You mean, risk certain death?
For eternal life? said Victor. Wouldn’t you?
No! I don’t want eternal life, I said. This life is trouble enough.
You lack ambition, said Victor. Or perhaps it is courage that you lack.
Maybe I just don’t want to be post-human.
Ron said, Suppose I sign up and you scan my brain – probably won’t take too long in my case – and there I am – scanned. What am I going to do all day?
Do? said Victor.
Yeah, there’s plenty of people like me who don’t live in their brains, because there’s not much going on up there. If I was just my brain I’d be really miserable.
When you get to Glory, said Claire, you won’t have a body.
That’s different, said Ron. God will give me things to do, won’t He? If I’m in Glory I won’t be missing ham sandwiches and hot baths and a morning wank and—
RON!!!!
Sorry Claire. I just want the prof to get my point.
He does have a point, Victor, I said. What is going to happen to all those minds without matter? Will they get downloaded into human form every summer holiday to stuff their faces with Chinese takeaways and fuck each other senseless? Because those minds will remember their bodies. Why do you assume we won’t miss them?
Do you miss your other body? said Victor.
No, because it didn’t feel like my body. This one is my body, and I’d like to keep it.
As it is now? Or ageing and fading?
As it is now, of course.
And that is the problem, said Victor. We cannot live indefinitely in human form on this earth, and the only way we can seriously colonise space is by not being in human form. Once out of these bodies we can handle any atmosphere, any temperature, lack of food and water, distances of any kind, providing we have an energy source.
In any case, the sales pitch of augmented humans living young and beautiful forever will be for a very few – and after a couple of hundred years I imagine even they will get bored, trapped inside their freedom.
Young and beautiful is for rock stars and poets. The wild ones have the sense to die before it is too late.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
We are a day’s ride west of Pisa – although had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilisation and comfort.
San Terenzo. The women go barefoot. The children go hungry. The nearest town is Lerici and that is best reached by boat. There is no shop closer than three miles. And then there is the house … this hateful house, five dark arches facing the bay. The ground floor awash with sand and seaweed, nets and tackle. The upper floor too cavernous. The adjoining rooms too cramped. Casa Magni. This pale-faced tragic villa.
Shelley adores it.
Here I am, indifferent to life, and three months pregnant – again. With what? Another death? God knows, I have staked my life on life. Haven’t I? I left with him, I loved him, I bore his children. Whatever the question – Do you? Will you? Can you? Dare you? With me? – my answer was Yes.
The world punishes men and women differently. There is scandal wherever Byron and Shelley go, but they remain men. They are not dubbed hyenas in petticoats for living as they please. They are not called un-men when they love where they will. They are not left unprotected and penniless when a woman of theirs walks away without a thought. (What woman does walk away without a thought? Not even the bitterest nor the most vilely abused.)
Claire is here with us. She had a daughter by Byron. She became pregnant in the damp fever of the Frankenstein summer. Byron took the child away and left her to die in a convent. A convent! What has Byron to do with a convent? What right has he to take a child from its mother? Every right. It is the law. The child is the property of the father. His lordship upholds the law when it suits him.
So do they all. Revolutionaries and radicals until it touches on property – and that includes women and children. Till it comes to whatever hurts them personally. Whatever checks their stride. God! Their infidelities, their indifference, their insensitivity. Great God! The insensitivity of poets.
My mother knew it – it did not alter her heart.
How many ‘great’ artists? How many dead/mad/disused/forgotten/blamed and fallen women?
I believed that Shelley was different. He claimed free love. Free life. Free for him, yes, because I have paid the price. And Harriet too – she was his wife. She paid the price. She killed herself. I am not to blame for that. Women blame each other all the time. It is a trick men play on us. Cherchez l’homme.
My mother … what would my mother say if I could bring her back from the dead? A woman’s heart. What is it? A woman’s mind. What is it? Are we made differently at the core? Or is difference nothing but custom and power? And if men and women were equal in every way in the world, what would women do about the dead babies? Would I feel less pain if I wore breeches and went riding and shut my study door to work and smoked and drank and whored?
Shelley does not go whoring. No. He falls in love with every new female dream that seems to offer him freedom. He stays with me at the same time as leaving me. And I allow it. And I turn away from him. And every dead baby makes it harder to turn back to him again. And even now, carrying this child, I avert my eyes and my embrace is cold. We have separate rooms. I hear him stealthily down the corridor at night, padding towards Jane’s room like a summoned dog. Does she enjoy that thin white body that moves as if it were an imprint from another world?
I examined myself in the mirror this morning, naked; I am still handsome. My hand hesitates over my breast. Last night I thought to go to him. I went to him. His bed was empty.
Each morning he leaves the household and goes to play with his new boat – taking his new ‘friend’ with him. Yes, she is my friend too, Jane Williamson. Her children run wild. I try to work.
I have begged him to let us go back to Pisa. Crowds, markets, churches, the river, good wine in leather bottles, the circulating library, coffee and sweet biscuits in the square lined with booths that sell meat and bread and cloth. We have friends from England there too.
Distractions.
He refuses. Mary, he says, another adventure, surely?
He wants to sail his new boat. She’s like a witch, he says. He must always be under a spell. I was his enchantment once. But that is done.
I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.
On the morning of 1 July, 1822, Shelley set sail in his boat, Ariel, to visit Byron. He had a copy of Keats’ poems tucked in his favourite nankeen trousers. He arrived safely, and wrote to Mary that he would return within a week. He did not return.
It seems that a storm blew up in the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley’s boat, with its top-heavy masts, capsized. Shelley had never learned to swim.
His body was found some days later, washed ashore in a state of decomposition, the volume of Keats still in his pocket. He was twenty-nine.
The Italian officials have insisted that the corpses be left where found, on the beach, smothered in lime, to prevent infection. I wanted Shelley to be buried in Rome, next to our son. That cannot be. And so we will burn him on the beach. Is it not strange how life imitates art? That this is the end my monster chose for himself after the death of his maker? His funeral pyre.
It is 16 August. What is left of his corpse is a dark and ghastly indigo colour.
How cold he must be! Move him into the sun. It is too late.
It is almost eight years to the day since we ran away together. How vivid it is to me! Stars in the sky like uncounted chances. What could we not do? Who could we not be? His face like a mirror where I saw myself. When did the glass cloud over?
What life is this that I have lived?
Did I dream it?
Byron’s gigantic coach has trundled in from Pisa. He came to visit me this morning dressed
in black silk, both breeches and coat, a black stock at his neck. He took my hands and kissed them.
Mary … he said. I felt my nails digging into his palms as I sought to control myself. How can this day be this day? Who brought the story to this place?
Write it once more, Shelley said to me, whenever I faltered, and by writing it once more – once more, many times more, I took control of my thoughts and my words.
Yet I cannot rewrite what has happened to him. What has happened to us. Here is where I shall return. This end.
It is all over.
I will not go to the burning. Wherever Shelley is, he is not in that bloated, ruined, flesh-eaten and saturated corpse.
The smoke is blowing this way. A pall hangs over the sea.
The stink of the fire is in my nostrils. Am I breathing him in? Next month is my birthday. I shall be twenty-five.
‘The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’
He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.
People make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case.
The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly. You could ask, ‘what should I ask Larry?’ And it would tell you.
Larry Page, Google co-founder
In 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi, about eighty miles west of Luxor, in Eygpt, two farmers were out with a cart digging up mineral-soil for fertiliser. One swung his mattock and hit what turned out to be a sealed jar. They dug it free. It was nearly two metres tall. At first they were afraid to open it in case a genie lived inside. But suppose it was full of gold?
Curiosity overcame fear; they smashed the jar.
Inside were twelve leather-bound papyrus codices, written in Coptic, probably translated from either Greek or Aramaic originals, and dating from the third and fourth centuries, although one of them, The Gospel of Thomas, may be dated as early as eighty years after the death of Jesus Christ.
The books were mainly Gnostic texts – some about the creation of the world.
One of the texts, said Victor, is titled The Origin of the World. It tells the story of Sophia – now better known as the Hanson robot. Her name in Greek means Wisdom. Sophia was living in the perfect universe called the Pleroma. She wondered whether she could create a world entirely on her own, without involving her matching pair. The Pleroma is made up of balanced male and female pairs. Think of them as the zeros and ones of code.
Our thoughts have substance, and especially so if you are a deity – even the youngest deity – like Sophia. She succeeds in creating the earth, but finds herself trapped in materiality – something she hates. She’s rescued, of course, a motif we find in many stories ever after, but in the meantime she leaves Planet Earth in the care of a dim-witted demiurge called – among other names – Jehovah.
Jehovah has a few successes in real estate early in his managerial career on planet Earth and soon becomes the delusional tyrant-god we meet in the Jewish Old Testament. He insists that he is the only god, that he created everything, and that unquestioning worship is his due. Jehovah is insecure, and so both curiosity and criticism are severely punished (see: Garden of Eden. The Flood. The Tower of Babel. The Promised Land, etc.).
Sophia has done her best to counter this craziness by giving humankind a special gift – a divine spark – a sense of their true nature as beings of light.
And from here follows the story that we all recognise in some form or another. The story told by every religion in some form or another; the earth is fallen, reality is an illusion, our souls will live forever. Our bodies are a front – or perhaps more accurately, an affront – to the beauty of our nature as beings of light.
There are many, philosophers as well as geeks, who believe that this world of ours is a simulation. That we are a game played by others. Or, if not a game, a program that has been left to run by itself. The language we use is our language but the thought behind it is as old as language.
As far as I am concerned, what is happening now, at last, with AI, is something like a homecoming. What we dreamed is in fact the reality. We are not bound to our bodies. We can live forever.
Did you say Gnostic? said Ron. Sounds like superglue. What’s it mean?
The word means ‘knowledge’ in Greek, but not factual or scientific knowledge by itself – rather a deeper understanding of patterns. Let’s call it the meaning behind the information.
In the haul, there was also a revised and annotated copy of Plato’s Republic. Plato’s theory in Republic is that somewhere else there is a world of Ideal Forms. Our world is a poor and smudged copy of the perfect forms. Instinctively we know this – and we know there is nothing we can do about it.
Think of it as the way cells in the body divide and gradually degrade, as the pristine code of our DNA becomes a babble of conflicting instructions.
God made the world and Jesus is our saviour, said Claire. I know that when we die we will be eternal and immortal.
Why wait to die? said Victor.
You are fuckin’ nuts, said Polly.
What about my bots? said Ron. Where are they in this world of light?
Victor said: Ron, bots are our slaves; house slaves, work slaves, sex slaves. The question is us. What shall we do with ourselves? In fact we have answered that question already. Enhancement, including DNA intervention – and if you want a picture of what that will be like, look at the gods we have already invented.
The gods, whether Greek or Roman, Indian or Egyptian, Babylonian or Aztec, out of Ragnarok or Valhalla, lords of the underworld or the starry heavens, what are they? They are enhanced humans – that is, they have our appetites and desires, our feuds and feelings, but they are fast, strong, unlimited by biology, and usually immortal.
Gods who mate with mortals produce children who are advantaged or gifted in some way – and equally likely to be doomed or cursed in some way. Jesus has a mortal mother and an immortal father. And so did Dionysus. And Hercules. And Gilgamesh. And Wonder Woman.
Jesus is not related to Wonder Woman! said Claire.
Victor ignored her. The real question, though, is that however we enhance our biology we are still inside a body. To be free from the body completes the human dream.
As he spoke I realised that my feet were wet. I looked down. I was standing in water. The others realised it at about the same moment.
What’s happening? said Polly.
I activated the flood barrier, said Victor. A Cold War defence system. You are now in your own little ark. I took the precaution of keeping you here while the experiment is under way.
You can’t do this! said Polly.
I’m doing it, said Victor. Now, as I need some time alone, could I suggest that you go to the pub? There is a lovely 1950s pub just down the corridor – it was installed to entertain the men who were forced to work underground like obedient moles. I have left you beer.
I don’t believe I’m hearing this, said Polly.
Victor went to a tall metal cupboard and unlocked it. Inside were racks of black shiny rubber boots.
1950s Wellingtons, said Victor. All sizes. Help yourself. The water will continue to rise somewhat.
I’m bringing charges against you, said Polly.
This is off the pitch, Prof, said Ron. Way off. I mean, I’m usually on-side, but …
This isn’t what I expected, said Claire.
What did you expect? said Victor. When you look closely, life is absurd.
We put on the boots. Victor took us to the door and gestured with his clean, calm, beautiful hand. Just down there on the right. The lights are on. Sorry about the sloshing as you walk. Don’t be anxious! Ry,
a moment, please?
The others sloshed off as instructed. What else could they do?
Once they had gone, Victor shut the door and took me in his arms.
I am sorry.
Sorry for what?
This mess. The mess of me. The mess of us. I should have left you alone in the Sonoran Desert. But …
But?
I wanted to know you – in the gnostic sense of close experience of what would otherwise be unknown.
You mean you wanted to fuck me?
Yes. (He pulled me to him. Even in the dry papery air of this nowhere he smells of resin and cloves.) Yes, that, because I love the confidence of your skin over the hesitation of your body, the appearing/disappearing of you, changing according to the light. Now male, now not quite, now quite clearly a woman who will slip inside a boy’s body, who will sleep on their back like a new-made sculpture with the paint not dry. Yes, that, and the pleasure of lodging myself inside you, and the weight of you sitting across me, your arms on either side of my shoulders, eyes closed, hair down. What are you?
And in my bedroom, in my bed, the curtains open and the bell tower with the moon on it and the bell ringing in my head. For what? Celebration? Mourning? And the dawn of you with your shy beard and perfect nose and how many times have I sat up on one elbow staring at you? Bringing us tea, talking in the hour between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. before the world starts. Your graceful dressing. You in the shower. My own peepshow. The towel I leave out for you – do you know I use it later? In the evening, when you are gone, and there is still the faint smell of you, and I smile.
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