Virtual Reality and the Great Divorce, Part I

Lead us not unto temptation.

If CS Lewis wrote The Great Divorce today, after feminism destroyed women but before virtual reality and artificial intelligence destroy mankind.

Since the day Pamela learned to talk, her mom, dad, teachers, coaches, professors, friends, schools, and administrators told her the same thing: the goal–The Goal–was to ascend the social and corporate hierarchy to become one of the global elite.  Along the way, she learned the necessary corollaries.  Don’t get pregnant.  Don’t get married too early.  Don’t let anything impede The Goal. 

Pam enrolled at Harvard at 18.  She excelled.  Each summer she interned at a first-rate bank, two in New York and one London.  She graduated summa cum laude on her 22nd birthday.  Her GPA was perfect.  She aced the LSAT and was admitted to Harvard’s law school.  Having nothing to do for three months, Pam took a warm summer evening to write a 7,000 word short story.  McSweeney’s published it and overnight Pam was the envy of every student on the masthead of The Lampoon and The Crimson. Editors at The New Yorker asked her to join as a staff writer.  Though she enjoyed writing, Pam dismissed it all.  Writing, she thought, was a distraction from The Goal.  For the same reason, she hardly noticed the men who noticed her and she never thought of children.

During her first year at Harvard’s law school, Pam inured herself to late nights of hard study.  She earned straights As.  She made law review.  She volunteered for legal aid clinics, mostly because signaling virtue was a prerequisite for The Goal.  After her first year, she landed a paid internship at a prestigious white shoe law firm.  Two weeks in, they asked, begged really, Pam to return the following summer.  She declined because the Chief Counsel to the President had already offered her an internship at the Whitehouse.  The summer after her second year, she spent three months traveling with the President to meet important people and visit important places.  She met governors and senators, famous actors, billionaires, foreign leaders, and four-star generals. Once, during a layover in Rome, she was introduced to the Pope.  He told her the world needed more women like Pam to be career role models to girls and women everywhere.  At the same moment, an exhausted, exasperated single mother struggling with a misbehaving toddler chanced into Pam’s peripheral vision.  Pam felt pity for the foolish woman burdened with an unwanted child.  At the end of her internship, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court offered her a clerkship.  Pam doubled down on The Goal and accepted.

Pam hadn’t enjoyed law school but was justifiably proud of her accomplishments.  At 25, Pam graduated first in her class, gave a stirring commencement speech, aced the bar exam, and began work as a Supreme Court clerk.  She personally wrote the most well-known opinion issued in a generation–one that overturned ancient legal precedent.  Two years later, she was an associate at the most prestigious law firm on the planet.  In the ensuing years, she developed a reputation as a pillar of the community and as a stellar litigator.  She didn’t particularly enjoy that either, but she donated to all the right causes, attended urbane cocktail parties, sat on the boards of public hospitals and world-class museums, and was recognized as a global ambassador to the United Nations.  At 35, she had argued and won six major cases in front of the same Supreme Court justices she had known as a clerk.  And at 36, the most prestigious law firm in the world offered to make her a partner.  With The Goal in mind, she didn’t hesitate to accept.  That evening, Pam let loose, imbibed too much alcohol, and went home with Reginald, one of her attractive, soft-spoken male law firm partners.

Pam thought, she insisted, that nothing could come between her and earthly goals. 

Creation

Thus it was that Pam was outraged when, five weeks later, she realized she was pregnant–outraged because of the failure of big pharma, the audacity of the uninvited parasite, and the inconvenience of the whole thing.  None of this was part of The Goal.  Pam resolved to terminate the pregnancy.  Since Reginald was her business partner, she reasoned it was only fair to tell him. 

But Reginald was elated.  He encouraged her to reconsider.  Though adamant, Pam agreed to think on it for two months.  She did this out of respect.  In the interim, Reginald stunned her by proposing marriage.  He made a convincing case.  Repeatedly.  Their one-night stand wasn’t the first time they had “noticed” one another.  It was true the mutual attraction had simmered for months.  Perhaps longer.  He was 45, she 36.  Time wasn’t on their side.  They had ample financial means.  He wanted kids and would be a dedicated father.   Pam came to believe that being married and having a child would serve The Goal.  She relented. 

They were married five months later in the most exclusive city venue.  Pam was in her third trimester.  1,500 people attended: dilettantes and businessmen, politicians and movie stars.  The New York Times published a full spread on the ornate affair.  Two months later, Pam became a 37-year old mother to a baby boy: Michael.    

In an instant, the immense power of 600,000 years of human evolution dissolved the superficial inanity of everything she had ever learned.  Simple, ineluctable biology swept away mountains of meaningless 21-century socio-political jargon about girl-bosses and glass ceilings.  Pam forgot about Harvard, and law review, and the Supreme Court, and the Whitehouse.  She forgot about being a partner at her white shoe law firm and a pillar of the community.  She quit her job, left the big city, bought a small house with a yard, and settled down.  At night there was no street noise.  She loved every minute of it.  She abandoned The Goal totally.  All her incredible talents were transformed and re-channeled into her new baby boy.

For the first six months, she held Michael nearly all the time.  Late at night, while breastfeeding, she would peer into his gentle blue eyes as waves of oxytocin pulsated through Pam’s hypothalamus, imprinting channels of affection that became great canyons of love.  At the same time, Reginald delivered.  Though he stayed at the firm, he reduced his hours.  He also loved Michael and doted on him.  He grew to love Pam and she him.   He was a good father. 

Michael was precocious like his mother.  She loved him for that.  He walked at 7 months and talked soon after.  Pam loved him for that too.  At 3 years he could read.  Well.  At 8 he won a state piano competition, and a year later the same thing for violin.  His parents adored Michael.  At 11, he was the national middle school debate champion.  Before he was 12, his math skills were prodigious, and he could speak Mandarin and Spanish fluently.  Pam loved him with every fiber of her being.  She spent every minute with him, taught him everything she could, invested in every tutor, every experience, every opportunity.  She showered him with everything she had–all her world class talent.  And, because devices and technology are ubiquitous, without Pam realizing it, nearly all of Michael’s words were recorded.  From his first words, to his fluent sentences in foreign languages, absolutely everything was captured and stored by some electronic device–an iPhone, an Android, an Alexa, Cortana, or a Siri.  Most of it inadvertently. 

Pam thought, she insisted, that nothing could come between her and her creation. 

to be continued . . .