This, in his mind, was lucky, as coincidentally he was both, and he was good at those things too.
Balance both sides, manage himself, look after himself, do a good job in a balanced, shared benefit way, for both sides. No problem, except that he wasn’t doing it, and he had to remind himself of that fact again.
His head started to ache, and something was also playing with his mind. It started hurting on the top of his skull again, so he tried to think about something else.
It seemed that penguins had evolved gradually away from needing to influence the collective penguin mind, even though they had clearly seen it and were heavily influenced by it.
Which probably meant that it had the upper hand, like an ant colony that didn’t need to change, because it had everything provided for it, and existed in its own evolutionary bubble. Penguins didn’t really care, as long as there were fish, and it wasn’t too cold, too crowded, and they had mates, of both sexes, they were fine, everything was OK.
Of course there were no radio signals here, no electrical interference, no chemicals, only fresh pure ice water and fish. It was easy enough to perceive the collective penguin mind here, see what was going on, here in the remote part of the Antarctic. They even had fibre optic cables for the low emission TV sets, and there was no need for mobile phones, as everyone was within waddling distance - well eventually.
So when everything was fine here, nothing needed to change. If nothing was wrong you didn’t need to fight, if everything was organised, straightforward and working, you didn’t need to adapt.
You would only need to do something like that if all the fish disappeared, or all the ice melted, or the air became poisoned.
Which of course would never happen, as they would never do anything to affect that.
No of course not, they weren’t that stupid.
So why did he feel so strongly that he needed to do something? Why was he bothering? He clearly didn’t need to do anything, and he was more likely to just upset the other penguins. He couldn’t get them to understand anyway, respond, or see things that he could see. It was almost as if they were being deliberately prevented from seeing him, or from hearing what he was saying, or understanding his perspective, like they were in little controlled programmed bubbles of belief that they didn’t need to come out of unless they were made to.
They didn’t want to change unless something pushed them out of their protective comfort zones. There was some sort of beguiling force at work, keeping them blind inside their bubbles, hypnotised, and it kept them oblivious and protected in their day-to-day habits and routines, which generally was ok.
Frankly if they couldn’t see what he knew, and if the collective penguin mind was the same, and was only interested in its short term perspective, what chance did he have in doing anything about it all?
Just because he had somehow managed to work out a way to communicate with it through meaningful synchronic events, and to partly influence it in times of stress with collective actions, that wasn’t going to get around the fundamental problems.
So somehow he had to get to the root of the problem, start putting more of the pieces together, make more sense, and get everyone to be more conscious of it, and do something inspirational.
He stopped and thought for a moment about the word he had just used, words always had deeper meanings to them, and operated much in the same way as computer languages did. So he had to be motivated, and very clever, and try a few things that no other penguin had ever tried before
He narrowed his eyes and put his determined face on.
He was going to need another very large sharp stick, and he boldly set off towards the beach where no penguin had gone before.
To see if he could find one.
10 The Penguin Cinema
The local penguin cinema had come on a long way since Dave was young.
Originally, a very long time ago, it had started off being in a cave somewhere with just drawings and torches, but that had got a bit limited and cramped.
So everyone had moved outside to an open area marked around with stones, in which they had various talks and shows.
Then due to the weather, someone came up with the bright idea of having it all enclosed again but this time in a building with solid walls, where everyone just got together to talk and listen about stuff.
The room would probably be a bit dark, but at least it would be large enough so that everyone could sit down facing forward listening to whoever was standing up at the front, or have a singsong without shivering, and enjoy a bit of food.
Then after many years, someone had the bright idea of putting a screen up on the table at the front, onto which you could project images of things they liked to see. You could understand things more easily, talk about them, and agree ideas.
Then when Dave was a juvenile penguin things really got going when his uncle had got out his projector, and came up with the idea of having regular slide shows, which were mostly black and white images from his past. But it was entertaining, and something to focus the mind on.
Then the projector evolved, and movies came. They were a bit limited at first, but then came sound, and then colour. Then 3D arrived, which meant they all had to sit there with funny little glasses on.
It was all still a bit restricted though; you only really got a small perspective view of what was actually going on.
True reality, even with surround sound, or with water sprayed at you, or smells, and having the floor move, was still only about 1% of the information of reality that you could get over to everyone, even with the technology and bandwidth that had evolved so far.
But he supposed there were limits to what was able to be translated into something that rationally and logically made sense, from everything that was. A sort of bandwidth and organising problem.
Mind you, the rate of change of the technology was increasing very quickly now, almost every week there was something new. Not just new films with novel ideas, but newer and better ways of seeing them - getting more and more of the whole experience.
This then allowed you to see things in different ways. It obviously helped of course knowing what you were supposed to be looking at, and what it meant. Otherwise it was kind of pointless, or meaningless, like a goldfish watching the television.
The thing Dave really didn’t like though was that it wasn’t just the cinema that was changing technically, but also the films. They were getting much too extreme, sort of ‘in-your-face’.
He liked the old films, the emotional black and white ones - the ones with feeling and good story lines. They seemed somehow more real, and with actors and actresses that could genuinely act, with charisma, and true emotion.
With the old films, as with reading books, you used your mind to enter into it, used your imagination.
Not these days. All the gaps were filled for you, and you didn’t have to think or use your mind at all.
So these days it was all about the ride; the sensual rollercoaster, the violence and horror, the swearing, and needless rudeness. You sort of became desensitised to the emotions.
The films weren’t clever any more, totally losing the connection with real penguins, the community feel; it just wasn’t all there anymore.
Music was going the same way too, less emotional, less real somehow. Less fidelity, all noise and millions of small MP3’s, rather than high quality live analogue full range quadraphonic that Dave’s old stereo had. That’s why Dave had hung on to his old record player too, and vinyl LP’s; it wasn’t just an emotional attachment, he also liked to remember how things sounded.
Yet the sound in the cinema seemed to be very good, though different from the music on MP3 players, which seemed to be getting less real, less true, which was odd.
The cinema that Dave found himself in today had evolved again. It boasted the new total immersion skin suits, and surround bubbles.
You were immersed into the ‘experience’, such that all your body senses were fed informati
on at the same time and you were completely shut off from reality.
You had to wear a touch sensory skin suit inside the bubble or sphere, with a transparent, virtual reality headset, and surround sound headphones. So, inside your own bubble you had images projected onto it from inside it by the headset.
The whole thing then rolled around inside a large bubble-like round room with all the other penguin-bubbles interacting like some giant Star Trek ‘holodeck’ thing, that had been filled full of zorb balls all wirelessly networked together.
The images from flash memory that everyone were seeing, were all then produced and coordinated and projected onto the inside surface of each bubble, and into the room and walls. The bubbles also had the ability to move around on the floor and bump into each other, and interact. There was also the ability to connect them together wirelessly if you wanted to, or hard wire a direct linkage if you really felt like it.
So the penguins were getting information from everywhere, which was limited only by what the system could cope with, and what the penguins could take in; sort of immunised to some extent from seeing everything in the cinema itself.
All the flashing lights and confusing mass of information was filtered into something that made conscious sense to everyone. It was all a pixelated, digital representation, or quantised view, of reality - both reading and writing data to and from everything.
It was all written in one go as a structure, to experience as a story, which was refined by what people thought of it. Sort of the other way around to how things really were, an objective view of how we were seeing, or perceiving things, and information with our minds and bodies.
Crazy stuff really.
After all, if you were trying to simulate the real world, you know actual reality, there would be no point in trying to produce it in any other way. You had to, in effect, create a physical framework environment to translate and generate one.
It was a massively complex virtual data system, an interpretation of information, projecting it, or parts of it in the best way you could, in a way that made sense. The only way of doing that was to create a software and hardware viewing sensory system that was in effect integrated with itself.
When penguins first arrived at the cinema they had to line up, and were then given a skin suit, which was fitted to them and connected up to their bubble at various points. Your bubble was then inflated, and then you were sort of shoved into the main giant cinema room, all ready to go.
You then had to pick the film up, or whatever was playing, as you went along, and try and make sense of it somehow, and join in and add to the experience.
It was a bit mad really, and the technology was clearly having trouble coping with the amount of data now flowing around. The pictures would quite often stop, get pixelated or get out of step. But hey that was penguin technology for you, and if it didn’t do that occasionally you might actually forget it was a hologram.
It was fun though, and you got a regular break when everything went dark, so you could rest, while the system updated itself.
It was interesting to see how technology changed, and what was popular, and what wasn’t.
Dave remembered, with a slight grimace, his Betamax video player – unwrapped in its original packaging- up in his attic, along with several of these large LP-sized laser disks; “You never know - they may be valuable one day…” his wife had told him with a smile.
He remembered that he had read about it all in a gadget magazine in a barber shop. They were the ‘latest thing’ at the time, except that he hadn’t noticed that the magazine was 5 years out of date.
He wondered why it had all been so cheap when he placed his order on the phone, and why they were so keen to sell them to him, even giving him a free Evangelists Today magazine subscription for a year, which sadly was also backdated - so it didn’t seem much of a consolation.
Dave looked around in the room, and he noticed that some of the suit bubbles were distinctly clouded over, they’re in their own little worlds he thought.
Dave wasn’t sure what they were seeing inside, or if they could pick up anything on the main screen at all, but hopefully they were having a nice time too.
The idea with all of it was that the films were now interactive, and you could consciously change the story or the characters by thinking through, and into the system, through the cables. Sort of thinking outside of the bubble, and affecting what happened to you in the story and to others.
You could even physically move the pixels around to change what was displayed and how, but that took quite a bit of energy; most people were happy just to watch and be involved.
All of the penguins were all plugged into one system in the room that was all interconnected – well that was the idea anyway. There were always a few that just didn’t get the idea or didn’t want to join in the game, and just stayed on the side-lines watching whatever they were seeing in their own spheres, which was fine.
The whole cinema room, holodeck, hologram projector thing was limited by rules, laws, limits and constraints. This was obvious really, and for everyone’s safety, and also so that it made sense.
You couldn’t just do anything - you were physically limited by a number of things, which was sensible otherwise it wouldn’t be any fun or point.
Today they were all watching Happy Feet, again, while everyone waited for the next David Attenborough natural history documentary to be released.
Dave did his best to join in, even though he had seen it dozens of times. Half way through the film it occurred to Dave that whoever was running the cinema, or selected the films and the environment, had quite a lot of control over what penguins saw, felt, and thought.
Mostly this was obviously decided by the penguins themselves, the old ‘bums on seats’ principal, and all that. The same laws seemed to apply to what was available to buy and eat in the foyer.
But there was a certain direction or strategy at work, over and above all that. It was curious, and he wondered why nobody had questioned it all, or wondered why, and more importantly how it had turned out this way. Just in the same way as the Eloi people behaved in The Time Machine.
In the middle of one of the dance routines that everyone was joining in on, Dave realised that his bubble had a small leak somewhere, and that it was getting a bit sort of saggy.
He had a feeling that they had given him the wrong size body suit, it was labelled as Large, but it was clearly not the case, as it was far too tight in certain places.
The straps that connected his body suit to the bubble were complaining a bit too, and the one at the top started to make a rip in the bubble itself above his head.
There was a fault; suddenly the entire movie flashed in front of his eyes in just a few seconds. The screen on the inside of the bubble around him flickered for a moment, then it went blue….
Ahhh… thought Dave, just the same as on his laptop, it was the ‘screen of death’.
Then a message appeared in front of him ….
Connection lost - synchronicity failure - dumping core to host cloud – report logged with operating system – Have a nice day - sorry.
There was a load ripping noise, and Dave had burst his bubble. “Uh oh…” he said quietly to himself, “I’m in trouble…”, and he slumped onto the dark floor.
Feeling quite odd now, he took his interactive virtual reality helmet off, and climbed out of his skin suit, which was shaped to fit his six-pack. He unzipped the top of his now very floppy bubble, and climbed out onto the black electro-responsive floor.
It was a very odd feeling this ‘out of bubble’ experience, and it felt strange looking down on the suit and bubble he had been in, now just lying on the floor below him.
He looked around and saw all the other penguins in their bubbles bouncing around, enjoying themselves, all with their own personal spaces; All seeing the film playing, reacting to certain events and images, all at the same time, well mostly.
The bubbles would bounce around at poin
ts when things got quite exciting, although clearly some of the penguins were seeing some things slightly differently, or had different takes on what was being shown. However he wasn’t part of it now, and neither was his bubble suit.
It felt as if he had come out of something, just like the ‘better than life” game he had seen his favourite sci-fi series Red Dwarf, in which the players didn’t know they were inside a virtual reality game.
That is until they worked it out, and sort of woke up into reality and removed their interactive headsets.
Dave was often worried that his whole life might be like that, some sort of virtual role playing game, and that he hadn’t done very well in it. Missed something in the game that he should have done, or something obvious that he should have worked out. Like say how to defeat polar bears, or found the right magical symbols.
Dave The Penguin Page 11