Our journey continues.
We move on now from bionecrotech to biotech: from biofuels and G-ARMs to intelligent organic biotechnology, from job share teams and conference shopping to life in the green dragon: a transition which took place over perhaps only two or three generations from Fred Drakely’s lifetime.
As we did earlier with necrotech and bionecrotech, we can consider why the change took place from bionecrotech to biotech. Bionecrotech was actually one long change, well intentioned, optimistic, but diabolical in its innocent destructiveness. Again, it is possible to attribute biotech to a crisis, in particular the extreme weather conditions, possibly brought about by the final elimination of natural ecosystems. The storms destroyed rigid man-made structures, rooted out trees, and made travel increasingly difficult and hazardous. The advent of the intos biotechnology, which exploited artificial organic metabolism, grew into the ultimate global city, may have saved humanity from that crisis, or it may just have been the next stage in technological innovation.
Bony Bailey, the pattern mathematician, would probably have pointed out that many human patterns were perpetuated into biotech. The green dragon was a city: like all cities it walled its citizens in, protecting them from needing to know the means of their subsistence, and spinning elaborate fantasies to sustain their beliefs in their importance and worth. Biotech continued a pattern which originated in bionecrotech of strict social equality: there was no longer any need for human labour, so everyone was a citizen, and no one was a slave.
Biotech caused no further harm to the planet. Its metabolism was mainly plant-like: it used energy direct from the sun and it put down roots to get water and minerals; it assembled the chemicals of life to provide food for the inmates and to construct and repair their cells. But it was unlike a plant in having human-like intelligence and memory through which it provided the illusions which saved the inmates from a vegetative state which they would have found intolerable, and probably died from boredom.
Life in the green dragon’s city was idyllic. Each individual received a perfectly balanced diet, was kept hygienically clean and physically fit, was mentally stimulated or diverted, and provided with the self-image he or she desired, together with self-determined success and admirers. The dragon was the perfect provider, and expected nothing from her charges but the knowledge that she was needed: indeed, it was only their desire to escape the paradise she assembled that made her begin to die – but that comes much later.
Biotech was the age of abundance and indulgence for everyone. It was a dream come true, but could anyone in necrotech have predicted the form that dream would take? I doubt it. Throughout necrotech, from the stone age to the nuclear age, there have been visionaries, great minds and inventors of all kinds of cleverness, who must have hoped that their grand schemes, brilliant theories or technological breakthroughs would transform the dreary struggle to a world of plenty. Some may have dreamed that the end of scarcity would render unnecessary any injustice, exploitation, and perhaps all forms of cruelty and suffering. Probably cynics commented that such a world would be very dull: what satisfaction could there be in indulgence unless others coveted it?
Biotech satisfied both dreamers and cynics. There was no injustice or exploitation. No one suffered unless they liked to. But everyone who wanted to be exploitative could indulge that, everyone who needed to be envied was, everyone who had to win and be cheered and admired got his fill of adulation. Those who wished to be heroes or commanders of armies or rulers of states, they could do those things, as could would-be tyrants and torturers, murderers and rapists, sexual perverts, cannibals and satanists. On the other hand, there were those who were content to spend their lives exploring the knowledge and artistry humanity had achieved, and to add their own contributions. Biotech rivalled classical antiquity and every subsequent surge of intellectual excellence in its cultivation of the mind. Works of genius poured into the intos dragon’s already overflowing libraries and institutions.
Although there was continuing creativity and new thought, the world of biotech was largely retrospective. It was necrotech re-lived in all its phases, with all its pride and shame, over and over again, for generation after generation. In early biotech the period most commonly relived was late necrotech before the collapse occurred, simply because the intos memory, inherited from the bionecrotech ‘system’, was full of its images. Later on the focus changed, and it proved vital that it did so.
Those who lived during that age paid no attention to the passage of time in the ‘real’ world, or to anything else in the ‘real’ world. Indeed, it was a social convention crucial to sustaining the illusions which made life worth living that one did not admit that the ‘real’ world existed at all. Those from my time who shifted to biotech frequently had some difficulty deciding on their return whether they had been someone in biotech or had travelled right back to necrotech itself.
There was one human activity which was new to biotech, although, like everything else, it drew on the past. Among those who delighted to entertain others through theatricals of one form or another were the providers of ‘storyframes’. They worked with the intos dragon to provide interactive stories for people to participate in. Their work required them to break the social convention and face up to the physical circumstances of life in biotech. I experienced a shift to a trainee storyframer, a woman named Amelia. The episode begins as she is demonstrating the storyframe she has created to a group of experienced framing professionals. In her storyframe, Amelia plays a queen named Agnetha. I hope this episode in Amelia’s life will provide you with an effective insight into the biotech world.