The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans Read Online Free PDF Page B

on an unimaginable scale. Any number of catastrophic scenarios could pose a life-altering or life-ending threat. But, in all likelihood, mankind will survive… Not because he deserves to survive… And probably not maintaining current culture, you understand. Cultures come, and cultures go. The one thing we can do, I think, is to make sure that our successors know what we did wrong. We might document all the hard-won facts of science, philosophy and art—the essence, if you will, of our present culture—to enable whomever is left to start a new civilization.”
    Jack Straw Huckleberry: “The greenhouse effect and the potential damage to the ozone layer have only entered the public consciousness in the last ten years. With the onset of unleaded gas and ‘environmentally friendly’ products, is it really a case of too little too late?”
    Conrad Adler: “Too little too late? Who is to say at what point we reach a critical mass? Yes, maybe it is too late to save our civilization, but even if it is too late, people will survive, and there will be another one. There were some thirty civilizations before the present one.”
    OMG! Is that the bottom line? The damage has been done, and the planet is so far gone that it’s too late to fix it. Write the manual, says Dr. Adler, to help those poor fucks that survive the noxious air and polluted water and radiation and whatever else plagues our environment to begin anew. My question: Why would they want our advice?
    “Maybe we’re already writing the book, Fizzy,” Kiz proposes.
    “What do you mean, Kizmet?”
    “Virtual Life,” she says matter-of-factly. “Isn’t it obvious?”

 
     
     

CHAPTER 3
Another Splendid Day in Quinn Town
     
     
    EVERY TIME I see Crystal Marbella walking towards me I blush. It’s not that I prefer women to men, but the way the full skirt of her dress moves with her body as she walks, and the way her long brown hair bobs and sways with each and every movement she makes, or the expressions on her face as she turns to listen to something I say somehow makes me understand what real beauty is all about. Of course I am looking at a digital creation, an arrangement of pixels projected on my monitor: I know that. So where does that sort of beauty actually originate? Certainly, it must come from inside the person the emulation represents. What else could it be?
    Most of the time Crystal and I meet at our shop in Lit-A-Rama. After all, the shop is the VL symbol of our mutual interest: timeless literature. Sometimes, though, when we’re both feeling social, or when there’s a band playing on the patio at Dirty Nellie’s, we meet for a drink at our favorite pub. We also sometimes chill out at Writer’s Pen Café with a virtual latté or a cappuccino. When we want to talk seriously about personal subjects, we often meet at the lighthouse in Lit-A-Rama (the REP is actually surrounded by water—even if it’s only virtual water—and the REP’s chief builder, our landlord Sly Sideways who says he lives his Physical Life in Barcelona, has constructed a lighthouse on a rocky outcropping that actually has a searchlight that shines its beam out to sea 24/7). All these places have become favorites in our everyday VL lives, but there is another place in the VL network that Crystal and I frequent—one we consider absolutely vital to our VL existence. It is called Quinn Town.
    Quinn Town is the creation of Artemis Quinn, a very talented animator whose PL company, Quinn Town Creations™, is located in Austin, Texas. Artemis’s curious emulation is a little boy called Ego Ectoplasm who actually doesn’t speak, though fortunately he is an excellent typist (lol)!
    Whenever Crystal and I go to Quinn Town, which is admittedly a bit like a trip to a digital Disneyland, we like to hang out in an area called Sugarland. There evergreen lawns are studded with day-glow stepping stones that lead us as we walk hand-in-hand past windmills and water wheels and great big