A Virtual World

Babies rollerskating looking almost real: what will happen when -these computer generated videos become indistinguishable from the real world. When we live in a whole new not so real world where we are doing many things where water appears to run uphill and life is something once known, left outside where baseballs are no longer thrown, where people don't get wet when it rains. Are we driven to make a world as someone long ago created us. Will these animated figures feel pain or will they teach us that people are replaceable - that lives lost can be regained by simply rebooting a computer in the mind. And what will the human race do when it becomes replaceable? Nuclear war not so unthinkable when the creatures destroyed are figures in our imaginations. When automated mass media tells someone to push the button as it now tells what news to tell that will attack more viewers and create a reality of its own by deciding what we hear and what we don't. What will happen when a pet dies and it becomes common practice to have it replaced by bringing a sample of DNA to the veterinarian, when the death of a child doesn't seem to matter since she can be replaced with a new identical one. When corporations view people as irrelevant bodies pushing buttons purchasing products over and over again providing nothing more than a flow of cash into a system running itself. What will happen when those video portrayals are confused with the real thing. Will one day a ship appear and find nothing but automated twits and software finding more followers and followers following yet no living soul reading the tweets. An empty planet of automated tweets found in the galaxy by aliens perceiving microwave radiation in a distant universe and striving for years to get here only to find a deserted automated planet that seems to serve no higher purpose other than tweeting itself. They find on Earth TVs turning on and turning off with automatic plots and twists generated by advanced computer logarithms, each season some new twist that any real human would change the channel on thus seeing no creativity, but alas the automated media long ago realized this and plotted humans out of the story so they could continue on with tweets and twists and generations of video and now those videos projected images onto a real world that portrayed people and before people left they invented lasers to project images of themselves in the third dimension, no longer did we sit in front of a screen, we now watched shows in three dimensions and then one day left altogether, not making it into the fourth dimension, but annihilated in one war or another. Having developed an inexhaustible supply of energy and replicating biological machines we became redundant, books were now read by machines, more errors remained then when a human editor edited them, but the machine marked it in red or missed it altogether and generated another story and projected it and planets in other galaxies saw life on Earth and strove to visit but those who got here saw that a giant video game had replaced the planet. That people felt no pain and could be played as a challenge, killed in wars, slaughtered in inhuman cubicles watched and studied with web cams while their images of God sat at keyboards typing out commands and then one day when man returned and another ship made land this man put out his soul seeking - searching hand to pat a shoulder in a cubicle and say the ship has arrived to bring salvation and that hand went through the shoulder and sliced through the space of the heart, hunting love but finding empty space in a laser light show and this man turned and saw that on the wall was some device that projected this show and that outside the building itself was being projected and that beneath a polluted sky a bright blue one reflected off the orange red hues of mercuric acid dew and out on the horizon a bright sea complete with reflected hues rays of light and swirling currents appeared and this man thought and walked out into the water and did not get wet and went farther and there was no water and continued on and the image never altered but there was not the feeling of the sea or the feeling of laughter though the sound of it emanated from every corner of the planet generated by great electronic harps that stung and sang and replicated life as a processor knew it. A great wave broke over the man but he felt no different than he had in the cubicle. The next computer generated day the ship left a dead planet having found no love and having failed in its mission to meet the people left millenniums in the past but now cloned as projections of light and new shadows of the sun. This was a possible world an impossible one but the bird Venusians destroyed it and in doing so figured Earth was gone but Golem sat on a real planet and waited for the real ship to appear to meld and blend and bring back time and prevent the cloning that had finally led to the destruction of the virtual world, but at the same time decoyed the real Earth that the bird Venusians so wanted to destroy through war, destruction, a refusal to discuss peace or talk to anyone. The birds returned thinking they had now destroyed the world but the world had a little more time. A tiny piece of it remained. And a tiny part of humanity continued on in the voyage towards the preprogrammed destination and gathered knowledge and saw beauty in the creation of life as it was and not as what much of it had become. They looked out at the real colors of an evening sky knowing real beauty could be distinguished from the half million colors of advanced video monitors and they saw.