Until then, his idea of a satisfying outdoor experience had been to saunter out onto the terrace of a European hotel to smoke cigars and drink brandy. His duties as an astronomer sometimes called him to remote locations such as the summit of Mauna Kea, where he would dutifully go outside, freeze his ass off for a few minutes, remark on the awesomeness of the view and the clarity of the air, and then go back inside to sit behind a workstation and stare at images on a screen. Camping, and the outdoor life in general, simply hadn’t been a part of the culture of his family, which tended to look with favor on being under a sound roof, in a heated space, behind locked doors, with plenty of food baking and frying in a modern, fully appointed kitchen. He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.
His sojourn to Moses Lake with Henry had turned him into a late convert to the outdoor life, and left him with a considerable stock of state-of-the-art gear that he was strangely eager to use. The visit to Bhutan had also been a trigger. This had been preceded by a lengthy series of flights across the Pacific and a brief stay on an aircraft carrier: cramped, crowded, artificial environments not unlike where he would be spending the remainder of his days. Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn’t even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references. A few hours later he had been back on the aircraft carrier with Dorji and Jigme and about a hundred other Arkers who had been collected in a similar manner from Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, various provinces of India, Sri Lanka, and scattered island groups. He had been struck by the contrast between how centered, how natural, how autochthonous the Bhutanese youths had looked when he had first seen them on the side of the cliff in their home country, and how lost they appeared in the painted steel companionway of an aircraft carrier, mixed up with other South Asians in equally colorful garb, all equally alienated from their native soil, all looking for a place to stow their priceless cultural artifacts.
He had come home with the idea in his head that he needed to get a little bit of native soil on himself before getting shot up to a place where he would be every bit as lost and alienated as Dorji and Jigme had been aboard USS George H. W. Bush. Which seemed uncontroversial to him. But when he presented the plan to Tav over a cup of naval coffee in one of the aircraft carrier’s eateries, Tav demurred. “You are totally overromanticizing dirt.”
Tav liked to play the devil’s advocate. He and Doob had had many such conversations. Doob shrugged and said, “Let’s say you’re right. What’s the worst that could happen if I get some dirt on me while I still have access to dirt?”
“Tetanus?”
“Before they started sending me to places like this, they made sure I was up to date on my shots.”
“No, seriously, I just don’t buy it, Doob.”
“Buy what? What is it you think I’m trying to sell you?”
“You’re trying to sell me the idea that there is such a thing as a state of nature that humans were designed to live in. It is the ‘dirt is good’ hypothesis.”
“But obviously we evolved in rustic outdoor settings. Those places are, in some sense, natural to us.”
“But we did evolve, Doob. We’re not animals. We evolved into organisms that could make things like this.” Tav waved his free hand around at the painted-steel environs of the aircraft carrier. “And this.” He raised his cup of coffee and clinked it against Doob’s.
“Which is a good thing, you’re saying.”
“Compared to being torn apart by hyenas? Yeah, obviously it’s a good thing.”
“Well, I’m not going to get torn apart by hyenas. I’m just going to go camping.”
Tav smiled in a way that seemed a little forced. You don’t get what I’m saying, do you? He said, “Look, you know my views on the Singularity. On uploading.”
“I did blurb your book on the topic.”
“Yes, thank you for that.” Tav was referring to the idea that the human brain could, in principle, be digitized and uploaded into a computer. That this would one day happen on a large scale. That it might actually have happened already—that we might all, in fact, be living in a giant digital simulation.
Something occurred to Doob. “Is that why you were grilling the king about his views on reincarnation?”
“That’s part of it,” Tav admitted. “Look, all I’m saying is that if you’ve gone where I’ve already gone, in terms of thinking about that—”
“If you’ve drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid, in other words?” Doob said.
“Yeah, Doob, as you know I’ve already done, then you’ve already made a fundamental break with trying to be Nature Boy. I am never going to be Nature Boy. I believe that the human mind is almost infinitely malleable and that people are going to adjust, within days or weeks, to life on the Cloud Ark. We will simply turn into a different civilization altogether from the one we grew up in. Our whole idea of nature will be forgotten. And a thousand years from now, people will go on ‘camping trips’ that will consist of sleeping in arklets, drinking Tang, and peeing into tubes just like their ancestors did.”
“To them,” Doob said, “that’ll be a back-to-nature experience.”
“I think that’s how we will see it, yes,” Tav said.