Of the
multitude of ideas contained within William Gibson’s Sprawl series, one is the
idea of transferring existence from the real world into a virtual world. Only one of many shining facets to the books,
Neal Stephenson grabbed the idea and took a tiny step forward with it, Snow Crash depicting a plausible second
life scenario. But it took Greg Egan to
get both hands around the idea and wrestle it humanist shape; nearly the
entirety of Permutation City focuses
on virtual life and virtual copies of humans in a virtual world. But even upon turning the last page of his novel,
the reader is still left with the feeling there’s a lot of room left for
exploration. Save the conclusion, Egan’s
world of multiplying copies of an individual remains too under control, too
civilized. One would expect a higher
degree of intra- and interpersonal chaos.
Probing the private, emotional side of virtual existence, David
Marusek’s 1999 novella The Wedding Album
takes the concept further along these lines.
The Wedding Album is the story of Ann and
Benjamin, ostensibly a newly married couple.
The time frame late 23rd century, each have been creating virtual copies
of themselves at various points in their lives, and now that they are married,
make these replications available to one another, the copies they created on
their wedding day forming the intersecting point. The variety of virtual selves covering a span
of evolved technology, some pass sentience tests while others do not, each only
half-certain of the difference between the virtual world they live in and the
actual happenings in the original’s life since the last time they were copied
or reset. A splintered overview of life the
result, Ann and Benjamin’s personal lives collide in virtual reality to the
point their lives in reality are affected, and chaos results.
My summary
of the main storyline lacking proper definition, describing the surface of The Wedding Album is not a
straight-forward task. The narrative as
fragmented as the virtual copies from the couple’s past, Marusek uses the
scenario to present how truly complex—truly fucked up—maintaining perspective
and memory becomes when previous versions of yourself are allowed to coexist in
an environment coinciding with reality.
The line between corporeal and virtual self losing significance the
deeper into the story the reader goes, a turmoil of emotions, stress, memories,
and beliefs take center stage.
In the
end, The Wedding Album is like a
shattered mirror in which each tilt and angle of the leftover shards presents a
different perspective of one reality, the eye unable to balance the whole save
by focusing on one at a time.
Relationships difficult enough to main—and sustain, such an equivocal
environment places an exponential degree of spin on the proceedings. Yourself now not the same as the ‘you’ you
remember years ago, coexistence of the two perspectives inevitably results in
clashes that are better left to a single entity moving forward in time, not to
mention each evolving in its own way dependent on the mood, feeling, and belief
of the original at the time a copy was made.
His view as humanistic as Gibson or Egan’s, it’s fair to say Marusek has
carried the idea of virtual personality copies forward.
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