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Optimizing Health

PROGENY

Picture of Jayroop Ramesh

Jayroop Ramesh

Indian
Writing from UAE

The setting sun cast a solitary ray of perfunctory light through the glass dome covering the desert city of Al-Waha, temporarily blinding Telos Mierre. He stumbled into the rustic pub Gil-gam, causing the Bartender-o-mata to perform a five-second pairing with his internal Cell- drones to assess his intoxication level, before being satisfied that he was merely clumsy. The bar boasted decor reminiscent of the 16th century, which Telos recognized from his readings as being that of a wayside English tavern that attracted stray bards, lost travellers, confused merchants, and wandering destinies.

He had spent the day farming, after manually overriding the automated Agri-drones and their supervising Farmer-o-matas. Usurping their rightful roles was yet another attempt to silence his gnawing desires to call something of his own to feel accomplished by. He could only halt the operations of this terrarium for a couple of hours, and any more tinkering could have alerted the Patrol-drones buzzing about in the twilight sky or the Police-o-matas. He then decided that a drink at one of the Sky Islands was the best option, nay, a necessity, before he retired for the night. It was not like he had anyone waiting at home should he be late anyway, and it was his father’s birthday.

“A barrel of ale my good sir, and a plate of your finest meat.” Telos jested in an accent mimicking an old farmer in a play he had once attended. This preceded curated personalization of media consumption becoming the general norm. His father had refused to sign up for this, dismissing it proclaiming, “personalizing is everything but personal, it’s hijacking your autonomy for someone or something to decide everything on your behalf”. But like any impressionable youth, Telos did not want to be left behind his peers and wanted to have the best experience without a single dull moment as per his interests. Ironic, considering that this feature made people have less things in common, and caused a sense of alienation where everyone become an island unto themselves, capturing everything about oneself, except what makes a person, a person.

“Consumption of a barrel full of alcohol is hazardous to health and can be construed as a voluntary intent to impart harm to oneself or others. This can be arranged; however, the Patrol- drones will be alerted as a precautionary measure. As for the meat, that can be arranged and cooked well-done as per your usual preference,” the Bartender-o-mata replied.

I forget that few models can process humour or sarcasm, however poorly constructed it may be, Telos thought ruefully. “On a second thought, I would prefer a chalice of red wine, from the vineyards of Tosan, my dear comrade!” Today however, he felt the imperative to switch his doneness preference. “Oh, and make the meat medium rare, please and thank you.”

“Of course. But in a glass.”

In less than twenty seconds a glass full of wine was placed in front of Telos on the wooden table and in less than sixty seconds a plate full of a carnivore’s delight joined him while his payment was processed by a momentary odd, almost romantic, gaze into his eyes, or rather retinas.

Telos was only five years old when he came to know that he would be one of the last
generation of children to be born. Many rumours regarding the causes of plummeting birth rates had been circulating well before the final announcements made its way across the world like an arrow piercing the core of collective potential legacy, in what became to be known as the Stagnation. Illegal contraception? No economic imperatives? Botched vaccinations? Global conspiracies? Extraterrestrial interferences? Whatever the reasons were, mass infertility had befallen humans.

Science and religion offered options for consolation, but with the former not being able to cure or isolate the issue, and the latter deeming the situation as a sign of the end times, the final people of a once proud race set out to make the most of what they could, with what they had. In the pursuit of reviving procreative ability, various breakthroughs were achieved. Longer lifespans were achieved with tiny Cell-drones monitoring and quantifying health from within the body to enable and ensure timely intervention, and artificial intelligences (A.Is) that learned experientially by acting and reacting with the world were developed to replace vocations and occupations. The auto-didactic A.Is entrenched its roots through all the networks of the world with the commands of governments as well as human right groups and sought to eradicate, or at least mitigate hunger and poverty by improving socio-economic policies and regulating capital. The only varieties of intelligence besides that of the underutilized humans’ were swarms of specialized drones which performed rote and repetitive tasks, and the human-like automatons, who replaced jobs requiring considerable sentience, with some models even passing, or rather acing, the Turing tests. While unbridled fear of impending A.I apocalypses, or technological dictatorships consumed the world in the nascent days, rapidly improving quality of life and the relatively slow diminishing of wealth inequality doused the torches of societal and cultural dissent and dulled the pitchforks of physical and virtual protests. This meant that people could now dedicate all their time to doing whatever they desired, whenever they desired, within reason, and no malicious artificial beings were infringing on human freedoms. At least, none so egregiously compared to what people did to each other, as the A.Is had no intrinsic desire to subjugate and hold dominion. Naturally, utopia did not come to
everyone equally, as those in power, maintained similar hierarchies and structures, and the A.Is perpetuated this too.

Now, almost two hundred years later, science had discovered a way to sustain mankind;
regeneration by lineage reprogramming. The sounds of jubilation echoed throughout the streets of the Sky Island, and Telos heard this before he saw the gigantic Media-drone screens above him visually convey the same information. A long way through a million iterations since Dolly, he thought. Apparently, this novel approach proposed to circumnavigate senescence altogether, evoking a transdifferentiation process akin to that of the biologically immortal class of jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii. Few people from the generations preceding Telos’ were alive today, and fewer still who had experienced begetting children, but the exhilaration of being able to propagate posterity was infectious. His father, before his passing a long, long time ago, used to remark: “All memory is unreliable, mine is, and so is yours.” He did not remember much else from his childhood days, except the stories of his fathers’ childhood. Or were they his?

The pub was noticeably scarce, perhaps due to the celebrations happening everywhere else. Out of the smattering of folk present, a fetching woman caught his eye, but he immediately dismissed the prospect once he recognized her as a Maiden-o-mata. After all, he had been in love once, achingly and passionately, and while he currently physically appeared to be a man in his 40s, his heart had aged tremendously, never quite recovering from the loss of his beloved. He begged her to undergo the medical procedures to decelerate aging, but she, like his mother, remained stubbornly anchored to the old ways of the world. She was in her teenage years when the Stagnation set in, and orphaned in a cruel twist of fate, so held fond memories lost to many of the idea of a family, of loving parents, of adorable siblings, of mischievous cousins and of doting grandparents.

Telos took his glass and walked beside a window for an aerial view of Al-Waha.

Nothing was as breathtaking as seeing this city, with its towering skyscrapers laden with lights, its bustling streets full of hovering vehicles, a layer of drones hanging like clouds as the buildings tapered towards their zenith, and of course, the other floating man-made Sky Islands enclosed in their own biospheres and ecosystems. He loved that the testaments to imaginative ingenuity beneath him did not adhere to a particular shape or design, but rather flaunted influences from multiple cultures and peoples who occupied the region of Al-Waha throughout history. As the drones and automatons became ever so entrenched in the daily lives of people, replacing the need for regular human input, the surmounting idle time available to people became satiated only through increased communication and interactions between diverse ideologies and belief systems. As for the fantastical lands suspended in air, one could not begin to isolate the mythological inspirations from the inventions: Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Anti-gravity propulsion engines and vertical farming. Abode of Shambala? Geospatial magnets and temperature-controlled domes. Ancestral hope for tomorrow was in the lifeblood of culture, juxtaposed against the despair of an unforgiving world, and shaped by their descendants’ dreams.

It’s simpler to unite, than it is to divide. Once we had learned to accept differences, seeking to separate based on dissimilarities became unnatural, Telos mused. He continued to wonder if all these wonders would have manifested if homogenization, of both self and society, had been encouraged in the name of frictionless conformity.

As he bit into his steak, he recalled a story from his grandfather about a farmer who wanted to live forever. In an attempt to befriend, tame and dominate death, in the futile fancy that one could stave off providence itself, he aspired to add years to a passing life devoid of life which had passed him by.

Strange, he could not remember how it ended. Something about his son? And he could not remember when his great-grandfather used to narrate it either. He continued to chew, hoping that the motion would jog his memory. As he looked through the window at the Light-drones covering the velvety night sky to form digits commemorating the impending reversal of the Stagnation, a sudden realization dawned on him. He was supposed to celebrate his father’s birthday, even if he was alone. Telos sheepishly glanced at the seven glasses in front of him which contained only a few scattered droplets of wine and congealed condensate.

“Huh, looks like I ended up ordering more throughout my meal. No matter, I’ll just get one mo—”
“I’m afraid your inebriation level is above the enforced limit, and I must refuse further service. I am, however, more than happy to call you a Hover-pod to take you home or arrange a Sleep- pod in our facilities till the countdown,” the Bartender-o-mata said in a tone that sounded disapproving.
“You don’t understand, I forgot to honour my father’s memory, I must have one more! …please,” Telos croaked, his tongue somehow constricting his ability to speak.
“But sir, the last six glasses were ordered citing the exact same reason. I shall play each of your requests as and when it was recorded,” the Bartender-o-mata remarked. Six audio snippets played in sequence, each with an alarmingly increasing lack of politeness, and decreasing notion of sobriety. For some reason, each drink was ordered in the name of Telos Mierre, and toasted to Telos Mierre, but not to his father.
“That is so inconsiderate of me for the man who raised me, I’m sorry, can I place an order for when my drunkenness subsides?” Telos plead, pronouncing each word like he was uttering them for the first time.

“Unfortunately, sir, the countdown will conclude before your intoxication levels are projected to reduce as per your body weight, age, gender and genetic susceptibility,” Bartender-o-mata replied without seeming particularly apologetic.
Whispering unintelligible attempts at curses, Telos swayed and collapsed on his bench by the window and peered out at this so-called countdown. 3…2….1!

The night sky split open as if a sharp knife slid down a satin black cloth, and for a few moments, Telos was suspended in eternity, no longer intoxicated, as a torrent of memories threatened to flood and overwhelm his senses.

He was in an abandoned clinical facility with long unending hallways, unusually long
shadows, and absolute deafening silence. Liminal spaces of the mind? A Doctor-o-mata which uncannily resembled a dishevelled scientist approached him and enunciated in a staccato manner.

“Telos Mierre, congratulations on surviving the latest experiment of the Stagnation Resolution, once again. Psychological continuity still appears to be an issue, but rest assured, we are working on it.”

Telos felt paralyzed, and locked-in, with no control of his body beyond the audio-visual senses and years and years of sights, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes competed with his limited awareness for attention. The Cell-drones inside him projected his abnormally stressed vitals to a digital interface behind the Doctor-o-mata, who after studying them briefly attempted to connect its limbs together in a gesture imitating placation.

“Do not worry, we do this for your benefit. To save the future of your race. Since the original Stagnation, humanity had tasked us with finding a cure to the problem of infertility. We devised a method to revert an individual back to a certain state in their own lifecycle, using their own genetic blueprints in the event of incident apoptosis, monitored by the Cell-drones. However, the human brain is not yet neuroplastic enough to retain or generate new neural pathways beyond an average age of 175 years. Thus, only vestiges of your past lives remain in each iteration, and interestingly, almost all people attribute them to stories being derived from parental figures from early childhood. Almost everyone leads different lives each iteration, but certain facets of the original base persist. Unfortunately, not everyone survives every iteration as even if you are functionally immortal, you are not physically invincible. This will inevitably lead to a mass extinction, and our explicit programming compels us to find the best solution to this problem. To ensure all conditions and variables of the closed system stay the same each time, we must perform a reset of this reality to a certain state as well. This will be to the date of our inception while retaining episodic metrics from each trial.”

Telos was falling in the dark. A fall without an end. He saw the fatal error of artificial intelligence. It was smart enough to iterate, but did not possess the creativity to change the initial conditions or take grand risks with no obvious reward. No ‘eureka’ moments emerged from its code to give rise to spontaneous mutations in our gene pool, thereby ignoring evolutionary advantages as the unpredictability of randomness is suboptimal. It formulated a way to keep humankind immortal, and even reverse time in a local frame of reference. But it could not collaborate, communicate, or consider any radically different plans to restore fertility. What could be more personalized than your legacy just being yourself? He could feel his body age backwards and his grip on consciousness fading. He willed himself to remember: “Impermanence is not insignificance,” and hoped that he would be able to sow the seeds for the future and reap a peaceful rest for himself. For now, he desired his life to share the cycle of day and night, to follow the seasons of life, and to return to the yesterdays when nature ran its course.