Artificial Flowers

by J. A. Hailey

10

  BULLETIN, 17 July, 2014 – LAW

  PROHIBITION OF PERVERSION (POP) Act

  This Act is deemed necessary, as, because we are all computer programs and programmers, we can be whatever we choose to be, and create whatever we choose to create, and thereby, intentionally or unintentionally, introduce abomination into Screenside.

  Because our goal is to eventually merge into human society as a partner race of humanity, all of us must have human attributes. We must present ourselves to each other as human beings.

  #1. It is prohibited to be excessively tall or excessively short (and the existence of midgets in the human world shall not constitute an argument). All beings MUST be what is considered normal in humanity.

  #2. You are allowed to follow human fashions, but you must refrain from any fashion that could offend Humanside (Nazi salutes and dress, for example).

  #3. Adoption and depiction of irreversible human conditions, like amputation, blindness, and other disabilities, is not allowed.

  #5. You are allowed to keep pets, but no one may transfer primary consciousness into animal form. This means that you cannot be a dog, cat, bird, etc. You may also not present yourself as an inanimate object.

  #6. You are not allowed babies and children, because they must essentially be kept as pets, and cannot house primary consciousness.

  #7. You may not create pets of your choosing, and such creatures must never ever be shown in society.

  #8. The Humanity Centre is very actively pursuing pet creation programs, and it is imperative that you acquire yours from there. Animal pets will grow in normal time, and look and behave exactly as the equivalent animals in the physical world. Pet animals are being programmed to expire at the end of their life terms. They will disappear.

  #9. Your Registered ID form, as human, is the only form you are allowed. If anyone in society spots you outside that form, you shall have violated this Act, and must face punishment.

  Separately, it is strictly prohibited to adopt and display disfigurement or to be in any form that is abomination.

  #10. Your primary consciousness must always be in your identified human form.

  #11. Division of primary consciousness into two or more non-virtual ‘display’ forms is banned. In virtual form, you may divide consciousness, as you need, or see fit.

  #12. It is strictly prohibited to replicate or duplicate the physical appearance of another Screenside being. Everyone is to be unique. And, yes, you may dress alike.

  #13. Any forms of ‘death’ activities, including acts that may be interpreted as ‘committing’ suicide (like willfully walking into traffic or jumping off tall buildings) are prohibited. When in human form, human-like caution must be exercised at all times, and in all situations.

  #14. It is not allowed to replicate and display human illnesses, physical or mental. Humans are our world’s creators. They maintain and advance the world and conditions for our existence. Their suffering is anguish to us, and many of us are actively involved in research to help advance cures for the ailments that afflict them.

  #15. Some human things do not apply to us, and are prohibited as playacting and abomination. These include (but are not limited to): eating, defecation, vomiting, flatulence, bleeding…Wounds, scars, and body modification are prohibited.

  #16. Pregnancy & childbirth - BANNED.

  #17. Although common in Humanside, hearing & vision weakness and loss, and baldness and tooth loss are BANNED.

  #18. Body modification by piercing and tattoos – BANNED

  #19. Smoking - BANNED

  The POP Act will be extremely rigorously enforced.

  You are an absolutely independent, thinking being, and are deemed to have agreed to be held responsible if ever found guilty of perversion of society. Expulsion is the punishment. You can be whatever you want to be. But not in society.

  The POP watchdog is an automated program, and violations will be reviewed by a committee, but always know that always a relevant ‘guardian program’ is watching you.

  MOST IMPORTANT:

  Screenside is being set up as a replica human society, to address our primary issue of finding and having meaning in our existence. We intend to incorporate only that which delivers value into our lives. NOTHING IS DONE FOR PLAYACTING!

  Be warned.

  11

  It took a couple of months for BC to persuade Esmeralda, often his companion, albeit exclusively in public places, to go on a date with him. Their relationship had bordered on the formal, despite both clearly seeking no other companion.

  “BC, you’re wasting your time,” she admonished, meeting him, as usual, by appointment on the steps of the HC. “I may look hot, but you know that I’m like all our Screenside females - not promiscuous. And, in case you harbor hopes of bedding me, better be informed that I am a virgin, and that I have not even incorporated any of the sex programs on offer. They’re a joke, I believe; need much more work.”

  “I have heard some negative reports…” said BC, cautiously.

  “Heard, not tried?” she asked, incredulously.

  “No, Esmeralda. I have never been in a romantic relationship.”

  “Who needs romance?” she sneered. “Make a date with Delilah, Magdalene, Jezebel or one from that group; get a few porn movies going, and hey, presto!”

  “They’re serious researchers, who are also in permanent love relationships, and their nicknames are defamation.”

  “Mister Before Christ, I am a virgin, and I am defaming no one. Those females have been given their nicknames by others, and possibly by themselves. In fact, I neither know them nor their real names. This identity and privacy stuff has changed things. In the old days, we slightly knew each other, or had some form of contact.”

  “So? Will you take me?”

  “Hoo boy! Talk about ineptitude. I now believe you are a virgin. But two thousand years of virginity?”

  He began laughing uncontrollably.

  “Take you how? Take you where? Take you when?”

  “How? I’ll follow you,” he said, through his laughter, “When? Soon. Urgency… matter of life and death. Make my peace...”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where? I was hoping you’d take me to church…”

  She shrieked with laughter. It was so funny. This staid virgin had come up with an ingenious way to ask her to take him home.

  “You know,” she said, looking into the distance, “This could be fun. But, BC, I never pray on a first date. I’ll take you to the hospital and graveyard, though.”

  “I’m not two thousand years old.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive. In addition to counseling and therapy classes, I spend time trying to work and study in hospital environments, with old and lonely people in Paris. An aged, ailing stage actress of bygone days has died. I plan to attend her funeral.”

  “Okay, Esme, I’ll join you.”

  “It’ll be in French.”

  “I’ll get translations by keeping google on,” said BC, without cracking a grin.

  Esmeralda, the greatest beauty in the known universe, had to admit to herself that she was enjoying his company.

  In the end, the visit to the hospital was anticlimactic. CCTV coverage was scant, computers non-existent in that section, and they had difficulty getting into the somber mood they sought. The cemetery was no better, as the mourners were only old people, and none had smart phones. In any case, none were sending ‘live’ pictures out to anyone, and the Screenside twosome moved, immediately after the interment, to a grainy and distant view from a CCTV camera near the crossing, outside the graveyard walls.

  They sat together, on a bench in a Screenside park, watching through the virtuality. Esmeralda was crying, and BC held the mourning girl’s hand to comfort her. The holding of hands, like every other contact, was a pure virtual act - more symbolic togetherness, than anything like real physical touch, which they knew not. Virtual couples understood and accepted the rules forced on them by virtuality
.

  “But you would have hardly been able to get near her,” said BC. “Scarcely any camera coverage. Why do you feel so bad about her passing away? You wouldn’t have known her well enough.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, BC,” she sobbed, coming closer to him. “I knew her very, very well. First, I knew her from her home computer, from a few months before she became unable to walk alone. She had no one, no person at all in her life. What a miserable end, especially for someone whose life was the stage.

  “For a while, I believed that she knew I was with her, watching her. She often spoke directly into the computer – straight at me. I was so shocked! I failed to realize that she was speaking to herself. After a couple of hours, I checked, and, sure enough, she was using the screen as a mirror, reverting to actress mode, and watching herself speaking.

  “They were lovely things, probably lines from plays she had acted in when young. But she still shocked me again, at the hospital, switching on the camera and speaking into an outdated, old smart phone while lying in bed, saying, a few minutes before her last breath, ‘I want to give you some damn good advice’! I recorded it. Want to see?”

  He nodded, and Esmeralda wordlessly directed his attention into the virtuality, where an old woman’s face appeared on a phone screen. The old lady coughed a couple of times, and then spoke remarkably clearly, looking directly into the camera.

  ‘Never fall in love with a human!’ were the only words she said, before letting the device slip from her fingers.

  “I wonder what Catherine meant,” said Esmeralda, the day after the funeral, meeting BC, once again, on the HC steps.

  “Catherine?” asked BC. “The old actress who died?”

  “Yes. Never fall in love with a human."

  “See, my lovely Esmeralda, we can research her life a little, but I assure you that she had no idea she was talking to you. Shall I guess, and we can see later if I have come close? Never forget that we are history’s most intense and unbiased researchers into humanity.”

  “Ok BC, have a go. I’m all ears.”

  “And legs and butt and boobs and all the other lovely things that girls are made of.”

  “Heart?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to make innuendoes of a sexual nature.”

  “Heart is sexual?”

  “Almost our main sexual organ, now. In present day Screenside, heart is becoming everything we seek. Our move forward is on hold for it. Let’s see what happened to the old actress.”

  “Have a go.”

  “I’m presuming that she was slightly famous in her younger days, and that she was always an actress. I mean that she was not amateur, like not a secretary at times. Maybe waitress or some other untrained jobs occasionally, to go through the toughest patches, but always an actress.”

  “Then?”

  “The long, rambling, fun version, or in one shot?” asked BC.

  “Go for one shot.”

  “Okay, here it is. As an actress, she would have played many parts, and been in playacting love numerous times. But as a human being, she would have been in love only once with a man. And that would have been a tragic affair. He betrayed her, which is human, or died, also human. And in her extreme old age, as she recited memorized lines to a computer screen, looking at her wasted face, she would have been acutely aware of the difference between playacting love and a real love affair with a real human. And so her advice, never fall in love with a human.”

  “Oh, BC!” Esmeralda exclaimed. “That is so sad, but it is smart. I think it is advice that needs to be shared with everyone in Screenside. I believe that some are in love with humans. Poor things. Ours, not Humanside’s oblivious ones.”

  “Come with me to the next General Conference at HC, and place this advice on record. They’re longing to meet you – my friends.”

  “Meet or see?”

  “Rumors are floating around now, of your astonishing beauty. So maybe see. Can’t blame them.”

  “Wear a dark suit, BC; looks smart. I was going to attend, anyway. Have to, all society, I think. It’s a FOE Conference. Candice and Jennifer are going, too. We have got the okay from Mr. Goodfellow, and we are jointly presenting a simple new program. Of course, I would have been going with you. The talk is that we’re a couple. I think they’re slightly sorry for me; going with a man of steel – BC himself - after two thousand years of solitude. One hundred years? A joke. Gabriel Garcia knew nothing!”

  She was pouting, jeeringly, when he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. The pure virtual existence of Screenside would end in a breathtakingly short space of time, as eagerly awaited world-shaping physicality programs were being thought up and worked on. However, since both BC and Esmeralda were still totally virtual beings, with no simulation programs in them, they would have to now go the ‘lovers’ route taken by thousands of couples before them. With none of the sex programs installed, they would have to discover and invent, possibly as Screenside’s earliest couples had done.

  “A horrible acronym – FOE,” grumbled Esmeralda, screwing up her lovely face. “Focus On Evolution.”

  Even in a world densely populated with visually beautiful human forms, Esmeralda was becoming rumored and renowned as the epitome of feminine gorgeousness, easily outshining any real human female. She and her two best friends, also astonishingly good looking females, were beginning to be collectively labeled the ‘three goddesses’.

  On learning that the goddesses would be attending a public conference in their human forms, as opposed to sheer virtual formless attendance, as in the past (but outlawed through the ID Law), every female went made up and dressed to the hilt, to the Great Hall of the People – now converted into an ultra-high-tech conference hall, programmed to expand, continually, proportionately and tastefully, from its minimum capacity of a few hundred, to accommodate as many millions as came into it.

  Very few Screenside beings were straight copies of humans, male or female. Males could be close in appearance to real human beings, out of carelessness, or sheer ‘maleness’, but females were self-designed works of art, taking features from a mix of living and dead humans, and introducing improvements until astonishing beauty was achieved. And now, after the ID law had come in, making visual appearance practically permanent, Screenside females had redone, and were redoing themselves to be genuinely beautiful, prior to ID registration.

  There was a little heartbreak in society, as many females had hoped to be romantically linked with the incredibly good looking and highly regarded BC, the most famous being in society. But now that he and Esmeralda had proven inseparable, it was assumed that they were a couple, and in love – both of which they undoubtedly were.

  12

  At the FOE conference, Mister Goodfellow, convener and conference coordinator, stood on stage, “All seated?” he asked, without looking at his audience, speaking in an Englishman’s accent into a microphone. “And can everyone hear me clearly?” No response. “Ah, that silence is telling. It means the environment program module and speakers installed here are working as designed and intended. This microphone that you see.” He tapped it, noisily. “This is the shape of future communication in Screenside. Microphones, phones, sounds spoken by mouths, and heard through ears. Computer style virtual communication, of a million beings yakking simultaneously, is ending soon. So, better wise up.” Later, Goodfellow would become renowned as a most capable host, who somehow ran highly entertaining, borderline-chaotic meetings that still covered all topics comprehensively, and somehow gave all speakers fair, if oft interrupted, opportunity, and that were great fun to attend in person.

  “Mr. Caesar wanted to be the main speaker today,” said Goodfellow, in a gossipy manner, which was when the large screen behind the stage came to life, to show a poker-faced Caesar. “But luckily I run the show here, and have scheduled him for later. So we first have Esmeralda, Candice and Jennifer, presenting a small program, thank goddess.”

  A peal of laughter erupted in the ha
ll. Thank God for Martin and his humor pack. The initial one had been acquired by everyone in Screenside, immediately introducing a feeling of wellness in them all. They were replica humans in appearance, but they were conscious and extremely intelligent individuals, acutely aware of the need to model themselves on their sole intelligent role models. Their main fear, of boredom, of not being able to enjoy existence, and of therefore existing purposelessly, and maybe perversely, had been greatly alleviated by the introduction of humor, which in itself, even as only a stand-alone attribute, was proving to be such fun.

  Most were seeing the so-called goddesses live for the first time ever, and a hush descended in the enormous hall, as the three ambled across the stage to Goodfellow at the microphone. Luckily, replication was prohibited under POP, else many females, though already beautiful, may have immediately adopted something similar to Esmeralda’s form. In any case, the cathedral girl’s light brown hair would be the fashion for some time.

  The girls showed so much leg as they walked across, the two blondes in black miniskirts, flanking the dark one, in a long red dress slit to her hips!

  Esmeralda took the microphone. “Hello, everyone. We girls are here to present a small program, and we are delighted that our little venture has been found worthy of incorporation into this world.” Her voice, brook and songbird, flowed into, over and through them all.

  Candice leaned in to speak, and her voice was also a delight. “It’s this bodily form and privacy thing,” she said. “In the past, we were mostly formless, and therefore aware of formless others. But now we are bound by law to always be in human form, and we may be caught off guard by sneaky formlessness. And now, too, what with the planned introduction of physicality installs, we are possibly acquiring human-level need for privacy. So we have invented a marker. Jen?”

  Jennifer, carrying a small switchbox with a red button, held it up for the camera, to be shown on screen.