The side effect has side effects, though. The activation of rapture-related neurocircuitry generates glossolalia even in baseline brains;[81], [82] given the modifications that Bicamerals use to enhance transcendence,[83], [84] the occasional bout of speaking in tongues is pretty much a given. Brüks should be thankful the hive doesn’t just scream all the time.
In hindsight, it is apparent that describing the Bicamerals as a religious order is a little misleading: the parts of the brain they’ve souped up simply overlap with the parts that kick in during religious neurobehavioral events, so the manifestations are similar. Whether that’s a distinction that makes a difference is left as an exercise for the reader.
The idea of God as a virus only really works if you buy into the burgeoning field of digital physics.[85] Most of you probably know what that is: a family of models based on the premise that the universe is discrete and mathematic at its base, and that every event therein can therefore be thought of as a kind of computation. Digital physics comes in several flavors: the universe is a simulation running in a computer somewhere;[86], [87], [88] or the universe is a vast computer in its own right, where matter is hardware and physics is software and every flip of an electron is a calculation. In some versions matter itself is illusory, a literal instantiation of numbers.[89], [90] In others, reality is a hologram and the universe is empty inside;[91], [92], [93] the real action takes place way out on its two-dimensional boundary, and we are merely interferences patterns projected from the surface of a soap bubble into its interior. There’s no shortage of popular summaries of all this stuff, either online[94] or off.[95]
Lee Smolin (of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute) goes against the grain: he rejects digital physics outright and serves up a single universe in which time is not an illusion, reality is not deterministic, and universes themselves grow, reproduce, and evolve via natural selection writ very large (think of black holes as offspring; think of entropy as a selective force).[96], [97], [98] Even Smolin’s model, however, is vulnerable to inconstancy in the laws of physics; the model actually predicts that physical laws evolve along with the rest of reality. Which kind of leaves us back at the question of how one can legitimately assume constancy in an inconstant universe.
You can’t get through these references without realizing that, whacked out as it sounds, digital physics has a lot of scientific heavy-hitters on its side. I, of course, am not one of them; but since so many smarter people are defending the premise, I’m happy to sneak viral deities onto the back of all their hard work and hope it slips through.
The fieldwork preoccupying Brüks at the start of the story descends from the “DNA barcoding” that’s all the rage today: a quick-and-dirty taxonomic technique for distinguishing species based on a chunk of the cytochrome oxidase gene.[99] There’s no way it’ll still be around in its present form eight decades from now—we’ve already got handheld analyzers[100] that put conventional wet analysis right out to pasture—but the concept of a genetic barcode will, I think, persist even as the technology improves.
The vortex engine[101] powering the Bicameral monastery derives from work patented by Louis Michaud,[102] a retired engineer who basically came up with the idea while tinkering in his garage. I have no idea whether two-hundred-megawatt, twenty-kilometer-high wind funnels are in our future, but the patents went through,[103] and the project’s got some serious attention from government and academic agencies. Nobody’s saying the physics are wrong.
We are already closing in on learning techniques that bypass conscious awareness,[104] à la Lianna Lutterodt’s training at the hands of her Bicameral masters. Likewise, the precursors of the gimp hood that Brüks uses in lieu of a brain implant can be seen taking shape in a diversity of mind-reading/writing tech already extant in the literature.[105], [106], [107], [108], [109] Brüks’s dependence on Cognital, on the other hand, marks him truly as a relic of a past age (ours, in fact): memory boosters are already in the pipe,[110], [111], [112] and as far back 2008, one in five working scientists already indulged in brain-doping to help keep up with the competition.[113]
The use of massively multiplayer online games as a tool for epidemiological simulation was first proposed by Lofgren and Fefferman;[114] they, in turn, were inspired by an unexpected pandemic of “corrupted blood” in World of Warcraft,[115] which occurred because people in RPGs—like those in real life—often don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. I don’t know how many have since picked up this ball and run with it—at least one paper speaks of using online gaming for economics research[116]—but if that’s all there is I think we’re missing a huge opportunity.
Near the end of this novel there’s a teaching moment on the subject of natural selection. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don’t get wiped out. A deteriorating Daniel Brüks muses on an especially neat case in point, the curious fact that the building blocks of advanced neural architecture already exist in single-celled animals lacking even the most rudimentary nervous systems.[117], [118], [119], [120]
A couple of isolated factoids. Fruit flies save energy in impoverished environments by becoming forgetful;[121] the construction and maintenance of memories is, after all, a costly affair. I imagine that Rhona McLennan’s “Splinternet” is suffering the same sort of energetic triage after Icarus drops offline. And that bit where Brüks wondered why Moore even bothered exercising to stay in shape? That’s because we’re within spitting distance of a pill that puts your metabolism into hardbody mode even if you spend the whole day sitting on the couch snarfing pork rinds and watching American Idol.[122], [123]
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