Review of Bridge to eQualia by Blackle Mori

First times for everything; the post-facto titled “Bridge to eQualia” currently only exists as a Bluesky thread (though the author has promised to post it on its blog; I will try to remember to update this review with a link later). I awoke this Sunday morning to see this on my feed, courtesy of a quote-post from someone else. I tapped on the first post, expecting a thread a few posts deep, and instead was consumed, compulsively tapping “Continue thread” and waiting for my slowwwwww outdated phone to load the next posts as I sipped my Sunday morning London fog in my library. I love it when I come across an unexpected work of fiction and am hooked—in this case, to the point where I need to do more than simply share this on my social media but actually review it here.

“Bridge to eQualia” has echoes of hardboiled detective noir mixed in with Gibson and Sterling: it’s a cyberpunk-for-the-now, a work of science fiction set basically in the present. The protagonist, Maggie (also named retroactively, such is the construction of the text), is a security researcher-turned-private-investigator of little mysteries on the internet. She has stumbled into her latest mystery after a Second Life rave led to an invitation to a MUSH (think a MUD but more roleplay than questing) that, upon visiting, proved not just abandoned but utterly devastated by an external force. Maggie dives deep on this one, consulting German microfiche and leveraging Minecraft exploits to ultimately arrive at the truth. The ending is consistent in tone with what little I have read of the noir detective genre: the detective seldom gets much closure and even less often gets the girl.

Blackle’s voice synergizes with the nature of the medium—Bluesky threads—to convey so much about Maggie so efficiently. Over the course of the story, we learn she’s trans (blink and you’ll miss it), autistic, variously neurodivergent in other ways I don’t feel particularly qualified to label. Often this exposition manifests as posts that feel overly focused on minute, seemingly unimportant details:

I fetched a chilled vanilla ensure from the minifridge and gave it those requisite twenty-five shakes that I'd found, from testing, would properly re-homogenize it. bring the admittedly already rare likelihood of encountering any disgusting protein lumps to near-zero.

The thread highlights this description in a way that would be lost in ordinary, paragraphed prose. The minimalist reader in me balks and wants to skim over it, get to “the action,” but because it’s chunked into its own post rather than buried within a paragraph in a story, my brain forces me to read—and therefore learn. Blackle seldom states anything outright about Maggie, but all the characterization is there.

This facility with clever details extends across the story like a lattice; truly, I think it’s what kept me reading despite the interface’s indolence. The MUSH’s name, eQualia, invoking both the philosophy of mind term and also the idea of “equality,” while the overall story title, while retroactive, hearkens back to that traumatizing novel of our childhood, Bridge to Terabithia, which also featured a world reified by its protagonists. Likewise, an avatar comprising seven crows feels perfect for a character experiencing multiple personalities. I don’t know how much of this is intentional and how much I am reading into it—and that is my point. “Bridge to eQualia” grabbed me because I kept seeing it, and it made me as the reader feel clever for spotting all these little allusions and ideas. A story—the real story—doesn’t actually exist on paper or screen or in the words of the author at all but is, after all, an experience constructed by the reader as we read, and this story exploits that incredibly well.

For me the obvious point of comparison, as mentioned above, is William Gibson. Reading “Bridge to eQualia” made me itching to take down some Neuromancer. Gibson, like Blackle, writes in a way that feels effortlessly clever to me without being overbearing or condescending. I love that Maggie, much like Gibson’s protagonists, has stumbled into this mystery almost by chance and takes it on despite not really having a client. She would fit right into Gibson’s conjuration of the Sprawl, the first, most compelling vision of a gender-expansive, transhumanist world I had ever encountered that still felt utterly grounded to me in the real, by which I mean the reality of human existence versus posthumanist fantasies of decompiling ourselves into qubits. Although much of Gibson’s vision of cyberspace has been outpaced, what endures is his observation that high technology inevitably gets ground down into the dirt like the rest of us.

“Bridge to eQualia” invokes online subcultures about which I have fairly little knowledge—I came to the web in the age of Geocities and message boards, so my experience with MUDs and Second Life were fleeting at best. But it throws you into these spaces with little ado while at the same time referencing the technology that underpins it all. Blackle’s writing speaks to discomfort with embodiment and the tensions between the capitalist system in which we must eke out existence and the anarchies flourishing in these heterotopias (Maggie’s dance with the Minecraft griefers comes to mind as the most overt instance).

With that in mind, let me bring another author into the chat: Cory Doctorow. Though I haven’t always loved his fiction, one thing I will give Doctorow is his ability to create characters who truly feel like they are living the lives he has given them within the parameters of niches created by technological change. The same is true here in Maggie, 7crows, and the other characters here. Unless you have spent a lot of time within these subcultures, lots is going over your head (certainly it goes over mine)—yet, fundamentally, you can still grasp how the internet and related technologies have mediated these characters’ lives in ways that are profoundly new yet prosaically predictable. Doctorow’s science fiction is almost always set in the present if not (like his most recent outings) the near-past, yet science fiction it remains because it is observing how our changing technology changes us—and Blackle does much the same here.

All of this is to say, “Bridge to eQualia” is a good read. If I haven’t already said this, it’s fun. Moreover, as I hope this review has convinced you, it’s deep without being obnoxious about it, and that’s exactly the kind of philosophy-driven science fiction I want.