After Forever – 1
The decision at hand is whether we need to come together. Whether we should head to the reprod centre and submit our wiring for the three-month-long process of generating a new human being. Whether we should scan our dials for consent at the centre’s Promise Wing like Anika and Raji did last year, like the two Jays did the year before. Whether we should share the inner maps of our minds with strangers like that, even if they call themselves docs.
The word doc, father had told me many years ago, comes from the word doctor. Doctors were humans who specialised in the prolonging of human lives through the optimisation of the body, back when humans had bodies that weren’t manufactured in facilities by other humans wearing bodies manufactured in the same facilities. There were doctors of all sorts, father had told me. For human digestion – back when humans would need to consume plants and animals for nourishment, back when there were nutritious plants and animals for humans to consume. For human creation – before human wiring would be regenerated from stored consciousnesses and housed in heat-resistant casings. For human reproduction – back when human reproduction was a series of physical acts culminating in the formation of an untrained, mortal human at a doctor’s centre. That’s where we get the word doc from, father had said. From the formation of untrained, mortal humans in doctor’s centres. Just like in the millenia before the Great Stew, a doc creates untrained humans at the reprod centre now. Each new human produced by splicing the wiring of two humans together, untraining and mortalising the resulting wiring in line with the stipulations of the Amundsen-Scott Convention and the treaties that preceded it, carefully placing the resulting consciousness in a heat-resistant casing, and pronouncing the result a human.
Father’s a historian, specialising in the social hierarchies of the Great Age of Survival. Having lived through its tailend – his parents had both been regens mapped from settlers who had landed in Antarctica from India – he revels in telling the story of what he sees as the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity. How incredible, he often exclaims, that we, as a species, found a way to survive the portended demise of our planet and our civilisation. It’s nothing short of a human-made miracle that we’re here. On Earth. Alive. As a youngster, I was in awe of him. I was more so in awe of mother, who, like so many of her contemporaries, had her early-grade body perish through annealing. Truth be told, I idolised every one of the great survivors, who had powered the hardest-fought glide in human history. A generation that had been through the unimaginable trauma of mass burial, that had made the scientific breakthroughs that had replaced early-grade bodies like those of mother’s with durable casings and made human brains reliably reproducible, that had signed the Amundsen-Scott Convention, decommissioning parents and grandparents and sometimes great-grandparents to save first-gen regens from the horrors of immortality. I was convinced, perhaps because father convinced me, that those of my generation would be among the last few who would find themselves in the presence of greatness. I wanted to grow up to be just like him, and since I couldn’t go back in time and live through the tailend of the Great Age of Survival like he had, I contented myself with studying to be a historian as a paltry homage.
It was at my studies – level four, to be precise – that I met Anax. They were studying psychology, I history. Early on, in a shared course on the history of human madness, they’d submitted an essay of unparalleled beauty, ‘On the decriminalisation of insanity’. For weeks, I read it every day, until I could repeat entire passages from memory. Like the passage in which they’d argued fervently that, for bodied humans, being committed would have been identical to incarceration. That pre-Stew humans must have seen limits to bodily autonomy exactly as humans of today might see being reprogrammed with half a brain. That the commission of bodied humans to care facilities was tantamount to incarcerating them for their condition, irrespective of the severity of their psychological state. That madness, as they’d written, has been a felony for most of human history.
It took weeks of reading and re-reading for me to work up the courage to speak to them; I was stirred at last by their conclusions on the monetisation of madness. For much of human history before the Great Stew, human society’s acceptance of the extranormal followed the same reluctant steps: desire → stigma → delegitimisation → struggle → monetisation. The society of bodied humans didn’t ever truly come around to accepting deviations from what it considered the norm; it just came to monetise whatever it saw as devious. Think of it as an eccentricity tax. For the first time in my life, I found resonance with a misanthropic argument. Shielded from my father’s influence and safely ensconced in the world of the L4s, I concluded that I had to meet the person who’d introduced me to it.
