It is not often that a modern, progressive, dyed-in-the-wool politician gets to experience Virtual Reality - although there are those who would say that the experiencing of virtual reality is what they are perhaps best at... Socrates "Sock" Gandapropoulos knew all about VR in the standard political sense, after all, weaving a saleable political strategy required many principal components of synthesis and projection that are common to the VR industry. It so happened that he breezed in at the Virtual Resources Studios to collect a party donation, inveigled himself into a possibly useful conversation with Fritz Blaugen, its slick, young and almost too handsome "virtual director" (his real title was actually Director of Virtual Synthesis Management) and wormed his way almost unnoticeably into a demonstration of the latest experimental VR techniques. The lab really impressed him and reminded him of the similar environment in which he had done the postgrad Political Engineering course in Lapland. Sock wouldn't have noticed the change, but the unwieldy projection headsets of the past, with their integrated sensors and all the other body-connected attachments had been done away with in VRS's development of the new Wave-Limited Negotiating Orchestrated Objective Reduction Ontowand, or WALNOW, which seemed an apt reflection of Fritz's often heard drawled speech mannerism, "Vellll, nooow..." It really consisted of a tiny oval and slightly thickened patch that upon being held lightly against the back of an amenable head used piezoelectric nano-actuators to bond itself to the base of hair or convenient pores, whichever was the most available - and didn't disentangle itself until so commanded from the remote-linked VR system computers. Fritz, with an explanatory " Vellll nooow..." plucked the cigar out of Sock's about-to-extemporise mouth and slapped the WALNOW on the reflective baldness of his political skull. The world as Sock knew it had ended, he could tell from his height of some 95 000 feet that a small arctic ice cap had moved to lie smack-bang in Yugoslavia, that the Japanese islands had somehow grown out of all proportion and were about as large as the continental United States, Russia had shrunk and its geographical outline resembled a filled-in dollar sign, the whole of Australia was covered by primeval tropical jungle and England and Ireland were separated by a vast desert that was crossed only by a wide canal with Arab dhows on it and running parallel with it, a single recently polished pipeline with a huge red label proclaiming "Biogas". Sock fell precipitously towards the Earth, passing a diminutive Scottish space shuttle on its way up to service the new International Space Station and landed (he somehow knew this) in Nebraska, whose motto is "Equality Before The Law" in an office overlooking the Platte River and endless rice paddies stretching into the distance (genetically engineered wheat now being mainly produced in the Orient and rice export good for the Dollar.) The office was extremely dilapidated but Sock knew it was his by the initialled bottle of single malt he found in a bottom drawer and photos of both his present wife and the two girlfriends under his desk blotter. There were large cockroaches everywhere that somehow looked semi-intelligent and reminded him of a political rally. What he wasn't quite prepared for though, was being addressed by a particularly fierce looking number on his desk that stood angled upright on hind legs and scowled at him in a challenging manner: "You have heard about the new Great Ape Project that wants to create what would be known as a "Community of Equals"?" "Cain't say I have," mumbled Sock through a pungent waft of single malt, although he merely wanted to hear a restatement that might serve to absolve him from any gaps in his knowledge and he tried to look interested because there were so many of them, gaps and roaches that is. "Well, it's an initiative to protect the rights of all species of Great Ape, gorillas, orang-utans and humans, as equal ethically and morally eligible members of a single bioethical community. Among its more profound principles are the right to life, the right to individual freedom and a right to the prohibition of torture. Those principles of course will be enforceable by law and govern all relations within that community." Sock slid the girlfriends back under the blotter, marked the bottle at its new level, gently sequestered it in its drawer and scratched in his pockets for a fresh cigar. "At least those market stalls in Rwanda, Zaire and Uganda that sell mummified ape heads and amputated arms for consumption and gorilla hands to the black market tourist trade will have to close down, I s'pose... but why are you telling me all this?" "What about the Blattodea? Without some forthcoming protection we might soon need a listing in CITES as an endangered species, it's getting harder all the time for us to maintain resistance to the whole gamut of insecticides and biotoxins that's continually thrown at us, or under development!" Sock smiled accommodatingly, "Where would you want it to stop though, next we'd have to give the Ebola virus protected status and declare it a member of the United Nations. Now I now it ain't nice to be trapped, hunted, poisoned and rejected - but there's got to be limits on the way any species competes for a niche in the ecosystem..." Blatto scratched a cuticle carefully with a spare leg, "That would seem to apply nicely to the human species, you displace more non-human life than any other does. If the projected rate of species extinction continues there will be an annual extinction of fifty thousand species at the beginning of the new millennium. There are dozens dying each day, species of flora and fauna that will never be known to the common man. It's only the disappearance of major species that make the news. Just think - the Great Auk in 1844, Tasmanian wolf in 1936, the Balinese tiger, 1952, soon the Abingdon tortoise, the Kakapo, Condor, Grey wolf, Woolly spider monkey, Golden Tamarin, perhaps the Cheetah, rhinoceros, global danger to non-human primates and amphibians...and those are just the more well-known ones. Don't tell me that Homo Mutilens has no responsibility!" "Hey, we ain't doin' to badly with the cetaceans though. Seen 'em myself" "Take account of the fact that Japan has started to teach its schoolchildren to eat Minke whale, and that the dolphin is gradually more utilised for human consumption. Don't forget that cetaceans were brought to the very edge of extinction by your eminent species and that there is still no guarantee - there is a minimum viable population size for any species, to preserve its genetic variability and breeding potential... Scientific assessment for future exploitation has set the total annual organic production of the oceans at 130 billion metric tons - imagine the rate of possible exploitation and bioresource transformation reaching fifty, sixty, seventy percent." "Fact is, I s'pose, that the rate of human expansion, displacement of other species in utilisation, competition and destruction is simply a measure of the success of the species." "Surely success can also be measured in retrospect regarding those species that have over-utilised their eco-niche and unbalanced the dynamic equilibrium to such a degree that extinction became almost preferable to the stresses of food and space deprivation and the distress of their continued survival under those conditions? It's really quite simple - those species that are incapable of controlling their own rate of competition are controlled by dynamic feedback from their ecosphere itself, make X too large and successful and the environment will shrink X back to establish a new and oscillating equilibrium but cannot always undo the collateral damage... it's that damage that could finally deprive this species of the minimum resources it requires for survival. Those species that have the potential awareness and sentient intellect to control their own rate of competition can circumvent, actually bypass the eco-feedback control vector and replace it with an intellect control vector. Homo is the first family on the planet that has developed that potential but if it is not applied, and neglected..." "Hmm, what's good for a human is not always good for a (Sock was about to say cockroach but changed his mind), for a whale or a gorilla." "Actually there comes a point where that which is not good for any select combination of species is not good for any remaining selection - any other perspective is not just speciestic and eclectically short-sighted but biologically self-destructive in an ultimately pragmatic sense..." "So good ain't always good and what is good depends on your depth of perspective eh?" "Perhaps this is what it really turns about," Blatto nudged a smaller colleague out of the way, "a new definition of 'good' that in an expanded, inclusive manner, regards any species as being a unique link in a continuum of life, occupying a niche that could certainly easily be filled by displacing it, but not with the unique adaptively acquired specialisation that the displaced species had for transposing the resources of that niche into the larger community." "So where do you reckon the most sensitive vector of disturbance lies that we humans need to take urgent account of then, what is it that we should immediately stop doing, or for that matter start doing?" Blatto smiled as much as chitinous exoskeleton would allow and was tempted to say that more war would be a good idea as that had always been rather advantageous for his species in the past, when he saw before him the equation that military biological research, stimulated by more war, would probably facilitate, if not precipitate, the speedy extinction of his species. "Easy, and difficult." Blatto said. "Easy because there are simple insights and simple implementations of them - difficult because there are quite a few of them and your species has a reluctance towards self limitation. That reluctance is caused by the simple fact that the impression of your success lags behind the facts of your actual success as a species - your mass intellectualisation of the eco-feedback control vector has not yet fully disseminated itself in the popular culture, it hasn't trickled through yet to fully settle in your memetic heritage to become commonly applied principle, with transparent and almost automatic thresholds. When those thresholds do change, the precepts of your global culture, religions, philosophies and intellectualisations of natural reality will sympathetically reflect them - simply put, instead of being anthropocentric they will become pancentric. "That sounds like a rhetorical antithesis - sounds like a concept that has both intro- and extrospective aspects, has both centrifugal and centripetal thrusts of perspective, what a word, pancentric!" "You're welcome," crackled Blatto, who needed a drink, cockroaches drying out rather easily with all the effects of pollution around these days, "you can quote me." "It reminds of course, of the Tao harmony of opposites, Yin and Yang. The threat is close though... most of your species hasn't seen or understood it yet - it might just only hit you when El Niño transforms itself into El Brujo, or you waste so much of your total species' energy in useless friction and quest that you never develop space travel. The Earth is your cradle you know - you've only just felt outside it with little toes and fingers. A cradle is where you spend your infancy until you can safely be trusted to take a few steps around on a new solidity that you never suspected the existence of, diapers and all." Sock fiddled impatiently with a cigar that he didn't dare light up. "A pancentric spacetravelling species with diapers...quite a vision, think we have a while to go yet before we get there - solid fuels and ramscoops or anything dependent on sub-luminal speed propulsion ain't going to do the trick ever though." "You are in the pre-Kitty-Hawk stage of heavier-than-air flight as far as space exploration is concerned - playing with variations of the Montgolfier balloon, a breakthrough always comes as a really profound surprise." In the distant rice fields, the robotic harvesters walked along on their six legs, periodically socialising with the larger octopod collectors or getting a good cleanup from the darting little cleaners with their thin, nervously snaking hydraulic hoses. Sock's unlit cigar had started delaminating and he threw it on top of the accumulated bottles and memos in the wastepaper basket. "Amazing how the sense of an ultimate good has changed throughout history but that its political implementation has always vastly lagged behind its vision - now how do you implement a pantocracy as an extension of democracy?" "That is simply being sensitive to the continuum of signalling, democracy is after all simply the centralised integration of signalled vectors and their resultant distributed implementation. It is the extension of that continuum, not just as a philosophical ideal, but as a pragmatic political definition, that holds the secret to mutual species resonance and the path to true sensitivity and responsibility." The relevant signals are all around, easily interpretable, if you centre yourself on a pancentric orientation and not on a select anthropocentric one." Blatto performed the equivalent of a sneeze, picked up
a scrap of paper and ironed out some of the creases while
scanning it sensitively with flashing antennae.
"Now, on this voting warrant we have indicated 325
favoured natural predators..." He halted in
mid-sentence as a strange phenomenon manifested, Sock
thought it could perhaps be a nicotine and alcohol
withdrawal symptom and had a flash of guilt spiced with
the realisation of a need for future self-discipline.
Things became fuzzy around him, blurred and quivered and
in a mad moment of vertigo and half-amnesia he thought
that he would find himself in a virtual reality
laboratory, whatever that was. Instead he found himself
in his own office, holding the phone to his ear and
saying "Absolutely, mister president, yes...sure,
it's an entirely new initiative...yep, slow and...
carefully monitored implementation...." There was an
overloud insistent knocking on the door, Sock ended with
"Yes, SIR!" put the phone down and turned to
the noise. He didn't have to open the door though, his
wife did, and behind her Sock recognised his two
girlfriends. Somehow he felt somewhat like a cockroach
and although he knew it was not going to be easy to,
well, to change, he was going to give it a good try - he
started by smiling a magnanimous welcome and hurried to
put out the cigar which was burning his fingers. Copyright © FV 1999-2004 Note: Chimpanzees comprise both
Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus
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