No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School

by Jonelle Renald

  Her growing discomfort with transhumanist principles made the idea of working to support iCon’s plan for the future feel like a big negative. Their goals for altering the human condition through technology didn’t seem like an improvement for the most part to her. Eternal life by linking to computer technology, living forever without disease or old age, putting Death to death with tech while leaving your soul and humanity behind. To her, it all sounded like a bad idea, a horribly bad idea. So many things lost, so many things that could go wrong. If it was possible, was it worth the cost? What were the unintended consequences of this future? Did the H+ advocates really expect to avoid all surprises and setbacks that might impact their essential core being after they tampered with their DNA and permanently modified their bodies? Would they even remember who they used to be once they went down this road?

  By Saturday evening after the research she’d done so far, Mia could see that transhumanists plans, their so-called improvements, would leave out everything that made up the best parts of her life. Simple pleasures like literature, art, history, philosophy, the great outdoors, music, good food, family and friends. Reading Chaucer and Dante wasn’t just part of her job being a professor. She enjoyed the literature found in old books, found reading them to be both a benefit and a satisfaction. To her great books were a treasures left behind by their authors, a record of their thoughts, the truths they had discovered. By writing their discoveries down, they preserved those ideas for readers to discover centuries later, providing a priceless perspective to see beyond the conventional wisdom of their own day. Context and history made sense to Mia, and she would never exchange rewards found in studying the past for endless life of digital experiences. H+ didn’t suit her, didn’t seem worth what it would lose. Of course she knew Humanity+ people wouldn’t like her ideas, that they would think her choices were outdated, romantic, and old-school. But why did they want to change the future for everyone?

  Mia spent Sunday morning in her robe and flannel pajamas, looking out the window at a snowy landscape that looked warm in the bright sunshine but was actually extremely cold, the temperature hovering around zero. Seated on her forest green sofa facing the statue of Jesus, she read several chapters from Psalms, including Psalm Twenty-Three, which she read out loud. Afterward, she went to the kitchen to make breakfast (pancakes with real maple syrup and butter, with a side of bacon), watching the cardinals, juncos, and sparrows that visited her bird feeder while she ate.

  Sunday afternoon, Mia researched iCon CEO Damien Cezary, and what she discovered was very interesting. Besides running the corporation he had founded after grad school, Cezary was now very involved in the philosophical promotion of Humanity+. He had even written a novel about it, his transhumanist hero searching for an upgrade to omnipotence while overcoming the obstacles put in his path by the backward and non-evolved individuals who were loyal to antiquated Homo sapiens. After writing his book, Cezary had formed a political party called Progressive Transhumanism, running for president in the past three election cycles, campaigning around the country in a bus decorated with cute, adorable robots. The main plank of his political party’s platform and the primary precept of his transhumanist philosophy was, “Saying ‘Yes!’ to every human desire.” As Cezary explained it, “Honoring individual autonomy, we will never submit to any external demands. If we want to live forever and never die by altering our DNA or by uploading our consciousness to a network, no one can tell us ‘No!’ Instead, we will say ‘Yes!’ to every human desire. This is the transhumanist’s primary goal. We choose to press evolution forward, not waiting for Mother Nature to act slowly and randomly on her own. We will step forward as the author of our own future, never stopping until our goal is fully realized. All resources must be dedicated to this pursuit of Humanity 2.0. All legal and political road blocks must be taken down and permanently removed. Nothing and no one will be permitted to stand in our way.”

  Six months earlier, after outpatient surgery to implant a microchip in his brain, Cezary had been filmed in his hospital bed, his head shaved and wrapped in bandages. The tech was intended to translate his thoughts into digital code, then broadcast the code to a remote server which would then translate it back into readable text. But the demonstration had been only a partial success. After initially working, the chip stopped transmitting data an hour later. Cezary promised his company would work out the bugs and return with a functioning chip at a later date. In spite of the failure, true H+ believers were ecstatic. It was a sign of how close the imminent Geek Rapture truly was!

  During supper on Sunday evening, Mia reflected on everything she had learned during the weekend. She knew that she would resist any kind of DNA upgrade for herself, even if iCon or some other company should succeed in their plans to upgrade humanity. Living longer — five hundred years or more — might seem like a good idea, but she wasn’t willing to give up the life she had now in exchange. She already knew she didn’t believe in better living through plastic surgery, already didn’t like the results of frozen faces and mouths stretched too wide. Using computer technology to artificially extend life didn’t seem much better. Both were based on the idea that controlling externals would lead to a better inner life. That seemed backward to her.

  Another hesitation for her involved putting trust in the scientists behind the H+ science. Given her experience, implicit trust in the concept of a universally reliable science was impossible. She had little reason to feel any confidence in decisions made by officials and bureaucrats who ignore the variety found in a world where people aren’t all stamped out with the same cookie-cutter template. She herself was one of those not-the-same people, someone who didn’t react in the same way to chemicals that other people did. Even the mildest over-the-counter cold remedies gave her hallucinations or disrupted her sleep with horrific nightmares. In addition, she was not technically allergic, but long-term exposure to all products made from GMO soybeans and all its chemical derivatives caused her body severe distress. Given the extremely wide range of products using soy as an ingredient, products that everyone encounters daily including most processed foods, nearly every sort of cosmetics, soaps and shampoos with oil in them, most pills of any kind, health care items — soy-related materials were almost impossible for her to avoid. Why were store shelves completely littered with potentially toxic chemicals? Experts had given their blessing to various chemicals that threatened her health, ignoring her experience because she was part of a small minority. It was true that soy didn’t bother most people, but she wasn’t most people. “Too bad for you, Minority! The Majority is doing just fine, so this toxic chemical is hereby declared safe. Officially yours, (signed) SCIENCE.” But it wasn’t true, it wasn’t safe for her health. No wonder she didn’t trust science.

  Twelve years earlier while she was in college, Mia had started getting progressively more and more weak and tired, more and more hampered by brain fog, until she was barely able to cope with the most routine daily tasks. And no doctor she went to for help had any idea what the source of her problem was. She received prescriptions that didn’t help, but that instead made things worse by causing her to break out in a rash. So she quit taking the pills, but the rash never went away. One morning she woke up, as tired as she had been before she went to sleep, feeling that she was headed steadily downward with no end in sight. She could almost see Death — that faceless movie character dressed in a hooded black robe, bony hands gripping a tall scythe, standing on a street corner five, six blocks away from her apartment — waiting to move in closer. This vision represented more than a fear of dying or a confrontation with the idea of her own mortality, or even dread and worry about not recovering. In her bones, Mia could feel Death waiting for her and knew that if something didn’t change, this steady decline was going to end her. Not that day, probably not next week or next month, but this weakening was going to result in her death. And the notion wasn’t especially terrifying because it was her reality. The realizat
ion was matter of fact information, like watching the weather forecast for the next ten days. Sunshine and rain, leading to death. Bring in the lawn chairs, shut the windows, get a list ready of your favorite hymns to have sung at your funeral.

  Odd thing was, the day after this brush with the grim reaper, Mia found the way out of her impossible situation. That night just before bed, she was using an organic vitamin E oil on a stubborn rash on her neck, hoping for an improvement to her skin. She had the oil on her finger when she rubbed her left eyelid because it itched. Next morning, her left eyelid was red and nearly swollen shut, hurting like it had been stung by a fracking wasp. But the saving grace was that only the left eye was affected. Finally a situation of “this, not that” where she could identify a culprit — the vitamin E oil had caused the problem. She read the label on the bottle and saw that the major ingredient was soybean oil. So she searched online for soy allergy and found hundreds of articles telling how pernicious GMO soy was to many people, and most importantly, how difficult it was to identify soy as the source of the problems. How most prescription pills used soy as a binder and this was the reason why so many medicines cause rashes.

  Here was Mia’s answer, her path out of a premature trip to Hades. Avoid soy and get better! Stop drinking soy milk and start making her food from scratch herself. And it had worked. Her strength returned, and the brain fog lifted. To celebrate her return to health, she took up fencing. That is why she loved sabre fencing so much. This sport allowed her to use her regained strength in every way, use every faculty that had been threatened earlier — mind, body, and spirit.

  So, no. She had zero confidence in Science to make her life better. Science made statements that were true only for the majority, while it ignored what the serious consequences were for the minority with non-standard reactions.

  By Sunday evening Mia realized she would never go work for iCon — not if it was just herself to think about. Given her objections to their goals, only under these circumstances (Edgestow College closing abruptly and Jan’s future being tied to hers) would Mia even consider accepting a job offer from a corporation like iCon. Or was it a club of some kind and not a corporation, because she wasn’t starting as an employee or as personnel. She was “becoming a member” of Team iCon. At least that’s how it was stated in all of iCon’s paperwork. This wasn’t a job or a career, it was a membership.

  Weeeellll, she’d already made up her mind that it wasn’t going to be a lifetime membership for her. All she wanted was a temporary transfer, not a permanent enrollment. She was willing to help Jan out and get ahead a little financially herself, but her teamwork would be for a short-term duration while she looked for another teaching position at a college somewhere. iCon might want passionate team members, but she had her own agenda to think about.

  For a brief moment, she almost gave in to that little voice trying to tell her to turn the job offer down. But what was a subjective feeling compared to the very real responsibility of helping Jan with her financial challenges? Mia told herself that she had no real choice. She knew she could offer critically needed help to Jan, and she would willingly sacrifice a period of her own discomfort working at iCon, knowing the financial stresses Jan was under caring for her mother by herself. And what could go wrong? She was accepting this job at iCon as a side-step career wise, a make-do situation only. She knew that she didn’t agree with their goals, and she wasn’t blinded by the lure of earning multiplied money. She was totally aware of what she was deciding. This was just a step back to parry, moving aside an incoming stroke, a strategic retreat from her ideal life. Nothing that she couldn’t undo later. Later on, she could get back on the right track, find another college to teach at. She told herself, “I can stay separated from iCon. I won’t allow them to contaminate me.”

  For just a moment, she was confronted with how truly monumental her objections were to working for iCon. This wasn’t a matter of small differences in values. Mia laughed and said, “In my mind, I’m comparing iCon to a GMO — an FDA approved food that is toxic to me, something that nearly did me in. Do I need to quarantine myself? Do I really think iCon will poison me if I take this job, even for a short time? To put it in business terms, we are not very aligned concerning our ultimate mission and goals. Not aligned in any way, if the truth be told. But can I keep myself separated and protected from their ideas? Yes, I think I can. I can keep from being contaminated by iCon and still do a good job for them.”

  To silence that still small voice saying “Don’t” once and for all, she said, “Frack it,” and signed her name next to every X on the disclosure forms and on the membership acceptance form, wrote herself a note to make an appointment with the iCon-recommended doctor to have blood drawn for a wellness evaluation, then opened her laptop to write an email accepting iCon’s offer.

  8 | Job

  Eight weeks after her first day at iCon, Mia was standing in her old office in Flanagan Hall, looking out the window at the melting snow on the lawn of the Edgestow College commons. Robins were returning, singing and chirping, congregating in trees and on the bare patches of brown grass. She sighed, “So glad to see something good is on the way.” The month of March in Iowa was always difficult for her. Little hints of the next season soon to arrive, but Old Man Winter never let go long enough to allow the green of Spring completely in.

  She missed the door to her office, because she really needed to close it and gather her wits for a few minutes. Alone. Without interruption or observation. A privilege denied to everyone below the vice president level at iCon. There was no privacy in cubicle world with those walls barely above waist high, and here was no longer any privacy in her old office either. iCon had taken the office door away, prepping for a remodel of Flanagan Hall. There would be only a few remaining days to find shelter here, only a short time that she would still have access to her old office. She stood at the window, her back to the door, massaging her temples. She was going to curse the day when she would be saying, “I miss my office.” Next week she was to be permanently moved into a cubicle in the iCon HQ, closer to the rest of the Corporate Communications team in their department area on the ground floor not far from the lobby. She dreaded that idea. Once that was done, no more private place for thinking, no looking out a window anymore. Not that the weather had been worth looking at lately. Gray skies, threatening rain or snow, but never doing one or the other. Just dark, cold, and clammy — thoroughly unpleasant. And a blizzard forecast for tomorrow. Looking back over the last eight weeks, the nature of her job at iCon felt exactly like the weather. Especially the dark and cold part. She smiled and thought, “Clammy, maybe not so much. But a little.”

  What a horrible day it was turning out to be. Just that morning she had been walking down a hallway in the iCon HQ, and Andie Fenna (Public Relations Writer, Communications and Investor Relations) had been walking toward her. And although there was plenty of room to pass on either side, Andie kept walking directly into Mia’s path. To avoid a last minute collision, Mia stepped aside, and Andie had passed her without speaking, a smirk on her face. Thinking back on the incident, Mia was even more angry now than she had been immediately following the encounter. She had decided that Andie had taken up a game of office hallway chicken to put Mia in her place, attempting to dominate her physically and make her feel intimidated. But instead, her bullying was having the opposite effect. The silent aggression pushed Mia into abandoning her natural inclination to be polite and considerate, and in the future, she would respond with actions more appropriate to aggression and challenge. Mia was accustomed to people with slashing sabres coming directly at her with the intention of scoring a touch, so there was nothing about a bleached blonde, five foot nothing, overweight twenty-two year old mincing around on three and a half-inch spike heels that intimidated her. Andie was going to face a very different outcome if she ever repeated that trick of walking into her path again.

  Eight weeks ago on her first day
on the job at iCon, at eleven in the morning, all the transfers from the defunct Edgestow College had been invited to gather in the HQ lobby for their presentation to the founder and CEO of Integrated Computer Operating Network Systems, Damien Cezary. Nineteen people lined up in a straight row, as if they were in a wedding (or funeral) receiving line, nervously waiting to meet the family. Their introduction to the corporate universe had already begun. Just entering the HQ had opened the eyes of these newcomers. Even the building design stated that they were about to be initiated into a very different realm with very different rules and dictates governing all behaviors and actions.

  Very different from the classic Collegiate Gothic architecture of the buildings on the Edgestow College campus, iCon’s HQ emulated the design principles of Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style building (accommodating nature to civilized habitation but on a scale suited to giants, not humans). The larger-than-life, six-story building was over a half mile in length (one kilometer long), one hundred to three hundred feet in width on average with cantilevered office suites situated on brick piers jutting out throughout its length. (Contrast this to the architecture found in Barrow Heights, where before iCon, the biggest building in town had been the middle school — the high school was in the next town north on the highway.) Suited to this grand design and sparing no expense inside, the HQ lobby lived up to the impact made by its exterior. Spacious and ostentatious, it was a stunning expanse filled with commissioned paintings and sculptures. The entire front wall of the iCon lobby (two stories tall) was made of plate glass panels, bringing in natural light and a panoramic view of the sky. The lobby was a large red and white space, imposing whether it was empty or filled with people. The accumulated effect of the imposing lobby’s design was to make people feel tiny and insignificant compared to the grand scale of the room. In many ways, the effect of the lobby was similar to that of a Gothic cathedral in the sense of awe that it manufactured. Even the largest crowd was overmatched by the room. Humans had no choice but to succumb to the atmosphere it evoked and acknowledge that the building was awe-inspiring and feel dwarfed by the space.