Somewhere out in cyberspace where the electrons run free, a new world is being born. "Hacker culture" is an oxymoron no more.

For the longest time, maladjusted computer geeks with plastic pocket protectors have tried to convince us that logging on was not just useful or interesting or necessary for our jobs, but really cool. They've been waging an uphill battle to create techno-chic. But now comes "VR.5" (Fox, Fridays, 8-9p.m. EST) - and it is, without a doubt, the revenge of the nerds.

Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer) is a painfully shy telephone linewoman by day, hacker supreme by night. Tormented by memories of a tragic car accident that claimed both her father and her twin sister, she has retreated into the world of RAM and ROM, megabytes and gigabytes.

Knee-deep in wires up in her loft, she is tinkering with the computer-simulated sensory-experience technology - virtual reality - her father, neurobiologist Joseph Bloom (David McCallum), helped to pioneer. One night, by accident, she slams her phone down on her modem and finds herself transported into her artificial realm - a 21st-century Alice stepping through a solid-state looking glass.

Sydney soon discovers that she can replicate the experience, and that she has the ability to draw anyone on the other side of the line in with her. But while she can set up the parameters of her virtual worlds, once inside she can't control what happens - the subconscious takes over.

Donning electronic wraparound goggles and black gloves, stepping inside the computer, inside her mind, the reticent Sydney is sometimes transformed into a slinky blonde in red-silk or body-hugging black leather, sometimes a little girl in pigtails and a jumper. A Darryl Hannah doppleganger, Ms. Singer is able to pull off both the wallflower and the buffed-out compu-sex goddess.

Most of the episodes find Sydney journeying across strange dreamscapes on quests for missing people, lost pieces of the past. She sets out after a young genius who's gone hiding with a secret formula, and a suicidal VIP who turns out to be an assassin. In this week's episode her childhood friend Duncan (Michael Easton) searches for her when she's abducted.

But destinations are finally less important than the trips themselves. There are good trips and there are bad trips, hallucinatory voyages through shadowy hallways and angular, off-center rooms that end with Sydney hanging off the sides of cliffs or coming face-to-face with her dead father. With every stride, the worlds she walks across seem to bend and twist and lurch. For those who managed to survive the '60s, there are heavy undercurrents of psychedelia here. Only this time, instead of peyote it's an electronic button that leads into the Freudian funhouse. Log on, tune in, turn on.

What's significant about "VR.5" is its sheer dazzling inventiveness - the way it makes use of the televisual medium with a range of images seen previously only on MTV or commercials, never in a dramatic series. The pictures here are solarized, super-slo-mo'd, spindled, twisted, mutilated and generally jazzed up. In black-and-white and hand-tinted colors, they explode off the screen.

But in any virtual-reality medium - even television - look is secondary to feel, and this show just feels cool. "VR.5" has that chilly mysterioso quality of the early "Twin Peaks," where everything is elliptical and odd, unstated and unsettling. Sydney is constantly given warnings: "I don't think you should go in... I think it's playing with your brain... I think you should take a rest."

An enigmatic secret organization known only as the Committee lurks in the background, a kind of Knights Templar for the '90s. Comprised of shadowy but powerful business and governmental leaders, the Committee may be operating for good or ill, but it definitely has its eyes on Sydney. Its minions want to take control of her technology, but each time they try, it results in dead bodies. And each time Sydney steps out of VR and into the real world, she encounters traces of this Big Brother - which gives "VR.5" that same sense of uneasiness, of edginess, of flat-out paranoia that made "The Prisoner" so fun.

Now clearly "VR.5" is flawed. While it has a great aura, the series doesn't track on several levels. Week after week, there are all sorts of loose connections in the plot. The writing can veer toward fortune-cookie aphorisms on the meaning of life, "the balance of the universe." And even the internal logic can be shaky at best. Sometimes Sydney needs her computer and phone to leap into VR with folks, sometimes she doesn't. Events that happen in VR sometimes change things in the real world, sometimes not - as in an upcoming episode, which has Sydney bedridden in a coma while the Committee tries to dissect the secrets of her abilities. We're venturing into weird areas of causality and Berkelian epistemology, hacker-style: If a tree falls in cyberspace...

But the best thing about "VR.5" is that it's mind-bending, which is more than you can say for most TV. And as such, it's the perfect Friday-night lead-in for "X-Files," another Fox show that's often a little slim on substance but long on aura. There are still plenty of wires to be connected in "VR.5", but executive produce John Sacret Young ("China Beach") has come up with the soul of a strong machine - a solid concept that will in time yield a cult hit.

In a way, it is surprising that "VR.5" works at all. After all, how exciting can a show be that features someone plunked down in front of a box? Yet somehow "VR.5" manages to transform an essentially passive experience into adrenaline. I like to think of it as a metaphor - the ultimate couch potato metaphor - the one that turns all of us, sitting in our chairs, staring at a screen, into heroes.