Second Life Sketches: Shipwrecked And Abandoned
By Warren Ellis
The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.
The wind whistles through the brick canyons of Welles City. You strain to pick up more sounds, but there’s nothing. Ten-storey buildings with no one in them. An empty church. Apartment blocks, one after the other, with no sign of life. It reminds you of 1980s documentaries about the neutron bomb, that would kill all organic life but leave all the buildings standing. Streets with no people.
The lights still burn in Darkside. You can pick out the great vaulted arches of its beautiful walkways from their glow. In the sunken gardens, pools of water glitter among the polished rocks. There’s no human life to disturb the scene. You feel like you might be walking through a diorama, kept on a high shelf somewhere out of sight.
Spindrift echoes with the sense that you’re in an evacuated Russian science city, or an abandoned Los Alamos. Spindrift’s rocket gantries are silent and unattended. You catch yourself looking for a blanket of dust on its gorgeous experimental devices and mechanical constructions.
But you’re in Second Life. There is no dust. Everything is preserved in chill digital vacuum, waiting for someone to find it.
As I write this, there are more than forty thousand people inworld. And yet, everywhere I go is empty. All the streets I walk down recall the opening act of 28 DAYS LATER. I find myself wondering where the zombies are.
I return to an old haunt, The Wastelands, and find it empty but for my acquaintance Aki. “Lots of land has changed hands,” she says. People consolidating parcels — more land in fewer hands. That and a planned upgrade to the in-sim game system seems to have led to people having less reason to visit right now.
I’ve written about this before, almost a year ago, when visitor concurrency — the number of people inworld at any one time — was half what it is today. The simple truth is that, at any given moment, there’s the population of a small village, at best, wandering around a place the size of eight Manhattans.
At a concurrency of 40,000 people, Second Life’s gears begin to grind a bit. My inworld sojourn last night was truncated by the teleport system failing, which, admittedly, kind of prevents people from circulating around the grid. I was stuck in Toxian City, along with about twenty other people. That said, someone just told me that concurrency has cleared 42,000, and things are still working, if slowly.
And I’m tripping from place to place, and seeing nothing but abandoned buildings wherever I go.
I start jumping to clubs. The Velvet, in Iron Fist, is empty. I find three miserable naked men in a sex club looking for a mistress to savage their little avatars. A vast vampire-themed club with not even the undead laying around. A space station that feels like it’s re-enacting the final days of Mir, all the service modules undocked and waiting to be deorbited. A massive replica of a STAR TREK Starfleet vessel with all hands missing, shipwrecked seven hundred meters up. A Zen temple chill-out zone with not a devotee to be seen. Again and again I teleport, like Gully Foyle in the last pages of THE STARS MY DESTINATION, and, for a while there I wish that I, like he, had bombs to scatter. But there’s no one here to receive them.
Lots of people have had lots to say about the recent hype surrounding Second Life, but very few have addressed the basic experience of the world — that you’re incredibly alone there. You can spend eighty percent of your time walking through immense, labyrinthine castles that no one lives in. Visit a seemingly endless string of shops with no customers.
There’s no one in Babbage Square to watch the hissing plumes of steam jet from the retropunk industrial engines. No one to feed the AI birds on the mountainside at Lauk’s Nest. I admire the science-fiction mind behind the rich detail of even the roadsigns at Abaddon, all on my own.
Finally, I discover that the city of Tenebra District has vanished entirely, and that parks I used to visit have disappeared. I can only imagine that no one visited them and the owners rolled up the streets, pulled up the trees and bailed out. Perhaps rueing the day They bought into a world without a population. Things in Second Life are only preserved for as long as one chooses to pay the bills on the land they rest on. When you stop paying, or abandon the land, the amber dissolves and the digital memory-hole erases everything. Entire islands disappear off the grid as if they were never there, and attempts to reach them are rewarded with the system message “the destination no longer exists.”
There’s nothing left to do, for a Second Life columnist, but keep teleporting. Just keep jumping from place to place, looking for signs of life.
