Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

sees childbirth as a profoundly human act, and she would like to try to be human. She’s unsure why she was not allowed to be human, but she now sees a chance to make her move.
    Growing up, she tried to make herself human. She researched what makes humans different from all other creatures, and all she learned was that only humans create art and music — elephants paint with brushes, but that somehow doesn’t count. And only humans tell jokes, only humans cook, only humans have an incest taboo, and only humans have ritual burials. Rachel dislikes and doesn’t understand music, because all it is is sounds; she doesn’t understand art, because all it is is scribbles and dribbles that don’t mesh with photographic reality; and she doesn’t understand humour or the notion of funniness — she only observes confusing braying-type sounds made by people after they hear something called “funny” (and usually after they’ve been drinking alcohol). However, from breeding white laboratory mice in the garage, she knows that an incest taboo is genetically useful, so she’s all for a taboo. And burial rituals strike her as smart, because they allow people to turn back into soil and be useful.
    Identifying the unique threads of the human condition is not something Rachel approaches lightly, and she is not deceived into thinking that high technology is an activity that makes humans different: complex human activities such as enriching uranium, for example, are, by extension, elaborate means of generating heat and of fighting — and there’s nothing special to humans about that. Smashing atoms into quarks and leptons is high-tech, but if you think about it, it’s merely a way of creating incredibly tiny, expensive building bricks, and bricks make houses and birds make nests, so what’s special about that? Rachel once thought that attempts to contact alien species might constitute unique human behaviour, but it’s really no different than a wolf cub standing in the shrubs around a human fire, hoping to be asked to come closer and join a tribe of a different species. But music, art, and humour? Rachel has to take it on faith that these human qualities exist.
    Rachel has never fit into the world. She remembers as a child being handed large wooden numbers covered in sandpaper to help her learn numbers and mathematics. Other children weren’t given tactile sandpaper number blocks, but she was, and she knows that she has always been a barely tolerated sore point among her neurotypical classmates. Rachel also remembers many times starving herself for days because the food that arrived at the table was the wrong temperature or colour, or was placed on the plate incorrectly: it just wasn’t right . And she remembers discovering single-player video games and for the first time in her life seeing a two-dimensional, non-judgemental, crisply defined realm in which she could be free from off-temperature food and sick colour schemes and bullies. Entering her screen’s portal into that other realm is where her avatar, Player One, can fully come to life. Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom; the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.
    Rachel also knows she is something called “beautiful,” but she has no idea what that is. Until she was seven, she was unable to look into a mirror without screaming. If you showed her a collection of photos of different people with one of herself in the group, she’d be hard pressed to find herself in the lot. But she knows that because she has this thing called “beauty,” people treat her differently than they would if she did not possess it. According to her father, having beauty makes her