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Transcript for audio log entry.
… cording on? Okay. We will momentarily begin recording the transmission that we began to receive near sector … 1138-2187 at approximately 1346 yesterday, uh—February 11th. The transmission appears to be looped … uh, and it appears to be degrading at a steady rate … we estimate that the transmission will end sometime around … 0400 tomorrow. So far, our efforts to pinpoint the origin of the transmission has, uh, have been fruitless, as well as our efforts to authenticate … okay, uh, the transmission will be back to what we think is the beginning in a few seconds …
Burst of white noise.
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 …
Burst of white noise.
… it seems like that interference comes and goes at different intervals, but that doesn’t make sense! See if …
… 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.
Burst of white noise.
In fact, the thing we discovered, the horrible, horrible truth that we found on one fateful day, so long ago is …
Burst of white noise.
… the hell! The transmission is completely free of auditory defects, crisp and clear, except for these parts! It makes no sense. Try adjus …
… 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 …
Burst of white noise.
… 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.
Burst of white noise.
Here the transmission begins to loop back to the beginning, but with a weaker signal strength. With the proximity of the Anomaly to this sector, there is speculation about the, uh, the time origin of this signal. It is entirely possible that this signal was transmitted sometime in the distant past … or distant future, although again, there’s no way of knowing. We will continue to monitor the transmission until it’s gone. Again, we have no way of knowing if it’s a work of fiction, or a factual account, so my recommendation is that we keep this under wraps from the general public.
Audio log entry ends.
End of transcription.
RSS
Are we the untainted ones? by schinckel :: NR0 :: Show
Thanks Nick, I quite enjoyed that. When I read the final paragraph the first time:
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.
I read: hidden away, in a remote corner of the universe, implying that we are the untainted ones. Which put a totally different slant on the story.
Audio Version? by schinckel :: NR0 :: Show
I think this is something that would work very well in an Audio version – with different voice actors, and special effects. Any thoughts to do this?
interesting episode by willwaddell :: NR7 :: Show
This would make a great episode of something like the Outer Limits or even the Twilight Zone. It has that wonderful unnerving effect that comes when a story seems, at first glance, farfetched, but, upon the slightest reflection, reveals a startling proximity to life as we encounter it.
Just As I Suspected, Nick by kflgilbert :: NR0 :: Show
…you are the reincarnation of Orson Welles.
I think this is, truly, one of your best pieces. It is a moral critique of civilization in a post genomic world – where chemicals/and or science have become God. (for humans – something has to be) Unfortunately, the theme is very timely.
You did a great job in fleshing out scientific naturalists, who believe that all things that happen in life must be biological.
I like the way you showed humans on the hedonic treadmill…racing along happily without guilt, only to discover that happiness just doesn’t last that long – no matter what; or, indeed, that what we think will make us euphoric forever – only lasts for awhile.
In a world without pain and suffering, we wouldn’t need God in the traditional sense. But, in your story, we see that mental anguish would supersede the painfree physical element of our existence. It is the age-old argument, with out pain, can there be joy? When one has nothing to compare joy to, does it lose its meaning? Happiness exists in our mental states, of course, not in our muscles, tissues, and bones.
Also, I like the idea of "be careful what you wish for". Humans are all about closure. We don’t want to live forever, even if we don’t believe in a life here after.(millions of people don’t anyway, and it hasn’t changed things) You have illustrated this masterfully.
In your newly created Eden, a world without sin & guilt, good and evil have become one.
Heady stuff, Nicholas.
K
simply laughable by starm_ :: NR0 :: Show
This story is transparent preaching and preposterous anti-intellectualism (read pro-stupidism). The whole story has nothing to do with god except for the title and the event, unrelated to the rest, at the beginning that it has been proven he isn’t. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Inserting a correlation in a story, in order to make seem a causality is even dumber than the stupid people who confuse these in research. The whole story is a ridiculous attempt at equating eugenics and genetic cleansing with atheism. It’s ridiculous. And why would anybody (exept maybe on faith based grounds) force people to live forever against their will? It’s incredible the amount of indoctrination you people must have been through to believe this is a smart story.
What has nanomachines gone awry anything to do with god? This story at most promotes an anti-technology and anti-science stance not a pro-god view. This post belongs in a blog titled the anti-nerd blog. BTW I’m sure there are as many anti-technology people (see hippy atheists) in the atheist crowd than in the theists.
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.
LOL! you wish.
Similarities to Other Sci-Fi by PowerPointSamurai :: NR6 :: Show
This is not meant to take issue with the originality of this story, but to provide some evidence to support my belief that the writer was writing about the arrogance of man and a technology that got out of control rather than simply being luddite and anti-technology.
The Terminator series was about men who thought they had a technology under control, with apocalyptic results. Battlestar Gallactica (the original series and the new series on The Sci Fi Channel follows a similar premise, where mankind creates machines to make their lives easier and the machines turn on them. Beware, there are plenty of references to religion on Battlestar. The humans are polytheistic in the new series, and seem to follow either the Greek Pantheon or something very much like it (i.e. Apollo, etc.). The Cylons make numerous references to "God" (singular tense), whom they follow.
I Robot, at least the movie derived from the original Isaac Azimov book titled the same was again about robots escaping our control and in this case, deciding what’s best for us.
There was an original Twilight Zone episode where some astronauts landed on a planet eerily like Earth, but it is absolutely perfect. The only person they meet is a lonely old man who says he is the caretaker. He is very nice to them, but later they discover that he is a machine who wakes up every 100 years or so to clean up and maintain the place. This strange place was indeed Earth (the astronauts were gone for a long time, ala Buck Rogers, and in the interim the machines decided that the only way to keep the place neat and tidy, and to achieve peace, was to kill off all the humans and turn the place into basically a wax museum. Any time you have more than one human around, it seems, a fight, controversy, or disagreement is inevitable.
Twelve Monkeys and Steven King’s The Stand were both about human meddled viruses that escape the lab and don’t exactly follow the purposes we intended for them.
The movie Serenity has another take on an attempt at Utopia gone horribly wrong.
Do I even need to go into detail about all the 1970’s and 80’s movies and TV shows about nuclear holocaust (including ones derived from misperceptions, like Under the Looking Glass) or nuclear accidents, like Silkwood? How about Jurassic Park, where something decidedly "macro" and well understood, like running a zoo full dinosaurs went terribly wrong?
There are hundreds of books, TV shows, and movies about things that escaped the lab, experiments gone wrong, or examples of our own technology, or arrogance in use of technology we don’t understand as well as we think we do (or the second and third order effects) led to the near extinction of us as a species. Some people would say Global Warming and the looming energy crunch are kind of boring, real life, slow motion examples of this.
If you knew me in real life, you certainly wouldn’t label me as a luddite, but I am cautious and thoughtful about technology. I don’t like it when people use computers as very expensive typewriters or try to "computerize" things for the hell of it (often taking a "paper" process and making it harder, rather than easier). Computers and technology should make things clearly better. Do I really believe that we’re in imminent danger of some super killer virus escaping the lab or computers taking over the world? Maybe some day. I think one of the things this author touched upon that I can’t remember seeing elsewhere in Sci Fi is the notion of humans basically becoming slothful once all of our basic needs are met. I’ve wondered about this before. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes people need a motivation to innovate. The Apollo moon project was one of humankind’s finest moments. Those people didn’t do that for a paycheck, they did it because they had a sense of urgency, and for various reasons. Would humans have a sense of urgency if they were in total luxury with all of their needs met for them? Would they have any sense of urgency and get around to do anything at all if they were longer lived or immortal?
As for the accusation that this piece unfairly attacks atheism, another poster correctly pointed out that without God or some type of clear moral code, all sorts of nasty things become possible. Will Waddel has written several excellent arguments about this elsewhere. Suffice it to say, men who believe in nothing are dangerous, and men who believe only in themselves are arrogant.
The bitter truth... by sujeewa :: NR0 :: Show
This sci-fi is very interesting. For my case being a non-believer of anything, I have thought many times down this line. Perhaps after reading that book "Origin of Life". What if the living beings are just chemical combinations of organic material who’s interaction make them "think" that they think!!! What if there is no "soul" in them???
The feelings I got were not very enthusiastic. I felt as if there’s nothing in me that is important anymore. No encouragement for the remaining part of my life, for it makes no importance to the universe, and I’m no longer "me" but a bundle of organic chemicals !!!
The belief of Athmaya, Sansara, God or any similar metaphore (hope I got the right word) make us feel special and important and be ourselves. The uncertainity over above "metaphores" make us curious and thrills us with the instincts of broader philosophy. However if it were certain that those departments of life are complete illusions, I’m so sure that the dystopia in the utopia in this fiction will surely be the end result.
BTW, where did I read sometime back that truth is the bitter most thing in this universe?
Flaw in First Person Perspective --causes this offense mess by bradsmith :: NR0 :: Show
I don’t wish to overly criticize your work, but I didn’t like the use of first person narrative. While I would agree that it is fundamental to your narrative, I think that it does a disservice to the piece. I will try to elaborate on this.
I think that the great "dystopian" authors like Huxley, Blair, and Lowery, all had "agendas" when writing their pieces. Each took something from human nature and explored it in their works. I would submit that most people could identify the authors overall view from the pieces, however, what made them great was that they explored human nature and society in a way that allowed the reader to understand why such things could happen and why such things should perhaps not happen.
I will use Brave New World and 1984 as examples. Brave New World is similar to your own essay, in that it examines how a growing global population is controlled through technology to allow "enough for everyone" and ensure that all are "perfectly happy." What Huxley did brilliantly was show the reader WHY the government/scientists did what they did. The novel was a thought exercise in "How can a Utopia exist with a government, social structure, and viable economy, and what must be sacrificed for it’s gains." The reader is then allowed to decide if the means justifies the ends! The same is true for 1984, in which Blair’s ideology is even more transparent. Nevertheless, in the end, that which Blair despises triumphants with the legendary lines "2+2=5" and "He won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Again, Blair poses the question could one establish a stable government/economy and what personal freedoms may be lost. There is an emotional connection in each of these stories that forces the reader to think, because he/she wants to understand what the character is going through.
Now I don’t mean to compare your work to those of great authors and say see…you’re not there. But rather ask what did you wish to accomplish from your writing? If it was a thought exercise as to where utilitarian bioethics would lead us, then I stand by my criticism that your First Person Point of View (FPPOV) does a disservice to the work.
> I wanted to take the concept of utilitarian bioethics to a sort of ultimate logical (to me, anyway) conclusion.
And here you outline the problem, your ultimate logical conclusion (while perhaps valid) isn’t fully realized. Because you chose to have a Scientist or rather I guess THE scientist narrate the story, I don’t think that you did a very good job conveying the reasons/hopes of the scientist. Because you used FPPOV you have to convey the rational (which you did to some extent) as well as emotions of the narrator. This is something that isn’t easy to do in FPPOV. What results is an essay in which I as the reader felt I was being dryly told a sequence of events. If I follow your piece logically then I follow your conclusion, but only if I read it void of emotion. There is nothing in your piece that has any emotion, or catch, or human interest. Your essay reads like a newspaper bland newspaper article, and while the news that you are spewing may bear merit, few will want to read it. Being able to place oneself in the narrative makes great dystopias so compelling. One can only really see themselves in the stroy if there is both intellectual and emotionally compelling. Case in point, Brave New World is perhaps the best case ever made for how to get it right and get it wrong, in my opinion. It is incredibly logical, but the story isn’t as compelling as say 1984 and it’s characters. Hence, more people read 1984.
The FPPOV makes the essay rather boring….even if it causes one to think…I think that it is also important to stimulate emotion as well as intellect. I think that is the reason so much discourse has been posted about your bias in the narrative. Had you included more of an emotional catch in the story few would be saying, "I think nanobots are a stretch," or "your bashing atheists." Instead they would be saying, "Yeah, it was a stretch, but I could see something like this happening," or "that gives you something to think about doesn’t it."
How a spin on Robert Heinlein by Anonymous :: NR0 :: Show
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story named "Methuselah’s Children". It too was researching what would happen if lives were expanded. My guess is you already knew this and wanted to make your own spin to the story.
I think you would have built more credibility if you acknowledged the Heinlein story and used a little humor by calling it "Methuselah’s Great Grand Children".
Indeed by Jackson :: NR0 :: Show
On a more relevant note:
I enjoyed the story and found it thought provoking. As a student of psychology, it is always interesting to think how close we really are to barbarianism… and to think what keeps us from going over the edge.
Personally, I felt that the narrator’s voice (and author’s choice of first person) conveyed a quiet desperation as the narrative progressed, almost a need to be understood; approved of. It seemed to me, as I read it, that he wanted forgiveness for his atrocities, and if not forgiveness, then understanding that he never intended to be the monster he became.
Good job.
Indeed by Jackson :: NR0 :: Show
On a more relevant note:
I enjoyed the story and found it thought provoking. As a student of psychology, it is always interesting to think how close we really are to barbarianism… and to think what keeps us from going over the edge.
Personally, I felt that the narrator’s voice (and author’s choice of first person) conveyed a quiet desperation as the narrative progressed, almost a need to be understood; approved of. It seemed to me, as I read it, that he wanted forgiveness for his atrocities, and if not forgiveness, then understanding that he never intended to be the monster he became.
Good job.
Or Proven. Then What? by gnifyus :: NR9 :: Show
This story deals with the possibility of proving that God (or any other higher spiritual being of your choice) does not exist. If God was proven not to exist it would of course mean the end of all religion, and a huge chunk of our human history and sense of who we are, whatever religion is practiced would be gone. But did anyone ever wonder what would happen if the existence of God was proven beyond any doubt that anyone could dispute? In other words, what if the word belief and disbelief could be changed to know? I feel that this would also be the end of all religion for almost the same reasons. It is the uncertainty of it all that keeps both believers and disbelievers going. That statement is demonstrated by most of the religious discussion that occurs on this site alone. Every time someone makes a point, a counterpoint is made (and it’s all good stuff!), but so far I’m never wholly convinced beyond any doubt, even though very valid points on individual subjects are made and unmade. The interesting thing is that the disbelievers seem to be just as passionate as the believers many times, almost as if disbelief was a religion unto itself. It’s all part of the search for knowledge, and it’s that search itself that perhaps makes life worth living. Knowing something for absolute certain ends the search.
In general when you feel that you are possibly ignorant of one last possibility for something you care about, you hopefully keep striving for that knowledge. If this ignorance were to forever end, what would happen to that psychological state?
I did feel that mixing the issues of there not being a God, and then obtaining immortality in a physical sense, sort of muddied the waters a little on what condition was causing the most trauma. If we were to have the ability to live forever now without the absence of God in the equation, it might eventually cause the same empty effect.