A cautionary tale about post-humanism and the end of the world.
“Dr. Idris, you are under arrest for boundary violations. Come with us, please.”
Idris had known it would come eventually. He had expected the agent of his undoing to be a real person (because his livelihood required intimate involvement with real people in pain), and that this person might be a woman (because he was known to have boundary issues in this regard), but that in any case his reputation, and consequently, his capacity to relieve pain, would be taken from him. His reputation was substantial. His face — at least as a digital simulacrum — was arguably as well recognized in many parts of the world as those of the manufactured celebrities seen every day in news reports fed to the landbound by the pirate captains of the sea-steading sovcorps which had commandeered international commerce and, increasingly, international law. His visage was known as well as that of the old Pope, who some years earlier had exchanged his purple robes for sackcloth and headed for the most afflicted parts of the planet, saying that good men had no choice but to do what the prophets of old had done. He was almost as much a meme as the so-called “Dog Who Could Talk,” enabled by an A.I. implant and canine cognitive therapy to articulate complete English sentences. Seven years before the date of this account, Dr. Idris had become known in many quarters as “The Man Who Heals The World.” In this perception of healing power lay the threat he posed to the people who then ran the world. What had allowed him so far to elude their grasp was his knack for being both ubiquitous and out of sight. Like another enigma of the early century, Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin, no one had known for certain that he was real.
In the beginning, he’d been able to stay under the radar because he was doing something that could not really be objected to by any faction. Even the sovcorps had mostly left him to his practice, because they reasoned that making people feel better was good for business. True, people bought stuff when they felt bad, but they bought even more when they felt better. As there was only one place for them to buy (the sovcorps company store formerly known as Amazon), upticks in sales were easily tracked. So for a while, they let him be. But as the newly revivified populace began to feel its oats again due to the effects of the Idris program, the sentiments of the captains had begun to shift. A genuinely awakened public is never good for business that thrives on keeping them asleep, and Dr. Idris had awakened them to the fact that despite the generous living wage payments they received each month, the safe charter schools and security they enjoyed, their value as individuals was now a negative number. They contributed nothing. Their sole function was to consume, to be given subsistence until the day the new post-human reality arrived, and then, little by little, to vanish from the face of the earth. The Idris Program had put a bug in this plan, by alerting The Herd to the very real possibility of its extinction. And so, various forces among the powerful had aligned to spade away the sand beneath Dr. Idris’s feet, in hopes that soon enough, he would sink from sight and the tsunami of consciousness he had unleashed would recede. The reason they had to go about it so stealthily was that Idris, for many, was close to being a god.
How had Dr. Idris climbed to such lofty heights that his elimination became the subject of fevered plotting among the most powerful .042% of people on the planet, the progeny of Peter Thiel, the ones who controlled 83% of the world’s wealth? In the middle of the fourth decade of the century, humankind had fallen into what seemed irreversible despair, what sociologists took to calling “The Great Malaise.” The root causes of TGM were best taken up with historians, economists, epidemiologists, as well as what was left of priests, pastors, and spiritual leaders. But to summarize: on a physical as well as psychic level, thirteen straight years of living with a relentlessly regenerative virus, proliferating at a never before seen scale, along with border wars in twenty-six countries that had more than once sent clouds of nuclear fallout circling the globe, had cost the earth a third of its population (some insiders thought this had been precisely the plan). So destabilized were governments and central banks that the pirate sovcorps (sovereign corporations) had risen to power on a tide of crypto-currency, then gone to sea to erect floating fortresses, initially to escape regulation by what remained, laughably, of state authority, but in short order to build an offshore empire that brought comparisons with the British Armada of the 19th century. The commoners, known to the captains as ‘The Herd,’ who survived on land did so by what was known as ‘bunkering,’ a mandated sequestration that had begun as a public health measure. The message to them from the captains was “Stay In. Stay Safe. Do Nothing.” They obeyed, and did this largely in solitude.
The human community — if indeed it could still be called a community — was atomized. The sociological effect of bunkering had been compared by one (now dead) historian to that of the 14th century’s Black Death. Public education ceased along with most public gatherings, and the populace was sorted by “affinity groups” based on race, ethnicity, preferences in sport, music, and video games, as well as by the results of a standardized test known as the Aptitude & Social Compatibility Matrix that aimed for maximal homogeneity of populations and minimal conflict, the better to maintain sovcorps profitability. White lived with white, black with black, Latino with Latino, queer with queer, like with like in honeycombed, high-rise clusters which had taken the place of antiquated concepts like towns, congressional and parliamentary districts. If you looked from a distance, at any given hour, at one of these residential towers, you were likely to see thousands of solitary human beings in headsets, staring blankly through their plexiglass picture windows at a world they had ceased to see.
This massive social realignment would never have been achievable without nearly global access to what was generically called Utopia Tech, the virtual realm of existence into which the bunkered slipped for days at a time, emerging only to pee, defecate, or to gobble or slurp the pre-packaged food that made it difficult for them to do so. This was the ‘tech’ that had been imagined as far back as the early days of the Internet, then reified in the third decade of the century with astronomical infusions of capital from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and an army of VC firms (as well as the founding fathers of the sovcorps). But as it turned out, the Metaverse never stood a chance against Maya, the cleverly named creation of an Indian start-up called the Manvantara Group that had reportedly been funded by an even richer source whose wealth was, for all purposes, invisible. The Maya engineers had found a way to utilize ultrasound frequencies to modulate brain waves and thereby replicate the full range of sensory experience: taste, touch, smell, sexual ecstasy, drug highs, and even ‘extra-sensory phenomena’ like mystical experience. When Maya came, life in the bunkers became, in all ways, better than the real thing, except perhaps on the toilet.
This was where Abraham Idris stepped in. It was, to him and eventually to his patients, a source of some amusement that his opening to them had come as a consequence of their chronic constipation. But think about it. What — other than terrible pain — is more likely to drive you to a doctor? And the fact that the presenting symptoms were so earthy and personal engendered an intimacy and honesty between doctor and patient that bypassed all the usual bromides of standard mental health treatment. Once people could talk freely about their eliminative organs, they could move pretty quickly to sex, and once they realized that anything resembling organ-to-organ sex was gone, they were able to talk about the disappearance of their bodies. The Idris Program had risen from shit to something approaching a new world religion. It had given The Herd purpose, and purpose is a very dangerous thing.
Idris’s genius had been to engineer a way to deliver his rescue from within the lion’s den. From inside Maya directly to the headsets of billions. In short (and it has to be short because this would otherwise become a technical manual), he had created an avatar that had replicated globally and which had undermined the ontology of virtual reality from the inside. Everyone hooked into Utopia Tech had avatars of differing genders, ages, sexual orientations, ethnicities, athletic abilities, and so forth. This digital diversity was baked into the post-humanist ethic (information floats free of bodies) and was an antidote to being ghettoed with one’s ‘tribe.’ And the ubiquity in Maya of pilot avatars — porn-aids, purchase-aids, security-aids, guides who rowed you like Charon through the Plutonian depths of the Mayan underworld — had, ironically, paved the way for Dr. Idris, for initially he seemed just another one of them. The Herd had long since become accustomed to being told what to buy, what to eat, what to think, and even when to die. In fact, almost no member of The Herd was able to navigate Maya without guidance, because The Herd had, in stunningly short order, been stripped of all agency and many higher brain functions. Idris’s epiphany was to perceive that this very incapacity could be used against Utopia Tech, which he loathed to the core of his being. He’d never taken a virtual holiday, eaten a virtual meal, or had virtual sex (in fact, it was his insistence on real carnal knowledge that would partially seal his fate). Abraham Idris was old school, and yet, in many ways he (or his avatar/s) was the first true post-human. If it could be said he had a theoretical north star, it would be the work of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst of the first half of the previous century, who had coined the term orgone energy and died in prison at the age of 59 after having had six tons of his published works burned by order of the court. Like Reich in an earlier age of repression, Idris sought to restore human beings to the truth of their bodies. The body was not merely a container, it was a house of spirits, a store of memories, a power plant. “Pause the feed,” he (or his Mayan avatar) would say to his patients in their headsets. “Look down at your body. Then come back to me and tell me what you see.” When they returned, they would sometimes say striking things, like, “What am I supposed to see?” Not because it wasn’t there, but because they could no longer sense it as an integral part of themselves. The women, especially, broke his heart. They’d lost all connection with their genital core.
“Yes,” he would answer. “Your body is disappearing. This is why you are having problems on the toilet. Let’s start with that and work our way up.” The process of rebuilding, of restoring the élan vital to these dispossessed humans, was almost shamanistic, and as with shamans, Idris had to die in order to resurrect, and this is how he became godlike to them. It began with a handful of people in Toronto’s Canton 68, Structure 787B, which was not far from his own physical address, and within six weeks, it had become more than one-hundred. After that, he could no longer monitor all the sessions personally, but his avatars, which operated by the principals of advanced deep learning A.I. assisted by quantum computation, could be in many places at once. Coded with the assistance of a phantom programmer who would later be revered as a hero in the Anti-Mayan underground, they could listen to the most searing personal stories and respond uniquely to each one, because the program has been based on principles of metaphysical logic that went back to the Neo-Platonists and specifically the Enneads of Plotinus and embraced the paradox that though no story is the same as another, all stories are essentially one. Idris’s first breakthrough came with a young woman — or so she represented herself — from Chillicothe, Ohio, who told him that “weird rumblings from below” were coming into and disrupting her Maya experience, that she hoped maybe it was her bowels moving, but suspected something much more alien to her being, such as a child.
“Okay,” he had said. “Let’s listen to those rumblings. See if you can locate the place they’re coming from and put your hand on it. No, don’t pause the feed. Keep it going. Reach outside Maya and find the place. When you find it, give it a name.” Suddenly, she was moaning, crying, laughing, and saying, “I know this is wrong. I know I’m in trouble.” Dr. Idris had been overcome with compassion and a desire that was both urgently physical and deeply spiritual (you might say Tantric). He found himself wanting to be the father of her phantom child. More than all else, he wanted to save her, and after many sessions, he did. She might not be able to leave her bunker, she might not have any place to go, but inside the coat of her flesh, all her selves had been reintroduced and reunited, and she testified to this, and her testimony was heard globally. This was something that the creators of Maya hadn’t properly anticipated, though it was staring them in the face. Because its virality, like that of all its cyberspace antecedents, was based on the sharing of experience (“You won’t believe the fantastic spa-cation I just took on Mars” or “Alien sex — the best I’ve ever had” or “I was touched by an angel”), and because the whole framework would collapse if not supported by sharing, everyone knew everything more or less instantly, and if this is a good recipe for sales at astronomical scale, it is also a good recipe for revolution. Sessions with Dr. Idris were the share of shares, because although they took place in a headset in a computer-created world, the experience of re-integration was real and embodied.
As his practice peaked in late ’37, with 2.2 billion subscribers, people on hundreds of thousands of consumer comment boards, designed so that the sovcorps could manage supply and demand and keep the Herd chewing its collective cud, began to report what they called religious experience, but was in fact, simply the description of what it felt like to be in their bodies. That was when Idris’s avatar ‘jumped the net’ and his likeness began to appear in graffiti art on urban buildings, on the side of mass transport carriers, and on New Year’s Eve 2039, lit up in pixels on the side of One Times Square.
Dr. Idris’s avatar was much like Dr. Idris himself. Salt and pepper hair swept back from his high forehead, prominent Semitic nose, chin and jaw firm but not aggressively so. Trim, compact body image, but modest height (or at least it appeared so relative to his virtual surroundings.) The sort of attractive, well-constructed man you might trust with any number of things. It was the eyes, however, that drew his patients so deeply into his confidence that after peak sessions, patients would report that he had entered them, possessed them, but always in a way that respected their spiritual and physical sovereignty. “Against the sovereign corporations,” he would tell them, “all we have is the sovereign self within the sovereign body, joined with others in saying that we want our world back.”
The phrase “the sovereign self,” or simply TSS, became the motto of a movement. The designers at the Manvantara Group, mindful (though dismissive) of the “primitive” human need for spiritual sustenance, had worked very hard to create simulations of religious experience, but in their ignorance of what this really was, had failed to forecast that such experience might actually be delivered extra-illusionis by Maya, or the effect that this might have. They had engineered orgasms so intense that people compared them to earthquakes, and fulfilled fantasies, like hang-gliding and dancing a ballet — all things that existed for most people only in meta-memory — but they had failed to anticipate that some might begin to incorporate these experiences in the literal sense of making them a part of body memory, and thereby begin to remember their bodies. This phenomenon was part of what had made Dr. Idris’s grand subversion possible, but it also led to his undoing when the woman came forward. There were strict laws against boundary violations, and there was no harder boundary that the one between digital phantasm and flesh. Trespass threatened the entire post-human project.
Until l’Affaire Idris erupted, even the most exhilarating of these in-game experiences were seen by the sovcorps barons as tools for the pacification of the herd, much like the bread and circuses of ancient Rome. “We offer you unlimited pleasure, you give us unquestioning obedience.” But the thirst for authenticity, once whetted, is insatiable, and what Maya was really doing, slowly but surely, and under the noses of its creators, was raising the stakes, priming the pump, increasing the appetite for the real. Had there never been a Dr. Idris, some other catalyst to rebellion would have emerged, but as it was, his simple command to “be in your body always, even when the mind is tripping across Utopia,” set off a chain reaction that at its peak of intensity altered the shape of Mayan reality. At that peak, it was ‘all Dr. Idris all-the-time.’ It was only him the people wanted in their feeds. He offered to take them out of the labyrinth, and in greater and greater numbers, they wanted to follow him, even if it meant pain — real pain — danger — real danger — and a revolutionary confrontation with the sovcorps.
In the beginning, the analysts at Manvantara began to notice odd little spikes on the emotographs that monitored and then averaged demographically and geographically the emotional pulse of every headset-wearer on the Maya network. These qubit-crunching devices ensured that if there was a regional drop or surge in the reactivity of human pleasure centers to any experience, the Maya experience could be recalibrated instantly to return to the mean. The spikes they began to see now suggested that emotional reactivity was increasing globally, and with much greater regularity, and when the increases went exponential, the analysts began to pull fire alarms. This was not supposed to happen. Manvantara’s analysts, both the flesh and blood humans and their digital doppelgangers, were clustered at nineteen widely dispersed regional hubs, twelve in highly secure terrestrial locations, six on space-based installations like the ones that had first gone into orbit during the great private rocket boom of the late 20s, led by by a dozen SpaceX-inspired companies with corporate addresses in places like the archipelago of Vanuatu, and one on Mars. Its headquarters — if it could be called that in such a decentralized operation, was located on a seasteading rig twelve miles off the coast of Chennai, India.
One afternoon, the following conversation occurred between two offensive analysts, whose charge was to identify and eliminate threats to the Mayan order. The older of them, Don, was now, in Roman calendar years, ninety-six, but having undergone one of the first widely available courses in trans-human therapy, looked no more than sixty. He was only now starting to have regrets, to think that maybe he’d lived beyond his time, like a vampire. Such reflection comes to the very old, if their minds are still clear enough to allow it, along with — perhaps — a reconsideration of moral choices. Don had kept his mind keen with a regimen of Zazen and smart drugs that had once made him a very demanding taskmaster and something of a prick, but age and retrospection had softened him, and in the company of his much younger protégé, a Melanesian data reader by the legal name of Simon Was whom he’d trained from the age of eighteen, he enjoyed a comfortably crusty father-son/mentor-mentee relationship. They were both arguably brilliant, and like so many brilliant tech operatives, from the first generation of code-writers on, they were both zealous in defending the ‘post-moral freedom’ of their craft, yet guardedly wary about the end-goals of its corporate funders. Smart people have always asked questions, which is what makes them a threat to tyrants. The two hid little from each other that wasn’t wrapped up in NDAs or security regulations, and some of the sentiments they shared would have been branded subversive if known. You may have come across the name of an early century intelligence analyst named Edward Snowden. He may be the best analogy.
“I think they’re waking up,” said Simon Was to Don.
“Not possible,” said Don. “Is it regional? It must be the equipment. Maybe a neutrino shower. ”
“I don’t think so,” said the young analyst. “We’re getting the same data everywhere. And most of it describes somatic activity we usually never see. It’s like the last Idris event, but longer, broader.”
“I doubt Idris will be around for much longer,” said Don. “I’m surprised he’s gotten this far. It’s his code. It’s genius code. His guy, his programmer — you can’t believe how he’s covered his tracks. And the more he covers them, the more mythical he becomes. One day he may take us all down. Anyhow, I hope you’re wrong. Otherwise we’ll have to figure out how to put them back to sleep.” He chuckled darkly. “Or the sovs will have to initiate the end times early.”
“The Eschaton plan?” queried Simon. “Isn’t that just a scare-meme to keep the Herd in line? They don’t really have the tools yet, do they?”
“Officially, still in development,” said Don. “But the tests have all been repeatable. If they hold, one blast of the Capgras frequency will render them all brain dead. Then it’s just a matter of clean-up.”
There was a lengthy pause as Simon absorbed this new information. He was not unaware, of course, of the post-human manifesto, but it had always seemed aspirational rather than practical. Don, who for years had been tracing the lengthening lines of both wisdom and worry on his trainee’s face, saw that Simon was discomfited. As divorced from human community as he was, never having had family and effectively imprisoned on this floating call center, Simon had developed “a moral sense.”
“What’s the Capgras frequency?” he asked. “I mean, what’s the wavelength.”
“Hell, I don’t know,” said Don. “It’s in a black box. Nobody knows but the qubits. But the trigger is in the hands of six sovcorps chiefs who serve on a rotating basis. Would they pull it? I can’t guess. Maybe if they’re scared enough. Maybe if they see the whole plan falling apart. Anyway, go ahead and write these spikes up. We’ll send a report out. Don’t speak to anyone about what I’ve told you.”
“This code writer. Idris’s guy. Do we know anything about him?”
Don got up slowly and walked to a remote corner of the workspace, where he powered up a drive. Returning to his terminal, he said, “This is what we know. Breadcrumbs on breadcrumbs. Metadata on metadata, like a medieval palimpset. The only thing that connects it all is cleverness. He wants us to know how clever he is, and that will probably out him eventually. Go ahead, genius. Take a look.”
The captains did receive the report, and others like it from disparate sectors, but reacted initially with only mild annoyance. The Machine was not hackable. The Herd would never leave Utopia. The benefits of their newfound contentment still outweighed the loss. As long as they remained in-system and there were no reports of boundary violation, it could be argued that the Idris Program was actually keeping them in line by deluding them that their lives were actually better. At any given time, the captains had so many deals going — especially now with the Red City project on Mars — that it took more than a few spikes to get their attention. And then there were their yachts, and their islands, and their joyboys — their “Little Greeks,” (who were not virtual at all). Six months passed before they took the threat seriously, and then only when the woman appeared with her claim against Dr. Idris.
Some will say that it was Dr. Idris’s libido that did him in, that his history of line-crossing had caught up with him. But in fact, he never did have physical contact with Celia from Canton 23, Structure 47Z in Zurich. Nonetheless, once his offline identity became known to the authorities (he wasn’t easy to find), his alleged dalliances with real women outside the Mayan realm formed a bill of particulars that he could not contest, and eventually, women other than Celia — first dozens, then hundreds — came forward to testify against him. As in all human populations at all times in human history, even freethinkers of radical disposition, when threatened with the loss of all comfort, will usually fall in line. The Herd had been trained to see sexual congress as a form of bad citizenship. There was no more serious border violation than the procreative act. And so again, as in all times, those who had championed a salvific figure like Dr. Idris could end up asking for his head.
In examining what happened between Dr. Idris and Celia from Canton 23, it may be wise to ask whether his vault in celebrity, the near worship he received from those he had cured and from those who wanted the cure, had inflated his hubris in the way that causes heroes to fall. Indeed, how could he not have felt semi-immortalized by the experience of being in a million hungry and grateful heads (and bodies) at once. Love had washed over him. Even in the headset, he’d felt its waves embracing him. Later, after his arrest and in the sterile silence of his cell, he wondered if he had gone too far with Celia and might have ineptly violated the protocol ordained by the Peaceful Villages initiative.
This is how he related it before the end came:
In the early stages, Celia did not present as anything other than a run-of-the-mill patient. She was emotionally numb, uncommunicative and unimaginative, as if whatever remained of her inner life had gone into eclipse. This was not unusual among young women who had come of age in Maya, had most likely never had mature sexual experience, and had almost certainly never been in love. She would not even speak of the endemic toilet difficulties that had probably brought her to him until the third session. Halfway through that session, she released an epic fart, and after that things broke open.
“Where did that come from?” he asked her.
“I guess from me,” she said shyly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You’ve rediscovered your body. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
And get somewhere they did. Celia not only quickly overcame her bowel problems, she went from never having had an authentic climax to being a multi-orgasmic volcano who took to calling herself Pelé and whose principal Mayan avatar now wore a diadem of flowers and a skirt of fire. She achieved her orgasms with no stimulant other than the sound of his voice, saying things like, “Your body is talking. Let it speak.” She erupted sporadically throughout their sessions and was always careful to say, “Thank you, Dr. Idris,” afterwards. Celia was no longer shy, and no longer filtered her feelings. In fact, she confessed unnatural desires and a history of violent crimes that could only have been committed on the dark side of Maya, but it all seemed to Idris part and parcel of her reintegration.
Perhaps against the counsel of his more prudent angels, Dr. Idris had opted to handle the majority of Celia’s sessions personally and in real-time. She still saw only his avatar, but she heard him live. He was invested in her and saw her recovery as a potentially powerful agent of the revolution he was, willy-nilly, engaged in, perhaps because she was, in so many ways, ordinary. In his earnest effort to help Celia break free of the Machine, he had never once considered the possibility that the corporealization of virtual experience that seemed to be happening throughout Maya might be dissolving the line between the real and the illusory, and thus altering the meaning of the word boundary. If there was no line, one could be accused of crossing it on almost any pretext. It the patient could not pinpoint where the feed stopped and experience began, the resulting psychic confusion could quickly spiral in psychosis. Perhaps too late, Idris came to see that the danger of this was greatest in the early stages of treatment, before full re-integration had occurred.
Post-orgasm, avatar-to-avatar, during the session that took place on the morning of February 1, Celia suddenly said:
“You were inside me. I felt you moving. How did you get into me?”
“I don’t have that power, Celia. Unlike the qubits, I can’t be two places at once. I can only help put you inside you.”
“This is different. I’m bleeding. From inside.” Then a pause: “I feel like you…you — ”
“Like I what, Celia?”
“Like you raped me.”
Dr. Idris — or rather his avatar — maintained a steady gaze at the self-styled volcano goddess on the opposite end of the feed.
“You may just be getting your period, Celia. How long has it been?”
“I can’t even remember.”
“That’s an effect of Maya,” he said. “All sorts of normal cycles are suspended. It’s a bit of a shock when they return. Suddenly you have to cope with having a real body. That also means having discomfort.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It hurts.”
They had just one more session, in the course of which Celia said a remarkable thing. She said, “I feel like I’m cheating.”
“Cheating on who?” he asked. “On what?”
“On what’s real, I guess,” she answered. “I mean, the way things are supposed to be. I feel like a criminal. I know I’m going to get in trouble for what I’m doing.”
And there, he saw, was the evidence of the terrible wrong against humanity done by Utopia Tech. People had come to take the simulacrum for the real, and in attempting to disconnect from it, felt like apostates leaving the one true faith. Like schoolboys playing hooky in days past, they felt guilty for skipping school. The illicit feelings stirred up by things like orgasm, desire, even the quasi-love induced by the transference between patient and doctor, probably redoubled the guilt. Her confession should also have served as a warning to him that if she felt like a sinner, she might be inclined to repent.
“I understand,” said Dr. Idris. “That’s the way we’ve all been taught to feel. Leave the feed, leave the breed. But you’ll need to work through this if you truly want your sovereignty. It won’t happen overnight. It’s a process, like recovering from a psychic break. Do you want to be free, Celia?”
When she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — answer that question, he knew that she was backsliding.
Celia dropped out of rotation, and soon, Dr. Idris couldn’t find her. Something had truly spooked her: the corporealization process, he later conjectured, had occurred so rapidly and powerfully that it had scared her back inside the digital shell. She’d begun to fear her body might swallow up all her other carefully curated identities, and that if she lost those, there would be nothing left worth having. Nothing but a dull, lonely, flatulent young woman, robbed of all the things that had filled her time: the holidays, the shopping trips, the idle chatter with simulated friends. It was a purgatory with no promise of heaven, and it hurt. It didn’t matter that he told her, “Pain is how we know we’re alive.”
There was more to the story, of course. Some weeks before making her formal accusation, Celia had begun to interact with a Mayan chat group for women who claimed to have experienced various sorts of rebirth under Dr. Idris’s care. They chatted for hours via their respective avatars, never having real face-time. Among them was a self-identified woman named Lucy Trapp, who was, at first, the only one in the group to question Dr. Idris’s methods and motives, despite the fact she’d also had been saved from invisibility by his counseling. Lucy’s principal avatar had been modeled to resemble the mid-twentieth century film star Betty Grable, all yellow curls and zaftig physique. As her command over the group grew, Lucy turned suddenly to labeling Dr. Idris as a charlatan, a sinister sex guru out to cultivate an online harem. And because she played confidant to Celia, she quickly got into her head. She convinced Celia to go public with her accusations of rape for the same reason that Idris had thought she could spearhead a revolution: because she was so very ordinary, and thereby so pure.
As you may have guessed, Lucy Trapp was a Mayan undercover agent.
About three weeks later, Dr. Idris was charged with four counts of having violated the Peaceful Village Act, including a third-level boundary violation, the kind most threatening to the masters of Maya because it undercut its ontology. The other charges were fraud and harmful misuse of the Mayan network, and, in a nod to the old days, physical battery. The notion, which had taken root in the middle of the second decade of the century, that words and online behavior could constitute violence, even rape, had been codifed into law and reified at the avatar level. In supreme irony, he was even accused of having violated Celia’s digital sovereignty — her right to have no unwanted intruders in her feed. The accusation was made in closed testimony to which Dr. Idris was not privy, and not permitted to respond. He was never even given his accuser’s name, though he knew well who she was. Justice was swift. There were never habeus corpus issues, because the accused was “brought to trial” almost immediately upon certification of the accusation. The trial, or rather judgement, was rendered in summary fashion on an offshore platform reserved for ritual occasions. Once the verdict was duly recorded and Dr. Idris removed to his cell to await sentencing, the challenge the Manvantara Group faced was to purge all traces of his digital existence from the Mayan world, a formidable task given how broadly and cleverly he had planted his roots and how slippery his avatars were. If he received the maximum sentence from the offshore court, he would suffer further ignominy. His I.D. number would disappear from the system, and with it, all economic and social privileges and all trace of his existence as a biological entity. He would not be executed, but he would be as good as dead. The Austrian libertarian streak in the social philosophy of the captains did not allow for lengthy prison sentences, because this meant providing upkeep to the prisoner. Idris would be alive but not recognized as such.
In this task of wiping the Idris Program and all of its acolytes, subgroups, and even adversaries from the feed, the top analyst/coders were culled from all nineteen hubs, including the HQ off the coast of Chennai where Simon Was diligently labored under his supervisor, Don. “You take this one, Simon,” said his boss. “I don’t have the stamina. I’m not sure I have the heart.”
Simon was not required to research the case. In fact, it wasn’t desirable for analysts to get to know their targets. His job was housecleaning — finding ways to clear all traces of the Idris brand from the network, including support groups and allies that might form an insurgency. But research he did, because it was his nature, and because he was still unsettled by the revelation of the Eschaton plan, which he now knew was at the doctrinal core of the movement’s final solution to the problem of humans. This hypothetical end game had not been unknown to analysts like Simon, but it was known as a game. He had never fully processed its brutality, perhaps because it was a brutality of the flesh, and flesh was difficult for him to connect with. At first, he just stayed in his lane and tried to determine where the holes in the Idris program were, but eventually, after poring over the transcripts from a sample of more than one hundred Idris sessions, he came to his St. Paul moment. True genius hungers for these moments when everything turns, because in this turning is is a gnosis. Abraham Idris, he had to conclude, was a fundamentally good man, who far from engaging in fraud, was truly trying to heal people. Simon, who had never engaged in non-Mayan physical activity, found himself hungering for it as he studied the Idris recordings. These patients, he thought, are feeling alive.
In one particular session — maybe the one that turned Simon’s head — Idris’s patient, who presented as ‘Rocky,’ a boy, thirteen or so, Eurasian complexion, was in pain because he could not suppress his urge to masturbate outside the feed, and had now begun to experience a form of stigmata, which presented in his avatar as burning vectors shooting from his vital centers. “I know I’m doing wrong,” said Rocky. “I know what will happen to me. I’m leaving stains everywhere.”
“No, Rocky,” said Dr. Idris gently. “Your body is a rebel. Like the scrappy hero in one of your adventure games who outwits the Boss, you know? Like Kaulu, the trickster god…you know him, right? The only way to tame it when it’s agitated is to acknowledge it…accept its strength.”
“Am I fucked up?” Rocky asked.
“No. Human bodies have been going through this for at least three-hundred thousand years. It’s hard-wired. You’re being prepared to procreate. Of course, that has been suspended. But laws don’t change bodies. So you’re going through what hundreds of millions, trillions of young men have gone through. Think of it…like the exploration stage of a game. What will you feel next? What does it mean?”
“You talk to me like I’m somebody who can think,” Rocky said.
“You are, Rocky. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Let’s keep working.”
The boy had left calmed. Such a weight is guilt, and such a relief is a lifting of that weight. Simon was moved by the transcript, far more than he had expected to be. Rocky’s pain had been his once, only he hadn’t had a Dr. Idris to talk to. He’d considered self-immolation, which was an in-feed ritual popular with nihilists, among whom many were analysts, and at least had some glory to it: you got to say goodbye to all your friends in Maya and they gave you a big send-off. But he left his suicidal impulses behind when he came under the influence of Don, because Don was all about living long.
Simon’s decision did not come overnight. He pondered the Rocky transcript and others he had seen, and was at first disturbed by the cognitive dissonance they induced. Dr. Idris, from all angles, seemed to be trying to break apart the world that he, Simon, had been working for most of his young life to maintain. And yet, he could not find a logic that would counter the truth of what the doctor was saying, for his own body, too, was a rebel. It took four days of pondering to birth an audacious strategy that would serve both his masters and his conscience. Simon was not ready to be a revolutionary leader, but he did not wish to see people die simply for trying to relieve their pain. He would find the chink in the Idris armor before anyone else, and once found, he would write a worm whose deployment would purge the Idris Program from all feeds. He was confident now that he could do it. He would register his creation on the chain as evidence of his good practice as a soldier of Manvantara, but of course, it would not be reviewed, much less approved for use, before passing through a labyrinthine series of protocols. But the worm would not be what it seemed to be. It would play two endgames at once. One would, ostensibly, end the Mayan reign of Dr. Abraham Idris as “the man who heals the world.” Simon could not fail at this and keep his job. The other…well, that was where he would earn his reputation as a genius on the same level as Dr. Idris’s man. Suddenly, young Simon Was had become aware that it might lie within his power to alter history. The satori occurred on 23 April at 23:23, when he was finally able to connect with the phantom writer of the Idris program, thereafter called Civis 2323.
At his sentencing, Dr. Idris was permitted to make a statement, a last vestige of English common law in a world that had abandoned the very notion of common law. “You’ve betrayed your own kind,” he told the court. “You may not recognize them now as your kind, but they are. And even as you ascend to the higher realms of post-human existence, you’ll carry their strain, as surely as the progeny of Adam carried his original sin. The memory of mortality won’t leave you, and it is memories of which we are made. In your hubris, you have caused grievous pain, and as a doctor, it is my task to relieve pain.”
“I am only a doctor bandaging wounds. I recant nothing.”
And with this as his epitaph, Dr. Idris as a person vanished from existence. Unfortunately for the captains, and potentially for Dr. Idris’s unwary patients, his avatars did not disappear, not did the “spikes” that signaled a somatic revolution in the offing. The six elected captains moved ever closer to executing the Eschaton plan. Ten full years earlier than anticipated, not adequately tested, but perhaps not a moment too soon. Idris had the Herd on the move, and all such movements were dangerous. It wasn’t until the program written by Simon Was made it through pre-clearance that they became convinced that maybe some time could be bought before punching in the launch code. That time would allow for a more fool-proof solution.
On the surface, Simon’s program looked like a highly refined search-and-destroy worm, and by design, the surface was all the captains and their tech gurus saw. But hidden within was a feature that would ensure that as it purged the Idris program from Maya, it would simultaneously copy it, like an RNA molecule, and these clones — tens of thousands of them — containing Dr. Idris’s entire Mayan fingerprint, would be stored on the chain for future re-release, when the storm had passed and the world was — one hoped — a better place. In the background, with the assistance of Civis 2323, under cover of multiple shells, they would hack the Mayan feed and launch a wholly different campaign. A series of warnings, alerting all those on Dr. Idris’s network of his impending fate, and theirs, and giving them two choices if they preferred not to receive a blast of the Capgras frequency and forfeit their brains. The first choice was for the cautious and chronically hooked: stop the feed within two seconds of a special signal, and wait at least one hour before plugging back in. With this tool, and sufficient high-level hacker’s chatter, Simon and his new ally believed they could pre-empt netcasts of the end times frequencies and save countless lives. The second was for the bold — those ready to leave their bunkers for good: remove the headset, stop the Mayan feed altogether and assert their bodily sovereignty. Viva la Liberación. Simon timed his release of this warning for precisely 15:00, the ninth hour, on what used to be known, and would one day be known again, as Good Friday.
It was on that restored Good Friday, seven years later, after trekking with a Berber guide to Tarfaya on the rugged coast of Morocco, sixty-nine miles as the crow flies to the nearest of the Canary Islands, and less than half that to the offshore headquarters of OmegaCorps, that Simon Was finally came face-to-face with Abraham Idris, the man whose plan he’d played a not insignificant role in consummating. Idris, following the counsel of the Pope, had “done as the prophets of old had done” and put on the simple wool robes of a mendicant Sufi to minister to the miserable. Simon found him among goatskin tents, kneeling beside a dying old woman, her hand in his. Once introduced, and with mint tea made and poured, and a fire lit, Simon told Dr. Idris the whole story. When he had finished, Idris said:
“I’ve always believed that there would be a kind of end-point to human civilization. A point to which it was being drawn by some force beyond reckoning. Certainly, it wasn’t the so-called ‘Singularity’ of the tech prophets. That was always a bastardization. A travesty. But it would be, in some way, post-human, in the sense of ‘the next step.’ I believe a genuine post-human would be possessed of such profound compassion for his fellows that he could remain in one place for all his life and still be felt everywhere.”
The bunkers had been abandoned by all but the resolutely hopeless and hopelessly addicted. The first, second and third waves of refugees now foraged, scavenged, hunted, gathered, farmed where they could, and held one another through the long nights and days of the new ‘post-post-human’ — or shall we just call it neo-human — era. Having lost the largest portions of their consumer base and the means of its control, the sovcorps began to battle among themselves for what was left, and more than one captain opted for the easy way out: uploading the contents of their memories to the Mars network and having their mortal remains consigned to the cold sea that buffeted their floating fortresses. But as Dr. Idris had said in his last words to the court, “it is memories of which we are made.” Once human, there is no “post.”
After tea and a simple lunch, Dr. Idris rose, belted his kaftan, and summoned his Berber comrades to begin loading the missile launcher onto the repurposed trawler that lay at port nearby. He turned to Simon and said, “Please stay the night, or longer, with us. I owe you a drink, and more. Right now, I have an island to blow up.”
