The End Of Second Life: speculative fiction about the demise of Second Life

After a new advertising executive hires Kevin Costner AND Richard Gere for the first ever television ad - Second Life's new user count drops to 0 (30 seconds after the first airing)..

One week the banality reaches critical mass and the entire grid implodes.

Meanwhile in an alternate universe....

One member gets his wish and everyone who was ever labeled 'FIC' quits..

The homepage reads 'Welcome to Second Life - Population : 2'

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in the dried grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
in our dry cellar....

This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star....

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river....

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

excerpts from TSE "The Hollow Men"

May 6, 2???

The last day of operation of the Second Life grid was the scene of parties the likes of which the old grid had never seen. Pushguns were in constant use but no abuse reports were being taken or made. Sexballs covered the PG areas, and the Lindens assigned music streams to all the Linden owned parcels with music so vulgar it made Satan's ears burn. The crowd loved it.

A few oldtimers shed some virtual tears over the end of the old program's name, but everyone was delighted at the immense success of Second Life's successor, "MV: The MetaVerse", which was running for a long time now on a separate grid with hardware located on each real world continent.

The new offering from Linden Research offered every Second Life resident the ability to maintain their identity and all their linden dollar and inventory. The conversion of the old grid to the new grid's file structure worked flawlessly.

MV: The MetaVerse included as part of it's free membership gloves, socks, and underwear with sensors and effectors, eye motion trackers, video based facial emotion detection, and audio and visual input and output, that enabled an unprecedented level of control and feedback . An EEG controller was available for a nominal fee; implantable versions of the complete control system were available for a large extra charge.

MV's reproduction and improvement on reality was amazing. The avatars could, if you wished, have realistic internal organs, a big hit in the war games that became popular when the massively improved physics engine made possible the replication of every possible physical game and sport plus, of course, a thousand new ones that didn't have to follow all the laws of real world physics. Cloth folded and draped, skirts flew up when avatars spun around dancing, liquids flowed and splashed and even boiled and froze. The presence of a variety of forces and fields delighted the science lovers, they could build Tesla coils from circuit components that really worked, or make spacestations orbit a planet just by launching them with the right velocity; the gravity routines did the rest in the background. Sculptors could use virtual chisels to carve virtual statues from virtual stone.

The vast improvement in visual appearance and the new methods of controlling avatar motion turned avatar sex from something mostly amusing to many into a truly erotic experience for nearly everyone. Romantic partners in real life were joining and watching their avatars on screens mounted on the ceiling over their bed.

The new physics engine wasn't the only change that helped the product transform the world. The integral and near perfect translation between languages, in both audio and written language, helped to break down the barriers of nationalism and geography based prejudice that had brough such sadness to the world for so long.

MV: the MetaVerse was released in PC, Mac, and Linux versions. The Linux client became the most succesful software product to hit China, ever, and remains to so to this day. The popularity of the Linux MV client in China, leading to a MetaVerse userbase of nearly a billion in just months, contributed greatly to the demise of Windows and the purchase of Microsoft by Linden Research, and the open sourcing of all of the software formerly belonging to Microsoft.

Humanity, joined together in a way never before possible, did indeed get a bit confused about things for a while, but eventually figured out that what they needed to do with the money they no longer wanted to spend on military spending was to spend it on space exploration, and that's why the MetaVerse extends today not only across earth but to Mars, Luna, and gas giant satellite colonies.

In the next issue we'll take a look at Linden's Research's upcoming attempt to expand to Alpha Centauri.

Uhm I'd say that was 2005 you meant to right.. no seriously write some FICTION!