Saturday 2nd April

Escape.  There is no escape, or so I have discovered.  Maybe it wasn’t the system I was running from but myself.  And now I am being offered the greatest escape of all; the possibility of escaping from myself.  Or the ‘myself’ I used to be.  As I look back I do miss them, my wife and kids.  But really, I lost them years ago.  The people I know now look similar, but they are strangers; hazy pictels on a poor res screen that resemble people I might have once known.  Though no longer, I even find it hard to remember remembering the memory of them, let alone themselves.  I have been informed that I have been discovered dead on a South London street somewhere, a victim of street gangs; my mangled body too badly damaged to be viewed.  I have been buried and I am sure Cathy and the kids will have cried.  If only for the man they thought they once knew a long time ago.  So, in a way I have already escaped.  No more wife and no more children.

And now ironically I am to be a father again.  Well, to be precise, the father of many.  The ‘select’ programme has always had two objectives.  As well as the final amalgamation of human and computer there is the second strand; creating a new direction for the species.  The programme has a long-term objective of changing the human race, so that it will be the equal of, and not some sort of inferior servant to the very machines we have created.  Apparently they have discovered special abilities in me; in my brain, to be more specific.  I am wired differently from most other, (actually all others, they tell me) humans.  My brain works more like a computer, in certain ways anyway.  It is all a bit technical, so I won’t bore you with the details, it is all to do with linked synapse connections, but it seems that I am ‘special’.

All human beings are special of course, in that the complexities of personality, hormones and intelligence have made each one of us slightly different.  Suffice it to say they want my genes, although so far they still haven’t managed to identify exactly which combination has made my brain work slightly better in some respects than other humans.  Of course I have always thought of myself as more than a bit stupid, and there is no dichotomy there.  Great intelligence, or the way one brain works faster in one way than another, certainly doesn’t make you generally cleverer than other people.  There are many scientists, many working for the ‘select’ programme, who believe that all humans are capable of far more than they have so far achieved.  That we are all potential geniuses (genii?), it is just that somehow we haven’t managed to switch on those parts of our brains which would make us so. They say that somehow, probably by some genetic quirk, I managed to switch some of mine on.

So they are going to try to replicate my little deviation into hundreds of children.  They have lined up over three hundred young fertile volunteer mothers for me to impregnate.  At first I thought I might actually get to fuck all of them.  See, what I was saying about being incredibly stupid at the same time as remarkably clever.  No, all they need from me is about a teaspoonful of sperm.  And not even a nice female assistant to help me produce it.  A state of the art, latest model, syn machine is all I have been given.  Not that I am really complaining; this model is the works.

They are working on my soupcon of spunk now, genetically weeding out what they think are the stragglers, and supercharging the best candidates.  The whole thing is being speeded up from the ‘natural’ process.  The embryo-to-feotus stage now only takes a few hours, and once implanted the entire pregnancy lasts but a few weeks.  And these ‘superkids’ will be speeded through childhood and should reach puberty at about five years old, when their eggs and sperm will in their turn be extracted and a new generation started.  So about every six years, rather than the twenty of old, we should get a whole new generation, and by selective manipulation and advances in genetic research the boffins running the programme reckon that maybe in thirty year’s time, or the end of the century at the very latest, we will have the first real ‘hyperkids’.   Incredible if remotely possible; Cosmos knows what they will be like – and just as much strangers to me as my own children I am sure.

The Americans are really the keenest on this element of the programme, and talk of this ‘Brave New World’ we are creating, as if they were ‘God’ himself.  Even though, as we all know there is not, nor ever was, a ‘God’, these old ideas still linger, especially in the land of the brave and the free.  Strange, I read some old book once which was actually called ‘Brave New World.’  It was a real dumb-ass story though, written by some old guy, must be over a century ago now.  Science had overtaken most of his ideas by the time I read it and it just seemed silly.  That must happen to anyone stupid enough to try to write about the future I suppose. But people have, it seems always written about the future, or what they imagine the future might hold.  By definition it is a pointless venture, no-one can predict the future, not even our Hypercoms with their extrapolations and posited and tested theories.  Not even, of course, and I hesitate to criticise my ‘employers’, the scientists on the ‘select’ programme itself.  They imagine that by changing the human race, by, as they like to think of it, speeding up our evolution, they will create ‘better’ humans.   I am not so sure, for all we know this new breed of ‘hyperkids’ may have lost something in the process (or gained something even nastier).  Maybe we need these life experiences, these mistakes, these foibles, these weaknesses, to make us realise we are not so important, in the scheme of things.

Anyway, I may be wrong; I usually am.