The invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares [35]
If one day the images should fail, it would be wrong to suppose that I have destroyed them. On the contrary, my aim is to save them by writing this diary. Invasions by the sea and invasions by the hordes of increased populations threaten them. It pains me to think that my ignorance, kept intact by the library, which does not have a single book I can use for scientific study, may threaten them too.
I shall not elaborate on the dangers that stalk this island— both the land and the men—because the prophecies of Malthus have been forgotten; and, as for the sea, I must confess that each high tide has caused me to fear that the island may be totally submerged. A fisherman at a bar in Rabaul told me that the Ellice, or Lagoon, Islands are unstable, that some disappear and others emerge from the sea. (Am I in that archipelago? The Sicilian and Ombrellieri are my authorities for believing that I am.)
It is surprising that the invention has deceived the inventor. I too thought that the images were live beings; but my position differed from his: Morel conceived all this; he witnessed and directed the work to its completion, while I saw it in the completed form, already in operation.
The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. But I may be generalizing about the peculiarities of one man, moralizing about a characteristic that applies only to Morel.
I approve of the direction he gave, no doubt unconsciously, to his efforts to perpetuate man: but he has preserved nothing
but sensations; and, although his invention was incomplete, he at least foreshadowed the truth: man will one day create human life. His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.
Logical reasons induce us to reject Morel's hopes. The images are not alive. But since his invention has blazed the trail, as it were, another machine should be invented to find out whether the images think and feel (or at least if they have the thoughts and the feelings that the people themselves had when the picture was made,- of course, the relationship between their consciousness and these thoughts and feelings cannot be determined). The machine would be very similar to the one Morel invented and would be aimed at the thoughts and sensations of the transmitter,- at any distance away from Faustine we should be able to have her thoughts and sensations (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory).
And someday there will be a more complete machine. One's thoughts or feelings during life—or while the machine is recording—will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience (as we can form all the words in our language with the letters of the alphabet). Then life will be a repository for death. But even then the image will not be alive,- objects that are essentially new will not exist for it. It will know only what it has already thought or felt, or the possible transpositions of those thoughts or feelings.
The fact that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space may perhaps suggest that our life is not appreciably different from the survival to be obtained by this machine.
When minds of greater refinement than Morel's begin to work on the invention, man will select a lonely, pleasant place, will go there with the persons he loves most, and will endure in an intimate paradise. A single garden, if the scenes to be eternalized are recorded at different moments, will contain innumerable paradises, and each group of inhabitants, unaware of the others, will move about simultaneously, almost in the same places, without colliding. But unfortunately these will be vulnerable paradises because the images will not be able to see men; and, if men do not heed the advice of Malthus, someday they will need the land of even the smallest paradise, and will destroy its defenseless inhabitants or will exile them by disconnecting their machines.[7]
I watched