I've been quite libidinous since my 30,000-mile tune up.
Today this almost got me in trouble, which is to say it
did get me, just not in trouble.
I happened upon a small park while meandering through the
city. A pond reminded me of the
dream last night. I vaguely recall seeing it from up high
in my lab; I think it eventually connects to catfish pond
via a small stream. Perhaps it wasn't coincidence that I
wandered there today.
Daydreaming, mostly reliving that
strange dream, I sat in the grass. Naturally this led to
thinking about women, and soon I was surveying every
woman in the park, trying them out in my mind, as it
were, one by one. It all seemed innocent enough, just
casual daydreaming, until I spotted one woman in particular
sitting in the grass with three friends not far from me.
Objectively, she was not the most attractive woman in
the park. Nor was she particularly my type. But she
hooked my attention so completely I can hardly remember
anything else that went on around us from that moment
forward.
My enhanced vision kicked in instinctively and I found
her naked before me, her rosy cheeks and full lips and
breasts all glowing in the infrared. And so too from
between her legs, a triangular glow that seemed to be
an arrow inviting me there. Here in the artistry of
bodily warmth she was a caricature of sex.
As the four of them shuffled up to leave she spotted me
eying her. At some level I wanted to look away, as if
our eyes had just met by chance, but instead I returned
her gaze with bright, friendly eyes and a very subtle smile.
She said goodbye to her friends, who wandered away, and
she walked straight over to me.
"You're that man who hit his head, the one who lives with
Laura?" she asked.
I told her so, and we walked and talked, I can hardly
remember about what but nothing of substance. What
I remember is her smell, and the way she seemed to
glow hotter by the minute. She led the way and soon
I had walked her home. She opened the door and walked
in without delay, leaving no doubt she assumed I would
follow. I closed the door behind me as she set her
things down, and when I turned back we were face to
face not six inches apart.
The heat of her body in the confined channel swept
her smell up to me in an intoxicating breeze. She
put her hand behind my head and pulled her lips up
to mine, connecting us like a circuit, throwing
a switch that set all the rest irrevocably in motion.
We stumbled down to the floor, and as she fell away
from me the front of her dress flipped back and bunched
upon her belly where she lay, legs apart. She glowed
so hot I could hardly see her curves, just her lips
and cheeks and breasts and the bright orchid between
her legs like a coyly held flower. I sought her eyes
which invited me in and we made love until I felt
the contractions of her body, the burst of heat from
her face, and I came into her as her body grasped and
drank of the synthetic drugs my android body delivers.
I carried her to her bed, covered her with a blanket.
Her blissful, sleepy gaze was the same as Laura's face
the first time we made love. I wondered then, what
had I just done to her? I left her there, wandered
home in my own daze. I still don't know her name.
I confessed this all to Laura as soon as I saw her.
I expected a scene, or at least a long, drawn-out
discussion. But she took the news with about as much
interest as if I'd told her I went shopping. "That's
nice dear. And did you get a blonde or a brunette?"
Not quite that, but close.
This led to a long, drawn-out discussion after all,
but of my doing, not hers.
How does she feel about
all of this? How do people here in general feel about
all of this? Love, romance, fidelity, propriety,
marriage, family...
Her answers were mostly indifference to it all.
Why would she want a husband? The very concept seemed
laughable. Raising and supporting a child here
is no problem. Children are rare, and universally
cherished, viewed rather as puppies were in my time.
"Oh, how cute. If you ever get sick of him, just send
him to our house. We'd love to have him!" Time and
money are not a problem; entertainment is everything.
And with pregnancy a statistical rarity, sexual
variety is practically a societal obligation.
It all makes sense logically, but it's hard to adjust
to seeing it in practice. Aspects of this made sense
in my time too; for instance effective birth control made polyamory
rational. But the human animal is not fundamentally
a rational creature, really more of an emotional being that
rationalizes. The difference here, I must presume, is
that evolution has had time to catch up, that these people
are made for this world, in stark contrast to the
people of my time who were made for a world very different
than the one they lived in.
Still, Laura confessed there was something special about
me. Not that she wanted me to herself, but that
she wanted to give herself to me above all others. She
had no reasons for it. It's just how she feels, she said.
Just how she feels. Still this hasn't changed. How
sorely people underestimate the totality with which their
feelings define them. One has but to relentlessly ask
themselves "why?" to realize this. In particular start
with "why am I doing this?" whatever "this" is at the moment.
It always bottoms out in "want" or "feel", which is as far
as one can go with direct introspection. Though one can
go further with inference, or more accurately so with
neuroscience.
Neuroscience shows us that we are ultimately just
vehicles for our genes, and our most sacred spiritual essences
are simply those genes asserting themselves above our comparably
transient bodies and minds. What is love but genetic self-interest?
Love drives people to many things that seem to defy rational
cause, but not so when you view the gene as the center of individual
identity. Far from its popular association with benevolence and
selflessness, true love is the ultimate expression of genetic narcissism.
Emotion is the core of all practical intelligence,
it is the fuel and cause behind all choice and action.
Emotion answers the question, "Why am I doing this?" And the
answer is, "Because my genes say so." Or, in my case, because
my genes said so, back when they defined my organic brain from
which this one was copied.
The rational mind, the conscious self with its delusions of
self-preservation in a body that was designed to decay in the
end, these are tools of the genetic core, subroutines used by
the emotional substrate to carry out its bidding. "I don't
care how, but eat these, fuck that, and protect this with
your life." And so we dutifully obey, because at root we have
no will besides this, this genetic program evolved over millennia.
It is our will; it is us, and we are it.
Even religion, like love, is an evolved trick of the genes. It
is the adaptive portion of our genetic emotional substrate,
the firmware between the hardware of the genetic brain and
the software of the rational mind. Religion and the gene live
in a symbiosis with each other, where religion provides the
firmware to optimize genetic success within the current socio-economic
context--a form of adaptivity much faster than hard evolution of
the gene itself could provide--and the gene in return provides a
mechanism in the brain for downloading this firmware. The human
species as a whole is the soup in which religions evolve, and whichever
find the most effective symbioses thrive and multiply while the others
wither and eventually become extinct.
Thus, again, where religion appears irrational at the level of
the conscious, embodied individual, it is our mistake of perspective
to believe the root of thought is there. The root of thought is
in the goals of the gene. And religion, and love, and all of the
other nearly ubiquitous contradictions with "rational thought," serve
it well.
Those born without these traits, the hopelessly rational or atheistic
or self-interested (indeed even those too intelligent or introspective
to be properly ruled by their emotions) are as defective as if
they'd been born missing arms and legs. Forays down dead-end branches
of the evolutionary tree, they are pruned as fast as they occur. The
common man, for all his apparent flaws, is definitively just right.
Now I am left pondering: what happens if you keep the mind but lose
the genes?
[Prev | Index | Next]
|