The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans (15 page)

Adrianne shrugs.

“I’ve never known anybody in Virtual Life who died,” I tell her.

“But it does happen, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I suppose it does. What happens now? I mean, if she actually did die?”

“I don’t know. I suppose somebody will have to remove the
body
.”

“You mean the emulation…”

“Right! She can’t just stay here indefinitely.”

“Well, at least there’s not a problem with the—”

“The smell?”

“Reduced sensuality can sometimes have its advantages,” I offer.

Adrianne looks at me skeptically. “What do you think I should do?”

“I suppose you should contact her next of kin,” I suggest.

“In PL, or VL?”

“Shit! I don’t know.”

“PL, I guess.”

“I’d start with her VL friends.”

“Right! Do you suppose they will claim the body? I mean the emulation?”

“Maybe…”

“I just hate this kind of stuff,” Adrianne laments.

“I know,” I commiserate. “Life’s a witch, and then you die!”

Bad jokes aside, it’s a fact that sometimes people die in VL. Or rather they die in PL, leaving a VL emulation unanimated. I guess it’s up to the deceased’s next of kin to tidy up affairs in VL, just as they might in Physical Life.

Still, I can’t help feeling that death—in Physical Life or in Virtual Life—is God’s worst joke. What the hell was He thinking when He dreamed up that one? I suppose someday I’ll get the chance to ask. But I can wait. Really! And maybe, just maybe, there is another way. Yes! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

GET READY to experience something quite remarkable, Kiz. Because I’m going to take you to a place I consider one of the most extraordinary in Virtual Life. But it is also one of the saddest places I know.

A moment later Kiz and I are standing together in a small, virtual museum. Just off the main corridor are several portals leading to what might be described as interactive dioramas. The possibilities are varied and equally interesting.

“What is this place, Fizzy?” Kiz asks.

“This is the
Land Where Lost Things Go
,” I tell her.

“What’s been lost, Fizzy?” asks my friend.

“Oh, Kiz, so very much has been lost. Love has been lost, freedom has been lost, and hopes and dreams have been lost. Faith has been lost, trust has been lost, and compassion has been lost. Rivers have been lost, and habitats too, and entire species have been lost. Time has been lost, and opportunity. Even God has been lost! In this REP we can visit all these lost things, but we cannot reclaim them.”

“Why not?” Kiz asks. “If people come here and find their lost things, why can’t they take them back?”

“This is
not
a virtual Lost & Found,” I explain. “And these objects are
not
the actual lost articles; they are only reflections of them. These things are borne of loss, and they are maintained from longing. But this is not really Beethoven’s piano, and this is not really the nose of the Sphinx. This is not the actual chalice from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. These objects are more like memories, or symbols of the real objects.”

“Is that really so important?” Kiz asks.

“That’s a question each person must answer for himself,” I tell her. “Now, come with me, Kiz. I know a place we can visit. I have a very special friend there. Her name is Carteret Rose.”

Without further delay we enter a gateway leading us from the REP’s small museum directly onto a tropical island complete with sandy beaches, birdsongs, and fruit trees laden with ripe bananas and papayas. “Where Carteret Rose now lives in Physical Life is anyone’s guess,” I speculate. “She used to live on the Island of Han in the Kilinailau archipelago in the South Pacific. A couple of years ago she began recreating her island home in Virtual Life for all to see and experience, in all its incredible beauty, as well as its impending horror. Nowadays I can almost always find her here in Virtual Life, because this place is her connection with her past, and with her essence.”

And surely this place must be paradise—a tropical island shaded by palms and blessed by the Trades. A beautiful lagoon with a living coral reef to yield all the fish the people could ever need. There is no money here, because there is nothing to buy: only coconuts and sweet potatoes. The people cook over open fires in front of bamboo huts. The children play naked. At night the villagers dance round a huge bonfire and sing tribal songs—thousands of songs from memory—that tell all about their ancestors and their long enduring culture (nobody actually knows how long they’ve lived in this place). It is a happy life, a blissful life. But wait! Something has gone wrong. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

You see, the tides have been rising dramatically in Melanesia during the past twenty years, and the Kilinailau Islands are sinking. It is predicted that by the year 2015, the islands that make up the atoll will slip beneath the waves once and for all. The islanders that live there will either have to leave their ancestral home and move to the larger Island of Bougainville, or be swallowed by the Face of the Deep.

To reach the Kilinailau Islands in Melanesia in PL one must cast all caution to the wind and board the
MV Sankamap
, a rusting freight and passenger ship with no anchor and one engine that coughs and sputters endlessly from a fuel leak. The overnight trip from the Bougainville port of Buka delivers you to the fringe of the oval shaped reef of the Carterets. Our journey to Rose’s simulated home in Virtual Life is somewhat less difficult.

The Island of Han is barely six hundred meters long. It is a tranquil paradise of pure white sand, turquoise waters, and picture perfect sunsets. But its once thriving gardens are being destroyed by seawater. Fallen coconut trees litter the beaches, their roots swamped by high tides. Water seeps from beneath the sand into the homes of the villagers. In an attempt to hold back the encroaching tides, the people have built seawalls from rocks and clamshells, but the barriers are breached daily. Once self-sufficient, the people of Han must now survive on handouts shipped twice yearly from the over burdened government of Bougainville. The carbon footprint of these islanders must surely be as low as any culture in the world, so it is ironic that they are perhaps the first people to have to leave their homeland because of rising seas attributable to global warming.

Standing outside her humble bamboo house we encounter Carteret Rose. She is a woman of forty with smooth tawny skin and tightly curled, dark hair with golden tips. Her shoulders and arms are strong from physical work, and the soles of her feet are toughened from a lifetime of shoeless trekking over jungle terrain. Her eyes are deep with wisdom, and with sadness, too.

“What you see here is the way it used to be: peaceful, plentiful, sublime,” says Rose. “I made it this way because I need to remember my home as it once was, and because I want people to see how it was, and to understand what is happening now, and why.

“When the sea began to encroach on the land, it became impossible to grow bananas, taro and breadfruit,” Rose explains. “When the ship with provisions did not come, we had to get by on only coconuts and fish.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine this place underwater,” says Kiz to Carteret Rose.

“It began with the rising of the tide in the lagoon, above the flashing coral, and up the beach where the thin canoes lie,” Rose tells us. “Soon the water breached the sea walls and ran over the coconut palms and the pathways of the village. The sea lapped at the houses; in the middle of the island saltwater bubbled up through holes dug by the crabs and flooded the fields and gardens until half the land was swallowed up.

“It happens every few months. But however many times we see it happen, it is never any less terrifying. The kids run around crying,” Rose tells us. “People try to comfort them. They carry the kids and leave everything else behind. I have seen houses washed away with everything inside them.
Whoosh
! Every year the surge becomes stronger and more frequent; every month, a few more inches are eaten away from the land. It happened once in March, then again in September. And it will surely happen again under the new moon.

“When the tides rise this place is shoulder-deep in water,” Rose says about an expanse of drying mud that was once rich bush. “There are stingrays and sharks swimming around—right here, where we’re standing! And when the water finally goes down, the entire place is a wet and stinking mess with rubbish all over the place. The mosquitoes breed in the water, and the children get malaria and diarrhea. Once this was a garden of breadfruit, papaya, cassava, tapioca, sugarcane and taro. Over time it has become a slimy, salinated wilderness where only palm trees can grow.

“How long before a really big wave comes? A tidal wave that will destroy everything—wash away all the houses, drown the children? We live in fear, but we have nowhere else to go.

“I recreated our island in Virtual Life because I know I’m going to miss the sea, the fish, and the coconuts. I will miss the palm trees. I will miss our beautiful life. This place is my home. I belong to the island, and I feel sorry for it. We have no cars, no factories, and no airplanes,” says Rose, “but we are the first victims of greenhouse-gas emissions. Our home will be lost forever, and the very idea of leaving this place is just too sad to think about.”

The next Virtual Life portal through which Kiz and I travel takes us directly to the Cornishe on the waterfront at Alexandria, Egypt. We intend to visit the recently completed, ultra-modern Bibliotheca Alexandria.

Mohammed Qatal, the administrator of the new library, welcomes us before taking us on a verbal trip through history, where he describes in intricate detail the famous ancient library that was destroyed by fire and earthquake two thousand years ago. Standing in stark contrast to the travesty of the destruction of the ancient library is the gleaming new library, which now stands as a defining architectural signature, not only for Alexandria, but also for Egypt.

“Egypt is an exact copy of heaven; the one place on earth where the forces of God and man are in balance,” Mr. Qatal asserts. “Egypt is the temple of the entire world!”

Mr. Qatal gives us a brief history of the ancient library.

“The Library of Alexandria was established by Ptolemy I in the year 288 B.C. It was intended as a meeting place for the most eminent minds of the time. The world’s first research center, it attracted intellectuals from all over the world.

“The library included all the knowledge of the ancient world. At its zenith, it held more than seven hundred thousand scrolls. Some of the great thinkers that the old library attracted included Aristarchus, the first to proclaim that the earth revolves around the sun; Hipparchus, the first to measure the solar year within six and a half minutes’ accuracy; Eratosthenes, the first to measure the circumference of the earth; Euclid, who wrote the elements of geometry; Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of the ancient world; Callimachus, the first to write a catalogue for books classified by topic and author.

“The ancient Library of Alexandria was open to all civilizations. Efforts were made to collect the best works from all over the world, and any ship that docked in Alexandria Harbor was searched, and all books found on board were copied. Scholars from all over the world were invited to come and study. The Old Testament was translated for the first time from Hebrew to Greek.

“The library stood for at least three hundred years after its foundation in 48 B.C. The library was partially lost to a fire in Alexandria’s Harbor when Julius Caesar attacked the city, and it was later totally destroyed by an earthquake. Some of the books were salvaged, but most of the manuscripts were sold to the hundreds of bathhouses in Alexandria, where they were used as fuel for the fires that heated the bath water!”

I cannot help but speculate: Were it not for the invention of the Internet, the ancient collection of scholarly materials and general information at Alexandria would still stand as the pinnacle of man’s effort to categorize, and to centralize, the sum total of the world’s documented information. Surely, many fine library collections have been assembled after the destruction of the ancient library at Alexandria, yet none has matched—or even come close to matching—the fabled collection of knowledge. The Internet, however, has enabled a new collection of information and knowledge to begin to evolve and to grow—one not necessarily created by design or decree, but a new and evermore glorious collection limited not to the contributions of scholars and experts, but open to every man, woman and child. Of course the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Virtual Life is a testament to this renaissance, as it houses the only complete external backup of Internet data.

“A body of knowledge such as that which existed in the ancient library surely took centuries to collect,” observes Kiz. “The vastness of geography—not to mention the relative lack of speed at which anything (goods or ideas) moved from place to place in the ancient world—was only one hindrance. Another impediment, surely, was the predominance of illiteracy. Esoteric knowledge was only for the educated people of the time, who were also the wealthy and privileged classes—royalty! Today, as Fizzy suggests, knowledge is literally at everyone’s fingertips. And so many people take advantage of the new medium, which is of course so much more than a library. Nowadays we are not confined to vicarious scholarship, we can interact at will. That’s Virtual Life! If we want to conduct an interview with Ptolemy I, for example, it is not impossible. Time is no longer a barrier. Geography is no longer a barrier. The only barriers that remain are the ones we ourselves impose.”