CleverCraft, Part I: Time Without Time

“Do you really believe you can escape humanity by digging deeper into the human? That would be the first — and final — paradox. Which is why transhumanism and suprahumanism are exactly what they claim to be: a sharp or a flat in the same old human key. Variations, not transcendence. Tweaks in pitch, not in substance. And when you fuse a person with the very tools they’ve made — in what some reverently call the Singularity — all you’ve done is crank up the volume on what was already there.

More humanity.
Louder.
Sleeker.
Still human.

Science — even in its most dazzling, most ingenious forms — doesn’t deliver us from the human condition. It delivers us deeper into it. Sharper, faster, stronger — yes. But still flesh. Still contradiction. Still longing. That’s the hidden clause of humanism itself: The better we become at being human, the more human we become. Which is why no matter how many neural nets we thread into our skulls, no matter how much data we hoard like modern-day pharaohs, we will never be like the God of Genesis — the one who conjured everything from nothing. But CleverCraft? CleverCraft might just make us deathless. And that’s where things start to get interesting.”

“Come on, now. You mean that kind of immortality where you stroll, fully upright, all the way to the far edge of eternity?”

“No,” I said. “Not that kind of immortality.”

“Oh, so now immortality comes in genres? Like soft rock?”

“CleverCraft doesn’t promise heaven. It offers human solutions to divine dilemmas. But only God gets to resolve the final equation — at the end of history.”

She rolled his eyes. “Can you fast-forward the sermon? I’m losing interest. What exactly does CleverCraft do with eternity?”

“It approximates it.”

She spun her hand, the international sign for get on with it. So I did:

“It allows us to pass — from one life to the next. Which means death is never ahead of us. It’s always behind. We become fugitives of finitude, smuggling ourselves forward through time.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re saying you’ve outrun aging? Outrun death? That you—CleverCrafters—live outside chronology?”

“In a way,” I said. “If by outside chronology you mean a kind of time that’s been stripped of temporality.”

“Let me get this straight. We’ve already got coffee without caffeine, milk without lactose… and now you’re selling me time without time?”

“Exactly!”

“And people wonder why the end of the world keeps getting delayed.”