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May 17, 2004 Thursday
(CHAT LOG)
Dalian Hansen:If "avatar" is the representation of a human in the virtual world, then from an avatar's perspective what would a human be? Is there a word to describe the owner of an avatar from the avatar's point-of-view?
Neal Stephenson:This is a good question and I commend you for thinking about it, but I don't have an answer. Perhaps "anima".
* * *
anima |n.| Psychology. Jung's term for the feminine part of a man's personality. Often contrasted with "animus." The part of the psyche that is directed inward, and is in touch with the subconscious. Often contrasted with "persona." ORIGIN 1920s: from Latin, literally 'mind, soul.'
* * *
April 9, 2004 Friday
The afternoon sky devoured a formerly blue horizon.
Its golden hue seized the heavens in a vampiric grip, draining away the vibrant color until its tone was a mirror of the endless and dry desert.
Billowing fires spewed tendrils of black smoke. They cut across the landscape like arthritic hands, leaving chalkboard trails upon the surface as if cut by the twisted fingernails.
Hot wind exhaled its rancid breath upon the carnage that littered the ground.
Brackish pools of red liquid soaked into the parched and dusty soil, feeding it. But no seeds of life were planted, only the continuation of death.
Among the smoldering remains of charred bodies and mangled equipment, a single man struggled.
His only thought was to find a sanctuary to escape the danger that hunted him.
But his broken condition made progress slow, and the wasteland had no shade to offer.
No refuge from the danger that encircled him.
Horrific sounds of torment filtered through and buzzed around his consciousness, along with a swarm of flies. They had been attracted to the drying blood that caked to his face like a scabbed mask. Most of it was not his own. His injuries had so far been internal, but just as crippling.
Harsh voices barked words that were alien to him. Hungry monsters tracking the scent of their prey. At times they sounded human. From the urgency of their tone, the meaning was clear. No translation was required when the words were followed by a crack of gunfire.
He continued to crawl.
This condition suddenly seemed humorous to him. Only the day before, he could fly. Unrestricted by gravity and virtually immortal.
But that was lost to him now.
His vision drained away in tandem with his energy.
Waves of dizziness pushed his mind about, like shock waves from an atomic blast. It became harder to focus and push the hallucinations aside.
As the black splotches in his vision gave way to sparkling white glimmers of bright intensity, he remembered how much they looked like the particle effects from the 3D computer world.
His virtual life seemed a long lost memory. Had it ever existed? A digital land where war could rage but life continued.
A distant life beyond physical boundaries, and the restraints of his mind.
But he was trapped now in the form of flesh, with no way to return home.
Flesh.
With all its fragile limitations.
He had escaped from its hold, only to become a hostage by it now.
Crippled by the organic restrictions.
There was no way to teleport out of the macabre slaughter that clung to the world around him.
No way to log out of this Reality and return to a safer one.
He struggled to escape the blinding gaze of the dying sun as it continued to feast on the day.
The glare that engulfed him drove tiny spikes of pain deep into his bruised skull. The sensation was momentarily broken when a shadow cut across his foggy vision. The unnatural shade brought an eclipse to the sun in the outline of a human face. The shape approached and enlarged until it swallowed the last of his faltering thoughts.
As darkness finally came in a shroud to claim his mind, one last thought stood in lone defiance.
The gentleness of her smile had found him.
His second chance had come from his Second Life.
September 1, 2006 Friday (Afternoon)
Even though he had left work an hour early, the rush hour traffic was already a thick beast that ingested every morsel of free space along the highway. Cars inched along both I-85 and I-285, as commuters embraced the start of their Labor Day holiday. The endless row of metallic colored vehicles resembled the iridescent sheen of bugs on the march along a cesspool trail.
For the driver of a 1999 pearl white Toyota RAV-4, the extra day's reprieve from work was now of no matter. As the mechanized crawl dragged him along the southern artery of the Atlanta interstate, thoughts replayed in his mind.
Benjamin "Jim" Talbot was in no hurry to get home, but he was in dire need of a drink. There were plenty of bars along his path that could have started him quickly on a bender. But Benjamin wanted privacy as he drank himself into oblivion.
Only a hour before, he had lost his job. With it, perhaps the direction of his career as well.
* * *
"Please sit down, Benjamin," his boss, Frank Harbin had said in his usual dry manner.
The executive office was stereotypical in its decor for a government funded bureaucracy. Just the right motivational posters hung on the wall, the politically correct furniture and color schemes only ten years behind corporate America. And a collection of aged technology that had been state-of-the-art when requisitioned but archaic by the time delivered. The room was filled with other such examples of squandered public funds, monuments to the welfare system for government officials.
As if to say he was above the shackled and mundane status of a tax-payer salary, Frank Harbin augmented his dull suit with a utility belt of technology. The PDA and mobile phone never left his side, even when he sat and the bulge of his plump stomach nearly smothered them. They were the emblems of the private sector's business elite, and his attempt to mimic them for gaining membership into the club.
But aside from the man being a lackey and general yes-man, he had always been fair to Benjamin and never applied threats or pressure to get work done. However, as Benjamin looked into the Frank's eyes, he got the feeling that the last favorable shreds of positive support for his boss were about to change.
"Benjamin? Only my mother used my full first name, and only when I was in trouble." he said, taking a seat in front of his Frank's desk. "Am I in trouble?"
His boss flashed an embarrassed smile and looked away to avoid eye contact.
"Yes," Frank admitted, in a combination of wry humor and guilt, "I don't know an easier way to put it."
A list of reasons formed in Benjamin's mind. He quickly reviewed them as balance sheet, and then guessed which item totaled up with the largest sum, the action that left his account in the red. "Because of the expense report?"
"That was a factor, but no, not the main issue," his boss replied, shaking his head slightly to dispel the bitter taste of the sensitive words he had to speak next. "It's Vicky..."
The remark came from left field, but at the same time it was not unexpected. Benjamin now shook his own head, to push away the accusing inner-voice of reason that he has so gleefully ignored.
"Figures. I knew she was trouble," he stated, with the air of admission and regret as he exhaled.
Benjamin's mind began to fill with memories. They floated on the surface of his thoughtscape, until he could drag them back down to the murky depths were they belonged.
The room began to spin. Not as if hit by a tornado, or a prelude to him fainting. It took on a surreal quality as Benjamin felt himself detaching from the situation's reality.
Shapes shifted.
A face laughed, then snarled.
"...Vicky..."
Lights and colors danced as the office folded inwards on itself.
From the pile of reports on Frank's desk rose a mountain peak. It pushed a crest of memos towards the florescent lit sky.
The cheesy collection of family photos detached from their frames. The paper cut automatons hunched into tribal poses.
These two-dimensional primitives, dressed in hand-me downs from the 1970s, frolicked around Benjamin's head in a ritual of celebration.
Even the cup filled with coffee had become a giant black tar pit, that bubbled with the corpses of other large office product creatures that had the misfortune to become snared.
Until a voice cut through the clutter and injected a measure of gravity back into to the weightless condition of his mind.
"Benjamin, understand that this was not my idea. But the department doesn't want a scandal," offered Frank, with his hands out now like the Pope trying to offer absolution to the masses.
His body had remained anchored, but Benjamin's thoughts continued juggling streams of sensory overload. His reality darted around like a plastic grocery sack caught in the wind.
As his sanity began returning to normal, a range of emotions showered around him like sparks from a welder's torch. These descending fireballs left a wake of smoke as they fell, until his entire vision was clouded by them.
From behind this foggy veil, Benjamin finally stepped forth. He crossed the gap from his far away dispatch and made a brief guest appearance again in reality.
"Even if I'm innocent?" a voice had asked. It was some time before Benjamin realized that the voice had been his own.
"Is there such a thing with the media today?" Frank countered, underlining his acceptance and conformity to the Information Age. To the mid-level manager's perception of time, the conversation was moving along quickly. He remained unaware of Benjamin's mental detachment as he tried wrap up the conversation with the least amount of unpleasantness. "Let's be realistic, it's best to keep it quiet. You keep your reputation in tact..."
From somewhere in the bleak pit of his regress, Benjamin threw a final mental rope as a last ditch effort to pull free. No matter that the lifeline resembled the RGB video connector that faced him from the back of Frank's dust stained computer monitor. It was a lifeline and he used it to climb out of the psychological bog. For all its comfort and security, the place was too dangerous for him to stay.
"Are you firing me?" he finally asked, even though the answer seemed obvious.
"Yes. I can think of a more gentle way to express it," Frank offered, again looking away to avoid eye contact, "but we have always been blunt with each other. They want you out of here, today."
"I suppose it doesn't matter that I never even slept with her?" Benjamin asked in a dejected sigh, without the expectation of an answer. The teasing and flirting that had aroused him so much was all it took to rob him of his job.
"No..." said Frank. With the implication of the question, his own thoughts turned to Vicky. He undressed the voluptuous red head in his own mind. Her usual tight and often revealing outfit was pealed away. Frank imagined how her warm body would feel against his, Vicky's thin and smooth shape next to his fat and hairy form. Until the mental image of his own boss entered the fantasy-play scene. The naked image of the department director, Chuck Rutlage, was more shocking than a cold shower. Unable to process and reject this snag in his sexual daydream, it came to an abrupt end.
And in a manner of speaking, because of Rutlage's secret affair with Vicky in the office, Benjamin's position of employment had met with an equally abrupt demise as well.
Money had attracted Vicky, certainly not Chuck's rotund form and questionable hygiene habits.
"...at least then the punishment would have fit the crime. If she's going to screw me..." Benjamin quipped with a taste of bitterness.
The earlier part of his statement had been lost on his boss, but it made little difference.
"Look, you know the policy is to have Security escort you out of here." stated Frank in an apologetic, hands-are-tied tone. "I would rather you just collect your stuff and leave..."
* * *
Benjamin's RAV-4 finally extricated itself from the funeral march pace of the Labor Day traffic procession. He headed down the off ramp for the Stone Mountain Parkway, his long dream now broken as events stopped moving in slow motion. The terrain rushed by as his drive finally began to catch up with the speed of his frantic thinking.
Much of the time after his meeting with Frank remained a blur. This was due a combination of the freshness of the event, resulting shock, and his overall mental instability. But encapsulated moments managed to stand out from the pack. They pulled free from the churning soup and replayed based on how upsetting they were instead of by chronological order. It has been a long time since he had slipped from reality during times of stress. Therapy and medication had put them to rest years ago. His episode in Frank's office only reminded Benjamin how much easier it was to drowned in alcohol than in the trap-door chambers of his mind.
At least he was spared a public humiliation, much larger than what he had endured while collecting his personal items while he cleaned out his office. It was a horrific ordeal to abruptly say farewell to trusted and respected co-workers with little explanation or a polished version of the truth. Benjamin felt as if his skin would fly off his body during the entire experience.
There would be no front page headline story in tomorrow's Atlanta Constitution. However, these things always had a way of finding someone with an ax to grind, and no regard for lives ruined in the process. So it would not be too long before the news stretched across the blogosphere with the magnitude of an old Soviet first strike missile launch.
He could see the RSS feed tracking across his vision like a news ticker on CNBC.
(newsfeed.xml) Benjamin "Jim" Talbot was fired from his job today for the CDC - Center for Disease Control. The Atlanta programming subcontractor had run the new software department. Talbot led the development of a game engine for the CDC to model mass population scenarios of infectious diseases. That was, until he had the bad fortune to discover another employee - who happened to be sleeping with a regional CDC boss - was embezzling funds. When asked, Talbot stated that he had only asked Miss Vicky on a date. "It was not sexual harassment, and had nothing to do with my covering-up for her expense reports in exchange for sex," he professed in a feeble attempt to claim his innocence.
His home, the Fox Run apartment complex, finally came into view. The familiar sight pushed away the imagined text that had subtitled his vision.
The afternoon sun finally began to foreshadow the darkness that was soon to come. He activated his garage door opener and drove into the underground parking structure of his building, towards the back of the complex. The sub-terrain lot was little more than a gray concrete box fitted with inadequate ventilation. Even with his windows rolled up, he could smell the dank atmosphere. The underground garage remained heavy with moisture from the rain a few days earlier. It had seeped into the ground and left puddles where the relatively new foundation had been set improperly. These small ponds reflected the occasional flicker of light from a dying florescent bulb in the ceiling.
However, to Benjamin's troubled mind, it resembled the camera flashes of paparazzi who had gathered to expose all his indiscretions.
He pulled into his parking slot and sat there with the engine running. The journey home had been mostly on autopilot. Before the cement bricks, support pylons, or other cars could begin to morph into some absurd nightmare, Benjamin switched off the ignition and grabbed the bulky object on the seat next to him. It was a cardboard bank box dressed up with a real wood grain texture. The design an odd attempt to make a simple box look fancy. It contained the last traces that he had existed at the CDC office, that he had ever been in charge of a game engine for the government with massive potential for private use and a profit flow from commercial release. Pulling it across the seat, he gouged the faux wood box against the emergency brake. The poorly packed and hastily collected items jostled about.
Benjamin closed the driver side door and touched his keychain to lock his car. The following musical tweet and mechanical clicks verified that the action had been completed. He then limped along the imaginary trail of paparazzi that ended at the storm drain, as he continued on towards the elevator.
With his body still on automatic, repeating a well rehearsed pattern of routines, a new image came into focus.
A martini glass filled with chilled vodka, and three skewered olives each stuffed with blue cheese.
He needed a drink now, more than anything.
The hallway carpet that led to his apartment muffled Benjamin's shuffling footfalls as he approached. After the struggle of finding the correct door key, while balancing the bank box on one raised knee, he finally entered the solitude of his private sanctuary.
Without ceremony, he dropped the box in the hallway outside the kitchen. Gravity and his momentum conspired to prevent the box from making a smooth landing. As a result of the impact, the contents tried to jump out. A couple did escape, only to litter just at the edge of the box. These items were finally pushed towards freedom when shoes were kicked off and landed like a bowling ball strike.
But Benjamin did not care about the mess and was already on his way into the kitchen. The banging of cabinets and refrigerator doors indicated that what he needed had been assembled, and construction of his martini could begin.
Because his single glass could not hold more, Benjamin made two. To save himself a trip, he carried them both and headed for the living room.
As Benjamin left the kitchen and entered the hallway, one item caught his eye. It had fallen out of his box, further than any other relic. He paused suddenly, which caused the contents of his full martini glasses to spin and nearly spill. Taking a sip from each to prevent a further accident, he bent down for a closer inspection of the object that transfixed his attention.
A BusinessWeek magazine.
It had been buried in a pile of papers he grabbed, and was forgotten about for months. But now he looked at it, as if recognizing his destiny.
Upon the bright yellow cover, in a striking contrast, was a figure wearing red. Not a real woman, but a computer generated simulation of one that wore a Chinese dress.
It was the headline, not her sexiness, that gave him goose-bumps and sent his soon to be intoxicated brain into overdrive.
"Virtual World, Real Money..." he whispered to the empty room.
September 7, 2003 Sunday
The odor of sickness hung in the air like a thick blanket.
It wanted to suffocate. It wanted to choke.
No amount of cleaner or disinfectant could remove its grip on the environment.
But for all its unpleasant intrusion, it was ignored by the only individual in the room.
Sheets covered the body up to the chest. The fabric was so clean in its pure white that the dim shadows, cast from the exposed arms which rested on top, appeared as oily stains against it.
The chrome rails on either side of the body were smudged with fingerprints of various sizes. They marred the shiny mirrored surface and distorted the reflection of the sleeping occupant they guarded.
Tubes and wires connected the body to various electronic devises. It was a symbiotic relationship. The machines did not bring life, but maintained it. In return, the body gave the electro-mechanical boxes a purpose to exist and function.
Liquid of different tints and opacities moved through the plastic tubes like an external artery system.
Small motorized fans spun to keep microprocessors cool. Their low hum blended into the dull symphony of gadgets that filled the compact space.
Like a clockwork devise, a nurse entered the room and went through a series of routines to check the patient's status. Each movement was a replay of previous meetings. It was an endless dance, that had repeated day after day as if on a video loop.
Data was recorded and compiled. Care was now in the statistics.
Numbers made math the true doctor.
The patient had been in a coma for weeks.
His family clung to the belief that he would awake from the temporary death that currently trapped him.
When someone came to visit the patient, a prayer was always offered.
Hope did remain, but was peppered with tears and sorrow.
The patient remained at the crossroads of existence, between life and another place.
To keep his memory from fading, the family maintained all the aspects of his identity that they could.
His life, like his mind, would remain frozen and suspended in time.
Put on pause until the Great Cosmic Powers decided to push the play button of the remote control for his existence.
And though he had fallen into shadow, much of him yet remained beyond the hospital crypt. His identity continued in electronic packets, stretched across databases and web sites around the world.
Digital footprints preserved in the metaverse.
- - -
- Excerpt from ANIMA: a novel about Second Life by Dalian Hansen.
2007 © Dalian Hansen. All Rights Reserved.
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