The Possibility of an Island (24 page)

After a meal as frugal as the previous one, I took my place next to the prophet in his Range Rover. Miskiewicz got in the front, and one of the guards took the wheel. The path continued beyond the tent village, hewn into the rock; a cloud of red dust quickly enveloped us. After a quarter of an hour the car stopped in front of a parallelepiped of a squared section, immaculately white, devoid of openings, which looked about twenty meters long and ten meters high. Miskiewicz pressed a remote control; a massive door, with invisible hinges, turned in the rock face.

Inside, he explained to me, there reigned, day and night, and throughout the entire year, a uniform and constant temperature and luminosity. A staircase led us to a gangway above that went around the building, serving a succession of offices. The metal wardrobes embedded in the walls were filled with DVDs of carefully labeled data. The lower level contained nothing but a hemisphere with transparent plastic sides, irrigated by hundreds of tubes, likewise transparent, leading to polished-steel containers.

“These tubes contain the chemical substances necessary for the manufacture of a living being,” continued Miskiewicz, “carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and the different trace elements…”

“It is in this transparent bubble,” added the prophet enthusiastically, “that the first human conceived in a completely artificial manner will be born; the first real cyborg.”

I looked at the two men attentively: for the first time, the prophet did not seem to be joking at all, he appeared to be impressed, and almost intimidated himself, by the prospects opening up in the future. Miskiewicz, on the other hand, seemed completely sure of himself, and keen to continue his explanations: inside this room, he was the real boss, the prophet no longer had the last word. I then became conscious that the outlay of the laboratory must have been expensive, indeed very expensive, that it was probably through here that the largest part of the subscriptions and profits passed, that this room was essentially the true raison d’être of the sect. In reply to my questions, Miskiewicz made clear that they were now able to realize the synthesis of the whole of the proteins and complex phospholipids implicated in the functioning of cells; that they had also been able to reproduce all of the organites, with what he considered to be the temporary exception of the Golgi apparatus, but they had run into unforeseen difficulties with the synthesis of the plasmic membrane, and were therefore not yet able to produce an entirely functional living cell. To my question about knowing whether they were ahead of other research teams, he frowned; I had, apparently, not completely understood: it was not simply that they were in advance, they were the
only
team in the world to be working on an artificial synthesis, where DNA no longer provided the development of embryonic layers, but was used uniquely for information concerning the completed organism. It was precisely this that was to enable them to bypass the embryo-genesis stage and directly manufacture adult individuals. So long as you remained reliant upon normal biological development, it would take about eighteen years to construct a new human being; when all of the processes were mastered, he believed he would be able to reduce this time to less than an hour.

Daniel25, 5

IN REALITY,
it took three centuries of research to reach the goal that Miskiewicz had set in the first years of the twenty-first century, and the first neohuman generations were created by means of the cloning he’d thought we would have dispensed with far more quickly. It is, however, true that his embryological intuitions turned out, in the long term, to be extraordinarily fertile, although this unfortunately led to the same credit being accorded to his ideas on the modeling of the functioning of the brain. The metaphor of the human brain as a fuzzy Turing machine was finally shown to be completely sterile; there really were in the human mind nonalgorithmic processes, as in reality had already been indicated by the existence, established by Gödel from the 1930s onward, of undemonstrable propositions that could, nevertheless, be unambiguously recognized as
true.
But in this, too, it took three centuries to abandon that direction of research, and to become resigned to using the old mechanisms of conditioning and apprenticeship—improved, however, and made more rapid and reliable by the injection into the new organism of the proteins extracted from the hippocampus of the previous organism. This hybrid method combining the biochemical and the propositional corresponds badly to the desire for rigor expressed by Miskiewicz and his first successors; its only ambition is to represent, according to Pierce’s operationalist and ever so slightly insolent formula, “What we can do best, in the real world, given the current state of our knowledge.”

Daniel1, 17

Once injected into the memory space of the application, it is possible to modify its behavior.

—kdm.fr.st

THE FIRST TWO DAYS
were mainly taken up by Miskiewicz’s lectures; the spiritual or emotional aspect was scarcely present, and I began to understand Cop’s objections: at no moment in human history had a religion ever extended its influence over the masses by appealing to reason alone. The prophet himself remained slightly in the background, I met him mostly at mealtimes, he stayed in his cave much of the time, and I imagine that the faithful must have been slightly disappointed.

Everything changed on the morning of the third day, which was to be devoted to fasting and meditation. Around seven, I was awoken by the grave and melancholy sound of Tibetan horns playing a simple melody, on three indefinitely held notes. I went out onto my terrace; dawn was breaking on the stony plain. One by one the Elohimites came out of their tents, unrolled mats on the ground, and stretched out, placing themselves around a platform where the two horn players flanked the prophet, who was sitting in the lotus position. Like the followers, he was dressed in a long white tunic; but while theirs were made of ordinary cotton, his was cut from shiny white satin, which sparkled in the dawn light. After a couple of minutes he began to speak in a slow, deep voice, which, well amplified, could be heard easily over the sound of the horns. In simple terms, he incited the followers to become conscious of the earth on which their bodies lay, to imagine the volcanic energy that emanated from the earth, this incredible energy, superior to that of the most powerful atomic bombs; to make this energy theirs, to incorporate it into their bodies, their bodies that were destined for immortality.

Later, he asked them to strip themselves of their tunics, and present their naked bodies to the sun; to imagine, there too, this colossal energy, made up of millions of simultaneous thermonuclear reactions, this energy, which was that of the sun, as of all the stars.

He asked them to go deeper than their bodies, deeper than their skins, to try through meditation to visualize their cells, which contained the DNA that was the repository of their genetic information. He asked them to become conscious of their DNA, to fix the idea firmly in their minds that it contained their blueprint, the blueprint of the construction of their bodies, and that this information, unlike matter, was immortal. He asked them to imagine this information crossing the centuries in expectation of the Elohim, who would have the power to reconstitute their bodies, thanks to the technology they had developed and the information contained in their DNA. He asked them to imagine the moment of the return of the Elohim, and the moment when they themselves, after a period of waiting similar to a long sleep, would come back to life.

I waited for the end of the meditation session to join the crowd that was heading toward the cave where Miskiewicz’s lectures had taken place; I was surprised by the effervescent, slightly abnormal gaiety that seemed to have seized the participants: many called to one another loudly and stopped to embrace for a few seconds, others advanced skipping and leaping, others sang a joyful threnody as they walked. In front of the grotto a banner had been hung bearing the words “Presentation of the Embassy” in multicolored letters. Near the entrance I bumped into Vincent, who seemed very removed from the prevailing fervor; as VIPs, we doubtless had a dispensation from ordinary religious emotions. We sat down in the middle of the others, and the shouts ceased as a giant screen, thirty meters wide, rolled down the far wall; then it went dark.

The plans for the embassy had been conceived with the help of 3D-creation software, probably AutoCad and Freehand; I later learned with surprise that the prophet had done everything himself. Although completely ignorant in almost every field, he was passionate about computers (and not only about video games), he had a good command of the most elaborate tools for graphic creation, and had, for example, created the sect’s entire Web site with the help of Dreamweaver MX, going as far as to write a hundred pages of HTML. With the plans of the embassy, as with the conception of the site, he had in any case given free rein to his natural taste for ugliness; beside me Vincent emitted a pained groan, then lowered his head and stared obstinately at his knees throughout the entire screening—which lasted slightly over half an hour. Slides followed slides, generally linked by transitions in the form of the explosion and recomposition of the image, all of it to the sound track of Wagner overtures sampled with loud techno. Most of the rooms of the embassy assumed the form of perfect solids, from dodecahedrons to icosahedrons; gravity, doubtless through artistic convention, was abolished there, and the viewpoint of the virtual visitor floated freely up and down rooms separated by Jacuzzis overburdened with precious stones, with walls adorned with heartbreakingly realistic pornographic etchings. Some rooms included bay windows looking out over a landscape of lush prairies, dotted with multicolored flowers, and I wondered briefly how the prophet intended to go about achieving such a result in the radically arid landscape of Lanzarote; given the hyper-realist rendering of the flowers and blades of grass, I finally concluded that this wasn’t the kind of detail that would stop him, and that he would doubtless use artificial prairies.

There followed a finale in which the viewer rose into the air, and the entire structure of the embassy was revealed to them—a star with six branches and curved points—then, in a breathtaking tracking out, the Canary Islands, then the whole of the surface of the globe, while the first bars of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” thundered in the air. Then silence fell, while on the screen vague images of galactic star clusters followed. These images disappeared in their turn and a spotlight fell on the stage to accompany the appearance of the prophet, bounding resplendent in his ceremonial costume of white satin, with yokes that threw off adamantine flashes. An immense ovation rippled through the room, everyone stood up applauding and shouting: “Bravo!” With Vincent I felt more or less obliged to get up and applaud as well. It lasted at least twenty minutes; sometimes the applause faded, and seemed to die out; then a new, even stronger wave started, originating in particular from a small group down at the front gathered around Cop, which spread to the whole of the hall. There were thus five fadings, then five reprises, until the prophet, probably sensing that the phenomenon was eventually going to die a death, opened his arms wide. Silence fell immediately.

In a voice that was deep and, I must admit, quite impressive (but the sound system overdid the echoes and low notes a bit), he sang the first bars of the welcome song for the Elohim. Several people around me repeated the words softly. “We will re-build the em-bass-y…” The prophet’s voice began to climb toward the high notes: “With the he-lp of those who love you.” More and more people around me were singing. “Its pil-lars and its co-lonn-ades.” The rhythm became more indecisive and slow, until the prophet sang again in a triumphant, powerfully amplified voice, resounding throughout the entire grotto: “The new Je-ru-sa-lem!” The same myth, the same dream, just as powerful three millennia later. “And it will wipe every tear from their eyes…” A wave of emotion ran through the crowd and everyone repeated after the prophet, on three notes, the chorus, which consisted of a single word, repeated indefinitely: “Eeee-looo-him!…Eeee-looo-him!” Cop, his arms stretched skyward, sang in a stentorious voice. A few meters from me I noticed Patrick, his eyes closed behind his glasses, his hands spread in an almost ecstatic attitude, while Fadiah beside him, probably rediscovering the reflexes of her Pentecostalist ancestors, writhed, chanting incomprehensible words.

There was another meditation, this time in the silence and darkness of the cave, before the prophet spoke again. Everyone listened to him not only in veneration, but also with a mute, adoring joy that bordered on pure rapture. I think this was mainly owing to his tone of voice, which was supple and lyrical, here marking tender and meditative pauses, there crescendos of enthusiasm. His speech seemed a bit incoherent at first, starting with the diversity of the forms and colors in animal nature (he invited us to meditate on butterflies, which seemed to have no other reason for being other than to fill us with wonder through their shimmering flight) and going on to the burlesque reproductive customs current among different animal species (he lingered, for example, on a particular species of insect in which the male, fifty times smaller than the female, spends his life as a parasite in her abdomen before leaving it, to fertilize her, then die; he must have had a book like
Funny Biology
in his library, I suppose the title existed for all the disciplines). This disorderly accumulation of details built up, however, to a
strong idea,
which he expounded to us immediately afterward: the Elohim who had created us, us and all life on this planet, were undoubtedly high-powered scientists, and we had to follow their example and revere science, the basis of any practical achievement, we had to respect it and give it the means necessary for its development, and more specifically we had to congratulate ourselves on having among us one of the world’s most eminent scientists (he pointed to Miskiewicz, who stood up and stiffly saluted the crowd, to thunderous applause); but, if the Elohim held science in great esteem, they were no less, and indeed above all,
artists:
science was only the necessary means for achieving this fabulous diversity of life, which could not be considered as anything other than a work of art, the most grandiose one of all. Only colossal artists had been able to conceive of such admirable luxuriance, diversity, and aesthetic imagination. “It is also, therefore, a huge honor for us,” he went on, “to have with us two artists of great talent, known the world over…” He gestured toward us. Vincent stood up hesitantly; I followed him. After a moment of wavering the people around us moved apart and formed a circle to applaud us, smiling widely. I made out Patrick, a few meters away; he applauded me warmly, and seemed to be growing ever more emotional.