The Graveman

The graveman crouches, breath held, muscles twitching, translating somewhere in his mind a kinaesthesic sense of this internal tension of a body flooded with adrenalin, pupils dilated, crawling scalp, heart pumping, into a sense of threat and opportunity, a sense of the tension not in the body but in the situation. A nomad scavenger, he looks out on a savage world of predator and prey, using this visceral cunning to discern the useful enemies and dangerous friends within one game, to balance in the roll and pitch and yaw of chance and change. His fight and flight transcribed to fear and fury, it's only then that he can take these tensions in and twist with them, feel forces working through them, turn them, use them to his own advantage, choose to chance it, stand and fight or run, to gamble with his life and win or lose the world. The graveman crouches.

The disposition of this figure on a Greek urn, notes Guy Reinhardt in his palmtop, painted in red on black, the posture struck of his body in the painted lines of it, or the settled behaviour of our similarly lined minds in opinion, in a mode of thinking, or simply the position of an object relative to specified directions, attitude is the articulation of our integration with the world. Through taste and touch and scent as much as sight and sound, but more so through its own internal poise, a beast inside the beast is built, designed by evolution to resolve the fine and fierce subliminal forces that invoke response in it, into a sense of form and tone. This, in its turn, in its involvement with the world and involution in it, is itself resolved into a sense of selfish, egoistic moods, the attitudes of us, the me, made up of forces not subliminal but sublime, of pleasure and pain and fear and fury. And made also of the nerve and will with which we face those forces and refuse to answer to their invokations.

It is a dry and hot and sun-bleached day in the simworld of ancient savannah, where Reinhardt watches the simian sprite of the graveman, simulation of his primal ancestry, unseen. The tall grass flourishes like golden fur under a gentle breeze and the earth under his feet is dusty red-brown like the ochre that the graveman wears, perhaps to mask his scent in dirt, perhaps only as paint, as an abstract adornment with no purpose other than decoration. The detail of the world is fine, grained at the level, almost, of the atom, as it should be. Thousands of generations have gone into the crafting of this landscape and its denizens. Generations of programmers, generations of technologies, generations of methodologies, of past research feeding into future studies, the study of our evolution itself evolving, tools created to create tools that we use to create tools and so on until we end with the graveman, crouching on a simulation of savannah, knapping an artifice of flint, creating a tool.

Reinhardt did not design the simworld of the savannah, nor even the graveman itself, no more than a potter designs the clay he works with. No individual could. Instead the sediment of these structures has been lain down over time, or over times, each ephemeral eternity built on the dust of its predescessors, VR simworlds built for recreation or education, simple facsimile worlds to play or learn in, developing complexity as required by commerce, to keep a games company's product on the cutting edge, or by the rigours of academic study. From the first sims where brutal, blocky avatars wandered through rough-cut corridors, blasting the loose-limbed legions slithing out at them from the shadows, or where agents formed from artificial neural nets interacted in unrealised, non-figurative abstractions, the imperatives of industry, the drives of so many different desires, have led to worlds of spaces of astrophysics and molecular biology and savannah. This world is simple in comparison with some of them, complex in other ways, though; Reinhardt is not trying to model black hole behaviour or design molecular medicines. Reinhardt is trying to craft a mind.