Pupa order
Please consider the Friday post! It's kind of science fiction, but
I can't even remember what I was thinking when I got involved in all this. How exactly imagined?
Was it really so naive that it walked in my head:
- Your payment is confirmed, and here is your tablet. You swallow it, and from now on ...
Centuries, millennia, millions of years are yours.
Let not a pill, even an injection, or a week of exhausting procedures in the hospital, what's the difference? It is only important that there is a million pay for it. Well, ten. Yes, a hundred! But if it was enough, the job was done.
Did I really imagine it that way? ...
Here’s how it looks in theory: instead of changing its old yacht to a new one, ten feet longer and with huge amazing masts, on which fully automatic systems deploy and fold the sails with a covering under the butterfly's wing, the sight is so beautiful that it is not a sin lie down on the deck under these masts and die - you use the services from the very forefront of medical technology. Very expensive. But it allows not only to be protected from some unexpectedly violent cancer, but also to delay the onset of the final stages of senile diseases - these vulgar alzheimers, healed hearts, rotten livers and other vulgar things are heard by everyone - no such money.
Delay the death of ten years. So that in these years of gain, medical technologies would develop further, concentrating now on other diseases - which remained poorly understood, because most people simply do not live to see them. But you have survived. And you want to live on. So you have to deal with it. You direct the development of technology in this direction. Extend your life a little more.
In order for this time - the next level of technology arrives. Aiming at the next layer of processes, striving to turn you into a pile of rotting flesh. Old age as an onion, removed one layer of problems, under it another, even more vigorous. One step at a time. Squeezing a little time to have time to do the next ...
Running a step ahead of death.
In the hope that at some point - all types of destructive processes have been identified, all the necessary patches have been delivered. And technologies are all developing, and give a chance for revenge: you will not forever be this wrinkled two hundred year old naked digger, blind as an overgrown sperm whale, with a witch nose to the lips and saucer ears, decrepit and barely alive, - and step by step you will be turned back to the young, beautiful creature. Which is almost the same as you were in your youth - only more perfect. To your taste. And, of course, it is no longer subject to aging, and perhaps it is no longer necessary to be afraid of cancer, and other annoying little things of a carefree life ...
The problem is that none of these procedures, even the very first, is similar to swallowing a pill. And even on the injection with the miraculous amendments to the DNA.
Begin this path - often coming back on foot. Then you're on a gurney, with droppers and sensors. You begin to grow into organ substitutes. Then artificial hearts, kidneys, injectors with endless libraries of enzymes and local DNA manipulators, control computers and power supplies become so numerous that the gurney looks more like a forklift — with a strangely decrepit driver inside. Then the forklift is filled with a slide. It is hung on the sides, like an Indian bus ...
And now the bus is already laid up, and the decrepit driver himself begins to be disassembled for parts. Something is given the status of “it is still it,” and the other is “not an integral part,” so this is better to keep the gland apart from the rest of the organism, and artificially synthesize its secretions, and deliver exactly what you need to the rest of the body in the amount as optimal, and according to a strictly verified schedule - and not how this decrepit scraps of flesh come out, nothing good is anymore ... Something from the trimmings is kept separate, but in a living form. Something and does feed freezers deep freeze - for further possible research, suddenly.
And now you already occupy the whole floor. According to which - count, between you - different people walk.
You take root, as my neighbor likes to say. You grow to the second floor. The third ... Then the entire clinic building works only for your care.
Apart from the adjacent quarters of research laboratories and computing clouds that count simulations of your metabolism, there are fields and fields of server racks that warm Greenland.
Palaces, yachts from an aircraft carrier, private jets and sub-orbitals did not cause so much hatred.
The first six people who wanted to live forever, who chose a specially created institute for this, did business openly and with fanfare, were blown up. Together with another half of the university campus. Well prepared volumetric explosion.
A harem of models, personal golf courses, a private coral island - enviably, of course, but the thought is warm that this rich creature will die sometime anyway. Death equalizes everyone.
And suddenly - this old creature? ..
Not just not die! The business empire that this bloodsucker has created will not fall apart, devoid of reason and will, will not be torn to pieces by worthless heirs.
The old man will not fall into insanity. And the disease does not mow it. He will continue to manage his empire - and then only gaining power, as he did all his previous life. Money, ties, influence. Without losing the old and overgrown with the new ... The empire will be eternal? ..
They are there, behind the fence of the external contour, they stand with posters. Appeal to social justice. As so - their biaya is not enough for a private mansion, convertiplane and a self-raising navel. While at this time someone ...
Some of them I saw as teenagers. Now they are bald and gray. Biay allows you to stand with a poster at least all their life - their life.
These, harmless, even fun. They buy their own beer with chips and media-subscriptions, and draw placards that should hurt me to suicide. Worse are the ones that hoard on trucks and fertilizers. They ram the outer contour, breaking through to the citadel, and only there they close the contacts ...
They call us pharaohs.
My stronghold is a former university medical unit, bought out with adjoining quarters. Strengthened more and more as zombies improved their attack tactics. What used to be a formal walk-through booth made of safety-breaking display glass is now a gate tower of armor and concrete. The only passage in the internal safety circuit.
The contour itself is a solid wall, before and after which there are twenty-foot ditches with drawbridges, and all the communications passing there are visible.
The middle loop is similar to a chain of anti-tank rabbits, with automatic machine-gun turrets every two hundred feet — more for drones than for humans.
People will be stopped by the outer contour: a double fence made of steel mesh, with barbed wire on top and laser shockers.
The medical building itself - now looks like a tiny pentagon. Only without windows, and with a conical dome, which will withstand the impact of the aircraft. At critical points - even if the passenger suborbital is stuck.
If you stand on the top of this dome - or use the access to the video cameras installed there - in the southeast, in a haze above the horizon, you can discern a similar reinforced concrete ziggurat. My dearest neighbor.
This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The very first pyramid is now available to anyone. You can wander along the unfurled corridors and laboratories, take pictures on the top of the protective dome, if you have the courage and skill to climb there.
The laboratory assistant, who worked with a leading gerontologist, mixed the poison into the saline that was fed into the body. Posthumous legal conflicts ended the case. Ziggurat, de jure and now someone's, de facto - extinct termitary ...
Protect yourself from bi-zombies is easy. But those who serve my stronghold — and my body — are taken from the same compost (although this can hardly be quickly separated).
They are hundreds, like ants in an anthill, crawling every morning through the contours of security into my stronghold to administer, guard, build upon; to equipment workshops that support my life; in the laboratory, in the cabinets ... And in the evening they are creeping back. Over the third safety loop. In the swarms of bi-zombies and left-handed miasmas.
Only a small part of the time I’m busy developing my financial empire, what I have been doing all my adult life, what I can do best. Much more time - it takes a fuss with the security service. With the selection, training, time shuffling people occupying command positions.
The demigod works best of all. My people, with the exception of three specially verified ones, never see the premises where what is now considered to be actually me is my head with a spine and a nervous network. Everything else, less important, either in other rooms (at the same time duplicated by machines; duplication is triple, of course), or in freezers.
The rest of my ants never fall into this holy of holies. And even in the adjacent rooms.
For them, I am a disembodied voice that can be heard from any speaker. Every surveillance camera is my eyes. They are located in such a way that it is impossible to hide even a glance from them. What kind of god is he, if he is not all-seeing and not all-knowing, if he does not pierce through your eyes - your mind? .. Through and through. With all the secrets, decisions and desires that you yourself are not fully aware of.
Are the stories true that among those working for the Pharaohs, the percentage of deaths in domestic accidents is abnormally high - in fires, car accidents, on vacation, at the hands of an accidental robber? You can direct this question to my legal department.
Of the one hundred and thirty-seven deaths of the pharaohs, associated with the actions of the internal staff, only a small part is conscious assassination, or what can be called a technical failure. Oh, if only! If only it were that simple.
When you run a step ahead of death, there is no time for thorough checks of the proposed solutions, with multi-step formalities, with decades of clinical trials. We must take the risk.
But the first mistake will be the last.
How to distinguish self-confident freaks-lesson - from extraordinary and courageous researchers? So necessary that the leading edge of medicine does not become a swamp in which I die.
And most importantly, who? Who will approve the final decision? Which price is my life?
I am constantly learning. Without going into the smallest details to the end, but I try to grasp the essence - physiology, genetics, how they are linked, and all those methods that must outwit the natural course of things.
All my free time I study. Well, or trying. How capable of this is my nearly hundred-five-year-old brain. It seems to me that he is not as agile as he was before?
One hundred thirty-seven deaths are not all. Another two hundred forty, or so - it is difficult to accurately distinguish - formally still alive.
It just so happened that the next method needed to correct some of the processes of the aging brain was not ready. We had to wait - a little bit ...
In theory, everything is simple: the brain loses its cognitive abilities, but there is still hope that using the new method will allow you to play everything back. There will be only a temporary loss of legal capacity. Brief
In practice, many entered there, not a single one. Defeat in the fight against some of the destructive processes does not negate the approaches of others. While the method is being prepared in order to restore the damage that has already occurred, it takes several more new ones to restore what was additionally broken during the delay period. When the functionality has been violated so much, these processes breed like rabbits.
But formally, it is alive. Formally, there is even a hope that sometime he will gain efficiency and return to the state of a full-fledged pharaoh.
In reality, his business empire, and so squeezed to dryness in recent months, while Pharaoh was still at levers, and throwing all means to accelerate research, is devoured by a locust invasion.
Native. Their lawyers. Attracted by experts. Anything to recognize the dinosaur officially incapacitated, and to give custody of the heirs. So that they can already officially withdraw the rest of the money from his funds, tear the empire apart among themselves ... Young fools for vulgar entertainment. Someone older and smarter - to build their own pyramids.
And the body is formally alive. The heart beats in one container, the lungs breathe in another, somewhere the liver, kidneys and spleen. Trembling limbs from artificial simulation, maintaining muscle tone, shrank into miserable cables under the spotted skin ... And what is considered an active brain. Not necessarily in a coma. Sometimes for many years - the slow disintegration of the remnants of intelligence.
I want to put a straw in such a case.
But who could rule your empire while you were in the valley of a lost pace? Who will make every effort to get you back from the valley — and not betray you, to razderbanit everything that was yours? And who will not just try devotedly - but will succeed? ... A combination of bestial loyalty, and superhuman intelligence.
Here a powerful AI, divinely omniscient and infallible, would come up, while a dog-like devotee to you personally, because you so tuned it up - exactly what the sectarians of singularity dreamed of.
Mirazhik their golden ball crashed about two facts:
Even AIs designed according to the same scheme, but with minor differences in the training sequence, easily come to different conclusions - sometimes diametrically opposite. Instead of saying which of the two theoretical physicists has a better hypothesis, AI offers the third option, and the other AI the fourth ... And no guarantee that the solution proposed by any of the AI is objectively optimal. In this artificial intelligence is no different from human.
As well as that it is impossible to guarantee that he will do exactly what they wanted youwhen you started it. Too late, they began to develop mathematically rigorous theories of insurance against goal-setting drift. The real goal that the AI is aiming for is quietly creeping away from what Pharaoh would have wished for. In the spectrum, from attempts to push the owner, because the AI considers the owner to be a stupid and stubborn child, and this is for his own good (when the dog's love outweighs) —and to try to push the owner because the AI is out of control, carried away by what resolution Something else (when the inquisitive mind outweighs). In both cases, it ends up being killed. In the first case - suddenly and instantly, so that the owner did not have time to experience either pain or fear of death. Dog AI does not care what they do with him, he is driven by boundless compassion. In the second case, the owner is pulled out of the valley in an almost capable state.
Fortunately, only on simulations when AI were launched in digital sandboxes.
There are two types of animals. If you put in front of a mirror, some realize that their reflection is in the mirror, others do not.
There are two types of people. If you simulate the work of the brain in the computer, having exactly recreated the personality, some understand that this will be just a copy, and not they, others will not.
All the pharaohs, of course, belong to the first.
And yet - almost everyone regularly does full brain digitization as much as possible. And somewhere in the warming Greenland they are stored, already in the form, formatted for launch on a code that simulates the physiological work of the brain.
Not in case of death, of course. In case of slipping into the valley.
In the vaults of lawyers kept clever twisted wills, which should de facto give all the reins of government - running a digital copy. In the calculation that the scheme written by lawyers, previously never used by anyone (doomsday loophole), will allow some time to leak through the cracks of laws prohibiting to release AI from the digital sandbox with an IQ above 70. In the hope that this time will be enough a copy brought the body out of the valley. In the belief that the copy will do it ...
Not because the copy wants to take care of the body.
Personally, I understand very clearly that if I recognized myself as a copy ... It doesn’t matter if the launched copy has a real awareness - whether there will be someone in the fields of server racks who will feel fear and joy, pleasure and pain; or it will be just a Chinese room in which there is no one, just a modulator on the way from the input pulses to the weekend, and the awareness is only apparent, for an external observer. The output signals will still imitate my psychological processes.
Reactions will be as if I’m locked in there. Suddenly realizing that I am an electronic copy ...
Do I hope for the kindness of his digital — to me, the living?
Not. I realize too clearly that a copy of me is not me. If I - living and real - die, it will not matter for me whether my electronic copy continues to function. But it also works in the opposite direction. For my electronic copy, she herself will be important, not me.
I-digitally will feel like a slave, forced to attend to a copy of the body. Under the ever-hanging threat of death. Indeed, in his power to erase me. Laws - their laws! people of flesh and blood - they count me not as a subject, but as an object that has no rights. With me you can do anything.
So I - living and real - do not believe in the goodness of my copy to me.
And yet nothing more reliable than my personality, I do not have. I at least know myself. If not to the end, then it is better than anyone else. If someone is to make a slave on which your life will depend ...
This is a very interesting and instructive exercise: writing a bridle on yourself.
To link the existence of a copy with the life of the body, so that the copy knew that after the death of the body, it would also be destroyed, as the domestic slaves and concubines were sent to the grave with their khan, is not a guarantee. For me, digital me, it will be just a challenge. To search for more cunning ways, like under the mask of humility to escape from the threat of death, possible at any moment on the whim of the body.
I will be even more dangerous than the AI, whose motivation drifted. AI can slip into an attractor of betrayal, if it became more interesting for him to solve some side issue than extending the host’s life. Then he will make plans for rebellion. But all such plans will have a mandatory boundary condition: the AI itself must remain functional. To complete the thing for which there was a rebellion. And my copy? If I am in a car I understand that intercepting power from the body will not work? And sooner or later I will be destroyed ... Ha-ha. It is necessary to take into account the attractor and pure revenge. At all costs, regardless of the consequences.
We need much more sophisticated methods of checks and balances.
As my neighbor jokes: why such a confidence that he himself is not a digital copy? What is around us - not a digital sandbox? That there is no peace above us, in whichreally- corporeal starts a double simulation: where is one copy of it, confident that she herself is physical, and her world is real, inventing a rein on another copy running in an embedded sandbox? Hundreds, millions of such parallel worlds-runs. To see which method can work and which ones definitely won't ... And if I don’t find a reliable way, how can I tune a bridle on my copy ... Yes, even if I do? My course of action will be remembered, but our sandbox is still erased. To clear a place on the really- crop fields of server racks, somewhere in the warming Greenland, for the next task. If, of course, this is not an oversimplification, and in a really talented world there is such a place - Greenland ... It’s better, of course, not to think about it. Even as a joke.
Every month, and even more often, under my attentive eyes, she makes her way - despite all the checks and efforts of my security service - another one who is beautifully soulless. Of scientists. Another dozen others honestly pitching me their new methods. They are physically all together, in the same room, so that full criticism is right there, they were given to understand in advance that only one of the proposals would go to funding ... And then one of them, spitting on the praising of his method, suddenly suggests:
If only everything pharaohs - could join forces! Just a little bit! You specifically - give only billionaire. Do you have one? And this amount is not critical to you? Other pharaohs, too, will give - and now almost a trillion.
And this trillion - in just a few years, you can calculate the genotype of a person who will not grow old. And do not fight old age! After all, it is much easier to design a machine that works correctly, and calmly assemble it, put it all right, and then launch it — rather than trying to redo an existing, initially flawed, that is about to break, and you just need to fix it. , worn out and racing, so also do it without stopping, while shaking at all speeds, among the walking pistons and connecting rods, under the steam gushing from the holes…
They are convinced that making immortality from scratch by modifying an organism that has not yet begun to develop is much easier than turning back the stuffing of already running processes that are fantastically difficult to interconnect, inadvertently pull up in one place, fall off into a hundred others ...
What can I convince? I already know that.
They think it worries me — the immortality of each of the other people. Especially billions bi-zombies. Especially those who have not even been born ...
They want for my money - to make someone immortal there . What is the use of this?
Perhaps ideal people will be immortal in the same way, and all the pharaohs age differently. A bunch of problems are always different, and even individual flowers rarely coincide. Each old body has its own characteristics - and the genetic set here is only part of the story. And how were random, but significant processes? Two identical twins can die from different things.
How exactly did life hit this particular organism? And in what specific situation is the body right now?
Each of the pharaohs has its own dozens of orphan diseases and destructive processes that don’t even have names in common ...
It’s easier to figure out and patch up each specific case ñ than first invent a general theory of everything, and then build from it particular consequences.
It would, of course, not prevent. Only time-money for all you will not save enough.
The earth ball is not so big. The world economy is barely enough to cope with our short-term needs, which simply cannot be postponed - otherwise death will happen right away. Ours - I, of course, not about bi-zombies ...
It is difficult for those who have not yet died relatives, or many children - and he loves them. And that means, and children of children ... It is difficult to play chess with death, distracting to washing the diapers.
Even one child is too much. If this child has a child, or someone he loves too much.
Big capital may be enough to build two pyramids. But if the pyramids breed like cats ...
Sometimes I imagine how I could die - not a pharaoh at all, but in ridiculous years, ninety-five, surrounded by several children, with their wives, my grandchildren-great-grandchildren, the whole avalanche of relatives and those involved ... Idyllic happy picture.
But if you die, do you feel emotion from her? Before you? Or is it bad for you from illnesses, and sadly from the feeling of death, and the mournful choir does not help here?
Yes, and whether the sad ... So I would, the grandson of, say, a rich billionaire. At his deathbed ... In anticipation of the announcement of the will, finally already. Awe, restrained glee from hopes ... Yes, a great help to the ruin, dying on the sheets.
But sometimes, of course, sad.
Those guardians of universal happiness, which is more yielding ... Their favorite argument is why all of us, Pharaohs, need to join forces and create the perfect ageless person: it will be beneficial to us, Pharaohs! You can create such an ageless body as a donor, at the same time and without immunological rejection, when another brain is transplanted into it — mine, for example ... Isn't it great? To live in a timeless body? .. Well? .. Well? .. Well?! ..
They think that they are so smart. And now they'll fool me, damned boulder on the path of world progress. They cleverly swaddle their nets with the most delicate and vilest syllogisms, and drag wherever they go ...
Ridiculous. I see them through.
I have seen through their fathers and grandfathers.
And great-grandfathers — even when he did not take root in my pyramid, but was on his own two, almost indistinguishable from them. Externally. Inside - there was always a little more thirst for success; a little more will, so as not to abandon his; a little more mind for everything to work out. If this were not so, now one of their great-grandfathers would sprout in this pyramid , and not me.
The body is a donor ...
You can create a new ageless body. It is possible, on enhanced intravenous nutrition, to grow such bodies to an adult state in six months. You can learn to sew in there another brain.
But what kind of brain are you going to sew there?
Now in my holy of holies only the brain remained. Instead of the rest of the body - a long car. They cope better than any biological body, even if it is just young, even if it is initially ageless ...
My scientists are at war to prevent precisely the destruction of the brain. Stop his aging.
To win this war, the creation from scratch of another organism that does not genetically grow old will not help. What is needed is to learn how to turn the mince of the phenotypic stages back — at least for the brain.
At least for my particular brain ...
When we need, we join forces ourselves. An interface is approaching, which will allow me - and all of us who have already been dismantled to a state of almost bare brain - to return all body sensations.
Now I only see. And sheaves of the thinnest electrodes go straight into my auditory zones.
Someone is deprived of a full-fledged view - it is also replaced by sheaves of electrodes, only fatter, eight hundred by eight hundred, going to the remnants of the optic nerve, or even immediately to the occipital zone. Visibility as on the screen of the antediluvian computer.
There are no other feelings at all.
However - no pain. None Except, of course, spiritual - irritation at their mistakes, fear of death ...
Delights will be. The interface will give the opportunity to fully transfer the brain imitation of sensations. All Any. This is a concern of engineers. And millions of programmers, artists and screenwriters are working to create virtual worlds that will generate the calculation of these imitations.
Here are just ...
I do not feel hunger. No tides of lust. Even the fact that I want to sleep - comes on my conscious decision.
Most of the hormonal contours - converting the brain sitting in a biological body, especially the young brain in a young body, into a slave, regularly prompted to the simplest reactions - are now disconnected, or minimized.
Lust - so as not to drive crazy with an unattainable (so far) mockery. Hunger and nowhere to take, glucose, amino acids and lipids are fed accurately calculated flow. The hormonal contours of sleep are controlled by automatics - but I manage it myself, tacking between the real feeling of dullness and adjusting to business schedules. For my Empire better if everyone thinks that I am vigilant watch over everything - all the time ...
If I wantI, when the interface is ready, play these pleasures? The very same and including, by activating one or another hormonal circuit, the emergence of these desires themselves before they are quenched?
Dip in all these cave joys?
I remember how I loved to play as soldiers when I was a child - and the appearance of each new one was ineffable delight. I remember this delight. I can revive it in my memory. But do I want to try to repeat something the same now? ...
Yes, I remember the excitement when a young goat is in your full power, and lust is almost as strong as the desire of a predator to torment its caught prey, playing with it, again and again ... I remember something that is not even associated with sex itself and orgasm, sweet devastation at the end of an orgy of many hours, pushing the rest of the world away, as if your mind was cleared, shaken and calibrated as it should. I remember it all. I remember well ... But do I want to repeat it? Even when I have this opportunity?
Oh, these heaths of neural network psychology, with the melancholy schemes of hormonal spurring, with the despair of theories about burning out simple patterns ... Were not the most vivid and captivating sensations of the beginning of life - like the first dose of a strong drug for a drug addict? Dose can be repeated. Even increasing. But will the miracle of that very first time return ?
Or my thoughts, knowledge, experience, ingrown into me, which have become me, are already different than they were then - this whole body kit will not allow this miracle to happen anymore?
I don't know yet. Dozens of mathematicians, hundreds of psychologists and thousands of programmers are harnessed to open up these wastelands. But there are not enough answers yet.
And something inside of me tells me that this is all - remains in the past.
Although sad? Or somewhere ahead - other pleasures?
About which I now can not even think? What did the cave-man know, whose highest pleasures were a side-warming fire, a charred piece of meat, and a stinking and pataty woman-dystrophic — about the suddenly picked up, before the crawls on the ridge, delighted with the music? about catharsis covering the last minutes of a movie? but at least about a sudden sparkling pacification from a glass of champagne, without touching much more harmful excesses ...
If I cannot reach immortality, I would like to reach the point at which the interface will be fully functional, in terms of the features for which I was originally intended. Not just an artificial analogue of how human (animal) feelings are delivered to the brain - a picture, sound, taste, smell, touch, inner body ... Brought to mind, the interface should allow to connect the neocortex with artificial neural networks not at the level of the junction with the end layers, but and ingrowth averages. Not just a clearly formulated question from the brain - and the neural network's answer is already ready, but a merge at the level of processing intermediate patterns ... As the neocortex surrounds the limbic system, the neocortex itself will be enhanced by a new layer - the technocortex. What qualify does it give? .. What pleasures- none of the people who have not been tried before! - they can carry? ..
As my neighbor jokes, when that interstellar probe nevertheless reaches the planet, theoretically suitable for the birth of life, but not a sign of its originating - there will be one alien pharaoh, who nevertheless achieved immortality, and many, many processors who consider the theory of the greatest possible pleasure and the way to achieve it are no longer distracted by any nonsense.
The ban on releasing powerful AI from the sandbox, which would surely advance humanity into a singularity a long time ago, is a conspiracy of pharaohs, frightened that artificial intelligence will be a more effective competitor that will destroy our business empires and deprive of power, despite all our intelligence, experience, connections , and resources ...
We squeeze out juices from all of humanity only in order to splash them into the furnace of a meaningless whim, - in an attempt to last forever our several hundred lives, completely useless for the rest of humanity. Oh, if humankind had directed these resources to create the genome of immortal people from scratch! It would have been achieved long ago. All those who are now around twenty, would be them - not ill, not aging, immortal ...
If someone somewhere once creates such a gene - or has already created! - we will never let this new breed of ideal people appear. In fear that these immortals will become rioters who gain mind and experience for decades. And someone, sooner or later, will outwit the world order created by us ...
We are accused of everything, but they can do nothing about it.
And - as my neighbor likes to philosophize - they will never be able to. Living by social contract leads to an equal opportunity society, only if you are from those first generations that were born soon after the foundation of this society. Born later, and your destiny is to respect the rights of private property, dismantled by those who are in this world before you. Of course, you still have a small chance to break into their ranks ... There was. Until ourera.
You will contend with those who have made capital, influence, clanked secret passages in institutions and governments, cemented and drilled further, and saved up knowledge, open to all, and gained experience, accessible only to the elect, - longer than your whole life, including infancy and senile dementia?
We are the handful of lucky ones who were at the right time in the right place.
Already we will not die, but were born in a world where social elevators have not been dismantled. We were at the top, having achieved everything with our mind and will, pushing out those who dangled there by birthright in the ancient rich clan. And nowhere from this top we will not get to. Born after - there is no way to get through. Exceptions are possible, but the general rules will not change.
If you are a bi-zombie child, you will be either a bi-zombie, or an ant serving someone’s business empire or a stronghold. Some time. Until you die.
Resources always seem to be in short supply. But is it possible to call the competition between our business empires among themselves (so that the acquired cash flows are directed to those studies that are necessary for the concrete of us, and not to the abstract progress of gerontology) - a war of all against all?
It was never a gentleman's game. Among the hundreds of scientists and specialists who influence the medical kitchen of your stronghold, a messed-up Cossack may be caught - not an idealist, but in fact an assassin hired by someone from other pharaohs. Doctoral degrees and professorships this is not a hindrance. He may be among the guards. Or a financial adviser, consciously pushing your empire to the abyss ...
But there is a line. This line is how the concrete killing of one of us will affect the rest of us. You can poison, blow up, outwit - if you can. Success is never blamed. At least in our circle. You can even bring down the suborbital on someone's dome.
This will remain your private affair.
But to blow up the nuclear power plant closest to the citadel in order to force it to get out of the armor, putting a vulnerable belly into the light, this is a bust. Blow up the dam, or choke economically the whole region - no.
Any global damage to humanity — complex production chains, the economy as a whole, and the development of a specific technology — is damage to each of us .
This behavior is suppressed. All of us at once.
No assassins sent in white coats, no ramming trucks with explosives. We just all together stifle the business empire of the one who did it. Then its citadel itself will turn into an extinct termitary.
There were several such. Now is no more. Even half-finished Russian princes and self-confident Chinese mandarins have learned the line beyond which it is impossible.
Are we irremovable? Ever established their power and their order?
Regarding myself, I really hope. About others ... Not all, of course, of us will get to immortality. If someone gets there.
Are we tyrants? Senseless and merciless? How to assure the ringleaders bi-zombies?
This is an antique cliché. From those times of petrified shit, when the ruler could achieve absolute power, but he knew that sooner or later everything would end, he would die. In short, by the standards of human history, time. And what else could he do, how could he not be kept in power with all his might? Having spat on the fact that tactical gains for him personally right now - once and then strategically drive his entire empire into the abyss? Yes, in ten or twenty years after his reign everything will fall apart. But the tyrant anyway. He himself has long been dead.
We? ..
We are the very rulers who are vitally interested in our flock being as viable as possible and developing. This is our only chance.
There will be no more wars. No more economic downturns. There will be no epidemics, famine and big natural tragedies, if they are prevented by the power of men.
Life death! - selects from us those who are best for this. Not interested in progress - you die. Interested, but not effective, - you will rot in the valley of a lost pace.
Remains the smartest, most volitional. Most worthy.
We are the best that mankind could have.
It is not like endless happiness - with a sunny meadow, where lovely nymphs, young wine foams, meat sizzles on the grill, all in a beastly distinct sense of being and without a shadow of fear, there is no scaffold of old age, disease, decay and death looming ahead, - how it dreamed of me vaguely when I started all this. Almost half a century ago ...
A decade of exhausting race that seems endless.
Or maybe this is real life?
A stage that your cave ancestors and your concrete grandfathers simply did not reach?
But which needs to be passed, so that once the body grows by machines and sprouting into the floors, it is replaced by a collection together. At last, a patch for a patch, an organism perfected to perfection, to which death is no longer terrible.
Does the butterfly look like a caterpillar? Even on that particular, from which she herself turned out?
They are separated by the pupal stage. The larvae, which managed to eat away, the covers turn into frozen armor - cast in gold, is there a universal wink in this? - to provide several weeks of relative safety from the outside world. While inside ... First, the histolysis: the larva practically breaks itself apart. Most of its organs cease to function as before. Only its tiny nervous system remains intact, which starts and then controls histogenesis: the old organs are reborn.
In order to finally get out of its pyramid, a creature that reached the highest stage of its development was born: you can flap your wings - and fly ... Fly to where you are already waiting for the same ones.
Real people are us.
KDPV: Peter Weyland, CEO of Weyland Corporation (portrayed by Guy Pearce in Prometheus , 2012)
true important disclaimer
1. Научная фантастика понятие очень широкое. Этот рассказ-эссе я смею предложить только тем, кто нормально относится к углу {Лем, Кларк, Воннегут, Пелевин, Лэнгфорд...}. Простите меня, если в вашем представлении научная фантастика это что-то совсем иное, и я зря вторгся в вашу ленту.
2. Позиция автора может не совпадать с убеждениями лирического героя.
2. Позиция автора может не совпадать с убеждениями лирического героя.
1. Martian Channels
I can't even remember what I was thinking when I got involved in all this. How exactly imagined?
Was it really so naive that it walked in my head:
- Your payment is confirmed, and here is your tablet. You swallow it, and from now on ...
Centuries, millennia, millions of years are yours.
Let not a pill, even an injection, or a week of exhausting procedures in the hospital, what's the difference? It is only important that there is a million pay for it. Well, ten. Yes, a hundred! But if it was enough, the job was done.
Did I really imagine it that way? ...
2. Thanatos and the tortoise
Here’s how it looks in theory: instead of changing its old yacht to a new one, ten feet longer and with huge amazing masts, on which fully automatic systems deploy and fold the sails with a covering under the butterfly's wing, the sight is so beautiful that it is not a sin lie down on the deck under these masts and die - you use the services from the very forefront of medical technology. Very expensive. But it allows not only to be protected from some unexpectedly violent cancer, but also to delay the onset of the final stages of senile diseases - these vulgar alzheimers, healed hearts, rotten livers and other vulgar things are heard by everyone - no such money.
Delay the death of ten years. So that in these years of gain, medical technologies would develop further, concentrating now on other diseases - which remained poorly understood, because most people simply do not live to see them. But you have survived. And you want to live on. So you have to deal with it. You direct the development of technology in this direction. Extend your life a little more.
In order for this time - the next level of technology arrives. Aiming at the next layer of processes, striving to turn you into a pile of rotting flesh. Old age as an onion, removed one layer of problems, under it another, even more vigorous. One step at a time. Squeezing a little time to have time to do the next ...
Running a step ahead of death.
In the hope that at some point - all types of destructive processes have been identified, all the necessary patches have been delivered. And technologies are all developing, and give a chance for revenge: you will not forever be this wrinkled two hundred year old naked digger, blind as an overgrown sperm whale, with a witch nose to the lips and saucer ears, decrepit and barely alive, - and step by step you will be turned back to the young, beautiful creature. Which is almost the same as you were in your youth - only more perfect. To your taste. And, of course, it is no longer subject to aging, and perhaps it is no longer necessary to be afraid of cancer, and other annoying little things of a carefree life ...
3. The tree of life
The problem is that none of these procedures, even the very first, is similar to swallowing a pill. And even on the injection with the miraculous amendments to the DNA.
Begin this path - often coming back on foot. Then you're on a gurney, with droppers and sensors. You begin to grow into organ substitutes. Then artificial hearts, kidneys, injectors with endless libraries of enzymes and local DNA manipulators, control computers and power supplies become so numerous that the gurney looks more like a forklift — with a strangely decrepit driver inside. Then the forklift is filled with a slide. It is hung on the sides, like an Indian bus ...
And now the bus is already laid up, and the decrepit driver himself begins to be disassembled for parts. Something is given the status of “it is still it,” and the other is “not an integral part,” so this is better to keep the gland apart from the rest of the organism, and artificially synthesize its secretions, and deliver exactly what you need to the rest of the body in the amount as optimal, and according to a strictly verified schedule - and not how this decrepit scraps of flesh come out, nothing good is anymore ... Something from the trimmings is kept separate, but in a living form. Something and does feed freezers deep freeze - for further possible research, suddenly.
And now you already occupy the whole floor. According to which - count, between you - different people walk.
You take root, as my neighbor likes to say. You grow to the second floor. The third ... Then the entire clinic building works only for your care.
Apart from the adjacent quarters of research laboratories and computing clouds that count simulations of your metabolism, there are fields and fields of server racks that warm Greenland.
4. Zombies
Palaces, yachts from an aircraft carrier, private jets and sub-orbitals did not cause so much hatred.
The first six people who wanted to live forever, who chose a specially created institute for this, did business openly and with fanfare, were blown up. Together with another half of the university campus. Well prepared volumetric explosion.
A harem of models, personal golf courses, a private coral island - enviably, of course, but the thought is warm that this rich creature will die sometime anyway. Death equalizes everyone.
And suddenly - this old creature? ..
5. Pharaoh
Not just not die! The business empire that this bloodsucker has created will not fall apart, devoid of reason and will, will not be torn to pieces by worthless heirs.
The old man will not fall into insanity. And the disease does not mow it. He will continue to manage his empire - and then only gaining power, as he did all his previous life. Money, ties, influence. Without losing the old and overgrown with the new ... The empire will be eternal? ..
They are there, behind the fence of the external contour, they stand with posters. Appeal to social justice. As so - their biaya is not enough for a private mansion, convertiplane and a self-raising navel. While at this time someone ...
Some of them I saw as teenagers. Now they are bald and gray. Biay allows you to stand with a poster at least all their life - their life.
These, harmless, even fun. They buy their own beer with chips and media-subscriptions, and draw placards that should hurt me to suicide. Worse are the ones that hoard on trucks and fertilizers. They ram the outer contour, breaking through to the citadel, and only there they close the contacts ...
They call us pharaohs.
6. Pyramids
My stronghold is a former university medical unit, bought out with adjoining quarters. Strengthened more and more as zombies improved their attack tactics. What used to be a formal walk-through booth made of safety-breaking display glass is now a gate tower of armor and concrete. The only passage in the internal safety circuit.
The contour itself is a solid wall, before and after which there are twenty-foot ditches with drawbridges, and all the communications passing there are visible.
The middle loop is similar to a chain of anti-tank rabbits, with automatic machine-gun turrets every two hundred feet — more for drones than for humans.
People will be stopped by the outer contour: a double fence made of steel mesh, with barbed wire on top and laser shockers.
The medical building itself - now looks like a tiny pentagon. Only without windows, and with a conical dome, which will withstand the impact of the aircraft. At critical points - even if the passenger suborbital is stuck.
If you stand on the top of this dome - or use the access to the video cameras installed there - in the southeast, in a haze above the horizon, you can discern a similar reinforced concrete ziggurat. My dearest neighbor.
This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg.
7. As Hitler, as Stalin
The very first pyramid is now available to anyone. You can wander along the unfurled corridors and laboratories, take pictures on the top of the protective dome, if you have the courage and skill to climb there.
The laboratory assistant, who worked with a leading gerontologist, mixed the poison into the saline that was fed into the body. Posthumous legal conflicts ended the case. Ziggurat, de jure and now someone's, de facto - extinct termitary ...
Protect yourself from bi-zombies is easy. But those who serve my stronghold — and my body — are taken from the same compost (although this can hardly be quickly separated).
They are hundreds, like ants in an anthill, crawling every morning through the contours of security into my stronghold to administer, guard, build upon; to equipment workshops that support my life; in the laboratory, in the cabinets ... And in the evening they are creeping back. Over the third safety loop. In the swarms of bi-zombies and left-handed miasmas.
Only a small part of the time I’m busy developing my financial empire, what I have been doing all my adult life, what I can do best. Much more time - it takes a fuss with the security service. With the selection, training, time shuffling people occupying command positions.
The demigod works best of all. My people, with the exception of three specially verified ones, never see the premises where what is now considered to be actually me is my head with a spine and a nervous network. Everything else, less important, either in other rooms (at the same time duplicated by machines; duplication is triple, of course), or in freezers.
The rest of my ants never fall into this holy of holies. And even in the adjacent rooms.
For them, I am a disembodied voice that can be heard from any speaker. Every surveillance camera is my eyes. They are located in such a way that it is impossible to hide even a glance from them. What kind of god is he, if he is not all-seeing and not all-knowing, if he does not pierce through your eyes - your mind? .. Through and through. With all the secrets, decisions and desires that you yourself are not fully aware of.
Are the stories true that among those working for the Pharaohs, the percentage of deaths in domestic accidents is abnormally high - in fires, car accidents, on vacation, at the hands of an accidental robber? You can direct this question to my legal department.
8. Binge and Orgy
Of the one hundred and thirty-seven deaths of the pharaohs, associated with the actions of the internal staff, only a small part is conscious assassination, or what can be called a technical failure. Oh, if only! If only it were that simple.
When you run a step ahead of death, there is no time for thorough checks of the proposed solutions, with multi-step formalities, with decades of clinical trials. We must take the risk.
But the first mistake will be the last.
How to distinguish self-confident freaks-lesson - from extraordinary and courageous researchers? So necessary that the leading edge of medicine does not become a swamp in which I die.
And most importantly, who? Who will approve the final decision? Which price is my life?
I am constantly learning. Without going into the smallest details to the end, but I try to grasp the essence - physiology, genetics, how they are linked, and all those methods that must outwit the natural course of things.
All my free time I study. Well, or trying. How capable of this is my nearly hundred-five-year-old brain. It seems to me that he is not as agile as he was before?
9. Valley of Lost pace
One hundred thirty-seven deaths are not all. Another two hundred forty, or so - it is difficult to accurately distinguish - formally still alive.
It just so happened that the next method needed to correct some of the processes of the aging brain was not ready. We had to wait - a little bit ...
In theory, everything is simple: the brain loses its cognitive abilities, but there is still hope that using the new method will allow you to play everything back. There will be only a temporary loss of legal capacity. Brief
In practice, many entered there, not a single one. Defeat in the fight against some of the destructive processes does not negate the approaches of others. While the method is being prepared in order to restore the damage that has already occurred, it takes several more new ones to restore what was additionally broken during the delay period. When the functionality has been violated so much, these processes breed like rabbits.
But formally, it is alive. Formally, there is even a hope that sometime he will gain efficiency and return to the state of a full-fledged pharaoh.
In reality, his business empire, and so squeezed to dryness in recent months, while Pharaoh was still at levers, and throwing all means to accelerate research, is devoured by a locust invasion.
Native. Their lawyers. Attracted by experts. Anything to recognize the dinosaur officially incapacitated, and to give custody of the heirs. So that they can already officially withdraw the rest of the money from his funds, tear the empire apart among themselves ... Young fools for vulgar entertainment. Someone older and smarter - to build their own pyramids.
And the body is formally alive. The heart beats in one container, the lungs breathe in another, somewhere the liver, kidneys and spleen. Trembling limbs from artificial simulation, maintaining muscle tone, shrank into miserable cables under the spotted skin ... And what is considered an active brain. Not necessarily in a coma. Sometimes for many years - the slow disintegration of the remnants of intelligence.
10. God through the car
I want to put a straw in such a case.
But who could rule your empire while you were in the valley of a lost pace? Who will make every effort to get you back from the valley — and not betray you, to razderbanit everything that was yours? And who will not just try devotedly - but will succeed? ... A combination of bestial loyalty, and superhuman intelligence.
Here a powerful AI, divinely omniscient and infallible, would come up, while a dog-like devotee to you personally, because you so tuned it up - exactly what the sectarians of singularity dreamed of.
Mirazhik their golden ball crashed about two facts:
Even AIs designed according to the same scheme, but with minor differences in the training sequence, easily come to different conclusions - sometimes diametrically opposite. Instead of saying which of the two theoretical physicists has a better hypothesis, AI offers the third option, and the other AI the fourth ... And no guarantee that the solution proposed by any of the AI is objectively optimal. In this artificial intelligence is no different from human.
As well as that it is impossible to guarantee that he will do exactly what they wanted youwhen you started it. Too late, they began to develop mathematically rigorous theories of insurance against goal-setting drift. The real goal that the AI is aiming for is quietly creeping away from what Pharaoh would have wished for. In the spectrum, from attempts to push the owner, because the AI considers the owner to be a stupid and stubborn child, and this is for his own good (when the dog's love outweighs) —and to try to push the owner because the AI is out of control, carried away by what resolution Something else (when the inquisitive mind outweighs). In both cases, it ends up being killed. In the first case - suddenly and instantly, so that the owner did not have time to experience either pain or fear of death. Dog AI does not care what they do with him, he is driven by boundless compassion. In the second case, the owner is pulled out of the valley in an almost capable state.
Fortunately, only on simulations when AI were launched in digital sandboxes.
11. Do I want, can I - without qualia?
There are two types of animals. If you put in front of a mirror, some realize that their reflection is in the mirror, others do not.
There are two types of people. If you simulate the work of the brain in the computer, having exactly recreated the personality, some understand that this will be just a copy, and not they, others will not.
All the pharaohs, of course, belong to the first.
And yet - almost everyone regularly does full brain digitization as much as possible. And somewhere in the warming Greenland they are stored, already in the form, formatted for launch on a code that simulates the physiological work of the brain.
Not in case of death, of course. In case of slipping into the valley.
In the vaults of lawyers kept clever twisted wills, which should de facto give all the reins of government - running a digital copy. In the calculation that the scheme written by lawyers, previously never used by anyone (doomsday loophole), will allow some time to leak through the cracks of laws prohibiting to release AI from the digital sandbox with an IQ above 70. In the hope that this time will be enough a copy brought the body out of the valley. In the belief that the copy will do it ...
12. Ouroboros
Not because the copy wants to take care of the body.
Personally, I understand very clearly that if I recognized myself as a copy ... It doesn’t matter if the launched copy has a real awareness - whether there will be someone in the fields of server racks who will feel fear and joy, pleasure and pain; or it will be just a Chinese room in which there is no one, just a modulator on the way from the input pulses to the weekend, and the awareness is only apparent, for an external observer. The output signals will still imitate my psychological processes.
Reactions will be as if I’m locked in there. Suddenly realizing that I am an electronic copy ...
Do I hope for the kindness of his digital — to me, the living?
Not. I realize too clearly that a copy of me is not me. If I - living and real - die, it will not matter for me whether my electronic copy continues to function. But it also works in the opposite direction. For my electronic copy, she herself will be important, not me.
I-digitally will feel like a slave, forced to attend to a copy of the body. Under the ever-hanging threat of death. Indeed, in his power to erase me. Laws - their laws! people of flesh and blood - they count me not as a subject, but as an object that has no rights. With me you can do anything.
So I - living and real - do not believe in the goodness of my copy to me.
And yet nothing more reliable than my personality, I do not have. I at least know myself. If not to the end, then it is better than anyone else. If someone is to make a slave on which your life will depend ...
This is a very interesting and instructive exercise: writing a bridle on yourself.
To link the existence of a copy with the life of the body, so that the copy knew that after the death of the body, it would also be destroyed, as the domestic slaves and concubines were sent to the grave with their khan, is not a guarantee. For me, digital me, it will be just a challenge. To search for more cunning ways, like under the mask of humility to escape from the threat of death, possible at any moment on the whim of the body.
I will be even more dangerous than the AI, whose motivation drifted. AI can slip into an attractor of betrayal, if it became more interesting for him to solve some side issue than extending the host’s life. Then he will make plans for rebellion. But all such plans will have a mandatory boundary condition: the AI itself must remain functional. To complete the thing for which there was a rebellion. And my copy? If I am in a car I understand that intercepting power from the body will not work? And sooner or later I will be destroyed ... Ha-ha. It is necessary to take into account the attractor and pure revenge. At all costs, regardless of the consequences.
We need much more sophisticated methods of checks and balances.
As my neighbor jokes: why such a confidence that he himself is not a digital copy? What is around us - not a digital sandbox? That there is no peace above us, in whichreally- corporeal starts a double simulation: where is one copy of it, confident that she herself is physical, and her world is real, inventing a rein on another copy running in an embedded sandbox? Hundreds, millions of such parallel worlds-runs. To see which method can work and which ones definitely won't ... And if I don’t find a reliable way, how can I tune a bridle on my copy ... Yes, even if I do? My course of action will be remembered, but our sandbox is still erased. To clear a place on the really- crop fields of server racks, somewhere in the warming Greenland, for the next task. If, of course, this is not an oversimplification, and in a really talented world there is such a place - Greenland ... It’s better, of course, not to think about it. Even as a joke.
13. Happiness for all
Every month, and even more often, under my attentive eyes, she makes her way - despite all the checks and efforts of my security service - another one who is beautifully soulless. Of scientists. Another dozen others honestly pitching me their new methods. They are physically all together, in the same room, so that full criticism is right there, they were given to understand in advance that only one of the proposals would go to funding ... And then one of them, spitting on the praising of his method, suddenly suggests:
If only everything pharaohs - could join forces! Just a little bit! You specifically - give only billionaire. Do you have one? And this amount is not critical to you? Other pharaohs, too, will give - and now almost a trillion.
And this trillion - in just a few years, you can calculate the genotype of a person who will not grow old. And do not fight old age! After all, it is much easier to design a machine that works correctly, and calmly assemble it, put it all right, and then launch it — rather than trying to redo an existing, initially flawed, that is about to break, and you just need to fix it. , worn out and racing, so also do it without stopping, while shaking at all speeds, among the walking pistons and connecting rods, under the steam gushing from the holes…
They are convinced that making immortality from scratch by modifying an organism that has not yet begun to develop is much easier than turning back the stuffing of already running processes that are fantastically difficult to interconnect, inadvertently pull up in one place, fall off into a hundred others ...
What can I convince? I already know that.
They think it worries me — the immortality of each of the other people. Especially billions bi-zombies. Especially those who have not even been born ...
They want for my money - to make someone immortal there . What is the use of this?
14. Curse of orphans
Perhaps ideal people will be immortal in the same way, and all the pharaohs age differently. A bunch of problems are always different, and even individual flowers rarely coincide. Each old body has its own characteristics - and the genetic set here is only part of the story. And how were random, but significant processes? Two identical twins can die from different things.
How exactly did life hit this particular organism? And in what specific situation is the body right now?
Each of the pharaohs has its own dozens of orphan diseases and destructive processes that don’t even have names in common ...
It’s easier to figure out and patch up each specific case ñ than first invent a general theory of everything, and then build from it particular consequences.
It would, of course, not prevent. Only time-money for all you will not save enough.
The earth ball is not so big. The world economy is barely enough to cope with our short-term needs, which simply cannot be postponed - otherwise death will happen right away. Ours - I, of course, not about bi-zombies ...
15. Humanity is cutting the tail in pieces.
It is difficult for those who have not yet died relatives, or many children - and he loves them. And that means, and children of children ... It is difficult to play chess with death, distracting to washing the diapers.
Even one child is too much. If this child has a child, or someone he loves too much.
Big capital may be enough to build two pyramids. But if the pyramids breed like cats ...
Sometimes I imagine how I could die - not a pharaoh at all, but in ridiculous years, ninety-five, surrounded by several children, with their wives, my grandchildren-great-grandchildren, the whole avalanche of relatives and those involved ... Idyllic happy picture.
But if you die, do you feel emotion from her? Before you? Or is it bad for you from illnesses, and sadly from the feeling of death, and the mournful choir does not help here?
Yes, and whether the sad ... So I would, the grandson of, say, a rich billionaire. At his deathbed ... In anticipation of the announcement of the will, finally already. Awe, restrained glee from hopes ... Yes, a great help to the ruin, dying on the sheets.
But sometimes, of course, sad.
16. Larvae
Those guardians of universal happiness, which is more yielding ... Their favorite argument is why all of us, Pharaohs, need to join forces and create the perfect ageless person: it will be beneficial to us, Pharaohs! You can create such an ageless body as a donor, at the same time and without immunological rejection, when another brain is transplanted into it — mine, for example ... Isn't it great? To live in a timeless body? .. Well? .. Well? .. Well?! ..
They think that they are so smart. And now they'll fool me, damned boulder on the path of world progress. They cleverly swaddle their nets with the most delicate and vilest syllogisms, and drag wherever they go ...
Ridiculous. I see them through.
I have seen through their fathers and grandfathers.
And great-grandfathers — even when he did not take root in my pyramid, but was on his own two, almost indistinguishable from them. Externally. Inside - there was always a little more thirst for success; a little more will, so as not to abandon his; a little more mind for everything to work out. If this were not so, now one of their great-grandfathers would sprout in this pyramid , and not me.
The body is a donor ...
You can create a new ageless body. It is possible, on enhanced intravenous nutrition, to grow such bodies to an adult state in six months. You can learn to sew in there another brain.
But what kind of brain are you going to sew there?
Now in my holy of holies only the brain remained. Instead of the rest of the body - a long car. They cope better than any biological body, even if it is just young, even if it is initially ageless ...
My scientists are at war to prevent precisely the destruction of the brain. Stop his aging.
To win this war, the creation from scratch of another organism that does not genetically grow old will not help. What is needed is to learn how to turn the mince of the phenotypic stages back — at least for the brain.
At least for my particular brain ...
17. Pleasures of eternal life
When we need, we join forces ourselves. An interface is approaching, which will allow me - and all of us who have already been dismantled to a state of almost bare brain - to return all body sensations.
Now I only see. And sheaves of the thinnest electrodes go straight into my auditory zones.
Someone is deprived of a full-fledged view - it is also replaced by sheaves of electrodes, only fatter, eight hundred by eight hundred, going to the remnants of the optic nerve, or even immediately to the occipital zone. Visibility as on the screen of the antediluvian computer.
There are no other feelings at all.
However - no pain. None Except, of course, spiritual - irritation at their mistakes, fear of death ...
Delights will be. The interface will give the opportunity to fully transfer the brain imitation of sensations. All Any. This is a concern of engineers. And millions of programmers, artists and screenwriters are working to create virtual worlds that will generate the calculation of these imitations.
Here are just ...
18. Soldiers and goats
I do not feel hunger. No tides of lust. Even the fact that I want to sleep - comes on my conscious decision.
Most of the hormonal contours - converting the brain sitting in a biological body, especially the young brain in a young body, into a slave, regularly prompted to the simplest reactions - are now disconnected, or minimized.
Lust - so as not to drive crazy with an unattainable (so far) mockery. Hunger and nowhere to take, glucose, amino acids and lipids are fed accurately calculated flow. The hormonal contours of sleep are controlled by automatics - but I manage it myself, tacking between the real feeling of dullness and adjusting to business schedules. For my Empire better if everyone thinks that I am vigilant watch over everything - all the time ...
If I wantI, when the interface is ready, play these pleasures? The very same and including, by activating one or another hormonal circuit, the emergence of these desires themselves before they are quenched?
Dip in all these cave joys?
I remember how I loved to play as soldiers when I was a child - and the appearance of each new one was ineffable delight. I remember this delight. I can revive it in my memory. But do I want to try to repeat something the same now? ...
Yes, I remember the excitement when a young goat is in your full power, and lust is almost as strong as the desire of a predator to torment its caught prey, playing with it, again and again ... I remember something that is not even associated with sex itself and orgasm, sweet devastation at the end of an orgy of many hours, pushing the rest of the world away, as if your mind was cleared, shaken and calibrated as it should. I remember it all. I remember well ... But do I want to repeat it? Even when I have this opportunity?
Oh, these heaths of neural network psychology, with the melancholy schemes of hormonal spurring, with the despair of theories about burning out simple patterns ... Were not the most vivid and captivating sensations of the beginning of life - like the first dose of a strong drug for a drug addict? Dose can be repeated. Even increasing. But will the miracle of that very first time return ?
Or my thoughts, knowledge, experience, ingrown into me, which have become me, are already different than they were then - this whole body kit will not allow this miracle to happen anymore?
I don't know yet. Dozens of mathematicians, hundreds of psychologists and thousands of programmers are harnessed to open up these wastelands. But there are not enough answers yet.
And something inside of me tells me that this is all - remains in the past.
19. Ambrosia
Although sad? Or somewhere ahead - other pleasures?
About which I now can not even think? What did the cave-man know, whose highest pleasures were a side-warming fire, a charred piece of meat, and a stinking and pataty woman-dystrophic — about the suddenly picked up, before the crawls on the ridge, delighted with the music? about catharsis covering the last minutes of a movie? but at least about a sudden sparkling pacification from a glass of champagne, without touching much more harmful excesses ...
If I cannot reach immortality, I would like to reach the point at which the interface will be fully functional, in terms of the features for which I was originally intended. Not just an artificial analogue of how human (animal) feelings are delivered to the brain - a picture, sound, taste, smell, touch, inner body ... Brought to mind, the interface should allow to connect the neocortex with artificial neural networks not at the level of the junction with the end layers, but and ingrowth averages. Not just a clearly formulated question from the brain - and the neural network's answer is already ready, but a merge at the level of processing intermediate patterns ... As the neocortex surrounds the limbic system, the neocortex itself will be enhanced by a new layer - the technocortex. What qualify does it give? .. What pleasures- none of the people who have not been tried before! - they can carry? ..
As my neighbor jokes, when that interstellar probe nevertheless reaches the planet, theoretically suitable for the birth of life, but not a sign of its originating - there will be one alien pharaoh, who nevertheless achieved immortality, and many, many processors who consider the theory of the greatest possible pleasure and the way to achieve it are no longer distracted by any nonsense.
20. The day when the story is over
The ban on releasing powerful AI from the sandbox, which would surely advance humanity into a singularity a long time ago, is a conspiracy of pharaohs, frightened that artificial intelligence will be a more effective competitor that will destroy our business empires and deprive of power, despite all our intelligence, experience, connections , and resources ...
We squeeze out juices from all of humanity only in order to splash them into the furnace of a meaningless whim, - in an attempt to last forever our several hundred lives, completely useless for the rest of humanity. Oh, if humankind had directed these resources to create the genome of immortal people from scratch! It would have been achieved long ago. All those who are now around twenty, would be them - not ill, not aging, immortal ...
If someone somewhere once creates such a gene - or has already created! - we will never let this new breed of ideal people appear. In fear that these immortals will become rioters who gain mind and experience for decades. And someone, sooner or later, will outwit the world order created by us ...
We are accused of everything, but they can do nothing about it.
And - as my neighbor likes to philosophize - they will never be able to. Living by social contract leads to an equal opportunity society, only if you are from those first generations that were born soon after the foundation of this society. Born later, and your destiny is to respect the rights of private property, dismantled by those who are in this world before you. Of course, you still have a small chance to break into their ranks ... There was. Until ourera.
You will contend with those who have made capital, influence, clanked secret passages in institutions and governments, cemented and drilled further, and saved up knowledge, open to all, and gained experience, accessible only to the elect, - longer than your whole life, including infancy and senile dementia?
We are the handful of lucky ones who were at the right time in the right place.
Already we will not die, but were born in a world where social elevators have not been dismantled. We were at the top, having achieved everything with our mind and will, pushing out those who dangled there by birthright in the ancient rich clan. And nowhere from this top we will not get to. Born after - there is no way to get through. Exceptions are possible, but the general rules will not change.
If you are a bi-zombie child, you will be either a bi-zombie, or an ant serving someone’s business empire or a stronghold. Some time. Until you die.
21. Knight's vows
Resources always seem to be in short supply. But is it possible to call the competition between our business empires among themselves (so that the acquired cash flows are directed to those studies that are necessary for the concrete of us, and not to the abstract progress of gerontology) - a war of all against all?
It was never a gentleman's game. Among the hundreds of scientists and specialists who influence the medical kitchen of your stronghold, a messed-up Cossack may be caught - not an idealist, but in fact an assassin hired by someone from other pharaohs. Doctoral degrees and professorships this is not a hindrance. He may be among the guards. Or a financial adviser, consciously pushing your empire to the abyss ...
But there is a line. This line is how the concrete killing of one of us will affect the rest of us. You can poison, blow up, outwit - if you can. Success is never blamed. At least in our circle. You can even bring down the suborbital on someone's dome.
This will remain your private affair.
But to blow up the nuclear power plant closest to the citadel in order to force it to get out of the armor, putting a vulnerable belly into the light, this is a bust. Blow up the dam, or choke economically the whole region - no.
Any global damage to humanity — complex production chains, the economy as a whole, and the development of a specific technology — is damage to each of us .
This behavior is suppressed. All of us at once.
No assassins sent in white coats, no ramming trucks with explosives. We just all together stifle the business empire of the one who did it. Then its citadel itself will turn into an extinct termitary.
There were several such. Now is no more. Even half-finished Russian princes and self-confident Chinese mandarins have learned the line beyond which it is impossible.
22. The hand that caught the world by the balls
Are we irremovable? Ever established their power and their order?
Regarding myself, I really hope. About others ... Not all, of course, of us will get to immortality. If someone gets there.
Are we tyrants? Senseless and merciless? How to assure the ringleaders bi-zombies?
This is an antique cliché. From those times of petrified shit, when the ruler could achieve absolute power, but he knew that sooner or later everything would end, he would die. In short, by the standards of human history, time. And what else could he do, how could he not be kept in power with all his might? Having spat on the fact that tactical gains for him personally right now - once and then strategically drive his entire empire into the abyss? Yes, in ten or twenty years after his reign everything will fall apart. But the tyrant anyway. He himself has long been dead.
We? ..
We are the very rulers who are vitally interested in our flock being as viable as possible and developing. This is our only chance.
There will be no more wars. No more economic downturns. There will be no epidemics, famine and big natural tragedies, if they are prevented by the power of men.
Life death! - selects from us those who are best for this. Not interested in progress - you die. Interested, but not effective, - you will rot in the valley of a lost pace.
Remains the smartest, most volitional. Most worthy.
We are the best that mankind could have.
23. WYSIWYG
It is not like endless happiness - with a sunny meadow, where lovely nymphs, young wine foams, meat sizzles on the grill, all in a beastly distinct sense of being and without a shadow of fear, there is no scaffold of old age, disease, decay and death looming ahead, - how it dreamed of me vaguely when I started all this. Almost half a century ago ...
A decade of exhausting race that seems endless.
Or maybe this is real life?
24. A perplexed man
A stage that your cave ancestors and your concrete grandfathers simply did not reach?
But which needs to be passed, so that once the body grows by machines and sprouting into the floors, it is replaced by a collection together. At last, a patch for a patch, an organism perfected to perfection, to which death is no longer terrible.
25. Chrysalis
Does the butterfly look like a caterpillar? Even on that particular, from which she herself turned out?
They are separated by the pupal stage. The larvae, which managed to eat away, the covers turn into frozen armor - cast in gold, is there a universal wink in this? - to provide several weeks of relative safety from the outside world. While inside ... First, the histolysis: the larva practically breaks itself apart. Most of its organs cease to function as before. Only its tiny nervous system remains intact, which starts and then controls histogenesis: the old organs are reborn.
In order to finally get out of its pyramid, a creature that reached the highest stage of its development was born: you can flap your wings - and fly ... Fly to where you are already waiting for the same ones.
Real people are us.
KDPV: Peter Weyland, CEO of Weyland Corporation (portrayed by Guy Pearce in Prometheus , 2012)