The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans (5 page)
“Bolivia is the only landlocked country in the Western Hemisphere. In 1998, the thickness of the glaciers in the high Andes Mountains was approximately fifteen meters thick. Today, it has decreased to one meter in thickness. These glaciers provide the water that eventually forms twenty-five rivers that feed Lake Titicaca, the largest fresh water reservoir in South America. The tributaries contributing water to Titicaca supply most of the drinking water to the residents of greater La Paz, which also includes the barrios of El Alta (population one million and ever growing). In the coming years, La Paz may lose as much as sixty per cent of its drinking water due to pollution created by silver mining in the Titicaca area, as the lake itself is becoming polluted, and in a short time the water will be unfit for human consumption. In just a year or two from now, water demand will exceed supply in the greater Chocaya region of Bolivia. This is a certainty: it is now too late to save Bolivia’s glaciers.”
What’s more, Omar Paquero has plenty to say about the Amazon Rain Forest:
“In the time it takes to read this note card, an area of Brazil’s rain forest larger than two hundred football fields will have been destroyed. The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards. In the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land.”
Here is another note card:
Nearly one hundred indigenous leaders from Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana will convene in Brazil’s northeastern Roraima State to protest development projects they claim are threatening the rain forest—and their own livelihoods.
Topping the discussion agenda for the four-day meeting are large-scale logging projects, gold mining and super-highways that cut through pristine tropical rain forest.
The summit is an opportunity for indigenous organizations in the region to advance joint proposals for defense of their territories and for economic alternatives for their communities.
Among projects listed for review are: the BR-174 superhighway that cuts through the northern Amazon region in Brazil; the 350-kilometer (220-mile) Georgetown-Brazil jungle road link; and Venezuela’s mammoth Guri hydroelectric plant, with the potential to supply power to neighboring countries such as Guyana.
Indians in the affected countries claim the projects pose a threat to the tropical jungle, where most of them live.
During a larger summit in May, indigenous leaders from nine Amazon Basin countries warned such projects had already caused severe environmental damage to the region, including polluting prime fishing areas and devastating hunting grounds.
Guyana, a former British colony on South America’s northeast shoulder, is embroiled in land disputes with its 35,000 Amazon Indians over efforts to open up more forest for commercial purposes. Foreign firms are increasingly eyeing the country, which has one of the world’s largest expanses of virgin rain forest, as a potential source of timber.
Guyana is also home to one of South America’s largest gold mines, which provides a fourth of the country’s gross domestic product. The mine triggered fears among environmental groups after its holding dam broke in July 1995, flooding a major river with cyanide-tainted water.
Indian groups need the summit to spur awareness of the effects of such projects on the world’s dwindling rain forests.
Among those expected to address the summit are Ageu Flotencio da Cunha, Brazil’s attorney general, officials from the Washington-based World Resources Institute, and the president of Venezuela’s power company.”
So that’s it! Yet another condemnation of man’s ongoing and sickening disregard for the very ecosphere that sustains him. Even a dog won’t shit in his den. What can one say in response to such obvious stupidity, to such selfish and pathetic irresponsibility? See you in the next life? (Is Virtual Life the new environment where we are all supposed to gather to salvage our culture?) Small consolation, I think.
Yet, day after day I log on to VL. During the past year I’ve only failed to log on one day, and that was because I was too sick to get out of bed; and actually, if I’d not had a fever of almost one hundred and three, then I would have brought my laptop under the covers with me and transferred to virtual Tahiti to walk along a beautiful tropical beach at sunset. Now that would have made me feel better, I suppose, but I was too sick to disconnect then reconnect my modem, so whatever travels I undertook that day were delirium induced, not cyber creations.
Needless to say, I’m very committed to Virtual Life, which is why I became a VL greeter, and why I give so much time and effort to the Open Books Project, and why I make it a point to attend concerts and poetry readings and lectures, and also why I try to meet as many other seedlings as possible. I find that most people here in VL have something unique to offer, and I think that many of us share the feeling that we are creating something very valuable: namely, a new universe, where we just might, if we’re committed and careful, get it right this time! Of course the impending Physical Life crisis—the accelerating environmental breakdown—makes our effort all the more imperative, because if people like Igloo Iceman and Omar Paquero are correct, then we’re surely in the eleventh hour, or the Sixth spasm of extinction (the first five have all been naturally occurring events, while the so-called Sixth spasm is the first one brought on by man), the clock is ticking, and our PL time is nearly up!
There is something a bit non sequitur about coming to a virtual Disneyland to play as children play while our planet glows and gushes in response to the hot and heavy gases we churn into the atmosphere by the ton each and every day, but what else can we do? If you stop to think about it, serious business is the real instigator of the degradation, and not once has a song, or a silly game, or a make-believe friend fouled precious water, or felled a tree, or coated a gull in oil. My analysis might be simplistic, I admit, but it is also irrefutable. Here in VL, it’s true for most of us that our work and our play are synonymous, which is why VL just might work where PL has failed.
I can’t help thinking that I would very much like my newest VL friend, Kizmet Aurora, to meet up with Omar Paquero, because I think they might have quite a lot to talk about. While most of us in Virtual Life do not talk much about our lives in PL, I think I know something about Omar Paquero’s PL existence, and about Kizmet Aurora’s, too.
Ever since I first met him, I’ve assumed that Omar Paquero is not only an Indian but also a very evolved human being (of course assumptions can be erroneous and dangerous in any universe, but especially so here in Virtual Life due to the nature of the environment). As for Kiz, I know that she lives her PL life with Native North Americans, specifically the Hopi, who, I’m told, are the most mystical of all North American Indians, and that her point of view has been greatly influenced by her experiences with the Hopi people.
The Hopi, meaning good, peaceful or wise people, live in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi mesas are called First Mesa, Second Mesa and Third Mesa. On the mesa tops are the Hopi villages, which are called pueblos. The village of Oraibi, located on Third Mesa, dates back to the year 1050, and is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.
According to Hopi mythology, Kiz tells me, we are now living in the final years of what is known as the Fourth World. Neither the Hopi, nor their antecedents the Mayans, view or count time as we do: their perception of time is a cyclical one, where the end of one world is necessarily the beginning of a New World. It’s actually all quite complicated, and I have to admit that I don’t fully understand everything that Kiz tells me about the Hopi and the Mayans and the way they count time (short count; long count; secessions; convergences), but I do get it when she tells me that these Indians firmly believe, as calculated by the Mayan calendar, that the Fourth World will end on the Winter Solstice of the year 2012, and that in the coming world, the Fifth World, all forms of life on Earth will be trans-mutated into a ‘perfected’ eternal form. The Hopi refer to this time as the ‘Purification Time’.
Now, what’s really interesting about all this is that during the so-called Purification Time, the very nature of time itself will undergo a transformation, and all beings will have to choose between what we now experience as time in our earthly lives and a very different kind of time—one that will allow us to reach the Fifth World.
OMG! Kiz, this is really scary stuff! You’re living out there on the desert (the documented temperature increase: five degrees Fahrenheit during the past six years, and anyone with eyes can see the results: the ground is blistered and cracked; not a cloud in the sky, and even the rattlesnakes will no longer come out of their subterranean world for fear of frying to death in the unrelenting sun) with seven thousand crazed Indians who have already made plans to survive the Big Make-over! Meanwhile, the terrain in Virtual Life looks a lot like California—no matter where you tend to go—which is admittedly not all bad when cast against the realities of Black Mesa or the Tsiarngagai Mountains of Greenland.
Meanwhile, here I sit in Sugarland, Quinn Town, Virtual Life… A cyber-reality where a ridiculous looking dinosaur guards the entrance to the womb of posterity, and a Bolivian kid of eleven (or a displaced American nun) walks around pretending to be a hundred-year-old
gaucho
who greets everybody he meets with a shy “
Buenos dias”
and invites them to please, when they have a spare moment, read over his note cards on glacier meltdown in the high Andes and rain forest destruction in the Amazon River Basin. Are we connecting here? Or is this pure lunacy as we wait to fry, or choke on the noxious air, or drown in the coming deluge?
And then there’s Crystal Marbella trying to create a cyber library of humankind’s most noble tradition: literature! She’s typesetting faster than Evelyn Wood can read, which I only suppose befits the medium on which she’s working: after all, Broadband cable moves information at more than seven megabytes per second! Here the limits of accomplishment are strictly human ones. I imagine the machines clandestinely expressing their frustration to one another that the operators are slow as bugs swimming in glue, knowing all the while that sooner or later fingers will stick together, rendering them useless for keyboard work, and the machines will have to finally go it alone. Is this what my computer really thinks? Can my computer actually
think
? Well, maybe not today, but the time is certainly coming when the distinction between man and machine will blur once and for all. Which may yet prove to be humanity’s Saving Grace!
Or maybe those books that Crystal Marbella is republishing online have something to do with our legacy. Who’s to say?
Back at Quinn Town center we meet up with Ego Ectoplasm himself, the emulation of the creator of Quinn Town. Ego Ectoplasm may be a little boy, but he seems to be wise in his innocence.
With Ego is a non-human, bio-engineered emulation called Tooltech, who looks something like a Grizzly bear with a primitive generator attached to his backside and a plumber’s wrench for an arm, which probably suits him well as he helps Artemis Quinn build out the Quinn Town REP. Tooltech is also the guitarist of a Blues band called The Mustardseeds. Strapped round his neck is a Les Paul Jr. on which he plays various Blues riffs to punctuate his statements. Tooltech gives each of us a Mustardseeds T-shirt, for which we thank him before storing the gifts in our respective caches.
“Hello, Ego Ectoplasm,” I say.
Ego types: Hello, Fizzy Oceans.
“Hello, Ego. Hello, Tooltech,” says Crystal.
Tooltech: (Stevie Ray Vaughan Blues riff).
I regard the cyber-guitarist inquisitively. “Tooltech, I know you’re a wholly original species, but what I want to know is this: Don’t you get tired of looking that way?”
Tooltech explains: “In VL there are basically two different types of emulations: static persona and doppelgangers. Doppelgangers like you can change their appearance whenever they choose, but since I am a brand, I must remain static. It’s kind of a celebrity thing. People would become upset if I changed my EM.”
“I must admit, your appearance is very distinctive,” says Crystal.
“Thanks to Artemis Quinn. She designed me.”
“Is your species actually alive?” I ask.
Ego types: Tooltech is very much alive!
“Explain,” I say.
Ego types: Barbarian Tooltech is a psychedelic vision, conceived in a whirlwind dance of a billion integers. His species is Quinngen. He will always be Quinngen. His existence is eternal because it is essentially arithmetic. He will always be Tooltech!
“Will I always be Fizzy Oceans?” I ask. “Will Crystal always be Crystal Marbella?”
Ego types: In PL, bodies grow old, systems fail, breakdown occurs; in VL, who knows? I suppose programs will sooner or later decay. How long might that take? I imagine that all depends on the integrity of the program in question. As a new species that was created specifically for this application, the Quinngen is a very adaptable, and therefore durable, life form.
“Are you saying that the Quinngen is a superior species?” asks Crystal.
Ego types: Not exactly. But, as I said, a Quinngen is a Quinngen and will always be a Quinngen. As emulations representing human beings, you and I must constantly adjust our emulations to this new and ever-changing environment. Not so for a species engineered specifically for this application, for this universe.
“How Darwinian!” I say.
Ego types: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! :)
I think I’m beginning to get it. I think I might just understand that whether we’re in PL or VL, it’s all just playtime anyway, all a matter of how we choose to spend our energy. Nothing is literal—not in VL, and not in PL either. Everything we see or experience is a symbol. Tooltech experiences himself as a member of a hybrid race, while Kizmet Aurora chooses to live with Native Americans who are waiting for the coming of the next world. Meanwhile, Crystal Marbella works to preserve the myths and ideas of an entire culture for posterity. Personally, I find it amazing that we can exist in PL and VL at the same time. And perhaps we still exist somewhere back in NL too, but those memories are awfully hard to reach nowadays. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised, not at all!
My own place in this new environment—or in the old environment, for that matter—remains mired in doubt, constricted by a lack of confidence, strangled by my own inability to freely admit the obvious. I’ve always been that way—tentative. I don’t like the trait, but I’ve never been able to free myself of it. What to do? Working alongside Crystal helps with my sense of belonging, yet I still harbor the feeling that the grand purpose behind that endeavor is hers, not mine. I’m not much of a crusader; I never have been one for causes. Though these days it seems that a cause or two is certainly warranted. If not now, then when might I—or anybody—take up a banner in defense of our culture, or our race, or our planet? No doubt, too many will wait until it’s too late. Will that be my legacy, too? I hope not. Commitment has always been hard for me, I admit, but I seem to be coming around a bit lately. My friends here in Virtual Life encourage me to be bold and decisive. Here we have so little to lose, and an entire world to gain. I must admit that I get a magnificent rush as I watch builders like Sly Sideways working to create this new and hopeful world, this Virtual Life. Just where I fit in I must still decide. And I think there’s still time…