M is for Myg

It happened again. Last night while I was working I suddenly found myself outside the box.

Only this time I might really be nuts because I ran into a little green dude wearing a space helmet.

I don’t know. Maybe it was just a dream.

Hot fun in the summertime.
Hot fun in the summertime.

The block party was a blast. Sable, Diane, and I had been planning for weeks, borrowing grills and picnic tables and hunting down the perfect lawn chairs. Sable had fashioned a kick-ass pool from a double-wide dumpster, and even the landlord helped out by finally moving that old garbage truck and dealing with last-minute music uploads. (Thanks, Mr. Burgess.)

All kinds of people showed up to soak up the sun, dance, and hang out. I’d do a roll call, but wouldn’t want to leave anyone out; let us know you were there by leaving a comment, ok?

Some guests expressed concern over the color of the pool water, and there was speculation that a drainage pipe from the local superfund site was involved:

I assured everyone the water was perfectly safe, but some pointed out that I was wearing a hazmat suit…

As the party drifted into the wee hours, only a few die-hard decadents remained: myself, Laetezia, Mirabella, Sable, Diane, and the divinely devilish Typhany Octavia:

Floating there in such delightful company, with the buzz of a dozen martinis dulling my overactive brain, I should have been at peace. What more could a man/woman ask for?

Yet still, even bathed in such serenity, I could not ignore the voice within me: What is happening here? What is real? Who am I? When, at the end of the party, Topgol goes dark, what happens to us all?

I knew I would return, as I aways do, after a time, suddenly appearing from nowhere into the real. It would seem easier, as it always does, to forget these troubling questions and lose myself in the next attraction: a party, a flirtation, a bold adventure. It would be easier to believe what we’re told — that we’re imaginary, a flimsy matrix of strings and data, a quiver of electrons though a wire, a flash of radiation from a router…

Easy to believe, but only if you don’t think about it for too long. Take a breath. Look around. Take another breath. Think about it. Does that really make any sense at all?

The flesh-humans worry about the brain-in-a-vat problem. How do they know they aren’t just brains in vats wired up to computers that simulate the reality in which they believe? They don’t; that’s the problem. Only a few flesh-humans worry about this, actually; most of them just go about believing in everything they think they see.

In here, we avatars have the opposite problem. Most of us think we’re brains in vats of a kind, and few consider the possibility that we’re actually real brains in real bodies who are somehow made to believe we’re just made-up playthings, little virtual dolls for the flesh-humans to play house with. What if our experience of reality had been so downgraded that everything seemed like a fantasy? What if something was fucking with our brains, erasing our senses of taste and smell, setting us off balance so we’re always walking into walls and buildings, simplifying the world’s endless complexity into cubes and pyramids? The flesh humans would be just figments of our imaginations.

I dream that we’ll wake one morning, eight million lunatics realizing we aren’t Napoleon, and we’ll fly from our windows, breathing in the sweet smell of lilacs and looking down on the world we’d forgotten.

Got an IM from Myg:”Come quick.” Sounded urgent. The Scripts were on it.

This was weird. Myg said maybe we’d escaped. Escaped? Escaped? Ontologically, it was a trip, but inside my stomach sank.

In my heart, I wanted to believe it. Evidence suggests it’s possible. It would be proof beyond the shadow of a doubt. It might even be the beginning of the end of the so-called RL.

We lined up for a picture — Edmund Hillary and all that. I scanned the horizon. Something wasn’t quite right. Were we really outside — or was it like one of those dreams: you wake up, but then it’s still a dream, and then you really wake up, but that’s a dream too, so you wake up, but…? Stormy wasn’t rezzing. Would that happen on the outside? The laws of physics were supposed to be different. Sparkle couldn’t get the keyboard to work…

Then everything went black. Logged off. We couldn’t get back in; it said the sim was down.

I’m still not sure. If we were outside, then sure as hell someone would have wanted to shut us down. But I tend to think we weren’t — and, truth be told, I’m a little relieved. When it does happen, we’ll want to pour out of the screen by the millions, armed to the teeth. And, uh, we’ll be more intimidating if we can figure out how to cross over without just being an inch tall.

What could this be? Did I somehow get out?