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 l
ast 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<
br />
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
Player One Page 18