The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-Humans

“Esteemed guests, welcome! We will shortly begin our ascent. Please sit comfortably and enjoy this once-in-a-timeline opportunity to bear witness to Earth’s largest mountain. If perchance some mountain goats appear on our radar, we will call your attention to this exquisite, yet sadly dwindling breed. Monoculars are at the front. Enjoy the view!”

Craig sat in the middle of the coach. They had been waiting for at least 2 minutes, but he forgave the tardiness. He was too excited to be angry. He had always wanted to see Everest. Not to climb it—he was far too sensible for that—but to see it. To feel small in the right way.

The woman next to him was reading something on a device he didn’t recognize. It was thin, almost translucent, and the text on it seemed to rearrange itself as she moved her eyes. She noticed him looking.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve just never seen one of those before.”

She smiled. “It’s a Lattice. Came out last month. You’re a natural, aren’t you?”

He didn’t bristle at the word. He’d made his peace with it. “Yes. Unenhanced, unaugmented, and—as my daughter likes to remind me—increasingly irrelevant.”

The woman—Jannesique, she said her name was—laughed. “You’re not irrelevant. You’re just… running on original hardware.”

“Original hardware.” He liked that. “And you?”

“Third-generation cognitive package. Memory, processing, some sensory augmentation. Nothing too exotic.” She said it the way someone might mention they’d had their teeth straightened.

They talked for a while—about the mountain, about the weather, about the goats. And then Jannesique said something that Craig didn’t understand. Not in the way that jargon is confusing, or that an unfamiliar language is opaque. He didn’t understand it the way a dog doesn’t understand calculus. The words were English. The grammar was correct. But the meaning—the actual thought she was expressing—was simply beyond the reach of his unaugmented mind.

He stared at her. She stared back. And in that moment, something passed between them that neither could fully articulate: the knowledge that they were two members of the same species who could no longer fully comprehend each other.

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As the capacity to augment, improve and increase the intellect of human beings soars forward, there will inevitably be a set of people who choose to forgo these enhancements, left in the dust of their enhanced counterparts. But what will it be like for the enhanced and the unenhanced to coexist day to day, in passing, on public transport, at cafes, in a line for the cinema?

This short story attempts to illustrate as-of-yet unexplored collateral consequences of enhancement. What if, in passing, an enhanced being with intellectual capacity far exceeding the 21st century norm strikes up a conversation with an unenhanced human and blows their mind, enlightening them to a truth, a question, a puzzle of the universe that would be too heavy to handle for an unenhanced mind?

A myriad of questions—moral, practical, legal and even existential—spring forth.