Define, Specify, Initialise, Call

What is real; where are you now; is your world buffering just ahead of you, millisecond by millisecond?

Most film sets now are created in computers. An animated film, of the Pixar variety, may run for ninety minutes, at twenty-four frames a second, and each second of that time requires fifty hours of complex computer time to create, and behind everything, matrices of code.

Strap-on an Oculus virtual-reality headset, and your kitchen erupts into a Formula One race circuit, or a vast cavern on a distant planet.

Today is someone's distant past, as, long ago, it was someone's distant future. For example, a new breed of actor is emerging who can interpret these time shifts more creatively than actors whose history is one of waiting for physical stage backdrops to be redressed by set painters and carpenters. Talents, prerogatives, and prerequisite attributes change, and the novelty of green-screen worlds insinuates itself in time as a common mantra, until the old world is forgotten, and the reality in front of us is all the reality there is, or at least appears to be. Unless you too are encoded, and your DNA is naturally in-sync with this new reality, you will not exist.

Just outside our field of vision, a shape hurtles by, a bird, flying low and unexpectedly close. Startled, we flinch and turn away sharply, a fifty-thousand-year-old instinct learned in an environs of dense woodland or reed plains. Someone unknown to us has exploited this reflex, generating code that replicates in our mind this ancient first-order reality, but here is no bird shape, no mating territory to be defended, no nesting young.

Where do you want to be? Whom do you want to be? In this new, encoded reality behind the lenses, we stand at the cliff's edge.

I remove the headset, and make a cup of tea.