The world of sin and the world of shin
This is episode 22 of The French Tech Comedy, by DNA cowgirl.
For Aubrey de Grey
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Episode 10: Mao’s Robots
Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen
Episode 12: The Last (French) Samurai
Episode 13: To Humanity and Beyond
Episode 14: The Music of Genomic Origami
Episode 15: Direct-to-consumer Ikigami Genetics
Episode 16: Underground Science
Episode 17: Gene Karaoke Groove
Episode 18: The Osaka Forever-Young Army
Episode 19: The Toilet Slippers
Episode 20: Ichi Efu
Episode 21: The Human Sapienome with the French touch
“ — 2020. Washington-Soweto is the capital of the U.S.S.A. — United States-South Africa, as North America (today’s U.S.) and South Africa now live under the same flag. On a daily basis, AfroAmerican and Latino people are shot in Soweto and Chicago by white supremacists. Journalists saw in this union a pooling of competencies in mass shooting. N.Y., Boston and California are belonging to the U.S.S.A. but they are under a separate economic and financial ruling. As Washington-Soweto politics is still prevailing for the whole territory, they are left with no choice but to leave the U.S.S.A. political zone. However, long is the road to independency. The only way they could finally make it happen, in the 22nd century, is through… religion. With their thriving economy, as they were mainly working with the economical and political epicentre of the world: Asia, their political belonging to the U.S.S.A. had been a thorn in the flesh for over a century.”
Koba, the manga artist, is in a meeting with the Kyoto branch of his publishing house. The building where the meeting is taking place is located right next to the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which happens to be more of a gigantic manga library, rather than a museum with exhibits. During the week-end, manga artists are volunteering to draw visitors — it goes without saying: manga-style. The Museum has a hipster cafe, where Koba is presenting the storyline of his manga project, along with a few of his drawings, in a rather informal meeting:
“ — The French Tech Comedy project has three main characters: Nono, the tech engineer from Paris, working in Japan and China — the last (French) samurai; Yuki, the Japanese geisha, and her brother Taka, working as a bioinformatician and oncologist, heading a lab trying to implement a cutting-edge stem cell therapy for cancer in a Tokyo clinic. His patient: Chinese giant TenBa’s founder Ken Ba, a zillionaire from Shanghai.”
“ — Why did you write The World of Shin in the title?”
“ — Good question,” answered Koba with a smile:
“ — Although we were able to design the new train — the shin-kansen, shin meaning, literally, new, right? — that until now has been running for 40 years almost without any accident — we were not able to do the same for power plants, and I guess we’ll never be.”
He went on:“ — As you know, Shinkansen trains are able to detect earthquakes, and programmed to stop in a timely accurate manner for the security of all passengers in the event of a (micro)seism or fault. We’ve made them highly susceptible to earthquakes, but in a good sense. The one and only accident that ever happened, to my knowledge, is when one of those new trains was caught in the epicentre of an earthquake. It was too late to stop, as the train was too close to the epicentre and hence wasn’t able to detect it anymore. Total number of casualties: one person. What is also highly susceptible to earthquakes, but not in a good sense: power plants. See what happened with Ichi efu — the Fukushima 1-F (ichi efu in Japanese) nuclear power plant.”
“ — So hopefully, here comes the answer to your question,” said Koba.
“ — We live in a world of things and people highly susceptible to a whole variety of risks and casualties and disasters. Whenever the risk management is highly successful in the context of innovation, I call it the world of shin. A world filled with useful tech, like Shinkansen trains. Whenever the innovation is seen as highly unsuccessful, I call it the world of sin. White supremacists in the U.S.S.A. only talk about their righteous God, and see the innovation in the world of shin — the successful innovative countries — as a world of sin. For them, technical progress can only happen in a two-faced world, a world of sin. Shinkansen trains and power plants are the two faces of this world. They don’t want it. They don’t want to live in a two-faced, hypocritical world that is driven by so-called technical progress. To them, a world of things and people highly susceptible to a whole variety of risks and casualties and disasters means Fukushima. Forget about the Shinkansen trains. They don’t believe in the success story of engineering. They believe in some kind of Ichi Efu scenario, infinite loop mode.”
“ — World of shin, meaning new, in Japanese; world of sin. Got it. But you said the manga was about biology and the new gene editing tool called CRISPR; not about Shinkansen trains arriving on schedule.”
“ — Spot on,” answered Koba, smiling again. Pitching a bunch of publishing company employees and execs a new manga project was always fun.
“ — CRISPR is not arriving on schedule. Nobody was waiting for it. It took the whole world by surprise. Like a tsunami. See what I mean with the world of shin / the world of sin?”
“ — Why not?… So your drawings here are only about religion in the 22nd century, right? You haven’t started with the other plot lines — the geisha, the engineer, the brother and the largest fish of all, the Chinese patient, right?”
“ — That’s correct,” answered Koba.
“ — But I’ve outlined a few of the plot lines already, more or less,” he added.
“ — Yes, we’ve seen that.”
The guys at the publishing house were now examining the drawings and the plot line regarding the religion of the future:
“ — China, 22nd century. The world of shin. Catholic religion has gained traction. We used to live in an envelop of flesh, from lust to dust. Now, we can download our consciousness and “soul” into a body. The Catholic doxa and the Muslim Sunna and the rest of all the major monotheistic religions have agreed on this: you will download into one — and only one — body. Although it is technically possible to download — with altered physical and psychological capacities, sometimes enhanced, sometimes negatively impacted, or corrupted — into several bodies, all monotheistic religions have explained and explicitly declared it is a cardinal sin to do so. Geronimo Faber PhD has been spearheading the global crusade to defeat ageing since 2020; back then he was already over 50 years old. He was still around (alive and kicking!) in the early 22nd century. He had become the earliest and most famous apostel of this new religion.
“ — This is the proof you don’t need to download into several bodies to live life to its fullest — and longest,” said all monotheistic religions.
“ — Geronimo Faber was born, lived and died within the same envelop of flesh. All believers are called to do the same.”
When Faber died in the middle of the 22nd century, he became a saint, acclaimed by all monotheistic religions. He was born a U.S.S.A. citizen. There had been Holy Father John Paul II a long time ago, there was now Holy Father Faber, the successful homo faber, meaning in Latin: the forgeron of his own fate. The Holy Father in the world of shin. Holy Faber. White supremacists in the U.S.S.A. soon found a way to exploit this new religion, the religion of the world of shin, for their own political gain. Black people were shot every day, from Soweto to Chicago. Some of them were lucky enough to find a cheap bioengineered body — the vast majority of black people living in the U.S.S.A. were poor, basic income was for the middle-classes in the countries of shin; not for them. Most of those bioengineered bodies were made with DNA data that had been hacked on the internet, on open-access databases but not only. Then the hacked DNA data was being re-engineered in the lab, and put into some kind of second-hand (hacked) and illegal high-tech vats or tanks aimed at accelerating the human ageing process. Then… voila, you had a brand new body, that would last for a few months, or years — or decades, if you were lucky. Downloading your consciousness into your own DNA was no big deal, most people were learning about this basic knowledge in middle school, all around the world. But even the most advanced technology in the countries of shin could not guarantee a complete and successful and genuine and sustainable download of a previously uploaded mind or consciousness into several bioengineered bodies — regardless of the quality of these bodies, regardless if the downloading was happening simultaneously, in a variety of different “synth” bodies at the same time, or if it was happening only once, then wait for the new body number one to malfunction, then choose another body (number two), then download the previously uploaded consciousness into new body number two, then when it starts malfunctioning again, repeat process, with new body number three, and so on and so forth.
It just didn’t work. From the cheapest to the most expensive bioengineered body, and everything in between, it just didn’t work. There simply was no way to do that. You couldn’t download — simultaneously, or repeatedly, one by one— an uploaded consciousness into a bioengineered body. Even if the backup medium for this A.I. consciousness was DNA. This was a major biobug. Biocomputers in the 22nd century didn’t have this capacity, or ability, and monotheistic religions, and white supremacist governments in the U.S.S.A. were betting that this would last for long… The biobug had become an ultra-lucrative religious niche.
Buddhism soon explained you could only download into one body, otherwise you would be confusing (betraying) your ancestral lineage. The anti-ageing and preventative medicine had become the one and only conventional medicine. Establishment medicine. Downloading into several bodies during your life time amounted to a breach of trust: you were repudiating Christ or the Prophet and sacrificing to idols. You could upload your consciousness as many times as you wanted, countless updates and upgrades and back-ups were allowed by all monotheistic religions. But you were only entitled to one body.”
“ — Of course, among AfroAmericans, a new religion was emerging. A religion of compassion, for Latino and Black people who were shot, some of them several times in their lifetime,” said Koba.
“ — But what does this have to do with the French tech and Japan?”, asked one of the guys in the meeting.
“ — The Dalai Lama, a woman, has made an alliance with Japanese Shintoism. She is helping the dissident religion in the U.S.S.A,” said Koba.
“ — And the French tech?…”, he insisted.
“ — There’ll always be The French Tech in Japan, and in China,” answered Koba with a smile.
“ — French engineers like Nono…,” he added.
The small team working with the manga publishing company he was pitching thanked him.
“ — We’ll get in touch in a few days. Thank you for the presentation. Can you do… say, 20 more drawings, for next week? We’ll introduce you to our boss. But before that, we need to meet again, to prepare for the formal meeting, which will be followed by a Sunday lunch in a traditional tofu restaurant in Tokyo. We need to book the restaurant as soon as possible, by the way.”
Space and schedule availabilities were discussed, and agreed, and as soon as Koba was back in his apartment, after a stop at the nearby Seven Eleven convenient store to buy cafe au lait and toast bread for his breakfast next morning — tonight for dinner he would have to be content with sokuseki-men, instant noodles, as he had some work to do — he saw that somebody had just sent him a text on his phone.
“ — Speaking of the devil,” he said, with a smile on his face.
Reality can be stronger than fiction. Nono had just invited him for his wedding in Paris. It would take place in a couple of months. Paris. Koba had never been there.
Yuki and Nono were getting married.
Catherine Coste
MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28x1–2 certified
Member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist Regina Holliday
