The path branches faster than memory can hold it. My screen-self grows vivid while the body at the desk becomes background scenery.
Type BRB and look away: I break the rhythm long enough to hear the house. The dance continues without me, but the wall, the window, and my breathing return.

Find the Way Home

The glamour thins. I close one window and discover that my body is still in the computer room, older by a night and strangely foreign. my return is Oisín's: the traveler survives the otherworld but cannot recover the world that passed. Home is possible only as a changed person, with part of the self still living behind the chosen name.

Pull the homeward tether: I follow the socket, modem pulse, or remembered dawn I kept at the threshold. The physical room floods back. I return changed, but present.
Close without a goodbye: I shut the laptop before the final reply. The abrupt boundary feels cold, yet it gives my body somewhere definite to stand.
Wait until everyone leaves: The room never empties. A new name appears, then another invitation. The path home fades while I wait for an ending the medium cannot provide.