People will be given what they want. Tomorrow’s end users/consumers will not be given what their doctors or their pastors think is good for them, for their bodies and their souls. Instead, people will be gratified. When this happens, the belle époque dies, because to get what you want means the end of what you were.

  The posthuman doesn’t mean Utopia (a synonym for Oblivion). Nothing is perfected, nothing is resolved. But it does means a new civilization with genuinely novel means of behavior and support. It is not a merely revolutionary change. It is a deep and permanent break in cultural and historical continuity. A revolution is just “the violent overthrow of one class by another.” The “posthuman” necessarily means a redefinition of what it means to be alive. This is a crushing blow to many eternal human verities, among them death. One of posthumanity’s necessary consequences will be the violent abolition of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. In a truly posthuman milieu, those terms of Shakespeare’s no longer make sense. The natural processes of growth, maturity, and aging are altered, scrambled, shuffled, or abolished. Human life loses its natural arc. The human stage is cleared, and new players tread the boards.

  What does this mean? How does it feel? It means that certain traditional phantoms of twentieth-century futurism are unlikely to happen. As we pointed out in stage one, there is very little market demand for a genetically altered human baby. Nobody with a spark of common sense wants to be the first customer to try this product, for as with computer software, the early adapter always gets burned.

  Old people, however, are another arena entirely. There is well-nigh unlimited market potential in combating aging and death, especially in a society, like ours, with unprecedented numbers of well-to-do people past the so-called retirement age. There are legions of hardened street fighters willing to battle in clinics over the fate of unborn babies—but there are very few champions of death rights who will leap up and insist that they personally should be allowed to die. In any case, their success would quickly remove them from the debate. The customers for life extension will be very focused and committed people. Life is a seller’s market.

  When you pay for extended life, it will probably be much like paying for information. You’ll never get the commodity itself, pure, immediate, and free. It will come in bits and pieces, full of qualifiers, caveats, snags, and trapdoors.

  If the belle époque becomes the parent of the near-term posthuman, there won’t be one large, dramatic breakthrough, such as a grand, government-sponsored moon landing or a military atomic blast. There will be dozens of medium and small advances. They will be webbed together in sophisticated ways, exploited by small, mostly profit-driven groups, working together electronically, over increasingly leaky and porous national boundaries. It won’t look like Ponce de Léon’s Fountain of Youth. It will look like the software industry, but medical. Juicier. Vastly more painful. Shipping behind schedule, wondrously botched, out of the doors of scanners, from the eyes of needles.

  Paternalistic governments will not take stern steps to spread these benefits evenly, as they did with the twentieth century’s universal suffrage or national phone service. They will be picked up first by technologically adept early adapters, then released in mass-market versions subject to periodic upgrades.

  Most of the people working in the new industries will not be professionally trained. They will lack ethical codes and esprit de corps. They will be sucked in by market demand from other industries and disciplines. They will train themselves by studying the Net.

  Successful companies will commonly disintegrate as everyone leaves for a start-up. Quieter areas of the industry, the parts that have dependable demographics and sustained demand, will be snapped up by huge enterprises seeking economies of scale. Certain areas of research and development will be palsied or killed by social resistance, transformed into smelly mires of cultural warfare and endless litigation. These prunable parts are the ones that can be zeroed in on by one sound bite, such as “Chernobyl,” “Brent Spar,” “Love Canal,” and “Bhopal.”

  “Posthuman” is a sound bite. Like the term “cyberspace,” it is a Procrustean neologism, raggedly covering some very ill-defined and multiplicitous ground. People who are genuinely posthuman will not consider themselves to be “post-” anything. The posthuman means an end to us and our concerns, but it’s just a beginning for them and theirs.

  Contemporary people find this situation very hard to imagine. In science fiction this problem of imagination is known as a “Vingean Singularity.” A Singularity is a place where matters that would be of great importance and interest to futurists become impossible to describe, simply because we futurists are, in point of fact, human beings. Being human, we have inherent human constraints: cultural, verbal, cognitive, and so on. We have never been two hundred years old, we do not have an IQ of 312, we have no industrial-strength DNA inside our cells. We can see that such situations seem more or less plausible, but they are so profoundly divorced from human experience that we cannot comprehend them.

  As with the event horizon of a black hole, there seems to be no possible communication between us and a Singularity. Our merely human reality is swallowed in an Einsteinian warp, and not so much as a single informative photon can creep back to us.

  However, although the approach of a Vingean Singularity is easy to dramatize, it’s not very relevant to what might really happen in a real posthuman world. Posthumans don’t care if contemporary science fiction writers like myself or my esteemed colleague Dr. Vernor Vinge are able to properly imagine them. Our ignorance is not a constraint on them; it is merely a healthy measure of our human limitations.

  Nevertheless, there are still a few ways for us to finesse the black hole of the Singularity, just as there are ways for us to map out good potential candidates for galactic black holes. Here are four things we can confidently say about this subject.

  1. There is no one Singularity. Any area of scientific inquiry, pushed far enough, could provide its own native version of a transformative cataclysm: biological, cognitive, mechanical, cybernetic, and so on. If man is the measure of all things, then there is no measure by which we can’t be made more than human. We might become ageless, or geniuses, or prosthetically enhanced, or cyberneticized, or any combination of those. We might be severely transformed by an unknown technology that we can’t yet imagine.

  2. A Singularity ends the human condition (because that is its definition), but it resolves nothing else. It would almost certainly be followed by a rapid, massive explosion of following Singularities. These ultracataclysmic events would disrupt the first Singularity even more than the first Singularity disrupted the original human condition. If we’re living longer, then we aim for immortality; if we’re superhumanly intelligent, all our possibilities explode in unforeseen directions. Posthumans aren’t content with human achievements; they’re better at posthumanity than we are.

  3. The posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards. Oh, sure, we may become as gods (or something will, maybe a chimeric genetic hybrid or a genuinely smart computer), but the thrill fades fast, because that thrill is merely human and parochial. By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They are not magic, they are still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules-based physical universe. They will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own conditions, whatever those limits and conditions may be.

  4. Messy, embarrassing, reversible, goofy, catch-as-catch-can posthumanism is politically preferable to sleek, streamlined, sudden, utter Final Solution posthumanism. The best way to encounter a Singularity would be to nick over the event horizon for a minute or two and have somebody else yank you back. Then the rest of us would be able to debrief you and see just how far you would be able to jam that experience into language.

  Lysergic acid, for instance, was loudly promoted as a life-changing, cosmic experience, but LSD, thankfully, lasts only eight hours in the system. This is well and good. If LSD were permanent, we’d be surrounded by many millions of middle-aged people who were irretrievably deranged.

  And here is a fifth thing we might assert as well.

  5. If it’s hard to be a little bit pregnant, then it’s even harder to be a little bit dead. Death, once known as the Great Leveler, will likely be rather less level than he used to be.

  Once your metabolic function has ceased, you are not any more or less dead than our very dead friend Otzi. This dark understanding can be a source of great comfort. The dead are a great host, but each person among them died only one time. Dying one time is all the dying humans find necessary.

  The traditional human response to death is to try to work through anger and rejection to acceptance. Typically, we humans imagine that we were put here by a higher power, to be taken away when it’s our due time. A posthuman does not get the due time or the acceptance. He may have more command over his biological fate than we do, but that exacts a price. When his own “strange eventful history” is closed, that’s not a kindness from the Grievous Angel; it’s his own lookout.

  It’s a theoretical problem for us, a practical problem for them. Death is a grand abstraction, but it has to manifest itself as a physical process undergone by an individual. No one else can do your dying for you. Life extension, that cheery notion, comes with the sinister underside of “death extension.” Death, that formerly brief, biologically necessary interregnum, can be extended to fantastic lengths far beyond any merely human experience. A posthuman runs the risk of spending an unconscionable amount of time in nonhuman states that are more or less alive.

  Possibly, the authorities may appoint someone whose business it is to properly oversee your death. It’s an open question whether you should ever trust any such person in such a vital, private, and personal matter. Professional euthanists don’t seem likely to be any more capable or incorruptible than their current equivalents: doctors at the fatal bedside and judges trying capital crimes.

  It’s a situation that is poorly explored, a problem that the belle époque just doesn’t get. It is tomorrow’s problem, and we lack the habits and customs for it. Nor are we likely to create those habits and customs, at least not any solid, deep-rooted ones. A posthuman transformation will have a very hard time staying friendly with any human habit or custom. It will even have a lot of trouble with its own.

  You may no longer be human, but you will not be divine or a superman. You will still have some kind of everyday treadmill, you will still have some quotidian engagement with time and space. Death will deserve respect.

  This realization is the last and deepest futurist insight, the one that tows a true futurist out of the shallow waters of the huckster and the charlatan. The future is a lovely thing to contemplate, but in the final analysis, it is where we go to die. Shakespeare knew this, and since he was a great artist, he knew enough to mention the fact and then stop. His soliloquy had to end, just as this book does.

  The world continues after our decease, and if we’re lucky, we might go right on talking. But death is an event we can’t finesse. Authentic futurism means staring directly into your own grave and the grave of everyone, and everything, you know and love.

  Perhaps some words will help. The melancholy Jaques, my faithful guide within this book, was very big on words. Sermons in stones, and good in everything. Words are little enough to offer, but at the side of the gravestone, words are what we give. We might therefore imagine a useful document for the future, a kind of preobituary for the posthuman. It might look like this:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  When you read this, I will be dead. Forgive me for addressing you without allowing you any reply. Due to unique circumstances, I lacked an alternative.

  I have passed from the scene of my own free will, by a method of my own choice that was thoroughly considered and appropriate to the desired end.

  Unfortunately, due to the following objective realities [link to details of my pressing circumstances here], the continuation of my life has become untenable. I have therefore chosen this deliberate and final exit. This was no mere whim on my part, but a grave and solemn act whose circumstances were thoroughly considered. Please take note of my Last Will and Testament, a sound and sensible document that clearly demonstrates a balanced judgment on my part. This clear intent to smooth the future path of my heirs will speak for itself.

  [Insert Last Will.]

  Ending my life is my final tribute to its worthiness. Those who grieve for me should take comfort. The final moment is but one among many and cannot invalidate the others. Death is merely a necessity.

  To prattle on after one’s last will is surely an act in dubious taste. But it’s a futurist’s occupational hazard. In writing this book, I’ve rudely imposed myself into the emerging world of my children. That’s a blatant embarrassment to all parties concerned, much like Dad crashing a teen dance with his rickety buck-and-wing. I’ve even sneaked furtively into the world of my grandchildren, who at this writing are entirely speculative entities. In those dodgy conditions, I’m a ghost who’s writing to unborn phantoms. What’s a ghost supposed to tell you people?

  Once Grandpa has done his soft-shoe shuffle off his mortal coil, his party small talk slips from the merely undignified to the downright eldritch. Speaking from the grave can seem such a strange and piteous thing. Trust me; I know this from experience.

  Whenever one visits a graveyard, attempting to commune with those worthy deceased, there’s a powerful sense of calamity there. Victorian graveyards are pretty common in my corner of the planet. Those Victorians are not just sort of dead—why, they’re all dead! The year 1880, for instance, has left us literally no survivors, not even one!

  It’s a simple matter to peruse those blurry stone exhortations of piety and sorrow. Rarely do you see an epitaph that really makes you want to know that grave’s inhabitant any better. There’s no human immediacy to these chiseled exhortations. They always fade into some blithering cult of ancestor worship—the temporal flip side of our peculiar regard for posterity. Quite commonly we just plain ignore our posterity. Sometimes we give it lip service. But when are we friendly with them? Nobody ever wants to level with posterity, to tell them something genuinely funny, gossipy, and deflating of pretense. It’s all about the judgment of posterity—as if our descendants all wore black robes for a living and had nothing better to do with their own time than to laud and appreciate ours.

  Victorian graveyards do infallibly offer me one stunning insight—that appalling number of dead children. Young wives dead in their teens and twenties, and a host of young men dead in plague and war. There’s a scary rarity there of dead people over seventy. They dropped to earth like dragonflies in a cold snap.

  But that is not at all the way Victorians saw themselves, even as they wept and dug those graves. On the contrary, one never saw an epoch more entirely progressive and self-congratulating. Very few peoples have ever been so pleased to be modern, so poised on top of the world. These people under the blurry tombstones—even the meekest and most downtrodden among them—knew they lived in a mighty age of fearless exploration, world conquest, and bold pioneering.

  The most famous old grave in these parts belonged to a young woman we locals call the Leanderthal Lady. “Leanne” is a paleo-Texan ten thousand years old, several millennia the senior of Otzi. Her friends and kin buried her with a fossil shark tooth, which—I feel quite sure—must have been her favorite toy and totem. And compared with the awesome gulfs of time that fossil shark swam in—well, Leanne and I, and Otzi, and even that crowd of Victorians—we’re all flirting and grinning at the same square dance, we’re grooving under the mirror ball at the same discotheque.

  A dead dragonfly is the creature of a mere season, frozen in some dirty ice with those four mosaic wings and those curled and brittle legs. But in the private world that creature saw through its busy, faceted eyes, it was a flying tiger. It swam, killed, and ate, and then it flew, killed, and ate, and though its life is brief by the lumbering standards of us mammals, its genetic legacy is much older than ours, older even than dinosaurs’. Grief at its lot is our pathetic fallacy. We project our sorrow onto that potent little entity from within ourselves.

  Some people are separated from us not by distance but by the ticking of the clock. A writer takes only debts and obligations from the past; he can tell them nothing. But if I may take the trouble here to speak to you, those who are to come, dear children of mine, as someone thoroughly dead—well, grief is just not a burden I would ever care to offer you. Given my druthers, I’d rather like us to dance, awkward though that may be.

  Yes, yes, I’m your remote ancestor and a spiritual progenitor and all that; I can’t and won’t deny it, I’m sheepishly owning up. But I don’t require you to trudge to my cenotaph in sackcloth and ashes. I’m not all demanding and judgmental about your bizarre and peculiar activities. On the contrary: I sympathize with your sense of inadequacy, your lasting awareness of hypocrisy and squalor. To the extent that such is possible—and it’s always more possible than we think at first—I’d like us to have a down-and-dirty chumminess because of all that. We should aspire to a rich appreciation of one another’s ironies and failings. Far from envying your stellar lot way up there in the glittering future, I’d love to help you celebrate your brief privilege of strutting the cosmic stage, of just plain being there-and-now. It’s all right! You deserve it!

  We dismiss the unborn as unknowable phantoms. We patronize the elder dead with the unearned benefits of hindsight. What we should strive to feel for both of them, for one another always and at all times, is a sense of sincere solidarity. If I win a role in your thoughts, unknown children, I would like to be a ghost you need not fear. A ghost whose strongest feelings for you are of unfeigned loving-kindness. Time may separate us, but outside yesterday and tomorrow, we can share the happy fact of being in the world.