Pigs and Viruses (or Account of an Emigrant III)

This is translated by myself from the Vietnamese original, "Lợn và Virút (hay Tự sự của một di dân III)", part of my novel, "Life Navigator 25: Người tình của cả thế gian" / "Life Navigator 25: He Who is in Love with the Whole World" (published 2016)

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I’d call him a guy with a pervert, morose imagination, if you ask me. A moron. An idiot. Yes, that’s the word. He has no idea of the most obvious fact that, in comparison to the will to survive of those “underprivileged” people with whom he’s willing to incorporate himself, the one of ours is by countless times stronger. Not to mention our power to survive. And yet he sounds like we possess next to no will to survive whatsoever. Doesn’t he have the ability to think about the fact that, with so many things to lose, we can be thousands of times more cruel and violent than those with nothing to lose in times of necessity? Give me a break, man.I was born into one of the families from the highest social order not only of my country but of the whole mankind as well. This entitled me the right to know, from the very moment I began to be aware of the world, one essential thing. Here it is. That power, the supreme power, the biggest possible power on earth, belongs to me. In the same way that air and sunlight naturally belong to me. And I know I deserve it. Not a second in my life, including those spent in dreams, passes by without me bearing in mind the fact that I exist in order to fulfill things no other human has been and will ever be able to, go to places no other human has been and will ever be able to, and possess things no other human has been and will ever be able to. This is my lot. My destiny. This I inherited and learned from my parents. My father – surely my contemporaries know him, whereas those living before my lifetime would never be able to hear of him, which is natural, and this, for them, is a shame. Perhaps it suffices to say just the following. My father belongs to the fewest, the rarest ones who, with the sheer power of their will and talent, change the world as they want. My father was among the founders of Global Mind Network, GMN. He did not invent it, yet he made it possible and commercially productive. Those of you living before my lifetime will have no idea what GMN is like. At best they would roughly imagine it as something similar to the age-old (to us) worldwide IT network, the only difference being that, instead of computers and their associated parts, i.e. hubs, switches, and so on, here you have human brains, either in the physical sense or technologically upgraded brains, along with their associated paraphernalia. In fact, anybody with an average sensitiveness and delicateness would be aware of the utter crudeness of this comparison. It’s no better than comparing a virtual human residing within GMN with a ghost in the traditional sense. And yet the following would not escape their comprehension: the advent of GMN in the middle of our century transformed our world the same way the birth of computers, of Windows and similar operating systems and global internet changed their world. It proved how inexhaustible the self-renewing potentials of humankind are. It proved how limitless the capabilities of human intelligence can be. The sci-fi of the past is the reality of the present.

The ultimate goal of the existence of humankind in the universe is to attain the stage where humans can become God themselves, create things that God had never created himself, and make decisions that God had never made himself. Decision for the survival of Earth, for example. The fate of Earth. Humans can truly be themselves only when they are capable of deciding the fate of their planet. Like God himself had done when he decided to create the Flood. When he decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Humans can only be themselves if and when they’re capable of transcending the psychological barrier that forces them to feel bound to certain incontestable obligations. Take, for instance, that of preserving the cradle where they were born. If the cradle had become to small to accommodate them no matter how hard they have been trying to shrinking themselves, and once they have attained sufficient awareness of the situation, then they will become themselves only if and when they’re able to find enough wisdom and courage within themselves to realize and accept that the only righteous obligation for them in this situation is to break free from within this cradle once and for all and move to a more appropriate place for their existence. Whether this place is natural or created by them makes no difference. What counts is that humans have another place for their survival. And this - this is the good.

And when I say humankind will survive, I mean a certain part of humankind, not the whole of it. It so happens with all species in all times: after a colossal catastrophe, only part of a species survives. The most adaptive, of course. The strongest, the best. And is the mere fact that this is only part of the once existed species the sufficient reason to say this species as a whole has ceased to exist? A single couple of humans who survive are enough for humankind to survive. Is that not true? Aren’t we the humankind itself?

We’re still alive, is this not sufficient to say humankind still exists?

Is it mandatory that all those several billions of humans be still alive together with us for us to have the right to consider ourselves humankind?

Once, when I was quite a small child, Father make me take part, for the first time, in a meeting between Him and some of His men where plans to care for the poor all over the world were to be discussed. It’s still vivid in my mind, as if it happened yesterday, how I realized from the very first moment the reason for this gathering, what it was that those people were debating. From where it had sprang up, this problem. Its true nature. Its significance. Why it was that we had to deal with it. Why it was that to avoid dealing with it was unthinkable. Which means to deal with it were better than other ones. I didn’t need any explanation from Father. All what He had to do was to sit me there, let me be there and listen, and I did so and I understood everything, exactly as He had foreseen. And I was four years old then. Which might be inconceivable to some, and which was the truth. I’m not a genius. I’m not one of those born with outstanding intellectual brilliance. I’m an ordinary individual possessing the characteristics typical of my bloodline. This belongs to me in the same way as does my body size, my muscular system, my immune system, my blood type, the colour of my hair, my eyes, my skin. What I ought to do is to accept it and, in my turn, do everything I can so as to let it develop to the utmost its potentials. At seven years old, I began to actually, officially participate in these meetings. I would debate about whether, all things taken into account, you really have to protect and preserve the earth and the humankind as it is at any cost.

The memory’s still vibrant in my mind of how the meeting in question was being unfolded. Father was lying on the bed entirely of water floating at 1,5 meter above the ground, of a dazzling golden colour, a transparent cube of liquid gold at the temperature of 24 Celsius degree. Separating the bed surface and his body was a bedsheet from purple silk, a kind of watertight silk as smooth as a maiden’s skin. His pajama, too, was of pure silk, dark orange, with emerald velvet linings, wrapping him from neck to heels, covering almost his entire body, like the cocoon covering the chrysalis, and yet, despite of this, or exactly because of this, I saw him as nearly naked, a horribly cadaverous body, with all the deeply engraved signs of death so to speak, which reminded me, against my will, of Steve Jobs in one of his final days. Father, however, was not suffering from a fatal disease like the famous man. On the contrary: with that emaciated body, which seemed to carry more death than life, he had the ability to consume a huge turkey for a meal. He had more than enough strength to do so. Yet he didn’t. What left the far deeper imprint in my memory, however, was the look in his eyes as I presented my arguments. No. Present is not the right word. Better to say, as I blurted out whatever I had in mind. I was seven years old then, after all. I said: If I embark Noah’s Ark (about which everybody was talking, using it as a symbol), I’ll bring along with me Hachiko and only Hachiko, the rest I kill all. Hachiko and I make a perfect pair. (Hachiko was one of the ten dogs my parents allowed me to have, me who from a very early age had begun to show an immense love for animals, especially dogs.) Having heard the first two or three words I said, Father turned his head towards me with such a gaze that made all the others fall silent and listen to and look at me as if this seven-year-old boy was delivering his speech in a thunderous voice on the same level with that of Hitler. And, at that very instant, during those seconds, I was living through the so-called revelation or epiphany that I would fall within those whose destiny is to lead the humankind, or, to put it more correctly, lead the ultimatehumankind, the one who has broken themselves, once and forever, from the cradle where they had been born, Mother Earth.

Why not to simply let toxic gases, radiations, volcano eruptions, tsunamis, pandemics, or famines kill them off instead of doing away with them with our own hands? someone asked after a short silence. I did not give an answer. I did not look at him. And I remembered how afterwards they said, What will be, let it be. Let the Fourth World War take place, and then Nature will do what is left to do. Present at the meeting, together with Father, were those wielding the utmost power on the planet at the moment. And, like I had said earlier, I came to know right there and then the obvious fact that I would grow up to become one of those to take part in making decisions that deal with the fate of the humankind. Not because I’m son of my father - even if this one fact does play a role - but because I am myself. Together with the gradual growing of my body throughout the childhood and the adolescence, also grew and solidified the transparent, crystal-like awareness of the fact that somebody like me cannot help become one who decides the fate of the mankind.

Here’s one example. One of my close friends (who name can be recognized immediately by my contemporaries without me even vaguely hinting about it) is the owner of one of the three biggest commercial spaceship manufacturers of the world. In anticipation of the Apocalypse, many a government has (in a secret or not-that-secret manner) ordered him to make whole arsenals of big and superbig spaceships which will be used solely for the purpose of urgent mass-people evacuation when the time comes. And our guy, full of alertness and self-confidence, decided to produce a lot more than the ordered quantity. To prevent the Fourth World War at the last minute means the huge quantity of his colossal spaceships, already as finished products or still work-in-process, will not of no use (at least in the predictable future) and in that case to whom can he sell them? How can he dispose of them? In response to his look, a look so nervous, so disoriented, so terrified (a word which seemed utterly inappropriate to someone like him), I said, in a perfectly calm, soft voice, that the magnitude of the needs for those spaceships depends on us and nobody else. Judging by the sudden spark in the bottom of his eyes that came right after I’d finished my words, I knew what I had just said was exactly what he had been intending to say, things he’d better die rather than let the world (not me) realize as having always been there in his mind before I started to speak them out, and I knew also that the nervous, disoriented, terrified look I’d seen just moments before about him could be interpreted as either residing deep within him like any of his internal organs or forming a flimsy fabric that covered him like one of his numerous different skins. What counts was that, the idea I’d just spoken aloud, it is the ultimate truth about the world, the world within our hands. I gently smiled, looking at him. Those big, superbig spaceships, capable of accommodating thousands, tens of thousands of people and travelling for many months and years without the need of replenishment, they were not his only concern. This man, he owned a huge amount of shares in a huge corporation specialized in building semi-military and civil facilities in space colonies_Moon, Mars, Cosmic Islands. Residential areas had been constructed there, completed with all the associating utilities, ready to welcome huge masses of emigrants from Earth, and this was another concern, not a bit lesser, that was weighing him down. And a simple sentence from me rendered whatever was weighing him down as weightless as thin air. No, I’m just kidding. It’s still there, and yet it’s both weighty and light like a sheet of duralumin. And the truth is, more or less weighty as it may be, it’s in no way as weighty as you can imagine just by looking at him. Part of his, no doubt the greater part, knew all too well I was going to say exactly what I said. For, after all, it was not without reason and not for nothing that we were friends.

It was but one of the factors that played an essential role in the process of my thinking and decision making. Other factors, too, played a similarly, if not more, essential role. Love for Mother Earth, for example. My hope is that not everyone who reads these lines would naturally assume such a love does not exist within me. Those who read these lines must know better. This hope of mine, I believe, does have a basis to rely on. It’s inevitable. I am a human. It’s true that I differ from most other humans. It’s true that I possess too many things they don’t. And yet I am a human. Like they are. No less so than they are. And, perhaps, more so than they are. How many of them have seen more different parts of the Earth than I have and carry more of them inside their heads and hearts than I do? Are they numerous? If you say yes, I’m ready to forgive you no matter whether you are deliberately kidding. I often dream of Sahara desert. Like a Tuareg. Of frozen oceans. Like an Inuit. Of pristine Amazon forests. Like a Yanomami. Of steppes. Like a Mongolian. Of tropical jungles. Like a Papua New Guinean. Or like myself, a citizen of the world. A child of the Earth. I love this Earth, it’s that simple. I love the Earth in no way less than they do, if not more. And yet I did take part in making the ultimate decision for the humankind to leave it. This is not to mention the fact that nobody and nothing could ever ensure the decision we had made was really our own one, a decision made by our own will. What we do is simply this: A cow is there standing on the brink of an abyss, about to fall into it and well aware of her situation and yet unable to do anything except stepping forward. And we give her a whip, an breathtakingly painful whip that renders her paralyzed on the spot, unable to proceed forward even for one single millimeter, and then seize her by the neck and mercilessly jerk her to another direction. That’s all to it. You can take a mad pig or a whole herd of mad pigs as an example instead of a mad cow, of course, this does not make any difference to the nature of the matter in question, and yet if I’m to relate this in a more straightforward and precise manner then yes, I did let that herd of mad pigs to plunge down the abyss, the only difference from what you’d usually read in Bible is that, I did keep aside some of those pigs, saving them from plunging down the abyss, those who are the only ones possessing sufficient mental strength or spiritual integrity so as not to be infected with madness like the others. They are the few pigs I’d selected beforehand, the chosen ones.

That’s a long process, and a difficult one. If we’re to go on with the herd-of-pigs metaphor then the chosen pigs, the marked ones to that matter, are separated from the herd not in a single time but into numerous batches, one or several ones per batch, which takes place throughout a really long time. While the whole herd, amidst the madness, continue to rush toward the abyss and hurl themselves into it (the magnitude of the herd being such that it may take several hundreds of years until it comes to the turn of the last one of them, provided that no one of the herd is permitted to give birth to any offspring during all these centuries). That is what needs to be done. To save each of the chosen pigs, one after another, and take them to a safer zone, to the Promised Land, the New Land already transformed in such a way as to meet their specific needs, prepared and waiting for them. To do so in a really long time, before it becomes too late, before everything becomes an uncontrolled and uncontrollable chaotic mess. To keep going along with this in such a way that, the moment the final event comes, the number of remaining marked pigs yet to be saved and evacuated will not be large or not that large and this ultimate evacuation will be a strategy which, albeit colossal in its magnitude, falls completely within our control, constantly on the edge of the abyss of chaos and disorder and, at the same time, perpetually ready to be held back at the right moment thanks to our strong hands and our sober heads. Yes, that’s all what make up our innate excellence, our unrivaled quality as the individuals whose responsibility it is to decide upon the fate of the whole species: strong hands and a sober, clear head. And a sufficiently warm heart, of course.

 

José Saramago, our old-aged sage, if you remember his name, has these unrivalled words to say about humankind: “Sometimes I tell myself: I hope we’ll never be able to leave this planet for if we expand to the universe then we’ll act there in the same way we’ve acted here. If we are to really migrate to the universe, which I do not think is possible, we may very well infect the universe. Perhaps we are some kind of virus that, fortunately, concentrates only on this planet.” Now, on the basis of all what has happened and is happening, and with the whole respect to one of the indisputably most brilliant and venerable individuals of our humankind, it must be noted that he was wrong about at least two things. First: humankind had in fact been capable of migrating to the universe, and this is a fact to be well taken into account, although it’s also worth making a sideline comment that this involves just a tiny part of humankind. Second, which is a more important point: it’s not that humans are likely to be a kind of virus, they are, and not merely any virus but the most lethal one, which have appeared and multiplied on the planet of Earth to the point of destroy their initial home, and this is a kind of virus capable of evolving into a species higher than itself, better than the species of virus it had been before, and, once again, only a tiny part of this species of virus is capable of doing so. And my task, the task of people similar to us, is to do everything possible to ensure that only those belonging to this infinitesimal minority get aboard. And, apart from being capable of transcending its virus fate, this minority, much like all other viruses, also possesses the capability of transmuting into another, more lethal, more destructive, more dangerous species of virus. This possibility does exist. Many things do exist. Only if and when this tiny population is put into an appropriate situation and environment and given a long enough period of time can you begin to learn what species can be born out of this germ. So long as this does not happen, statements the like of Mr. Saramago are nothing more than a Nostradamus-like prophesies, a sort of dough you can knead any way you like, that is, something akin to good-for-nothing. It’s nothing more than the growls and grumbles in utter powerlessness of a world-weary, cynical, idealist old man wobbling through a world he thinks he understands and yet in fact he does not, and, for that reason, nothing more than trashy words, having no value whatsoever.

Tranh của Zdzisław Beksiński