Methuselah's Children

Transcript for audio log entry.

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Sometimes the hard part is figuring out where to begin. Not in this case, though. The beginning is simple. It all began—the end, that is—began when we, the scientific community—although maybe, in hindsight, I should say we, the Scientific Oligarchy, found incontrovertible proof that there was no God. No afterlife. No judgment.

The proof was amazingly simple to find, being right there, in front of all of us, the whole time, throughout all of history. But it took ...

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... owed the results to the world, frankly, we weren't prepared for the reaction. The funny thing is, by now, most people already acted like there was no God. Few churches still existed, fewer still attracted more than a few dozen parishioners, but still, we were surprised. Oh, sure, a very tiny minority refused to believe us, but that much we expected. It's how many people seemed to lose their minds when shown absolute proof that there is no Great Beyond. For generations most people showed little to no regard for God, but judging by their extreme reaction to the news, it's as if even the staunchest atheist believed deep, deep down that they could offer a little prayer of contrition on their death bed, just in case. But no more.

After the riots, mass suicides, arsons, murders, and other countless acts of violence began to subside, the next important question surfaced: what next? Since bio-utilitarian ethics had long ago replaced religion for most people anyway, the ground work was laid for the next step. With no afterlife, no hope of anything Beyond, the concerns of the Flesh became the be-all, end-all of human existence. But the specter of Death hung like a pall over everything. The answer was quite simple, really. We did away with death.

Fortuitous with the fall of God was the rise of bioengineering and nanotechnology. Combined, the two disciplines could create virtual immortality in a human being. Of course, the problem arises—how does our planet sustain an 8 billion-plus population that never dies and continues to grow? Obviously, it can't. So we sterilized the human race—those that were allowed to live, that is.

Even at zero growth, an eternal 8 billion would be a drain, not only on the planet's resources, but on the general level of happiness.

First to be humanely euthanized were those that were mentally and physically handicapped. Then came the criminal element, followed by any population centers that refused to comply with the new order. After that, we still had a global population that exceeded 6 billion. Estimates for a stable, eternally happy population were about 3 billion. So we instituted a lottery. Of course, the riots that broke out did make some decisions easier in that regard.

When the immortality program finally began in earnest, it was the dawning of a new age of humanity, the Golden Age—The Final Age, as it turned out.

Bioengineering made the human body adaptable to the changes wrought by the nanomachines. It was the nanomachines that provided the key to human immortality. The nanites, rather like a virus, take over the host body's DNA, essentially re-writing the genetic program. The nanites then monitor and maintain the body on a cellular level, responding to trauma, repairing damage, and blocking pain when necessary. Nothing short of disintegration can kill the host. Aging is stopped, and depending on the host's age, reversed.

After four years, all of humanity was reborn as eternally twenty-five years old. War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death were defeated, once and for all.

The first task of our new immortal race was to automate as many of the mundane, labor-intensive tasks as possible. After all, who wants to spend eternity unclogging drains, or maintaining roads? Some had broached the idea earlier, before the purges, of keeping some of the undesirables around for slave labor—but of course the idea was rejected. We are, after all, not monsters.

Food production, manufacturing, and general maintenance were all fully automated within ten years. Areas of the globe that the newly down-sized human race would no longer need to populate were returned to their natural states. Pollution was scrubbed from the air and water; wildlife that had been on the verge of of extinction bounced back. We had created Paradise, the Eden that never really existed. Ironically enough, with Eden also came the Serpent.

No longer shackled by the restraints of work, mortality, or even morality, the human race was free to indulge its every whim, every fancy. Artists could paint and sculpt and write almost nonstop, never having to worry about paying the bills, needing only an hour of sleep a night and as little food as possible. Hedonists explored the limits of their new bodies in ways that would have made Bacchus blush, as sex was given and taken as freely as money used to be.

It was rather surprising, then, how quickly everything began to get ... boring.

We weren't even a hundred years into the Golden Age before the cracks started to show. New art began to slow from a flood into a trickle. The crazed sex parties began to turn into ... dull sex parties, as if all in attendance were just going through the motions. Scientific discovery, which was mostly abandoned at the dawn of the Golden Age anyway, completely ceased.

It was halfway through the second century of the Golden Age when people experimented with pain as a distraction. Unfortunately, the nanomachines kept us from feeling any pain. Or getting too drunk. Or stoned. Or high. Or numb. Not even sleep was a refuge from the increasing grind of daily existence, as the nanomachines would only allow us an hour for recharge. People began demanding that the scientists who had delivered them from death and responsibility do something about our new plight, but there was nothing we could do. The nanomachines were too perfect, too efficient in their work. A terrible realization began to dawn on us all.

By the third century, many people stopped doing ... anything. Stopped eating. Stopped fornicating. Stopped creating, walking, moving. They just lay on their backs, staring at nothing. Even though they didn't eat, the nanomachines kept them alive, just they way they were designed. Of course, not all of us stopped. No, we stubbornly kept going through the motions of existing. But none of us were actually living anymore.

After four hundred years the mass suicide attempts began, as fruitless as they were and as insane as the concept even seems when faced with the prospect of nonexistence. But by now, nonexistence was the desired outcome. Many tried to drown themselves in the ocean, actually walking in large groups, lemming-like, over coastal cliffs. They couldn't drown. Some tried to get eaten by large carnivores, but even the most aggressive predators always ran from us, as if they couldn't stand our smell—or maybe the smell of the nanomachines. As desperation grew, a few intrepid soul ... heh, I almost said 'souls' ... funny, that—a few intrepid people began to throw themselves into active volcanoes. Unfortunately for them, the heat wasn't enough for complete disintegration, and they couldn't even have the bliss of excruciating agony. They all just climbed out.

For a thousand years ... A THOUSAND ... YEARS!! ... nothing changed. We, never changed. I don't know why I'd held out so long before coming to this decision. I could've ended all the numbness ... so long ago. But ... I get ahead of myself. You see, I've been lying. Since the start, I've been lying about one very, very important detail, as have all of us, the Scientific Oligarchy. A lie promulgated over a thousand years ago. We never actually found proof of God's nonexistence. It was a well orchestrated conspiracy, carried out on a populace that was dooming itself generation by generation. We thought to save the human race, instead we've damned it.

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In fact, the thing we discovered, the horrible, horrible truth that we found on one fateful day, so long ago is ...

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... things I've been lying about, something that only I know. We are not absolutely immortal. You see, it's the nanomachines. I helped design them, create them. I built into them ... why, at the time, I didn't really know ... a way to end all our suffering. Hidden away, at ...

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... am now, is the signal that will cause every nanomachine in every human being to vaporize the host, then themselves. All at once, painlessly, the human race will simply cease to exist. This signal will also shut down all of the automations that have kept humanity from the need for labor and work, and purpose.

Except ... and here's the final secret, the one I leave for posterity: hidden away, in a remote corner of the world, is a small population of humans, unchanged by the nanites, unaware of the greater world around them, untainted by our ultimate blasphemy. We, the Scientific Oligarchy, kept these baseline humans mortal and unmolested as a scientific curiosity, to see how evolution might change them even as we remained eternally unchanged. They will inherit this cleansed world, and hopefully, someday find this transmission, and avoid our fate. May God have mercy on them, and us.

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Audio log entry ends.

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