“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:
“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:
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.
The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans Page 4