Idea: Finishing School

(Interesting that I first thought of the blog as the place to put this.  Here's an idea for a future post: blogs are the modern era's answer to the Commonplace Book...)

A small number of people sign up for cryogenics nowadays, but as more do, the numbers of the "frozen" will increase.  Those with families will doubtless sign up their spouses, children, etc.

Wait, ignore that bit for a second.  Focus on the Cryogenics




The thought of waking up in the future is hardly a new idea; it's significantly older than science fiction.  But the idea of how different the future will be has changed quite a lot.  Rip Van Winkle woke up to find new people living in his town, or the war being over or a new one started, but the town was still there.  The unnamed protagonist of The Time Machine finds mankind differentiated and specialized across separated mutualist populations, and then witnesses the eventual dying of the earth.  Asimov wrote a short story (title forgotten, since who can keep track of them all?) where an anomaly engulfs a modern man, sending him into an Asimovian galaxy-spanning future, where he is pored over by amazed scientists ("He can grow hair on his face!  And his appendix is nearly two inches long!").  Warren Ellis wrote Transmetropolitan with the specific intent of freaking you out, and then showed us that when  we present-day folk walked out the halfway home for the reconsituted to our first look at his neither-utopia-nor-dystopia City, we were sent into a near-catatonia that might not abate except with death.

That's only one step behind the current prevailing democratic transhumanist theory, which is that you wake up and everything's normal at first, due to a need for a period of gradual adjustment, and you can't even be sure that you physically exist in the same way you're used to using those words.

(The Libertarian Transhumanists think that the future people will feel no obligation to resurrect and upgrade simple neanderthals like you, at which point you might reasonably ask, "Then what's the point of being a Libertarian Transhumanist?"  To which I can give no answer.)

What I mean is, in the future, it might be more convenient for everyone to be simulated, and if the world is significantly altered, it might be far more convenient for all us dead frozen folks to be scanned and simulated, rather than given a body, etc.  And then we might ask things of our keepers like "but is this really me?", we might betray our ignorance by the standards of the time; we will have equated our notional body with identity, the same way a hunter-gatherer could equate notional image with identity, and shun the cameras which can capture his soul.

But, assuming we're brought back for more than just being toyed with by godlike-to-us posthuman intelligences...no, wait.  Actually, don't assume that.  Let me try again.

So we show up in this slightly weird place.  I mean, it looks a lot like a simple sanatorium, but after all, here you are, alive, cancer-free, possibly in a younger body.  That takes a bit of getting used to.  You meet with a counselor, who answers some of your questions, and annoyingly avoids others, giving you the impression that things may have really, seriously changed.

But this is an idea you're used to, right?  After all, you consciously made this choice after reading on the subject and thinking long and hard about it, maybe discussing it with others, making a real financial commitment to the payments.  You wondered, more than once, what it would be like, and what you should do.  Maybe you fight against the strictures a bit, since you're probably really neophilic enough to think the world changing entirely might be really cool.  When are the training wheels going to come off, so you can ascend to join the other superintelligences or crab-people or whatever?

But maybe you aren't like that.  Remember, this could happen not only to the dude (they're almost all dudes nowadays) who committed to cryogenics, but also to his family.  More to the point, to his children.  I mean, good for him, not wanting to deny them future life.  But think about it: what happens if they die before they grow up all the way?  Imagine going through this process, except you never finished high school, or elementary school before kicking it.  Shit, imagine dying before you can talk.  Maybe in the near future, people might get policies early enough that SIDS will be covered.  Imagine growing up in a situation like that.

Or maybe they wouldn't be made to grow up in it.  Maybe if you're young enough, you haven't formed clear or rigid enough models for the world to resist this new strange world, whatever it is.  Maybe human babies humans can just just be tossed a series of physical and mental extensions to be made into starbabies.  And hell, we've figured out that people actually can grow new neurons into adulthood, so maybe the greater context that experience grants adult gives them stability rather than brittleness.  Maybe there's an easy path out for adults.

So what about the kids who fall between, neither young enough to rapidly forget their humanity, nor old enough to keep an unaided grip on their sanity through the revelations?  What if they need a customized process?  What if, especially, they become really antsy and afraid unless they think they're surrounded by other mostly normal people?  Remember, even though the whole family had the insurance, they might have all died at different times, or in such a way that only the kid was recovered, or that their family was recovered  and integrated a while ago (better preserved bodies, I mean), or maybe it was just determined that being grouped in a simulation with anyone you know is counterproductive.

Or...there might be gaps in memory caused directly by physical trauma or decay, and if the technology is sufficiently advanced (oh, say it can be!), there might also be traumatic memories which are blanked, whether of one's death, or of one's family, or even of anything the Intelligences (I'm not married to that terminology) deem to be damaging.  Pain, deprivation, or outright abuse might be blocked.  Or maybe more sophisticated memetic science would identify memories or associations that we might think benign.  Taunts and embarrassment?  Religious indoctrination?  Wetting the bed?

Perhaps all those gaps in memory would be too alarming.  Maybe they'd be smoothed over, so that you didn't notice what you didn't remember, or maybe they'd be outright replaced with less damaging ones.  Of course, it would be terrible (I think) for those memories to be covered up forever.  What kind of post humans would they grow up to be if they couldn't incorporate all their own experiences, their true "natures?"  Maybe their memories would be gradually revealed to be false, with the new ones rising to the surface, when "therapy" was complete.

That's what they would need, in essence.  Therapy.  The purpose of school has always been to indoctrinate children into being good members of their class and nation.  What if it was its primary focus was emotional development?  A rapid path to adulthood, independent of such easily-fixed things as knowing how to drive, or being of a certain age...

Oh, right.  In case the title didn't give it away,  I'm trying to stack assumptions such that I can let all these kids go to "school" with one another.  In my mind, at the moment, it looks a bit like The Sixth Sense meets Revolutionary Girl Utena crossed with Ender's Game, with all the kids essentially living inside "The Giant's Drink."  Or else, in game terminology, it's lacuna (no, not Blue Lacuna, though that's a good thought...do they explore multiple worlds and modalities, rising through the layers gradually until they're ever closer to the truth?) meets Bliss Stage meets Grey Ranks, except there's no war but an internal one...although that might still seem threatening to them!  Growing up, extending beyond yourself and changing who you are, can hurt!

They're of a variety of ages, ranging from...let's say 8 to 16.  And they were all definitely alive during different stretches of time...potentially very different.  At least between today and fifty years from now.  And they're being guided, prodded, shaped by literally impossible-to-understand forces (post-humans would think better than us, not just faster).  Even if we accept as given that those forces are beneficent (okay, how about just hedonistic and gregarious?), won't the kids be in a fascinating situation?

Cool?  Not cool?  Story?  Game?

-Nick