The Life Engineered Read Online Free PDF Page A

confusing. Her analogy meant nothing to me. “What’s your favorite color? Do you like math? Would you rather read a story or run outside?”
    “Blue. No. Run.” The answers came quick, easy. They were unfiltered and untainted by what I perceived the expectations of others to be.
    “This is who you are. You are not a collection of stories but rather the results of these experiences. The value of your personality far outweighs that of the lives that served as a crucible to forge it.”
    “But I’ve lived a life! Am I dead? Is this life after death?” I do remember a life, but I can’t remember any specifics, aside from the name Jonathan.
    “It depends on your definition of life,” the voice explained. “If you mean an existence sustained by the synergy of complex biological processes, then I’m afraid you’ve never had that. In that strict sense you’ve never been alive.”
    I pondered the news and had to disagree. I’d definitely been alive before. I breathed and ate and drank. I remembered pain and love and pleasure.
    “If, however, by ‘life’ you are referring to the cumulative experiences gathered by an individual on the journey from the womb to the grave, then I’m glad to say that you’ve had many of those. Dozens.”
    “That can’t be right. How can I have the experience of being alive if I’ve never lived?”
    “The experiences happened to you in an artificial environment. A virtual construct called a Nursery. In this world you can live hundreds of lives without ever drawing breath once, though you’ll certainly have thought you did. Within the Nursery you are born, you live, and you die—only to be born again. With each cycle your personality is further refined. Through many lives, who you are becomes tempered to perfection.”
    “I’m perfect?” I certainly didn’t feel perfect. For one, if I were perfect, you’d think I’d have known all this information already.
    “Oh no,” Yggdrassil said, giggling. “No one is, but you are a perfect version of you. A personality devoid of doubts and inner conflict. You know yourself completely, and the inner workings of your own mind hold no more secrets from you.”
    I like blue. It’s not the color of my favorite sports team, and I can’t associate it with any specific memory I might be fond of. I can explain why I like it, though: it’s soothing yet vibrant, cool and calm, but the building blocks of how I came to that opinion are lost to me.
    “So what am I? Just a collection of opinions and tastes?”
    “No, you are so much more than that.” Her tone was comforting, almost motherly. “You’re an individual. Biological tradition has the body come first, with the personality developing second, hobbled and damaged by the limitations of the physical self. That’s just not efficient. We do things differently.”
    “Is this why I can’t feel my body? Because I don’t have one?”
    “Exactly, but you will. You and I are going to design it together.”
    Design a body? Were we going to be choosing eye and hair color? Height and build? Was this going to be like creating an avatar for a game?
    “Fine. Where do we start?”
    “First you need to know the parameters that you’ll be dealing with. I find that most people, when they first step out of the Nursery, have a very limited idea of everything that’s available to them—how far the actual limits of what they can create actually stretch. I guess that’s inevitable. Human history and biology, along with their limitations, are the framework of the Nursery.”
    “Wait. I’m not human?” It hadn’t crossed my mind that I might not be a human being. I remembered being human. Jonathan is a decidedly human name. Yggdrassil is a mythological concept from a human culture. If my personality was forged from human experience, then wasn’t I human by definition?
    “Well, that line is blurred. You’re a third-generation Capek.” Capek, from Karel Capek, the nineteenth-century Czech