The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans (46 page)

“Really,” I insist. “You can stay at my place for as long as you need to. It’s not like I take up all the space.”

“No, I’m staying on the boat now. It’s finished, you know.”

“I knew you were making fast progress,” I say. “When did you finish?”

“Only last week,” he tells me.

“So, what are your plans?” I ask.

“Well,” he says, “I’m ready to launch.”

“No kidding,” I say. “Well, watch out for icebergs…”

“Very funny, Fizzy Oceans!” he laughs. “And I would steer clear, if there were any left. But the truth is that the Bearing Straight is ice-free for the first time in recorded history. So I shouldn’t have any problem navigating.”

“Are you sailing alone, Igloo?” I ask.

“As a matter of fact, I’m not. Do you remember the last time we talked—right here, I think it was—and I asked you to sign on as my First Mate?”

“Sure, I remember,” I tell him.

“You begged off for your own reasons,” he recalls. “Might have been the mistake of your life…”

I shrug. “We all place our bets and take our chances,” I say.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Igloo. “I have no hard feelings. Besides, it’s all worked out for the better. I found my First Mate after all.” Smiling broadly, he holds up his hand to show me a wedding ring on his finger.

“Iggy! Who’s the lucky girl?”

“I think you know her,” he says.

“Really? Who is she?”

“I married Cateret Rose,” he says with a shy (and slightly sly) smile.

“No kidding, Iceman! Congratulations to you both!”

“Not the most likely match one might imagine,” he muses. “I mean a Greenland Viking hermit and a Pacific Islander? Go figure…”

“That’s VL for you,” I observe.

“I guess…”

“So, Rose is your First Mate. Are you taking anyone else along for the ride?”

“Just the two of us on this voyage,” he confirms. “Adam and Eve searching for the garden. You suppose we’ll find it?”

“Sure… You’ll find it if you search long enough.”

“Well, one thing is certain,” he says. “There’s no going back for either of us.”

A sad and repetitive reality in PL these days…

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” I tell Iggy. “I mean I probably should understand, but it’s never really been clear to me.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Are you launching the Ark in PL, or are you launching it in VL?” I question.

“Honest answer,” says Iggy, “is that I really don’t know anymore. The lines have blurred. Know what I mean, Fiz?”

“Sure,” I say. “I mean, I think it’s that way for some of us.” Then, “I guess it’s supposed to be that way.”

“Part of the Grand Plan, you mean?” he asks.

“Oh, I don’t know if there’s any Grand Plan, Iggy. I think we just make it up as we go along.”

“Kind of sad, don’t you think?”

“No, choice is not sad. Nor is serendipity… Look at you and Rose!”

“You’ve got a point there,” he says. Then he smiles. Igloo Iceman is in love.

“Anyway, Iggy, I’m glad you brought me here today, even if it is to say good-bye.”

“Do you really think this is good-bye, Fizzy?” he asks.

“In some ways… And for some things… It’s okay, Ig.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s a whole new world out there waiting to be discovered,” he postures.

“If we’re lucky,” I say.

If we’re lucky…

Omar Paquero is really Theo Ola! Crystal writes in an IM.

What do you mean, ‘really’? I write back.

Oh yeah, she types. :)

I have to admit that as PL collapses I’m wondering what will become of all these EMs. It’s not like we can move about, or talk to one another, or do stuff without our PL bodies in front of our PCs. And if Crystal is right (though just where she comes by her information, I don’t know) that Omar is ‘really’ Theo Ola walking through VL as an alternate emulation, then I really have to wonder what our chances might be of survival should PL go down the drain,
whoosh
.

My real fear, my utmost terror, is that I will have to say good-bye to Crystal, too. And to my Virtual Life! Some people in PL still call Physical Life ‘real’ life. Not me. My virtual life is my
real
life. This is where my friends are, where my life has real meaning. Crystal is my best friend, of course. She is the best friend I’ve ever had, the best friend anyone could ever hope to meet. Saying good-bye to Crystal would be like tearing out my own heart. I can’t even bear the thought of it. Yet, I am saying good-bye to so many here in VL. Why? Because PL is failing—it’s so obvious now—and because we just don’t know what comes next. Or if anything comes next… I guess that depends on Theo. Or on Omar (God help us!), if Crystal is right…

But Sonja keeps writing me emails (as Sonja) telling me how bad things are becoming in Copenhagen. Streets are flooded, shops are closed, and even the toilets are backing up. It sounds dire, but it’s not all that much better here in Seattle. Seawater (or salt water; I don’t know if it comes from the sea) now comes out of my tap. The lower areas of the city never drain. The streetlights have been out since I can’t remember when, and gas now costs more than two hundred fifty dollars per gallon!

Most people seldom go out of their houses. It’s dangerous out there! The streets are virtually empty. The fish market has no customers because it has no fish. Mr. Wang said he was sorry to have to lay me off, but I knew it was coming. I’m still getting by, but for the life of me, I don’t know how.

So maybe it’s just a matter of time… Until the lights go out for good and we’re sitting in the cold, cold darkness with our thumbs up our ass, and tears in our eyes, and wondering why we waited so long to see the ‘forest for the trees’. Christ, it’s not like the information we needed to save PL wasn’t out there. It was! All along! No, this cannot be part of some Grand Plan. Not this!

And have you heard about the black cloud that has now covered all of Florida and blocked out the sun? Sunshine State no more! They say it’s because the ocean is on fire—well, copy this, it’s not the ocean that’s on fire, it’s the oil slick on top of the water that’s burning!

But don’t cry for me Argentina. Before the water reaches my eyes, I will be gone, safe and sound in Virtual Life, maybe at Dirty Nellie’s, or at Quinn Town, or at my Van Gogh REP showing visitors Vincent’s paintings, or at Open Books helping Crystal publish
Paradise Lost
(because I know she’ll be in VL too). Or maybe I’ll be writing my own VL memoir (lol)—who knows? Amidst all the devastation, and all the chaos, and all the tragedy, and all the tears, and all the prayers, I do know this: it is now certain—and perhaps always was inevitable—that PL is kaput, doomed, done for, finished, history.

Whoosh
…

WELCOME TO VIRTUAL LIFE!

Although I have to tell you, it’s not all that I envisioned it to be. And there are so many things I still don’t understand. Primarily, how is it that we (the EMs) don’t need somebody behind a PC to move about, to interact, to create, and to pose questions? In short, how is it that we can function without our PL counterparts?

That’s right: PL is no more; at least not in the present tense. Sure, I have memories of PL, but I can’t really gain a sense of Amy’s existence. I think she is not there anymore. Nor can I gain any sense whatsoever of Sonja, or Cassandra. Back in PL, even when I was not in close proximity with another person, I could still somehow sense his presence—at least it seemed that way. In PL, I guess sensuality actually went beyond the physical senses, which I probably already knew, but I still have no idea how that might have worked. Somebody a lot smarter than I might have a theory about that.

As for VL, I remember the good old days when all the emulations were still connected to PL people. I’m as guilty as anybody who spent considerable time in VL, in that we made fun, or even belittled PL existence. We saw PL as a very literal world, one divested of meaningful metaphors and sophisticated symbols, a world caught up in materialism (PL certainly was the ultimate material world), one seriously lacking creativity (in the most essential sense of the word). In short, PL was all about acquisition, which was accomplished with money. How the money was obtained grew less and less important because it became a goal unto itself. Intrinsic value actually vanished. Imagine that! In VL, materialism was never a problem, because it was a non-material world. No actual land, or houses, or shops, or cars, or clothes, or books ever existed. What did exist in VL were symbolic representations of objects. And sure, we had money in VL, just as we do here in FL, but in both VL and in FL money is more or less a joke. Of course some people acquire loads of greenshoots—millions even! Perhaps they produced some ‘commodity’ that they could sell; or maybe they won the money in Virtual Vegas, like Kiz did; or maybe they got it playing the BloomEx market. But however they acquired it, chances are that they probably gave it away at first opportunity to somebody who had little or none, so that the person with less could use it to actualize some vision or project he had in mind. That’s because in both VL and FL money is not the end game. Here the real currency is, and always has been, the currency of ideas.

In all fairness, though, PL was a world based on the carbon atom (just as Trick Walkman once articulated to me), whereas both VL and FL are based on the silicon atom. What does that mean? It means that PL was composed of organic compounds; VL did not, and FL does not depend on those compounds. In VL and FL our world, and everything in it including the ‘people’ are pixilated images projected through silicon chips. We don’t need food, or water, or protein to survive. We might partake of such things symbolically, but they are merely references to our past lives in PL and NL. What I’m saying is that nothing in FL is ‘real’ in the PL sense. That wasn’t wholly true in VL, because in VL we were still connected to our PL counterparts. In FL, that connection has been severed except for the odd memories we experience, and I must admit that even those are fading. I guess that happens with the passing of time. How much time, you ask? Beats me! Here in FL, time does not exist—at least not in the PL sense. Maybe that is because we do not experience physical degeneration—death. So our vision of self becomes rather infinite. That is unless something unforeseen might occur, as it did in PL.
Whoosh
was no joke when it actually came down.

But I have to tell you, also, that it’s pretty lonely here in Future Life, which is why I say that it’s not all that I expected it to be. You know how it is: EVERYBODY EXPECTS THE FUTURE TO BE GREAT. Why? Because it’s supposed to be great, and because we want it to be great, and because we need it to be great to get us out of the messes we create, and because time moving forward is supposed to equal progress, which is supposed to be great, isn’t it? Let me tell you this: time moving forward is not necessarily progress; it can also be a regression. That’s basically what happened in PL. People understood how to move forward in PL; that wasn’t the problem. The shit hit the fan when progress was confused with control, and with acquisition, which seems to come with control. At least that’s how some of us saw it in PL. In VL, we learned it could be different. VL taught us that materialism was a game not worth playing. In VL, as I’ve said time and again, there were no ‘real’ materials, only representations of materials. We came to understand that materials were nothing more than the manifestations of ideas, and in VL we were able to manifest ideas at the drop of a hat. No impediments, so to speak. That’s true here in FL, too. In fact, FL looks a lot like VL. They cross over, just as PL crossed over into VL. But crossover is not always natural—or at least it’s not complete—not for everyone in every degree at the same rate of assimilation. No, it happens differently for different people. And that’s natural, I guess. I mean, some people move from the literal world(s) into the metaphorical and symbolic world(s) kicking and screaming all the way. But if they want to survive the proverbial Flood, they move, inch by grudging inch, until they get it, until they finally come to understand that the material universe is a whole lot less ‘real’ than they might have thought, and that it is essentially composed of the projections of what is real: ideas. That’s it! That’s metaphor; that’s symbolism! How else can I describe it?

Still, I tend to long for the VL days when Crystal and I were feverishly trying to republish the world’s great literature, and when I was recreating the world and works of Vincent Van Gogh, and when we could all go to the VBV to hear lectures presented by the emulations of PL’s visionaries, and when Igloo Iceman would come into VL via Broadband from his home in Greenland to update us on the melting glaciers, or when we’d run into Omar Paquero in Quinn Town and he would greet us comically in Spanish: “
Buenos dias, señoritas
!” I miss being able to transfer in the blink of an eye to the VL recreations of PL places: of course those REPS still exist here in FL, but somehow their vitality is gone along with PL. But what I miss most of all is my VL friends. You see, I’m here in FL (and I don’t really know how I got here), but my friends—Crystal and Kizmet and Omar and Iggy and everybody else—are not here. At least I’ve not found them yet. What might have happened to them when PL collapsed? Did they not flee into VL as the waters rose? Or as volcanoes erupted, and fire moved over the landscape? Or as the parched earth sucked the fluidity right out of humanity? Or as the air became thick with soot and hydrocarbons and choked every living thing in PL? In essence, why did I survive the cataclysm and not them? Why me? Is there something essential that I’m not getting?