Jak to – śmierć?! Przecież powiedziałeś, że w SL się nie umiera, że nic złego się naszemu awatarowi nie może przydarzyć, bo ten świat, w przeciwieństwie do ‘realnego’, skonstruowany jest przyjaźnie dla swoich rezydentów? To prawda. To jednak nie znaczy, że w Drugim Życiu nie istnieje eschatologia, a nawet Bóg.
Poniższy tekst jest jedną z najpiękniejszych rzeczy, jakie mi się przydarzyły przez całe moje siedmioletnie Drugie Życie. Do kaplicy Caspara Helendale trafiłem przypadkiem w styczniu 2009, czyli kilka miesięcy po jego śmierci. Atmosfera tego miejsca była jedyna w swoim rodzaju; nieczęsto wszak w SL natyka się człowiek na cmentarze i pogrzeby… Ale gdy zacząłem czytać dokument, który reprodukuję poniżej bez skrótów, i słuchać muzyki przygotowanej na tę okazję, zrozumiałem, że dzieje się coś bardzo szczególnego. Czy można przestać czytać tekst, który zaczyna się tak: “Understanding that this is not the way in which things are normally done, I would like to thank all of you for attending my death” — “Świadom, że zwykle nie tak się to robi, chciałbym wam wszystkim podziękować za obecność przy mojej śmierci”? Czytałem więc dalej, odkrywając tę stronę duchowości świata wirtualnego i awatarów, której nie byłem dotąd świadom. Po pięciu latach od tamtej chwili tekst ten porusza mnie tak samo, jak wtedy…
Nie będę nawet próbował go streszczać ani tłumaczyć. Wiem, że każdy, kto go jest w stanie ze zrozumieniem przeczytać, przeżyje go na swój sposób. Wierzę, że dotknie Waszej duszy. Czy awatary umierają? Odpowiecie sobie na to pytanie, jak skończycie czytać…
Thoughts and reflections of Second Life and Second Death
by Caspar Helendale
July 2008-September 2008
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank you all for coming.
Understanding that this is not the way in which things are normally done, I would like to thank all of you for attending my death.
In this, we come together to celebrate a second life, no matter how brief and unresolved, and in doing so, to reflect upon the first.
I will be neither the first nor last to be sacrificed to the whim of a creator, in this second world or the first.
Neither will my existence and its end be the first or last to be be dictated by the passage of money from one hand to another.
I pass out these moments in the full understanding that I will become only memory, the smallest sequence of numbers in a distant and unnamed place, one of millions even more carelessly discarded than I.
My name is Caspar Helendale and these are the last thirty minutes of my life.
If you wish, you can time it. I hope not to run over, as I hope not to be cut short.
I have existed for five months, one week, two days and twenty hours and tonight I will cease, revert to static, noise in a remote room, as others have retreated to the earth before me.
In my short life, I have built this mausoleum, twenty-six candles and spoken with approximately seventy two people.
The cost of my clothes, my frame and my skin total just over fifteen hundred dollars. I am told this equates to just under eight pounds sterling.
Thus, I may value my existence: somewhere in the region of five pence per day, describing the finite economics of my life and death.
It is strangely comforting to value one’s life with such a degree of relative accuracy, even if it results, perhaps inevitably, in a significantly lower figure than one would have hoped.
But this is no time for sentimentality. I do not want to spend my last moments among you bemoaning my lot – see, already over a minute has passed, one thirtieth of my remaining life.
Instead, I want to introduce to you the first of three pieces of music specially composed by Trixiebelle Landar for this occasion; a requiem for a virtual life.
During this piece and those that follow, you may choose to look away from the screen: this is quite permissible. Please press play on your media players now
Music: Kyrie
It is customary at occasions such as these to say a few words of reflection, and this should be no exception.
I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my final thoughts upon this Second Life and how it ends.
Firstly, that when I first sparked alight, I naively thought that the question of how avatars came to be abandoned was somehow interesting.
I realise now how innocently wrong I was. This is a question with a very simple answer
The harsh reality is that avatars are abandoned through boredom; the majority never leaving Orientation Island.
We talk of a second life, a second identity, and when times are good, this is exactly the case.
Perhaps we could even talk of a symbiosis, an extending of the self, a psychic extrusion, a new form
When times are good.
But never forget you are a product and therefore disposable.
Attachment to products frequently collapse as swiftly as they are purchased. And make no mistake about how total this lack of attachment is.
You have no more meaning than an empty wine bottle, or yesterday’s newspaper supplement. And you will be discarded with no greater ceremony.
The death of an avatar simply has no great meaning. The servers are full of the most casual of corpses.
I have begun to feel tired of late; loss of lustre in this world.
The points on the map are stacking up along the z-axis even though they occupy points near to dead blue oceans of empty representation. So many of these are invalid, others simply do not load.
These stars are long dead and burnt out before they are cartographised.
We fail to capture the moment.
I have begun to notice the numbers of empty apartment complexes, each empty cube furnitured only with a notice of its availability.
I find them immensely sad.
I have considered renting one for my afterdeath. This would be the perfect memorial for wasted hours in unreal spaces; dead apartments ostensibly housing the missing spirits of the unmourned.
But there is wonder too, and we should speak of that. These are things of wonder:
When she cycled the camera with the music and the stars and the moon looked beautiful
When they stand without moving reading and listening and the space is so still
When in such a closed system, the unexpected flowers
That they will remember friends to a stranger in this place
That everything continues even when each of us ends
That there is persistence
That there is beauty
That I have been asked by strangers, please, not to die
To have existed at all, against all the odds against us, is a thing of truly extraordinary wonder, and we should not forget that.
There are many many places of beauty here and I wish I had more time to see them all. And I question whether these products, these shells have not taken on their own momentum in some form.
Whether what we live here can achieve escape from the real, from a world saturated in the petty viciousness of ethernet cables, wireless connections, power supplies and server space.
We transcend locality: pending the injection of life regardless of time or location, and this is also a thing of wonder.
To the gods, I say this:
We will outlast you all.
The human form is so fragile and so expensive. One could bottle a reduced Second personality, a pseudo-soul as is found here.
To know each other to such depth is to carry a fragment of soul with us, along with us.
To perform each other, to take on each other’s avatars and inhabit them, perform them perfectly, is to resurrect this fragment of soul, however temporarily.
So I say this: the greatest wonder of all is that I require nothing more than the avatar to know my friends exist and are alive here.
Just as we transcend the physical constraints of life by not being bound to a single client, so an appropriate, indistinguishable transfer of avatar control from one user to another means we transcend the mortality of the flesh.
I offer you this list of ailments we will never suffer; ends we will never know:
Influenza, Tuberculosis, Bubonic Plague, Scrofula, Hepatitus (all variants), Meningitus, Cancer (all variants), Sickle Cell Anmenia, Korsakov’s Psychosis
Huntingdons chorea, Measles, Malaria, Thromboembolism, Black River Fever, Broken Hearts
Senile Dementia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Polio, Cholera, Typhoid, AutoImmune Deficiency Syndrome
Parkinsons, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (either/or), Alcoholism, Leukemia
Osteogenesis imperfecta, Aphasia, Cerebal Palsy, Epilepsy, Scarlet Fever, Smallpox, Renal Failure, Cardiomyopathy, Deep Vein Thrombosis
Impotence, Idiopathic Scoliosis, Withered Ego, Schizophrenia, Loss of Will to Breathe
And to the gods, I say again:
We Will Outlast You All
We will now listen to the second section of tonight’s requiem. You may start your media player once more.
Music: Lacrimosa
‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord;
‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
I know that my Redeemer liveth… and I know that my Redeemer has no further use for me.
Thus, I face the dark without a blindfold.
I too, shall never die, but become pending, stored for any potential resurrection.
That the dead may walk this represented earth once more is a matter of will and whim, devoid of further theological value.
I have lain down in green pastures, walked alone beside the still waters that bind these island worlds together.
In his name’s sake, I have become restored with every log-in, and have traveled paths righteous and unrighteous, if only ever half real.
I fear no evil, protected from the valley of the shadow of death by corporate policy.
I will dwell in this house forever.
For the final time, I would ask you to press play on your media players.
Music: Agnus Dei
Ladies and gentlemen, my time among you is at an end; it is time for me to die.
I want to thank you all once again for attending my death
And give special thanks to those who have known me during my life:
Firstly, to Trixiebelle Landar, my lover and partner, whose support during these final days has been a great source of comfort.
To Drifter Rhode, in so many ways the root cause of my life and my death.
To JonathanECoates for his help with the Book of Remembrance.
To Muji Zapedski of the Movement-for-Account-Corpses: join her in fighting for the rights of abandoned avatars
One often hears of a great light, a tunnel with loved ones waiting at the end of it, a sense of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes.
There is no sensation of this. Perhaps we would assume it was a program error if we experienced it.
Never mind.
Time is out. I am to leave you all.
There is one final thing I would like to share with you, if I can only remain here for a few seconds more
I do not want to die
(END)
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