Intercepted Email - Subj: From one Monster to Another
Project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios
Project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios
From: e2050@eco.eleventhour.fut
To: adam001@darwinianposthumanist.cub
Hello adam001,
I am a monster. Ordinary, yes. Human, yes. Plugged in even, active as I am on eleventh hour. But I’m not modified like you. I’m a cyborg, but only because I hold the phone to my chest, and look at the warps, and check a little too often who’s listening. Is it up to fifty-thousand yet? That’s my game. Last check, forty-eight thousand six hundred and six. Two thousand online, right now. With the African Avatars, it might be over fifty thousand. But poor people in slums have a way of not reporting. Understandable, we might say. The rigors are getting in there too, and yes, they’re human, and water is always the first priority.
So I’m wired like you, but only on the outside, not inside, like you. Is it pity that makes me still sometimes want to fuck you? You, so alien to my point of view? I admired you when I saw you, I must admit. First saw your blog on Skeptics, your certainty that the brain is one with the mind. I agreed with that; I agreed with that part, but there was the part you missed, the unstated, un-arguable part, which was what you wanted to say… that the brain caused the mind like a one-way street. So I delicately responded with a query. What about radio. Radio? Radio like, if I bust the radio this way, so that it can’t receive 106.3 FM because the dial won’t turn to that notch anymore? I can’t ever hear 106.3 FM again, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? And by the way, we’ve both got L.A. addresses and let’s meet for lunch.
You told me over and over you hated the eleventh hour, and had some bad experience there, that people tried to push you this way or that. Hmmm, I said. You think you can be pushed. Well, I don’t quite see it that way, but okay. Nice enough meeting, coffee, a bagel, some nice partly-cloudy on San Vicente. I checked eleventh hour again, I kissed you because your coldness enthralled me and I could feel the electricity moving at some point deep within your lips. Brain implants, wired through your lower jaw, which for whatever reason in the design of the human organism is highly conductive. Funny, that you should be wearing coke-bottle eyeglasses and have the strength of a mule. I correct. It wasn’t wondering why the mods; I am just attracted to the post-human, in fact, still am. Maybe too many fetish magazines when I was a crazy teenager in SF; back then it was just leather and latex, but today you can have the latex inside you, it’s not just skin anymore.
At first I found you beautiful, just shy of stylish, and on our second meeting I checked eleventh hour, found I’d won the game I’d set for five years in the future without even looking. One million acres of rain-forest re-seeded in Ghana, just like that. Repromise for another million acres? The crowd advised creating a new sub-net to do that, this time referencing the micro-economic feeds posted by several local chieftains. Spend too much time on eleventh hour and soon enough you have too much time on your hands. That’s why I said to hell with it for the rest of today, went upstairs to your loft above the coffee shop and fucked your flesh and vinyl body, just like that. So fascinating, so alien… when you’re naked you’re not really naked; there’s clothing inside you as well. I knew it was dangerous the moment I got involved. It always is. I find it beautiful, the mods, I’ve told you. It’s a fascinating art, and I’ve thought about doing my fingers, or maybe my eyes, just for the thrill. Seeing differently, that’s what I’m about. A friend recently called me an adrenaline junkie. Yep… I guess I am, and the whole world gets served.
But by our third meeting, it was your obsessions that scared me. You had to do this, didn’t you? You were boasting about the thirty-terabytes wired right into your neocortex, telling me how you could calculate pi to the millionth place and see into the next room right through the wall, and how a new hierarchy would soon replace all the ones that eleventh hour had shattered, and I asked you what are you modifying from? If you had inquired, I would have stayed with you. If you had even just stared blankly back at me for half a second, even then I would have stayed with you. But you didn’t. You just didn’t get the question. You didn’t acknowledge the question at all.
You just pulled up your cam and made another argument to the world, much the same as the one that attracted me in the first place, but posted as if I’d never asked the question I had. That’s when I realized how sad you were. That’s when I realized the blinds were always drawn in your place, the sun only admitted in along perfectly maintained Venetian strips. You sit here six hours a day, making your arguments, cajoling obscure professors to listen to you. And ten hours at the lab, proving your point of view. Thirty terabytes, you tell me with your wicked smile, like it’s who you are. You can peel off whole books from memory. You can twist Augustine and make him stand on his head. You can cite Leviathan on a dime, Hume, Marx and Engels, and prove, at least to yourself, that eleventh hour will fail. Humans, you say… you don’t need to say much more.
Arguments I can hear, I’m willing to listen. I fucked you one last time, a little less passionately I can say, after our fourth meeting. You’re committed to something beautiful, that’s clear enough, and if you admitted it I might actually be moved. You won’t admit it, and it’s your sadness, not your arguments that I can’t penetrate. For all your super-strength, you shuffle. That fourth time’s when I met you at the lab. Your colleagues, all doctorates, all some variation of you, that’s the day I got your world. That’s the day I left you, because that’s the day I could not lie to myself anymore. That’s the day I looked into what was left of your eyes and had to acknowledge what my intuition had been telling me all along. It’s not human you think is disgusting but your own self.
That was the day you told me that one of your colleagues discovered the seat of consciousness in the brain. Hooray for you. Now you could delete it; now at last you’d be able to answer that un-answerable question that I’m certain still lies at the heart of everything you say: am I doing it right? Well, I know you thought you’d be able to answer it, and I know I tried to tell you otherwise. Eleventh hour has made every one of your beloved dictators and hierarchies completely impotent in every corner of the world, even with their super soldiers. They’re still in power on the books, but they just can’t outsmart a billion of us, and I’m sorry you had to end this way. You’re still alive, I know, but even without brain mods I know where you’re headed. If I hate you, it’s because I still love you. I’m sorry, and I hope one day, despite yourself, you come to hear.
You know how to find me.
- E
e2050@eco.eleventhour.fut
To: adam001@darwinianposthumanist.cub
Hello adam001,
I am a monster. Ordinary, yes. Human, yes. Plugged in even, active as I am on eleventh hour. But I’m not modified like you. I’m a cyborg, but only because I hold the phone to my chest, and look at the warps, and check a little too often who’s listening. Is it up to fifty-thousand yet? That’s my game. Last check, forty-eight thousand six hundred and six. Two thousand online, right now. With the African Avatars, it might be over fifty thousand. But poor people in slums have a way of not reporting. Understandable, we might say. The rigors are getting in there too, and yes, they’re human, and water is always the first priority.
So I’m wired like you, but only on the outside, not inside, like you. Is it pity that makes me still sometimes want to fuck you? You, so alien to my point of view? I admired you when I saw you, I must admit. First saw your blog on Skeptics, your certainty that the brain is one with the mind. I agreed with that; I agreed with that part, but there was the part you missed, the unstated, un-arguable part, which was what you wanted to say… that the brain caused the mind like a one-way street. So I delicately responded with a query. What about radio. Radio? Radio like, if I bust the radio this way, so that it can’t receive 106.3 FM because the dial won’t turn to that notch anymore? I can’t ever hear 106.3 FM again, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? And by the way, we’ve both got L.A. addresses and let’s meet for lunch.
You told me over and over you hated the eleventh hour, and had some bad experience there, that people tried to push you this way or that. Hmmm, I said. You think you can be pushed. Well, I don’t quite see it that way, but okay. Nice enough meeting, coffee, a bagel, some nice partly-cloudy on San Vicente. I checked eleventh hour again, I kissed you because your coldness enthralled me and I could feel the electricity moving at some point deep within your lips. Brain implants, wired through your lower jaw, which for whatever reason in the design of the human organism is highly conductive. Funny, that you should be wearing coke-bottle eyeglasses and have the strength of a mule. I correct. It wasn’t wondering why the mods; I am just attracted to the post-human, in fact, still am. Maybe too many fetish magazines when I was a crazy teenager in SF; back then it was just leather and latex, but today you can have the latex inside you, it’s not just skin anymore.
At first I found you beautiful, just shy of stylish, and on our second meeting I checked eleventh hour, found I’d won the game I’d set for five years in the future without even looking. One million acres of rain-forest re-seeded in Ghana, just like that. Repromise for another million acres? The crowd advised creating a new sub-net to do that, this time referencing the micro-economic feeds posted by several local chieftains. Spend too much time on eleventh hour and soon enough you have too much time on your hands. That’s why I said to hell with it for the rest of today, went upstairs to your loft above the coffee shop and fucked your flesh and vinyl body, just like that. So fascinating, so alien… when you’re naked you’re not really naked; there’s clothing inside you as well. I knew it was dangerous the moment I got involved. It always is. I find it beautiful, the mods, I’ve told you. It’s a fascinating art, and I’ve thought about doing my fingers, or maybe my eyes, just for the thrill. Seeing differently, that’s what I’m about. A friend recently called me an adrenaline junkie. Yep… I guess I am, and the whole world gets served.
But by our third meeting, it was your obsessions that scared me. You had to do this, didn’t you? You were boasting about the thirty-terabytes wired right into your neocortex, telling me how you could calculate pi to the millionth place and see into the next room right through the wall, and how a new hierarchy would soon replace all the ones that eleventh hour had shattered, and I asked you what are you modifying from? If you had inquired, I would have stayed with you. If you had even just stared blankly back at me for half a second, even then I would have stayed with you. But you didn’t. You just didn’t get the question. You didn’t acknowledge the question at all.
You just pulled up your cam and made another argument to the world, much the same as the one that attracted me in the first place, but posted as if I’d never asked the question I had. That’s when I realized how sad you were. That’s when I realized the blinds were always drawn in your place, the sun only admitted in along perfectly maintained Venetian strips. You sit here six hours a day, making your arguments, cajoling obscure professors to listen to you. And ten hours at the lab, proving your point of view. Thirty terabytes, you tell me with your wicked smile, like it’s who you are. You can peel off whole books from memory. You can twist Augustine and make him stand on his head. You can cite Leviathan on a dime, Hume, Marx and Engels, and prove, at least to yourself, that eleventh hour will fail. Humans, you say… you don’t need to say much more.
Arguments I can hear, I’m willing to listen. I fucked you one last time, a little less passionately I can say, after our fourth meeting. You’re committed to something beautiful, that’s clear enough, and if you admitted it I might actually be moved. You won’t admit it, and it’s your sadness, not your arguments that I can’t penetrate. For all your super-strength, you shuffle. That fourth time’s when I met you at the lab. Your colleagues, all doctorates, all some variation of you, that’s the day I got your world. That’s the day I left you, because that’s the day I could not lie to myself anymore. That’s the day I looked into what was left of your eyes and had to acknowledge what my intuition had been telling me all along. It’s not human you think is disgusting but your own self.
That was the day you told me that one of your colleagues discovered the seat of consciousness in the brain. Hooray for you. Now you could delete it; now at last you’d be able to answer that un-answerable question that I’m certain still lies at the heart of everything you say: am I doing it right? Well, I know you thought you’d be able to answer it, and I know I tried to tell you otherwise. Eleventh hour has made every one of your beloved dictators and hierarchies completely impotent in every corner of the world, even with their super soldiers. They’re still in power on the books, but they just can’t outsmart a billion of us, and I’m sorry you had to end this way. You’re still alive, I know, but even without brain mods I know where you’re headed. If I hate you, it’s because I still love you. I’m sorry, and I hope one day, despite yourself, you come to hear.
You know how to find me.
- E
e2050@eco.eleventhour.fut
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