Eden on Earth

Quinn was a Cyberbiologist, working on Quantum A.I. ~ Self-Evolving Intelligence. Today, he and his wife live in a treehouse, working on a permaculture initiative to restore the rainforest.

The Macaw’s resplendent wingspan, regally adorned in phosphorescent blue, gold and scarlet feathers, spread across the thunderstorm gray of the late afternoon sky. The heavens rumbled like the belly of a beast as Quinn snapped the shutter, capturing the pre-historic bird with his 800-mm telephoto lens that rivaled the length of its wingspan. Voilà! The talons and wings were frozen in complementary symmetry.

Frozen in time, at least for now, yet the Scarlet Macaw was inching ever closer to extinction. Local legends held the Macaw could fly to the spirit world and was related to the Phoenix. Could be true. The Macaw seemed to have become Quinn’s spirit guide, teaching him many lessons since he and his wife had moved to Ecuador almost a decade ago. But the biggest lesson the Scarlet Macaw had to teach him was yet to come.

Spirit Bird… Quinn used to be a staunch rationalist, would never have believed in such things. But the aperture of his life had opened when they moved here.

The rain was starting. Good. It had been unusually dry recently. Quinn retreated from the deck through a sliding glass door. Their home was the product of cutting-edge architecture and engineering. From its crescent-shaped deck, the structure was suspended on angled, reinforced beams leaning against the trunk of a giant Kapok tree. Quinn and his wife, Quinci Delterra, lived in a treehouse.

Granted, it was an ultra-modern treehouse. They christened it ForestTree, a reminder to see the forest and the trees. They constructed their nest from all-local materials, and it had taken only a modest toll on the local environment, less than half the lumber from one tree, for which they had replanted an acre. Still, there was nothing simple about the home’s advanced engineering. Could this same home even have been designed using a drafting table, before computers built the modern world?

Quinn slid the glass door shut and stepped into their eloquent and efficient kitchenette. Not bad for a house built around a tree. No, far better than not bad. Life couldn’t be better since he left the Sahara Foundation nine years ago.

They had considered New Zealand at first, and Hawaii. But Quinn’s body told him he needed to be here, close to Pachamama, the Kichwa name for Mother Earth. Humanity had done enough damage. He, himself, had done enough damage, all in the name of technology, the deified son of science.

Quinn had quit that life nearly a decade ago and vowed to do whatever he could to live lightly on the Earth. Sumak kawsay, the indigenous people called it — living in harmony with each other, ourselves, and most importantly, the living, breathing planet. Sumak kawsay was even incorporated into Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, which was also the first constitution to grant legal status to the Rights of Nature.

“What are you thinking about, my love?”

“Just lost in the past again,” Quinn said.

Quinci walked into the kitchen, smiled and patted his side, just as the symphony of rain began to crescendo.

“But I was also thinking how much I absolutely adore our life here,” Quinn said.

“That’s so sweet. Do you know what I was thinking could make the afternoon even better?” Quinci asked.

He crinkled his brow.

“Don’t give me that ruffled potato chip look, Tarzan,” she chided him and locked her arms around him in her signature koala squeeze.

He smiled, relishing the aromatic smell of the sweet and verdant air mingling with the scent of her long, flowing auburn hair. Their life in the tree for the last five years seemed like a lucid dream endlessly coming true.

Mere coincidence couldn’t account for their instant attraction. They met at a Digital Detox retreat six months after Quinn had left his career in Cyberbiology. Less than a year later, Quinci left her job at NASA, and they never looked back. Their life became a retreat from the modern world.

The withdrawal symptoms of immediate gratification and Swiss-cheese attention spans caused by too much ultra-smart technologies abated after the first year or so. Quinn found he could concentrate for extended periods of time again just as he remembered being able to before social media. The happily-ever-after of the last five years far outweighed anything missing from the lives they left behind. Life in the rainforest had a natural rhythm.

The late afternoon thunderstorm subsided like clockwork just before sunset. When the heavens settled down at just the right time on certain delightful afternoons, a golden hue of the setting sun filtered over the canopy into their bedroom, turning misty dewdrops into flecks of gold.

The ethereal motes of sunlight were welcome visitors this evening, an exclamation mark and a blessing after making love in the cocoon of a tropical storm.

“Is this a fairy tale?” Quinn asked.

“If it were, I would imagine a rainbow,” said Quinci. “No, a double rainbow.”

The motes of moisture in the setting sun beaconed them to see for themselves. “Oh, incredible!” Quinn breathed as he bounced out of bed. “There is a double rainbow! Imagine that!”

“I think I just did. This might be the happiest day of my life,” said Quinci, breathlessly.

“You said that yesterday,” Quinn said.

“That’s how I know this isn’t a dream, Tarzan,” she said. “This has been our life for the past five years. Not a weekend, not a vacation. We’re here. This is real.”

“But what about everyone else?”

Survivor’s guilt. That was what Quinn had felt since escaping the trap of modernity. Quinci only had a reassuring smile to offer. But that was enough. He kissed her. They watched the rainbow until it faded, color by color, first the brighter hues blending into the sky, then the indigoes and violets fading into twilight.

If you knew me when I worked in Cyberbiology, you would have thought I didn’t have a soul to sell. I was working on what we called Self-Evolving Intelligence, also known as Quantum A.I. I would spend up to ten hours a day in front of a screen coding them and a few more working with the humanoid prototypes themselves.

My short-tempered perfectionism and point-the-finger attitude was simply part of the cutthroat tech field I was in. I demanded perfection of myself and others and always found someone else to blame. We had deadlines to meet, shareholders to answer to. I would wake up frustrated and go to bed angry. Leaving that life was the best turn my life ever took. I vowed never to forget who I had become and to always remember it as a lesson learned the hard way. The irony is, I was developing ethical and morality sub-routines for artificial intelligence while my own humanity was slipping away.

— Being Human

That was just the introduction to Quinn’s book on the dangers of technology. His head was filled with sci-fi from the 1970s that probably no one remembered, bristling with similar themes. Before technology had become an infatuation, an obsession, we told cautionary tales. Decades later, those cautionary tales had turned much darker, dystopian.

How radically Quinn’s life had changed since leaving the modern world. Quinn told himself he was a lunatic to think his book would ever see the light of day. Maybe he’d been living in a tree too long.

When he wasn’t writing, he wrestled all the time with his survivor’s guilt. He was one of the few who had managed to jump off the human hamster wheel thanks to a golden parachute from his former employer, the Sahara Foundation. Quinci was the one person who could bring him back to the present. It was a task she performed lovingly, patiently. She was constantly having to pull him out of his book, or out of the past.

Tonight, as the double rainbow had blessed ForestTree, the tendrils of the past had no grip on him. He was free. But could he ever truly be free while so many others were trapped?

Meanwhile, here in the paradise of ForestTree, oil lamps were glowing softly as Quinn sat at the kitchen counter, working on his manuscript with pencil and paper. Quinci made graceful brush strokes on a canvas in the living room. Even though their home had a modest 1.1 kW photovoltaic setup, they enjoyed the ambiance of candlelight.

Tomorrow they would journey into the village to put in a day’s work on the permaculture farm, a rainforest restoration project Quinn had helped fund. Dystopian sci-fi from the 20th century never dreamed up such irony as the rainforest being destroyed by materialism sharing its name with the largest online retailer.

It’s like we’re holding the scepter of truth in one hand, and sticking our finger in a light socket with the other. Truth? Facts? How can we make heads or tails of this tangled mess? We need a twelve-step program to break our addiction to materialism. We de-humanize each other and feel more comfortable making eye contact with our screens than with each other. We are over-stimulated, and we rarely unwind unless it’s with screen-time. Is being alone with our thoughts so terrible? Do we fear we’ll figure out that we’re not happy? Spoiler alert…

“Swinging from the vines again, Tarzan?” Quinci asked. That was her way of bringing him back from the jungle of his words.

“I was just getting to the best part. Can I read you one passage before bed? I need some feedback.”

“Sure, shoot.”

Spoiler alert … we can be happy but not at the rate we’re going. We’re infatuated with the latest and greatest, like flying squirrel suits or attempts to colonize Mars, but the day-to-day too quickly becomes passé, leading us to find only ennui in the ordinary. We are hungry ghosts living in a technological Eden.

“Oooh, poetic. Yes, I love the word ennui,” Quinci said, “a listless dissatisfaction. That pretty much sums it up.”

“That’s encouraging,” Quinn said.

Our constant craving for the new and newfangled is the heart of the problem. It keeps contentment at arm’s length, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. And when we reach the summit? Global catastrophes, at which point, like Sisyphus, we start all over from rock bottom.

The solution to this madness?

Buddha’s epiphany was that being fully present is the solution to craving and desire, and those are the roots of dissatisfaction, of suffering.

We live in an eloquent civilization. Yet we squander so much potential by not appreciating it. We have the infrastructure for our society to be a true heaven on earth to rival Plato’s Republic, or Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets. Eden is all around us. We never left the garden. We just don’t see the forest for the trees.

“Too preachy?” Quinn asked. “Do you think people will get it?”

“And run off to live in a tree? No.”

He looked crestfallen.

“I didn’t mean it like that. Do you want everyone to live in a tree?”

“No,” he said. “I just want us to be more conscientious. I want us to stop chasing rainbows.” But he remembered there was a rainbow tonight. “Bad example….”

“Listen, is it true?”

“What do you mean?”

“What you wrote, is it the truth?”

He nodded. “It’s as close as I can get to the truth, yes.”

“Then there will always be a few people who will hear it. Do you know how the truth works?”

“How?”

“First of all, the truth is never going to convince anybody. It only speaks to people who already know, who hear it and say, Wow, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. The truth works by reaching the right people and letting us know we’re not alone.”

“Wow,” he said. “That might be the most encouraging thing you’ve ever said. Can I put that in the book?”

She just smiled. “Tomorrow. Come on, my love,” she said softly. “It’s time for bed. Be here with me. Live this life, the one right in front of you. Take your own advice. Don’t keep making me share you with the life you left behind.”

He sighed, nodded, knew she was right, and followed her to bed.

That night, Quinn dreamed of riding on the back of a giant Macaw through the arches of a double rainbow. The gateway took them to the spirit world, and they wove between parallel dimensions.

In his dream, he lived in Eden, a Utopia on Earth.

As they soared over Eden, the Macaw swooped down, and Quinn saw his treehouse from a bird’s eye view. It was at that moment he realized what the Macaw was trying to show him all along. Eden was the very life he was living with his wife. He had everything he’d ever dreamed. It was the Macaw who finally helped him learn to appreciate and enjoy it, to forget the past, to finally come to terms with his survivor’s guilt, and to stop squandering the paradise he lived in by not appreciating it.

Quinn was grateful the Macaw had taught him what he needed to learn. A few short years later, the Macaw was gone, extinct, its lessons taught, but heard by only a few.

This story appeared in a previous version in the novel “The Eden Syndrome”