Well anyway you know that story about the guy in Malaysia or wherever it was whose wife divorced him because he married another woman in Second Life? It was years ago now I know but probably there’s been loads more cases like it since. I just don’t know about them. Well anyway he got into trouble for that alright but that’s nothing in comparison to what happened to me. That guy – no offense meant even though he sounds like a bit of an idiot – didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘trouble’. I wouldn’t call what happened to him trouble – I would call it a picnic. I’d call it a garden party. I’d call it a laugh a minute. Real trouble is what happened to me and I guarantee you won’t read a story like this in the papers or in your news-feed or anywhere else for that matter. I promise you that. If you want to know what real trouble is just wait until you hear what happened to me…
I’m not into Second Life or any rubbish like that. I wasn’t involved in any type of virtual romance, I can tell you! Building virtual empires is more my bag, science-fiction military strategy games and that type of thing. Games like Galactic Conquest. So what happened to me was that I established a fair to medium-sized intergalactic empire and was gearing up to take on those last few troublesome star clusters that were still defying my rule. One final push was the only thing that stood between me and total conquest of the known universe! I’m doing pretty well, all in all…
So then the next thing was that I get hauled up before a specially convened war-crimes tribunal. It is alleged that all the virtual prisoners of war that I has taken and imprisoned or killed or forced to work in underground slave-labour camps under subhuman conditions have rights. Rights which I have flagrantly disregarded. They have rights that are or should be defined in law just as the populations of all the planets I had destroyed with antimatter cannon or atomized with Gaser (gamma-laser) artillery in the course of the long offensive that I had mounted. We’re talking thousands of trillions of people here, just in case you’re interested in specific figures.
The charges I am facing are accordingly serious, as you might imagine. It turns out that philosophers have proven that all of the events that took place in the Galactic Conquest game I was playing really did occur in some unspecified parallel universe somewhere, which means that I am technically a mass-murderer. A mass murderer on a scale hitherto unknown in human history. It turns out that there’s no such thing as a ‘virtual reality’ in the unlimited field of possibilities which is the multiverse. Or to put this the other way around, every reality in the Holographic Universe is a virtual one! We’re all just smears of probabilities, no matter what we might think…
The world press are baying for my blood. I am being denounced as a monster. I’m pleading ignorance of the complex quantum coherence equations that prove I am guilty of these horrendous crimes – my story is that I just thought I was playing some crummy computer strategy game. How was I to know of all these unsuspected quantum-probability ramifications? I’m no physicist. How can I be held accountable?
So how do you like them apples, huh? Is that trouble or what? OK – so I admit it, I made all that up. It’s a load of baloney. I invented it. But even so, I think that the point I’m making here is valid. It could happen. Who is to say that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time, in fact?
