In the title story of Burning Chrome, William Gibson envisioned a virtual reality cast in liquid metallic polygons and textured lightfields. It was the first story to use the word "cyberspace", but Tron came to theaters the same year Burning Chrome first appeared in print. The sleek and unearthly world of cyberspace was literally rendered for the public imagination by Tron, Lawnmower Man, and the inexplicable Mind's Eye series. Cyberspace became a fundamental pillar of cyberpunk. In Shadowrun, it is named "The Matrix"; and in Shadowrun, it exists, exactly as Gibson described it.
Science fiction draws meaning from cultural context. It extrapolates current trends, it expands upon dimly glimpsed possibilities, but it can only reflect the knowledge and biases of the author's time and place. In a different cultural context, the same work can have a very different meaning.
Our Shadowrun game is set in an alternate modern-day New York, with history and pop culture changed as little as possible. This implies that The Matrix and its sequels exist as well. But if The Matrix exists, it presents a conundrum. The Shadowrun world certainly can produce The Matrix as a work of fiction, but its implications are markedly different.
This essay is postmodern, in a way. The "death of the author" is a repudiation of the author's intent in favor of how a text is ultimately interpreted, filtered and flavored by a universe of context that the author might never have imagined. One might argue in good faith whether or not to read a Shakespeare play from the 1500s using the context of the 1990s. But how are we to interpret a product of our reality if we imagine that it were written in a fictional one? Specifically, what would The Matrix mean if it were produced in the Shadowrun world?
Yes, we're going full Philip K. Dick here.
In the late 70s and early 80s, the culture at large was finally starting to
realize that computers were not just a scientific tool, not just a toy for
egghead hobbyists, not just an importunate bureaucrat that stamped "Do Not Fold,
Spindle, or Mutilate" on paperwork that used to be entirely amenable to folding,
spindling, and mutilation,
but an ongoing and irreversible transformation of daily life. The world of
computers had already absorbed a huge percentage of financial and business
operations. A hundred thousand file clerks had been long since been kicked to
the curb reskilled, decades before the gig economy would turn their
underemployed children into taskrabbits. Before the World Wide Web, the new
world of information was invisible, yet pervasive, and those who had some
inkling of its true shape and scope were themselves unnerved to learn that
wizardly hackers ruled it from the shadows.
This was not, strictly speaking, true. The age of botnets, netsec, darknets, and Stuxnet was a quarter century down the line. But hard drives walked the earth, phreaks were stealing long-distance by whistling control tones into their landlines, The Shockwave Rider had proposed the first computer virus, and hackers had implemented it, and even though most cracks did not yet have a financial motive, the future was not hard to see.
The genius of cyberspace was to make this invisible world visible. And in the 1980s of our Shadowrun world, magic was on the rise as well. The parallel is clear enough. In the Shadowrun context, William Gibson's vision of cyberspace, wherein an invisible world becomes visible through a "shared hallucination", can be read as a response to magic; almost a rebuttal, in fact, a manifesto preaching the true wonders of technology. Although magic may bring hidden powers flaring to life in the world, the computer world is more powerful. Come and see.
When a wizard enchanted the first man-machine interface, the irony was not lost on anyone.
The Matrix movies are inspired by increasing automation, fear of government surveillance, and the valorization of subcultural rebels. Those themes are resonant in Shadowrun, of course; the "agents" are simply read as corporate enforcers instead of government ones. But when considered from the Shadowrun perspective, The Matrix has an additional concern: the nature of magic.
In the world of Shadowrun, the real world has magic, but the virtual world does not. Magic is just as useless in the Matrix as muscles are: the only things that matter are intelligence, reflexes, guts, preparation, allies, finances, and equipment. However, in The Matrix, the virtual world can be reshaped through intelligent will in a way that the real world cannot. When the agents dodge bullets, or when Neo stops them in midair, they are using magic. And—this is crucial—they do not break the rules of the Matrix by running programs that exploit its loopholes. They break the rules by perceiving the falseness of their reality. They are unshackled. They move their hands... with their minds.
In The Matrix, there is no spoon, and it is Neo who bends. In the real Matrix, the one from the Shadowrun world, there definitely is a spoon, and it is stored on an Oracle cluster in a data center in New Jersey, and if you want to bend that spoon, you should pose as tech support and spearphish a middle manager. You can always jack in with your Fairlight Excalibur and run a hundred programs which strike the opposing firewall like magic missiles, but in the final analysis, that stuff is an HTC Vive drawing an AR overlay on top of a shell script.
In other words, The Matrix proposes a virtual reality which works like magic, which provides a raw communion with the stuff of life. In The Matrix, the fact that the virtual reality is false does not kill its value: running up walls and leaping between buildings is exhilarating, it is primally satisfying, and in large degree, it is what the movies are truly about. What's more, it proposes a virtual reality where there are things of value at stake, where there are threats greater than trolling and cyberstalking and rewards greater than Instagram likes. It is a magical reality, where experiences and emotions are heightened, not manicured and manipulated. In fact, it is what the Matrix was meant to be, in the early days of the internet, when magic and computer science were both beginning to flourish as public forces.
Of course, the Matrix has black ICE and hacking programs that look like lightsabers and avatar duels and vertiginous dives into neon security systems writhing with lightning, but it is easier to take the long slow route and pay a guy called "Kenny Logins" for a password copied from a spreadsheet found in a Dropbox account where the CFO didn't set up 2FA, and either way, what is the reward? A couple hundred Bitcoin? That rabbit-hole doesn't go very deep after all. In The Matrix, the reward is the survival of humanity, and Neo is the chosen one. The Matrix is a place of deep meaning. The Matrix is the home of the Kardashians.
It may seem incongruous that in The Matrix, the fictional real world has no magic, yet in the world that produced the movie, magic is alive and well. This may seem to be a curious choice on the part of the Wachowskis. Why omit magic? It makes more sense when you consider that they, like most people in the Shadowrun world, cannot use magic.
The real world is a place without magic, when most people only see magic on TV, or as a literal parlor trick their buddy Mike can pull off once every ten tries. A lucky few are so powerful that corporations immediately hire them to work their miracles for a Goldman Sachs salary. An unfortunate few will hurt themselves or others as their powers awaken. Most just work day jobs, realizing that your average spell is honestly less useful than a car, a computer, or an appliance, and far less reliable. The "street mages" who "run the shadows" are considered a threat to public safety at best, domestic terrorists at worst.
In this reading, The Matrix is in some ways a protest against magic. Magic was supposed to solve the problems of mankind, but on that front, it has been about as useful as the most literalist version of religion: a miracle here and there, excellent for its beneficiaries, but hardly scalable. Magic couldn't help the Wachowskis with their gender transition; pharmaceuticals and surgery did that, as well as human skill could manage. Magic couldn't feed the poor; and neither does the government Soylent program, though it generated yet another unicorn to feed the VC frenzy. Is it any wonder that The Matrix is an inherently humanist story? Anyone freed from the illusion can gain control over it. Neo may be special, but anyone can be a Trinity or a Morpheus. And even in the grim "true" reality, Zion is worth fighting for. Everyone there is good and strong, everyone counts, every climactic battle is meaningful and for every robot invasion there is an orgiastic underground rave. Say that about New York.