It is very difficult for me to not keep explaining, but I think you get the point: squishy computer chips for use inside of living things so that you can have a tiny Fitbit inside of you telling you, in real time, whether your blood sugar is crashing or you’re having a heart attack. My research was an attempt both to gather signals from the nervous system and to send inputs into the nervous system. It was potentially interesting research in everything from diagnostics and scanning to prosthetics, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to care.
I got back to Berkeley, and somehow my lab had only partially been torn apart by people who needed equipment for their own experiments. I was able to put it all back together pretty quickly. But the thing I had been so excited about before now felt like busywork. Knowing that technology as elegant and powerful as Carl’s existed in the universe made me feel like a monkey banging rocks together. I’m sure part of this was grief, but I think part of it was the post-Carl depression that a lot of people were dealing with.
The day I read that Petrawicki article, I was working on assembling my little jellies using literal laser beams to push impurities into the perfect places before letting the gel solidify. I was basically making Jell-O, except instead of pears and marshmallows, I was pushing around individual atoms. With lasers.
It sounds cooler than it was. Someone else had built the laser robot; my lab just bought it. All I was doing was typing instructions into the program that would control the laser. This was not terribly cerebral work, so my mind kept drifting back to the article and Peter Petrawicki’s new island life. Was this his redemption arc? It was so nice of him to apologize to a magazine reporter who was doing a puff piece on him. Had he apologized to April’s parents? To Andy and Maya and Robin? To me? I must have missed the email. And it’s also nice to hear how many struggles he’s had. That’s definitely something people need to be worrying about.
Of course, I stopped filling in the numbers my circuit CAD program had spat out and went back to the article. The writer continued:
Peter Petrawicki is not a changed man, though. He’s driven, sure of himself, and believes that anyone standing in the way of the path he sees as right is dangerous. But now, without the Carls looming on the streets, his anxieties have turned elsewhere. I ask him what his biggest fear is, and he stays silent for thirty seconds before replying.
“You met Taggart on the way in.” He’s talking about the island dog that he adopted. It’s medium-sized, medium-haired, medium brown, and of medium disposition. If there is a purebred dog in Taggart’s lineage, it was many generations ago. “I love Taggart, and I think Taggart has a good life, certainly better than he had before we met. He gets fed twice a day, he gets to run on the beach, we cuddle up and watch TV. Taggart has literally everything taken care of. And when Taggart starts to decline and suffer, I’ll decide for him when he should die, because that’s the appropriate thing to do. Taggart does not even think to question his life. Everything that happens to him, he accepts, both good and bad, because he isn’t even capable of imagining that he can affect his own life. When we go to the vet’s office that last time, he will have no idea what is happening. He will just go to sleep, and it will be just one more thing that happened to him.”
We sat there for a while. I stayed quiet, even though I didn’t really get where he was going with all of this sad dog talk.
“That’s what I’m afraid of, that we will become like that. I’m worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic virtual pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying—the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We’ve lost our way, we don’t have a vision for the future anymore.”
As he continued, it starts to feel like a speech he’s given before.
“I don’t think that the last two hundred thousand years of human suffering will be best brought meaning by humans today living like dogs—accepting what has been given to us as unquestionably inevitable and, ultimately, when it gets taken away, seeing that as just another part of life. I want to fight every bit as hard as my ancestors fought to keep my lineage alive, to make me possible. I don’t have to fight”—he gestured to his daiquiri—“but I owe it to everyone who came before me, and to everyone who will come after, to push humanity forward, maybe to even redefine what it means to be human.”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get goose bumps when he finished that monologue.
While reading this, I also got goose bumps. The kind you get when you go to pee in the middle of the night and suddenly start wondering whether there is someone in your house. The article continued a while, fleshing out PP’s ideology, but then finally they got to the point. Or at least near it.
Peter’s house is not just a house; it’s part of a compound. There are dorms for workers, offices, server rooms, laboratories.
“That’s where we’re doing the mining.” He gestures toward a huge cinder block building with no windows. He means the cryptocurrency mining. “Before we make our initial offering, we want to have a
