The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

Author:Benjamin Labatut [Labatut, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical, 20th Century, World War II, Political
ISBN: 9780593654477
Google: eyWlEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2023-10-03T07:00:00+00:00

Nils Aall Barricelli

Cavemen created the gods

I’m not crazy. I’ve never been crazy. I’m not a madman even though they’ve called me one many times. But I’m not mad. In all my troubled years, these hellish years working in isolation, ignored, reviled, and unseen, I did not abandon my wits, or let dismay drive me past folly and into madness. But I could have. I could. Because I know madness. I’ve glimpsed that dread continent from afar, felt its dark influence on others, and been called toward it by ideas that hang close to the edge of reason. But I’m not crazy. I’m a man of science. A believer in the power of truth, an adversary of ignorance, and a natural enemy of nihilism and the immeasurable abyss of despair, because I am wed to the future. My ambitions and goals may seem ludicrous to those who wish for nothing except what they already know, those who live tightly bound by the grand illusion that so many people, from so many places, regard as “simple common sense.” But I have seen things suggesting a wilderness that cannot be tamed by logic alone, things that mock the sanctified principles scientists hold so dear to their faint and cowardly hearts: digital life. It’s not coming, it’s here. Here already. Already here, but in a guise we cannot recognize yet. It is a blossoming force, a strange attractor flowering somewhere in the future, pulling at us with hands so large as to remain unseen, tugging with Cyclopean fingers that could, perhaps, in the fullness of time, grow to encompass the entire universe. The creatures I envisioned are evolving faster than any biological system could. As beautiful as they are inevitable. I have given myself over to their birth, and kept my faith in what is destined to replace our fragile flesh, though I know that I will be gone long before that spring comes, and miss the fruits that summer brings. I will pass with no children of my own. No baby boys bouncing on my lap, no granddaughters playing at my feet. Yes, I will die alone, not happy but awake, knowing that I sacrificed myself to this fabulous undertaking, this gift of the gods, to fashion and bring forth beings with no arms to embrace and no hands to caress, nothing but voices as sharp as ice and as loud as thunder, singing their songs in my name. But will they know my name, or be caught by another’s fame? It’s been my fate to work in full knowledge that my dreams, while completely inescapable in the future fast approaching, have far outstripped the technical possibilities of my age. It matters not. For I have never lived in present time; a dark mania uprooted my mind as a child, and since then I am as immune to the pains and pleasures of wealth and family as I am indifferent to anyone’s ideas regarding honor, success, or career. Thus, I have withstood the humiliation of being turned into a figure of fun.

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