Journey To The Ancient Cities Of The Old World,
Bearing The Seven Thousand Wonders

I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.
---George Canning, The King's Message

...branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.
---Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter six

....false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
---Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter twenty-one

We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.
---Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter three

Chapter One

There appeared fresh, so sprightly rendered on the dense murky surface of the screen, a bright orange sunrise, with a nose and lips that moved. "I hope everyone brought their asbestos suits and safety goggles and gloves." The voiced boomed smooth and clean, from out of no where, which seemed to come from an area behind the wall or down from the ceiling or off in the corner.

Though it was fairly obvious it was the orange sunrise doing the talking. Dark blotted out the eyes. The face lopped off, except for the forehead, which appeared oblong, narrowing to a slope and freakish in the wild light. Fluttering up, now a pinkish hue, oval and drooped over a shoulder. A hand slipped free of the dark.

A rectangular black abyss swallowed the sunrise and the dark goosed by a click, gave way to the pristine image of a green meadow. Birds chirped. Dogwoods, maples dripping with the morning light. The morning bloomed amid a wood. The little lens singed with a speck of dust blocked briefly the wood. Blurred for a moment. The speck large as two-story house rolled through, taking with it the nose, leaving the nose. But strange disturbed not leaf or twig or dandelion in the meadow.

Clear again. Wiped. All vanished when the mushroom cloud shot up, swooned and swelled the white-puffy trimming and jutting forth its moon-tinted middle the lips from which struck a tremulous voice.

"Not with a bang! Nor whimper does the world end! Rather it falls to an explosion of technology! Information! The Electronic Age upon us like a plague! A fire in the mind that can only be extinguished by us all entering it like the holy children: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego."

Sprinkles of colored lights tossed up from the darkened pool, red, blue, green, violet crescents surfaced, little moons spinning round as one might expect on the wooden floor of roller rink.

Then it all paused, squawked to a halt. And as though some door to an unhidden room swung wide, an invisible hand thrust out the Lone Ranger. The masked hero. He sat proudly on his white horse Silver who on cue whinnied, reared up, legs kicking out. Tonto was just over his shoulder, head bowed, studying some fragment of the desert, his knife drawn and glinting in the sunlight that fell lush in the canyon. Red, orange flecks that streaked the high mountains in the distance. Then came the murmur of strings and the William Tell overture, befitting some grand adventure.

What ensued was a sequence of swirls, faces glimmering across a white pastel sky, flashes so brilliant they blinded the eye momentarily. A blend of recognizable and unknown figures. Spit out. Chair Mao sitting in a bamboo chair, George Bernard Shaw standing with his hands on his hips, Charlie Chaplin throwing a globe into the air and catching it behind his back. The Marx Brothers sitting in a row boat. Mahatma Gandhi sitting cross-legged. Albert Einstein reading a book. Shirley Temple standing on her head. Harry Truman standing at the rear of a train, waving to voters.

"So can we safely assume cyberspace is the New World? Are we the fortunate beneficiaries of modern technology, privy to all splendors and the seven thousand wonders of the information age? Are we all, in short, Marco Polo traveling to far away places? The net an Orient that promises to satiate those of us with wanderlust, bring riches to the greedy, bless us with its endless variety of new secrets, unexpected pleasures, beauty, truth, the fountain of youth, true love. All merely passengers assured of this and more by the journey itself?"

A picture flashed on the screen, hiccuped out of the dark, gave off a floodlight showing a hungry child chewing on a chicken bone. A whoosh sound erupted out of the child and the picture crumbled to darkness.

Then flickered up another picture of rat-infested tenement in south central Los Angeles. Then the hiccup, more metallic this time, like an electric fan clearing its throat, and another whoosh. The dark whipped out of some corner of east Los Angeles, a curl of light that ballooned to burst and excrete with a fizz a picture of the Strip in Las Vegas with its glittering casinos and gaudy neon signs.

"Or are we the backward race some think we are. Neanderthals? Are we doomed? Headed forward or back? Prosperity or famine? Is it beyond the pale to think so? That more or less something extraordinary has happened? Or are we in the throes of an societal-wide epileptic seizure? Is the net the byproduct of a sick society? Grand delusions of the paranoid schizophrenic whacked out mad man in all of us screaming to get out?"

In the background, silhouetted against the screen, a head bobbed like a vessel at sea. Suspended there it jiggled, floated an inch to the right, then left, only to be momentarily joined by shoulders, a hand that leaped upward, slapped the waves of light that sudden spun out of the pitch-dark and enveloped the classroom. Then a final awkward apocryphal whoosh and the last hiccup.

The questions came from Thomas Kroll, professor of English Literature at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University of Blacksburg, Virginia. A town recently written up in Reader Digest as the most wired town in America. The 24,000 students comprised nearly three-quarters of the population.

"Are we all doomed in the Old World? Our days numbered? The old rundown cities soon to crumble? Our world be little more than curiosity like the Parthenon? All that left us be the wild dogs and a few straggling cave man?"

Professor Kroll gave the class to adjust to the light. He clutched his pointer and aimed it at a young man in the back who had his hand raised.

"Yes!"

"Gorrwah! Gruogh!" snorted the student, issuing his Neanderthal reply.

The class gave out with laughter. Cheers.

"Thank you, Mr Billings, for that dissertation," said Professor Kroll.

Polite applause. Smiles all around. It followed that the class should take his side.

The whole town was wired. Bell Atlantic in alliance with the small southern town had only last summer hooked up more than half the residents and gave them access to the global information highway. The Blacksburg Electronic Village project had proved a popular phenomenon and gained the town considerable reputation.

Indeed, the french newspaper Le Monde dubbed Blacksburg "La capitale of du tout-comminicant." Several European radio stations have announced similar reactions to the wired aspects of such small town American connectivity. The Japanese tourists had scheduled stopovers in the Blue Ridge Mountains and made it a point to visit Blacksburg.

The news of Blacksburg arrival at ground zero for the electronic revolution had boosted the town's moral. It being the prototype community. Academic and technologically sophisticated. Assumed its rightful place in the electronic revolution.

2.

At the time, he thought little of it. The various cutting comments occurred in mid-lecture, pausing only to address his class from the dark with the sudden circumspection, Professor Kroll had no misgivings. How could he predetermine such things? He held no prejudices for or against the electronic domain. The New Dominion had come to the Old Dominion. Virginia. Birthplace of presidents. Now wired to the hilt.

Not in the least was he impressed by either argument. Though it was obvious which side needed weight. He spoke for the downtrodden side of those sprung upon by technical gadgetry that bleeped in wristwatches and alarm clocks. The microchip in the golf ball. The bar-coded bag of barbecue potato chips. The miniaturized video camera in the prophylactic. The random access memory that shall one day set us all free.

The slight comments were offered polite and innocent enough. It perhaps was illusory. A side of him that showed on occasion. Informal such a digression. The comment came into his head with a harmless thud. He said it without so much hesitation. He did not think of frisking his words for sharp weapons before letting them go their merry way.

The class recoiled. The comment gave them pause. It ran circles in their heads. They buzzed. And for all the murmurs, it was poorly received. He remembered trying to embellish the moment. "What say you? Are you prepared to hoist up your sails in the Old World and set your mark for the New World?"

His voice at the moment of the delivery had been pitched in a tone of critical assessment. A dark cloud of cynicism. A touch snide. "Are we the doric temple of Athena, 5 B.C.? Tumble-down acropolis of the Old World? Dusty, bone-dry, forgot, distant. Half-expecting our voices to echo in the holes in our heads? Books, the libraries of the world, literature, the good life, God, the green hills of Paradise, all plundered, broken down, stooped, rancid meat, withered, pulp, grist for the mill, spoiled goods, in decay, soon to split, skipped, lost, unknown carcass which we all dare not touch? Or it will tremble? The doom rub off on us like some sooty chimney we have all climbed up. What has come of us that we look anywhere else for our survival? Is our future in telecommunications? Are we all doomed? Am I far from wrong to think the Information Age is little more than an expression of unwarranted expectations?"

The brunt of that subsequent remark caught the class offguard. Chairs scooted, puzzled faces drawn up. Sprung from the befuddled recesses of the brain came the beginnings of a grudge. Lips curled up, all around a distant look came into their faces. The fire didn't start up just on that beat. No, it waited. It spawned no ringing in the ears, a few deep breaths that lay down their solemn sighs along the inner beings.

And the answer, or that portion of the response that came in the silence, or guise of raised eyebrows, no hands in his class rose to meet it, no excited voices addressed the subject.

He ran to meet the quiet and busily smoothed it with "Is there some discretionary implausibility to the world in which we all inhabit that we should look elsewhere for fulfillment?"

The class quarreled amongst themselves. Murmurs. He heard a few curt phrases trickle up the back of the class. But couldn't make them out. They ran out of steam by the time they got nearby. Out of earshot, that short distance between professor and students a vast continent he wished so much to cross. If only to stand within shouting distance. Uncomfortable with the silence in the classroom, he crushed it with "Can anyone advance the cause of this obviously bogus, overrated new wave of technology? Are we all to kowtow to every new technological advancement? Who's right? Who's wrong? Please smash your idols. Smash them against the hard facts. No soft puffy smoke ever burst a golden calf."

He smiled, wishing that the question gave as much as it got. They were mute spectators. The title of the course was The Electronic Village. The course catalogue listed the item on page 49 of the English Literature section, the section listing the required reading and participation, access to computers and the Internet for which the college had unlimited and free access.

He recalled a previous lecture, only last week in which electronic books and electronic rights spawned a particularly heated discussion. Voices were raised, an exchange between himself and a student wearing a T-shirt that said The Cyber Revolution Is Restitution. A fierce argument ensued. The anger developed around the subject of the callousness of the publishing empire. The failure of print publishers to recognize electronic publication rights. Few print publications made any such attempt to read, much less accept the writing that appeared on the web.

It flashed there for a brief few seconds and passed on. Perhaps read in cyberspace like the blinking neon sign in the window of the corner pub. Like the images that appear in the rain puddle, the flickering sky and faces of children peering down into the cool surfaces. The major publishers of print books discarded the idea of electronic rights as pishposh. Litter along the information highway. As the glint in beer cans and the broken glass of pop bottles flicker up momentarily as we pass.

The disagreement lasted only a few moments, as the class was ending. It spilled over into the hallways. The angry student raising his clenched fist in the air, screaming "The cyber revolution is restitution!"

And then later, stuffed into his mailbox, Professor Kroll found a note scrawled on the back of flyer for more varieties of beer available in the student Union Hall. "Gutenberg! Gutenberg! Look what have they have done to the printed word! They've burned it to a crisp. Beaten it to a pulp! Now the books never say a word! Never has anyone heard a book utter a word. They're as dead as the stuff in a scarecrow's head. Dead as the dirt in the flowerbed. Set them ablaze! Light the fire! The truth is not for hire. Burn the burners of books and throw them in the fire!"

3

Later Kroll discovered the comments had stirred up a commotion. He heard a few murmurs in the hall and later that afternoon in the library students looked his way with a faint glare. One than once a student approached and nodded and smiled in his direction. They always did that when they ran across him in the library. But he detected in their friendliness this time a guarded caution. They mistrusted now. He had trespassed.

In the coming week, the messages on his answering machine grew more intense, more angry. Kroll thought it better not to bring up the subject again, when the messages suddenly turned more ugly, loud outbursts of petty remarks against the Old World. Most comments were anonymous. A few made up names like Julius Caesar, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, Winston Churchill, Adolph Hitler, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, Oscar Wilde, Big Foot and Charles Darwin.

They scribble messages and stuffed them under his office door. The messages were signed variously by luminaries like Horace Walpole, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, William Shakespeare, Plato, Bullwinkle, Aristotle, Thucydides, Bozo the Clown, Groucho Marx, Charlotte Bronte, Queen Victoria, Mae West, Lord Byron, Batman, the artist formerly known as Prince, Mickey Mouse and John Philip Sousa.

The messages audible or written ranged from pleasant invitations to surf the web to curt jabs of obscene cries of derision. Disturbed as though he had struck them. One called him an idiot, another merely burped into his answering machine and another screamed. Some students took the time make a half-sensical comment. Babbled of corrupt aboveground life, hideous as it was to the callers, so wretched the physical world compared to the virtual world, the Old World and its stench of poison in the air, industrial waste that ate the guts of their parents, pukes in their water, the industrial state rewarded for its levels of toxicity, ecological disasters pending, laws of conservation abused, painted-faced whores that screwed everybody, rancid babies born of the madhouse governments, chaos a form of goodness, falsehoods distilled and bottled, the future abandoned.

The messages proclaimed the New World as revolution against the destroyers of rainforests, the crazed and paranoid schizophrenic governments, the drug-infested streets hurled his way deaththreats, anxieties, absurdities. A consensus the voices seemed to gather around its center, in which the Old World had disappointed, collapsed, exploded from its own gloom and cynicism, coarse, crude, grotesque and mean, self-destructive---the wasted chances gone now.

Pissed away and passed on to the next generation. The idiots and fools who were each in their turn supposed to be ever so grateful for the opportunity. And somehow overlook the discrepancies, the stink of bad water, rat feces in the granaries, insecticides on the crops, corruption of laws prohibiting strip-mining, careless burial of nuclear waste, fallen as the low standards of meat inspection. All were to stand stoic as stone pillars of society and pretend that the world was invincible, pure and good, unspoilable, a veritable Garden of Eden, so much amok with love and purity that they should rejoice to be in it.

Surely as it was their bountiful inheritance, nothing short of thankfulness was in order. No indignation would be permitted. Respect for government, law enforcement, church and State, all the more deserving of their undying loyalty as they had preserved and protected the world so overabundantly generous with its splendors and endless pleasures. A lifetime of goodness was their reward by being alive.

Kroll learned his comments had been posted on the bulletin board in the college union hall. His comments had posted as well on posters that were scotch-taped to parking meters and streetlamps all over campus.

Somehow he had betrayed them. These internet fanatics. Believers in the cyber revolution. His comment had perhaps cut more deeply than he wished. He had exposed a portion of himself that wrought him, undid him and what remained was distrust. Sudden upon him like heavy stone. That sense of thick disappointment and disgust. As though he had violated each of them.

No better than a child molester or one who celebrates the modern vice of adultery by talking about it. That was it. He had boasted of some conquest outside his marriage vows. They didn't approve. There mingled with the responses of the murmurs and shouts left on his answering machine at his home. He received several notes in the mail as well.

He reached inside his coatpocket and felt a sudden pain. Someone had slipped a razor blade inside. It was attached to a note. His hand dripping with blood. He wrapped it in a handkerchief. Should he report the incident? What would the Dean think of such treachery?

He felt himself growing faint. He was sick to his stomach. He opened the note and read it:

Cyberspace is nothing so small and trivial as merely the New World. Nor is it revolution or innovation. The cyberworld, asshole, my learned prick, is the last chance we have to break free of the past. Its mistakes and miserable failed experiments to enliven the dead carcasses that run our government, inflame the already incendiary ashes of democracy with their gasoline-gushing geysers of outmoded and corrupt responses to the fallen, gasping ghettos in which we dwell like rats scurrying in the dark toward the flames, the end having come inside us now. And what other way can we turn to find a way out, through the dirt and grime. The note was signed 'Drunk and Dispirited.'

At home, in his mailbox there was another letter. He didn't get home till dark as he went to emergency clinic of the university. Six stitches. The nurse asked nosy questions. What happened? Oh, that's terrible. Cut it in your car on a letter opener. How dreadful, Professor Kroll. He felt the cheerful gloom of sink inside him. He didn't say a word. What could he say? Some student boobytrapped my coat with a razor blade. He sensed that something wrong, terribly misplaced the divisiveness of such a ploy. Was he suppose to resign his tenure. Twenty-one years of teaching at one of the finest universities in the world.

He drove home. The bandaged, stitched hand in his lap. Limp like a clump of clay.

In the bathroom, he removed the new note from his pocket and read:

Dear Shithead. Banged out, disheveled world, eat your flesh, rot and stink. Tell your children what to think. Believe in your wretched Old World so far as it will take you. Take care of yourself, as we leave and return to feel more sorry for you each time around. The pity in us is waning. But we have enough of it. We shall make of it statues and plaques to remember you by. Bronze the stone of your age, the metal that in you shimmered of your once bright future. Now lackluster, tarnished and the tiny part of it that gives of light holds you spellbound, so much glare from the dark in which you sit like something hidden away. Kept for posterity.

It wasn't until just at that moment that he realized the note was written in a different handwriting than the previous note. And he looked and he didn't see a name attached. Not at the bottom. But there, up in the corner, a curly almost feminine handwriting. The scribbled name of Cyber Queen.

He walked out into the hallway. The telephone rang. Rather than let the caller leave a message he picked up the receiver.

"Hello," he said. He waited for an answer.

The phone clicked off. Coward.

There were times when the phone rang off the hook. It rang all night. He turned off the phone so he could sleep. He didn't like it waking him up. It was rude and by now he was nervous from the lack of sleep. His wife Nancy first thought it was a harmless prank. He didn't dare tell her of how he really cut his hand.

He made jokes about the callers. The phone going on like that. But she wasn't certain that was the right approach. The callers were lewd, hateful. She had heard their messages. When he brushed them off as practical jokes she refused to accept it. She made him sit with her. She played the messages back like a bizarre radio show. They listened together.

But the messages grew pale and dull. The frustrated anger of the callers, helpless as though each held some enormous grudge against him. That some harmless comment had resurrected the wraith of so heated passions. Overdone their harsh response.

Hate was the least of the voice mails concern. What venom they spilled was first bittersweet, now turned rancid, slipped inside Nancy until she screamed each time the phone rang. Refused to answer it. He cut the ringer off. That was enough of that. No more. Watch the blinking light. That was all you needed to know if there was call or message.

He went to bed nights with somber thoughts in his head. He questioned his post and his obligation to the university. He even grew to dislike the computer sitting in his library. The screen even when it was off seemed derisive.

The net was promising. But it was no messiah. Were we all oblivious to our own glorious world, caught up in the bright fireworks of its empty promise? How can pushing buttons help us move toward a better understanding of life's mysterious dark underpinnings? Aren't there ethical questions that arise from such electronic wizardry.

Contraband. Kid porn. The smut culture of the underworld that sudden comes among us, passing for gadgetry. Bludgeoning our senses left and right in the name of technocracy. What is new? Where is the advent? The Antecedent? Will the network of world computers feed hungry children in Biafra or Zimbabwe? Will it heal the sick? Can it abolish racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia? Is the net so merciful it can understand, grant absolution, save our souls.

He decided it could not. He believed the cyberloom was woven of many sordid impulses, none of which have at heart the slightest interest in our well being, but the hedonistic, simple mad desires of selfish cybercrats and netophiles who are little more than rapists and child molesters

Technology in its ascendancy, should we beat our brains out trying to figure out the mystery of life? Or should we venture into the cyberland and find it has its own homepage. Paradise, step aside and allow the button-pushers of the world to take us to the promised land.

Does anyone have any reservations about leaving? Everyone said their good-byes? Eh? You there, Mr Clampton? Are you prepared for the fall of civilization? He imagined himself posing questions to his persecutors. He could see their faces in the dark. He couldn't sleep. He lay limp in the bed. He listened to Nancy's breathing, so sweetly whispered in his ears the tender remorse for which he yearned.