Paul Archer grew up in a small new England town - not quite big enough to be classified in the census as a city, but too large to be much like the drive-through places of the South. He lived in the West End of town, a suburb really, although in that part of Connecticut, far enough away from Hartford or New Haven there were no bedroom communities.
The West End was the old Anglo-Saxon redoubt where generations of New Englanders, captains of industry who built the town into something of an indispensable, had lived. Appointments were all Revere, Townsend, and Chippendale, houses were white frame, trellised, and picket-fenced. Summers were spent on the Vineyard or Nantucket, and children were all at Choate, Andover, and Exeter.
New Brighton was in many ways semi-rural - the truck farms of Berlin and Southington were a short drive away, Meriden Mountain was accessible for climbing, and orchards and cornfields were common no more than five miles out of town. The Lancaster Country Club, the watering hole for the West End, had been designed by Ben Hogan and was one of the county's premier golf courses. It was surrounded by the Pequot hills, the town reservoir, and the spacious houses along Monroe Street.
Paul's childhood was a mix of all this - schooling, summering, and socializing were all predictably prescribed but pleasant. His trajectory from Adams Country Day to Groton and on to Yale was familiar and preserving of the historic privilege of his families and others in the West End.
Growing up Paul's life was interior, surprising for one for whom environmentalism became his modus vivendi, his defining cause, and what he considered his purpose in life. Despite the proximity of the outdoors, his life like that of his colleagues was one defined by intellect, travel, and the appreciation of art, literature, and philosophy. His father, educated at Yale and Oxford had taught his son that the entire world was within the mind, and all outside it was confounding and irritating at best.
It was the distilled experiences of Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, Kant, and Faulkner - the pure reason and purer sensibilities of the world's greatest minds - that were enough to complete one's education. One needn't stray outside the social milieu - his milieu - in which such intellectuality thrived. So while Paul's father never dismissed mens sana in corpore sano, it was always the mind which prevailed, not
At some point after graduate school on his way to post-doctoral studies in computer engineering, Paul discovered environmentalism. Perhaps because this was the cause celebre of the day, or perhaps because it was the first time that he felt energized, if not passionate about anything, he became a profound believer in the crisis of global warming.
The woods of Southington Mountain the ponds and lakes in Vernon, Avon, and Farmington, and the shores of Long Island Sound now meant something profound; and for the first time interior and exterior became equal parts of an existential algorithm. Philosophy and rocks, stones, leaves, and branches were joined in an intellectual symphony.
Environmentalism had grown significantly by the time Paul became involved. More and more people had become committed to slowing or stopping global warming and stopping the commercial rape of the natural world. Environmentalists not only united to increase political influence but to join a movement which had higher, even spiritual ends. Saving the planet was no different from religious evangelism and the saving of souls. Environmentalists were passionate, even ecstatic about their mission; and belonging to a like-minded group of believers was like participating in a Holy War or a Crusade.
All this was appealing to Paul whose conversion to belief and newfound skepticism of his father's restrictive logic-only vision was thrilling and life-changing. Environmentalism added an entirely new dimension to the dry intellectual pursuits he had been following up till now.
He joined many of the environmental subgroups that had formed as competitive lobbies - for clean water, clean air, clean oceans, carbon emissions, organic farming, the spotted owl and the snail darter, and the capitalism that underlay all the assaults on the natural world
He did not give up his studies, however, and had begun to write on the increasingly important world of virtuality. Although users of virtual reality looked upon it as enhancement of the real world, slowly but surely the real world was becoming supernumerary if not irrelevant. What would happen, he wondered, when the link between brain and computer became perfect and seamless? When the mind, enabled and facilitated by the computer had access to all the world's information, history, and live experiences instantaneously; and when individuals could construct, confect, and construe 'reality' in any way they pleased?
Who would not prefer to walk through the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, dine with the Duchess de Nantes, sleep with Persian princesses and Palestinian dancers? Or more to the point, what was the point of preserving the natural environment when it could be created virtually? Artificial Intelligence was already revolutionizing the way the real world is perceived. Imagine when this powerful tool is linked with brain-computer inter-functionality!
'Seen one mountain, Seen 'em all' was the cynical but ironically prescient hate poster Paul saw on the way to work. It was the work of an anti-environmentalist climate change denier group which resented government's arrogant policy to electrify its way to some distant environmental Utopia.
Paul was by no means a climate change denier. Far from it. He was convinced that the planet was warming due to the indifferent burning of fossil fuels and that dire consequences would result unless rising temperatures could be slowed. However as a computer engineer working in the world of AI-facilitated virtual reality, the group had a point. The environment, nature and the very fundamental configuration of human interaction would no longer be regarded the same way.
If there was an existential change in the wings, it was not the warming planet, it was a society running for the exits of a brick-and-mortar, buggy, hot-and-humid, 'métro, boulot, dodo', incessantly routine, overcrowded world.
Mountains, lakes, forests, birds, and animals would be virtual choices not absolutes. The ascribed sanctity of nature and the environment would be a thing of the past. Individual choice would neutralize value. Causes, passions, crusades would be folded into a universally personal experience. Genetic engineering will be the new environmentalism, reconfiguring the human species to live anywhere at any time under any conditions, realigning the codes of plants to grow wherever convenient, readjusting the living world to sustain the virtual.
Mirabile dictu, one passion had been displaced by another. Having been raised from the spiritually dead by environmentalism, it was an easy elision to the passion of virtual reality; but where he found that the old-fashioned, Armageddon-style environmentalism was nothing more than smoke and mirrors, the post-human generation was a lock.
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