“Well, think about it. First, medicine is highly advanced here. But second, any pain signals start routing through the Vertebrane system once it’s installed, and Vertebrane can mask any pain. There’s no such thing as unnecessary pain once you have Vertebrane installed. You’ll never have a headache again.”
“If we can do it today, let’s go for it. I have got to try this out.” I had once been a game fanatic, and just the thought of an immersive game was enough to sign me up.
We went to the clinic. Linda held my hand as they put me under, and when I woke up…
Chapter 8
I woke up as if I had taken a light nap. No grogginess really. Everything was completely normal. Linda was sitting in a chair nearby with her eyes closed. She was reading her email or walking around in virtual space, for all I knew.
“Did they do anything?” I asked.
She opened her eyes. “Yes, of course. They put in the whole Vertebrane system.” She said.
“Where is it? Nothing is different.”
“It’s there,” She said. “It defaults to pass-through mode. Now you have to learn how to use it. That will take a day or two. I’ll take you over so you can start training.”
It turned out to be incredibly easy to use. And once you learned the basics, it could do an amazing range of things. Just like Linda had said, you could use the Vertabrane system to talk to people anywhere in the Australia Project, to get answers to any question from the network, to play totally immersive games. You could meet with people in VS, and some of the meeting places were quite bizarre. You could meet in weightlessness in a space station. You could meet underwater. You could meet while walking under the canopy of a redwood forest. Linda’s favorite “place” to meet was flying through the air, like Superman. In her Virtual Space, you could fly in the traditional arms-forward Superman pose, or you could stick your arms out and use them like wings to control your flight. Or you could ride on a flying carpet. The flying sensation was remarkable.
You also ordered everything through the Vertebrane system. You could try on clothes, see and taste food, try out products, choose housing and vacation options. It made shopping incredibly easy, and you knew exactly what you were going to get.
The funny thing was that Vertabrane was like every other technology I had ever used. During the first couple of days it was miraculous. Each new feature was surprising and amazing. But after a week or two you got used to it and it became a part of your life. Think about any technology — the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the refrigerator, the home computer… These were all miracles the first day people saw them and used them, but a week later they were passe. By the end of orientation I didn’t even know Vertebrane was there — it seemed completely normal to me.
One thing I did think about more and more was the security of this whole system. Computers had been plagued with bugs and viruses since the beginning, but the Australia Project seemed to suffer from none of these problems. One day I asked Linda about it.
“What’s to stop someone from taking over the system and turning us into an army of zombies?” I asked.
“I’m no engineer,” Linda said, “But here’s the best explanation I’ve heard. Why can’t someone take over your brain?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why has no one ever been able to take over billions of human brains and create an army of zombies that way?”
“Well, it’s inside of me. How would they take it over?” I replied.
“Why can’t they just upload a program into your brain, and that program takes over your brain and turns you into a zombie a minute later? Why does that never happen?” She asked.
“Because there is no way to ‘upload’ a program into my brain. And my brain does not execute programs anyway. It is not a computer.” I replied.
“Yes.” She said. “Everything you learn comes in through your eyes and ears. It passes through your conscious mind one piece at a time, and your conscious mind evaluates it. Then your conscious mind ‘executes’ the things you learn consciously, thinking about each one. If someone were to try to teach you to cut off your own arm, your conscious mind would reject that as ridiculous when the lesson came in, and your brain would certainly never cause you to cut off your arm except in the most extreme situations. The Vertabrane system is operating in the same way. It is learning things, not running programs. It acts consciously rather than being ‘programmed’, and it has a far more rigid moral code than most human beings do. The Vertebrane system never blindly ‘executes’ a program, so it cannot be taken over. That’s true of all of the robots here. The Australia Project would have collapsed long ago if this were just a bunch of computers blindly executing code that humans had written. That is how things were in the beginning, or course, but we advanced beyond it fairly quickly.”
Once Vertebrane was installed, orientation became much easier. Everything happened in VS and we covered a huge amount of material over the remaining five weeks — the economic system, government, voting, housing, credits, travel, crime, punishment, rules, interpersonal interactions, referees, education, ordering things, designing new things, news, awards, social responsibilities and so on. There were lessons on the nine core principles, what they meant and the effects they had on the community as a whole. There was a lot of emphasis placed on treating other people with respect, and understanding the basic humanity of the people around you.
It was very interesting to compare this new world to the world I had known all through my life. The biggest difference, of course, was the economic system. It had effects on everything — the psychology of people living in Australia, the way people worked with each other, what people bought and why, the level of innovation, the way resources were allocated, etc. One of the more interesting features of the economy from a psychological standpoint was the fact that no one had more than you did, or less, and everyone knew it. That removed entire layers of negative emotions. The fact that you could have pretty much anything you wanted, anytime you wanted it, meant that you placed far less importance on material things. You would expect that, given essentially free access to everything, people would go nuts. Actually, the opposite happened. Suddenly there was no condition of “want” or “envy,” so people had no need to show off.
This will sound surprising, but one of the bigger differences was the lack of advertising. The robots did not care whether you bought one style of clothing or another, ate in one restaurant or another, lived in one kind of housing or another… It was all the same to them. Therefore, there was no need for advertising. If a fad caught on — whether it was a song, a book, a style, a pair of shoes, a restaurant — it all happened by word of mouth. And everyone knew that. If you tried something and it was good, you told your friends about it.
Innovation was incredibly interesting and important, and in orientation we discussed it extensively. I had never really thought of innovation as a part of society. Here it was actually something that people thought about and talked about as part of the “better and better” principle. But the reason for the discussion was surprising.
What became clear after several weeks is that a big part of the Australia Project was living, and understanding what living meant to you. Perhaps for the first time, a huge group of people had the freedom to decide exactly how they wanted to live their lives, and then make it happen. A big part of orientation was helping people realize that fundamental feature of the Australia Project, and help you work through the questions. It reminded me a little of the process of setting an animal raised in the zoo free in the wild. If you’ve been caged your entire life, actual freedom is a completely new experience.