Expanding reality

“The cyberpunk concept of" mirror glasses "positioned virtuality as the opposite of reality. In part, it was so. In the early 90s, the network was a lot of geeks turned around on equipment, well-versed in network protocols, but poorly understood in life. For the next ten to fifteen years, the network became closer to the average consumer and the escapism element gradually decreased. At present, the virtuality of the Cybernetic Globe equally contains both the concept of virtuality divorced from the material world and the concept of “augmented reality”. The first zone of Saybergloba - Reflect is a digital copy of reality. Second and Third - fictional worlds in which ... "



The screen goes out for exactly a second to explode with the old Gorilazz clip. That's always the case. Good lecture was. I sip two small sips of still hot coffee. A paper cup with the Shvidko logo looks like an anachronism. In “Mack”, three years have passed since they were transferred to glasses, with “moving pictures”. Then it was fun for children, now they are turning contextual advertising for adults.
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However, this TV screen with a diagonal of 60 also looks like an anachronism. E-ink technology has fallen in price, “electronic” wallpapers can be bought at a reasonable price in any large store. And the programmer, if you yourself can not connect the broadcast through the "smart home" system. TV on the wall. If desired, all the walls of this mall could be stuck with screens and start advertising. The question is - why do this in reality, if all this can be done in virtuality?

Half past ten, Saturday. Shopping center is still empty. I take out the Palm Qaudro 750i's inner left jacket pocket, a Classic form factor, expanded with a “scroll”. I wear glasses in another pocket, in an old-fashioned case, along with a velvet cloth. It looks like ordinary glasses, only a slightly extended handle gives them a gadget for access to Cyberglob. Communication with the "palm" - through the radio. I wear "glass". Slight dizziness. The data flow from Reflect blurs the outlines of the world, superimposing information layers on matter. Around the glass doors of stores start to appear menu, technical and marketing information. The friendly interface of the Decada operating system unobtrusively pops up in the lower left corner. I would not wear them here, but Lena asked me to break through the prices of some clothes. Climb shopping lazy, it's easier to spend a little traffic and finish drinking more hot coffee. The list of products is displayed in the lower right corner and its development begins. The list moves smoothly from one outlet to another, goes around the corner, returns, goes down to the first floor and returns to the right corner with specific prices in specific stores. Smooth, eye pleasing animation. The result of a long technological chain of data processing and the imposition of a virtual image of the interior of the building. Reflect downloads information from everywhere, starting from the streams of the internal cameras of the full wave spectrum, open information systems of the shopping and entertainment center and ending with microchips embedded into clothing labels from fashion boutiques. Through satellite trunks, radio channels and cables, this powerful stream goes somewhere to the processing “platforms” of Seibergloba, where a multilayer cake is made from “dice”, “impression of reality”. From there, a thin stream of data descends from the heavens to the call of some end user like me. Another couple of clicks on the "palm tree" and the list flies to Lenka's soaps.

Sometimes I think that it would be nice not to know about the mechanics that pull these ghostly images onto objectively existing matter. Maybe it is worth thinking about changing the profession? ..

Coffee remains black viscous sediment. Time to go. The clip of Gorilazz ends, I go downstairs to the first floor by September morning on the other side of the glass doors and catch the continuation of the “lecture” with the edge of my ear.

“The network of the 1990s melted geographical distances and destroyed the administrative boundaries of space. The virtuality of today is realized in the multidimensionality of space, an infinite variable series of expanding realities ... ”

***

Operational screen "palm" is extinguished, I read from the "scroll" - a flexible 8-inch screen, pulling the PDA case. Option for left-handers - the “scroll” is pulled to the right side, the left hand remains on the gadget's qwerty-clave.

The compilation of information was flooded by the Gatekeeper operator three minutes ago, when I got into the car on the "Pozdnyaki." Well done for the gatekeepers, when ten years ago the people were talking about a fucking-two-three-zero they prepared their breakthrough and made everyone understand that the human factor in the fight against informational chaos is a key issue. Gated to work with dense data sets and armed with tools for searching for information, gatekeepers have long been a real alternative for “traditional” media, giving the end user the information that he needs. Five years since I have subscribed to the daily expanded newsletter of what I need and since then I don’t bother surfing the net. However, real grandmother gatekeepers do not on the fact that they filter information arrays. They created Cyberglob and now have the Main Contract in their hands, serving this cybernetic universe.

"Europe has jaundice." That's for sure, Arabs and Chinese in thin ranks entered the Old World, settled there and began to actively proliferate. "The process has begun." No need for crusades and other bloody activities. It is enough to come here with your family, consolidate with your fellow countrymen and slowly crush your fence on Europeans who have become softer from the benefits of civilization.

"Two shops are crushed in Little Shanghai." This is local news. About what is happening there, on that side of the city.

The Chinese came here ten years ago, when the construction of real skyscrapers began in Kiev. The crisis with the local staff, local general contractors who were sore with unrealistic prices and lack of experience in high-rise construction provoked a massive landing of the Shanghai brigades that built half-kilometer “candles” in their city. A couple of years later, they built up their quarter in Troyeshchina, and organized another Chinatown. Kiev has become even closer to the civilized world.

The train breaks out to the South Bridge. Bright September day beats in the eyes, forcing to squint and look away from the screen. Every day I cross the Bridge at least twice a day, but I still love to look at the landscape outside the window. Lower Telichka on the right side of the Dnieper - in the picket fence of completed and under construction skyscrapers. Ten years ago, the remnants of equipment were carried out from a dilapidated industrial zone, demolished shops and warehouses of Soviet times, leaving untouched only tangled deposits of engineering networks under bad asphalt and re-zoned the territory. The core of the new business center has grown here in less than five years and continues to grow further, competing with Podol City of the Rybalsky Peninsula. Under the pressure of billions of dollars and the "wishes" of private investors, the "blue lines" of the right and left banks have changed forever.

Cars with whistling go into the tunnel. Passengers return to reading newspapers, sticking to communicators, PDAs and simple phones, listening to mp31 and the latest albums of emo artists. Three boys in front of slander from some kind of podcast on the screen of the gadget. The young lady on the left is watching a transfer from the fashion channel on the stylish Nokia FF7575 model. Carefully dressed pensioner carefully dials SMS.

"New York. Waiting for a new attack. Eshkin cat ... When they already understand that the Third World has already begun and in full swing?

We must tie with political news.

“QuakeCon 2017 closing”. The first congress of the Quakers, which was held in the sixty-thousandth Singapore "Crater", the largest center for cyber-games in Southeast Asia. Nothing fancy, but the last paragraph of the news makes you smile. This year, the sum of transfers by cyber-fighters for the first time surpassed that in baseball. Cybersport is gaining momentum. But it all started with local fights in DOOM. "Smart clothes have become even smarter." Columbia launched a new line of winter jackets for the season 2017-18. The slogan of the advertising company - It's Wired. Ponty for visitors. Jackets stitched with heating-cooling systems, diagnostics of the wearer's condition and translators of this data into the network have been riveted by the Chinese for five years. “Biocomputers are entering the market of individual users. Silicon will finally be a thing of the past ”...

I read this news to the transfer station at the Palace of Sports. The screen goes blank, rolls up and gently hides in the side panel.

***

I walk along the crowded main row of Old Petrovka, the media market that grew out of the “gully”, where speculators sold books and magazines in the early 90s. Now they are selling everything that can carry information. Including pirated products.

Pirates chased as much as this market existed. Waves of exponential purges passed through these rows several times a year, but the vendors again krafta raised their points and laid out colorful boxes with software, games, music and movies on the shelves. The situation could not change even the specialized shopping center planted next to the market, where only media products were sold. It’s a paradox, but high-tech media sold better at the flea market format flea market than in the glamorous supernova of the media mole.

The life of the pirates was only able to spoil the new Minister of Culture, a young, progressive and, most importantly, owning a significant part of the production capacity for replicating disks. Underground factories quickly shut down. With the customs, too, could agree. True, the problem is not solved anyway.

The minimization of the element base of computer equipment, including storage media, gigabit communication “trunks”, which became available to the ordinary user for a penny, gave the pirates fundamentally new opportunities.

Bored-looking guys, lazily hanging around in a crowd, quickly got out of the wide pockets of the immense neoreping jackets, pocket gadgets, reinforced with additional memory modules and broadband wireless adapters. The distribution is discarded on a flash drive or disk in a matter of minutes. If a pirate companion is not on the local media of something the client needs, then it merges in the same minutes from local or western servers. Cops if they catch such fighters, then really can not stick anything. Technology, as always goes ahead of the law.

The rest of the market has not changed. All the same iron boxes with counters, plastic canopies over the rows and mobbing crowds, changing bank notes to ephemeral tales, coded with zeros and units of information about worlds that never existed.

Passing through the rows, I understand that in a few years this place is waiting for a really high-quality jerk, which will lead to the writing of new rules of the game. If once money was money for which you bought this information, then soon the information itself will become money. The currency for which you can buy material goods.

***

The front door creaks hard, I find myself in a room that differs little from a store of ordinary computer parts of medium size.

The first impression is deceptive.

Scripter comes from somewhere in the back rooms, buttoning up his fly on the move.

- Hello.

- Hello. Everything is in place?

- Yes. What will be calculated?

- 256 hard bits.

- Basalt?

- What do you think?

In the jargon of networkers, “basalt” is the most dense version of the “construction material” of Seibergloba, dys, a multi-layered information file describing a material object in various aspects. "The cast of reality." Basalt is the currency of information business professionals. To get really dense versions of dys, from which gatekeepers make advanced versions of clusters for the Second and Third Zone - the task is not easy.

A box appears on the counter from under the SonyErricson 1100. Without waiting for my surprised replicas Scriptter opens the lid and shows the contents. I nod in satisfaction. Inside - Dreamer-VI.

"Full Speaker".

For dozens of centuries, mankind has created static artifacts of art, whose “immobility” was determined by the properties of the carrier of information - stone, wood, metal, paper, on which signs were written. Torn out from the flow of life, images depicted some single instant of this changeable world, forever frozen impressions of reality. The figure defrosted the problem. Now artists created works of art, changing as well as reality itself.

Scripter takes a white matte cube out of the box and activates it. A flexible transparent screen creeps out of the top face. From the side - two planes with contours of the palms. I give Scripter a disc with "basalt" and put my hands on the contours. Intricate multi-colored patterns, slowly turning spirals, circles and ovals, begin to appear on the screen. The “speaker” pulls information from me about my emotional state and converts it into graphic images. It looks fascinating. The initial purpose of Dreamer-VI is meditation practice, when a person watching the visualization of his emotional state controls and corrects it, achieving peace and tranquility. However, possible and opposite options.

It seems everything is in order. I take my hands off the contours and put the artifact in the box. Scripter stands opposite.

I am a designer. Basically I am engaged in building construction, but lately I have begun to switch more and more to interiors. Market. I need Dreamer-VI not only to take up empty space on the shelf or to relax after a busy day. The ability to record visualization of the emotional states of the client gives a lot of material in order to then make the interior that he likes.

- Order? - I ask.

- Yes.

Not too talkative type. But it is always a pleasure to deal with him.

I go out, holding in my hands what should, as I think, change this world around a little more.

***

“The boundaries are blurred. To say exactly when it began is to sin against the truth, everyone who looks around and reflects on what is happening will have their own starting point.

Borders between states still retain their strength in the form of barriers and customs officers, stopping goods from material values, but modern communications cut through barbed wire and communication between people on opposite sides has practically no restrictions. Information is no longer subject to customs clearance.

Streams of advertising demolish the cultural boundaries, accustomed to consume everyone and everything. In all the McDonalds of the world it smells the same. We forget our history, but we are well aware of the international consumer hieroglyphs-brands, which clog up the media broadcast with different voices, which essentially say the same thing - “buy me!”.

Reality interferes with fiction. Frames crashing into the twin towers of the aircraft as if copied from Hollywood blockbusters. At the premieres of "cult" films, people are discharged into the costumes of the main characters, and the popular characters from the series continue to be called screen names in real life. The entertainment industry rivets the fictional worlds into which we run from time to time.

The network is a huge carnival, where real faces are erased by nicknames and fake data in user profiles and everyone can be anything, with anyone, and as their heart desires.

The difference between a man and a woman is erased by fashion, the stage images of teenagers who are undecided in the wardrobe, and surgeons who change their sex. The boundaries between life and death disappear. That unfortunate sheep will still be erected by a monument to those who are pulled from the next world with the help of cloning and genetic engineering technologies.

We don't need Archimedes turning over the earth. We need a fulcrum. The fulcrum around which we can build our coordinate system, where the world has more or less clear contours. "