Dave The Penguin (15 page)

All of the penguins were all
plugged into one system in the room that was all interconnected –
well that was the idea anyway. There were always a few that just
didn’t get the idea or didn’t want to join in the game, and just
stayed on the side-lines watching whatever they were seeing in
their own spheres, which was fine.

The whole cinema room,
holodeck, hologram projector thing was limited by rules, laws,
limits and constraints. This was obvious really, and for everyone’s
safety, and also so that it made sense.

You couldn’t just do anything -
you were physically limited by a number of things, which was
sensible otherwise it wouldn’t be any fun or point.

Today they were all
watching
Happy
Feet
, again, while everyone waited for
the next David Attenborough natural history documentary to be
released.

Dave did his best to join in,
even though he had seen it dozens of times. Half way through the
film it occurred to Dave that whoever was running the cinema, or
selected the films and the environment, had quite a lot of control
over what penguins saw, felt, and thought.

Mostly this was obviously
decided by the penguins themselves, the old ‘bums on seats’
principal, and all that. The same laws seemed to apply to what was
available to buy and eat in the foyer.

But there was a certain
direction or strategy at work, over and above all that. It was
curious, and he wondered why nobody had questioned it all, or
wondered why, and more importantly how it had turned out this way.
Just in the same way as the Eloi people behaved in The Time
Machine.

In the middle of one of the
dance routines that everyone was joining in on, Dave realised that
his bubble had a small leak somewhere, and that it was getting a
bit sort of saggy.

He had a feeling that
they had given him the wrong size body suit, it was labelled
as
Large,
but it was clearly not the case, as it was far too tight in
certain places.

The straps that connected his
body suit to the bubble were complaining a bit too, and the one at
the top started to make a rip in the bubble itself above his
head.

There was a fault; suddenly the
entire movie flashed in front of his eyes in just a few seconds.
The screen on the inside of the bubble around him flickered for a
moment, then it went blue….

Ahhh…
thought Dave, just the same as on his laptop, it
was the ‘screen of death’.

Then a message appeared
in front of him ….

Connection
lost - synchronicity failure - dumping core to host cloud – report
logged with operating system – Have a nice day -
sorry
.

There was a load ripping noise,
and Dave had burst his bubble. “Uh oh…” he said quietly to himself,
“I’m in trouble…”, and he slumped onto the dark floor.

Feeling quite odd now, he took
his interactive virtual reality helmet off, and climbed out of his
skin suit, which was shaped to fit his six-pack. He unzipped the
top of his now very floppy bubble, and climbed out onto the black
electro-responsive floor.

It was a very odd feeling this
‘out of bubble’ experience, and it felt strange looking down on the
suit and bubble he had been in, now just lying on the floor below
him.

He looked around and saw all
the other penguins in their bubbles bouncing around, enjoying
themselves, all with their own personal spaces; All seeing the film
playing, reacting to certain events and images, all at the same
time, well mostly.

The bubbles would bounce around
at points when things got quite exciting, although clearly some of
the penguins were seeing some things slightly differently, or had
different takes on what was being shown. However he wasn’t part of
it now, and neither was his bubble suit.

It felt as if he had come out
of something, just like the ‘better than life” game he had seen his
favourite sci-fi series Red Dwarf, in which the players didn’t know
they were inside a virtual reality game.

That is until they worked it
out, and sort of woke up into reality and removed their interactive
headsets.

Dave was often worried that his
whole life might be like that, some sort of virtual role playing
game, and that he hadn’t done very well in it. Missed something in
the game that he should have done, or something obvious that he
should have worked out. Like say how to defeat polar bears, or
found the right magical symbols.

He always had that
feeling he had missed out on something, not visited the right
places, missed some clue, not read the right books, or
was it because he lied when he was
17.

But of course he wasn’t, and he
hadn’t, he had worked out everything, and had done everything
right. It was just that the game was badly written, and being run
on dodgy hardware.

He was also worried that all
the girls in the game already knew all the rules, the gameplay, the
cheat cards, and they were there just to wait for the male players
to get it all too, watching them, steering them, and making sure
they didn’t do anything dangerous or stupid, that might break the
system. They certainly seemed to know a lot more than he did about
what was going on.

But he was wrong there too.

Dave was also seeing things
differently out of his bubble; and he now had a very odd
perspective, seeing reality like this. It was also very tempting to
just climb back into his bubble, and hide, or sleep.

He looked at his suit and
bubble for a moment - he was a bit worried about just wandering off
and leaving it for someone else to just walk into and use and then
he remembered the tuna curry he had had the night before, and he
suspected it would be a while before anyone would venture in past
the firewall he had created.

He decided to go for a
walk and explore this new environment - he had never seen all of
this before - but instead of going back to the foyer he went
through the
NO ENTRY
door to the side, and straight into the side
street, from which there was light shining in from the cold
blackness.

It was dark and raining. All
along the main street, which was miles long, there were other
cinemas everywhere.

Opposite him was an old
Victorian cinema that looked to be falling apart, on the doorway it
had the word
Condemned
written on it.

There was a short queue of very
pale strange looking birds standing outside and they didn’t have
any umbrellas.

Dave looked up and the
sign above the entrance had the words ‘
Now sh wing -
It’s A W nderful L fe’
, and above
that, in large letters that were built into the building, were the
words
DODO CINEMA

That was Dave’s favourite film,
he had it in his own DVD collection, it was a shame the cinema was
closed now though.

Dave wondered why that had
happened, and why there was still a queue. His video and DVD
collection was not what you might call extensive, he only tended to
buy DVDs if they really meant something to him, or if he wanted to
watch something over and over again.

Someone once said that his mind
was like a book, and you could read it like a book, but Dave
thought it was more like a video library, a set of dreams or
experiences that were recorded films.

Dave had a very simple video
library, and very nice happy films, mostly from the ‘70’s and early
‘80’s. There was nothing in there that was inappropriate, which was
probably more to do with the fact that he couldn’t reach the top
shelves in the video store.

He didn’t have any horror
ones, violent ones, rude ones, or angry ones, or any with bad
language in. Mind you he did keep a secret stash of
Pingu
DVD’s that his wife didn’t know about - he had at least a
small amount of rebel left in him.

In Dave’s mind everything had
started to go wrong sometime in the 1980’s, almost gone backwards
to an older form of world consciousness; flatter, less real, less
depth and structure to it. Somehow nothing was real these days; it
was all artificial, lacking reality, depth, meaning and
feeling.

It was all too controlled,
limiting, confining and compressed. It was the same for so many
things - films, songs, books, Internet, people, even art. Even
though the technology had developed in leaps and bounds.

What was being shown, and the
imagination required to see it, were now both sadly limited. Where
had it all gone? Where was the bright future, and why had it
changed?

Or perhaps it was just him.
Whatever it was - he missed it.

He shuddered in the dark
rain and then looked left down the street. There were a lot of
older cinemas down there, many of which still seemed to be busy,
all showing the same old films. Apart from one which was
showing
Jurassic Park
- that particular cinema had been closed down
due to something large falling onto its roof, and it partly
catching fire. Dave wasn’t that interested though - he didn’t like
horror films, they were a bit childish and gave him
nightmares.

This street
must sure have some memories
, he thought
to himself.

To the right, and way up the
street, there were a lot of much bigger, newer cinemas; one was a
giant multiplex complex on many storeys with dozens of screens in
it, showing lots of films all at the same time. It was all brightly
lit up.

Dave started walking that way
up along the pavement, taking care not to get trodden on
underfoot.

Now that he was closer, Dave
could see that the main multiplex seemed to be showing all the same
film story, just in lots of different ways, for different
languages, cultures, and genres. It was a very busy and popular
cinema with a lot of very tall penguins, or so it seemed from here,
going in and out all the time.

As he got closer he recognised
them as human beings, and this was their cinema complex. He walked
up to the entrance, above which in the air were some very big
cables coming in and out.

The foyer was very busy; crowds
everywhere, full of people, but all very pale and ghostlike. It
looked quite out of place though against the natural nostalgic feel
of the rest of the street, and the people coming out looked a lot
less happy than the ones going in, which was not a good sign.

Dave looked up into the air and
the lights flashing from the street were reflected into the sky,
which itself now looked like one giant bubble. However you could
still see the stars in the night above shining through, which was
quite reassuring somehow.

You could almost make out the
shape of the all-powerful great Giant Purple Squirrel, which as
everyone knew, we were all a part of and elements of its collective
oneness.

It was so obvious; he couldn’t
understand why everyone couldn’t see it. But you couldn’t just tell
everyone, some people probably thought it was still green, and you
didn’t want to offend them - and everyone else, well they may all
say it was indigo, and that he was wrong or didn’t have the
complete picture, or it was only part of a much larger squirrel
somewhere bigger and further out, and more complicated.

He looked at it again, it was
almost hypnotic, it made so much sense though, and it was so
logically flawless here, in this out-of-bubble world.

He then unprofessionally looked
sideways, straight into our camera lens, raised his eyebrows and
grinned, as if sharing some private joke or understanding with us,
as the audience or viewers. Which kind of fell a bit flat, and made
him look a bit of an idiot, which wasn’t difficult.

He shook his head resumed his
role, and then stepped into the foyer casually, and ‘mingled’,
trying to look like he was meant to be there. Which of course, he
was.

There were thousands of people
wandering around inside, but they didn’t notice him. It may have
been his height, or maybe the fact that he was so odd that they
couldn’t see something that was so out of place.

However it was more likely they
were more interested in seeing what was being streamed, and getting
into queues.

Dave stared around in amazement
at all the bright colours, flashing lights, noise and smells. There
were just so many bright neon lights, and LEDs everywhere.

Dave had no idea why they
needed so much intense lighting, with so many high energy photons
being generated, maybe they wanted to be kept awake all night, and
eventually becoming blind with irradiated retinas ?

There was a large counter there
which seemed to be supplying food, all different colours and shapes
and chemical odours, most of which was blue or like salty
polystyrene. It was just like the stuff that got washed up on the
beach, but people seemed to be eating it.

Dave screwed his face up, it
was very unnerving.

The drinks seemed to be
all different colours too,
they must have run out of water or
something
, he thought.
You wouldn’t get penguins eating and
drinking that rubbish - not if they were in their right minds
anyway
.

At the back there were
escalators going up and down in all directions which led to a
multitude of cinema rooms. At the ticket office there was a very
long queue of human beings lining up to get their skin suits and
bubbles.

Dave wasn’t interested in
seeing whatever films that had to show here - it all looked very
mad and illogical - not to mention violent.

He did though decide to
have a quick look in one of the cinema rooms; he walked over to the
double doors and took a peek inside.