April 17, 2004
I was watching Cowboy Bebop just the other night on Adult Swim, and I
saw this episode where Spike had to stop this mad religious leader who
converted souls into electrons. You might remember that episode, but
I’ve wondered since then, is that actually possible?
Better example: Serial Experiments Lain. The whole plot, which alot of us finally
got at the last two episodes, was about how the young (and seemingly
desperate) people involved were “dumping” their bodies in the real in
return for living totally in the digital world, “The Wired”.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past decade and a half, you
might have heard of the thing called virtual reality, where a machine
electronically creates a 3D environment for your eyes and ears.
Today that’s old news. As the gaming industry goes further than it has
in anytime in history, we are seeing new changes in how technologies
correspond to our senses.
I mean, you might have heard of the television spinoff of the acclaimed
“.hack (dot-hack)” game series. Remember the whole plot behind the
story?:
Tsukasa, the protagonist, logged into the rp game once and couldn’t log
out until he finally defeated the boss in the game. His body in the
real, which happens to be that of a girl, has passed into a coma. So
basically, her soul was trapped in the his digital self.
I mean, how else exactly could he taste? smell? feel? in the game.
I’m thinking that the digital world is about to reach new heights and new lows, in all aspects.
I know that he’s a cartoon character, but if that could happen to him, then I wonder if that could happen for real.
We live our mundane lives in the real, but we put our passion, our pleasure, more and more into the digital.
So maybe we, the ones who find our passion, our solace, our maybe our
secret lives into the digital world while living in the real, will
ultimately be given the chance to live our lives totally in the digital.
The way and at the speed technology is going onward, I wouldnt be
surprised if some of us, or our children, will be living their/our complete lives in Vana’diel rather than here on Earth or Mars or whatever.
It will be then that our lives in the real will matter less and less.
I’m not saying that once that happens that our digital lives will be a bed of roses. Far from that.
I’m saying that those who find a better relationship with other people
in the digital rather than in the real, and those who can’t find
themselves fitting into how the real world defines them, they might
find this option, living the rest of their lives in the digital, even
to the point of converting their souls into electronic versions of
themselves (just personally customized) very interesting.
Will it take the form of what happened in that episode of Cowboy Bebop?
Or the plot behind Serial Experiments Lain? I don’t know. Fate will
tell us that.
