Surviving the shipwreck.
Even if Marie23, even if all the neohumans and I were only, as I was beginning to suspect, software fictions, the very pregnancy of these fictions demonstrated the existence of one or several IGUSes, whether they were of a biological, digital, or, intermediary nature. The existence in itself of an IGUS was enough to establish that a decrease had taken place, at one point in time, within the field of innumerable potentialities; this decrease was the condition for the paradigm of existence. The Future Ones themselves, if they came to be, would need to make their ontological status conform to the general conditions for the functioning of IGUSes. Hartle and Gell-Mann already establish that the cognitive functioning of the IGUSes (Information Gathering and Utilizing Systems) presupposes conditions of stability and the mutual exclusion of sequences of events. For an IGUS observer, whether natural or artificial, only one branch of universe can be endowed with a real existence; if this conclusion does not exclude in any way the possibility of other branches of the universe, it forbids any access to them to a given observer: to use the quite mysterious but synthetic expression of Gell-Mann, “On every branch, only this branch is preserved.” The very presence of a community of observers, even reduced to two IGUSes, was thus proof of the existence of a reality.
According to the current hypothesis, that of an evolution without solution of continuity within a “carbon biology” lineage, there was no reason to think that the evolution of the savages had been interrupted by the Great Drying Up, nothing indicated however that they had been able, as Marie23 supposed, to gain access to language again, nor that intelligent communities had formed, reconstructing societies of a new type over which neither we, nor the Founders, would have the slightest control.
This theme, regardless, is obviously close to her heart, and she returns to it increasingly often in our exchanges, which are becoming increasingly animated. I sense in her a sort of intellectual ferment, an impatience that is gradually rubbing off on me, although there is nothing, in our external circumstances, that justifies us breaking out of our stasis, and I often quit our intermediation sequences shaken, as if I’ve been weakened. The presence of Fox, fortunately, soon calms me down, and I settle into my favorite armchair, at the northern extremity of the main room, to await, eyes closed, sitting tranquilly in the light, our next contact.
Daniel1, 21
I TOOK THE TRAIN to Biarritz that very day; I had to change at Hendaye, some young girls in short skirts and a general holiday atmosphere—which was obviously of little interest to me, but I was still able to note it, I was still human, there were no illusions about that, I was not completely thick-skinned, deliverance would never be complete, not until I was effectively dead. On my arrival I took a room at the Villa Eugénie, a former holiday retreat given by Napoléon III to the Empress, which had become a luxury hotel in the twentieth century. The restaurant was also called the Villa Eugénie, and it had a star in the Michelin Guide. I ordered squid with creamy rice, in an ink sauce; it was good. I had the impression that I could order the same thing every day, and, more generally, that I could stay there for a very long time, a few months, all my life, perhaps. The following morning I bought a Samsung X10 laptop and a Canon i80 printer. I more or less had the intention of starting on the project I had talked about to Vincent: to recount, for a yet undetermined audience, the events I had witnessed on Lanzarote. It was only much later, after several conversations with him, after I had explained to him at length the real but weak feeling of calm, the sensation of partial lucidity that this narration gave me, that he had the idea of asking all those aspiring to immortality to devote themselves to the practice of the life story, and to do it in as exhaustive a manner as possible; my own project, as a consequence, bore his influence, and became clearly more autobiographical.
I had of course intended, on coming to Biarritz, to see Isabelle again, but after I moved into the hotel, it seemed to me that, fundamentally, it wasn’t all that urgent—quite strange really, because it was already obvious that there was now only a limited amount of time left for me to live. Every day, I went for a walk on the beach, for about quarter of an hour, I said to myself there was a chance I might meet her when she was out with Fox; but this didn’t happen, and after two weeks I decided to phone her. After all, maybe she had left town, it was more than a year since we’d last had any contact.
She hadn’t left town, but informed me that she was going to as soon as her mother was dead—which would be in a couple of weeks’ time, a month at the very most. She didn’t seem particularly pleased to hear from me, and I was the one who had to propose we meet. I invited her to lunch at my hotel; it wasn’t possible, she told me, because dogs were barred. We finally agreed to meet up as usual at the Silver Surfer, but I immediately sensed that something had changed. It was curious, quite difficult to explain, but for the first time I had the impression that she had it in for me. I also realized that I had never spoken to her about Esther, not a word, and I found this difficult to understand because we were, I repeat, civilized, modern people; our separation hadn’t been marked by any meanness or any financial pettiness in particular, you could say that we had parted good friends.
Fox had aged a bit, and put on weight, but he was still as cuddly and playful; you had to give him a bit of help to climb onto your knees, that’s all. We spoke about him for more than ten minutes: he delighted the rock-’n’-roll biddies of Biarritz, probably because the Queen of England had the same dog—and Mick Jagger, too, since his knighthood. He wasn’t a mongrel at all, she told me, but a Welsh Pembroke Corgi, the official dog of the Royal Family; the reasons why this little creature of noble extraction had found itself, at the age of three months, incorporated into a pack of stray dogs at the side of a Spanish highway would forever remain a mystery.
The subject occupied us for nearly a quarter of an hour, then inexorably, as if obeying some natural law, we came to the heart of the matter, and I spoke to Isabelle about my affair with Esther. I told her everything, from the beginning, I spoke for slightly over two hours, and I ended with the account of the birthday party in Madrid. She listened to me carefully, without interrupting, and without showing any real surprise. “Yes, you always liked sex…,” she just said briefly, in a low voice, at the point when I was indulging in a few erotic considerations. She had suspected something for a long time now, she said once I had finished; she was happy I had finally decided to talk to her about it.
“Basically, I will have had two important women in my life,” I concluded, “the first—you—who didn’t like sex enough; and the second—Esther—who didn’t like love enough.” This time she smiled frankly.
“That’s true…,” she said in a different voice, which was curiously cheeky and juvenile, “you’ve had no luck…”
She reflected, then added: “At the end of the day, men are never content with their women…”
“Rarely, yes.”
“Doubtless, it’s because they want contradictory things. The women as well these days, but that’s more recent. Basically, polygamy was perhaps a good solution…”
It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without trace—one begins to feel slightly ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic. Ah well, let’s just say it’s slightly sad; there are always sadder things, obviously. Isabelle had always liked theoretical discussions, it’s partly what had attracted me to her; inasmuch as the exercise is sterile, and can prove fatal when practiced for its own sake, it is also profound, creative, and tender immediately after making love—immediately after real life. We were looking each other straight in the eye, and I knew, I sensed that something was going to happen, the noises in the café seemed to have hushed, it was as if we had entered a zone of silence, provisional or definitive, I could no longer say, and finally, still looking in my eyes, she told me in a clear and irrefutable voice: “I still love you.”
I slept at her place that
very night, and also the nights that followed—without, however, giving up my hotel room. As I expected, her apartment was tastefully decorated; it was situated in a small residence, in the middle of a park, about a hundred meters from the ocean. It was with pleasure that I prepared Fox’s bowl, and took him for his walk; he walked less quickly now, and was less interested in other dogs.
Every morning, Isabelle drove her car to the hospital; she spent most of the day in her mother’s bedroom; she was being well looked after, she told me, which had become something exceptional. Like it was every year now, summer was scorching in France, and like every year the old died en masse, owing to lack of care, in their hospitals and retirement homes; but people had long since stopped feeling indignant about this, it had in some way passed into tradition, as though it were a natural means of solving the statistical problem of an increasingly aging population that was necessarily prejudicial to the economic stability of the country. Isabelle was different, and I became conscious again, by living with her, of her moral superiority over the men and women of her generation; she was more generous, more attentive, and more loving. That said, on the sexual level, nothing happened between us; we slept in the same bed without even feeling embarrassed, without even feeling resigned about it. Frankly, I was tired, the heat was overwhelming me as well. I felt about as energetic as a dead oyster; during the day I sat down to write at a small table overlooking the garden but nothing came to me, nothing seemed important or meaningful, I had lived a life that was about to end and that was that, I was like all the others, my career as a showman seemed a long way away now, no trace would remain of any of that.
Sometimes, however, I became conscious again that my narrative originally had another goal; I was well aware that I had witnessed on Lanzarote one of the most important stages, perhaps the decisive stage, in the evolution of the human race. One morning when I had a little more energy, I phoned Vincent: they were in the middle of moving, he told me, they had decided to sell the prophet’s property in Santa Monica to transfer the headquarters of the Church to Chevilly-Larue. Knowall had remained on Lanzarote, near the laboratory, but Cop was there with his wife, they had bought a house near to his, and they were building new offices, they were taking on personnel, they were thinking of buying airtime on a television channel devoted to new cults. Manifestly, he was doing fundamental and significant things, at least in his own eyes. However, I couldn’t quite bring myself to envy him: throughout my entire life I hadn’t been interested in anything other than my cock, now my cock was dead and I was in the process of following it in its deathly decline, I had only got what I deserved, I told myself repeatedly, pretending to find in this some morose delectation, while in fact my mental state was evolving more and more toward horror pure and simple, a horror made all the worse by the constant brutal heat, by the immutable glare of the blue sky.
Isabelle could sense all this, I think, and would look at me, sighing; after two weeks it was beginning to become obvious that things were going to turn out badly, it would be best for me to leave once again and, let’s be honest, for the last time, this time we really were too old, too worn out, too bitter, we could only do ourselves harm, reproach one another with the general impossibility of things. Over our last meal (evening brought a bit of cooler air, we had pulled the table out into the garden, and she had made an effort with the cooking), I spoke to her about the Elohimite Church, and the promise of immortality that had been made on Lanzarote. Of course, she had followed the news a little, but she, like most people, thought that it was all complete bullshit, and she hadn’t known that I had been there. I then became conscious that she had never met Patrick, even though she remembered Robert the Belgian, and that basically a lot of things had happened in my life since her departure, it was actually surprising I hadn’t spoken to her about it earlier. No doubt the idea was too recent and new; frankly, most of the time I forgot myself that I had become immortal, it took some effort to remember it. I explained it all to her, however, recounting the story from the beginning, with all the requisite clarifications; I emphasized the personality of Knowall, the general impression of competence that he had left me with. Her intelligence, too, was still up to scratch, I think she knew nothing about genetics, she had never taken the time to become interested in it, but she had no difficulty following my explanations, and immediately grasped their consequences.
“Immortality then…,” she said. “It would be like a second chance.”
“Or a third chance; or multiple chances, to infinity. Immortality, really.”
“Okay; I am happy to leave them my DNA and my estate. You can give me their contact details. I’ll do it for Fox as well. For my mother…” She hesitated and her tone darkened. “I think it’s too late for her; she wouldn’t understand. She’s suffering at the moment; I think she really wants to die. She wants nothingness.”
The quickness of her reaction surprised me, and it was from that moment on, I think, that I had the intuition that a new phenomenon was going to manifest itself. The fact that a new religion could be born in the West was already a surprise in itself, bearing in mind that the last thirty years of European history had been marked by the massive and amazingly rapid collapse of traditional religious beliefs. In countries like Spain, Poland, and Ireland, social life and all behavior had been structured by a deeply rooted, unanimous, and immense Catholic faith for centuries, it determined morality as well as familial relations, conditioned all cultural and artistic productions, social hierarchies, conventions, and rules for living. In the space of a few years, in less than a generation, in an incredibly brief period of time, all this had disappeared, had evaporated into thin air. In these countries today no one believed in God anymore, or took account of him, or even remembered that they had once believed; and this had been achieved without difficulty, without conflict, without any kind of violence or protest, without even a real discussion, as easily as a heavy object, held back for some time by an external obstacle, returns as soon as you release it, to its position of equilibrium. Human spiritual beliefs were perhaps far from being the massive, solid irrefutable block we usually imagined; on the contrary, perhaps they were what was most fleeting and fragile in man, the thing most ready to be born and to die.
Daniel25, 10
THE MAJORITY OF TESTIMONIES confirm it: it was in fact from this time onward that the Elohimite Church was to gain more and more followers, and spread unhindered across the whole of the Western world. After having achieved, in less than two years, a takeover of the Western trend toward Buddhism, the Elohimite movement absorbed, with the same ease, the last residues from the fall of Christianity before turning toward Asia, the conquest of which, starting with Japan, was also surprisingly rapid, especially when you consider that this continent had, for entire centuries, victoriously resisted all Christian missionary expeditions. It is true that times had changed, and that Elohimism marched in many respects behind consumer capitalism—which, turning youth into the supremely desirable commodity, had little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors—inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth, and the pleasures associated with it.
Islam, curiously, was a more durable bastion of resistance. Relying on massive and unending immigration, the Muslim religion became stronger in the Western countries at practically the same rate as Elohimism; targeting as a priority the people of the Maghreb and black Africa, it had no less success with some “indigenous” Europeans, a success that owed itself uniquely to machismo. If the abandonment of machismo had effectively made men unhappy, it had not actually made women happy. There were more and more people, especially women, who dreamed of a return to a system where women were modest and submissive, and their virginity was preserved. Of course, at the same time, the erotic pressure on the bodies of young girls did not stop growing, and the expansion of Islam was only made possible thanks to the introduction of a series of compromises, under the influence of a new generation of imams
who, inspired by Catholic tradition, reality shows, and American televangelists’ sense of spectacle, developed for the Muslim public an edifying script for life based on conversion and forgiveness of sin, two notions that were, however, relatively foreign to Islamic tradition. In the typical plotline, which you would find identically reproduced in dozens of telenovelas most often filmed in Turkey and North Africa, a young girl, to the consternation of her parents, starts off by leading a dissolute life stained by alcohol, drug-taking, and the wildest sexual freedom. Then, shaped by an event that provokes a salutary shock in her (a painful abortion; meeting a pious and upright Muslim boy who is studying to be an engineer), she leaves the world’s temptations far behind and becomes a submissive, chaste, veiled wife. The same plotline existed in its masculine form, this time setting the story around rappers, and emphasizing delinquency and the consumption of hard drugs. This hypocritical script was to have a success that was all the more stunning because its designated age for conversion (between twenty-two and twenty-five years old) corresponded pretty accurately to the age when young North African girls, spectacularly beautiful in their teenage years, begin to get fat and feel the need for less revealing clothes. In the space of a couple of decades, Islam thus managed to assume, in Europe, the role that had been Catholicism’s in its heyday: that of an “official” religion, organizer of the calendar and of mini-ceremonies marking out the passage of time, with dogmas that were sufficiently primitive to be grasped by the greatest number while preserving sufficient ambiguity to seduce the most agile minds, claiming in principle to have a redoubtable moral austerity while maintaining, in practice, bridges across which any sinner could be reintegrated. The same phenomenon occurred in the United States of America, beginning in the black community in particular—with the caveat that Catholicism, buoyed up by Latin American immigration, retained important footholds there for a long time.
The Possibility of an Island Page 26
