Dave The Penguin (14 page)

Problems would just arrive, he
would ‘see’ what needed to be done, make decisions, and then it
would al happen, somehow, probably.

Dave was also different. Dave
was smart, and he knew that if he was going to change things, which
of course he wasn’t, he would have to be both a manager and a good
bloke penguin.

This, in his mind, was lucky,
as coincidentally he was both, and he was good at those things
too.

Balance both sides,
manage himself, look after himself, do a good job in a balanced,
shared benefit way, for both sides. No problem, except that
he wasn’t doing it
, and he had to remind himself of that fact
again.

His head started to ache, and
something was also playing with his mind. It started hurting on the
top of his skull again, so he tried to think about something
else.

It seemed that penguins had
evolved gradually away from needing to influence the collective
penguin mind, even though they had clearly seen it and were heavily
influenced by it.

Which probably meant that it
had the upper hand, like an ant colony that didn’t need to change,
because it had everything provided for it, and existed in its own
evolutionary bubble. Penguins didn’t really care, as long as there
were fish, and it wasn’t too cold, too crowded, and they had mates,
of both sexes, they were fine, everything was OK.

Of course there were no radio
signals here, no electrical interference, no chemicals, only fresh
pure ice water and fish. It was easy enough to perceive the
collective penguin mind here, see what was going on, here in the
remote part of the Antarctic. They even had fibre optic cables for
the low emission TV sets, and there was no need for mobile phones,
as everyone was within waddling distance - well eventually.

So when everything was fine
here, nothing needed to change. If nothing was wrong you didn’t
need to fight, if everything was organised, straightforward and
working, you didn’t need to adapt.

You would only need to do
something like that if all the fish disappeared, or all the ice
melted, or the air became poisoned.

Which of course would never
happen, as they would never do anything to affect that.

No of course not, they weren’t
that stupid.

So why did he feel so strongly
that he needed to do something? Why was he bothering? He clearly
didn’t need to do anything, and he was more likely to just upset
the other penguins. He couldn’t get them to understand anyway,
respond, or see things that he could see. It was almost as if they
were being deliberately prevented from seeing him, or from hearing
what he was saying, or understanding his perspective, like they
were in little controlled programmed bubbles of belief that they
didn’t need to come out of unless they were made to.

They didn’t want to change
unless something pushed them out of their protective comfort zones.
There was some sort of beguiling force at work, keeping them blind
inside their bubbles, hypnotised, and it kept them oblivious and
protected in their day-to-day habits and routines, which generally
was ok.

Frankly if they couldn’t see
what he knew, and if the collective penguin mind was the same, and
was only interested in its short term perspective, what chance did
he have in doing anything about it all?

Just because he had somehow
managed to work out a way to communicate with it through meaningful
synchronic events, and to partly influence it in times of stress
with collective actions, that wasn’t going to get around the
fundamental problems.

So somehow he had to get to the
root of the problem, start putting more of the pieces together,
make more sense, and get everyone to be more conscious of it, and
do something inspirational.

He stopped and thought for a
moment about the word he had just used, words always had deeper
meanings to them, and operated much in the same way as computer
languages did. So he had to be motivated, and very clever, and try
a few things that no other penguin had ever tried before

He narrowed his eyes and put
his determined face on.

He was going to need
another very large sharp stick, and he boldly set off towards the
beach where no penguin had gone before.

To see if he could find
one.

The local penguin cinema had
come on a long way since Dave was young.

Originally, a very long time
ago, it had started off being in a cave somewhere with just
drawings and torches, but that had got a bit limited and
cramped.

So everyone had moved outside
to an open area marked around with stones, in which they had
various talks and shows.

Then due to the weather,
someone came up with the bright idea of having it all enclosed
again but this time in a building with solid walls, where everyone
just got together to talk and listen about stuff.

The room would probably be a
bit dark, but at least it would be large enough so that everyone
could sit down facing forward listening to whoever was standing up
at the front, or have a singsong without shivering, and enjoy a bit
of food.

Then after many years,
someone had the bright idea of putting a screen up on the table at
the front, onto which you could project images of things they liked
to see. You could understand things more easily, talk about them,
and agree ideas.

Then when Dave was a juvenile
penguin things really got going when his uncle had got out his
projector, and came up with the idea of having regular slide shows,
which were mostly black and white images from his past. But it was
entertaining, and something to focus the mind on.

Then the projector evolved, and
movies came. They were a bit limited at first, but then came sound,
and then colour. Then 3D arrived, which meant they all had to sit
there with funny little glasses on.

It was all still a bit
restricted though; you only really got a small perspective view of
what was actually going on.

True reality, even with
surround sound, or with water sprayed at you, or smells, and having
the floor move, was still only about 1% of the information of
reality that you could get over to everyone, even with the
technology and bandwidth that had evolved so far.

But he supposed there were
limits to what was able to be translated into something that
rationally and logically made sense, from everything that was. A
sort of bandwidth and organising problem.

Mind you, the rate of change of
the technology was increasing very quickly now, almost every week
there was something new. Not just new films with novel ideas, but
newer and better ways of seeing them - getting more and more of the
whole experience.

This then allowed you to see
things in different ways. It obviously helped of course knowing
what you were supposed to be looking at, and what it meant.
Otherwise it was kind of pointless, or meaningless, like a goldfish
watching the television.

The thing Dave really didn’t
like though was that it wasn’t just the cinema that was changing
technically, but also the films. They were getting much too
extreme, sort of ‘in-your-face’.

He liked the old films, the
emotional black and white ones - the ones with feeling and good
story lines. They seemed somehow more real, and with actors and
actresses that could genuinely act, with charisma, and true
emotion.

With the old films, as with
reading books, you used your mind to enter into it, used your
imagination.

Not these days. All the gaps
were filled for you, and you didn’t have to think or use your mind
at all.

So these days it was all about
the ride; the sensual rollercoaster, the violence and horror, the
swearing, and needless rudeness. You sort of became desensitised to
the emotions.

The films weren’t clever any
more, totally losing the connection with real penguins, the
community feel; it just wasn’t all there anymore.

Music was going the same way
too, less emotional, less real somehow. Less fidelity, all noise
and millions of small MP3’s, rather than high quality live analogue
full range quadraphonic that Dave’s old stereo had. That’s why Dave
had hung on to his old record player too, and vinyl LP’s; it wasn’t
just an emotional attachment, he also liked to remember how things
sounded.

Yet the sound in the cinema
seemed to be very good, though different from the music on MP3
players, which seemed to be getting less real, less true, which was
odd.

The cinema that Dave found
himself in today had evolved again. It boasted the new total
immersion skin suits, and surround bubbles.

You were immersed into the
‘experience’, such that all your body senses were fed information
at the same time and you were completely shut off from reality.

You had to wear a touch sensory
skin suit inside the bubble or sphere, with a transparent, virtual
reality headset, and surround sound headphones. So, inside your own
bubble you had images projected onto it from inside it by the
headset.

The whole thing then
rolled around inside a large bubble-like round room with all the
other penguin-bubbles interacting like some giant
Star Trek
‘holodeck’ thing, that had been filled full of zorb balls
all wirelessly networked together.

The images from flash memory
that everyone were seeing, were all then produced and coordinated
and projected onto the inside surface of each bubble, and into the
room and walls. The bubbles also had the ability to move around on
the floor and bump into each other, and interact. There was also
the ability to connect them together wirelessly if you wanted to,
or hard wire a direct linkage if you really felt like it.

So the penguins were getting
information from everywhere, which was limited only by what the
system could cope with, and what the penguins could take in; sort
of immunised to some extent from seeing everything in the cinema
itself.

All the flashing lights and
confusing mass of information was filtered into something that made
conscious sense to everyone. It was all a pixelated, digital
representation, or quantised view, of reality - both reading and
writing data to and from everything.

It was all written in one go as
a structure, to experience as a story, which was refined by what
people thought of it. Sort of the other way around to how things
really were, an objective view of how we were seeing, or perceiving
things, and information with our minds and bodies.

Crazy stuff really.

After all, if you were trying
to simulate the real world, you know actual reality, there would be
no point in trying to produce it in any other way. You had to, in
effect, create a physical framework environment to translate and
generate one.

It was a massively complex
virtual data system, an interpretation of information, projecting
it, or parts of it in the best way you could, in a way that made
sense. The only way of doing that was to create a software and
hardware viewing sensory system that was in effect integrated with
itself.

When penguins first arrived at
the cinema they had to line up, and were then given a skin suit,
which was fitted to them and connected up to their bubble at
various points. Your bubble was then inflated, and then you were
sort of shoved into the main giant cinema room, all ready to
go.

You then had to pick the film
up, or whatever was playing, as you went along, and try and make
sense of it somehow, and join in and add to the experience.

It was a bit mad really, and
the technology was clearly having trouble coping with the amount of
data now flowing around. The pictures would quite often stop, get
pixelated or get out of step. But hey that was penguin technology
for you, and if it didn’t do that occasionally you might actually
forget it was a hologram.

It was fun though, and you got
a regular break when everything went dark, so you could rest, while
the system updated itself.

It was interesting to see how
technology changed, and what was popular, and what wasn’t.

Dave remembered, with a slight
grimace, his Betamax video player – unwrapped in its original
packaging- up in his attic, along with several of these large
LP-sized laser disks; “You never know - they may be valuable one
day…” his wife had told him with a smile.

He remembered that he had read
about it all in a gadget magazine in a barber shop. They were the
‘latest thing’ at the time, except that he hadn’t noticed that the
magazine was 5 years out of date.

He wondered why it had
all been so cheap when he placed his order on the phone, and why
they were so keen to sell them to him, even giving him a
free
Evangelists Today
magazine subscription for a year, which sadly
was also backdated - so it didn’t seem much of a
consolation.

Dave looked around in the
room, and he noticed that some of the suit bubbles were distinctly
clouded over,
they’re in
their own little worlds
he
thought.

Dave wasn’t sure what they were
seeing inside, or if they could pick up anything on the main screen
at all, but hopefully they were having a nice time too.

The idea with all of it was
that the films were now interactive, and you could consciously
change the story or the characters by thinking through, and into
the system, through the cables. Sort of thinking outside of the
bubble, and affecting what happened to you in the story and to
others.

You could even physically move
the pixels around to change what was displayed and how, but that
took quite a bit of energy; most people were happy just to watch
and be involved.