Scenario Three -- "Jack into Feeling"
Collapse Scenario
You hardly even notice as your eyes close, and the room slowly dissolves into a star-scape and the floor beneath you becomes a strange red plane stretching off into seeming infinity... in your hand a carrot, already nibbled. You begin to taste the carrot in your mouth, and decide to have another chomp as you investigate your surroundings. As you turn, you see that the plane on which you are standing is actually part of a large matrix of intersecting planes and platforms, suspended between stars. You curiosity cannot be satisfied with a mere glance and you decide to wander towards what appears to be the epicenter of this strange complex. Your peripheral vision picks up a small skittering node descending a series of ramps with such twittering speed that you are amused and filled with wonder. Then a strange sound and a burst of light rush past you, and you wonder what other strange things inhabit this world. But you do not wonder long. Soon the smell of singe hair fill your sensitive rabbit nose, and you realize that this smell is accompanied by a growing sensation of warmth in your tail and hindquarters...As you turn to look at the source of these sensations they continue to grow. The moment of realization is accompanied by the crescendo of pain, as your realize that indeed your cotton ball tail is in fact gone and smoldering.
Before you have time to react, another pulse of light, and the same strange noise excites the ground directly under your right foot. You glance to the source of the light and sound and you see the small twittering, teetering being is rapidly advancing in your direction. A small helmet masks an unidentifiable face. A face that is staring down the barrel of a none-too-inviting object that is trained on you....As the realizations continue to develop you feel yourself jump into the air, carrot flying off to the nether reaches of space, and in single motion you are off and running down the strange red plane extending off into the infinite...
The next twenty minutes of your existence is filled with humorous evasions of the small waddling creature with the space gun. You leap and bound and dodge. You amaze yourself with witty maneuvers, and the karmic backlash that the small creature seems to be reaping upon himself. Eventually you find the small craft that is destined to take you back to Earth, back to your small rabbit hole, and all the heaps of carrots you can indulge in. As you bite into the carrot, the world slowly dissolves back into your family living room, and you find yourself looking down at your small daughter who is looking directly back at you. This world, the "real world," in which you have a daughter, a job and a mission to complete, fades through each of your senses and you are returned to your faculties as they exist here. The lingering taste of carrot is the last sensation to go. As you look at your daughter she extends a small container towards you, and you glance at the title...."Bugs and Marvin the Platinum Sensorial collection." You realize that you must have accidentally grabbed the wrong play cartridge, and this experience was just a child's program, an old throw back animation from the middle 20th C.
You return to your library of experiences, and see that your newest installments have arrived. The ancient animation series is highlighted on the screen and you understand that the slightest of accidents sent you to this false world of softness and the age old game of hunter and prey. "Amazing" you think to yourself, "Why on earth would they have ever imagined space to be like that?" it matters not and soon the walls are dissolving again, being smoothed away by a new set of sensations...this time a red desert, with a cold breeze....
In this future, Animation as an art no longer exists. The practice, and many other artistic forms of the past have become unneeded, as expression of ones physio-emotic reactions can now be directly tansmitted and manipulted. The deep submersion media that is now available allows for the creation of experiences that go beyond the personification of animal, aliens, and nightmares. They are no longer reflections of society that are cast into a human way of thinking or being. The nightmare has been dissected and recorded directly from the neuro-chemical and psycho-electric sources from which they come. Cross sections of human and animal cultures and species have been physically and neurologically explored and data-based in ways that were once thought impossible. Technology has enabled us to study and record all the simultaneous interactions of chemical elements and electromagnetic forces occurring within different manifestations of life. When we dream, the machines record the excitations in our mind, and databank them. When we live and work in the world, the sensor data continues to be stored. The technologies are not intrusive, and for all intensive purposes unnoticeable, but the banks of information they have produced, and the new ways in which we can now manipulate and create with this information have radically altered the ways that we communicate with our fellow man, and the rest of our surroundings.
These banks of information are available firstly to those who have created them. Most individuals have signed unlimited content usage waivers, as a society able to connect and interact so deeply has little left to fear or hide from. There is no need to use an over expressive icon when the same astounding feats that these characters once portrayed are now accessible to the physio-neural cortex of the global population. Simple technology, based around pervasive nano-receptors and relay machines log our experience, and store it for us to embellish as we see fit. Some historical art, including many animations, has been retroactively "felted," a process by which a number of people indulge in the old art, leaving a cross referenced database of reactions. These databases of physio-emotional responses to art are intended to be archived for future generations to better understand how we appreciated “art” before it became a total sensory experience.
Animations can be used during childhood educational phases, but they are by no means the prevalent form of Early Childhood learning or development. Most animations are now seen as crude and rudimentary precursors to experimental neuro-stimuli, and though they occasionally approached realism in creating sensorial empathy for the viewer, our current technologies have far eclipsed them.
Your episode of Bugs and his martian nemesis, is generally meant as a simulated gravity trainer, to prepare young ones for their role in the expanding solar economic system. Speaking of which, it is nearly time to head back to your research vessel, and to share the days data collection with colleagues. The team's "terra-sonsorial" review of the new found space habitat in the outer belt of Saturn is due next week.
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