Blurred Lines

The most significant difference between man and any other inhabitant of the planet is our ability to talk. We can speak, we can express ourselves, we can interact with others by words alone. At first we were limited to the distance the human voice can travel, a few feet at most, but soon we had something else, the written word.

One man could write his words, and another could read them later, they did not have to be in the same place at the same time.

Pen and paper, a letter to a friend or relative, a way of communicating across a distance. It may have taken days, weeks or even months for a reply and true interaction was impossible but this was just the beginning.

With the invention of the telephone, things started to change. At first limited to the wealthy or large business corporations, but soon to find a place in every home, it was now possible to hold a real-time conversation with another person regardless of the distance between the two, but it was still a long way from being in the same room as your caller.

Next came live television. This however was a one way medium, but still paved the way for improvements in video technology.

In the early 1990's the Internet was thrust into the public eye. No longer the sole property of scientists, scholars, and the military, but now available to all.
Now you could join a conversation with a group of people and it did not matter where in the world you were. Initially this was almost like taking a step back to the days of pen and paper as the only method of communication was by text based chat. In fact a whole sub-set of English came into being to help cope with the limitations of this communications medium. Shorthand, acronyms, emotivons, and a much more simplistic use of words all helped to avoid the possible misunderstandings that could occur. After all the written word is a slippery thing to master, with most words having multiple meanings and with no vocal intonation or facial expressions available to qualify meaning. Internet Chat was an art difficult to grasp, but people loved it.

It didn't take long for the next obvious progression or two. From text to sound and pictures. At first however, you could only have one or the other. Sound of inferior quality to your telephone, or black and white video where the sender looked as if they were in a time lapse film. But technology was moving faster now, there was an unbelievable hunger for improvement. It is also not insignificant that those who wanted these improvements were also in the main still the doers of the time. They were the software engineers, the programmers, and others in the computing industry. Things changed quickly. Hardly a month went by without some new advance in inter-personal communications being released. Very soon colour video of near television quality, and better than telephone quality sound was common place.

What did this mean?. It was just another way to communicate with people, but so much more real than anything that had gone before. It was about now that the boundaries between reality and virtual-reality started to become blurred.

The main limitation to the Internet was it's hunger for more and more bandwidth. Fibre optics and fractal data compression solved the problem. It was soon possible to send gigabytes of data per second anywhere in the world and people did.

Freed from it's speed limit, Internet technology accelerated rapidly. What is the next obvious development after vision, 3D vision. At first stereoscopic images required a viewing tank, much like a fish tank, to enable the image to be rendered by it's lasers. But soon this restriction was gone too. Now you had a three dimensional image to converse and interact with. Those boundaries became even less clear.

Around 2040 a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, working in close partnership with a colleague at the MIT, made the most significant breakthrough of this century. They used the pure energy of an accelerated particle beam to create matter. Only a very very tiny amount, of a very unspecified type of matter. It existed for a nanosecond and then didn't, returning to it's original state, but the event recorders clearly showed it had been there. Don't ask me how they did it, I haven't a clue. I am not a physicist.

This, like all discoveries of similar significance sparked the scientific community into action, sponsored of course by big business. There were two distinct areas of research within this new field. The first concentrated on making this created matter stable, so that it would continue to exist without a continued supply of energy. The second concentrated on making the process as efficient as possible, so that less an less energy was required to operate the process, but both lines of research had the same ultimate goal, to make money. Everyone who was anyone had their own idea for the perfect use of this technology. The main lines of research were food replication and other possible profit making consumer goods, and of course, the entertainment industry.

These practical applications sound a long way from creating a minute amount of something, but in reality are not. If you can create an atom, you just need to be able to tell it how much to weigh, its electrical charge, and where it should position itself, to then be able to create something of significance. It didn't take long before every educational and research establishment had produced their own objects from nothing. Work then started in earnest on the control mechanisms. Devices to scan a target and reproduce an accurate representation of it.
The ultimate magicians trick had almost been brought to life.

At this point everyone had an opinion on the moral issues. Were we playing at God?. The answer was simple. No. If you examined the theory you would see that it was impossible to actually create life. You could create a static model of a living thing using the stable matter theories, but this was just a representation. It had no life of it's own, it was just another inanimate object. Alternatively you could create and destroy a series of models using the non-sustainable matter theory, much as an old style stereovision broadcast gave the illusion of movement and reality by displaying a sequence of frames in quick succession, but this was no more alive than a black and white cinema film from the early 1900’s, it just looked like it was. These facts however did not prevent a series of international laws from being passed to satisfy the moral crusaders. However, the real implications could not have been foreseen at that time. Very few people, with perhaps the exception of a few gifted science fiction writers, could have looked at the current, the now, and progressed it to its inevitable conclusion.

It would have seemed an unlikely dream that progress would be made so rapidly that within another 10 years the technology would be available to everyone.

So how does this relate to the subject in hand? Well, one of the inventions was the General purpose low power non-sustainable matter generator. A bit of a mouthful, but this device is the core much of the current entertainment industry. It generates your television images, real solid characters that play out their roles on your entertainment centre viewing table, real miniaturised representations of your friendly newsreader or weatherman. It is attached to your workstation, creating your business associates for the meeting you need to attend. It brings your friends and family to your home without them having to leave theirs in true colour, life size, fully interactive format.

Now, at last, we are back at the beginning. True face to face interaction. The lines between reality and virtual reality were no longer blurred. They had been rendered invisible. Now the trouble began.

� Russ_UK 1997