MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 31

I took an AirShip to Nepal, a slow three day cruise on the jet-stream, it gave me time to think. I descended from the ship to Pokhara in a BubbleCar. Despite all the melting glaciers and rising snow-lines around the world, the Himalayas were still white, covered in snowy ice.

I joined a small group of trekkers I met at the lodge I booked for the first two nights by the town's lake. We started hiking the Annapurna Circuit early in the morning, just as the sun was rising, and a frigid air blew down from the majesty of mountains in the distance.

I noticed a number of others wearing ThinkingCaps and more than a few with GymLegs. Their experiences of nature overshadowed with visual windows, music, thought-streaming, and a mess of multi-tasking interfaces. Either because they had to work during the trek or because mere nature was too dull to keep them entertained. The GymLegs were more understandable, although they were depriving both their body and minds of a truly natural, human, experience. A test of endurance they could only pass by cheating.

For me, the trek was time to think, let my mind wander along with my legs. Thoughts I might never have deliberately uploaded from a Cap, never thought to think about, if that makes sense, would trickle into my mind, while following a canyon carved by a melting glacier a million years before.

For certain, I felt pains in my back and legs I wouldn't have felt with the GymLegs, but the pain and discomfort kept other thoughts at bay. And when I relaxed with a hot tea after a long day of walking, there was a relief I can only describe as euphoria. No AddaBoy jolts or Tranquil_Prods or UpFeels needed. The tiredness of my body alone made me as calm and serene as the mountains upon which I gazed.

I struck up a conversation on one evening with an older man from India, a scientist as it turned out, and a climatologist to boot. "I was surprised to see snow and ice up here," I told him. He smiled at me and asked about my tea. The conversation circled like this for two hours, every time I brought the topic back to something foundational, like the world, technology, or economics, he directed the conversation to where we were and what was happening right now.

He was old enough to have studied at a university with books. Using rote memorization, traditional lectures delivered by a live professor, and through various homework assignments and tests. If I had told him that I successfully led a MoonCorp project to save the Earth from solar storms, he wouldn't have believed me. I never studied to be a scientist. I had no degree. I might have uploaded the equivalent of a degree into my longterm memory, and I had the help of an artificial intelligence with a vast repository of knowledge, but I hadn't done the work this man had done. I hadn't felt the agony of staying up all night memorizing, reading, and working out math equations, to prepare for an exam the next morning. I hadn't suffered for my knowhow.

As Wizard informed me, even before the Caps, many young students had foregone the difficult courses of mathematics, physics, and other sciences, because they were too difficult. Life offered easier options, many of which paid a lot more. And hyper-intelligences did most of the practical work now anyway. Or maybe Ollie told me this, or Dad, the three of them are all intertwined. Regardless, this trend was the academic equivalent of people moving from walking to automobiles in the 20th Century, with a corresponding increase in obesity and depression.

Life was meant to be hard, because without suffering there's no joy when something comes easy. There's no joy in overcoming the suffering. And so there's no joy, because it has no opposite. An old KnowLoad from Epictetus and some other stoics came to mind. An example of a memory I would never have thought to recall or link with the concept from my conversation with this scientist. It came to me while suffering up a steep trail.

When we finally got back to the topic of science and technology this man started to smile. Then he went wild with theories and explanations. While I could recite numerous facts from my cerebral cortex, he weaved elaborate stories, anecdotes, and personal memories, and was as excited as a child to tell me.

Of course science and technology would eventually solve our problems, he said while ordering yet another tea. Climate, solar storms, asteroids from deep space, and super volcanoes, all had solutions, and increasingly our technology and hyper intelligences would be able to figure it all out. Good for the human species. But as individual humans, what would we lose in the process? What would become of our humanity?

At least for the remainder of the trek I would be walking, humping up steep hills, bundled up against icy wind, pushing through exhaustion, and even a little fear. A human that walks the earth. Grounded. Free of illusions, and yet my mind, much like our ancient stone-age ancestors, would still be very much aloft.