Idlewild

Work Title: Idlewild
Medium: Novel
Episode Title:
Year: 2003
Writer(s): Nick Sagan
"Original" Writer: Yes Own work?: No
Summary:

By Nick Sagan (Carl's son); "As the book opens, out protagonist wakes up knowing nothing about himself or his location; all he knows is that someone is trying to kill him. His exploration of the world around him makes for a surreal experience: a disembodied voice tries to speak to him, he casts no reflection in mirrors, and Lovecraft-inspired nightgaunts seem to do his bidding. As a reader, it's hard to get your bearings in the beginning, but the protagonist's story soon begins emerging from the chaos. His name is Halloween, and he is one of eight students at an extraordinary school run by an enigmatic fellow named Maestro. His consciousness is in fact embodied in virtual reality, and that is why he and his friends are able to do some rather extraordinary things. He begins to remember things, both positive and negative, about his classmates, but he is unable to trust anyone at all. His misgivings about his own safety are exacerbated by a growing belief that he is responsible for the death of a fellow student named Lazarus." (from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0399150978/qid=1123977602/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-7581607-0983124?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)

Era/Year of Portrayal: distant_future
Distinctive characteristics of the world in portrayal:

All people are dead, excepts 10 geneticaly modified children. A plauge wiped all humanity.

Technology

  • Name of portrayed presence-evoking technology: Virtual reality
  • Description of the technology: The children grow up in total virtual reality. Their bodies rest in reality, but their minds are linked into a virtual world, where they go to school, live, have parents - everything. The world is quite vivid, and seems completely real.
  • Nature of task or activity: The chldren do everything in the virtual world - read, write, play, even go online into virtaul reality. Thier whole lives are virtual.
  • Performance of the Technology: It works well up to a point. Once the children are around age 18, one of them becomes a socio-path and figures out thier world isn't real. He becomes murderous and thus the system malfunctions.
  • Description of creator(s): A team of people created the VR, both male and female. The primary people are 2 men and 1 woman, all middle aged. They are computer scientists.
  • Major goal(s) of creator(s): To perpetuate the human race. Once the genetically modified children were created, the VR was created to raise them ( all other people were dead).
  • Description of users of technology: 10 children were raised in the VR. They are the only people left alive on earth.
  • Type(s) of presence experience in the portrayal: both
  • Description of presence experience: The VR was a pleasent place to live, for most of the kids. However, thier virtual teacher, Maestro, disliked a few of them, making thier lives unpleasent. This was not planned by the creators. The VR functioned as the normal world for the kids. Also, once one of the students became murderous, the VR became a dangerous place to be.
  • User awareness of technology during experience: They are unaware they are in VR, until a couple figure it out. They are unaware they are in VR, until a couple figure it out.
  • Valence of experience: They enjoy it, until they realiza it is not real.
  • Specific responses: Becuase the children have lived thier entire lives online (with thier real bodies lying in a pod), when they emerge into the real world, they have no immunities. They are allergic to everything.
Long-term consequences:

Well, the consequences ultimately are both good and bad. For the children who die, the consequence of being raised by virutal people is unfortunate. But, some of the children live and realize that thier job is now to perpetuate the human race, which they undertake with gusto (by cloning dead people).

Other:

An interesting aspect about this VR world is that the kids live entirely within it. But, in it, they also go into VR. The differernce is that when they think they are out of VR, they are still really in it. VR within VR.

Coder name: Amanda Scheiner
Coder email: amandags@temple.edu
Coder affiliation: Temple University