English 285 - Interpreting Cyberspace
Presentation Paper - Timothy Allen
Themes of Cyberspace in Babylon-5
Babylon-5 is a complex series involving television, novels, and even comic books. The entire storyline has been written and conceived in full in advance; everything is planned out. There are many different points in the huge overall storyline that cha racters address and interact with different concepts, elements, and dreams of cyberspace. From a three dimensional interface like Netscape to browse the universe to their InterWeb, Babylon-5 has carefully paid attention to details of information distribut ion and the future of technology in many ways that had not yet been conceived.
In the novel Voices, themes of conspiracy result from technology, and a chase between Earth, Mars, and Babylon-5 occurs in reality and across the InterWeb. At the beginning, a fake data crystal is used as a bombing device implicating Babylon-5' s resident telepath Talia Winters. She goes on the run to earth with some help from her friends. On the run, her profile was released across the InterWeb as a top priority; instantly, on all ISN broadcasts and the nets, her name was on hot alert.
Enter Babylon Five gangster Deuce: a techrunning terrorist out for profit. Deuce decides to help Talia. When they arrive on Earth, he helps her get a false identicard from a tribe of hi-tech would-be Indians who live in the desert.
Harriman Gray is a telepath who was introduced in a television episode who was sympathetic to Babylon-5 personnel, especially Ivanova, in the past. He and Garibaldi are assigned to search for Talia and quickly board the first Earth-bound shuttle in se arch of Emily Crane, whom they have come to believe has vital information on the bombing; also the one who gave the data crystal to Talia. Through the InterWeb, Garibaldi tracks Crane to Boston. His access level is extremely high: level Ultraviolet-Alpha. Its kind of like being on the inside of the Earth Alliance Intelligence Web.
After he finds Crane, he does some more tracking throughout the InterWeb from a name he saw on a memo on her desk. He finds that the telepaths were about to be privatized instead of being a military branch of the government, and that the answers are o n Mars. Like in Neuromancer, travel is quite accelerated: it takes a very short time for them to get from Boston to Miami, but still a good two day trip to get to Mars.
Accusations, the next book in the series, is even more computer oriented than the first. The scene opens on a busy day at C & C, Command and Control, as Commander Susan Ivanova is monitoring the station's traffic lanes. The screens highlight a single crippled cargo vessel with failed stabilizers. Her computer screens are her eyes and ears for docking ships and preventing chaos in the space lanes.
Then Ivanova gets informed by the computer that she has received a new e-mail message marked urgent and personal. The sender is reported simply as "J. D." Ivanova figures out that it is from J. D. Ortega, her former flight instructor who had chosen to leave Earthforce and go back to Mars to work in the mines. Finally she views the message:
"Susan, I am in trouble. They say you're Number Two here on this
station. I don't know anyone else who might be able to help.
There's something I have to tell you. Please, meet me in the
Alpha Wing ready room at 20:00 hours."
After nearly two hours of waiting, she finally queries the computer about J. D.'s arrival on the station. The computer responds that although there have been eight Ortega's arriving on the station since it first came on-line, none of them have had the in itials J. D. After doing some more queries about the origin of the message she asks for a search of all files containing the name "J. D. Ortega" to which the computer responds that it has found a restricted file.
The computer responds to her executive officer password and the screen is replaced by an image of his face along with the fugitive alert listing him as a suspected terrorist. Ortega is found dead, and in the meantime while responding to a distress cal l off station, Ivanova figures out that raiders, or space pirates, have been finding new targets to hit. She finds an attacked shit, and it turns out that the ship was carrying a strategic metal called "Morbidium" which is vital for the production of phas ed plasma weapons. The raiders seem to be on the rise, Ivanova decides to cyberhunt for a pattern to the raids.
Later that evening Ivanova begins sifting through the data. After several blind paths she finally tracks down a correlation. Which is that the increase in raids has occurred out of Marsport and that further all of them were on strategic metals. Securi ty Chief Garibaldi had been examining Ortega's death, but for some reason a special investigator had been sent it. He is ordered to terminate his investigation into Ortega's death and prepare to turn over all files related to the matter to a special inves tigator from Earth Central. The investigators promptly arrive in security and demand that he turn over his files, records and passwords.
Garibaldi discovers that the investigator has locked out files on suspects not directly related to the case: this is like stepping on his ego and his virtual toes at the same time. Garibaldi gets Captain Sheridan to make the investigator release the f iles. He then turns up a clue on another suspect in the Mars leak and has kept all of the information about it out of the computer to avoid prying by the investigator. He promises Ivanova he will continue looking into things on the InterWeb. This suspect, found dead, is recognized by one of Garibaldi's prisoners as "an enforcer from AreTech mining on Mars." The InterWeb and a facepic save the day again.
After tracking AreTech through the InterWeb, they find that the metals had actually been being sold on the black market. The raiders would hit the AreTech ship, and AreTech would collect the flight and cargo insurance on very, very expensive metals, w hile all the ships were really carrying was worthless cargo.
The treatment of communications through the InterWeb and the relationship of access and skill levels are heavily addressed in Born to the Purple. Babylon 5 communications has a priority "Gold Channel" reserved for emergency communications. This channel can be used for private conversations between high level government and military officials, as well as a kind of over-ride system. When someone with enough access uses the Gold Channel, it can be used to override all monitors on the local system, or throughout the Earth Alliance Network. Gold Channels are ONLY for official use, they're high-priority channels that can go anywhere back on Earth. Commercial communications are less reliable and only have a few channels available; you've got to wait f or a call to go through. To use a Gold Channel for personal communications is absolutely against the regulations. This idea of access priorities is taken to a new level - in the future, while browsing the web, it is quite possible that emergency interrupt ions could be incorporated. The idea of access is also furthered when Commander Sinclair expresses the fact permission is required to use Gold Channel, and its existence is known only to the ambassadors and senior officers. Garibaldi investigates an unaut horized use of this restricted communications channel, and finds out Commander Ivanova was uses the Gold Channel and responsible for the ICE blocking him from tracking where the signal was coming from. Ivanova was using the channel to talk to her dying fa ther and did not want her fellow officers' pity, thus she attempted the cover-up. Garibaldi is the equivalent of Hiro Protagonist: he collects every bit of interesting or uninteresting data he encounters and saves it to data crystal. As he says, "I never know when I might want to write my memoirs." "I like to know all there is about Babylon 5," Sinclair says, "and Garibaldi's files are very thorough."
While all this is happening between Ivanova and Garibaldi, having their "hacker wars", Ambassador Londo Mollari's career is in jeopardy when a beautiful slave seduces him and steals a sensitive computer file: the purple files. If an outsider were to g et hold of a treasure trove like Londo's purple files, all of Centauri would be diminished. These files include incriminating evidence about him and his family - and war atrocities committed by his relatives. If they made it public, he would be ruined; ho wever, with some help, he manages to recover the data crystal.
Perhaps the greatest realization of the entire series was during the episode Voices of Authority. I believe the writer and producers of Babylon 5 show one of the most creative applications of a computer and "cyberspace." In the truest sense of the meaning of "cyberspace", this computer allows you to "surf the universe" throughout space and sometimes, time itself. As Dave said, "Why only three dimensions?" Babylon 5 manages to portray manipulation of a fourth dimension, time, and possibly more.
In one of the scenes we saw in class, Commander Ivanova was able to extract information from a Great Computer in the planet below Babylon Five, made by an ancient race. She managed to find a pretty specific recording in what must have been huge mounta ins of data (literally!) How the browser works specifically is not known, but this definitely resembles "jacking in," just on a much higher level than human intellect has encountered before.
The enemy, otherwise known as Shadows, sensed Ivanova's "presence" at Sigma 957 while using the browser interface. That implies that the Machine was actually projecting something there rather than passively scanning, and that the projection was tangib le enough to provoke Ivanova to comment that the enemy "knows my name," an odd remark in itself.
Just how much contact there was between Ivanova and the Shadows wasn't clear. Did they have a hand in her discovery of the President Clark recording? Given the enemies apparent affinity for chaos, the release of the recording and the subsequent upheav al on Earth might be exactly what they want. Then again, it could have been accidental contact with the Shadows that allowed her to find out that they were involved with Clark in the assassination.
The fact that Ivanova was able to escape the Shadows by returning to the "path" that connects all living things is perhaps more significant; what does it imply about the Shadows that they're somehow excluded from that path? Is the path more like the M atrix or the Street? Does it have access levels and different "browsers," some computers, some supertelekinetic? These are interesting thoughts for the future of information distribution, that's for sure!
My sense was that basically Ivanova jumped onto the wrong path as she fled...the shadows were in proximity, and she ended up briefly on their path, which took her to the interception of the transmission, which was then recorded to data crystal for rel ease. That's what I call jacking in!
As has been shown, the complex Babylon-5 universe leaves itself open to many interpretations of cyberspace. With its following, the show has realized it is imperative to be at the top level of knowledge of the present; the writers do a magnificent job of playing off current trends and events in technology and information to create an ambiance of the future that people can find both terrifying and enthralling. With the overall story only halfway complete at the time of printing this paper, one can only imagine what kind of topics they have planned for the conclusion of the heavily cyber-influenced storyline.
VOICES by John Vornholt
ACCUSATION by Lois Tilton
BORN TO THE PURPLE by J. Michael Stryczynski