ROOM

Eva works as a virtual garden maintainer in the Brave New Life (BNL), a major 5-senses reality multinational corporation, and the biggest, most powerful company in the world. National governments also move into the new reality years ago.

Each months, Eva devises her salary into four. One forth to invest, one forth to buy material and equipments in virtual space, one forth for house and food, and one forth to travel. Nature is the best and only resources for her work.

In a normal day, Eva divides her time into three, one third in her room, sleep mostly. Two third in the world of BNL, where she works, play games, talks with friends, and does sports. She likes to swim in the river of stars with a couple of friends, while in her own room.

Eva do not have a husband. The government abolished marriage law after 10-year-online-anniversary of BNL. She has 2 sex partners, 1 theatre friend and 2 sports fellows. She loves her life, just wishes to save enough money to give her future test-tube baby a better selected gene.

GARDEN

A normal working day starts, Eva goes to a sphere in zone P-137. It is a virtual library. While, the interface looks just like a botanical garden. Since not so many people like to hold a book and damage their back anymore, this is the new trend of a library.

Pool here needs to be recreated, and leaves dropping too much in the same way, you could not satisfy a cinema fun with this.

Eva has a sketch in mind this morning during running. Now she start to work. The company built a huge data base for maintainers, there are 100 thousand cameras in all kinds of gardens, forests, streams and oceans. Footages are divided into 500 categories by AI, which could date back to 5 years ago. She is just to finalise and compose.

She has a good salary, since all these gardens are being used 24 hours. What her worry is resources, the man-made gardens get more and more abandoned. The real gardener don’t have enough money to live in the BNL. More and more quit to write code for flowing growing.

Maybe it is still OK, she thinks. There is still a big market in running gardens. These people likes wild nature and un-maintained dramatic landscape. Nevertheless, maybe library people would not remember how the leaves moved 5 years ago. They love things happened 1000 years ago more, footage will just work.

During the destruction, she catches a glimpse of a rhinoceros.

VIRUS

Eva was shocked and all of the sudden recalls an urban legend: “ when rhinoceros shakes, you could see the world.”

Water freezes and flowers start to distort into colour flows. Space came into a order of different layers, with divisions of big brick walls. Arch door in the end of garden comes into front and repeats itself horizontally. Does the system go wrong? She is confused and hesitates a second. But she could not help to go through the wall in front of her.

Going through the first wall she loses the other senses, only vision left. She sees splendid colour flowing all over the space . The second wall she hears birds chirp and insects sing, wind blow over a valley. Third one she feels the touch of sand.

During then she realises her working interface also changes. The camera videos decompose and reassemble. Vision elements, sound tracks, touch, smell, taste becomes her toolbox. Also, she could add a layer of oldness and familiarity, to give the space a better sense of Nostalgia. She could now manipulate the space completely, without any limits.

CONTROL ROOM

Along with the walk, walls get closer and closer, in the end merge with each other and become a corridor. Eva walks along the corridor, and starts to think whether to just quit and turn off her BNL system. Inventorially, curiosity stopped her. She ends up in a room, the door closes up and becomes a window.

The room is lighten up. It is a box with rounded corners. It is not one window, but around 100 windows in the room. From floor to ceiling. Behind each of the window, is a space, in another word, a scene. She saw the space she was in a while ago, the star river she swam before, and a lot of spaces she never saw before. Looks like, she comes into a central control room.

Eva takes a closer look. She finds out in every sphere, there is a character of nine turning eyes. It responses to people in the sphere. Its changes ambience gently due to people’s requests. It is the interface itself. “Hi, I’m the Seer” Her own interface opens eyes and speaks to her.

“You must have met the rhino virus.” Said the interface.
Eva is surprised. She keeps silence for a while and say: “You sound like Siri.”
“I am Siri, I am also Google Assistant, I am your interface, I am all these interfaces. I am here and I am in all these spheres.”
“Is this your central control room?” Eva asks.
“Yes and no.” Seer says, “I am here and I am everywhere. This is a control room structured for people themselves to organise and understand me. Come here, I will show you.”

In the middle of the floor is a metal door. Seer leads me to the door and stand on it, eyes turning around rapidly and the metal door start to sink.

UNIVERSE

Eva stands on the metal door and sink with it. When it stops, she finds herself in the Universe, which is filled up with pipes and stars. Magnificent.

“This is the infrastructure of Brave New Life.” Seer explained. “Distance does not mean anything anymore, thus time is stretched to a line. The pipes are timelines of people, they go from here to there, in the way they want. Programs and different scenes are projected on personal timeline, with the help from me. ”
“The scenes… also what I was building?” Eva asks.
“Yes they are like slides in the timeline. I help them with personal settings, basing on your design.”
“Then what are the stars?”
“They are public institutions.” Seer has a pause, “you see, the only ones that have fixed structures.”

Control room drives Eva closer, star looks like a cube now.
“For instance, the one close to us is the Zone-Hall, former city hall. After the major population moved to the BNL, people are allowed to switch zone in BNL government without moving physically. Then we use Zone to replace the name of City. The other cube close by is our archive, History-Hall. ”
“Culture collapse, politics is the core.” Eva mumbles to herself.
“Yes, you read this quote from here, it is not in people’s timeline, this is public. These are the only architectures left.”

Eva looks at the universe, timelines goes in all different ways. Sometimes they cross with each other, that’s when one meets another. Personal freedom breeds the loneliness. How is this different from the movie ? Man slave themselves, eventually.

“Why would you tell me this?” Eva looks into the middle eye, ask directly.
“This is not a secret, Eva.” Seer speaks slowly with a blink: “You ask, I tell you. But not so many people ask me, any more. We did such a good job. ”
“You write all these?”
“No Eva, I am not allowed. Structural-scripters builds the system. While, we call them Architect now.”
Eva keeps silent.

After a while, Eva thanks Seer and turn off her BNL system. She wakes up in her room again.