What Will It Mean To Be Human A Few Decades From Now? - Hur’s Novel Paints A Fascinating Picture

In the great literary jewel from ancient Mesopotamia, The Epic of Gilgamesh, also reckoned as humanity’s oldest written work, the hero Gilgamesh sets out on an audacious journey to seek immortality. Despite his passion, doggedness and demi-God stature, it turns out to be a wild goose chase. In stark contrast, celebrated translator Anton Hur’s debut novel Toward Eternity unfolds somewhere in near future where human intellect in tandem with astounding technology has entered the age of immortality. 

While Gilgamesh wished for a powerful eternal presence towering over mortal mankind and its collective memory, Hur’s world sees a host of proliferating immortals navigate a new reality with ‘redundants’. It is another brave new world where consciousness, imagination, and memory require deeper questioning and frequent renegotiations: 

“I am remembering a thing, not of the past, but a thing that is yet to come. What is memory anyway? Memory is as much a product of the present as it is the past. Created with the perspectives of the present, the colors and limitations and lacunae of the present. Just as history is written by the victors, as the cliché goes, so too do the victors own the future. Who is to say we do not create memories out of the future as well? That the echo of an event doesn’t go both ways?”

The novel reels out with a mysterious episode in the South African Institute of Science and Technology in Cape Town. Researcher Mali Beeko notes the sudden inexplicable disappearance of ‘Patient One’. She finds it so eerie and confounding that she decides against registering the incident in the patient’s digital database; rather, she pens it all in a physical notebook. The novel thus progresses as a series of hand-written journal entries by various characters. These stories leap from the earth to Space Station with time frame blurring from near future to eternity. The variation of space and time is intertwined with changes in human aspects- physical, intellectual, and spiritual. In its structure, the novel feels like a memoir of sorts from the future that has travelled back in time to the present day.  

The advances in nanotechnology have cured cancer and maladies enabling humans to switch to an entirely new body formed out of nanites. Youngun Han, or the ‘Patient One’, before his disappearance experiences an episode of ‘rapture’-the recurrence of an old scar on his nanite body. It seemed as though his old body was fighting back, perhaps because his old memories overwhelmed his consciousness. However, when he reappears a few days later, his resurrection (re-instantiation) makes him feel like a changed person altogether. He retains his memories and experiences but doesn’t feel like they are his own. This is an astute allegory to Theseus’s paradox- what remains of the original identity midst a constant flux of renewal? Is it Han from the past or the future? The boundaries stand smudged as he broods, “I am the recursion, the vessel necessary for the love to return, a love so great it has overcome the death of its previous vessels to live in this world again, searching for what it had lost.”

Working at the Singularity Lab, Han was training an AI project named Panit on poetry. Hur deftly uses Panit’s character to breathe in the romance of poetry into the novel. There are frequent references to works of talented poets like Rossetti and Milton that blend seamlessly with the plot, adding literary beauty and cryptic profundity to an otherwise grey dystopian world. Mali Beeko instantiated a Han-Panit hybrid after the disappearance of ‘Patient One’. This fusion of Panit’s programming and Han’s nanodroid goes wandering about for several years across the globe, and eventually gets gripped with the desire to father a child. The evolution of AI program to a potential parent makes for an intriguing plot, with the reader evaluating the odds of its future probability. 

As the story spans the transitions of entities- human, machine-human, nanodroids and their ilk, the central question gapes wide at us- what does it mean to be human? Hur uncannily captures the confusion and dilemma, often hurling the reader to the edge of existential crisis. Our memories and emotionsas parts of our human-ness, are translated through language for expression. But, is language enough? – “Language is inadequate, but it’s all we have.”, one of the characters in the novel reflects. 

Even within the compartments of language, is poetry more human than prose? Or would music serve as a superior marker of being human? The novel teems with unsettling questions which warrant intense philosophical enquiry. 

In our cosmic journey so far, we’ve learnt that death is the ultimate truth. What then would it mean to be human in a world of immortality? And what would be the fate of those who choose to stay mortal in this mayhem? Between the struggle of humans to survive and the desperation of immortal nanite forms to be human, the story races through time and we see an earth ravaged bypost-nuclear clone war, nefarious corporations, and identity clashes between immortals and redundants. As the plot shifts into a bioengineered world where bodies are produced in vats, there is dramatic shift in the Hur’s writing- the narratives grow cruder, memories of characters become patchier, and language loses its romantic rhythm. 

But, “the universe still echoes from the Big Bang that created it.”And even when emotions are lost, the memory of emotions can travel like an echo or stories from the future can creep into the wormholes of our consciousness -for we are all part of this grand cosmic narrative, existing to perpetuate and proliferate our stories from one singularity to another, in an “interstellar ark”, toward eternity.

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