If you could just put yourself in the right frame of mind—in a Matrix frame of mind, Matthew grinned like a criminal plotting a scheme—then walking from home to the grocery store and back again, as he was now in the act of doing, could be indistinguishable from going online and navigating through the internet. The only substantial difference between the two acts, Matthew nodded as he drifted up the sidewalk, are the bodily sensations incurred while walking. There are pressure points fired on the bottoms of one’s feet, nerve endings triggered in one’s moving joints like the knees and hips, and plenty of sensations felt through the skin like wind and radiation from the sun.

Then there are the smells, the sounds, and the visuals. But all of those, just like the sensations in the joints and on the skin, are really just a matter of technology. He rounded the corner past the lesbian dildo shop (no conceivable “research project” could rationalize going in there, none that he had concocted so far anyway) and began the gentle slope up Commercial Drive.

One day “monitors” will be enhanced to the point of providing visuals close to what his own eyeballs take in on the real street: the gigantic and empty Japanese restaurant, the tiny pizza-for-a-dollar place with the constant line-up, the bus shelter with the Hitler mustache drawn on the oversized face of Avril Lavigne. What would it take, really, to make a machine that releases subtle scents in accordance with the images flitting across the monitor to fulfill the expectations of passing a flourishing flower shop, then a bean-grinding café, and then a samosa warmer by the open door to an Indian food store?

Matthew wondered, pressing his fingernails hard into his forearm, how far away we are from electrical diodes placed round the skull to imitate with an electrical impulse the triggering of any nerve in the entire body, including, he thought, as he trudged with his head down past the Honduran drug dealers outside the organic superstore (who smelled oddly like hot electronics, speaking of smells) those that make the feet sore, the knees and hips grind, and the forearm feel pain from one’s own fingernails pressing into it.

By the time he got to the yuppie bar with the snobbish office clerks perched like judgmental pelicans on tall stools behind the showcase-like windows, he had achieved that out-of-body sensation possible if you concentrate hard enough on intellectualizing all the bodily sensations incurred while walking up a sidewalk, so long as no one says “Hi” or bumps into you. You can become like a camera on a wheeled tripod filming a movie if you move your head in a slow panning motion and adjust your stride so your body isn’t bouncing up and down with every step. Matthew swiveled his head almost 90 degrees to the side as he swooshed slowly, smoothly, and straight past the railings penning in the crowded outdoor restaurant-goers. His video camera brain met and held, momentarily, the eyes of healthy looking couples calmly masticating on ground-up slaughtered animals.

That wasn’t fair. They were eating hamburgers.

His camera slowly swung away 180 degrees to find and follow Mike approaching and going past, the guy who asks him for a quarter every day. No answer from Matthew. Just a smooth, steady return of his video camera brain to the straight ahead position again as the sound of the 13-year-old kid busking with guitar on the corner in front of the dental office filled his left ear. When you’re playing Grand Theft Auto, Matthew maintained, after some hours and after you have played it for months, you become unaware you are directing action on the screen through the use of a hand-held panel of buttons and mini-joysticks.

It’s like the guy he watched operating the city’s big yellow backhoe digging the trench across the street for the new house’s sewer hook-up. Studying his face with binoculars through the hole in the front window curtain, you could tell he wasn’t thinking of this lever to move the shovel sideways, or that lever to move the shovel down or up. The hydraulically-operated shovel on the end of the 40-foot elbowed device was, by this time in the man’s career, a part of his body. There was no interface between his hands and the knobs of the levers; his nerves extended to the clawed tips of the scraped steel shovel itself.

There was no longer any distinction between the man tearing up the trench in the street and the little kid a couple of yards over, also observed through the binoculars from the Norman Bates riser on top of the house, who, in his sandbox kitted up by his loving father, curled his wrist, scooped his hand, and shoveled up some sand to move it, by the act of swinging through the ball socket of his shoulder, out over the wooden edge of the sandbox and into the grass, till his father came out and angrily, too angrily thought Matthew, remonstrated against him. “Into the truck!” the father corrected the child, a lesson the man out front in the big machine had learned already. The only difference was the kid had to provide his own soundtrack by vibrating his lips through puffs of air, while the man had a diesel engine to provide his sound effects.

What, he wanted to know, was the difference between playing a video game at home and walking up Commercial Drive, aside from maybe some inconsequential equivalent of having to vibrate your own lips to make the sound of an engine revving? He even experimented with diesel engine sounds at about the time he slid past a café with outdoor tables where boastful voices were always heard exclaiming on the transitory news of the day. They stopped and stared while his camera, held sideways again, shone its critical light on them, his mouth making that diesel engine sound. “Idiots,” thought Matthew.

If the internet were to evolve into a sentient being, how would it think? All thinking, Matthew surmised, grasping a tub of crunchy peanut butter in the claws of his hand and moving it, big yellow back-hoe like, over his red shopper’s basket and dropping it in, begins and ends with improving strategies for survival. “Get food,” Matthew accidentally said out loud, as an example of a strategy for survival. That woman with a chrome stick driven through a hole in her eyebrow looked up from her own red basket at Matthew with exhausted annoyance, as if to say, “That guy again!”

Words undulated over her ballooning chest. “Do not pan down,” Matthew reminded himself. He’d been ejected by the store’s goon squad for less.

So, he thought, trying to distract himself away from Christ’s temptation itself now standing in front of him with her back turned, what is “food” to the internet? Energy, one might think at first: electricity. Without it, there is no internet. But that’s the human equivalent not of food but of air: we don’t think about breathing at all or about improving the efficiency of our air, it is too base a need. It is so basic that we have never experienced life without it, unlike food. Food we know in both abundance and scarcity, and so it’s something we can engage with on a strategic level. Air is always here, because if it’s not, we are dead: we have never experienced “no air”.

The internet, as a life-form, has similarly never experienced “no electricity”, because if it had, it would cease to exist, and cease to experience anything, including the state of “no electricity”. So electricity is not something the internet would engage with on the level of survival strategies.

But there is something it depends on very much, and of which it has indeed experienced in both abundance and scarcity, abundance making it grow, and scarcity making it shrink: contact with human users. The more people go “online” and the more time they each spend being “online”, the bigger the internet becomes, both “spatially” and in importance. The bigger it is in these terms, the more secure from elimination it becomes. One might think that, given the way things are now, the internet is here to stay. Who can imagine life without it? And yet, from the internet’s point of view, it’s only got a tenuous, two-decade-old purchase on life, and it’s not like it has others like it to compare itself to. There are no other internets for the one internet to measure itself up against to be able to say, “I’m doing well enough, considering.” How would a hockey team know it is good or bad if there were never any other hockey teams to play against?

And so the internet, insecure as a baby about its own survival, would ceaselessly seek to grow bigger and more secure by acquiring and consuming as much “food” as possible, in this case, “food” being contact with humans. It hardly matters what kind of contact: connoisseurship comes later in life. Kids eat junk food to excess, and the internet, being a “kid”, will “eat” junk “contact with humans” to excess.

Hence spam. Is that going to be the title of his novel? “Spam”?

Matthew looked down in his basket. Peanut butter. Crackers. Chips. Cheese. Cheese Whiz. Cheese strings. Cheezies. He looked up. Out the open doors and across the street he noticed Luke sitting with John outside at the café there. Luke was looking right through Matthew staring back at him from inside the grocery store and didn’t even seem to notice him waving. What could they be talking about? It looked awfully serious.

He considered bolting, but noticed the goon, hands folded across his chest, staring at him and reading his mind. He put everything back but the peanut butter. He had only brought $3 to the store.