The Possibility of an Island (40 page)

Unlike Marie23, Esther31 thought that the community that had settled in the zone was not made up of savages, but of neohumans who had rejected the teachings of the Supreme Sister. The satellite images, it’s true, left room for doubt: they might, or might not, be beings transformed by SGR; but how could heterotrophs, she pointed out, have survived in a place that supported no trace of vegetation? She was convinced that Marie23, although expecting to meet humans of the previous race, was in fact going to find neohumans who had undertaken the same journey as her.

“Maybe that was, fundamentally, what she was looking for…,” I said. She reflected for a long time before replying, in a neutral tone: “That is possible.”

Daniel1, 26

IN ORDER TO WORK,
Vincent had moved into a windowless hangar, about fifty meters long on either side, situated right next to the Church’s offices, and linked to them by a covered passageway. As I passed through the offices, where despite the early hour secretaries, archivists, and accountants were busy behind their computer screens, I was struck again by the fact that this powerful spiritual organization, which was thriving, which already claimed to have, in the countries of Northern Europe, a number of followers equivalent to that of the main Christian denominations, was, in many other respects, organized exactly like an SME. Cop was very comfortable, I could tell, in this hardworking, humble atmosphere that corresponded to his values; the strutting, show-off side of the prophet had always, in reality, deeply displeased him. At ease in his new existence, he behaved like a socially minded employer, listening to his employees, always ready to give them a half-day off or an advance on their salary. The organization worked wonderfully, the members’ legacies came in, after their deaths, and enriched a capital already valued at twice that of the Moonies; their DNA, replicated in five samples, was preserved at low temperature in underground rooms impermeable to most known radiation, which could withstand a thermonuclear attack. The laboratories run by Knowall constituted not only the
ne plus ultra
of current technology; in fact nothing, in the private sector as well as the public, could compare with them, he and his team had acquired, in the field of genetic engineering as well as in that of fuzzy neural networks, an unassailable lead, all done with absolute respect to the legislation that was currently in force, and the most promising students at most of the American and European technological universities now applied to work alongside them.

Once the dogma, ritual, and regime had been established, and any dangerous deviations liquidated, Vincent made only brief media appearances, during which he could afford himself the luxury of tolerance, agreeing with representatives of the monotheistic religions on the existence of common spiritual aspirations—without disguising, however, the fact that their objectives were radically different. This strategy of appeasement had paid off; and the two bomb attacks against offices of the Church—one, in Istanbul, was claimed by an Islamic group; the other, in Tucson, Arizona, was attributed to a fundamentalist Protestant sect—had aroused universal indignation, and had backfired on their perpetrators. The innovative aspects of the Elohimite proposals for life were now essentially taken on by Lucas, whose incisive communication of them, straightforwardly ridiculing paternity, playing—with a controlled audacity—on the sexual ambiguity of very young girls, and devaluing the ancient taboo of incest without explicitly attacking it, ensured every one of his press campaigns an impact out of all proportion to the investment made, while still maintaining the establishment of a broad consensus, through unreserved praise for the dominant hedonistic values and emphatic homage to Oriental sexual techniques, all dressed up visually in a manner that was both aesthetic and very direct, which went on to become seminal (the ad “Eternity, Tranquilly” had thus been joined by “Eternity, Sensually,” then “Eternity, Lovingly,” which, without a shadow of doubt, innovated the sphere of religious advertising). Without offering any resistance, and without even imagining the possibility of a counterattack, the established churches saw most of their followers, in the space of a few years, disappear into thin air, and their stars wane in favor of the new cult—which, moreover, recruited the majority of its followers from atheistic, well-off, modern milieus—As and B1s, to use Lucas’s terminology—to whom they had long since had no access.

Conscious that things were going well, that he was surrounded by the best possible colleagues, Vincent had devoted himself more and more exclusively, over the last few weeks, to his great project, and it was with surprise that I saw again, beneath the mask of the business leader, a man who was fragile, timid, and uncertain in speech, slightly vacant, but at the same time weighed down by a secret preoccupation. He hesitated for a long time, that morning, before letting me discover his life’s work. We had one coffee, then another, at the automatic dispenser. Turning the empty cup in his fingers, he finally said to me: “I think this will be my last work…” before looking at the floor. “Susan agrees…,” he added. “When the moment is right…I mean, the moment for leaving this world and beginning the wait for the next incarnation, we will enter this room together; we will go into the center of it and there we will take the lethal mixture together. Other rooms will be built, along the same model, so that all the followers can have access to it. It seemed to me…it seemed to me that it was useful to formalize this moment.” He stopped talking, and looked me straight in the eye. “It was difficult work…,” he said. “I have thought a lot of ‘The Death of the Poor,’ by Baudelaire; that helped me enormously.”

The sublime verses came back to me immediately, as if they had always been present in a corner of my consciousness, as if my whole life had only been a more or less explicit commentary on them:

Death, alas! consoles and brings to life;

The end of it all, the solitary hope;

We, drunk on death’s elixir, face the strife,

Take heart, and climb till dusk the weary slope.

 

 

All through the storm, the frost, and the snow,

Death on our black horizon pulses clear;

Death is the famous inn that we all know,

Where we can rest and sleep and have good cheer.

I nodded my head; what else could I do? Then I went into the corridor leading to the hangar. As soon as I opened the hermetically sealed, reinforced door, which led inside, I was dazzled by a blinding light, and for half a minute I couldn’t make anything out; the door closed behind me with a dull thud.

Gradually my eyes became accustomed, and I recognized forms and contours; it looked a little like the computer simulation I had seen on Lanzarote, but the luminosity of it all was even more enhanced, he really had worked on the whiteness, and there was no longer any music, just a few light, quavering sounds, a little like vague atmospheric vibrations. I had the impression of moving inside a milky, isotropic space, which sometimes condensed, suddenly, into granular microformations—on moving closer I could make out mountains, valleys, and whole landscapes, which became rapidly more complex, then disappeared almost immediately, and the decor fell back into a vague homogeneity, crisscrossed by oscillating potentialities. Strangely, I could no longer see my hands, nor any other part of my body. I quickly lost all sense of direction, and I then had the impression of hearing footsteps echoing mine: when I stopped, the steps stopped as well, but slightly afterward. Looking right I caught sight of a silhouette that replicated every one of my movements, and that was only distinguished from the dazzling whiteness of the atmosphere by being a slightly duller white. I felt rather worried: the silhouette disappeared immediately. I stopped worrying: the silhouette rematerialized, looming out of nothingness. Gradually I became used to its presence, and continued my exploration; it became increasingly obvious to me that Vincent had used fractal structures, I recognized Sierpinski Triangles, Mandelbrot sets, and the installation itself seemed to evolve as I became conscious of it. Just as I had the impression that the space around me was fragmenting into Cantor’s triadic sets, the silhouette disappeared, and there was total silence. I could no longer even hear my own breath, and I then understood that I had
become
the space; I was the universe and I was phenomenal existence, the sparkling microstructures that appeared, froze, then dissolved in space were part of me, and I felt them to be mine, producing themselves inside my body, both every one of their apparitions and every one of their cessations. I was then seized by an intense desire to disappear, to melt into a luminous, active nothingness, vibrating with perpetual potentialities; the luminosity became blinding, the space around me seemed to explode and diffract into shards of light, but it was not a space in the usual sense of the term, it included many dimensions, and any other form of perception had disappeared—this space contained, in the conventional sense of the word, nothing. I remained like this, among the formless potentialities—beyond even form and absence of form—for a period of time that I couldn’t define; then something arose in me, at first almost imperceptibly, like the memory or dream of the sensation of gravity; then I became conscious again of my breathing, and of the three dimensions of the space, which gradually became still; objects reappeared around me, like discrete emanations from the whiteness, and I was able to leave the room.

It was, in fact, impossible, I told Vincent a little later, to stay alive in such a place for more than ten minutes. “I call this space
love,
” he said. “Man has never been able to love, apart from in immortality; it is undoubtedly why women were closer to love when their mission was to give life. We have discovered immortality, and presence in the world; the world no longer has the power to destroy us, it is we, rather, who have the power to create through the power of our vision. If we remain in a state of innocence, and under the approving gaze of one pair of eyes, we also remain in love.”

Having taken my leave of Vincent, once I was in the taxi, I gradually calmed down; my state of mind as I crossed the Parisian suburbs remained, however, quite chaotic, and it was only after Porte d’Italie that I regained my sense of irony, and was able to repeat to myself mentally: “Could this be possible? This immense artist, this creator of ethics, he hasn’t yet learned that love is
dead
!” At once I felt a certain sadness as I realized that I had still not given up being what I had been for my entire career: a sort of Zarathustra of the middle classes.

The receptionist at the Lutétia asked me if my stay had been fine. “Impeccable,” I told him as I looked for my Premier credit card, “things are really humming.” He then wanted to know if they would have the privilege of seeing me again sometime soon. “No, I don’t think so…,” I replied, “I don’t think I will be back here for a long time.”

Daniel25, 15

“
WE TURN OUR EYES
to the heavens, and the heavens are empty,” writes Ferdinand12 in his commentary. It was around the twelfth neohuman generation that the first doubts regarding the coming of the Future Ones appeared—that is to say a millennium after the events related by Daniel1; it was at almost the same time that the first defections were heard of.

Another millennium has passed, and the situation has remained stable, the proportion of defections unchanged. Inaugurating a tradition of nonchalance in relation to scientific data that was to lead to the demise of philosophy, the human thinker Friedrich Nietzsche saw in man “the species whose type is not yet fixed.” If humans in no way merited such an assessment—less so than most of the animal species in any case—it certainly no longer applies to the neohumans who followed them. It can even be said that what characterizes us best, in relation to our predecessors, is undoubtedly a certain conservatism. Humans, or at least humans of the last period, adhered, it seems very easily, to any new project, quite independently of the direction of the proposed movement;
change
in itself was apparently, in their eyes, a value. On the contrary, we greet innovation with the utmost reticence, and only adopt it if it seems to us to constitute an undeniable improvement. Since the Standard Genetic Rectification, which made us the first autotrophic animal species, no modification of any real significance has been developed. Projects have been submitted for our approval by the scientific authorities of the Central City, proposing, for example, to develop our aptitude for flight, or for survival in underwater environments; they have been debated, debated at length, before finally being rejected. The only genetic characteristics that separate me from Daniel2, my first neohuman predecessor, are minimal improvements, guided by common sense, for example an increase in metabolic efficiency in our use of minerals, or a slight decrease in sensitivity to pain of the nervous fibers. Our collective history, like our individual destinies, therefore appears, compared to that of the humans of the last period, peculiarly calm. Sometimes, at night, I get up to observe the stars. Huge climatic and geological transformations have remodeled the physiognomy of this region, as they have most of the regions of the world, over the course of the two last millennia; the brightness and position of the stars, their constellations, are undoubtedly the only natural elements that have, since the time of Daniel1, undergone no transformation. As I consider the night sky my thoughts turn to the Elohim, to that strange belief that was finally, in a roundabout away, to unleash the Great Transformation. Daniel1 lives again in me, his body knows in mine a new incarnation, his thoughts are mine; his memories are mine; his existence actually prolongs itself in me, far more than man ever dreamed of prolonging himself through his descendants. My own life, however, I often think, is far from the one he would have liked to live.