Shadow Of A Gene

I've been quite libidinous since my 30,000-mile tune up. Today this almost got me in trouble, which is to say it did get me, just not in trouble.

I happened upon a small park while meandering through the city. A pond reminded me of the dream last night. I vaguely recall seeing it from up high in my lab; I think it eventually connects to catfish pond via a small stream. Perhaps it wasn't coincidence that I wandered there today.

Daydreaming, mostly reliving that strange dream, I sat in the grass. Naturally this led to thinking about women, and soon I was surveying every woman in the park, trying them out in my mind, as it were, one by one. It all seemed innocent enough, just casual daydreaming, until I spotted one woman in particular sitting in the grass with three friends not far from me.

Objectively, she was not the most attractive woman in the park. Nor was she particularly my type. But she hooked my attention so completely I can hardly remember anything else that went on around us from that moment forward.

My enhanced vision kicked in instinctively and I found her naked before me, her rosy cheeks and full lips and breasts all glowing in the infrared. And so too from between her legs, a triangular glow that seemed to be an arrow inviting me there. Here in the artistry of bodily warmth she was a caricature of sex.

As the four of them shuffled up to leave she spotted me eying her. At some level I wanted to look away, as if our eyes had just met by chance, but instead I returned her gaze with bright, friendly eyes and a very subtle smile. She said goodbye to her friends, who wandered away, and she walked straight over to me.

"You're that man who hit his head, the one who lives with Laura?" she asked.

I told her so, and we walked and talked, I can hardly remember about what but nothing of substance. What I remember is her smell, and the way she seemed to glow hotter by the minute. She led the way and soon I had walked her home. She opened the door and walked in without delay, leaving no doubt she assumed I would follow. I closed the door behind me as she set her things down, and when I turned back we were face to face not six inches apart.

The heat of her body in the confined channel swept her smell up to me in an intoxicating breeze. She put her hand behind my head and pulled her lips up to mine, connecting us like a circuit, throwing a switch that set all the rest irrevocably in motion. We stumbled down to the floor, and as she fell away from me the front of her dress flipped back and bunched upon her belly where she lay, legs apart. She glowed so hot I could hardly see her curves, just her lips and cheeks and breasts and the bright orchid between her legs like a coyly held flower. I sought her eyes which invited me in and we made love until I felt the contractions of her body, the burst of heat from her face, and I came into her as her body grasped and drank of the synthetic drugs my android body delivers.

I carried her to her bed, covered her with a blanket. Her blissful, sleepy gaze was the same as Laura's face the first time we made love. I wondered then, what had I just done to her? I left her there, wandered home in my own daze. I still don't know her name.

I confessed this all to Laura as soon as I saw her. I expected a scene, or at least a long, drawn-out discussion. But she took the news with about as much interest as if I'd told her I went shopping. "That's nice dear. And did you get a blonde or a brunette?" Not quite that, but close.

This led to a long, drawn-out discussion after all, but of my doing, not hers.

How does she feel about all of this? How do people here in general feel about all of this? Love, romance, fidelity, propriety, marriage, family...

Her answers were mostly indifference to it all. Why would she want a husband? The very concept seemed laughable. Raising and supporting a child here is no problem. Children are rare, and universally cherished, viewed rather as puppies were in my time. "Oh, how cute. If you ever get sick of him, just send him to our house. We'd love to have him!" Time and money are not a problem; entertainment is everything. And with pregnancy a statistical rarity, sexual variety is practically a societal obligation.

It all makes sense logically, but it's hard to adjust to seeing it in practice. Aspects of this made sense in my time too; for instance effective birth control made polyamory rational. But the human animal is not fundamentally a rational creature, really more of an emotional being that rationalizes. The difference here, I must presume, is that evolution has had time to catch up, that these people are made for this world, in stark contrast to the people of my time who were made for a world very different than the one they lived in.

Still, Laura confessed there was something special about me. Not that she wanted me to herself, but that she wanted to give herself to me above all others. She had no reasons for it. It's just how she feels, she said.

Just how she feels. Still this hasn't changed. How sorely people underestimate the totality with which their feelings define them. One has but to relentlessly ask themselves "why?" to realize this. In particular start with "why am I doing this?" whatever "this" is at the moment. It always bottoms out in "want" or "feel", which is as far as one can go with direct introspection. Though one can go further with inference, or more accurately so with neuroscience.

Neuroscience shows us that we are ultimately just vehicles for our genes, and our most sacred spiritual essences are simply those genes asserting themselves above our comparably transient bodies and minds. What is love but genetic self-interest? Love drives people to many things that seem to defy rational cause, but not so when you view the gene as the center of individual identity. Far from its popular association with benevolence and selflessness, true love is the ultimate expression of genetic narcissism.

Emotion is the core of all practical intelligence, it is the fuel and cause behind all choice and action. Emotion answers the question, "Why am I doing this?" And the answer is, "Because my genes say so." Or, in my case, because my genes said so, back when they defined my organic brain from which this one was copied.

The rational mind, the conscious self with its delusions of self-preservation in a body that was designed to decay in the end, these are tools of the genetic core, subroutines used by the emotional substrate to carry out its bidding. "I don't care how, but eat these, fuck that, and protect this with your life." And so we dutifully obey, because at root we have no will besides this, this genetic program evolved over millennia. It is our will; it is us, and we are it.

Even religion, like love, is an evolved trick of the genes. It is the adaptive portion of our genetic emotional substrate, the firmware between the hardware of the genetic brain and the software of the rational mind. Religion and the gene live in a symbiosis with each other, where religion provides the firmware to optimize genetic success within the current socio-economic context--a form of adaptivity much faster than hard evolution of the gene itself could provide--and the gene in return provides a mechanism in the brain for downloading this firmware. The human species as a whole is the soup in which religions evolve, and whichever find the most effective symbioses thrive and multiply while the others wither and eventually become extinct.

Thus, again, where religion appears irrational at the level of the conscious, embodied individual, it is our mistake of perspective to believe the root of thought is there. The root of thought is in the goals of the gene. And religion, and love, and all of the other nearly ubiquitous contradictions with "rational thought," serve it well.

Those born without these traits, the hopelessly rational or atheistic or self-interested (indeed even those too intelligent or introspective to be properly ruled by their emotions) are as defective as if they'd been born missing arms and legs. Forays down dead-end branches of the evolutionary tree, they are pruned as fast as they occur. The common man, for all his apparent flaws, is definitively just right.

Now I am left pondering: what happens if you keep the mind but lose the genes?

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