I read an article this week called “10 Amazing Superpowers Humans Will Be Able To Get From Brain Implants.” (I posted it on Facebook and Twitter.) My first thought was that I shouldn’t have set Wake the Dead twenty-something years into the future. Maybe ten. Maybe next week.
My second thought was that my brain is already connected to cyberspace and I just didn’t know it. I ruled that out when I tried to check my bank balance without using the app on my phone.
But some of the stuff on the Top Ten list really does happen to Chase Sterling (the transhuman I wrote about). One: super hearing. Two: night vision. Of the ten superpowers examined in the article, the only one that wasn’t used to enhance Chase or some other character in the book was number three: the ability to zoom in and focus on a faraway object. I’m sure Chase could use that. I’m writing the sequel—maybe he’ll get it.
So I wonder after reading the article, even more than when I first began plotting this story in my head, what the world will be like when a growing percentage of us can leap a tall building in a single bound, so to speak.
Leaping isn’t actually on Top Ten list, but a leap is what it’s all about. Will we voraciously take the evolutionary jump that Chase was forced to make? Will we understand it? Chase just doesn’t get it. He’s a game show host, for crying out loud, not a scientist. He finds the hearing enhancement and night vision a bit of a joke. Even the doctor who implanted the superpowers calls them gimmicky.
But soon it may be more than fiction. No joke. Motivation exists for aiming toward the transhuman. Health, comfort, convenience, safety. Money. Utopia.
More than anything: power.
More than power: eternal life.
The everyday consternations of the human being might very well meet a new world and claim new victory. But real power belongs to God. And eternal life is a gift from God. And He gives it freely. Don’t look to the superpowers coming soon to offer thin hope in winning the war against death. Instead, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
