This, in somewhat cleaned-up format, is the original manuscript of the novel I wrote between 1984 and 1989. I'm still not sure whether this is a functional book or merely interesting wreckage, but in an admittedly rather naive experiment in electronic publishing, I'm putting the file on the web under the terms of a shareware license.

Issue 4 of Hyperrhiz is dedicated to electronic literature. As Davin Heckman notes in his introduction to { Literal1.Text }, e-lit, as "a form that was born quite consciously as a response to emergent technics (both hardware and software), opens up the door for literatures that can reveal something to us about the nature of the technical system." This response, increasingly, forces us to reckon with the ways in which literature is becoming code, and code, literature. If the works included in this issue are any indication, the nature of Heckman's "technical system" is generative and additive, rather than instrumental.

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures provides a forum for experimental new media projects (both critical and creative) located outside or across current disciplinary boundaries. Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures is a peer-reviewed satellite journal of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, housed at Bowling Green State University, Department of English, Bowling Green OH 43403. Hyperrhiz is published twice-yearly, with additional dynamic content available year round.

This paper is based on the general (yet disputable) assumption that the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted, just as the poetic practices it is shaped after, from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ''hypertext'', ''hyperfiction'', ''hyper-/ multimedia'') towards paying attention to the very codedness - i.e. textuality - of digital systems themselves. Several phenomena may serve as empirical evidence