Mrs. Illinois Congressman laughed, “Oh, that’s so true. You should have seen me on a trip to England when my husband, without any notice at all —”
Mia thought, “How different this is. And how pleasant. Everyone is so friendly. None of the frack I have to deal with in the Corporate Communications and Investor Relations Department.”
Some time later, Mia looked at her glass and thought, “Empty!” She went to the bar to get another rumpletini. Chase was there, standing to one side, deep in conversation with Mr. Missouri Senator. Chase was saying, “I’m talking about ignoring ignorant people. Outcomes have been determined, and we can’t be deterred by people drawing their own conclusions. We’re taking them where they need to go, in spite of themselves.”
Nodding, Mr. Missouri Senator replied, “Yes, that’s the best way forward. It’s essential to move quickly on this legislation. Mustn’t give the naysayers a chance to build up steam behind the opposition’s response.”
Chase nodded gravely. “It’s the only way to make progress.”
Another hour and Mia was getting out of the black SUV back at her front door. As Mia unlocked the front door, Chase held open the storm door for her, the height of his auburn head equalling the top of its frame.
He said, “You made a great impression tonight, Mia.”
She looked up to say thank you and caught him peering down the front of her dress. He didn’t care that she had noticed, and his hand brushed against the back of her skirt.
“Hey! Stop that!” she yelled.
“So sorry. How clumsy. Please accept my apology for any awkwardness.”
“Well. Of course. Good night.”
Quickly shutting and locking the door behind her, she escaped inside her house, glad the drapes were already drawn. She didn’t turn on the living room lights, but sat on the forest green sofa opposite the statue of Jesus gleaming white in the semi-dark room. She asked it, “Why does it always turn toward the creepy with him?”
It was several minutes later that she asked herself another question out loud. “How do you know when you’ve started to erode your moral fiber?”
12 | Confer
Two weeks later, Mia exited the airport terminal in Miami. She’d made a prison break from the chilly and oppressive, silent and stone cold atmosphere. And that was just the atmosphere on the iCon campus. So different from the warm welcome Florida was offering her — a blue sky with fat white clouds lazily floating across it, summer for the asking. Back in Iowa and other nearby Midwest states, March was rushing out like it had rushed in, like an arctic lion, threatening a blizzard. Tomorrow. So marvelous nothing had stopped her flight today! Taking in a deep breath of warm tropical air laden with the fragrance of sunshine on green and growing plants, she smiled to hear the sounds of birds singing. On the taxi ride to the hotel, she rolled down the window so she wouldn’t miss one single scent, sight, or sound. Here in Florida, winter didn’t exist. She looked at herself in the taxi’s rear view mirror and smiled, happy that everything cold had been left behind. In addition to this change in the weather, the change in venue was also doing her outlook good. This conference was a place where she would be learning things (something she was good at), and doing well would make her feel competent and valuable again.
The hotel where the conference was located, where all the people from iCon were staying was in Miami Beach, right on the ocean. The others from Team iCon attending the BMI Rising Technology Congress had arrived the day before for a pre-conference jam and party last evening. However, Mia had not been included in the invitation. Her hotel room (two queen beds, mini-frig, and microwave) was beautiful and had a view of the inland canal and the parking lot — no ocean view for her. All the rest of Team Communications was staying in suites with balconies that overlooked the ocean, although there were dozens of other teammates from iCon scattered throughout the hotel, also not in suites. (Seems it is an advantage if you’re the department making the travel arrangements.) Well, that told her where she stood in her department’s and iCon’s hierarchy (bottom-ish), as if she hadn’t already figured that out. Calling on her cell phone, she checked in with Marsha when she arrived at the hotel. No one else from iCon was staying anywhere near her room, and no one had made any plans including her. As she had suspected, she was a last-minute add-on, an afterthought. Again.
She thought, “So the rest have decided to confer this week without me. Well, hooray for me! I am going to put iCon out of my thoughts for the duration of the conference. I’m on my own, and I will just go and learn as much as I can about transhumanism and get up to speed so I can make better contributions as a writer.” No sense wasting another minute thinking about how miserable she was working at iCon.
The first item on her agenda was the keynote address for all the conference attendees, held in the hotel ballroom. The pathway there led through the BMI Rising Technology Congress’ Vendor Show and Expo. In dozens upon dozens of booths, the Humanity+ vendors were insisting, “The future has arrived NOW!” All were offering to help people discover their niche in the H+ world by giving away trinkets, tote bags, lanyards, key rings, and mugs displaying their logo and company slogan — each company promoting their ideas for an enhanced transhumanist future. She was surrounded by signs, demonstrations, and professionally produced videos designed to persuade you that their transhumanist ideas were better than the transhumanist ideas in the booth next door. Statues and photos of robots and cyborgs decorated booths everywhere. Myriad groups were hoping to be the first to hear the Last Digital Trumpet and lead the vanguard of the elect who would be changed in an instant, improved and transformed in the twinkling of a nano-bit, and gathered into their eternal cyberspace home, propelled upward into the Geek Rapture.
Observing the other people attending the conference gave Mia the impression she had been transported into a totally new world, and she was lost without a guide or map. Before today, she’d never realized the extent of the transhumanist universe. It was like being at a cosplay convention with many sporting e-tattoos or glowing sub-cutaneous chips, happy and excited nerds seeking a Digital Nirvana, VR-glassed participants walking toward the vision of their own enhanced universe. Pursuing other aspects of H+, some conferees had already begun the journey to transcend and move beyond their current state, tattooed to resemble animals, reptiles, or aliens, leaving their human appearance behind with implants for antlers or muzzles, embedded devil horns and symbolic demon tattoos, lizard skin and reptile eyes, or feline facial features. The energy level was very high, people talking loudly and excitedly in high pitched tones, crowds exploring the vendor show to find something to buy. Except for the brief online research she’d done before accepting the offer from iCon, these people and ideas were totally brand new to her. Mia had previously thought she was pretty tech savvy, but what she was seeing here proved that she didn’t know anything about where future technology was headed. She needed to catch up, if only for self-defense purposes. She thought, “Otherwise I could go to bed one night and wake up a cyborg the next morning.”
Everywhere she looked, there were products based on totally new concepts and technologies, offered by groups and organizations with many bewildering names and acronyms (such as the one in the conference’s title):
BMI: Brain Machine Interface.
HER: the Human Enhancement Revolution.
IEET: the Institute for Ethics in Emerging Technologies.
Transhumanity: non-scientists and artists promoting the understanding of transhumanism.
Transhumanist Party: “The Only U.S. Presidential Party Promising YOU the Right — and the Technology — to Live Forever.”
Wolfram Alpha: online search engine using an artificial intelligence to answer questions.
SNePS: natural language software for intelligent cognitive robots.
BRAIN: Brain Research through Advanced Innovative Neurotechnologies �
� Mapping the connectome, every neural connection in the human body.
DNA-based computers: molecular biology hardware storing massive amounts of data (even videos) using enzymes and DNA molecules.
The Blue Brain Project: attempting to reverse engineer the human brain.
aHuman: developing human personality via computer program.
AND: Artificial Neural Devices.
AILEENN: Artificial Intelligence Logic Electronic Emulation Neural Network.
Hierarchical Temporal Memory Numenta: technology to replicate brain function.
Cyc: a database of everyday knowledge, to enable machines to use human reasoning.
Trying to drum up interest in their own Humanity+ conference scheduled for next winter in Provo, Utah, a group of Mormons had a booth at the vendor show. They had been very successful at creating buzz with dozens of young men in their twenties, some wearing black suits with white shirts and dark ties. Handing out brochures promoting information on the upcoming event, the young men staffing the booth wore T-shirts that read “Mormon Transhumanist Association” above their logo — a wooden wagon wheel between two out-stretched feathery wings. The size of the group and the degree of interest surprised Mia. She thought, “Very futuristic for a religion founded in the nineteenth century.” The vinyl banner over the booth read, “We should learn to become gods, to raise each other up. Learn to become Christs to save each other, comfort, and heal one another.”
Another group focused on political issues was trying to gather support for a range of topics — humane transition into the technological future through legislating protection for the sanctity of each individual human life, a guarantee of human rights for clones and human hybrids, a mandate for the government to extend the length and quality of the human lifespan, a provision for economical access to artificial wombs, and a ban on the coerced use of microchips. They also sought federal funding for all aspects of using technology to improve human existence. Another booth was looking for signatures on a petition for a Technology Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law restricting the development of transhumanist tech, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom to opt for any desired transhumanist alterations and procedures,” and so on. Mia thought their offerings might be too conceptual, because there weren’t many people in either of these vendor booths.
In contrast, these other booths had large crowds gathering information, with many conferees flashing their credit cards to make purchases:
Computer science departments from several universities
Businesses offering edited DNA
Monolayer graphene substrate vendors
Avatarible
Inventoried, stochastic neural networks with morphological and cognitive enhancement
The Breakthrough Institute
Wearable tech companies
Channel Zilch
Memberships in transhumanist societies, agendas, movements like Advancing Singularity, The Trans-Religious Transhumanist Network, Immortality and Community
Utopias and X-stream futures via the Geek Rapture
Neural networks loaded on a USB stick
For many others at the vendor show, Nimrod the ancient Sumerian tyrant was their poster child. Recognizing the name, Mia knew him from Genesis in the Bible, a mighty hunter (humans were his prey) and the builder of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. But here, he was admired for challenging God by becoming a giant even though he had been born a normal human, altering and profaning his own DNA after he was born, perhaps with magick or perhaps with ancient lore and forbidden knowledge, to make himself one of the “mighty ones,” known then as the gibborim. The self-same achievement twenty-first century transhumanists were attempting to duplicate with technology and science, preparing to construct and implement the necessary combination of AG/CT nucleobases using 3-D DNA printers, which are already available for purchase from several companies.
What surprised Mia the most was the degree to which H+ had already made an impact on the people at this conference. She had only recently heard about the plan to merge computer technology into human life, and had assumed it was blue sky thinking for a far-off, sci-fi future. But according to what she was seeing at the vendor show, certain aspects of transhumanism had already arrived for many people. And there’s more to come, invasive programs like the Internet of Things — due to be introduced before 2020, with many other changes to begin within a decade after that. So soon!
After a look at the mind-expanding vendor show, it was time for the conference to begin so Mia made her way to the ballroom. Inside the darkened hall (big enough to park a fleet of corporate jets inside), a welcome to everyone attending the International BMI Rising Technology Congress was given by keynote speaker Byron Melendez, one of the vice presidents in iCon’s IT department.
“Transhuman — what does it mean, what is it all about? If I could define it for you, I would say transhuman means beyond human, moving above, beyond, leaving behind, more than the heritage that our caveman ancestors provided for us. Transhumanism is about propelling human destiny beyond where we are today by taking the future into our own control, shaping the next step in our evolution through radical science and technology. Why? To improve the human condition! Put Death to death! Health and long life are our imperative.” (cheers from the audience)
Melendez continued, “So I welcome all you Humanity+ people to the conference! As Zoltan Istvan would say, Welcome to all you life extensionists, biohackers, techno-optimists, Singularitarians, roboticists, AI proponents, cyborg-wannabes, and futurists. Before you upload your mind to the cloud, download the information we have to offer here at our conference. Decide how far you will go along the path the transhumanists are blazing. At the sessions this week, learn what can be done today, catch a glimpse of what tomorrow will bring, so that you can determine what you are willing to do to become a god and conquer death, reversing the inevitable end humanity is currently headed toward.” (louder cheers from most of the audience)
Following the keynote address, the moderator at the first general session introduced an expert panel discussion. But first he started with praise for the Geek Rapture. “The day is nearly here where human consciousness can be uploaded into a computer environment. I’m not talking about artificial intelligence constructed from scratch by code, although that work is proceeding at quantum speed as well. I’m talking about the actual transference of one specific human’s thoughts, personality, and talents — the realization of mind uploading. (applause from the audience) Discover perfect health, expanded sensory perceptions, unlimited access to every bit and byte of archived information — all making for a better and endless life. We want to be the death of mortality. (applause and cheering) Who has the right, the authority, to tell us we cannot do what we want?”
Later, the first breakout session Mia selected to attend dealt with the growth of human knowledge and its ever-increasing pace of development. According to the speaker, Buckminster Fuller formulated the Knowledge Doubling Curve, which proposed that before the year 1900, human knowledge was doubling every century. The twentieth century had seen the rate of this learning curve take an exponential turn upward. After World War II, knowledge was doubling every twenty-five years, with the rate of change continuing to accelerate. By 2015 the quantity of knowledge pertaining to the average person was doubling every year. By the year 2020, knowledge and information will double every twelve hours! Sleep for eight hours and wake up behind the curve, knowing about half what you should where technology is concerned. And there’s a bigger problem being left behind in your understanding of the next generation of new technology than mere ignorance or losing status because you have outdated tech. If you fall too far behind, encountering new technology might pose a danger to your life, cause a fatality through the misuse of its function or use. You could end up like a Neanderthal trying to dri
ve a car (or even walk across a busy highway), or a bird that flies over a massive solar farm, dead before you know you’ve encountered technology that can be a dangerous hazard to the uninformed.
In another breakout session, the panel of subject area experts discussed efforts to make sensory input possible via computer systems, asking the audience what the boundaries should be for experimenting on human subjects. (The consensus: no boundaries to limit experimentation.) They were also excited at the prospect of “freeing Mother Earth from the burden of parasitical life.” It took Mia a few moments to realize that by parasitical life, the experts meant human beings who breathed oxygen and needed food and water to live. She presumed they meant all those other humans and weren’t putting themselves into the parasitical category. For the rest of the session, the panel focused on the question, “How can we throw off limits to progress and help transhumanism liberate humanity?” In another breakout, she learned that data storage technology was no longer a barrier to uploading human consciousness, technology having reached the point where it was now possible to store on one device all the information contained in one brain — 1000 Brontobytes, give or take. This means that each person’s lifetime of experience, knowledge, and skill development could be categorized and archived in networked databases, made available for sharing between all individuals on the planet. Hard-wired minds would no longer be limited by the intellect provided by your genetics. Everyone would be able to grasp exactly what Einstein thought, if only Einstein had been plugged in and his thoughts harvested. The speakers grieved over all the people from history lost and unsampled, their contributions never to be shared.
In spite of multiple comments Mia heard showing their disrespect for the average, normal person, most of the experts giving talks at the BMI Rising Technology Congress were enthusiastically confident that by the year 2030, the majority of people around the globe would happily agree, at a minimum, to enable their brain to be connected to the cloud and adopt the necessary genetic or wetware engineering. (Mia assumed the experts were under the impression that the average person would do whatever some random technocrat told them to, without question or hesitation.) This optimism was contrary to a report by other transhumanists that the biggest obstacle to moving forward came from the prejudices of the unenlightened and their resistance to the Brave New H+ World.
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