The Elementary Particles (25 page)

We now believe that Michel Djerzinski died in Ireland, where he had chosen to live out his last years. We also believe that, having completed his work, and with no human ties to bind him, he chose to die. Many witnesses attest to his fascination with this distant edge of the Western world, constantly bathed in a soft shifting light, where he liked to walk, where, as he wrote in one of his last notes, “the sky, the sea and the light converge.” We now believe that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea.

Epilogue

Though we know much about the lives, physical appearances and personalities of the characters in this book, it must nonetheless be considered a fiction—a plausible re-creation based on partial recollections, rather than a definite, attestable truth. Though
Clifden Notes
—a complex blend of memories, personal impressions and theoretical reflections jotted down by Djerzinski while he was working on his theory between 2000 and 2009—tells us much about the events in his life, and the choices, conflicts and dramas which were to shape his distinctive view of existence, there are many areas in his biography and his personality which remain obscure. What follows, however, belongs to History, and the events which followed the publication of Djerzinski’s work have been pored over, commented on and analyzed so often that a brief résumé seems sufficient.

In 2009, the magazine
Nature
published a separate section entitled “Toward Perfect Reproduction,” eighty pages synthesizing Djerzinski’s last works. This was to send shock waves throughout the scientific community. Around the world, dozens of molecular biologists tried to duplicate his experiments and verify the details of his calculations. After several months, the first results came in and then, week after week, more and more experiments confirmed his original hypotheses with exact precision. At the end of 2009 there could no longer be any doubt: Djerzinski’s conclusions were valid and could be considered to have been proven. The practical consequences were dizzying: any genetic code, however complex, could be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated from disturbances or mutations. This meant that every cell contained within it the possibility of being infinitely copied. Every animal species, however highly evolved, could be transformed into a similar species reproduced by cloning, and immortal.

Hubczejak was twenty-seven when he, like hundreds of researchers all over the world, discovered Djerzinski’s work. He was completing his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge and was nervous, distracted, always on the move; for a number of years he had been roaming Europe, where he studied at the universities of Prague, Göttingen, Montpellier and Vienna—searching, as he put it, “for a new paradigm, yet also for something more: not just a way of seeing the world but a way of situating myself within it.” He was certainly the first and, for many years, the only defender of the most radical of Djerzinski’s proposals: that mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which was asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation and evolution. It is superfluous to note the hostility with which such a project was greeted by the defenders of revealed religion; Judaism, Christianity and Islam were for once agreed, and heaped derision and opprobrium on work which “gravely undermines human dignity in its unique relationship with the Creator.” Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and that the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution. Nonetheless, Hubczejak could count on little support from organized religion. It is perhaps more surprising to note that traditional humanists also rejected the idea out of hand. Though it may be difficult for us to understand this now, it is important to remember how central the notions of “personal freedom,” “human dignity” and “progress” were to people in the age of materialism (defined as the centuries between the decline of medieval Christianity and the publication of Djerzinski’s work). The confused and arbitrary nature of these ideas meant, of course, that they had little practical or social function—which might explain why human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration. Nonetheless, the educated or semieducated classes, having more or less succeeded in inculcating these ideas, clung desperately to them. It is hardly surprising that Frédéric Hubczejak had such difficulty in making himself heard in those early years.

The story of the period in which Hubczejak finally managed to have his project, initially greeted with unanimous disgust and condemnation, accepted by a growing proportion of global opinion to the degree that it was eventually granted funding by UNESCO, reveals an extraordinarily brilliant and pugnacious individual, a pragmatic and agile mind, the archetype of an intellectual propagandist. Certainly he was not of the stuff of great researchers, but he was capable of turning to his advantage the enormous respect the scientific community had for Djerzinski and his work. Though he was neither an original nor a profound thinker, in annotating and prefacing
Meditations on Interweaving
and
Clifden Notes,
he presented Djerzinski’s thought with precision and incisiveness, making them accessible to a wider public. Hubczejak’s first article, “Michel Djerzinski and the Copenhagen Interpretation,” is, despite its title, a long meditation on a quotation from Parmenides: “That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be.” In his next paper, “A Treatise on Concrete Limitations,” and the more soberly titled “On Reality,” he attempts a curious synthesis of the logical positivism of the Vienna circle and the religious positivism of Comte, and he is not averse to flights of lyricism, as evinced by the oft-quoted passage “There is no
endless silence of infinite space,
for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void. The world we know, the world we create, the human world, is as round, smooth, simple and warm as a woman’s breast.” Whatever his failings, he understood how to communicate to a growing public the idea that humanity in its current state could and should control the evolution of the world’s species—and in particular its own evolution. In his struggle, he had the support of a number of neo-Kantians who, making use of the sudden unpopularity of Nietzschean ideas, had taken control of the wellsprings of power among the intelligentsia, the universities and the press.

The general consensus is that Hubczejak’s real genius lay in his precisely calculated ability to marshal the confused, bastardized, late-twentieth-century ideology known as “New Age thinking” to his advantage. He was the first of his generation to see beyond the ridiculous, contradictory and outmoded superstitions it adopted to the fact that New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of psychological, ontological and social breakdown. Beyond the repellent mix of fundamentalist eco-babble, attraction to tradition and the “sacred” which they inherited from their spiritual forebears, the Esalen commune and the hippie movement, New Agers had a genuine desire to break with the twentieth century, its immorality, its individualism and its libertarian and antisocial aspects. It testified to the anguished awareness that a society cannot function without the unifying axis of some kind of religion; it was, in effect, a call for a new paradigm.

Hubczejak was keenly aware that some compromise is essential. And when he founded the Movement for Human Potential in late 2011, he did not hesitate to openly recycle some New Age themes, ranging from what he referred to as “the formation of the cortex of Gaia” to his celebrated comparison “ten billion people on the face of the planet, ten billion neurons in the human brain,” from his appeal for a world government based on a “new alliance” to the almost commercial THE FUTURE IS FEMININE. This was done with an agility which generally drew admiration from commentators. He was careful to avoid any drift toward the nonrational and the sectarian and, on the contrary, secured strong support from the scientific community.

A certain cynicism in the study of human history tends to identify “artfulness” as a key component in success, although in the absence of strongly held convictions it is by itself incapable of producing any significant change. All those who had the opportunity to meet Hubczejak, or to debate him, are agreed that his persuasiveness, magnetism and extraordinary charisma were all rooted in a profound simplicity and an authentic personal conviction. He said exactly what he believed, regardless of the circumstances—and to his critics, tangled up in the limitations of outdated ideologies, such simplicity was devastating. One of the principal objections to his project concerned the suppression of sexual difference, which is so central to human identity. To this Hubczejak responded that his intention was not to re-create the human species down to the smallest detail, but to create a new, rational species, and that the end of sexuality as a means of reproduction in no way heralded the end of sexual pleasure—quite the contrary. The coding sequences responsible for the formation of Krause’s corpuscles in the embryo had recently been identified. At the time, such corpuscles were sparsely spread on the surface of the glans penis and the clitoris. There was nothing, however, to prevent these from being multiplied in the future to cover the entirety of the epidermis, offering new and undreamed-of erotic possibilities.

Probably the most profound criticisms focused on the fact that every member of the species created by making use of Djerzinski’s work would carry the same genetic code, meaning that one of the fundamental elements of human individuality would disappear. To this Hubczejak responded that this unique genetic code—of which, by some tragic perversity, we were so ridiculously proud—was precisely the source of so much human unhappiness. To the notion that human personality was in danger of disappearing, he proposed the concrete example of identical human twins who, through their individual experiences and despite their shared genetic code, developed different personalities while maintaining a mysterious fraternity—which, as Hubczejak pointed out, was exactly the element necessary if humanity were to be reconciled.

There can be no doubt that Hubczejak was sincere when he presented himself as a logical successor to Djerzinski, like an executor whose sole purpose was to put into practice the ideas of his master. Evidence for this might be found in his staunch loyalty to the bizarre idea proposed on page 342 of
Clifden Notes:
the number of individuals in the new species must always be a prime number; it is therefore necessary to create one person, then two, then three, then five . . . in short, to scrupulously follow the sequence of prime numbers. The purpose of having a population divisible only by itself and one was meant to draw symbolic attention to the dangers which subgroups constitute in any society; but it would appear that Hubczejak accepted this at face value without having the slightest idea what it might mean. More generally, his relentlessly positivist reading of Djerzinski led him constantly to underestimate the extent of metaphysical change which would necessarily accompany such a profound biological mutation—a mutation which had, in truth, no precedent in the history of humanity.

This gross ignorance of the philosophical subtleties of the project, and even his inability to recognize philosophical subtleties in general, in no way hampered or even delayed its implementation. This reveals the extent to which, in all Western societies and particularly in the most advanced segments represented by the New Age movement, there had been an acceptance of the idea that a fundamental shift was indispensable if society was to survive—a shift which would credibly restore a sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred. It is also a measure of how little the public understood or cared about questions of philosophy. The global ridicule in which the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze had suddenly foundered, after decades of inane reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped contempt on all those intellectuals active in the “human sciences.” The rise to dominance of scientists in all fields of thought became inevitable. Even the occasional, sporadic and contradictory interest which New Age devotees pretended to take in this or that belief or “ancient spiritual tradition” was nothing more than further evidence of a poignant, almost schizophrenic despair. Like others in society, and perhaps more so, they truly believed only in science; science was to them the arbiter of unique, irrefutable truth. Like others in society, they believed in their hearts that the solution to every problem—whether psychological, sociological or more broadly human—could only be a technical solution. Thus it was without any great risk of contradiction that Hubczejak launched his 2013 campaign—the first to unleash public opinion on a planetary level—with the slogan THE MUTATION WILL NOT BE MENTAL, BUT GENETIC.

The first fund of credit was voted through by UNESCO in 2021, and a group of scientists immediately set to work under Hubczejak’s direction. In practice, from a scientific standpoint, he had very little to do with the project, but he was to prove himself stunningly effective in the domain of public relations. The extraordinary speed with which the results came in was a surprise; only later did it become apparent that many of the scientists, already members or sympathizers of the Movement for Human Potential, rather than waiting for the green light from UNESCO, had been working on the project for some time in laboratories in Australia, Brazil, Canada and Japan.

The creation of the first being, the first member of the new intelligent species made by man “in his own image,” took place on 27 March 2029, twenty years to the day after Michel Djerzinski’s disappearance. In homage to Djerzinski, and though no French nationals were on the team, this synthesis took place at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Palaiseau. The worldwide broadcast of the event reached a huge audience—dwarfing that, almost sixty years earlier in July 1969, of man’s first steps on the moon. Hubczejak prefaced the broadcast with a short speech in which, with typical directness, he declared that humanity should be honored to be “the first species in the universe to develop the conditions for its own replacement.”

Today, some fifty years later, reality has largely confirmed the prophetic tone of Hubczejak’s speech—more so than perhaps even he envisaged. There remain some humans of the old species, particularly in areas long dominated by religious doctrine. Their reproductive levels fall year by year, however, and at present their extinction seems inevitable. Contrary to the doomsayers, this extinction is taking place peaceably, despite occasional acts of violence, which also continue to decline. It has been surprising to note the meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief with which humans have consented to their own passing.