by Eric Alfred Burns, 26th July 2001

My name is Eric Burns, and I am not a Puppetmaster.

Of course, you all know that. My name's not on any of the lists, not in the movie credits, not in the media. I'm clearly not a Puppetmaster because we finally know who the Puppetmasters are, and so it's simple enough to figure out where I fit into the scheme of things.

So... why do I get e-mail from so many people looking for clues? Or, even better, completely blank e-mail, from people testing to see if an autoresponder will tell them something they don't know? Why does something I'm responsible for keep coming up as Trout in the main list?

And what in Sophia's good name am I talking about?

Simply put -- I'm talking about The Reflecting Pool.

The Reflecting Pool is the personal home page of Matthew Heiglot, an IASA-accredited Apprentice architect, specializing in the development of Sentient Houses. It has his contact information, his journal, some Sentient House-related news (including a memorial to Kate Nei and the slain Swinton houses, as well as Matthew's recollections of his meeting a Nei house and embarrassing himself there), some hopes and dreams, and a link to his entry in the IASA/MLH Debutante's Ball. It's also the personal homepage and artistic space for Acheliah, Matthew's AI, running on different second and third hand pieces Matthew's put together. One could call Acheliah his 'house,' except she's just been plugged into the dumb controls for his apartment, which have been upgraded with the castoffs a grad student in a cross between architecture and civil engineering could get on the cheap. He's poor, he's young, he makes mistakes, he has dreams, he has hopes, and he's afraid of 'committment.' (At least, the level of commitment that would have a neuroput implanted in him, so Acheliah could be his Familiar as well as his Administrative Evolving Intelligence.) Acheliah herself is a little bit unstable and a little obsessed with angelic and quasi-mystic imagery, but seems to mean well. For Matthew, at least.

It's a fan site, in other words. Put up and maintained with the same drives that led a group of fans to write the BWUNN pages. Or even to put up "for-evan.com," which opens Cloudmakers itself. It's a site that let me try and give something back to the Cloudmakers and even to the Puppetmasters. It's a site that let me have some fun with the whole concept and the universe. It's a site that makes my whole entry -- or rather, Matthew's entry -- into the Debutante Ball a little deeper, taken to another level. It's a darn good excuse to brush off my webmastering skills, my photomanipulation skills and my design skills and stretch myself. (For the record, all the photos and graphics that I didn't make myself on the site are legitimately licensed for use, from the Artville and Art Today collections. Nothing illegal is on the site.) It's a lark.

Or, at least, that was the idea.

The Reflecting Pool came out of my discussions with another Cloudmaker, Matt Gerber. Matt and I were discussing the ramifications of living homes (particularly living homes with Belladerma shells -- we *are* both SF geeks and male, after all) and the kinds of relationships that would form. We postulated a couple of Living Houses and their residents and what might evolve between them. (Nadia is his, actually, for example). "Huh," I said. "We ought to write all this up." He laughed.

By the end of the night I'd registered reflecting-pool.com, and had started the work on the site. At the moment, all the content, design, etc. is mine, though I bounced a lot of it off on Matt and solicited ideas before typing things up. I named Matthew's first name after him, and 'signed' the work in Burns Gerber Academy, referenced on the front page as Lee Baldwin's greatest known work. (Lee Baldwin drew another friend in -- he's the character and design of a fellow named Mason Kramer.) After getting the site ready for revision 1's update, I also made sure to drop content in 'signing' the work in my name, acknowledging Matt and Mason, and saying in very loud commented text that this was not a game site. Period.

And then I put it up, made as unassuming a mention as possible on Cloudmakers, and waited. And sure enough, traffic was generated. It felt good.

Almost immediately afterward, I began to feel... responsibility.

See, the site's a fan site. But it had people who were reading it. I felt a certain need to provide content for those people. Matthew and Acheliah began really taking shape too, and I began to explore their relationship as well as their attitudes. The FAQ filled out, as Matthew had to explore the duality of being a pro-Emancipation Houser -- not unlike an abolitionist who sold Plantations in the Antebellum South. With that came his need to reconcile his deep beliefs that AIs should be free -- but freeing them would mean his own crucially-needed AI, Acheliah, would be free to leave too, along with most of the money he'd spent on her. One could almost see the tragedy of Bosch and Georg preparing to play itself out again, except that Acheliah isn't Georg.

Actually, Acheliah isn't like anyone.

And that's kind of the point of this editorial. You see, after a few days of playing, the fan site "Reflecting-Pool.com" became something... different. It tapped into actual science fiction. At the same time, it involved composition, it involved interactivity, and it involved graphic design.

All of which, by the way, are typical of the real in-game sites. They're internally consistent from a fictional point of view -- a self-contained series of websites, telling an ever-increasingly broad and deep story. But more than that, they're expressions of Flash, of web-content, of graphic design, of photography and photomanipulation. And beyond *that,* they're collections of voice, of sound, and of telephony.

This is more than a game, and much more than a movie promotion. This is an entirely new form of art. Interactive, yes, but moreso because it's self-contained. It no more breaks the fourth wall than most sitcoms, but no sitcom invites the reader to participate directly. This is performance art without the obscurity. This is theater and visual art and fine art colliding with fiction.

Before the World Wide Web, none of this could have existed. The Puppetmasters took this -- and weren't the first, I'll admit, though few if any have ever tried something of this much scope and scale -- and pushed as hard as they could. And in the process, they and we finally created an art form to match the medium of the Web.

And in attempting to emulate the Puppetmasters, I found myself creating in that same idiom. The self-referential, self-consistent web site. Not just the stories I wrote, but contact information. Not just a cast list, but e-mail addresses for them. (And yes, "Matthew" and "Acheliah" try very hard to respond to e-mail sent to them, though I have autoresponses for the clueseekers, too.) When I put up a mailing list to keep people informed about updates, I found a need to use it. (So Matthew started griping about climate control.) It all does what it's supposed to.

It's a working web site, about specific people, who have done specific things and want to say specific things about issues they believe in.

None of whom exist.

I've got some post-game ideas. I think this art form could be something big. More than that, I really love the concept of web metafiction, and want to go further with it. Much further with it. I have some really broad concepts in mind.

My name is Eric Alfred Burns, and I am not a Puppetmaster.

Yet.

Eric Alfred Burns can be reached at eaburns@annotations.com.