The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans (4 page)

Again the speaker pauses for dramatic effect. It’s obvious he’s a real pro at public speaking, and at persuasion.

“The European Union—and even China—are far ahead of the United States when it comes to fuel efficiency requirements. Both Ford and GM are filing suit against the State of California to stop stricter fuel efficiency standards. These standards are already in place in Europe and in China—and in may other parts of the world as well. American automobile manufacturers are struggling to compete with foreign-made vehicles. Why? It’s quite simple: they make cars that are illegal in the rest of the world!

“Former vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has stated: 'With Hurricane Katrina the U.S. has entered a new and critical era.' Warmer oceans will mean more intense storms; and higher sea levels will threaten coastal populations from Shanghai to Amsterdam, from Indonesia to Florida.

“The crisis I am talking about has been escalating for decades. We’ve known about it almost as long. And we’ve done nothing! I ask each and every one of you: Is life on our planet worth so little that we refuse to take the simple steps necessary to maintain a viable ecosphere?”

At this point Jack Straw Huckleberry breaks in to guide Dr. Adler’s diatribe. “Dr. Adler,” he addresses, “what is your specific prognosis for Planet Earth in the coming years?”

“I speculate that as we enter the twenty-first century we will slowly grow a little more crowded and a little more polluted, but civilization will continue in much the same way as it has in the past—for a while, anyway. That said, remember that any number of things could go wrong. A major volcanic eruption could disturb the growing cycle and cause widespread famine. Unchecked flooding could disperse refugees on an unimaginable scale. Any number of catastrophic scenarios could pose a life-altering or life-ending threat. But, in all likelihood, mankind will survive… Not because he deserves to survive… And probably not maintaining current culture, you understand. Cultures come, and cultures go. The one thing we can do, I think, is to make sure that our successors know what we did wrong. We might document all the hard-won facts of science, philosophy and art—the essence, if you will, of our present culture—to enable whomever is left to start a new civilization.”

Jack Straw Huckleberry: “The greenhouse effect and the potential damage to the ozone layer have only entered the public consciousness in the last ten years. With the onset of unleaded gas and ‘environmentally friendly’ products, is it really a case of too little too late?”

Conrad Adler: “Too little too late? Who is to say at what point we reach a critical mass? Yes, maybe it is too late to save our civilization, but even if it is too late, people will survive, and there will be another one. There were some thirty civilizations before the present one.”

OMG! Is that the bottom line? The damage has been done, and the planet is so far gone that it’s too late to fix it. Write the manual, says Dr. Adler, to help those poor fucks that survive the noxious air and polluted water and radiation and whatever else plagues our environment to begin anew. My question: Why would they want
our
advice?

“Maybe we’re already writing the book, Fizzy,” Kiz proposes.

“What do you mean, Kizmet?”

“Virtual Life,” she says matter-of-factly. “Isn’t it obvious?”

EVERY TIME I see Crystal Marbella walking towards me I blush. It’s not that I prefer women to men, but the way the full skirt of her dress moves with her body as she walks, and the way her long brown hair bobs and sways with each and every movement she makes, or the expressions on her face as she turns to listen to something I say somehow makes me understand what real beauty is all about. Of course I am looking at a digital creation, an arrangement of pixels projected on my monitor: I know that. So where does that sort of beauty actually originate? Certainly, it must come from inside the person the emulation represents. What else could it be?

Most of the time Crystal and I meet at our shop in Lit-A-Rama. After all, the shop is the VL symbol of our mutual interest: timeless literature. Sometimes, though, when we’re both feeling social, or when there’s a band playing on the patio at Dirty Nellie’s, we meet for a drink at our favorite pub. We also sometimes chill out at Writer’s Pen Café with a virtual latté or a cappuccino. When we want to talk seriously about personal subjects, we often meet at the lighthouse in Lit-A-Rama (the REP is actually surrounded by water—even if it’s only virtual water—and the REP’s chief builder, our landlord Sly Sideways who says he lives his Physical Life in Barcelona, has constructed a lighthouse on a rocky outcropping that actually has a searchlight that shines its beam out to sea 24/7). All these places have become favorites in our everyday VL lives, but there is another place in the VL network that Crystal and I frequent—one we consider absolutely vital to our VL existence. It is called Quinn Town.

Quinn Town is the creation of Artemis Quinn, a very talented animator whose PL company, Quinn Town Creations™, is located in Austin, Texas. Artemis’s curious emulation is a little boy called Ego Ectoplasm who actually doesn’t speak, though fortunately he is an excellent typist (lol)!

Whenever Crystal and I go to Quinn Town, which is admittedly a bit like a trip to a digital Disneyland, we like to hang out in an area called Sugarland. There evergreen lawns are studded with day-glow stepping stones that lead us as we walk hand-in-hand past windmills and water wheels and great big urns with endlessly flowing clear water pouring over shiny slippery rocks into crystalline pools. All the buildings in Sugarland have mushroom tops in bright green or red with big white polka dots. Enormous yellow sunflowers with fat green stems tower over our emulations, and busy bumblebees buzz endlessly around giant asters with multi-colored corollas. At the end of a particular cobbled walkway there is a very large and very friendly dinosaur guarding the pitch-black entrance to a cave. Braving both Brontosaurus and blackness, we enter the opening. Inside we find a cozy chamber with a fire burning at the center of the circular cavity. What an elemental place for us to rekindle ourselves! That cave in Sugarland, a cavern within the boundaries of imagination and recreation, safe and secure and guarded by a comical reptilian sentry, is certainly the designated womb of our new existence.

“Crystal,” I ask as we sit in front of the virtual fire (and I really do wish I could feel the warmth of the flames), “are you afraid of the day when your PL body is no longer alive?”

“I can’t actually say I’m afraid, Fizzy. I just wonder what if anything comes next.”

“And what will become of all this: VL and our emulations and Open Books?”

“I suppose it will all still be here,” she says. “Once created, digital representations go on forever. They just won’t be animated anymore.”

“Don’t you think that’s really sad, Crystal?”

“Well, maybe somebody somewhere will be able to re-animate everything, including our emulations.”

“How could such a thing be possible?” I say.

“How could Virtual Life be possible?” she answers rhetorically.

And that’s what I really love about my friend Crystal Marbella. She never seems to entertain the notion of finality. She is forever evolving, and she approaches others, and indeed the entire world, as if Creation itself is the primary and unending condition of the universe. If only we all could embrace such a notion, then we would not be in the fix we’re presently in, which ecologically speaking certainly seems final enough to be concerned about, not to mention scared.

Yet, Crystal methodically goes about her work preserving what might otherwise be lost—the world’s great books. Script after script, she carefully sets the type and creates beautiful and unique designs for each cover, and then she publishes each one in its own special place with keywords and page titles and lots of links so that future readers will find each book by title, by author, or by subject. My own role is considerably more mundane: I write the trailers and the bios. I organize the book launch parties, as well as workshops and readings given by living writers. I must say that I’m extremely proud of Crystal, because she’s the one who conceived of Open Books, but I’m also proud of my own part in the endeavor. I think it might just mean something to somebody someday. What do you think?

Now I admit that it’s all too easy for me to digress, to go off subject, particularly when I’m enfolded within this place of nurturing, this cyber-womb that calls to mind a much different conceptual point, a different cave, a different time with a very different agenda. Of course I’m talking now about the early days of man, when humans had not yet discovered Physical Life, when they still lived not by choice but by instinct in NL (Natural Life), and had no knowledge whatsoever of such distinctions. The memories contained within our psyches assuredly run very deep, perhaps back to the first moments of consciousness when survival often hung in the balance for very different reasons than it hangs there today. So, yes, even a virtual cave located in Sugarland brings to mind these issues. I suppose such reflections are inevitable as our race teeters on the brink of ecological and social disaster. Crystal says she’s not frightened, but I’m terrified. I would hate to see it all washed away.

Anyway, enough of such gloomy prophesies! Here in Sugarland it’s easy to once again contact the child within. That’s right! That’s the real reason that Crystal and I come to Quinn Town: to rekindle our natural innocence, and to re-invigorate the bliss of uninhibited creativity! Quinn Town unveils the eternal child within me, and each time I visit and play here I return feeling refreshed and more positive.

Quinn Town is also where we first met Omar Paquero. Indeed, one might wonder why a very old and somewhat diminutive Mestizo man cloaked in an alpaca poncho and wearing a weathered and dusty bombin with its bent brim casting his forehead and eyes and much of his face in shadow might lurk behind the stem of a giant mushroom to watch children playing leapfrog in an enchanted garden? Surely, the scene itself calls to mind something sinister (and all too common) in Physical Life, but Omar Paquero’s presence in Quinn Town is more like that of a sweet and docile grandfather watching over his beloved grandchildren at play than a pervert with nefarious intentions. Here in VL things are not always (or even usually) what they seem to be, and both Crystal and I have heard that Omar Paquero is actually not an old man at all. One speculation is that he is an eleven-year-old boy living in La Paz, Bolivia; another is that he’s actually an American nun, Sister Dorothy Stang of Notre Dame de Namur, originally from Ohio, who moved to Brazil forty years ago and has ever since been teaching sustainable farming methods to the farmers in the Amazon Basin while openly and vocally opposing the logging industry and game poachers in the Amazon Rain Forest. Just why this emulation has been cast in such a disguise is known only to the subscriber that created it, but perhaps that person is expressing some timeless adaptation of himself, a version of which only he (or she) is aware, or maybe he simply feels that it makes him more easily identifiable as he makes his way, cane in hand, through the multiple layers of this constantly expanding cyber landscape. Without question, Omar Paquero is one of the more mysterious and taciturn characters trekking through Virtual Life. On first seeing his enigmatic emulation one gets the impression that he is more than a hundred years old, yet on closer inspection finds that the skin on his face is still smooth, not wrinkled. His hands are weathered, yet they are not arthritic or feeble. His fingernails are thick and yellowed, but not cracked or broken. His movements are slow by choice, not by infirmity. With his cane he touches the ground before taking each step, yet his gate is not uneven or uncertain or weak or clumsy. He speaks mostly in Spanish, which neither Crystal nor I understand, but he’s also been known to converse in practically every other language spoken in VL, which of course is virtually every language spoken in Physical Life. He is always respectful, even deferential, when talking face to face with others, and he seems to be more an observer than a dynamic participant in whatever activity might be going on around him. He is a truly wonderful mystery wrapped inside an ambiguity, an insoluble puzzle whose only clue is a ridiculous riddle.

“
Buenos dias, señoritas
,” he greets us as we pass him.

“
Buenos dias, señor
,” Crystal and I giggle as we envision a precocious Bolivian boy (or a displaced American nun) at a computer terminal and hiding behind the guise of this centenarian emulation.

If I right click Omar Paquero’s emulation, a window opens to disclose his PL profile, which is even more curious than the personality that moves through Virtual Life. His creator depicts him not as a man at all, but as a primeval animal that has assumed human form for the purpose of observing civilization at this point in time. As such, Omar Paquero becomes an advocate for the tribal peoples of South America, and through a collection of note cards describes the various environmentally destructive activities that subjugate the poorest people on the continent, the Aymara Indians and the Quechua Indians, whose civilizations dates back to 600 A.D. I have read many of Omar Paquero’s note cards, and if we think that glacier meltdown in Greenland is devastating, then what is taking place in the Brazilian rain forest and high in the Bolivian Andes is downright catastrophic! I am grateful to Omar Paquero for the information he contributes, even if the consequences seem tragically irreversible. Here is an example: