“Shut up, you big metal squealer!”
“I do not know this word ‘squealer.’ Is this a derogatory term? The fact remains that I am incapable of shoving a carrot up my arse.”
Romy laughed, the manager did not.
“This kind of behaviour will not be tolerated in this establishment. The cleaning staff will fetch your belongings immediately. Our limousine will transfer you to the airport. We have no desire to prolong your stay with us. We appreciate your understanding. We will now have to update our policies to prohibit the admission of dogs, children, and robots.”
“Oh, okay, it was just a kid’s joke …”
“I don’t know whether such jokes are acceptable in France, but let me tell you that here in Austria, sexual harassment is considered reprehensible.”
“But Doctor, I paid for a ten-day course of Intravenous Laser Blood Irradiation!”
“You should be happy we haven’t contacted the Klagenfurt police. You’re lucky that the guests decided not to press charges—it took considerable effort to calm them down. No one wants rumours of this incident to get out.”
“I am sensing a distinct tension in this gathering of humans,” Pepper said. “Syntax error 432. Austria is the birthplace of Mozart and Hitler.”
The staff coolly but firmly escorted us to the door. We climbed into a black Mercedes and immediately set off.
“I’m starving,” I said. “Romy, you shouldn’t have taught Pepper to grope people.”
“It wasn’t me. He’s making it up, I swear!”
“Monsieur has intimated that he is hungry. Might I advise that Burger King is currently offering a promotional menu Double Whopper with fries and a drink for only €4.95,” Pepper said (because SoftBank Robotics had an advertising contract with that particular US fast-food outlet). “As you can see, I’m well up for it.”
I asked the driver to take GPS directions from Pepper to the nearest Burger King.
“In three kilometres, turn right,” Pepper said. “I am well up for pinching some slut’s arse.”
The robot pumped his fist. Romy gave him a virtual high-five. I felt robotically excluded. My body was desperate to renew my acquaintance with the toxins of mainstream consumer culture. We would have to find some route to immortality other than detox. From Geneva, Léonore had emailed us an invitation to the “21st Century Cellectis Dinner” in New York, where she was going. Ranked number 13 in the World’s Smartest Companies by MIT in 2016, Cellectis is a global leader in genome editing, and its CEO, Doctor André Choulika, was one of the pioneers who developed “DNA scissors.” We were getting closer to our goal. The limo glided down the mountain towards Burger King. All we needed to do now was to carry on to Vienna, the city where Countess Elizabeth Báthory slit the throats of hundreds of young women (at 12 Augustinerstraße) in an attempt to achieve immortality. Spoiler alert: we’ll come back to the Báthory technique later in the book. In Vienna another plane was waiting to whisk us to the United States. It was here that I should perhaps have started this journey: after all, America was the country that had invented the atom bomb and immediately tested it on humans. The New World was the place destined to create the New Man.
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KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMAN AND ROBOT
HUMAN
ROBOT
Knows nothing
Knows everything
Works eight hours a day (whining and sometimes even unionizing)
Works 24 hours a day (12-hour maximum shift without recharging)
High long-term costs
Initial expense quickly written off
Has a dick
Has a dongle
Has a soul
Has a Lithium-Ion Battery
Has an imagination
Has algorithms
Mediocre at mental arithmetic
Unbeatable at mental arithmetic
Dangerous
Inoffensive (excepting data error)
Rebellious
Not (yet) rebellious
Cogito ergo sum
Cogito ergo sum coniuncta ad Wi-Fi
Can be turned off only by being killed
Can be turned off using a power switch
Average empathy
Facial-scanning software
Hot
Cold
Sometimes cruel
Cruel only inadvertently
Unpredictable
Predictable
Walks
Rolls at 3 kph
Memory fallible
Memory: 1 terabyte
Approximate spelling ability
27-language autocorrect
Capable of love
Haptic sensors in head and hands
Suffers
Doesn’t suffer
HUMAN
ROBOT
Not telepathic
Information is cloud-shared
Sensitive skin
Polyurethane skin
Capable of fantasy
Incapable of fantasy (for now)
Spreads malicious rumours
Hard drive of factualinformation
Cultivated (sometimes)
Appropriate cultural references chosen by algorithm
Alcoholic
Doesn’t drink
Bulimic
Doesn’t eat
Addicted to drugs
Addicted only to mainlining 200 volts
Insubordinate
Obedient
Doubts everything constantly
Believes what he’s told
Not up for groping arses
Up for groping arses
Nuanced
Brusque
Hypocritical, cowardly, and dishonest
Constantly blunders by saying what he thinks
Ironic
Naive
Circulatory system
Integrated circuits
Flies off the handle for no reason
Keeps calm in all circumstances
Has an identity
Has a microprocessor
Carbon-based brain
Silicon-based brain
Has to prove that he is not a robot by completing a Captcha every time he tries to log in to Air France
Travels in the baggage hold on Air France flights
-
6 GMH = GENETICALLY MODIFIED HUMAN
(Cellectis, East 29th Stree
t, New York)
“O death, where is thy victory?”
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians
-
THE FOURTH BLOW to humanity’s narcissism was the last.
Just as Sigmund Freud demonstrated in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917), the first of humanity’s narcissistic wounds was the Copernican Revolution of the sixteenth century: man was no longer the centre of the universe.
The second blow came from Darwin in the nineteenth century: man is descended from apes.
Freud himself dealt the third blow in the twentieth century: man was not even master of his own urges.
Humanity did not survive the fourth blow: the twenty-first century discovery that DNA, which determined his fate, could be modified.
Once this was proven, Homo sapiens could no longer be saved.
It is difficult to pin down the precise moment when Homo sapiens became synonymous with “subhuman.” The realization came from the convergence of a number of breakthroughs: the digitization of the brain, gene correction in human embryos, cell and blood rejuvenation, and brain enhancement. What is certain is that the first step occurred in 2026, when neural networks were first connected to the internet. Once a small subsection of humanity had permanent access to Google, the rest of the Earth’s inhabitants were immediately relegated to the status of cavemen. Integrated artificial intelligence gave a tiny minority of children a huge advantage over other students. In 2020, the first babies to be born with CRISPR-modified DNA were a global event. Their genetic supremacy was the talk of every YouTube Live Show. The educational level of paleo-humans meant they simply could not compete with the neo-humans dubbed “Wi-Fi babies.” New schools had to be founded to educate these “super-children,” whose grades couldn’t be measured by ordinary means. Homo sapiens is a Latin phrase meaning “wise man,” but the rise of neo-human 2.0, with an IQ that was off the scale, made it necessary to rename the species Homo inscius (ignorant man). Yuval Noah Harari proposed referring to posthumans as Homo Deus (god man). But in everyday speech, the new species was called the “Uberman.”
The main inequality between Sapiens and Deus was speed: Ubermen didn’t need to talk. They communicated by thought, exchanged MM (Mental Mails), and had instant access to all human knowledge via Google. The good news was the huge public spending initiative brought about by the abolition of primary and secondary schools, which were replaced by training courses for programming cerebral prostheses. Subhumans attempted to protect their species, but their fate had long since been sealed by Charles Darwin: “… as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most” (On the Origin of Species, 1859). Poor Homo sapiens had to communicate using his vocal cords, he could not read minds, how could he possibly know what the Uberman was plotting? The elimination of non-competitive species is an inexorable selection process, even if the evolution of the Uberman is the product of genetic modification. It is a new phenomenon, one that scientists refer to as the “Suicidal Boost,” after the groundbreaking work by George Church (The Suicidal Boost Test, Random House, 2033, foreword by Professor Stylianos Antonarakis of the University of Geneva). According to Church’s theory, Homo sapiens somehow accelerated his own demise by making changes to his intellect and his chromosomes. In other words, he gave an unwitting genetic “boost” to his own extinction, just as Homo neanderthalensis, spending too much time foraging for food, was overtaken by Homo sapiens who could communicate. What followed was entirely predictable: the subhuman genocide carried out by biological machines was essential to deal with problems of overpopulation and global warming. Accordingly, in 2040, a global famine was scheduled by the World Googlevernment to allow the Great Darwinian Replacement and ensure Living Space for the Ubermen. Officially, this process was called the Definitive Dehumanization (Operation “2D”). The first Longevity War erupted in 2051, shortly after the Chemical Exterminations and the Blood Wars of the 2030s: it was this that finally eradicated Homo sapiens.
All in all, the legacy of Homo sapiens was less than heartening: they had eaten all the animals, harvested the plants for food, and depleted all natural resources in order to advance their domination. Then, inadvertently, they had devised their own successor. Their extinction could have been deliberate … but no. Having subjugated animals and plants, and destroyed the environment, they found themselves overtaken. But perhaps it was no more than Homo Sapiens deserved …
But let’s go back to 2017. Soaring high above the clouds in the plane to New York, the sky was no longer sky, it was outer space. I felt intergalactic. Eternity is not a matter of time but of light in the blood. This is the infinite, and it is already within reach of Turritopsis nutricula—the “immortal jellyfish” (which never die because they are fluorescent). From the windows of the plane, the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan Island looked like white crosses in a cemetery.
Léonore was waiting for us at Newark Airport, her shoulders were bare, and she was clutching a bag of Swiss meringues. In her arms, she cradled a baby with hair as yellow as a chick, wide blue eyes, a gap-toothed smile, and a green dress that she had grown out of. When I saw them, I wanted to dance, but I restrained myself. Like all lovers, Léo and I were doing our best not to show our true feelings. But I betrayed myself, babbling incessantly like an idiot. Léonore with her golden saltcellars, her ivory shoulders, her bra bursting with her heavy breasts … I found her even more arousing since she had made a new life for me.
Pepper was attempting to patch things up with her.
“Romy has told me a lot about you. She said you’re cool. Are you a supermodel? Your cheekbones are 97.8% symmetrical and your teeth are straight.”
“At least you’re making an effort, that’s something.”
After a stop-off at the Bowery Hotel to shower, change—and, in my case, make love to Léonore up against a mirror, squeezing her white grapefruits—we summoned an Uber. A babysitter recommended by the concierge was looking after Lou, already sleeping in her crib. The 21st Century Cellectis Dinner was at Benoit NYC, the Alain Ducasse restaurant on West 55th Street, a block from Trump Tower. In the United States, biotechnology and genetic research receive huge government support, because in the US the past is shorter than the future. One of the perks of being a TV celebrity was that Léonore, Romy, Pepper, and I were seated at the VIP table with Cellectis founder André Choulika, an affable dark-skinned man who made his fortune in genome tampering. I’ve always liked the Lebanese, I feel that the population of a country wedged between Israel and Syria have no choice but to be open-minded. They’re caught between Hezbollah and the deep blue sea! This makes them particularly creative and determined to escape. Choulika worked on the development of meganucleases (or “molecular DNA scissors”) while working with a team led by Nobel prize winner François Jacob at the Institut Pasteur. The biopharmaceutical company he founded in 1999 is now worth one and a half billion euros. Our arrival caused something of a stir: when he saw a robot on a leash being led in by a ten-year-old girl asking everyone for the Wi-Fi password, Neil Patrick Harris (the actor who plays Barney in How I Met Your Mother) whooped joyously: “This is the twenty-second-century couple!” The guests at the dinner were mostly sceptical reporters and a few enthusiastic geneticists. Among them I recognized my own doctor, Frédéric Saldmann.
“So, tell me you’ve been exercising every day and only eating vegetables.”
“Sadly not. My time at VIVAMAYR ended with a blowout at Burger King! But I’m hoping to make up for it tonight with this transgenic dinner. You know that after I saw you I visited a Swiss geneticist and an Israeli biologist and I had my blood lasered in Austria.”
“Good. You’re on the right path.”
“Oh no I’m not! The Swiss geneticist told me that immortality is i
mpossible, the Israeli biologist told me that the planet was dying. The luminous neo-blood, on the other hand, was amazing.”
“By coming to this dinner, you’ve taken a step closer to your goal …”
It’s rare to attend a dinner where none of the guests plan to die before the year 2200. New York’s elite were all gathered to sample a menu consisting exclusively of gene-edited foods, whose DNA had been modified by Calyxt, a Minnesota-based subsidiary of Cellectis. It was a clever idea, choosing a traditional bistro to test New Nature plants on neophytes. The typically French atmosphere made it easier to forget that the diners were merely guinea pigs for mad scientists. Outside the windows, sirens wailed, taxis hurtled, passersby raced: New York was still stuck in the twentieth century. André Choulika tapped his microphone and everyone fell silent.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Tonight is a world first. Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago, Parmentier organized a banquet to launch the potato in France. Thanks to Alain Ducasse, tonight you will get to taste a ‘new potato’ in various forms: as purée, as blinis, and as a tart, together with new soybean varieties whose DNA has been improved. Our potatoes have been modified so that they no longer interact with free amino acids when stored to form acrylamide, which is a carcinogen and can prove neurotoxic when fried. This evening, you will have the opportunity to sample the food that millions of consumers will be eating in the coming decades. Next year, Calyxt will market a new high-fibre, gluten-free wheat that contains no sugars and is more easily digestible. We modify the amino acids, cut the DNA, plant, and harvest. Welcome to the new food!”
A Life Without End Page 15
