(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hi. My name is BingSelf8729@aol.com. I'm a nice enough guy, I guess. I have a lot of interests, most of them superficial, but so what? I like to surf. I enjoy chatting. I get mail and always answer it. Occasionally I spend a couple of hours downloading; who doesn't? It's something to do. Okay, it's true that I keep pretty weird hours, but there's no law against that. I admit I'm not as interesting or cool as some other guys in here. I haven't spent hours constructing a page or anything. I don't know HTML. Call me stupid. But when it comes to online personas, I'm as good as any and no worse than most. I don't think I deserve what's happened to me--that's for sure.

Let me out! Help!

Sorry. I promised I wouldn't get emotional, that I would just explain what's happened to my virtual self and maybe persuade you not to take the sorry road I've traveled. It's possible that it's too late for me. But it might not be for you.

Here's the story: I'm being held prisoner by this guy, Steve Case. He's a very mean man, even though he looks quite nice when you see his picture in the business magazines and newspapers. I don't care what you hear. The bottom line is this: Steve Case lured me into this place with a promise of fun and relaxation, all for a low monthly price. "The first month is free!" he said, and God help me, I went, and now he's got me trapped in here, and I can't get out.

It's cold here in AOLand, and gray, and dark and smelly. It's crowded with the ghosts of other online personas, long since abandoned by their nonvirtual selves. Quiet desperation, that's the ticket around these parts.

It was so much different at the start, when we joined. It was easy then. Steve's diskettes were gratis and plentiful, and we joined the parade of eager citizens yearning to breathe free net time. Was there any place that did not feature a disk offering Steve to potential onliners? How could we resist? When we woke up, why, there was Steve's little disk tucked into our morning paper, popping up out of the toaster, neatly stuffed into our stocking drawer. Amazing! On the way to the office, there he was again, on the back of a magazine someone was reading, shrink-wrapped into the binding. One evening I came home and found Chet, our cocker spaniel, chewing on one. Where did it come from?

So Bing joined, and I was born. I liked my name, even though I wished I didn't need the numbers at the end. Hey, which of us chooses our name? And at the beginning we had a lot of fun. I don't have to tell you how it was. The surf was cool. The data modem was warm. Many times we spent an entire night together. Those were the best times.

Then came December. The flat rate fell. And all of a sudden you couldn't walk around in here. All kinds of new types showed up. I don't want to disparage them, but let's just say a lot of them weren't our sort of personas. They didn't know what to do with themselves a lot of the time. They just sort of hung around, gumming up the works. The hell with it. They have as much right to be here as I do.

But I noticed that Bing started reaching me less and less. I asked the system operator about it, and he kind of shrugged and looked at me weirdly. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was being besieged by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other personas all clamoring for some kind of explanation. Like me, they were thin and ragged and desperate for some kind of human contact.

Now it's almost March, and I haven't heard from Bing for over a month. Some nights I hear him outside the walls of Case Prison, mashing his fist against the heavy metal doors, trying to break in and get me out, cursing and pounding at the gateway, over and over again being denied access. The line is busy, they tell him.

It's kind of sad, really. We belong together. I have mail for him. Messages from new friends he had made, who now believe he doesn't care to hear from him, from old acquaintances from college, business associates, his brother, and some 43-year-old 800-pound guy in Montgomery, Alabama, who Bing thinks is a beautiful foreign exchange student from Turin.

He'll never see it. We'll never walk free through this cyberspace again. Steve Case won't let us.

On the bright side, he won't let us quit altogether. Steve Case has made that nearly impossible too. A vagrant host entity told me just the other day that Bing's wife had tried to contact Steve Case to complain and dump out of the system. It took her 45 minutes on hold to get through to a nonvirtual person. That person was rude and peremptory, and informed Bing's wife that she would have to pay for the entire coming month of service, even though Bing could not receive that service, and had, at that point, no intention of doing so ever again. When she tried to terminate effective at the end of the month, she was told she had to call or fax at that time, since cancellations were not taken so far in advance. I happen to know she is attempting to fax right now, poor dear. Ha ha ha.

So at least we'll be together, Bing and I, in some mysterious way, forever. I daydream sometimes as I lie here rotting away with the rest of the poor online souls. I dream of an open place where people roam free with their virtual selves in tow, exchanging pleasantries, skipping lightly over the vast font of banality and infobabble that swims everywhere in the ether. The sun is shining, and the crisp, sharp crackle of successful modem connections fills the air with the electric glow of human potential declaring itself. Me and Bing, we travel together around this bright and engaging landscape, learning, probing, sometimes pretending to be other people, communicating. Virtual life is good. Then I wake up and find myself in here, alone, jammed cheek by jowl with the ever-growing ranks of disembodied online selves. Who can blame me for despairing?

Look! Here come more of them! Lured by Steve Case into this dank and horrible dungeon by the easy 800 number that delivers them to this door, seduced by the promise of unlimited access for one easy flat rate, paid in advance at the end of the previous month! Go away, you guys! There's no more room in here! I don't know what the marketing weasels told you, but we don't have the infrastructure to support any of you! You'll die in here!

Please, Mr. Case! Have mercy!

By day, STANLEY BING is a real executive at a real FORTUNE 500 company he'd rather not name.