Player One: What Is to Become of Us (19 page)

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 training 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 threat 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.

Anthropozooku

Small haiku-like moments during which human and animal behaviours exhibit total overlap.

Antifluke

A situation in the universe in which rigid rules of action exist to prevent coincidences from happening. Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually
do
. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of antifluke.

Attack-Moderates

The result of a common political tactic used by members of extreme orthodoxies. By forcing people in the political middle to polarize over issues about which they don’t feel polar, the desired end state is achieved — one in which the hyperamplification of what was not very much to begin with creates a tone of hysteria amid daily cultural discourse. This resulting hysteria becomes a political tool used by the instigators to push through agendas that would never have been possible in a non-hysterical situation.

Bell’s Law of Telephony

No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.

Binary Subjective Qualities

Subjective human qualities that most of us take for granted but which remain elusive for some people with brain anomalies. These include humour, empathy, irony, musicality, and a sense of beauty. Subjective sensitivity is often regulated by specific nodes in the right side of the brain that fine-tune and contextualize the information we take in. (See also Cartoon Blindness; Cloud Blindness; Metaphor Blindness)

Blank-Collar Workers

Formerly middle-class workers who will never be middle-class again and who will never come to terms with that.

Capillarigenerative Memory

The tendency of history to remember people who invent new hairstyles: for example, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and the Beatles.

Cartoon Blindness

A brain connectivity issue that makes a person dislike cartoons or information presented using illustration. Specific versions include an aversion to Saturday morning children’s television and the inability to understand and appreciate
New Yorker
cartoons. Seriously.

Catastrophasic Shifts

Enormous, life-changing decisions that are delayed until a crisis has been reached. In most cases this is the worst time to be making such decisions.

Centennial Blindness

The inability of most people to understand future time frames longer than about a hundred years. Many people have its cousin, Decimal Blindness — the inability to think beyond a ten-year time span — and some people have the higher-speed version, Crastinal Blindness — the inability to think past tomorrow.

Christmas-Morning Feeling

A sensation created by stimulus to the anterior amyg-dala that leaves one with a strong sense of expectation. (See also Godseeking)

Chronocanine Envy

Sadness experienced when one realizes that, unlike one’s dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forward.” (See also Sequential Thinking)

Chronophasia

An inability to maintain stable circadian rhythms or to approximate time or time sequencing, possibly caused by irregularities in the 20,000-cell region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Chronotropic Drugs

Drugs engineered to affect one’s sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short-term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Cloud Blindness

The inability of some people to see faces or shapes in clouds. Like prosopagnosia, or “Face Blindness,” the cause can be traced to impairment of the fusiform gyrus of the inferior temporal lobe. Fun fact: the psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in clouds or perceiving as significant other vague and random stimuli is called pareidolia.

Collapse Attraction

The situation in which people are usually at their most attractive and interesting shortly before a total personality collapse. While some of us are attracted to those who are vulnerable — because it makes us feel good by comparison, or it makes us feel good to be able to help, or to
think
we can help — it also turns out that if you are convinced that nobody could possibly like you, you often become less inhibited. Not caring gives you a bulletproof aura of mystery and aloofness.

Complex Separation

The theory that, in music, a song gets only one chance to make a first impression. After that the brain starts breaking it down, subdividing the music experience into its various components — lyrical, melodic, and so forth.

Connectopathy

Idiosyncratic behaviour that stems from idiosyncratic neural connections.

Cover Buzz

The sensation felt when hearing a cover version of a song one already knows.

Crazy Uncle Syndrome

Or, for that matter, Crazy Aunt Syndrome. One of the few genuine indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of their crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy yourself — you merely end up
different
. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful. (See also Trainwreck Equilibration Theory)

Crystallographic Money Theory

The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species. (See also Time/Will Uniqueness)

Dark-Age High Tech

Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters.

Deharmonized Sin

Seven deadly sins vs. the Ten Commandments vs. every other way of counting transgressions — the inability to scientifically count and calibrate sin.

Denarration

The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story. (See also Limbic Trading; Narrative Drive; Sequential Dysphasia)

Deomiraculosteria

God’s anger at always being asked to perform miracles.

Deromanticizing Dysfunction

Writes Alice Flaherty, “All the theories linking creativity to mental illness are really implying mild disease. People may be reassured by the fact that almost without exception no one is severely ill and still creative. Severe mental illness tends to bring bizarre preoccupation and inflexible thought. As the poet Sylvia Plath said, ‘When you’re insane, you’re busy being insane — all the time when I was crazy, that’s all I was.’”

Deselfing

Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)

Dimanchophobia

Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but, rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord’s Day.

Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year’s, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be “life in a world without calendars.” A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song “Every Day Is Like Sunday,” by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear war, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday.

Drinking Your Own Spit

That’s what it feels like to see yourself on TV.

Dummy Pronoun

The word
it
, as in “It’s raining” or “It’s six o’clock.” Not to be confused with Itness. (See also Itness)

Ecosystemic Biology

Biology that looks at bodies, both human and animal, as ecosystems as opposed to discrete entities. This way of thinking is bolstered by the fact that the average body has roughly ten times as many outsider cells as it has of its own.

Eternal Divide

Unlike the future, Eternity, by its very definition, cannot be limited by the vagaries and unknowns of time. At best we can understand Eternity as existing outside of time, as timelessness — an infinite present. Which makes you rethink that eternal afterlife you were counting on. But don’t worry, because another name for timelessness is nirvana. So it’s all good.

Exosomatic Memory

Memory stored in externalized databases, which at some point will exceed the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there will be more memory “out there” than exists inside all of us. As humans we will have peripheralized our essence.

Fate Is for Losers

A state of being whose opposite is Destiny Is for Winners.

Fictive Rest

The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.

Field Denial

The near absence of any discussion around the fact that while fields exist (for example, magnetic fields) nobody actually knows how they work, nor are we any longer trying to figure them out.

Frankentime

What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is being spent working with and around a computer and the Internet. (See also Time Snack)

The Future of Labour

The fact that there is no word in the Chinese language for a “me day.”

General Anesthetic Afterlife

The concept that death must be akin to being under general anesthetic. A variant of the belief that because you don’t remember anything from before you were born, you need not worry about what happens after you die.

Goalpost Aura

The ability of places and objects, such as football goalposts or artwork in a museum, to possess an indescribable aura. An application of the more well-known process of sacralization — wherein places such as churches and mosques are understandably transformed through human emotion, thought, and belief into sacred places — to seemingly random elements of our lives.

Godseeking

An extreme version of Christmas Morning Feeling. Significant scientific literature has postulated that religious experience stems largely from a God module based in the temporal lobe. Additionally, for those who believe, as many physiatrists do, that our ideas of God are heavily influenced by our infant memories of giant, all-powerful beings — our parents — the hippocampus, encoder of those memories, must also be important for religious experience. And finally, there is evidence that the parietal lobe plays an important role in all mystical experience. All of which leads us to the primary objection to localizing religious activity in the brain, the reductionist “nothing but” argument: that if religious states are brain states, they are nothing but brain states, and the experience of God is simply a neurological phenomenon.