A Mensa meeting in 2046. This competition-winning essay was written in 1997 and published in the Mensa International magazine. Author: Mark van Vuuren.
Dear Diary,
Another Mensa meeting experienced. Cool! The usual crowd of
pals: Rob, Chang and Debbie Foo. Me in LA, Rob in New York,
Chang in Hong Kong, and Debbie Foo somewhere in China.
The meeting place: VR-net
(Virtual Reality on the Internet) as per usual. This time we used the VR
meeting room which Rob set up with a VR pianist plink-a-plonking in the corner.
Coo-ool.
But first let me tell you about
my new machine: it has a small hard drive, but the RAM is sufficient: 16 (gigs
of course). This latest software upgrade I’ve scored is amazing. With a simple
command this entire document can be saved in another language. Then there’s
Spell check, Style check. (Same letter to New York,
London or Sydney
and boy, what a difference! And we call this English?!) Culture check. (Literal
translations can sometimes be offensive, so the culture check picks up what is
ambiguous and asks me what exactly I’m trying to say.) Then there’s Voice
check: heard of voice to text? Well, here’s text to voice. I send a letter to a
friend and it is read out to him in the style I would speak and in my voice.
Welcome back the era of the listener who knows what I’m trying to say. No more
of this “say what you mean, mean what you say” science.
Virtual world is the place to be.
I mean, how is anyone meant to cope with the world out there? Overcrowding,
high inflation, everyone is a professional of some sort or other. My suburb,
like everyone else’s is a multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual,
multi-talented disarray of interests. At least on the Net there’s a sense of
order.
Now, about that meeting we’ve
just had: Chang took the meeting room and “placed” us in Paris,
in the Eiffel Tower! We “sat” in that restaurant a quarter of the way up, listening
to the soft murmur of real time patrons, mixed with VR plink-a-plonk and looked
below to see the passing traffic of Peugeots and bicycles. Rob was describing
the New York
police’s new high frequency sound receiver:
using two or more receivers the ultrahigh frequencies of gunshot sounds
are picked up and placed. This way the cops can identify criminal activity and
get to the crime scene sooner. So I asked, “Like, Rob; so, can you show us a
bit of New York?”
Rob said: “Dig this, I put up cameras in my house and also linked up to the one
in Central Park.” So we sat, in VR, watching a
giant monitor showing us life in New
York with Rob describing what was going on. Those
yellow cabs, running on electricity with short anti-noise pollution toots are
an absolute laugh!
Chang did one better. There’s a
camera attached to the front of a three wheel taxi in Hong
Kong. It’s a laugh a minute looking at the people jump out the
way! And if you think you’ve got stress, welcome to Stress Hell. It’s also the
ultimate acid test for your computer. If you can get total colour without
streaking and good 3D sound effects from a busy market place you’ve got a good
machine (for this quarter, anyway!) Well, Chang got into the scooter engine’s
CPU. Although the taxi driver knows what’s going with the tv camera (and Sony
pays him to keep it there) he didn’t count on having someone else control the
accelerator!
Debbie Foo is great company.
(She’s also programmed her VR body with a great cleavage!) Unfortunately
there’s a censorship problem where she is, so she can only speak on-line but
can’t show us the kind of daily-life Rob can. She told us the latest jokes
doing the rounds in China!
To round off the entertainment I
zoomed the group into Macy’s, LA’s hottest comedy spot where we watched the
latest comedy acts. Thumbs up for Ali and Yusuf! These Muslims are great!
If anything came out of the
meeting it was news from Parthenon. The background goes something like this: if
you live in a country under a merciless dictator and want to leave, chances are
the only place you can go to is Africa; the
rest of the world is pretty clogged up. (That’s a joke because the Ozone mishap
of 2025 left Upper Africa so bloody hot no-one
is allowed to live there.) So a group of
human rights lawyers devised a new set of rights saying that the geographical
location often created a boundary from where laws began, but hey, what’s in a piece of turf anyway? Can laws exist which
are not restricted by geography? So this new country was established in
cyberspace called Parthenon. Anyone who wants to be a citizen has to be the
following in real life: a pacifist; may not own a gun or explosives; has to
contribute 10% of his income to charitable causes. Parthenon is in VR of
course. What you see is Greek columns and bearded dudes hanging around in their
pj’s. If you go to the market place you see debates taking place (it’s the
actual text from Plato and Socrates and the boys) and if you take off to the
coast you see this magnificent array of hotels and mansions. This is known as
Virtual World where you can dress in your own image and meet people from around
the world. I’ve got a pad and a Ferrari (electraglide, of course - we wouldn’t
want to irk the cyber fresh-air police) and I entertain Debbie Foo on weekends.
It’s quite a mind-freak at first, but you own a house or an apartment and
decorate it to your own taste. Thanks to the magic of cyberspace an apartment
block that seems to hold 15 apartments is actually used by 200 000 “owners”.
The reality is cool: you don’t see them and they don’t see you. There’s also
this course I’m enrolling for and it is in the Parthenon College.
Bril!
Oops, I digress, Parthenon is a
haven for all those refugee types we see on the news. The international
understanding is that if they accept membership the host country cannot
imprison them or harm them as they are pacifists. If anything does happen to
them the human rights organisations will have a field day. The world’s pretty
crowded, but at least more people than ever before have the ability to make
decisions which satisfy their own moral conscience and not be persecuted for
it. Well, the issue of the week is that corporations want even more advertising
space on Parthenon. Does it ever end?
All this modern-day talk gets me
thinking about the world the way it was in the past. Back in pre-mil days (i.e.
pre-millennium. Wow, if only those dudes could see us now. All that Star Trek
stuff, and how about “celluloid video” and “photographs” - way out!) I think
the closest someone ever came to
predicting today’s lifestyle was in the movie Blade Runner. Clones? Not yet.
But you can have a talk with your laptop’s Help function for addresses,
reports, links and dvd clips (known as video clips a few decades ago.)
Our next meeting is in 96 hours
to play Fortress. It’s this medieval game on VR-net which involves multiple
players. I’d like to say we’re meeting on Tuesday at 7pm but with this global
time thing we work in “hours from now.”
Whatever Mensa stood for pre-mil,
I don’t know if it’s being achieved now. There are some severe SIG’s around
which are way too serious for me, maybe they’re doing what is expected of them.
Within my crowd of friends we have a good time, we learn about each other, we
identify social problems and support social solutions. Life is good, except
mealtimes. Blade Runner was a goodie but Soylent Green wins the cigar.
LA
28 February 2046
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