Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents

by Dean C. Moore

  “Not on your life. I don’t want my son growing up like him.”

  Leon let the setting sun work its magic on both of them, until he could come up with a better line of attack, emptying his mind to make room for more ideas. The palette of colors painted across the sky had only grown more robust in the intervening minutes. The pinks didn’t seem to much belong up against the golds. He figured he had a reconciliation to make no less unlikely.

  Finally, he said, “Don’t you work in genetics? Turning men into supermen?” She gave him a wary look, not sure she liked where he was going with this. “So you build superheroes then?” She looked away to hide the confirmation in her eyes. “You realize Natty and Laney are the two people in the world likely to advance your work years ahead of what even DARPA could do for you? And doing just that might bring you together as a family more than you can possibly know. DeWitt already plays superhero by day. Trust me, the comics are the toned down version.

  “Who knows, maybe your son will end up with those new superpowers you’re bringing on line now. And he’ll know just what to do with them, having grown up on his father’s comic books.”

  A gulf of silence occupied the space between them, only spreading wider. The unlikely confluence of colors in the dusk sky just grew more garish.

  “You should have gone into sales,” she said finally. Leon smiled. “So where’s the dynamic duo’s lab exactly?”

  Leon pointed to the sky. “Oh, no, I’m not living my life in some airship like one of those mobile hospital units that goes from country to country dispensing much needed medical treatment.”

  “Please, nothing so banal.” The sun’s disappearance behind the hills had exposed a sky thick with stars, unobscured by city lights. Leon gestured with his hand across the heavenly expanse. “I’m talking about a spaceship that travels the stars faster than light, and that opens all of the cosmos for exploration. And creates a need for enhanced humans who might possibly survive the rigors of other worlds. When, of course, they aren’t fighting to maintain the peace for a federation of planets.”

  She gulped. “Federation of planets?”

  “Stands to reason one exists. If not, I suppose we’ll just have to create it. So what do you say?”

  She returned her eyes to the sky thick with stars. So many lights pointing the way in the darkness. “Ivan!” she shouted. The kid ran up to her and hugged her waist. “Put away that comic.”

  “Why, mama?”

  “Because we’re going to go live in one.”

  “About time. I told you this whole reality thing was just a bad dream.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Time to come clean and confess acts of transgression. I allowed myself two loopholes in regards to technological breakthroughs we can imagine happening in the near future. The first is in making the hero of this tale a Nikola Tesla type, with the capacity to manifest things that ought rightly to belong further into the future. In a similar manner, Tesla’s efforts to bring us free wireless transmission of electricity on a global scale is something I’m convinced would have happened if the politics weren’t against him. While he didn’t have the chaos math in his day to back up his engineering ideas, today we know that air, which normally acts at an electrical insulator, can undergo a phase change and serve as an electrical superconductor if you send enough power through it. Given the funding and the political backing he may well have given to the world a gift over a hundred years ago that scientists have yet to give it. Why, because the same dirty politics is in place today as it was then. Luckily, because my book focuses on DARPA-like projects, and classified breakthrough technologies limited to wartime escapades, corrupt politics is hardly an issue.

  I would hasten to add in regards to the Tesla analogy, some more food for thought. Genius is by nature lazy. Feynman was once asked, how is it he could survive in theoretical physics with an IQ of 125 when the average IQ is closer to 190. His analogy was quite priceless. He said, and I paraphrase, “Well, it’s like this. The much brighter guy will see the way through the maze at a glance and set the paper down. I, on the other hand, have to try one failed route after another. But in so doing, I find ways through the maze that that fella with a 190 IQ would never have found. Some of those ways are more useful to scientists.” If genius is lazy by nature, then it should occur to most anyone that in an age overly hostile to scientific breakthroughs that such Tesla-types would simply choose another occupation. But in our current atmosphere of garage science? When folks can create bioweapons for less than a couple thousand dollars’ worth of tech? And can get their hands on CRISPR units and proceed to manipulate the genes for intelligence that might allow each of us to have a 1000IQ? The barriers to such “insane” breakthroughs no longer have anything to do with time or money, but with savvy. And guess what, we’ve taken away the major impediment to lazy genius, by making it just that easy. And who knows, maybe Tesla was never one-in-a-generation. Maybe there have always been at the very least hundreds of these folks around in any given day who now we will find out about because we will no longer be nudging them to pursue less mind-intensive tasks. To say nothing of the near-future breakthroughs that will be coming down the pike courtesy of that 1000 IQ injection we’ll be able to take. Or China’s “genius gene bank” becoming the norm for bringing babies into this world, even if it’s just the norm in China.

  The other whopping big loophole I gave myself was taking Ray Kurzweil’s dictum to heart. Namely that the pace of technological evolution, which has been of a geometric nature for some time in computers and artificial intelligence will eventually go post-exponential. Meaning that what we can’t possibly imagine for another fifty years out at least, is likely to arrive in less than five years. The analogy he gives for helping us to get around our mind’s tendency to misread the future is quite elegant. Namely, give a person a penny on day one and double the amount he gets on day two, and keep doubling it and within thirty days he’ll be a millionaire. That’s geometric progression for you. What’s more, it’s no longer limited to progress with artificial intelligence. Other fields are beginning to accelerate in kind, informed now more than ever by AI, so we can expect similar rates of progress in biology, chemistry, genetics, materials science, and so on. And even more alarmingly, with the convergence of these various fields as is starting to happen, synergies emerge that have a similar time-warping quality, allowing us to manifest tech if not in the here and now then in the near future that seems little more than magic from our more pedantic mindsets which seem so unable to get our minds around geometric, far less post-exponential rates of change.

  Okay, so much for the cheats.

  What science is taking place today that casts much of what’s depicted in the near-future world of the book as very down-to-earth and well within the realm of plausibility?

  Let’s take a look.

  NANOTECH

  Kurzweil’s immune-boosting, life-extending nanobots, prophesized for the near-future are featured here: http://singularityhub.com/2016/07/22/ray-kurzweil-outlines-the-coming-biomedical-revolution-video/

  http://motherboard.vice.com/read/engineers-develop-key-building-block-for-sophisticated-bio-computers

  A.I. (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)

  The Deep Mind project

  https://deepmind.com/

  Some examples of just how rapidly the AI learning curve is taking off:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivek-wadhwa/the-amazing-artificial-intelligence-we-were-promised-is-coming-finally_b_10592674.html

  I.A. (INELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION)

  The race is on to make each of us into the next Natty Young or Nikola Tesla, if you prefer. Some brief examples from the literature can be found below:

  Nootropics (intelligence boosting supplements)

  http://nootriment.com/nootropics-list/

  China’s genius gene bank

  http://www.inc.com/samuel-wagreich/the-company-thats-figuring-out-which-genes-make-you-smart.html

  The 1000 IQ brigade


  http://www.businessinsider.com/superintelligent-humans-with-iq-of-1000-2014-10

  Just one example of evidence that the first steps in Eugenics are already being undertaken can be found here: http://www.nextbigfuture.com./2016/07/nextbigfuture-predicted-near-term.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20blogspot/advancednano%20(nextbigfuture)&utm_content=FaceBook

  BLENDING OF AI AND IA EFFORTS

  http://io9.gizmodo.com/humans-with-amplified-intelligence-could-be-more-powerf-509309984

  http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/20/iaai-the-rise-of-intelligence-amplification-artificial-intelligence/

  Ecosystem of IA and AI

  http://futurism.com/keeping-humanity-must-cultivate-hive-mind/

  ACTUAL DARPA FUNDED PROJECTS

  The articles cited below were chosen because they bear on this story in one way or another.

  http://www.informationweek.com/government/big-data-analytics/10-cool-darpa-projects-in-development/d/d-id/1006262

  http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/05/four-darpa-projects-could-be-bigger-internet/84856/

  http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/military-technology-pentagon-robots/406786/

  https://occupycorporatism.com/darpa-continues-human-experiments-to-create-military-super-soldiers/

  THE FOREST THAT GLOWS AT NIGHT

  Numerous bioluminescent life forms have been found recently in the Peruvian rainforest (see the link below). Being as my story is set in the Brazilian section of the Amazon rainforest, I clearly took some liberties based on the idea that because glowing life hasn’t yet been found in Amazonia, doesn’t mean it won’t ultimately be found (as much of the region remains unexplored), or won’t ultimately evolve. Necessity being the mother of invention, even in nature, after all.

  http://blog.perunature.com/2015/04/bioluminescence-in-peruvian-amazon-like.html

  ENERGY MEDICINE AND ENERGY HEALING

  While this tradition extends over 3,000 years in the Far East, it has only recently moved front and center in Western culture. (Unless of course we’re speaking of Acupuncture and Acupressure which have been used in pain management here for decades. Acupuncture has more recently being offered as a pain management alternative during many surgeries).

  And who’s driving the exploration into energy medicine in the West, you ask? Who, of course, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

  http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/darpa-wants-to-jolt-the-nervous-system-with-electricity-lasers-sound-waves-and-magnets

  MIND READING TECH

  For those readers who may still find the near-future mind-reading tech featured in the book a bit far-fetched, take a look at the links below to see where we are with the technology currently.

  http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-aquaint-2011-7

  http://metro.co.uk/2014/11/03/mind-reading-brain-scanner-can-eavesdrop-on-thoughts-in-your-head-4932492/

  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/mind-reading-helmet-decodes-your-inner-4558815

  THE FEYNMAN ASIDE

  While I love using the quote paraphrased from Feynman above, because I find it and his epic humility quite inspirational, I should tell you that no one takes the 125 IQ figure seriously. From Psychology Today:

  Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another)

  FURTHER READING

  For those who would like a more in-depth understanding of Ray Kurzweil’s projections about how we are accelerating into the future, I strongly recommend THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR.

  With all the above in mind, it’s easy to see how I’m far more likely to have undersold the near-future than oversold it. And that’s just not my experience, but the experience of every science-fiction writer who ever lived.

  ONE FINAL NOTE ON THE AMAZON RAINFOREST

  Throughout the story, I tried to do what I could to relay some of the horrors taking place against nature in this part of the world. But I couldn’t get to them all. Sadly, because, in no small measure, those specifics would fill several books all of their own. I was alarmed to find, for instance, that the rainforest, due to so much deforestation, has recently become subject to droughts and forest fires. Something that historically was unthinkable in the region.

  It’s my sincere hope that all readers continue to reflect on what small acts they can take to help in protecting and preserving what’s left of the most unique and arguably most precious environment on earth.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  So much research goes into even a highly speculative book of this kind. As much as you’d be tempted to believe it’s all imagination, it’s not. To this end I’m indebted to far too many souls to name. But the short list would have to include:

  Those witting and unwitting souls who share their work so freely on the internet. In particular, those folks whose discoveries or reportage thereof weighed heavily in granting my prose that extra realism factor.

  My primary Facebook newsfeed folks who keep their nose to the ground for all breaking technology news, especially those pertaining to the transhuman era. Gareth John, Marco Santini, Sergio Tarrero, René Milan, Louisa Baqués, chief among them, but there are literally hundreds of others.

  And, of course, to the many transhumanist Facebook groups to which I belong, whose mind-trust is invaluable. Not just for the sharing of great intel, but for the willingness of all participants and experts in their fields to answer questions.

  And last but not least, to my loyal beta readers, and to my writer’s circle. They help me to get outside of my own head and help to illuminate all my blind spots when it comes to editing and fact checking.

  That said, all errors are entirely my own. As the buck stops with me.

  AFTERWORD

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