Leonardo Mind for Modern Times: Part 2, Future Present

Chapter 1:  Guess Who

“Day Zero at Cell Zero, waiting in darkness suddenly ends as the spermatozoon scores.  Like airliner hitting skyscraper i-sperm meets i-egg. With a chemical shiver my cell wall becomes impervious to latecomers.  His propulsion unit drops off and he is engulfed in us-me.

“In the beginning there was desoxyribonucleic acid.  And DNA said, let there be Form and Function.  And Meaning was expressed.

“Who is this who cometh?  Quis est iste,,, qui venit, eh?  It's me, I-dentity, all purposeful action, while chromosomes fuse and split, DNA tangles and replicates in a new genetic.  The Voice commands again and again:  electrons here; protons there; let proteomic transcription units commence, oh, oh, oh, and let there be oxidative phosphorylation.  And there certainly was.

“I blastulate, by the way, therefore I am.

“I set up my schedules and clocks.  Proximity and distance are known to me precisely. Sensors, receptors and messengers form in all the right places, all on schedule.  Driven & driving, mitochondria start up their retronanotech engines, as I begin organising materials into myself to create me.  I lay down the first primitive substrates for my senses, rhythm melody harmony vision sense-of-smell taste colours synthesis humour meaning intangible IQ infinite shades of unmeasurable strophic creativity.  Out of and because of these purposive teleological networks, predelictions are made ready for what I may become, create, be predisposed towards.  For infinite definite and endless unformed and unscheduled opportunities, genes express and patterns emerge, neurones in my developing central nervous system distribute themselves fate-map by fate-map, differentiate, link.

“The precision of the disposition of materials and products, and the split-second timing of commencements and intersections,  the obedience of molecules in holding sway and in giving way along their concentration gradients, all these are utterly wonderful yet unremarked upon.

“Inner meaningfulness is generated distinct from named constituents and processes.  Am I poetry or science?  Who presumes to set values?

“Things are happening in parallel, people are existing in parallel with me in other places, unaware of the influences gathering in me that would lead in time to come to their living or dying.  None of this works without time.

“For now, all is dark except for ratchetting photonic emissions flashing, scintillating and sparkling in showers and tracks, all is silent save for the mumbling genes, parsing out their proteomic phonemes of chemical-serious games with quiet little clicks and rumbles which nobody hears.  Much is kept in reserve;  waiting for some environmental push for a different set of proclivities to be pulled out of the genetic back-pack tool-kits, rapid-response survival development that can become active in a generation.  Little do they know who call it gene-junk.

“Now I am two cells; now four; now eight.  I drift; I implant; I need nutrition, oxygen, glucose, gas-exchange.

“I decode DNA.  I create chemical gradients along which precursors of cell groups and organs organise themselves and form.   I am calculator and the sum of all mathematics, equation & argument are my being.  I am the Number One Made Flesh.  My chorion means business, baby!

“Busy making clumps of cells, sheets that rotate to form tubes and layers in my new protobody,  I model and remodel myself with no need of consciousness.  I am master of myself and my constantly re-invented self.  See how my fishy heart and retro-styled gill-like branchial arches give way to a sleek modern mammalian model, very fashionable!  Even if my element will be aqueous for many months, this is fun, fun, fun.

“For a while I had no definite sense of self, but now there was beginning to be sound.  The world was rhythmically whooshing and thudding, and there was  gurgling, clicking and chuckling.  Without memory, I was hardly myself, but everything experienced moved softly in a magical fluid world of sound.

“Weeks later, I still had no particular self-knowledge other than what was passing moment to moment, but somehow awareness of light began, I think it may have been on day 197 or thereabouts.  Sheets of light, so much grosser than the fine track and tracery of single photons, but now more entrancingly intense and beautiful;  so soon, yet I was beginning to develop my very own aesthetic!  Dark gold and orange, pulsing, often shadowed, often glimpsed, always unfocussed, always entrancing.

“I am tireless, ceaseless, driven, directed, connected, strategic.  I have the big picture within my pancosmic little person.  I need my placenta, my placenta needs me.

“I have no focus beyond urgent building and developing.  An ancient sense of purpose draws me on relentlessly through an infinite series of events, towards something infinitely complex, wonderfully finished, marvellously unfulfilled.

“There was no pain or unease.  No animals suffered during the making of this person.

“My pulsing dark golden world was indivisible from existence.  It had its own completeness within itself.  The question why had no coherence.  No separation into language, art or music.  Those were already being folded into the world, but for now all was absorbed in bridging the space between past and future worlds.  The imperative of survival, no doubt, but also the certainty that through my being the past would change the future.

“On the 266^th day, the time arrived when it was time to go, for I already had everything I needed in the next world.

“Even so, what a surprise it was!!

 “Soft downy lanugo covers my skin, lanolin-like vernix caseosa eases me into the external world where everything has turned inside-out.

“The urgent sense of choking changes rapidly to a clearing, crackly expanding chest sensation as my lungs fill for the first time with the fresh morning air of Aberdeenshire.  As the wag-at-the-wall comes into view upside-down, I make a mental note of the time:  big hand at 9, little hand at 3:  03:45am.

“At the same time a window inside my chest closes with a sibilant murmur and snap, and I feel the surge of blood flowing through a new route.  For one horrible moment I miss my umbilical cord, but pretty soon I realise that from now until death I will have to do my own gas exchange in this world.

“The changes are happening with frightening speed, for a yelling cry fills my ears, brand new, loud and very clear and utterly shocking.

“Who or what is this Memus44?”

A moment of quiet.

“You remember all that, Memus?” asked Strellitz, turning off the recorder.

“That wasn’t the half of it,” said Memus44.

Chapter 2:  Professor W. A. Strellitz's

Confidential report to the University Senatus (Condensed Excerpt 13a)

As will be known to a very few members of the Senatus, one of the major objectives of the Human Re-Design thread of the University’s Non-Darwinian Project is the elimination of the Reptilian Tranche genes.  These have provided the basis for the aggression and machismic violence which have distinguished and demeaned the human race for so long.

For technical reasons, it had proved necessary to replace certain stretches of DNA completely, and it turned out that a length of genetic material from the swallow (martinus domesticus) was ideal for the purpose. The Department of Social Semiotics has accrued several grants on the strength of all the jokes about crossing kangaroos with cardigans and bassoonists with gastroenterologists, which for a time threatened to overwhelm the e-mail system in the Institute of Medical Sciences, but – looking back – my staff and colleagues in Anthropomimetics, Neo-Genetics, Engineering & Realisation bore all that with commendable fortitude.

Many people, especially those who were unavoidably displaced, were less happy when the Human Re-Design Initiative was merged with the Leonardo Mind Scheme to form the Elvinci Project.  This was the result of financial stringencies – or as some people have alleged, outright mis-management – but the serious departures from protocol which later occurred were, it turns out, the consequences of deliberate mishandling of genetic material by one Findo Gask, a technician in my Department of Anthropomimetics.

The vision & strategy set out in the business plan dictated that the cloning process of the subject known as Memus44 would involve using DNA from the human remains discovered at Clos Lucé in Amboise, attributed to the first Leonardo da Vinci, spliced with a DNA section from a specimen of martinus domesticus which habitually nests within the atrium of the Institute of Medical Sciences, where it flies around annoying visiting dignitaries with its unduly cheerful song and incessant defaecatory habits.

A full internal enquiry was carried out in strictest secrecy, in compliance with the University’s policies on Health, Safety & Transparency, and we have established that the motivation for Findo Gask’s misguided actions was his intention to generate not one but two Leonardo Hybrid Clones, the first of which was to be grown from a merger of da Vinci’s DNA with that of a little-remembered popular singer of the 20^th Century known as King Elvis, and the other would be a version of Leonardo who would be able to fly like a bird, OMG & LOL, as Findo Gask’s final blog mysteriously put it.

In point of fact, the Memus44 version is certainly showing remarkable talent in acquiring vast amounts of useless information, although regrettably four of his singing teachers have unaccountably commited suicide over the last few years.

However, I regret to report that the martinus domesticus hybrid came to an untimely end after crash-landing in the car-park in a cross-wind.  No blame can be imputed to the Principal, who could scarcely have been aware of what was behind him as he reversed into his space.

As for my own defence, as Head of Department it would have been very much easier for me to have kept an eye on what was going on had I not had the Direct Instruction laid on me by the Principal concerning the long-term kyptocryo storage of the Holy Emperor St. Tony, who was assassinated during his recent visit to Scotland.

I can reveal to you, in strictest confidence, that some weeks prior to that event, we were informed that his death was to be staged, and because of certain facilities which we had developed in this region, our Department would be responsible for the immediate processing of the holy corpus and its subsequent long-term maintenance.  Meanwhile there would be plenty of time to work on the kryptothermal resuscitation technicalities.  In this way, the sponsors of this proposal would make a magnificent gift to the world two millennia from now, in the person of the sainted Tony.

We were faced with the prospect of a 2000-year project, with guaranteed major funding, independent of the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise.  Of course, we could hardly refuse.

My proposal, therefore, is to draw a line under the more unfortunate aspects of the project during recent times.  We will continue to study the Memus44 subject in the furtherance of our research (which is, by the way, still undermanned despite the grant support which we generate).  But now that Memus44 has been displaced from the kryptocryo process, as soon as he has outlived his usefulness he will be terminated.  Compliant with Health, Safety & Transparency regulations, naturally.

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010