92615_RAA_LooseCannon_Text_R1_PROOF

knows only as Happy Panda. Like the omnipresent guy in the Nissan ads, he's Wilson's Yoda; he's one of the only characters that we see in the "real" world and in the DifferNet. In fact, just wait until you read the plot.

The Plot

The main project that The Mathemagicians are working on is an alternative to the Internet. By using proprietary coding techniques, There There, Inc. has stumbled on an access infrastructure that can be piggy-backed on existing coaxial cable, with no loss of signal for either regular television broadcasts or information exchange. Coupled with self-designed dedicated hardware, the Mathemagicians' first real-world application of their new dis covery is a constructed Internet-like network that links the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History to all American zoos. There There is set to offer this new technology to a media-saturated world and potentially make a load of cash. As Jon Fox glibly says, "There's money to be made sending discrete packets of informative data from There to There." These twenty nothings are poised between slacker apathy and old-fashioned greed. Playing their cards close to their collective vests, Les comes up with a tagline to sell their product to the world: "It's not the Internet; it's differ ent. It's the DifferNet." The DifferNet is an intentionally murky, quasi-mystical application of com puter technology that'll take a while to define. For now, let's just leave it at the sample ad copy at the start: out where electrons spin and photons flash, ones and zeros represent the sum total of human knowledge. And in that place, anything can happen. Take a one here, and put it there, and suddenly a housewife in Springfield is getting a visit from Ed McMahon. Take a zero here, and put it there, and you can go to a place where the ani mals talk. The first issue opens with Estaban racing around San Francisco, with that frenetic energy coupled with that laconic slowness that seems to charac terize bike messengers in all major cities. The first three pages are a kind of teaser. Page one is a mishmash of San Francisco landmarks, a quick visual tour of famous places that instantly grounds the reader in the locale. Estaban narrates a shoot-from-the-hip-per-than-thou monologue that builds to a two page, Kirby-esque splash of action. Pages two and three showcase a new logo and features Estaban, on his bicycle, jumping over a curb and through a puddle. When the reader turns from the first page, I'm going for a visceral, punch-in-the-face effect. He rides down Market Street, towards the newspaper pods on the corner of Second. After locking up his bike and getting two coffees, Estaban brings them over to a grizzled Asian senior citizen manning the newspaper kiosk. It is here we meet Happy Panda; this may or may not be his real name. If

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