On the edge of a shimmering lake, five men gather in the shadow of a rugged wooden cross to talk about their faith in Jesus.

Drifting smoke renders the scene strikingly biblical, a snapshot from the days of the apostles. A creature — part woman, part red fox — sashays by.

"Nice cross," it says.

This make-believe place is Second Life, a virtual world where creatures talk and only two of the Ten Commandments have been handed down.

The author and his alter-ego.

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They appear as avatars — vivid, 3-D pixelated presences — in a mad masquerade played out on the cutting edge of the technologically possible.

Second Life is a tiny Xanadu existing only on the servers of a California company and in the minds and hard drives of its subscribers; a city of almost 20,000 souls on 12 square miles of virtual land.

Murder and stealing are not allowed in Second Life, but virtually everything else is. Nobody needs to eat; the laws of physics are optional. So what do Second-Lifers do when unfettered by such real-life concerns as gravity, hunger and mortality?

They worship and sin, acquire property and build on it, hold protest marches, raise money for worthy causes and buy and sell things, even though they have no material needs.

University students log on to study cyber-architecture. Subscribers with disabilities enter a world where physical limitations don't exist.

Here you can find virtual proselytizers and prostitutes, virtual couples, virtual designers and artists and virtual gamblers. Soap opera-style drama abounds, fads rise and fall, people play games within the game. They fly airplanes, hold fashion shows, host poetry readings. They dance endlessly. They marry, cheat, divorce, remarry.

The virtual world has its own money and economy, but it's also possible to make real money — thousands of dollars, in some cases — buying and selling creations in Second Life.

The result is a willy nilly Wild West of sprawl badly in need of a few zoning regulations, a completely unpredictable place that mutates so quickly that it can never be fully explored.

Calling Second Life a computer game would be wrong. Games typically have a goal, and Second Life does not. At least, no more of a goal than real life, or RL, as it's called inside the world.

"The point is that Second Life evolves as a function of what people like and dislike," says Philip Rosedale, head of Linden Lab, the company that created the fledgling world.

Everything in Second Life is created by, and owned by, its subscribers. Every aspect of the world — gender, personal appearance, construction of buildings, animations that make avatars jump or act silly — can be modified by the people living there.

Second Life is not about armed conquest, explosions or amassing point totals. It simply is about living in a different place, a place where virtually nothing is impossible.

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