The screen blinked at him in its seventeen billions of colors, nuances of blue behind a raytraced airplane. It seemed real, it was reality. Alessandro glanced the screen again, its picture seemed a photo, it could be accepted by the world. Television speaks, people listen. He breathed deeply, a bottle of beer at his side. "Beer never dies", he thought sadly. Then he dived in the melancholic ocean of his memories, as usual.
He remembered his youth. The first
computers, the new electronic era. He
had lived its birth, he had followed
its development since the beginning.
It was about in the Eighties, of the
last century, when with the first home
computers were trying to set a new
market slice.
I B M . Such names never die.
The beginning had been less difficult
than expected.
Resistance and obsolete convictions
couldn't last.
After the first years, when common
people seemed to fear the new machines,
everything went into the unavoidable
direction.
In few years computers invaded every
field, every office, bank, school and
most of the houses.
A new kind of generation was taking
shape and he belonged to it, the first
electronic generation.
Now times were different. He was old,
his days were empty, to get lost into
the past was his alternative to
television bombing and virtual dreams.
He thought back to his youth, his first
computer activities, his epistolary
relations with guys of the same age and
with the same interests, all over
Europe. When Europe had different
countries.
Everything was running with him,
history and technology, he hardly could
chase his own seconds, he failed to
follow the fast paths of progress.
It seemed that humanity's history and
development was having an impossible
acceleration, it was a good background
for science fiction writers but they
weren't good enough, reality was
beating their fantasy.
The word "Cyberpunk" popped up in his
mind. He smiled sadly.
How many words, how many ideas, it
seemed the first literary movement
which had the will and the power of
describing the future and influencing
it at the same time. Cyberpunk became
something more than a book, it became a
social behaving, a cultural background,
a political movement.
Cyberpunk was building the world it was
describing.
It was something totally absurd, odd,
crazy, pervert.
It painted a future in grey, frantic
technology and uncontrolled genetics,
corporations and violence, pollution
and immorality. Maybe things had just
to go in that way, but somehow
Alessandro thought that THEY had wanted
them to take the shape of their
editorial nightmares.
He smiled remembering where the
cyberpunk addicts had failed, their
wrong predictions, their totally failed
previews of the future, a future which
was now eaten by present and past.
He smiled remembering where the
cyberpunkers were right, where they
had imagined what had became reality
after.
Virtual Reality. Since the beginning
it was considered a landmark and a
dream by those maniacs, citizens of
tomorrow. A new reality, made for
one's wills and necessities. The way
to creation, the end of the world of
substance.
It was something totally revolutionary,
not in its first pathetic attempts but
in its possible consequences.
The consequences had been even worse
that what he had expected.
Virtual Reality wasn't just the
single's new world, it became the
alternative reality of a whole society,
of the whole world. After a certain
point of view humanity history had
stopped. There wasn't anything to
study or to relate, everything could be
invented.
Alessandro recalled the day when he
realized in what absurd direction
humanity was running. He had watched a
movie where computer animated dinosaurs
were playing with human actors. They
seemed real. It was the beginning of
the end.
Computers were already a reality, a
common, digested reality, they had
flooded all the productivity fields and
they were preparing they offence to the
world of communication.
Global computer networks were a
reality, the word written on a keyboard
could give the mask of reality to
everything, the next step were the
images and, since that movie, computers
were beginning to conquer them.
Alessandro wondered what could happen
when computers could reach the world of
reality. When they could be able to
create images completely similar to
real photos and animations completely
similar to movies.
After the dinosaurs arrived computer
generated human actors, at the
beginning they didn't seem too real,
but computer were fast, faster than
cyberpunk writers' imagination.
In few years who had a powerful enough
computer had the power of creating real
images and just then people started to
understand that images on television
build reality and history.
Technology was running faster than
man's culture, driven by economic
necessities it was creating
developments where there wasn't even
anything to develop. Organic
Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Medicine
and Genetics were finding new truths
from year to year, new cures, new
solutions.
Eyes of chaos were watching behind the
curtain, everything collapsed under its
arms when computers started to build
reality. You could see everything and
everything's contrary. There was no
chance to distinguish a filmed and real
sequence from an computer generated
one, the whole system of information
crushed down.
He remembered when a television
broadcasted as an example a new version
of Kennedy's assassination. A monkey
had jumped on his car and it had shot
the ancient president from two metres.
It seemed real, even more real than the
real films. A computer had made it, a
computer had killed J.F.Kennedy.
The same had to happen for everything.
Television news couldn't be trusted any
more. They could show a peaceful
square with happy old women and pigeons
where there was a violent party's
protest.
A shocking evidence of that appeared
when the face of a famous political
leader had continued to talk at the
television and to rule his country
while the real body was dead and rotten
for months.
The scandal exploded, debates and
discussions filled every screen for
some weeks then they faded away slowly,
lost in storms of news and words and
fake images of a maniacal progress.
Even in trials computers' images
irrupted. Photographed or filmed
evidences couldn't be considered
reliable any more, a computer could had
done them.
Law had lost its visual arm.
It all happened while on every home
everybody could feel and live a full
virtual reality experience, immersed in
his own world of perfect images and
exciting sensations. It didn't
remained a single's experience, it
broadened its field of influence.
Television started to broadcast an its
own reality, made of reassuring and
merry images. It was almost a mass
hypnotic experience, everybody was
losing the sense of reality, of
proportions, of measure.
Virtual sensations were as strong and
true as real ones, there was no need to
define what was what, neither for the
single nor for the community.
Alessandro stopped to think, it was
useless. After all he had been dragged
into this world of consumes and
multiple emotions like the others.
He had accepted it, he had exploited
it, with the sole price of his
individuality and mental freedom.
Such thoughts passed fast from his
mind, he was old, he wasn't far from
death, still he wanted to experience
new virtual adventures and make new
virtual love. There was much fun left,
to think and remember was the sad
alternative to virtal happyness.
Memories weren't more real than his
daily dreams.