MEATSPACE JOE by Martin Olson and Robert Sheckley Robert Sheckley and I were out smoking cigarettes in my back yard overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, California. It was a perfect day, late afternoon, end of summer, 1993. My wife brought us a cartoonsized joint to celebrate the check we'd just received for writing a live action video game. The yard took on a blue and orangey hue as Bob started talking about the strange, recursive structure of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which led to a recurring topic between the two of us, writing The Ultimate Story. He was being witty, metaphysical and tastefully bombastic as I howled laughing, typing notes on my piece of shit laptop. Our story premise was to create a simple narrative that engulfed all other stories. Among anarchic pantheists, our story premise was trendy and unoriginal, that the universe was a sentient being ignorant of its origin and destiny, if it had either. We figured the story would begin after this cosmic dunce had accidentally split off into infinite replicas of itself, organic and otherwise, manifesting itself in all levels of scale, all of its separate parts sharing the same knowledge and ignorance regarding its origin and destiny, if it had any knowledge about it, which it probably didn't. The appealing thing about this premise, of course, was that in it the greatest thing that existed, the universe, was a moron. A sincere but selfabsorbed cosmic idiot. Exactly like us. The simple conceit at the core of the entire Shecklian Universe. We imagined the lowliest of these selfaware replicants, struggling to get by in a Beckett like state of aloneness, crawling through the muck, wondering where exactly he was going. We called him Meatspace Joe, after William Gibson's use of meat as a metaphor for the physical world. We never wrote the story, and now that Bob is gone, it will never be written. But when Gail Sheckley called and asked me to contribute to this book, I remembered how much we both loved this idea. I dredged up these old notes from an ancient fiveinch diskette, found Bob's subsequent notes scrawled on a dot matrix printout, merged them into a cleanedup draft, and present them here in all their ineffable, incomprehensible glory. Be prepared to be bored. Feel free to skip to the end where I tell what happened to our video game script. But some of the philosophic asides that follow are Bob's own words, and it was damn fun. For what it's worth, then, what follows are the complete notes of our conversation by the canal, surrounded by ducks, lighting cigarettes and passing the giant joint back and forth, trying to nail down The Ultimate Story, a story that will never be told. NOTES ON THE STORY OF MEATSPACE JOE The mystics were wrong.
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