The Possibility of an Island (13 page)

In the course of the lunch, not one word was pronounced on the subject of the Elohim, and, as the week went on, I began to ask myself: Did they really believe in them? Nothing is more difficult to detect than a light cognitive schizophrenia, and with the majority of the followers I was unable to make a judgment. Patrick, clearly, believed in them, which, moreover, was a little worrying: here was a man who held an important post in his Luxembourg bank, through whom sums of money occasionally exceeding a billion euros passed, who believed in fictions that directly contradicted the most elementary Darwinian arguments.

A case that intrigued me even more was that of Knowall, and I ended up asking him the question directly—with a man of such intelligence, I felt incapable of playing games. His reply, as I expected, was perfectly clear. One, it was completely possible, and even probable, that some living species, sufficiently intelligent to create or manipulate life, had appeared somewhere in the Universe. Two, man had well and truly come into being by means of evolution, and his creation by the Elohim was therefore to be taken only as a metaphor—however, he warned me against too blind a belief in the Darwinian vulgate, which was being abandoned more and more by serious researchers; the evolution of species in reality owed far less to natural selection than to genetic drift, that is to say pure chance, and to the appearance of geographical isolates and separate biotopes. Three, it was totally possible that the prophet had met, not an extraterrestrial, but a man from the future; some interpretations of quantum mechanics in no way excluded the possibility of the movement of information, if not material entities, in the opposite direction to time’s arrow—he promised to provide me with documentation on the subject, which he did not long after the end of the course.

Emboldened, I then led him onto a subject that, since the beginning, had bothered me: the promise of immortality made to the Elohimites. I knew that a few cells had been taken from each follower, and that modern technology allowed their unlimited conservation; I had no doubts about the fact that the minor difficulties preventing human cloning at that current time would sooner or later be overcome; but personality? How would the new clone have the memory, however small, of his ancestor’s past? And to what extent, if his memory was not preserved, would he feel like the same being, reincarnated?

For the first time I sensed something in his eyes besides the cold competence of a mind used to rational notions, for the first time I had the impression of an excitement, an enthusiasm. This was his subject, the one he had devoted his life to. He invited me to accompany him to the bar; he ordered a very creamy hot chocolate for himself, I took a whisky—he didn’t even seem to notice this violation of the sect’s rules. A few cows approached the bay windows, and stopped, as if observing us.

“Some interesting results have been obtained from certain nemathelminth worms,” he began, “through simple centrifugation of the implicated neuron, and an injection of the proteic isolate into the brain of the new subject: you obtain a renewal of avoidance reactions, in particular those related to electric shocks, and even of routes followed in some simple mazes.”

I had the impression, at that moment, that the cows were nodding their heads; but he didn’t notice the cows either.

“Evidently, these results do not translate to vertebrates, and even less to evolved primates like man. I suppose you remember what I said, on the first day of the course, concerning the neuro-circuits. Well, the reproduction of such a mechanism is possible, not in computers as we know them, but in a certain type of Turing machine, which we can call fuzzy automata, on which I am working at the moment. Unlike classical calculators, fuzzy automata are capable of establishing variable, evolving connections between adjacent calculating units; they are therefore capable of memorization and apprenticeship. There is no a priori limit to the number of calculating units that can be linked, and therefore to the complexity of possible circuits. The difficulty at this stage, and it is considerable, consists of establishing a bijective relation between the neurons of a human brain, taken in the few minutes following its death, and the memory of a nonprogrammed automaton. The life span of the latter being almost limitless, the next step will be to reinject the information in the opposite direction, toward the brain of the new clone; this is the
downloading
phase which, I am convinced, will present no particular difficulty once the
uploading
has been perfected.”

Night was falling; the cows gradually turned away, returning to their pastures, and I could not prevent myself from thinking that they were distancing themselves from his optimism. Before leaving, he gave me his card: Professor Slotan Miskiewicz, from the University of Toronto. It had been a pleasure to talk with me, he said, a real pleasure; if I wanted complementary information, I shouldn’t hesitate to send him an e-mail. His research was progressing apace at that moment, and he hoped to make significant progress in the year to come, he repeated with a conviction that seemed to me a little forced.

A veritable delegation accompanied me to the Zwork airport on the day of my departure: in addition to the prophet there was Cop, Knowall, Joker, and other less heavyweight members, including Patrick, Fadiah, and Vincent, the Plastic Arts VIP, with whom I had got on pretty well—we exchanged addresses, and he invited me to come to see him when I was next in Paris. Of course, I was invited to the winter course, which would be held in March in Lanzarote and which would, the prophet warned me, take on an extraordinary dimension: this time, members from across the entire globe were invited.

I have certainly made only friends this week, I thought as I passed through the metal detector. No action, mind you; it’s true I didn’t exactly have the looks for that. Nor did I, needless to say, intend to join their movement; what had attracted me to it, at its core, was
curiosity,
that old curiosity that had been mine since childhood, and which, apparently, outlived desire.

The plane had two propellers, and gave the impression of being about to blow up at any moment during the flight. As we flew over the pastures, I became conscious that during this course, people, not to mention me, hadn’t fucked much—as far as I knew, and I think I probably would have known, I was really good at that type of observation. Couples had stayed as couples—I hadn’t got wind of any orgy, nor even a banal threesome; and those who came alone (the great majority) remained alone. In theory it was all extremely open, all forms of sexuality were permitted, even encouraged, by the prophet; in practice, the women wore erotic clothing, there was a lot of rubbing, but things went no further. That’s what is curious, and would be interesting to delve into, I told myself before falling asleep on my meal tray.

After three changes, and an extremely unpleasant journey overall, I landed at the Almería airport. It was about 45°C: that was thirty degrees more than in Zwork. It was good, but still not enough to stop the rise in anxiety. Crossing the tiled corridors of my house, I switched off the air conditioners one by one that the warden had switched on the day before my return—she was an old and ugly Romanian, her teeth in particular were very rotten, but she spoke excellent French; I had complete confidence in her, as they say, even if I had stopped giving her housework to do, because I couldn’t stand a human being looking at my personal objects—it was quite funny, I told myself occasionally while wiping the floor, to do the housework myself, with my forty million euros; but that was how it was, I could do nothing about it: the very idea that a human being, however insignificant, could contemplate the details of my existence, and its emptiness, had become unbearable to me. On passing in front of the mirror in the main living room (an immense mirror, which covered an entire wall; you could, with a woman you loved, have made love there while contemplating your reflections, etc.) I was shocked to see my face: I had become so thin I looked almost translucent. A ghost, that’s what I was becoming, a ghost of the sunny lands. Knowall was right: you had to move out, burn photos, and all the rest.

Financially, moving would have been an interesting operation: the price of land had almost tripled since my arrival. I still had to find a buyer; but rich people were plentiful, and Marbella was beginning to become rather saturated—the rich certainly like the company of the rich, no doubt it calms them, it’s nice for them to meet beings subject to the same torments as they are, and who seem to form a relationship with them that is not totally about money; it’s nice for them to convince themselves that the human species is not uniquely made up of predators and parasites; when you reach a certain density, however, there is a saturation point. For the moment, the density of rich people in the province of Almería was rather too low; one needed to find a rich person who was quite young, pioneering, and intellectual, possibly with ecological sympathies, a rich person who could take pleasure in observing pebbles, someone who had made a fortune in information technology, for example. In the worst-case scenario, Marbella was only 150 kilometers away, and the plans for a new highway were progressing quickly. No one, in any case, would miss me around here. But where would I go? And to do what? The truth is, I felt ashamed—ashamed of confessing to the estate agent that I had separated from my partner, that I didn’t have any mistresses, either, who could have put a bit of life into this immense house, and ashamed finally of confessing that I was alone.

Burning photos, however, was feasible. I devoted an entire day to gathering them together, there were thousands of snaps, I had always had a thing about souvenir photos; I only made a rapid selection, it is possible that some incidental mistress disappeared on this occasion. At sunset, I took all of them, in a wheelbarrow, out to a sandy area next to the terrace, poured a jerry can of gas over them, and lit a match. It was a splendid fire, several meters high, which must have been visible kilometers away, perhaps even on the Algerian coast. The pleasure was strong, but incredibly fleeting: around four in the morning I woke up again, with the impression that thousands of worms were swarming under my skin, and the almost irresistible desire to tear at myself until I bled. I telephoned Isabelle, who picked up the phone after the second ring—so she was not sleeping either. We agreed that I would stop by to take Fox in the following days, and that he would remain with me until the end of September.

As with all Mercedes above a certain power, with the exception of the SLR McLaren, the speed of the 600 SL is electronically limited to 250 km/h. I don’t think I dipped particularly below this speed between Murcia and Albacete. There were a few long and very open bends; I had an abstract sense of power—that, no doubt, of a man indifferent to death. A trajectory remains perfect, even one that concludes in death: there can be a truck, an overturned car, an imponderable; this takes nothing away from the beauty of the trajectory. A little after Tarancon, I slowed down somewhat to turn onto the R3, then the M45, without really going below 180 km/h. I went back up to maximum speed on the R2, which was completely deserted, and which bypassed Madrid at a distance of around thirty kilometers. I crossed Castilla along the N1 and I kept at 220 km/h until Vitoria-Gasteiz, before embarking on the more sinuous roads of the Basque country. I arrived in Biarritz at eleven in the evening, and took a room at the Sofitel Miramar. I met Isabelle the following morning at ten in the Silver Surfer. To my great surprise she had grown thinner, and I even had the impression she had shed all her excess kilos. Her face was slim, a little wrinkled, ravaged by sadness too, but she had become elegant and beautiful again.

“What have you done to stop drinking?” I asked.

“Morphine.”

“You haven’t had problems getting supplies?”

“No, no, on the contrary, it’s very easy here; there’s a network in all the tearooms.”

So all the old biddies of Biarritz were shooting up with morphine; it was a scoop.

“It’s a question of generation…,” she told me. “Now it’s posh, rock-’n’-roll old biddies; inevitably they have other needs. That said,” she added, “don’t be under any illusions: my face has returned more or less to normal, but the body has completely collapsed, I don’t even dare show you what’s underneath my tracksuit”—she pointed to a sea-blue item, with white stripes, chosen three sizes too big—“I don’t do any dance, no more sport, nothing; I don’t even go swimming anymore. I do an injection in the morning, one in the evening, and in between I look at the sea, that’s all. I don’t even miss you, at least not often. I want for nothing, Fox plays a lot, he’s very happy here…”

I nodded, finished my hot chocolate, and left to settle my hotel bill. An hour later, I was overlooking Bilbao.

A month’s holiday with my dog: throwing the ball down the stairs, running together on the beach. Living.

On September 30, at five in the afternoon, Isabelle parked in front of the residence. She had chosen a Mitsubishi Space Star, a vehicle classed by
L’Auto-Journal
in the category of “ludospaces.” Following the advice of her mother, she had opted for the “Box Office” model. She stayed about forty minutes before driving back to Biarritz. “Ah yes, I’m turning into a little old woman…,” she said, putting Fox in the backseat. “A nice little old lady in her Mitsubishi Box Office.”

Daniel24, 10

FOR A FEW WEEKS NOW,
Vincent27 has been seeking to establish contact. I had had only brief relations with Vincent26; he hadn’t informed me of the proximity of his death, nor of his passing to the intermediary stage. Between neohumans, the phases of intermediation are often brief. Each can, if he likes, change digital address, and make himself undetectable; for my part I have developed so few relationships that I have never considered it necessary. Sometimes entire weeks pass without me connecting myself, which exasperates Marie22, my most assiduous interlocutor. As Smith has already acknowledged, the subject-object separation is triggered, in the course of cognitive processes, by a convergent mesh of failures. Nagel notes that the same applies to separation between subjects (except that failure is not this time of an empirical order, but rather an affective one). It is in failure, and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself, and the passage of humans to neohumans, with the disappearance of all physical contact that is its correlative, has in no way modified this basic ontological given. We, like humans, have not been delivered from our status as
individuals,
and the dull dereliction that accompanies it; but unlike them, we know that this status is only the consequence of a failure in perception, another name for nothingness, the absence of the Word. Penetrated by death and formatted by it, we no longer have the strength to enter into the Presence. Solitude could, for certain human beings, have represented a joyful escape from the group; but as such, it involved, for each of these solitary beings, abandoning their original sense of belonging in order to discover other laws, and another group. Now that all the groups have disappeared, and every tribe has dispersed, we know ourselves isolated but similar to each other, and we have lost the desire to unite.