The Words - An Autobiography

End of the World As We Knew It

I was 'not home,' up to my usual mischief when something went terribly wrong in Virtuality. It ripped me from whoever's mind I'd occupied, and I found myself sitting on my penthouse floor in my underwear. I tasted blood as I stared down at the Magick Hat in my hand, wondering what had just happened. Then I realized that I must have reacted with such violence tearing my Magick Hat from my nose that I'd punched myself in the face. It was late at night since I didn't perform hijacks at the office or during business hours, even though it had been tempting. Now, I had the sense that would never happen again.

I hurriedly pulled on running clothes and shoes. The first validation of those instincts was discovering that the elevator was unresponsive and I needed to run down one-hundred flights of stairs. Not bad for a two-hundred-fifty-year-old man, especially since I'd spent so much of my non-work hours of late existing as little more than another of the couch potatoes - not currently home. None of my cars was an option without a Magick Hat, which I was not about to place back in my nose until I was sure of the source of the nightmare I'd barely escaped.

Once I was standing outside my building, I quickly realized how fortunate I was not to be behind the wheel of a car as I watched a series of collisions up and down the street. Vehicles careened into one another, jumping curbs across the sidewalks, smashing into light poles and buildings, and killing pedestrians in their path. I saw that there were also fatalities in many vehicles as I began running at a crisp pace, acutely focused on anything and everything going on around me. I observed a world that I sensed had radically changed, the same instant I'd torn my Magick Hat from my nose, but not yet that it had been technologically thrown back centuries into the past. If I'd been aware of this at that moment, I might have taken more careful stock of all we'd lost in that instant, or if I hadn't been more focused on my survival and not being killed by careening cars or falling light poles.

What had our modern world been like that instant before whatever catastrophic event had occurred? With Virtuality limited only by the collective imagination of its participants, in the two hundred or so years since its inception, the world within had easily advanced the equivalent of ten-thousand years. Within Virtuality, innovation occurred as rapidly as imagination could be layered upon imagination since even that required a foundation to support it. But the layering of the newly imagined upon anything preceding it was instantaneous and continuous.

Virtuality had none of the inertia of the Real, where imagination held no such omnipotence, there being no Magickal incantations to leap-frog thousands of years ahead in two centuries. Once a bright, shiny new idea was spawned, or more likely plucked from those imaged a century earlier, innovation in the Real remained limited by the time required to design, prototype, manufacture, market, then finally deliver the shiny new, already obsolete products. And, to slow innovation further, the products of these brilliant new ideas still needed to be manufactured using the antiquated technology of the present. Paradoxically, even as its innovation accelerated into the future, Virtuality effectively restrained the Real's rate of innovation since very few people were interested in doing, let alone accomplishing, anything in the Real.

Even so, the Real had advanced significantly in the nearly two-hundred-fifty years since I'd been a child. There were modes of transportation delivering passengers to the opposite side of the globe in an hour, supposing anyone had cared to go. Some had traveled to other planets, even beyond our solar system, although very few. Why travel to some distant location in the Real when anyone could go anywhere and do anything they imagined? In Virtuality, travelers arrived at worlds not possible in the Real instantly, without interminable delays at the airport or suffering through the comparatively infinite time it took to get there.

We had Magickal new conveniences in our homes if anyone had chosen to be 'home' to use them. We had solved the world's energy problems in a single telepathic collaboration session while conquering all its ecological concerns in another. Medicine had advanced so that people with access to it were rarely sick. They remained healthy and mentally sharp until late in their lives. The average expectancy for which exceeded one hundred years. Although, nearly none of those in our modern world spent enough time in the Real to appreciate it. In the Virt, they were as young as they imagined until the hearts they'd abandoned somewhere back in the Real ceased to beat.