Paul was feeling dazed at the prospect of further regenerative treatment when he left the doctor's surgery. It had got to be rather too frequent and it was increasingly difficult to recuperate from its affect as he got older. Nevertheless, he was sure it was a price worth paying. After all, he was superficially still as fit and healthy as he'd ever been. His research into ancient computer records only confirmed to him how very lucky he was. Not for him the degenerative diseases or visible aging of earlier centuries.
Paul understood that Dr. Patel, like most people he'd ever known, considered his archaeological research into the stored data of earlier centuries to be a total waste of time. After all, what could people in those ancient years teach people of the 38
th
century? They used to live rather less than a hundred years. For centuries they were restricted to only one planet. And for much of that time they acted in denial of the impact of their actions on this same planet. However it wasn't so much what people in the past thought they knew but what they collated and didn't understand that Paul found to be most interesting. These earlier societies didn't have the means to fully analyse the vast volume of data, measurable only by impossibly large numbers, at their disposal. There was also the fact that the most interesting data had been classified as confidential by government agencies for sometimes several centuries.
At the moment, Paul was investigating a curious phenomenon that has been observed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries which at the time was known only to these secretive government agencies. Typically, they were totally ignorant that other agencies, sometimes belonging to the same nation states, had gathered data on the selfsame phenomenon.
Paul would normally travel the five kilometres or so back home by sky pod, but today he decided to take the doctor's advice and have some exercise. It wasn't that he wasn't fit and healthy. Indeed, if he wanted to, he could probably run a circuit around the circumference of Godwin, but such exercise was wholly out of character for him. He arched his head up to look at the sky, where five kilometres above was the colony's central hub from which radiated the light and heat that kept the community alive. If he chose to, he could run to the other side of that hub in just three or four hours and his head would then point down towards the ground he was currently walking on.
The walk home was along the shore of one of Godwin's many lakes. A third of the colony's habitable surface was composed of lakes on which floated islands where a tenth of the colony's population lived. One thing in relative abundance in the Outer Solar System was water. This was extremely convenient for the colonies in the Kuiper Belt as it was one of the handful of things that was absolutely necessary for life to exist. It was stored as ice in the two hundred metre shell between him and the outside of his cylindrical world where it was part of the protective shield between the colony and the incredibly low temperatures of Outer Space. It also housed the colony's administrative functions which were mostly managed by robots.
Like every day of every year, it was a mild temperate day troubled only at the exact same time of each day by rain that sprinkled from the hub above. As Paul idly gazed at the boats bobbing about in the lake, he was careful to keep to the path and not stray onto the grass. Although such carelessness wasn't illegal—nothing was illegal on Godwin—it could invite severe reprimands from one of the many self-governing syndicates. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree, and every one of the animals that roamed or flew about in Godwin's cylindrical interior was precious and was maintained with extraordinary care. The colony was several weeks, even months, of space flight away from the next nearest source of replenishment.
Paul often wondered what it would be like to live on a planet. He'd not once left Godwin in all his eighty years and for the most part he was disinclined to ever do so. Most planets were inhospitable places with either too much or too little gravity. And, as if gravity wasn't enough of a problem, there was the hostile climate and lack of breathable atmosphere. Even though Paul's archaeological studies were principally focused on humanity's earthbound days more than fifteen centuries earlier, even that was on a planet that was mostly too cold or too hot, too wet or too dry, for anyone to live in quite the predictable comfort that Paul took for granted.
He passed many houses along his route home and many were pretty much the same as his. Most were three or four stories high and, unless occupied by a family, had just a single apartment on each floor.
His perambulation took him through a glass tunnel which wound through one of the forests that were as necessary as the lakes to the ecological balance of the community. Although barely a kilometre in length, this was the most memorable part of his walk. Here he could see elephants, lions and antelope in a tiny microcosm of wilderness. None of the animals who lived fifty meters beneath him were aware that their lives were circumscribed within the bounds of a long pencil-shaped structure, revolving at a precisely defined rate, almost as far from their original homes as was possible in the inhabited Solar System. And the colony was itself a very long way indeed from the Solar System's final frontier. And beyond that, only robotic craft had ever ventured very far and humans hardly at all beyond the bow wave of the heliopause, well within the orbit of the Oort Cloud's furthest speck of dust.
There were no prescribed hours to Paul's working day. His was work he could pursue whenever and for however long he wanted. Sometimes he would spend days at a time, pepped up with artificial stimulants, cocooned within the university campus following a train of investigation until he finally had to succumb to nature and retire home for sleep. Equally as often, he might not visit the university for weeks on end while he either underwent regenerative therapy or just didn't feel sufficiently bothered. His wasn't an occupation that demanded constant attention and he often felt that because it was such a solitary pursuit of so little measurable significance to anyone else in the colony he could easily abandon it altogether and no one would notice.
Today, however, he felt rather more like recreation than work. And what better recreation was there than to return to the virtual world that had become his greatest obsession when he wasn't data-mining and to which he must be its most frequent visitor, at least within the confines of the Godwin colony.
Everyone on Godwin had access to the countless virtual worlds in the Solar System, given the constraint that the colony was several hours' transmission from Earth orbit where most such universes were devised and from which they were broadcast. Most people only dipped into these virtual worlds on an irregular basis, if at all. But Paul was an addict. He'd lived a substantial slice of his life in virtual space ever since he was a moody reclusive teenager and this was a habit he'd never been able to shake. The virtual universe he'd stayed most loyal to and which consumed the highest proportion of his waking life was the obscure but still intermittently enhanced Nudeworld.
What it was about this particular virtual world that captivated him, Paul didn't know. His psychoanalyst, on the few occasions he saw her, told him that it was a critical key to his personality and asked him many questions about his fixation on a virtual universe that was nothing more than a representation of the 33
rd
century, when it was first launched, different only in that nobody wore clothes.
"It's the delicious oddity of it," he explained.
"Odd, it certainly is," Dr. Mkose agreed. "But to follow the same game for over sixty years and in a universe so different from today: that's what's most strange. If nudity is your kick, and there are no laws proscribing it, then why not pursue it for real? What's so great about a time five centuries ago when Godwin hadn't yet been founded and when capitalist economies had their last renaissance after centuries of obsolescence? It just seems bizarre."
"I like the way that century harked back to the early days of the industrial revolution, from Adam Smith to the days before climate change dramatically changed the Earth's economy for the next few centuries. It was an exciting time when stock markets opened again, when people took to wearing blue jeans and listened to ancient music like dubstep, opera and jazz, and when there was a craze for two-dimensional visual entertainment."
"Exciting it might have been," said the psychoanalyst, "but it was retrospective even then. Wouldn't it be better to actually engage in a virtual world set in the actual time that was celebrated? Why not enter a world of traffic chaos, nuclear bombs and rising sea levels, rather than its later idealised shadow?"
"I don't know," Paul sadly admitted. "I guess I'm less attracted to the reality of those days than its later reflection. Rather like the United States of America was an idealised vision of Classical Rome and Greece, or the way Neo-Communist Canada was to the Soviet Union, the later manifestation was somehow rather better than the original."
Dr. Mkose had no opinion on such socio-political musing. Her brief was to understand why Paul should find consolation in an imaginary world rather than the real one around him. Obviously, she couldn't tell him that his chosen leisure-time activity was in any way wrong. That would be wholly out of step with the anarchosyndicalist ideology of Godwin (although disagreeing with the colony's ideology was also perfectly acceptable). It was Paul's mental health that was her concern. She could have analysed the data on his neuron chart but hers was a profession that would only describe behaviour as abnormal or unbalanced if it caused Paul any visible distress. And this, it was clear to everyone, was not the case.
Whether she liked it or not, Paul wasn't unhappy with his chosen lifestyle and immersing himself in the real world wasn't going to make him any happier.
When he got home, almost the first thing Paul did was step into his virtual portal, let it strap him in and then surrender his consciousness to the artificial constructs that had been devised so many centuries before he was born.
"Awake at last!" exclaimed Blanche, his virtual lover in this bizarre universe. "You've been dozing for days."
Paul nodded. Like so many avatars in this capitalist-engendered universe almost the first thing she said was a reprimand that he'd neglected his obligation to return to this virtual world. Perhaps in the days when such virtual worlds were associated with economic indicators (as they still were for a quarter of the Solar System's population) it had been necessary to build consumer loyalty to the product. In Godwin, it was a quaint relic of an age when such things were thought important.
One way of knowing whether the avatar you interacted with was real or simply a programmatic construct was by observing his or her sleeping habits. Real people tended to drop in and out of wakefulness in Nudeworld according to their real life commitments. Only the truly obsessed, at a level far greater than even Paul, could engage in this world for a full waking day. The virtual avatars, however, had a much more predictable rhythm. If they possessed anything other than an artificial intelligence they might have found it strange to observe people in their midst who came into wakefulness at irregular intervals and stayed awake for barely two or three hours. There were many people dozing in Nudeworld, especially as its popularity in the Solar System waned, as sleep was the designated state of anyone who wasn't currently active.
"You look lovely today, Blanche," said Paul as he admired his lover of so many years. And indeed she did. Although she was an artificial construct that could have looked exactly as perfect as Paul would like, she was designed to appear natural to someone from the 33
rd
century. People in those days had rather less sophisticated regenerative surgery at their disposal. Her skin had slight imperfections, her teeth were ever so slightly uneven and her eyes were slightly too far apart.
But Paul loved her.
In truth he loved her more than any real woman he had ever known. She was also, of course, naked. Everyone was naked in Nudeworld: however absurd and impractical it might seem. There were real communities within the Solar System— apparently growing in number—who practised naturism as a way of life, but Paul never expected he'd ever be able to visit such places for real. The Solar System had a huge extent and space travel was a luxury few people in Godwin had the opportunity to enjoy, unless the expense of it was deemed to be in some way for the greater good of the colony.
"You look beautiful, too," said Blanche with a broad grin on her face. "What do you want to do today? There's an exhibition of paintings at the gallery. We could watch a movie. Or we could go for a walk in the park."
All these options were rather more exciting than they sounded. In each case, the activity's pleasure was enhanced by the fact that everyone would be unclothed. The paintings in the art gallery, for instance, might consist of paintings by real life artists such as Rembrandt, Gainsborough or Cocker identical to the originals except that not one stitch of clothing troubled the models they painted. The movie might be a classic from any era, the twentieth or the thirtieth century, and these too would be wholly nude. And as far as the voyeuristic pleasure of a walk in the park was concerned...
