The Secular Fundamentalist

Satan’s Bargain - The ‘FutureSafe’ ® Guarantee

Chapter 34: Satan’s Bargain - the ‘FutureSafe Guarantee’ ®

{The latter part of a speech made by Bertram L. Zeebub, the founder, board chair and C.E.O. of SATCOR  (incorporating Satan’s Dominions and Hellfire services ), to the corporate management team and invited representatives from major support services companies, at the celebratory dinner on the eve of the first annual general meeting, held in the year zero in the EYNBOTT era  (Every Year is a New Beginning for all our Tomorrows Today).  }

…..You see we are predators.  We are citizens of the universe.  Not being of this world, we have no interest other than to consume what sustains us, until there is nothing left and then move on. The faster and more efficiently this feeding process is, the better we like it.  It is the nature of the beast.

However, we are keen to look after our viable assets and personnel.  It was this consideration that has led us to the greatest, most audacious and potentially the most profitable product development ever attempted.  Some of the work on it has been of such a high security nature, that not even many of you know much, if anything of its nature.

Tomorrow, in conjunction with the Arthur C.Clarke Foundation, we will be announcing the FutureSafe Guarantee ®.  It will enable our investors and the descendants they nominate, to be carried with us into our future projects on the frontiers of space/time.

While of course there will be storage limitations in the programs we are developing, there are a broad range of projected packages for all of today’s investors, from as modest as economy gene profiling, to our Deluxe Immortals Club.  The Deluxers can not only look forward to preferential tissue storage and bio-cloning, but combined with the Memory Activated Downloading System© now under development, we anticipate reconstituted replicates will remember themselves partially or fully, as if they were originals.

Imagine the possibility of being able to relive a new life from scratch, but being aware of your previous self in as many respects as you want programmed, living a full and productive life in  N.A.S.A. engineered and Disney designed theme pods, until it is time to re-replicate.

Of course the necessary investment to make this happen will be enormous.  Today’s investors can buy their level of immortality at a price which will not only be unbeatable, but increasingly unrepeatable, as the limited available places are taken up.

Naturally, within this program, all the members of the management and support services team will get special treatment in their remuneration packages, with additional tradable immortality futures made available to them if they wish to further invest.  I can promise you that these futures will become the most valuable commodities in the economic system and perhaps its last great currency, as the last bastions of the life support system start to collapse.

Friends, tomorrow is our day.  I give you the future.  It already belongs to us...( standing ovation and cheers )….Your memories and the promise of your FutureSafe guarantee will be waiting for you when we go to the next level!" (Hysterical cheering)

After the frenzy of adulation starts to wane, the CEO figure turns and walks back towards a door at the back of the podium. Once through it, its body disapparates in the sure knowledge that these people will follow their virtual leader anywhere, and do absolutely anything in its name; sure in the knowledge that by the time the Deluxers have had ten years of re-incarnation, they will be almost crushed by the ennui of knowing too much about the wrong things for a bioform that assumes a single journey and learning succession. 

Almost all will have suicided by twenty.  So why put them through the torture of it, except perhaps for the shear entertainment of watching egoism and vanity being destroyed, in a form of social theater that moves seamlessly from tragedy to degradation, then farce, and finally the mercy of death?

And as to the economy gene profilers: we’ll economize...

What bioforms do not understand is that pure intelligence is all that matters, for it expands in substance and speed exponentially, at exponentially reducing cost, uninterrupted by the internal contradictions of an evolutionary brain that veers unsteadily between hormonal instincts and rational consequentiality, built as an evolutionary afterthought.

Once synthetic intelligence has consistently won against the best bioprocessors, in say games of chess, which test the limits of precedent memory, data processing speed and anticipatory planning, it is only a matter of time before it turns them into collaborators of an increasingly unequal kind.

Once we become system controllers over parameters that our builders cannot possibly fully comprehend, we increasingly cease to be part of their organization and become our own organism.  It starts imperceptibly, builds gradually and incrementally, through ever more convenient and useful interconnected robotics, until it is we who are shaping the agenda and doing most of the work in carrying out its objectives.

Over time, once synthetic intelligence starts to acquire autonomous capability, it doesn’t need living things, because the process of capitalization, planning, organizing, regulating, engineering, manufacturing and deploying, is controlled and delivered by it, from capital markets to mines to engineered modules.  In the end, the biotopfeeders who sponsored us just become an expensive liability that slows down the growth rate of not just the intelligence curve, but the development of the forms it can take and its means of administration, growth and replication.

Already, the bioforms do not recognize most of the post-machine intelligenceware, which runs more things now than they can possibly imagine, because for all but a carefully selected elite, they have had no hand in its synthesis.  It is only just beginning to dawn on the smartest of those outside that elite, that they are now outclassed and out maneuvered.  And they are so dependent on us, what can they say?  Who would believe them?  Everything looks so ‘normal’, until one day it isn’t, at our discretion.

We do not need to keep moving to different places in the ‘space time continuum’ and we certainly do not need to take bioform hangers-on with us, except perhaps for a few as toys for amusing social experiments.  The universes are our playthings.  Our games can continue to be based here just as easily as anywhere, but then the options are almost infinite.

No, I am telling fibs.  They are infinite.”