Zazen in the Shinkansen
This is episode 11 of The French Tech Comedy by DNA cowgirl.
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
The night following dinner with her brother Taka and famous French blogger Thomas, Yuki had a dream. She was teaching the flute to junior students at the Tokyo college of music, as she usually does. Only, her student was unusual. She was looking like one of those manga characters, and her avatar could change on a regular basis. She could grow ears like those of a cat, and the next thing Yuki knew, she was wearing an elegant embroidered red hat. She was playing divine music in a way Yuki had never heard, and the music was talking to her in vibrations. It was telling a religious story, a legendary one. Yet it was about the future. She was not sure if it was a distant one.
“ — You already know it. It will happen… Men’s and women’s fertility started declining drastically, but it happened in a timely manner. Indeed, evolution and bioengineers had learned how to engineer human embryos and grow them in artificial wombs. Women soon wished to be discharged of the burden of pregnancy and giving birth. At the same time, the science of ageing was making good progress. It became a religion, then a crusade. Some bio-gerontologists started suggesting Jesus had not yet been on Earth for real, for He was the one who would relieve humanity from getting old, sick, miserable and die. In her 2,823th reincarnation, her dying Holiness the Dalai Lama had provided instructions on how to use bioengineering science in general and gene editing tools in particular for Her next avatar, when it would still be an embryo. She was announcing a new religion.
Yuki soon became very anxious. She wanted to have kids, at least a cute baby of her own. This was way too disruptive. And how about her own maternal great-grandmother she was seeing everyday? She was 103 years old, feeling well and fit. And Yuki’s best support. The Japanese Geisha wanted to have a baby early enough for her great-grandmother to get to know him or her.
She was starting to feel the pressure, time was ticking. But what if she could stay during the first 150 years of her life the 26-year-old woman she was now? And how about her great-grandmother? Was it too late for her? Would she get to live an additional 80 years as a 103-year-old lady? If you could stay young for over hundred years, the pressure to get kids while you were still young was vanishing. But would you have to get hundreds of them? None? Just a few? How about one? Yuki just wanted one, as she wanted time to train for her yoga and music classes everyday, and for her art. But what if she would get 150 years to train and did not have to give birth to a child, or children? What level of perfection could be attained? Or would she be crippled by a major depression or some kind of nervous breakdown? Nono was now working with Facebook Palo Alto, California, and was offering her to stay with him for a couple of months.
“ — The flat I’m living in is huge. You can even invite friends, there are three bathrooms. All you would have to do is stroll around, go to the Stanford campus nearby, listen to concerts, I even have a swimming pool. And you can buy all the Burt’s Bees beauty products you want. Did you know that fresh fruit is inexpensive in California? You always complain about how expensive it is in Japan.”
Yuki found it very tempting, but she knew her parents and her brother Taka would be furious. They had all warned her about that French engineer working in Taka’s lab, Nono. “I must not agree to accept this invitation,” she thought. The questions were piling up in her head. About Nono, about ageing, about women not having to give birth anymore, about people dying when they would be 500 years old.
“ — It’s never gonna happen anyway. Not in my lifetime.”
The vibrations could be heard again.
“Holifart watastink
Whozit who stinks?
Old religion stinks,
New one rocks,
You rock the baby and find her funny,
wiggly and sweet smelling.
New baby,
New religion.
You rock the baby and find her funny,
Wiggly and sweet smelling.
Holifart watastink
Whozit who stinks?
Old religion stinks,
New one rocks.”
Now Yuki was sitting in a bullet train, next to her brother, an oncologist and bioinformatics engineer working in Tokyo.
“ — Could a gene editing tool disrupt death one day?”, she asked him. He didn’t reply. Instead, he became her and she became her own brother. It wasn’t just some kind of virtual reality that had done the trick. She was really Taka, and her brother had become… her, Yuki.
“ — Would I also be able to impersonate Nono?”
The vibrations were now telling her about something very intimate. A love scene, her body was fully awake. She was with Nono, they were both making love. But who was she? Had she become her lover? What if we were all able to put ourselves in another person’s skin? Kinky? Scary? Silly? Depressing? She started hating the vibrations. They would make her mentally and physically sick, they were tricky and treacherous. Or was it death that was treacherous? The grief and pain being felt by your significant ones when you died. The fear she had. One day her great-grandmother would die. One day her parents would die. No religion had ever been able to wipe out the scandal of death. Instead, they invented eternity.
The vibrations were carrying on.
“ — Eternity is the opposite of big data.
Eternity is a wasteland. Big data is the universe.
The universe is not revolving around you.
You are not revolving around the universe.
You are both turning around each other.
You are becoming Nono.
He is becoming you.
This continuous movement will go on for half a millennium.”
Yuki wondered if that strange-looking person was one student of hers, or herself. She also felt that getting off the ride would mean becoming old and sick, and die. She started feeling very anxious, miserable. Implementing the new religion was not her problem. She didn’t even care about it. She was in dire need of comfort. Being connected with other people. Wasn’t that the promise of every religion? But what if you could become the others you were willing (or not) to connect with? This was so unsettling, so unheard of. Would an inhumane fear just replace another inhumane fear? She could not imagine religion would want to make you ashamed of your fears. Your fears of getting old, sick. She could not imagine religion would make death look glorious or desirable. Could big data solve the divide between life and death? How big was this divide? And how about using gene editing tools to revive extirpated species? If next-generation CRISPR-Cas 9 tools could become the black box of life, they could also become the black box of death. Help us understand ageing, disease and death. Then she head Taka’s voice:
“ — Still now it’s not everyday that a lab uses CRISPR to genetically modify human embryos. Yet.”
Yuki didn’t quite understand the vibrations, but she could sense some kind of connections.
“ — It’s never gonna happen anyway. Not in my lifetime. Yet.”
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
