Karen was in tears and Luke took her hand. In doing so, he accepted the sorrow of the human condition. Luke knew that this was the moment his father would have stated, “This is all God’s doing.” And then he would have turned to Luke and said, “And now, son, would be a good time for a prayer.”
Rachel/Player One
This is Rachel, a.k.a. Player One. I’m no longer with you, but I’m not in pain or anything, so please don’t worry. I finally get to see what exists down inside that black cartoon hole Daffy Duck used to slap onto the ground to get himself out of trouble. The birds are here with me now, and so are the plants and all of God’s fine animals. I’m sitting in a glade, with all the creatures in the forest sitting around me, a dove on my left palm and a grey squirrel on my right. I am dozing, resting, feeling completely at peace. Stillness is what I have here — wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world, but I’m not yet a part of what follows.
I don’t know how long I’ll be here. This is a stopping point only, and you’d think I’d be bored here, but boredom exists only in linear time. Eternity isn’t linear, so there’s no boredom. No current events, either. Eternity is free of news because there’s no timeline. It’s everything and nothing. No calendars inside Eternity.
It is cooler here, too, and quiet. And I don’t look at things the same way anymore, because — well, guess what — I now understand metaphors! That’s a surprise. I know that one thing can be something else. A burning book indeed equals fascism. Gently cooing doves equal peace. In my ears I hear a noise, and that noise is the sound of the colour of the sun. That’s like four metaphors wrapped up into one! Anything can be anything!
I don’t think my child — if that’s what it was when I was shot, my fertilized DNA clump — is here with me. But I’m not sad, because the DNA clump is probably in a here of its own.
I have mostly happy memories of being alive on earth. I remember how shampoo foam circling the bathtub drain resembles galaxies. I remember my father driving around the block three times so I could hear the whole version of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” on the radio. I remember being allowed to stay home from school to reprogram the coffee maker to display European time instead of North American time. And I remember the bathroom steaming up and my mother’s handwriting appearing as if by magic on the foggy mirror: the words “I ♥ Rachel.” I didn’t know what that meant — why would someone mix a heart shape with letters? But of course it meant she loves me — hearts equal love! And I know this because of how my heart was beating with Rick. That’s a happy memory, too.
Poor Rick. Poor Luke. Poor Karen. Poor Max . . . Poor everybody, really. Humans have to endure everything in life in agonizingly endless clock time — every single second of it. Not only that, but we have to remember enduring our entire lives. And then there is the cosmic punchline that our lives are, in fact, minuscule compared to geological time or the time frames of the galaxies and stars.
Dreams help fix the curse and gift of time perception. I wonder if humans are the only animal to know the difference between sleeping and dreaming. Dogs and cats probably don’t differentiate too much between dreams and real life. And people probably didn’t much either until the past few centuries. Nor did they over-analyze the voices they heard in their heads during the day — they probably didn’t even realize that they themselves were creating those voices. They probably thought the voice in their head was the king, or the gods passing in and out like some cosmic late-night AM radio station bouncing off the lower ionosphere, allowing them to hear distant ideas and sounds.
I wonder if my DNA clump is sleeping. Can eggs sleep? Can sperm sleep and dream? They’re only half-creatures, really — how can they be alive? And how can they dream? I think the division point between where life begins and ends is far murkier than we might think.
The only other sounds I can hear around me down inside Daffy Duck’s hole, other than nature sounds, are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to wherever it is I am. Do prayers create electrical fields? Is that how they cross the universe? Who’s to say? I have no idea how cellphones connected me to call centres in Mumbai, but they still did it. Poor humanity, praying and cursing and praying and cursing. What is to become of us as a species?
A part of me doesn’t worry about us. If we can breed wolves into wiener dogs in ten generations, what might we do with a billion years? Never mind what God might do with a billion years. Human existence has been so short. For every person currently alive, there are nineteen dead people who lived before us. That’s not that many, really, and maybe our time as a species was only ever meant to be short. Luke is right: Human DNA truly is, in so many ways, a total disaster. I heard him say that just before I came here — or I’m pretty sure it was Luke. He and Rick were both wearing bartender’s outfits. I’m a broken record, but why can’t people wear name tags?
What would God say about evolution? Why has nobody ever asked that specific question that particular way? God’s probably been having a big chuckle since eighteen-fifty-whatever, watching humans scramble and bunker and fight and scream over evolution. God made our DNA, thus God made us. What matters is that He got us here, to this point. Or maybe the DNA did it all. Whether you’re a believer or a nonbeliever, it’s a win-win scenario.
I think cloning is where it’s probably going to get really fun. Imagine being a lab worker in 2050 and creating a great-great-great-grandchild during a coffee break. Or blackmailers holding your hairbrushes hostage, something like, “Give us your money or we’ll make ten of you — and then kill them all.” Or maybe captains of industry rewriting their wills, deeding everything to themselves down the line, forever and always. And imagine being born and getting an owner’s manual written by the previous versions of you — like the manual that comes with a 2011 Volkswagen Jetta. Imagine all the time this would save us — wasted time, hopeless dreams. Maybe this is how we get to evolve forward, electively mutating our way out of our present dire situation — because mutation on its own isn’t going to make it happen. Human beings are going to have to speed things up considerably if we’re going to survive on this piece of milky blue rock. We need technology, and thank heavens technology is the inevitable result of our freakish DNA. I’m quite certain that intelligent beings on other planets have had growth curves just like ours, and maybe they’ve mutated forward too, but it’s not like aliens are going to come do our hard work for us.
Back when I was young, I used to believe in Superman. He was an alien life form, just like me. I chose to believe I was from some other planet, because if I were, then I wouldn’t have to be a “beautiful” girl marooned in a North American suburb at the start of the twenty-first century — a beautiful girl who couldn’t tell one person’s face from another and who could only sleep covered with ten blankets’ worth of weight on top of her, whose father didn’t think of her as a real human being, and who would scream if potatoes touched the meat on her plate. Instead, as a space alien like Superman, everything I did would be supernatural and meaningful. Even the smallest of my daily acts would be awe-inspiring and shocking. I remember watching silkworms pupate in science class. Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That was me. But of course, Superman is an anatomical impossibility, and I’ve lost my sense of kinship with him, and just who am I now? Sometimes I think humans don’t even exist as discrete persons. Rather, there is only the probability of you being you at any given moment. While you’re healthy, that probability remains pretty high, but when you’re sick or old, it shrinks. Your chance of being “all there” becomes less and less. When you have Alzheimer’s, like Luke’s dad and Karen’s mom, the probability of being you drops to almost zero — and then you die, and it really is zero — except here I am now, talking, so who’s to say?
I’m not being too cheerful, am I? I have to watch it with that sort of thing. I may be in the hereafter, but my normalcy train
ing seems to be sticking. I don’t want to give offence to other people. I don’t need the trouble. Being different is hard, and being different in the New Normal is going to be harder still.
The New Normal.
You people still on earth are now inhabiting an era in which all human personality characteristics are linked to some form of brain feature. Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums — and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity. I could go on, but do remember that, in the end, it’s real people at the end of all these variables, not androids. And if you don’t have the courage to face the truth about how we are made, then you don’t deserve the wonder that comes with being alive, regardless of how your particular slot machine generated you. Knowing your demons won’t chase away your angels, and you won’t be able to kill your demons, so you can’t get melodramatic that way.
Of course, nurture is a factor in the slot machine, too, as is your geographical entry point onto planet Earth. But in the New Normal, the effects of geography and nurture will grow fuzzier as the Internet allows collective real-time fulfillment of the needs and dreams of the human species. If we view the brain as a device designed to allow us to experience and foster free will, then we’ll see a staggeringly concentrated expression of will occurring with extreme speed. As this happens, the modern economy will stop being about the redistribution of wealth and start being about the redistribution of time and options. Shopping is not creating. We’re all stuck on the same airplane flight now, and they just got rid of first class and business class.
Listen to me, metaphoring like crazy. And trying to define time while no longer living inside it. Past, present, and future tenses now seem like party novelties, and keeping my tenses straight here has been difficult. But I do remember a bit of life before the twenty-first century, and I do remember the sensation, especially after 9/11, that time had stopped feeling like time. Society collectively lost the sense that an era feels like an era — they forgot the way it felt when time and emotions and culture were particular to one spot in time, the way I suppose decades felt in the twentieth century. And lives stopped feeling like lives — or at least, people began talking about not having a life. What could that mean? Information overload triggered a crisis in the way people saw their lives. It sped up the way we locate, cross-reference, and focus the questions that define our essence, our roles — our stories. The crux seems to be that our lives stopped being stories. And if we are no longer to have lives that are stories, what will our lives have become? Yet seeing one’s life as a story seems like nostalgic residue from an era when energy was cheap and the notion of the super-special, ultra-important individual with blogs and Google hits and a killer résumé was a conceit the planet was still able to materially support. In the New Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance. Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls trapped in twentieth-century solipsism. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It’s called life on earth. Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
In a thousand years, electively mutated post-humans will look back at us with awe and wonder. They’ll say that this was when humans and the planet got married, fused, melted together, the moment when one could no longer separate the two. I hope they see that we did it with a sense of humour. Yes, I realize from my new perspective that it was ridiculous of me to buy a $3,400 dress to find a mate in a seedy airport cocktail lounge. And yes, it was sweet and funny for Karen to end up on Max’s social networking page as a cougar.
But here’s the new deal: I just realized I’m being allowed to return to earth — and I’m being allowed to return with my DNA clump, which will become a 6.3-pound baby girl next April. I guess that’s why they brought me here to the glade, to sort things out.
And so I’m going to have a future tense.
And so I’m going to have a story.
And many things will soon happen . . .
It will begin to rain, and the chemicals outside the lounge will crackle and fizz and drain away. Gas will be rationed and doled out by the government, and it will never go below $350 a barrel again.
The police will show up and everyone will leave. Karen will live in a hostel with Luke while they wait three weeks for planes to fly again. A few months after that they will get married, and Luke’s former flock won’t press embezzlement charges and will instead pray for Luke — which makes me think they are a bit stupid. But Karen and Luke and young Casey will have their happy ending.
Rick? Rick will go to the hospital with Max and me. Max will be blind and I’ll lose my ability to understand metaphors and humour — I’ll miss them very much. I’m not sure if I’ll still believe in God. That remains to be seen. But what I can see is that I’ll marry Rick, and I’ll breed white mice and pay our bills that way. Best of all, my father will think of me as a real human being, which is all this trip was ever really about, and so I get my happy ending, too.
However, I won’t be allowed to remember everything I’ve learned here in the quiet place — which is sad — and I have to leave soon. My final thoughts? Poor humanity! Poor everyone! My poor fellow citizens, children of the children of the children of the pioneers who somehow became immune to God, citizens inhabiting a New Normal world of robotized collective minds that exist everywhere and nowhere. Metaminds with inexplicable biases and wants and unslakeable thirsts — real-time fear all the time. Bertis Freemont wasn’t so wrong after all.
And we’re all waiting for It now, aren’t we? Good old “It” — the It who rains, the It we mean when we ask what time is It? I suppose It is the arrival of the Sentience. The arrival of the metamind that is us and yet much more than us. It is the Sentience that will eclipse us, that will encourage us, and shame us and indulge us. It is out there waiting. I’m certainly waiting — it’s why I’m here, talking to you before I enter the New Normal, too.
And so before I enter this new world, curiously, the words that come to me are the words of Leslie Freemont, and I raise the hand that holds a sleeping dove and put forth a toast to you all: “Here’s a toast to everyone on earth who’s ever been eager — no, desperate — for even the smallest sign that there exists something finer, larger, and more miraculous about our inner selves than we could ever have supposed. Here’s to all of us reaching out our hands to other people everywhere, reaching out to pull them from the icebergs on which they stand frozen, to pull them through the burning hoops of fire that frighten them, to help them climb over the brick walls that block their paths. Let us reach out to shock and captivate people into new ways of thinking.”
I have this funny feeling that I wouldn’t have missed earth for anything, so I must be getting something out of the experience. I hope you do, too.
I, Rachel, a.k.a. Player One, can now see the nighttime light of your real world.
Good night and goodbye to you all.
FUTURE LEGEND
Achronogeneritropic Spaces
Nowhere/everywhere/timeless places such as airports.
Airport-Induced Identity Dysphoria
Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveller of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise.
Aloneism
A recognition of the fact that it is a burdensome amount of work to be an individual, and also that many human beings were not necessarily cut out to be individuals and are much happier being lost inside a collective environment or a self-denying belief system. Individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation not evenly spread throughout the population, a mutation that poses a thr
eat to those not possessing it, hence the ongoing war between religion and secularism.
Ambivital Consensus
The fact that there’s really no common consensus on where “life” begins, or what is living: cells and bacteria are easy, perhaps, but what about eggs and sperm, which are each only 50 percent of a human, yet seem quite alive? Meanwhile, scientists, still not finished haggling over viruses, have now discovered nanobes, tiny filament structures that some argue represent the smallest living organism yet.
Ameteoric Landscape
Describes the incredibly small extent to which the earth’s surface, protected by a thick defensive atmospheric layer, is defined by meteoric impacts compared to its moon, to Mars, and to the solar system’s other moons. There have been some minor incidents since the last great meteor, broken into pieces, collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all life and leaving a number of craters across the planet’s surface. That was just the most recent of numerous meteor strikes that caused mass extinctions and drastically altered life on earth over hundreds of millions of years.
Androsolophilia
The state of affairs in which a lonely man is romantic-ally desirable while a lonely woman is not.
Anorthodoxical Isms
The isms that pose the greatest threat to inflexible religious orthodoxies:
Humanism
Cultural Relativism
Moral Relativism
Secularism
The Anthropocene
A term recognizing that human intrusion on the planet’s surface and into the atmosphere has been so extreme as to qualify our time on earth as a specific geological epoch. Along with vast increases in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, which have drastically raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our human footprint now covers more than 83 percent of the earth’s surface, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 16
