Short Cuts: Episode I 
Love and War in Cyberspace
Brandon and Denise were not like other people. They were smarter, more introverted. They adored computers.
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It never occurred to Denise that the T-3 could upset her whole grown-up world. She was making up the rules as she went along—like the other Waldenites—trying to adjust to social expectations, and she thought that maybe she would find some friends there, like Brandon had. But when she first got to Walden, the opposite occurred: She withdrew from everybody, including Brandon. She stayed home and nuzzled one-on-one with the T-3. In the first few months after she and Brandon had moved in, Denise was unemployed, and she knew exactly what to do with all that free time. Like Dude on the Floor, she played EverQuest twelve hours a day, every day. After Brandon left the apartment in the morning, she would roll out of bed, go online, and become her EverQuest character, "a little 31 enchanter." (The enchanter, she bragged, was the hardest class on EverQuest.)
"I'd use it as a chat function just to talk to people," she recalled, giggling. "So I'd start EverQuest, shower, get dressed, play EverQuest, go out and run errands, play EverQuest." She would chatter on about her EverQuest character to the few Waldenites she bumped into. She even tried to drag them back to her apartment to see for themselves just how great her "enchanter" was. She lived EverQuest. She breathed it. It was better than the real world. She met more people, for one thing. There were chat rooms in the game that allowed people to get to know each other—in the same way Brandon and Denise had first met years before. Her obsession became infamous at Walden; residents told stories of the girl who was so obsessed with the game that it destroyed her marriage. See, before long, Denise met a special friend while playing the game.
Like the last time, her meeting in cyberspace led to a series of long-distance phone calls. Brandon noticed unfamiliar phone numbers on their phone bill and he thought, "She's playing one game all the time . . . this rings a bell. . . . " Their marriage, by this time, had already started to fall apart. They agreed that they would see other people. One weekend, when Brandon went out of town, Denise's new friend flew from California to visit her.
And, in short, it was O-V-E-R. Slam door, press hands over face, end of sentence. The virtual and the real worlds were colliding and turning against them. Click, tick.
But that's not the strangest part of their story. The strangest part is that neither one of them could bear to abandon Walden. Rather than leave their beloved T-3, they shook hands and went back to their respective corners. Denise moved into a two-bedroom Walden apartment with a male friend who played EverQuest (only friends, she insisted) and Brandon moved into a single poolside apartment.
News of the breakup was quickly disseminated both online and around the pool, which functioned like a giant barbershop. Brandon started dating his next-door neighbor, Melba, a Walden rarity: a quiet woman who was more interested in art movies than computers. Some of the tenants sat in the pool and watched them go into her apartment and close the door, then into his apartment and close the door. People talked. People wondered what was going on with Brandon. Rumors flew.
"The stories were just incredible," he said. "I was always going, 'They said what?!'" Walden was becoming a small town in the middle of America's fourth-largest city.
After Brandon and Denise broke up, they swapped roles. As Brandon got closer to Melba and withdrew from the group, Denise plunged headfirst into the social life at Walden. She began dating Ché, a programmer who was in the core group, and she started going out with crowds of up to twenty to dance clubs. They would stuff themselves into a few cars, then they'd speed down Houston's highways, accompanied by the deafeningly loud thump-thump-thump of dance music. Denise and a couple of others bought walkie-talkies so they could talk from their cars: "Hey there, Little B—whoo! Hold on. [Sound of car accelerating.] Heyyy you there?"[Laughing] "What are you doing?"
"Passing—would you get a load of this guy over here?"
"Hold on, Pata wants to talk."
"Hey there, Little B!"
Then they'd race back home and slip into the hot tub. Sometimes they'd stay in the fizzy water until sunrise. Even when they were stinking drunk and hunched over in the illuminated blue tub, the talk was computers and gadgets and gaming.
Walden was changing. Wallflowers like Denise were blossoming. Partying accelerated. "Someone brings a minilaser," Denise said, waving her hands as she talked, "then somebody brings in black lights, then somebody brings better speakers and a better mixer, and all of a sudden you've got this insane party." Parties at the complex became no-holds-barred events where beer and Ecstasy were consumed in large quantities. Thump-thump-thump.
By the fall of 1999, Walden had achieved its potential to become a mini-civilization, just as Birney had hoped. Birney, who still lived at the complex and had observed the results of his handiwork, was pleased. "In many cases," he said, "our residents feel like in the past they've been isolated pioneers running around doing their own thing, but even those who were seriously isolated—even positively rejected—come here and find a peer group that is stimulating and challenging." Ask any of the residents and they'd agree. "These people are rejects," said WebGirlie, with tears in her eyes. "We were the ones made fun of at the back of the class in high school, and this is a triumph: We are our own clique now." Another tenant, a bony Louisianan who went by the name Pitre, laughed eagerly when he recalled his life before Walden: "I had two friends, but they were mentally disturbed."
Waldenites internalized Birney's old ad slogan, "Come for the Bandwidth, Stay for the Community." To outsiders, they gushed about how utterly fan-tas-tic, how totally bliss-ful they were. "The level and the ability to communicate is unlike anywhere else," said Walter, one of the older Waldenites. "It's like a giant co-op at times."
Like Brandon and Denise, many found it hard, even impossible to leave. Bosch, a lean, constantly smiling resident, left Walden after he bought a house. But he moved back, he says with a shrug, because he got too lonely and wanted to "hang out with the guys."
Says WebGirlie, dryly: "This is a cult. You've heard of Jonestown? This is Jimstown, except . . . without the poisonous drinks. People go in and out, but when a guest comes you can smell 'em."
With the cult came a sense of belonging, of togetherness. One night, EyeBurn and eight other residents saw a burglar on the grounds. They hauled after the thief, tackled him, and sat on him until the police arrived. "If something happened to your neighbor, you'd help out because you knew them," Little B earnestly explained. If a tenant couldn't pay rent, others would pitch in to cover it. When somebody lost a job, the group would pay for his meals. Waldenites received birthday cards with at least fifty signatures. Frequently they'd ICQ each other in the middle of the night to say "I have beer; will be in hot tub" or "Anybody want to grab a bite at House of Pies?" and eleven people would meet out in the parking lot. They were making up for a whole lot of sheltered years; they were as excited as prison escapees reunited on a Hawaiian cruise ship.
Maybe they were enthusiastic too soon. While Walden's denizens were busy melding into the techno-commune of Birney's dreams, the man himself had been busy thinking of his next move. Though he was basically a real estate man who owned and managed commercial complexes like Walden, he still had a pocketful of big ideas, most of which started with real estate and then spun up into something more spiritual. He believed that Walden itself, for example, "might develop into multiuse communities incorporating office structures and retail and residential and the whole works, built around the premise that it was the lifestyle of the future." But, ultimately, he was still a real estate man. He and his wife had been running properties in Houston and New Jersey for years. He knew his way around the Internet, sure, but—he wasn't one of the Waldenites. He waved and made small talk with them, but for the most part, he watched Walden develop from the other side of the office glass.Birney had decided that if Walden "is a bold step forward, it must look like a bold step forward." It had been his idea, after all; it had worked splendidly. Now he had an idea for how to spruce the place up, make it even cozier and more inviting. In September 1999 he hired a crew who proceeded to paint Walden's eleven apartment buildings in a variety of blindingly bright colors that included Aztec blood red, marigold yellow, jade green, and Majorelle blue. The idea sounds harmless enough. But in the tiny, cloistered, intensely communal world Birney had created, the new paint was taken as nothing less than an invasion of privacy.
"There was no announcement," Denise said. "There was no saying, 'We're going to paint the building.' All that happened one day was the front building turned—I kid you not—coral pink. And we're talking about ninety-five percent guys in their twenties. They don't want to live in a pink apartment complex." Birney, waxing spiritual, explained to the tenants that it was "derived from primary color states, archetypal origins, primal states of nature, and cycles of life." But, of course, that made it worse. So, as dutiful members of their community, Waldenites made their opinions known on the misc list. Tap, tap, tap, double exclamation point. Tappity-tap, triple exclamation point. Many demanded that it be painted back to "a nice gray." Brandon wrote, sarcastically, "Dammit, when I own my own apt. complex with an OC-3 internet connection, I'm going to paint the buildings a nice camouflage color!" They felt cheated. This was their place. Why were they not consulted? Birney ruled that it was his building complex and he was keeping the colors. Period.
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