They were walking down the steps outside Stark Gymnasium to head across campus when he wrapped up his call. “My apologies, Mia. When Cezary calls, you take the call. No matter what or where.”
Mia smiled. “No personal experience with that situation, but sounds like words to live by.”
“You never know, Mia,” Chase replied. “You never know. It’s been my privilege to speak to many VIPs from many walks of life.”
“Yes, they come from all over to visit iCon, don’t they,” she said. “Earlier today I saw some special VIPs at the front desk in the lobby. Several senators, congressional representatives from both parties, politicians from around the area. Sounded like they have a meeting scheduled with Cezary today.”
“That’s correct. In advance of encountering outdated regulations and laws, we are meeting with legislators to see if iCon can’t get in front of some issues that may become roadblocks to our work supporting transhumanism at a later time.”
“You expect help from people in Congress? That means your experience with Congress is different than the average voter’s. Most citizens expect to be ignored by their representatives, to have their concerns go unheard. Or if heard, not acted on.”
“True, true.” Chase nodded. “But as iCon is a large international corporation, we have resources to attract their attention, get our concerns heard. I admit we do have the means to develop channels of access that most people do not have.”
“So you are confirming that there is a culture of graft in DC, where money makes a difference in what gets done, where you can buy favorable legislation. Sounds like the charges of corruption that people make about Congress are true.”
“The reality isn’t quite as black and white as that. For some time now, big business and government powers have been courting each other, hoping to create a powerful and effective synergy via a more thorough unification. iCon has been a part of that dynamic, seeking ways to encourage politicians to help move our agenda forward as well as offering our expertise to legislators who are crafting regulations. The reality is that while we are not able to purchase legislation that benefits iCon off the shelf, we do have the opportunity to present our case to legislators, exert some influence by shaping the discussion before mandates are written, before legislation is passed. So we’re not seeking anything illegal. But overall, I would agree with your assessment concerning the presence of corruption in our political system. Washington, DC is awash in a culture of corruption.”
Surprised that Chase was being so open and upfront about the reality of political corruption, Mia was distracted from thinking about the definition of fascism (government getting into and controlling private business through excessive regulation and nationalizing the ownership of resources). She said, “Everyone complains about the corruption, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do to roll it back. Many politicians campaign on promises of reforming and cleaning up DC. But then once they are elected and arrive in Washington, nothing ever changes.”
“Which is to be expected,” Chase said. “Entering a corrupt system, even the most idealistic people tend to lose their moral fiber. Or at best compromise their principles. Currently, there’s a ‘If you lie down with dogs’ situation in politics. The system grinds even the highest idealist down to mesh with the system’s existing corruption.”
Mia shook her head. “I don’t believe that has to happen. A person could stand up for their ideals and resist becoming corrupted.”
“Jimmy Stewart goes to Washington? It would never work in real life. There would be too many things for a reformer to object to. When everything is corrupt, would you know where to start? Where would you draw the line? In small ways, with things that don’t seem to matter, you’d start compromising immediately. Little compromises soon lead to bigger compromises, and so on. Especially if you have ambitions and want to get things done that require the help of other people. You’d go along to get along, because no one wants to work with someone who never stops rocking the boat. And in politics, there is always someone waiting to push you farther over that line, bringing the fall and corruption directly to you, promoting your participation in it.”
“Like Satan in the Garden of Eden,” Mia said.
“Ah, yes. That imp on your left shoulder whispering to you, advising you to become enlightened. ‘Start acting on your own behalf, in your own best self interest, and cease abiding by old codes of restrictions and constraints.’ Wouldn’t that be a horrible idea!” His laughter boomed across the open air between the buildings of the former campus.
“So you’d call sin, death, and evil ‘enlightenment’?”
Chase said, “Ignoring God is not what I would call sin, and it’s certainly not an evil in my opinion. If I don’t accept the misguided idea that God has my best interests at heart, then I won’t accept his laws, which only spell out how I am to debase myself. The notion of obedience is relevant only to person who is a slave. My own idea of what is good shapes my actions because self-interest is my highest moral imperative. And I say that’s good advice for anyone — don’t obey or abide by the commands of some antique deity. What is good for what you call God is not necessarily what is good for me. I always pursue what is good for me, what is best as I see it. Nor would I accept God’s verdict on what has caused all the misery in this world. Mia, you shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t acknowledge the concept that the word sin denotes evil. Or even acknowledge that the devil is evil, whoever that might be. In fact, I believe in safeguarding every person’s right to determine their own destiny, their right to pursue what makes them happy, no matter what. God, as you call him, is only interested in developing ignorant dupes who don’t question their chains of slavery. Slaves who never have the chance to develop their true potential because they are forbidden this, forbidden that. Forbidden from living their truest self. And if it is true that the good I want is different than the shabby, uninspiring good that God offers to his slaves, you can be certain that I would leave God’s area of domination as quickly as possible in order to pursue what I do want.”
“You could say ‘leave as quickly as possible to pursue other options,’” Mia said. “Or perhaps Satan had no choice, and he was thrown down out of Heaven like a bolt of lightning.”
“That is an alternative view,” Chase said. “Who’s to say which is the right one?” He took several steps before continuing. “If you want to know what I consider to be the definition of moral good, I’d have to say that the three laws published by a new political party, the Transhumanist Party, come close.”
Mia said, “I did read something about that, but I don’t remember what they are.”
“Founded by Zoltan Istvan, the Transhumanist Party is a rival, in a sense, to the Progressive Transhumanist Party that Damien Cezary has founded. But in many ways our goals are aligned and quite similar. And so we are willing to adopt these three laws written by Istvan as our own.”
Chase counted off the three laws on his six-fingered hand. “The first law, safeguard your own existence, above all else. Second, strive to achieve omnipotence as quickly as possible. Third, safeguard your value to the universe.”
Mia laughed, but then stopped when she saw that Chase was entirely serious. “Omnipotence? Is that something you can achieve? In most stories, the people who try to become omnipotent change into a monster trying to destroy everyone and everything around them because nothing is perfect enough for them. And then they self-destruct. How would you stop from becoming consumed like that? Especially if you plan to value your own life above all others.”
“Well, to my way of thinking, omnipotence isn’t so much about inflating one single intellect as it is about linking everyone together so that everyone knows what everyone knows, if you follow me. And if you know everything, you can do anything. Nothing Humanity+ imagines will be impossible for them.”
As they were walking past Noonan
Hall, a young woman from the HR Department at iCon approached them. She glanced at Chase, and a nervous look crossed her face. Although there was room, plenty of room, to pass, she stepped off the sidewalk to walk in the mud and snow instead. As if she needed as much space as possible separating her from Chase, like giving wide berth to a bison on a Black Hills highway.
Smiling, Mia nodded hello to her, then said to Chase, “I do. Follow what you’re saying, I mean.”
Chase continued, “Omnipotence could be achieved by an aggregated mind. A pejorative term for it would be ‘the hive mind.’ So to be clear, I’m not proposing that transhumanism offers a romantic era, ego-centric notion of one person ruling over the rest of the universe. Instead, each individual, connected to an artificial intelligence, perhaps in such a way that they maintain their own identity, would benefit from a limitless source of knowledge and experience. We wouldn’t need to dethrone God to turn humanity into a better version of themselves. Instead, we would make him irrelevant and move beyond him. Our goal is to be progressive, improve on what evolution has provided us with. The result — people would have the means to do whatever they desire or imagine they can do. How can you say that would amount to promoting evil? We would be offering a new kind of freedom and new levels of accomplishment for people who will live forever. This is the ultimate dream of transhumanism. Doesn’t that sound like a goal worthy of devoting your life to?”
“I don’t know,” Mia said. “I agree that people deserve the freedom to do what they want. But the rest sounds like an updated version of the Garden of Eden. You’re proposing becoming a rival and replacement for God, only not by eating the apple. Instead, it’s by using technology like microchips, software, and WiFi. But I think infinite information alone is not enough. To be a successful god, you’d need infinite wisdom to know how to best use all that data.”
“Mia, Mia, Mia! You really are one hundred percent old school.” His laughter carried across the wintery air. “Allow me to show you the error behind your resistance. Don’t you see that your own love of stories proves that God is not worthy of your loyalty?”
“No, I don’t see that. God loves telling stories.”
“How can that be?” Chase asked. “God doesn’t lie, or at least that’s what he says. Stories — fiction, things that have never happened, things that never could happen — all are beautiful lies.”
“No. Absolutely not. Fiction, stories — they are not lies.”
“It is telling what never happened, and so, a lie,” Chase said.
“Just because it never happened doesn’t mean the story isn’t true. The best fiction has to be based on truth, or it falls apart.”
Shaking his head, Chase said, “That may be what you suppose, but God would not agree with you. He has commanded, ‘Only tell the truth.’ In addition, people wouldn’t agree with you either. When someone wants you to stop lying, what do they say? ‘Stop telling stories. Stop telling fairy tales.’ Everyone agrees that stories are lies, even if they do enjoy hearing a story. Stories are a perfect example of the kind of thing that I’d say is good, good for entertainment. But obeying God’s command to only tell the truth would bring that all to an end.”
Mia said, “Well, if you’re going to quote Scripture, it should be an accurate quote. The commandment says, ‘You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.’ It doesn’t say, ‘Only tell the truth.’ God hasn’t forbidden the creation of fictional stories, there is no commandment against it. Hundreds of years ago, story telling was a valuable treasury of wisdom, a way for sharing what earlier generations knew to be right. By sharing what had happened in previous ages, relating the impact and consequences of right and wrong moral choices, the story teller could illustrate for a younger generation how evil behavior corrupts people and brings destruction with it. Stories provide the audience with a moral imagination. Lying does not benefit anyone but the liar who is manipulating their audience to get something or gain an advantage they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“I certainly agree that storytelling is valuable,” Chase replied. “But I maintain that storytelling is an art based on falsehood offered as entertainment, author and audience indulging in impossible fantasies together. Storytelling creates unity of mind, expands imagination, and releases limitations of the heart. Even nightly dreams are filled with lies told by the mind when the brain is released from control. You don’t need to fear to admit that lying can offer a benefit. It’s only God who would not approve of it.”
She replied, “Oh, I can’t agree with you on that idea. Not at all. I think Tolkien was right with what he said about storytelling. When a person — say it’s me — tells a story, I’m acting as a sub-creator. I’m replicating God’s power of creation, but on a smaller, more limited scale. I create a secondary world, a world that exists in my imagination. Then I as author invite the audience to enter my creation and explore, see what I’ve made. If I remain true to the laws of my secondary world, there is no need for my reader to have to suspend their disbelief. Why? Because there is no lie in my story. They can activate their belief in the secondary world, and that world won’t let them down. The art, the story-telling magic if you prefer, hasn’t failed.”
“So how is fiction not lying?” he asked. “I still don’t see that you’ve made your point.”
“It might help if I give you an example of a lie within a story,” she said. “To show there is a difference between the two things. There used to be a science fiction TV program that was boldly trekking through the unknown regions in the universe. They had an episode or three where characters were stranded in an alternate dimension, out of phase with their own world to the extent that they could walk through the walls of the starship. That’s the law that the writers of this secondary creation have instituted — the starship is no longer a solid object and human bodies can no longer interact with it. In one episode, a stranded crew man in a red shirt, of course, gets knocked through a wall and is propelled out into the vacuum of outer space, dying because the walls didn’t protect him because they were out of phase and no longer solid. But throughout that whole episode, that law the writers invoked is ignored in many ways, the violations written by those same writers. I won’t even mention the issue with the lungs of the crewmen breathing out-of-phase oxygen or dying without oxygen in space, but the issue where feet are concerned is impossible to ignore. At the same time the walls have become nothing, the stranded characters are running on absolutely solid floors, getting traction and moving on a surface that should be as insubstantial as the walls. And seeing this inconsistency shoots the audience, at least it did me, right out of the story because disbelief is activated. ‘That isn’t consistent,’ you might say. Or you might say, ‘That story is based on a lie.’”
Chase smiled but didn’t reply.
“My aunt also told me another example of breaking the truth of a story, this one in a sermon,” Mia continued. “The minister was talking about Zaccheus, making a point about how challenging it was to climb up in a sycamore fig tree. Because there are long, sharp thorns everywhere on that tree that grows in Israel, making it painful to even pick the figs off that tree, let alone clamber up. The minister continued on with his message, but my aunt was taken by the image of the thorns that would tear into anyone who climbed the tree and kept thinking about it. Toward the end of the message when he said, “So Zaccheus slid down the fig tree to meet Jesus,” my aunt burst out laughing — the only one who did — because she was thinking about a man sliding down over those long, sharp thorns while the minister had forgotten about them, no longer included them in his story. He violated the law of his secondary creation. That would amount to a lie in a story.”
“I see your point about plot inconsistency, I guess,” Chase said. “However, the Author is stating, ‘This happened, this person, this place exists,’ when clearly that it is not so.”
Her voice getting louder with intensity
, Mia said, “But it does happen! The characters, the actions they take, it all does exist. Maybe not here. Maybe it only happens in the dimension of the imagination if you want to call it that. But all great characters in literature are alive. People talk about these characters to their friends, even consider a fictional character to be their friend, get mad at things they do or say or what they don’t do or don’t say. Readers even fall in love with fictional characters in a book, like most women do when they read about Mr. Darcy. Go to a graduate lit class that’s reading Paradise Lost, and I swear everyone accepts the reality of God as a character in the book even if they are atheists in the rest of their life. And then the character that Milton featured in his fiction provokes a discussion about a real God, the King of the Universe. It only takes five minutes before you realize that Milton created a character that can stand up to the most serious issues imaginable — theology, philosophy, ethics. ‘Why did God allow suffering?’ ‘Free choice — what does it mean for Adam and Eve and Lucifer?’ That transfer couldn’t happen if fiction was created as a fabrication and didn’t relate to the real world, if the characters were simply a false tissue of lies. In all the great stories, characters are made out of ink and paper, created in the heart of the author — but they are real. People care about them, get involved with them. That’s a reality, true existence, even if it’s not tangible, not present on our planet. Stories. Not lies, not the same thing as lying.”
Chase shook his head. “I concede that point about the perceived reality of the characters in fiction, to an extent. Imagination can manufacture a perception of reality that people can interact with. But it’s still not the same thing as telling the truth. It never happened.”
No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School Page 16
