Page 18 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Shangri-la South

“First,” said Cyril Kornfleck, “allow me to apologize to
Hydrargyrum. I think I failed to tell Izzy about keeping it short. At
any rate, I should also thank her for breaking the ice on the use of
controversial topics in our stories. Mine has some religious content,
and I am not sure how explicit it should be. Following the dictum
that the artist should show, not tell, I would be happy to keep it
submerged. Certainly our genre is rife with such subtexts—usually
salvation or damnation by a deus ex machina in the form of aliens or
humans imbued with superpowers. But I get ahead of myself.”
“Like many or all of you, I find inspiration in extrapolating
current trends, mixing and matching them to come up with
unexpected but just-barely-credible combinations. At the same time,
we depart from accepted notions of human motivation at our peril;
and we cannot avoid the resemblance of social interaction and
organization in our fantasies of the future and the past to those of
the present: historicization is unavoidable—unless we are willing to
make a split from the zeitgeist that will make our work unsaleable.”
“So, what’s going on right now that partakes of long-standing
theology and superstition? It is simply the invidious distinction
between those who will ascend to heaven—known in Protestantism
as the Elect—and those who will not. The concomitant necessity of
maintaining belief in hell I will not discuss. Nor will I not get into
the absurdities of free will versus predestination here; suffice it to
say that piety and morality became transformed through the
centuries of mercantilism in Europe to net worth and conspicuous
consumption, in lockstep with a decline in demonstrating one’s
virtue via charity in favor of internalized faith—or its self-righteous
demonstration. But today’s Elect, equivalent to the super-rich, have
lost that modicum of faith. They are spending their wealth on
quests for physical immortality, aided by scientific advances and
made urgent by the evident and near-universal decline and
degradation of social and biological systems on Earth.”
“In our time, research has led to the possibility of breaking the
mortal tyranny of telomeres, the replacement of bodily organs and
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