Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.
The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.
"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)
"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.
"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?
"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."
Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?
"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?
"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.
"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.
"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.
"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."
...to be continued...
* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).
So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.
1 comment:
Hmmm... for some reason I was wondering what Buck was up to and thought I'd check it out. Glad to see he's still alive and kicking- E
Post a Comment