CHAPTER 8 - REAL WORLD

Punky rose early from her big fluffy bed in the Faculty Housing section of the campus. She had an enormous Victorian style house all to herself. Punky decided she could sleep here in a guest room, but she was very uncomfortable, in the old house, because this was Professor Raphus home. She had too much respect for Old Bird Brain to enter any of the rooms other than to take a quick glance and to make sure that the windows were closed and everything was ship shape. She had decided to restrict herself to the guest bedroom, the guest bath, which was quite nice, and the professor’s study. She had planned not to use the study, but in order to prepare her lesson plans for Flight 101 she needed a mountain of reference materials and flight manuals. All these and more she found in the study.

The study was a large room and toward the front of the house on the first floor. It had obviously once been a parlor, but now it was positively stuffed with books, manuals, files, records, air ship models and designs, and all kinds of memorabilia covering almost a century of teaching at the Academy of Balloons. Punky had decided that Professor Raphus would say it was ‘ok’ if he had been there and understood the need to keep the cadets on schedule in meeting their graduation requirements.

The professor always was insisting on “time in the seat” as a solution to almost every flight issue or pilot error. By that, the Professor meant that in every spare moment a cadet had, should be airborne. Flying, flying, flying was his mantra.

Punky remembered once when the Professor had come across Punky sleeping under the giant second class gum tree. He laughed loudly, kicked Punky gently, and ordered her aloft.

“If you’re going to sleep Punky, I insist you do it airborne,” intoned the Professor.

Which is exactly what Punky did. She ran to the Aerodrome and joined a crew that had formed to go on a lark to the Sim of Io. She went along, but sleep was impossible. It was too exciting. That was the day she learned to swap red hot exhaust tubes from an active boiler with nothing more than two spoons and an empty soup can. Yes, ‘time in the seat’ was critical Punky had come to recognize.

Punky had skipped breakfast to stay in the Professors Study and get the lesson plan in order. For the life of her she could not remember the details of the wreck of the Hesperus which was always used in the first class to demonstrate the need for proper training and carefully following protocol, and then throwing out the protocols, when they didn’t attain the desire outcome. So she started looking about the office for reference materials. On a table near the door she found a large and carefully laid out stack of folders. Each one was labeled Flight 101 and a lesson number. Wow, thought Punky.

Dare I use the professors lecture plans? This would normally present a moral dilemma, but Punky was only an ‘Acting Professor’ and by using the professors notes Punky was more likely to avoid fatalities which inevitably occurred in flight training at the Academy. Yes she though, Old Bird Brain would approve.

Punky picked up the stack of folders and took them to the desk and sat down. She opened the first file and began to read. Quickly she realized that the lecture notes were the work of generations of Blimp and Balloon flight instructors, not just the professor. They were written in many hands and the style of the language indicated that the notes went back at least 200 years and perhaps to the dawn of the balloon. Some sections dealing with ancient technologies or outdated flight concepts were crossed out and new section attached by little slips of paper carefully pasted along one side and covering the older section. You could lift up the new inserts and still read the older instructions. The section on navigation aids was almost a tiny book and the oldest entry referred to bonfires and dragons teeth. The whole history of navigation in the Balloon service and then in the Blimp Corps was laid out in the little stacks of notes covered in dense writing from many generations of instructors.

It was almost evening when Punky realized that she had become entranced by the lecture notes. She was really hungry. She was about to stand up and go the commissary when she noticed that the Professors rug in the far corner had a lump under it. She would not have noticed, but the slanting light of the setting sun created deep shadows on the rug along the far wall near an over-loaded bookcase. The lump was rectangular and was clearly a file. Punky’s curiosity got the better of her and she walked to the edge of the rug and pulled the corner up.

Yes it was a file. A brown file with a red diagonal stripe. The file used for holding student records. Punky picked up the file unsure if she should look further, but clearly the file did not belong here decided Punky. Perhaps in the morning she would return the file to the Registrar of Cadets.

She placed the thick file on the desk and then she read the tab on the edge. Loopy Lou, 7488, it read.

Punky swallowed. Then she was stuck with an uncontrollable urge, like the night she jumped onto the ghost ship, and she took the file to a big red leather overstuffed chair. She turned on the tiffany lamp and sat down. She opened the file and began to read. Soon she had forgotten all about lesson plans, potential fatalities, and dinner. What she read raised the hair on the back of her small neck.

Sindy and gone to the boring scientific conference and had found it quiet interesting. Fascinating in fact. She sat in her office thinking about the impact of what she had heard in the evening keynote lecture and the entertainment that followed.

“Copy boy,” she yelled.

“yes sindy,” replied Jimmy already out of breath even though he had been lurking in the doorway for hours.

“Take this copy to the City Desk, and pronto,” shouted Sindy in her best reportorial voice.

Jimmy grabbed the copy carefully written out in long hand on pulpy yellow paper. He dashed from the office, but had barely turned the corner when he stopped. No one was looking so he stepped into the Janitors closet to read Sindy’s copy and learn more about journalism.

“Get out of here your pervert!” shouted Lilly Long.

“Sheesh get your little journalistic nose into somebody else’s business,” said Tanner Gunst.

“sorry,” said Jimmy carefully noting with his newly developed journalistic eye that Tanner’s trousers were all akimbo.

Jimmy exited the janitor’s closet and found an empty cubical. It was the cubical used by the famed sports reporter Armstrong “Its Outta Here” Weik. Weik was never here because he was always at the game or in Willie’s Sports Tavern under center field interviewing fans and players. Jimmy sat in Willie’s chair and spread Sindy’s copy before him. Jimmy got a fresh piece of paper from the drawer and a yellow crayon from his shirt pocket and prepared himself to take lessons and learn from an acknowledge master of journalistic slander and innuendo.

The article read:


UNIVERSITY PHENOMONOLOGY SCIENTEST SAYS SECOND LIFE IS NOT REAL.
REAL WRONG WRITES LOONY LOOSER
Sindy Blazer, Science Editor for The Times. Times Semaphore.

(Heart of the Ocean Forum, Sonogno) - Disgraced University Scientist, Daneel Looby, former head of the Phenomenology and Existential Sciences Department at the University of Sonogno, was booed off the stage at the Conference for the Scientific Determination of All Things meeting held at the Forum of HOTO in the Sim of Sonogno.

In a controversial paper, Professor Looby stupidly claimed that all that we do and say is not real.

“What a loopy idea,” commented famed Scientist Igor Eisenstein. “My foot is real, the air I fly through is real, and the lust in my loins is really real. What a dope,” said the bronze medal winning scientist.

Donnatella Fernachi, science maven and all around hottie, kept screaming over an over again the phrase "Esse est percipi" as the crowd drowned out the presentation by the really dumb scientist.

Speaking for conventional wisdom, Professor Rogoshin of the University Department of Accepted Precepts and Safe Thought pointed out it follows that any knowledge of Second Life is obtained only through direct perception, and mistakes come to us from thinking about what other individuals perceive. Knowledge of the world and of avatars and prims and actions may be purified and perfected by stripping away all but the pure perceptions found on our graphics displays.

Therefore the ideal avatar in Second Life forms his knowledge through pure un-thoughtful perceptions of the graphics display, and if we would all look to the superficial found in SL, we would develop deep insights into the natural world and the hearts of avatars.

Fernachi conclude that the goal of any right thinking avatar is to de-realiticize and de-morphacize avatar perceptions.

The foolish Professor Looby was chased from the stage by a pack of raving empiricists carrying pitchforks and flaming torches. Looby’s whereabouts are unknown.