77 Shadow Street

28

Topper’s

Over appetizers of baked stuffed mushroom caps, they talked about Renata Dime even though Mac said that thinking about the woman put him off his mood. All these months later, a subject about which Dime had written seemed to be gaining ever more traction in the scientific community, and maybe it was a topic they should build a segment around for their new radio show.

The book of hers that they had tried to read—Mac got to page 104, Shelly to page 260, the halfway point—had been a philosophical exploration of posthumanism. At least that was the subtitle of A More Rational Species. By the time that Mac put the book on the floor and stamped on it a few times to express his disgust, perhaps 20 percent of the text had concerned posthumanism and 80 percent had celebrated Renata Dime, her singular intelligence and keen insights, about which she could not say enough, though perhaps only because her publisher specified a maximum word count for the volume.

According to Shelly, by the time you got to page 207, the text was 90 percent about either Renata’s life or Renata interpreting Renata’s theories for lesser minds, or Renata reinterpreting Renata’s theories for her own benefit now that she had reached “a more mature point of view and greater sense of synthesis from which to more fully understand the unconscious depths of my previous insights.” Shelly didn’t stamp on the book, as Mac had done. She took it with her on one of her Saturday-morning walks and dropped it in the open fire in a barrel at an empty lot where manual laborers waited for employers to pull to the curb and offer them a day’s work.

Posthumanism was not Renata’s invention, only something about which she had been interested in bloviating. A great many scientists and “futurists” believed that the day was fast approaching when human biology and technology would merge, when all diseases and genetic maladies would be cured and the human life span vastly extended by BioMEMS—Biological Micro Electron Mechanical Systems. These tiny machines, as small as or smaller than a human cell, would be injected by the billions into the bloodstream to destroy viruses and bacteria, to eliminate toxins, and to correct DNA errors, as well as to rebuild declining organs from the inside out.

Now, finishing his order of stuffed mushroom caps, Mac Reeves said, “The no-disease-long-life goal seems okay to me. I sure don’t want my dad’s arthritis.”

Pointing at him with her fork, Shelly said, “Hey, maybe BioMEMS could cure your stubbornness, since that appears to be genetic, too.”

“Who would want to cure a virtue? What you call stubbornness, my dad and I call commitment to our ideals.”

“Refusing to use the GPS in the car is an ideal?”

“I always know where I’m going.”

“Yes, you do. The problem is you get from point A to point F by way of point Z.”

“It’s called the scenic route. And there is an ideal behind the refusal to use a GPS. It’s the ideal of human exceptionalism. I’m not going to surrender my free will to a stupid machine.”

“Some exceptional human beings created the GPS,” Shelly reminded him. “The machine may be stupid, but it’s not stubborn.”

“Remind me again why I married you.”

“Because you knew I can carry a radio show.”

“I thought it was because you’re smart, funny, and sexy.”

She shook her head. “Nope. You knew that if you had an off day when you were on the air, it wouldn’t matter because I’d be there to pick up the slack.”

“Not that I ever have an off day,” he said.

“Not that you ever do, baby.”

Advocates of posthumanism envisioned BioMEMS—in this case robotic red blood cells called respirocytes—that would conduct the oxygenating function with more efficiency even than natural cells, storing and transporting oxygen hundreds if not thousands of times more efficiently than biological blood. A Mac or Shelly with BioMEMS could run a marathon and hardly be winded, or even skin-dive without scuba gear and remain underwater hours without needing to breathe.

“The downside of respirocytes,” Mac said, “is your sister would talk even more and faster because she wouldn’t have to stop as often to catch her breath.”

“Which is why we’ll want to spend long hours underwater, where we can’t hear her,” Shelly agreed. “I sure love Arlene, but it is kind of scary thinking her nonstop rap might one day be machine-assisted.”

“They’re predicting nanorobotic-augmented blood by 2025, maybe 2030 at the latest. You know what’s going to happen if the life span goes up like to three hundred or something?”

“We’ll have to get another gig. I love radio, but I can’t do it for two more centuries.”

“Maybe we’ll have to,” Mac said. “For sure, the government isn’t going to pay out social security to anyone younger than two hundred fifty.”

“I wouldn’t worry about social security, baby. It’ll be bankrupt long before 2025, and that’s the truth.”

“The whole subject, posthumanism—maybe it’s too complex for breakfast-club radio.”

“Or too dark,” Shelly said. “People want feel-good in the morning.”

The dark prospect of posthumanism was the part of it that most excited the theorists and scientists: the augmentation of the brain with hundreds of millions of microcomputers made largely of carbon nanotubes, which would be distributed throughout our gray matter. These tiny but powerful computers would interact with one another, with the brain, and potentially with every computer in the world through a wireless network, tremendously enhancing the individual’s intelligence and knowledge. The posthuman species, a combination of biological and machine intelligence, never aging, nearly immortal, still human in appearance, inspired scientists at MIT and at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and at hundreds of other universities, institutes, and corporations around the world. They saw at last a possibly swift path to a human civilization with superhuman capabilities, the total submission of nature to humanity, the acquisition of godlike power, the looming end of nationalism and tribalism and superstition, therefore the elimination of all limits in all things.

As the waiter brought their entrees, Mac said, “For the show, we could just focus on the cheery part of it, get some expert on to talk about that. Anyway, the people working toward posthumanism don’t see a dark side. They see it as progress toward total freedom.”

“What could go wrong, huh?” Shelly said. “What could possibly go wrong when the aim is to make a perfect world?”