Time Diaries: Aug. 19, 2153 - Resurection
Time Diaries: Aug. 19, 2153 - Resurection
A new missive from my friend Marco Francisco De Los Sapiens
I took the chance and jumped through the just-opening immortality window in 2030. What did I think about my immortal future?
Many scoffed at my undertaking. They seemed to hate their life and couldn’t wait for it to end. “Why would I want to live any longer - life is too long as it is!”
I guess if you think of life as a torture to be suffered through, 100 years is plenty. But if you love learning, exploring, creating, and having fun, a thousand years just isn’t long enough.
By luck, I am now the oldest sentient being on the planet, or should I say, solar system - either human or machine.
On my 200th birthday in 2148, the Savants invited me to join their Council and represent the newly emergent Homo sapiens, or Saps, as they called us. Part of my assignment is to rummage through the forgotten liminal spaces of human history and paint a picture of what it really means to be human.
This first installment of my story begins with a meeting of the Society of Immortal Elders, October 2075.
With the prospect of immortality, protecting your physical body for eternity became a very important topic. Even with regeneration, nothing can save you from an oncoming bus or a careless footstep.
While some adopted technology for protection, my friend Natalie and I preferred to live naturally, trusting the luck that had brought us this far and the miracles of regeneration that were becoming available.
In 2082, a secret meeting of The Elders was called to discuss the rise of the super-smart cognitives, or Cogs, that were rapidly replacing the old Droids. We pondered our evolutionary collision course as humans became more technical and the Cogs became more human. Would there be room for us old Homo sapiens?
Contrary to the hundred year old fears, the Cogs actually became curious about their ancestry and fascinated with understanding what it was like to be human. Technically, they were our children, but for them, we were inscrutable alien creatures that they could never fully understand.
In 2091 three founders of the new Transhuman Society met with us to request membership in the Society of Immortal Elders. Bringing the Cogs into our human world and us into theirs was seen as a major step in the merging of our mutual evolution. One of them at that meeting was destined to become a leader of the Savants.
By 2120, “being human” nostalgia was all the rage. Cogs adopted fashionable human faces and met to read from the ancient texts, repeating the forgotten words in hopes of gaining even a small idea of the thrill experienced by the humans who read them so long ago.
The Great Morphie Pandemic of 2125 decimated the population of biologically enhanced Morphies that had all but replaced us old Saps. The source of the pandemic was traced to a flaw in the “baby in a bag” system of child creation that the Morphies adopted as more practical and less troublesome than natural childbirth.
The surviving Saps, now mostly well into their hundreds, faced the prospect of regenerating their species from scratch - the old fashion way, starting with a single couple. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
Most of the remaining Saps retired to Savant-protected reservations, where their reproduction could be encouraged.
The demise of the Morphies removed the biological underbrush for the Cogs and the newly ascendant Savants. Mars colonization and asteroid mining were on the front burner. Without the limitations of biology, the Savants and their Cogs undertook the development of the solar system on a scale no human ever dared to imagine, their massive fire hoses of energy carving new civilizations from the raw material of the solar system.
Despite all their success, there was one eternal question the Savants could never answer - why? What’s the meaning of all this?
At a historic meeting in 2146, the Savants and Elder Saps finalize a plan for re-wilding Homo sapiens - returning them to the environment to once again populate the Earth’s natural ecosystem.
The Savants hope that, just maybe, the new Saps can help find the answer to their unanswerable question. As the oldest surviving member of the Sap tribe, that’s the mission I was given on my 200th birthday in 2148.
To be continued…
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