E = Am2 - the 14Th Paradigm Shift

By David Lucas

Professor Rachel Buddywell, Chair of the world-wide Commission, finds her own life story enmeshed in her revealing humanitys 14th paradigm shift there is no inexplicable, just the unexplained as science encompasses the traditional realms of theology and philosophy.

Her whole life has fashioned her for the unique task she confronts as Commission Chair. The influences that made her are commonplace, yet have produced a woman who is not.

As a cognitive scientist, aided by presenters in anthropology, neuro-science, zoology and psychiatry, she weaves, amidst the conflicting objectives of her fellow Commissioners, the disparate scientific disciplines into a finished tapestry.

Delegates and the Commissioners find the implications of todays science simultaneously thrilling and horrifying but the science exist, so the genie is out of the bottle.

Her unconventional love unbolts her lifes lynchpins, to seemingly mock her professional endeavours. This love confronts her work in the Commission and the core of who she is. The entwining of her professional life and her private life shapes her Commissions monumental report.

The story blends her struggles to unite tensions from the Commissioners and pressures from Delegates to identify universal human traits to be inculcated into human clones. Some Delegates cannot see the new way of the world as it is now much less as it will be tomorrow.

At the same time, her life story twists and turns so unexpectedly as to be unimaginable, except that it happens.

Come and immerse yourself in Rachels life both public and private.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524518592

David Lucas

David Lucas has been named one of the UK's ten Best New Illustrators, an initiative created by Booktrust to recognize the best rising talent in the field of illustration today.

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Copyright © 2016 by David Lucas.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016917460

   ISBN:   Hardcover           978-1-5245-1861-5

               Softcover            978-1-5245-1860-8

               eBook                   978-1-5245-1859-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/27/2017

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Contents

Characters

Celebrity Debate

Commissioners

Introduction

Thanks

Lift-off

Chapter 1 Rachel gets the gig

Chapter 2 Rachel meets Narayan

Chapter 3 Celebrity Debate

Chapter 4 Life lessons learnt slowly

Chapter 5 Battle of Marathon x 2

Chapter 6 Too ineffable to be real?

Chapter 7 Seminar presentations

Chapter 8 Rachel’s charge

Chapter 9 Rachel and the commissioners

Chapter 10 The dinner party

Chapter 11 Rachel and Narayan

Chapter 12 The secretary general receives the report

Chapter 13 The extraordinary resilience of humans

Chapter 14 Rachel’s reverie

Chapter 15 From where did it all start?

Chapter 16 Executive summary

About the author

Characters

Celebrity Debate

Sir Terry Bracken

Rachel Buddywell

Helen Cith

John Crumbles

Jim Dwyer

Peter Walgalukaba

Commissioners

Rachel Buddywell of Australia, representing the Pacific countries

Emusa E. Jones of the USA, representing North America

Poonam Dimri of India, representing the subcontinent

Kushim El Sayed of Egypt, representing the Middle East

Mathurin Kana-M’Bia of Botswana, representing Africa

Javier Palaclo of Venezuela, representing Central and South America

Oriana Positano of Italy, representing Eastern and Western Europe

Gao Zeng of China, representing Asia

For the first time in human history – hopefully never to be swept away by any future dark ages – humans no longer have to confront the inexplicable. Yes, the unexplained still remains, but for every unexplained there is someone somewhere with an explanation. Not many of those explanations will survive the testing and peer review, and indeed none might, but then only to be replaced by new explanations.

The banishment of the inexplicable must surely be the greatest achievement of humanity.

Commission’s Report to the General Council

Introduction

Above all, the search after truth and its eager pursuit are peculiar to man.

Cicero

Paradigm shifts

A paradigm is the collection of ideas and assumptions that pass from one generation to the next and which seem to be immutable.

The paradigm shift, then, is when the paradigm shifts. The past shudders under the force of an earthquake, and gives away to a new understanding, a new way of seeing, a new way of doing.

Such shifts are usually, but not invariably, associated with scientific revolutions.

There are innumerable views on what have been paradigm shifts for Homo sapiens, and most would encompass the following.

Mammalian

A. The initial one, revealed in this novel, which shaped human nature. We share some 98% of our genes with great apes of the genus Pan – bonobos and chimpanzees, the only species in that genus.

Pre-Homo sapiens

B. Control and use of fire. No other species does it, and it was more transformative than even the agrarian revolution millions of years later.

Homo sapiens did not bring either of these about – our ancestors did – and so they are not included below.

Homo sapiens

1. The transition from egalitarian hunter-and-gatherer societies to agrarian-urban societies. It took until 2007 for more people on Earth to live in an urban rather than rural area.

While the start of this shift has been explored a number of times, the concomitant transformation from egalitarianism and ‘worth of all’ to the ‘greater worth’ of some individuals than others is surprisingly not explored as often. The ‘kings’ and ‘nobles’ emerged, and were seen as more worthy as humans than the ‘peasants’. Religion came to the fore to provide that justification, and the ‘Uriah Heep’ self-promoters secured its foothold, as did craven courtiers and sycophantic ‘arts and crafts’ practitioners. They all needed others to support them, as they were ‘more worthy’ than those deemed ‘less worthy’.

This change led to diseases, poorer nutrition, a less varied diet, and shorter physical stature for the ‘less worthy’. Skeletons show that peasants lived short and hard lives, with enlarged joints, arthritis, and deformed spines brought about by performing tasks such as carrying sacks, pushing ploughs, and scything.

Paradoxically for some, it also led to today’s cornucopia, first of goods and then of services.

2. The Arab reintroduction of Aristotelian logic into mediaeval Spain, which led to a new way of thinking throughout Europe

3. The Copernican revolution, which placed Earth not at the centre of the universe, but as a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun, which in turn is but a small star in a galaxy of stars

4. Renaissance Florence’s rediscovery of perspective geometry, which in turn enabled deep-sea voyages.

5. The printing press, which enabled widespread sharing of new and exciting ideas, which could then be refined by others

6. The discovery of laws of gravity

7. The American War of Independence – a country that refused to be ruled by a king, outlawed aristocracy, aimed at a secular State and had a sense, best expressed by Thomas Paine, of human rights for all. As an aside, Paine’s life story is as unrealistic and fantastic as any true story.

8. Marrying statistics to medicine so that the patient’s symptoms were more important than the individual patient, to better understand the illness rather than simply soothing the patient’s individual pain

9. The English Industrial Revolution that also led the cornucopia of today’s world for some.

10. Darwin’s theory of evolution with the changed view that humans are not angels but rather just hairless apes.

11. Freud’s discovery of the ‘unconscious’ – the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behaviour is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions of which we are barely aware

12. Quantum physics that has produced our computer, digital, and electronic world, as well as the atom bomb

13. The development of an understanding of the very organ – the human brain – that made all the other revolutions possible

14. I had the original thought (so I thought at the time!) of a fourteenth paradigm shift:

Sweep both religion and philosophy aside to explore what science has to offer in providing explanations to topics hitherto thought to be the province of religions and/or philosophy.

It is well known the unsustainable trappings of religion would have been swept away long ago, were they not kept alive by those States who are captured by religion and so rigorously enforce them, or by societal custom which can be even more rigorously enforced, and the explosion of the ego when seeking an existence beyond this mortal coil.

Philosophy has also been well documented as failing in its core promises, and the most recent and powerful debunking was by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle in The New York Times in 2016.

Religion and philosophy are defeated by their own inexplicables. They might embrace evolution, but their evolution stops at the head – religion must have the soul, while philosophy accepts the Wallace situation that the mind is unique and so immune to natural selection [unlike Darwin].

Religion remains mired in the by faith alone way of knowing, despite the bewildering array of revealed truths that exists between different religions, and indeed sects within them.

Philosophy remains mired in bizarre mind games that result in the critical question in early 20th century English philosophy being The King of France is bald. Or we are the Brain in a vat, no matter how exciting retold in the film The Matrix. No wonder Renee Descartes said one cannot conceive anything so strange or so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

Science has transferred their mirings from inexplicable basket into the unexplained basket, while also making substantial inroads in removing them from the unexplained basket.

Science embraces being subject to proofs. Religion and philosopher deny any need for proofs. It remains very difficult to distinguish the invisible from the non-existent!

Yet there is nothing new under the sun. Many people have expressed the fourteenth paradigm shift in many different ways – all unknown to me at the start of my adventure. Religion and philosophy are human thought constructs, while science starts as a human thought construct, but then must be independently verified and verifiable.

Paradigm 7 is the only paradigm shift in danger of disappearing. The rich and powerful are the true terrorists, the very real threat to a way of thinking that is barely 200 years old – they want democracy gone and restoration of their plutocracy.

Is the science in this novel right?

I would like to think so, but a scientific treatise is not the purpose of the novel. I am not a scientist, and would not know a shovel from a pick or scraper for any fieldwork.

Plus the landscape is forever changing – as this novel was being finalised, the stem cell research lauded in chapter 14 was withdrawn; the UK approved use of CRISPR as outlined in chapter 5 but now with possible uses previously thought to be some twenty years away, while the 46th World Economic Forum in January 2016 addressed some of the issues raised in this novel. Melbourne neurologist Tom Oxley and his team have developed a bionic spine that may give victim of ‘locked-in syndrome, as outlined in chapter 8, some mobility. Recent fossil tool finds, though disputed, in Sulawesi and 80,000+ years Homo sapiens fossil teeth China and Neanderthals having Homo sapiens genes for at least 100,000 years, means the out-of-Asia and out-of-Africa dispute as referred to in chapter 7 is still not finally resolved. The restorative power of favourite music on damaged brain is just becoming mainstream. Google’s AI programme AlphaGo – using intuitive neural pathways – was given ninth dan – akin to ‘divinity’ ranking – for its performance in the Go championship against the human grandmaster. Genome tracking on some Australian aborigines has only increased the fascination of their story.

So the predictions of the redundancy of the report made in chapter 1 may be true of this novel when published.

Nicholas Humphrey, Bruce Hood, Paul Thagard, Patricia S. Churchland, Dean Burnett, Nick Lane, and Edward O Wilson, to name but a few of the pantheon, explain the evidence and the science, as well as their own thoughtful and insightful inferences, so you can evaluate for yourself. Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Frans de Waal’s Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? will explain the animal side to you most delightfully.

In August 2014, Australia opened its ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function to combine with both the Human Brain Project in Europe and the US Brain Initiative that are both discussed in chapter 10.

Indeed, with the plethora of books, TV shows, films, and politics now on this topic, the fourteenth paradigm shift is the zeitgeist of the decade.

Where will all this lead?

If you want to know how revolutionary all of this is, and the understanding and appreciation that flow from this paradigm shift (and perhaps the impossibility of the task Rachel has undertaken) then Bruce Hood’s The Domesticated Brain (2014, Pelican Publications) will leave you awestruck.

There is a comprehensive bibliography on the website davidlucasauthor.com.

My aim is to stimulate your thoughts, and then leave it to you to actualise them.

Thanks

So, thanks to all those who have assisted with this book’s conception and the whole gestation (much longer than that of an elephant), even before the lengthy and difficult birth process. Thanks to my midwives: Marlene Dodd, Jacqui Lucas and Keiran Ryan, John Souness, Michelle Hughes, with Musetta, the wellspring of such joie de vivre hitherto before unknown. My partner Cath and my dog Summer have been bedrocks.

And to those over the millennia who have helped shaped my thoughts and, over millions of years, me as a human.

Especial thanks to

✓ New Scientist magazine for making so much science accessible to the non-scientists, and so providing much of the glue and inspiration for this novel.

✓ Wikipedia – I have used this source as a starting point, so in turn should you chose to follow up any aspect you could start there. So, if you think something like GenePeeks, or Jibo, the socially aware home robot (marketed as ‘the world’s first family robot’), or iCub, the astonishingly ambitious programme to create a robot with a sense of self, belong in the science fiction world of tomorrow rather than the real world of today, you can check them out on Wikipedia, and follow their progress.

✓ Xlibris for materialising a ghostly wraith.

I hope I have heeded Cicero’s exhortation

If a man commits his thoughts to paper when he can neither arrange them well nor write them agreeably, nor furnish pleasure of any kind to the reader, he is recklessly misusing both his leisure and his paper.

more so than his seemingly modern-day but more likely eternal lament:

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Lift-off

Let us see how far we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the astrophysicist, when referring to the limits, or non-limits, of human endeavour

He saw the fate of Icarus as not paying the price for hubris, but rather as an experiment in human endeavour and taking up the challenge.

Background

The Story of Icarus (adapted from Wikipedia)

In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus. The main story told about Icarus is his attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea where he drowned. The myth shares thematic similarities with that of Phaëthon – both are usually taken as tragic examples of hubris or failed ambition.

Rachel discarded her blinkers, carried out one last check of her fibreglass wings, adhered with a new synthetic non-melting resin, and armed with both ancient and new charts that point to a pathway through the blindness of unquestioning light, launched.

Ask the right question. The ‘right’ answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer.

Anon.

Chapter 1

Rachel gets the gig

From his forty-second-floor office, with its panoramic view of New York, the secretary general prepared to meet and somewhat intimidate his visitor. She was not his choice, but the panel had chosen, and that was it. But he had to ensure that she knew who was boss. Strangely, in the whole process, he had only met her once, when she was one among many. He removed her résumé from his desktop, smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, then rose to greet her and deliberately sat her on the other side of his large desk.

‘Well, Doctor Livingstone, I presume. The ship is yours,’ he joked.

Rachel inwardly flinched at the mixed metaphors, and was as aghast as her Aunt Venetia would have been. She was wary of this olive-skinned man, with his distinguished grey mane. She well knew the intent of her ten-minute wait, and now her sitting opposite him, with the large desk in between, and why she had not been offered tea or coffee.

Though still piqued somewhat, as he was not used to being thwarted, she was, he thought, attractive with her neat figure, taller than most women, reddish hair, fair complexion with demure make-up, a stylish dress. When combined with intelligence blazing out of her eyes, a certain aloofness and frank expression, he could see she could easily be spellbinding. He wondered if her somewhat unkempt hair was coiffured or really so. Her style and elegance as she entered, walked across the room and in the way she sat were palpable. He watched her eyes pretend to take in his office, the view, but really take in him. What would he make of her? And indeed, she of him?

Outwardly, as she was expected to, she smiled at the secretary general while replying, ‘Touché,’ without knowing if that Bolivian gentleman had any French in his vocabulary. She wondered what he would make of her.

‘The president has informed you of the appointment, which we will make public at next Friday’s press conference. You are expected to take up your appointment the first day of next month. Does that fit your timetable?’ Rachel nodded her assent, a mere pleasantry, as her consent was not really being sought. ‘The appointment is to remain confidential until that press conference.’ She met this with another nod. ‘Only you, the deputy chair, and the other commissioners are aware of your appointment, so you may speak to them confidentially before then.

‘You would be familiar with The Edge Questions, I am sure.’

‘Not especially.’ She feigned ignorance by asking, ‘Any in particular?’ as he clearly wanted to enlighten her. He could play his game but it would be on her terms, she had already resolved.

‘The genesis of the Commission’s establishment was the 2009 question: What will change everything? As The Edge expounded on its website:

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

‘Yes, secretary general, though I am not so sure about the accuracy of all of those assertions.’

To his quizzical look, she began to change his rules.

‘I accept the general thrust. I know the redefinition of life, and to the edge of creating life itself were picked up by some of your members as something the Council should address.

‘People’s votes have been influential on those who set budgets, and revisions to budgets, for space travel and for nuclear power, to mention just a couple. People voted on cell phones and the Web by adapting their lives to demand better and better service and speed with reduced costs on those technologies.’

She could see that he had understood her point, but was he impressed, she wondered.

He continued, focusing on what the Council had indeed picked up. ‘The Commission, as you already know, is how to inculcate human values into human clones, and so perhaps allow humans to define themselves with the benefit of current knowledge, including technology.’

‘No mean feat!’ she mused to herself. But when to really throw down the gauntlet? Might as well be now, so she said, ‘Of course, it is not as novel as some may think.’

His eyes widened. ‘I BEG YOUR PARDON?’

‘Well, every parent does it. They think – not correctly, by the way – that their child is a tabula rasa. They then train and mould their children to fit into their own values, sense of right and wrong, view of the world and their place in it. Which, in turn, comes from and is shared by the values, customs, and rituals of their tribe or clan or locality, right up to their nation. Religions establish their own schools to inculcate their beliefs into the young. Society, and groups within society, control their members more by social pressure, by peer acceptance or rejection than they do by enforcement of written laws.

‘And for some time, roboticists have been doing the same with robots.’

‘Robots are definitely not on your agenda,’ was the stern rebuke. Rachel mused that there was the first challenge to be circumvented. ‘We all know that robots are not to harm any human.’

As he saw the flash in her eye as she replied, he began to understand why the panel had chosen her.

‘That really is my point. That so-called First Law of Robotics is merely one set out by a science fiction writer in the 1940s. There have been many such laws since – including the 2011 Laws of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and then the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain.

‘All laws have been devised by humans for what humans have created – whether they be babies created naturally, or robots created by machines. So, likewise for babies created by non-natural means.’

She could see that he was a little taken aback by her reply as he sought to regain control of the conversation. ‘The delays in having the Commission set up may make its role already redundant, but there is nothing you and I can do about that. The Council is concerned at extraordinary technological leaps and bounds, such as the GenePeeks technology, which, as you know, allows for the creation of virtual embryos so that even before pregnancy happens, there are glimpses of the genetic defects that may occur in the child if the two parents mate.’

She replied, ‘Of course, everyone lauds GenePeeks and the CRISPR gene-editing technology uses for the avoidance of such defects or diseases, while clearly the same technology can also be used to create ‘designer babies’ with blue eyes, blond hair, and a muscular build or bell-shaped curves. Scientists say that such choices will not be offered, but if the technology is there, who can really say it has not been, or soon will be, offered by those who have the technological know-how and desire to make money.

‘However much they try to conceal the moneymaking purpose,’ she invited him to start joining some dots.

‘Indeed – however much they conceal,’ he agreed. Rachel could see he was warming to her so she moved to the nub.

‘Power and profit. To wonder and to wander. Chance. These could be the famous five to describe humanity.’

He obviously did not then appreciate the profundity of her ‘famous five’ quip. ‘So, your report may be ancient history before it is even born, as the scientists may already operate in this way.’

‘True, secretary general, so the report must be convincing and compelling, while providing clear direction and workable imperatives. There have been other paradigm shifts in history, and once the key was turned and the door of knowledge unlocked, in hindsight all they espoused seemed so obvious.

‘That is the spirit the report will encapsulate, so it will be relevant, and defining.’

Touché, the secretary general to himself.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, wanting to hear more from this woman upon whom the whole Commission now hinged.

‘The contortions in which astronomy found itself were baffling because they were all predicated on the sun revolving around the Earth. The Copernican revolution acknowledgement that the Earth goes around the sun allowed so much of astronomy to then fall into place.

‘The age of the Earth, first really expounded by Linnaeus, then allowed for the Darwinian paradigm shift of evolution, and again, so much learning in many other fields also then suddenly fell into place.

‘I suspect that one day quantum physics will have a paradigm shift so that we will redefine, perhaps in ways not yet imaginable, reality. A lot of knowledge spread throughout many disciplines will then fall into place.’

Rachel was becoming animated, and her ambition for the Commission shining.

‘So, if the report, and its processes, can assist how we review and even redefine human nature, then its exposition will then let other disciplines take it up, allowing many seemingly unrelated thoughts to coalesce and fall into place.’

‘But,’ he cautioned, ‘many have sought to define, and redefine, human nature. That is hardly a new task for anyone, much less the Commission.’

‘Of course,’ Rachel demurred, ‘but that does mean that we do not try – to try is one of humanity’s ongoing traits. The Commission was established to do more than that and it shall. It will identify the sources, and then how those sources can be inculcated into cloned human beings. I think those factors take the Commission’s tasks beyond others.

‘In but a few hundreds of years, and especially over the last seventy years, extraordinary developments in knowledge and understanding of the brain and how it works have had far-ranging reach. These developments are culminating into a coherent picture, which will be a tipping point for human understanding. The implications – practical and ethical – transcend what humans have believed for over 100,000 years.’

Rachel paused, and looked him directly in the eye to declare her intent.

‘That, as I see it, is the role of the Commission – to be at the forefront, the vanguard, of intellectual challenge. I cannot guarantee success, but I can guarantee that the Commission’s work will deserve success.’

Rachel knew from his nod that she had won him over – and that he would have no hesitation in holding her to that bold declaration. She was not afraid of accountability. She had changed his rules, and thought it now time to lighten the mood.

‘The Commission’s role is not that of a coroner.’ To his arched eyebrow, she said, ‘All it takes to be a good coroner is hindsight. So we can all be good coroners.’

She laughed when he observed, ‘In my country we call it retrospective clairvoyance.’

‘That is nicely put – better than mine,’ she flattered him.

‘Do you have another one?’

‘I do.’ She was genuinely surprised to be asked.

‘Pray, tell.’

‘Are you a South Park fan?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Well, there was a character called Captain Hindsight, with perfect 20/20 hindsight, and his three companions, S, C, and W.’

‘Which would stand for something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Let me guess.’ He pondered this for a moment. ‘Captain Hindsight is the clue. Then, S, C, and W. Mmm … I suppose they would be Should’ve, Could’ve, and Would’ve.’

‘Indeed, they are. Well done.’ And Rachel was actually impressed. She knew he was no fool, and now had first-hand proof. It was a very good idea to have him onside.

Rachel knew he was testing her as they spoke, so she returned to the real theme, to continue. ‘A famous Australian – John Monash – provided good advice, which I have always heeded, when he counselled:

The main thing is always to have a plan; if it is not the best plan, it is at least better than no plan at all.

‘I plan to have the best plan, and it is not that my wishbone is where my backbone should be,’ she smiled.

He continued the game, adding, ‘No one plans to fail, but most fail to plan,’ as he recalled the quaint and attractive woman from years ago who had quoted that at him. He could not recall her name – it was an unusual name, Letitia or Venice, or something like that.

He was now satisfied that the panel had chosen wisely in appointing the chair. His tests had shown she was more than capable. With his status and his power confronting them, people generally were not themselves, and became unduly deferential. Lawyers used brutal cross-examination to try and reveal ‘the real you’, but when people felt trapped, tricked, and cheated, he could not see how that could work. With his psychology background, he felt his probing techniques allowed people the scope to reveal their true selves. He judged that Rachel had the smarts, was confident without being arrogant, was flexible, and could inject humour and humanity into dealings with people.

The appointment of the chair had come down to six applicants, each of whom had strong lobbying. The fact that she was Australian had been a surprisingly strong point. The process had chosen what he now thought was a remarkable woman.

‘To chair this group, with the charter to come up with the answers to guide the future of humans, is immense. The one-year term of the Commission cannot be extended – preferably it will be shorter.

‘Are you sure you are equal to the timelines inherent in the task, Professor? Doctor Emusa Jones, your deputy, is apprehensive about the timelines.’

Rachel was alerted by the name – was he the secretary general’s preferred choice? Emusa’s and Rachel’s paths had crossed a couple of times in the past. He had a formidable intellect, and was a smooth operator, like most Americans, though bombastic under pressure.

She demurely feigned weighing her reply.

‘I am conscious of the support being provided by my deputy, and the other commissioners, without whom the whole commission could not properly function. I am confident, as I share timelines and projects with them, with their skill and expertise, their enjoyment in sharing the timelines responsibility, that the commission will work. I will instil, and then monitor, the commission’s values, acutely aware that the end of any company, any institution, is when it fails its own values.’

Double touché, nodded the secretary general to himself.

He started on the mechanical details of the commission and who the commissioners were. There were eight, including Emusa and Rachel. She knew the machinations that had been gone through to ensure representation from different continents and countries. The secretary general had skilfully guided the path of each commissioner’s appointment. He had adhered to the political sanctions of not having a Russian-born commissioner. Rachel had privately determined to make amends for that.

Rachel knew from Aunt Venetia that the fact numbers on the Commission were eight breached one of Parkinson’s laws of comitology. She would make history by the Commission, consisting of that cursed number, actually succeeding. As though she really needed another challenge!

‘The Commission must produce a majority report. I am aware that in countries such as yours, even when judges agree on the outcome, they insist on having their own say as to why they decided. Such indulgent luxury we cannot have here. A clear guide is needed. It is essential to have only one majority report. The dissenters may want to produce minority reports, though I would hope there are no dissenters.’

Rachel was alert to that danger. ‘Will they also have to produce just the one dissenting report?’ She thought this was a good way to distract the dissenters. Let them agree on their dissent.

He paused, then nodded. ‘Yes. I will ensure the terms of reference reflect that.’

He had no idea that inside this cool, calm, and collected woman there coursed an exultation that her life’s task was now on the threshold, and that she was just so determined to have her own way. She exulted in the two separate battles of Marathon that had just been won with her appointment – a personal one and a world one.

While the secretary general rambled on with mechanical details of the Commission, Rachel invoked her ability to appear to be following intently, while she actually wallowed in her own reverie and her mind wandered. She knew already most of what he was saying, or did not need to know now, and her antennae would pick up on anything out of the ordinary.

How she had been primed for this task by her father and his work, and by Mother. Throughout her life, they had helped Rachel forge her own path and mould her own career. Her somewhat unusual upbringing had shaped who she was and how she thought. She knew she was unique – as each human was the product of their own individual upbringing experience and so equally unique as that individual.

She had accompanied her anthropologist father Jack to far-flung places, and had been exposed to wildly different cultures and societies in the flesh, by living and by observing other people’s lives. Jack’s hero was a man who renounced a life of wealth and privilege, who sought to discover how the material world actually works, who refused to believe that those ways were unknowable, who donated monies to similar aspirants while not seeking from them, who believed that knowledge should be shared, and who died a pauper.

Mother had exposed Rachel to an assortment of faiths, and their adherents. Mother’s hero was a man who renounced a life of wealth and privilege, who sought to discover a world outside the material world, and who taught that the ways of the material world were unknowable, who accepted material comforts such as food and shelter and clothing from others, and believed that knowledge can only come from within and with the guidance of others, and who died a pauper.

Both Alexander von Humboldt and Buddha, Rachel had always thought, would be quite disappointed how their so-called adherents trampled on their respective legacies. Power and profit reign supreme for their adherents.

A mind that was eclectic, with a non-judgemental and non-imposing view of the world, was not the only product of her upbringing. She was ‘natured’ and ‘nurtured’ to wonder and to wander.

Rachel did not really belong anywhere. She had her family, her acquaintances, her career, but because she was not inculcated with any one society’s rituals, passions, beliefs, customs, norms, sense of self-importance, histories, or justifications, she never really subscribed fully to any one of them.

Thus, most people saw her as a little eccentric, an outsider, her outward conformity was perceived as masking an inner ‘picking and choosing’ rather than a wholehearted acceptance. Consequently, she was respected rather than liked; most people were acquaintances rather than friends. People enjoyed her company but never sought it out, just accepting when she was present.

That caused her some mild distress sometimes, and perhaps led to her obsession with pain and suffering.

The fact of suffering tortured Rachel. So much of history was savagery and pain. Sure, Rachel thought, humans survived and rose above that, yet still today, people live in savagery and pain. Humans turn their eyes and blame compassion fatigue. But what of those who were the victims? What of their lives?

She felt every one person’s story. Every person who plays a ‘bit part’ in someone else’s story is the main character of their own story, even if others never know it. The number of orcs and goblins killed as fodder for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie trilogies numbed her.

She had wept when reading the story of the abolition of slavery in the UK in Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains and of the unspeakable pain and suffering. This was in a Christian country, where the Church of England in fact owned a large number of slaves in the Caribbean. There was no moral debate on slavery, or the slave trade – money spoke.

Power and profit.

She was aghast at Dr Reg Hamlin’s report on the fistula women of Ethiopia. What horror! What a nightmare, in their wakefulness, for those women. What of their story, of their great adventure of life? Those individual lives.

So many tens and tens of millions over the tens of thousands of years – blighted and muted, of wasted potential and of no joy. The pain of grinding poverty, the pain of torture, the pain of illness. The sufferers were outcasts from the banquet of life.

Rachel was well aware of the irony that this mass human misery nonetheless helped to create the comforts and luxuries of today’s world – not the least of which are leisure and concomitant recreational activities. But did their gradual acquisition have to be accompanied by so much misery and injustice and ways of the ‘nobles’ and ‘self-promoters’?

She wondered, like Yossarian in Catch-22, why pain had to be at all.

In her master’s degree on the alleviations of pain, she wrote that no one could rationally see the need for, or blessings of, such suffering, or any ennobling qualities or effects. Religion’s opiates – the will of God, God loves the poor and suffering, God never gives you a challenge that is beyond you, God is there suffering with you – were very wan, and more so when you were a believer but God abandoned you to such abominations, torture, and suffering. Rachel had taken Mother Teresa’s Suffering of itself is useless as a heading, but went on to decry the balance of what she had said: Suffering that is shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift and a sign of love. Christ’s suffering proved to be a gift, the greatest gift of love, because through his sufferings our sins were atoned for. Suffering, pains, sorrow, humiliation, loneliness are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that he can kiss you as balderdash.

She had focused instead on humankind’s attempt to actually alleviate the pain. Painkillers, she had written, helped to cure the illness in many cases, as pain first had to be relieved to enable the sufferer to heal. And so the acceptance of pain as preached rather than seeking relief can be damaging.

Chemical anaesthetics were but a couple of hundred years old at best. How people had suffered before then – imagine removing a limb with no anaesthetics! She graphically pictured the horror of the Black Death, of smallpox, of Ebola, for not only the infected ones but also their families, and then life afterwards for the survivors. With an average lifespan of only thirty-five years until a couple of hundred years ago, what a woeful time was had by so many.

Rachel introduced in her thesis that the ultimate painkiller was at hand from people with a genetic make-up that results in them feeling no pain. She expressed the hope this would come to fruition – the sooner the better, even though the early indications were that it was a false dawn as yet.

Whether such painkillers would be readily available and cheap were other matters.

Power and profit.

She had devoted a chapter to the paradox of pain – that pain makes us realise that each one of us is alone, and is unique. The most quoted segment of her thesis read:

No one can really understand my pain, and how it affects me. All palliatives, all sympathy, all empathy may make it a bit easier for me to bear, but no more than that – it is my pain, unique to me, and how it affects me, and how I deal with it, are also unique to me. It is what sets us apart as individuals. Love embraces the whole world and we want to proclaim it to, and share it, with the whole world. Pain retreats us into ourselves.

Pain suffocates all else in our lives. Whatever made us people – hopes, ideas, ideals, emotions, loves, joys, laughter, dreams of the future – are suffocated, and we even wish to be rid of the body that excruciates with the pain.

Her antennae aimed at the secretary general remained quiet, so she continued to ruminate. She inwardly smiled as she equated pain with publicity – you can prepare, but you never know what you really will be like until it happens. With publicity also, how will you be perceived, and what little things will distort who you really are? She loathed the shallow insincerity of the media, though it was sometimes useful, as her Celebrity Debate appearance had demonstrated.

She did not accept that the world had to be as it is, and often wondered how it might have been different. When Rachel was a youngster, Aunt Venetia had taken her to see the film The Mission. Rachel had been completely overwhelmed. It depicted the political shenanigans that allocated a South American native population to Portugal that permitted slavery rather than Spain that did not. The aristocrat who wanted enslavement opined to the cardinal, who had been instrumental in bringing about the natives’ enslavement:

Ah, the world is thus.

To which the Cardinal replied,

No, Senor Hontar. Thus we have made the world.

She so felt for such victims – victims of the cruelty of other humans, of the unknown and unknowable will of god. The pitiless indifference of nature was bad enough.

Yet most humans have some compassion, some empathy, even if it extends no further than their line of sight. At least it extends that far. How far is God’s line of sight? Infinite? She rankled that no pieties, no sacred mysteries, no holding out of an eternity of bliss granted at the whim of a deity who deigned not to help now could atone for that lack of compassion. What human would not intervene to stop the torture or pain of a human – and even an animal – visible and present to them now?

She had resolved to shape the commission and its report by exampling those humans who had changed human existence by not accepting fate – despite what they were told, and led at first to believe, was the will of god. The game changers – those who wondered something different– never saw themselves as mere pawns of the gods.

The general populace changed the religions founders’ intentions anyway, as evidenced by not only dazzling array of religions but also the sects within them.

She had to fashion her report to cross all such boundaries and appeal to all.

Her mind wandered back to the pivotal point for her at school when an ageing history teacher was banging on about the Battle of Marathon, where the Athenians defeated Persians under Darius in 490 BCE, and his challenge that she had taken very much to heart – so much so she remembered it today word for word – as it set her off on a train of thought in a mind that was already a whirlpool:

So, there comes a time to examine the sweep of history. If the result of the Battle of Marathon had been reversed so that there had been no age of Pericles, no Socrates, no Plato, no Aristotle, no Archimedes and no Euclid What would we, of European descent, be today? In what would we believe? Our Western today, which seems so natural and inevitable, would be vastly different. She first then began to understand when the same teacher talked of ‘Whig History’ – as though history was on a set course to a determined end, rather than a confluence of chance that simply evolved.

The world she had simply seen ‘as is’ was in fact one created by a whole host of chance events. Why was she born into the family she was? Why had she escaped crippling childhood illnesses? Why had nothing disastrous happened to her family? Why had they not won the lottery?

Who would she be if her chance was to be born a woman in a Muslim country? Born in an African village? Damaged with fistula after the birth of a dead child? Born in a Bangladeshi slum?

What if she had been an autistic savant? What if she had contracted polio? Been hit by a car?

Or if her brother Julian had been the victim of one – how would that event to him have shaped her life?

What if she was born as one of the uber-rich – every whim indulged? People would be attracted to her – maybe not to her as a person, but to what she represented. She would have the power to gratify their whims, or summarily wave them off, knowing that many others would still be there, clamouring for her attention.

Power and profit.

Could she control the type of person with whom she fell in love? Was love all-consuming, or just a passing fad that lasted long enough to ensure the necessary offspring to keep the human race alive? Only once had she experienced the whiff of complete love, but that was a bizarre and impossible happening.

The list of possibilities was as boundless as there were individual human stories.

She had a greater appreciation of individual lives, including those she had visited with Jack in far-flung communities, and what they had to do to survive, to belong, to feel that they were someone. And she knew that capricious chance could change all in the blink of an eye.

As the long-forgotten Battle of Marathon affected the history of the European world, a multitude of other such events had affected the world on a grand scale while simultaneously, Rachel reflected, each and every individual has a myriad of personal battles of Marathon during his or her life, because we are all humans, with the same basic needs and the same basic aspirations, and the same basic sense of self and of self-importance. We are each the centre of our own world. That of course is the core of humans that religion appealed to.

Her antennae began to twitch as the secretary general was talking about her office accommodation, and she was not surprised to hear that her office was in the same building, but of course on a lower floor.

He concluded, as her new secretary came in to be introduced and take her to her new office: ‘It is a tremendously important task, one that may very well consume you. Be wary about that. Good luck, and remember to find time to smell the roses.’

Rachel was startled. He could not know that Venetia, when using the same exhortation, then went on to observe about Rachel: ‘But you seem to only find time to be scratched by the thorns as you whizz past the roses.’

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As she sat in her not-so-palatial office – but, gratefully, with her own bathroom suite – and a more restricted view, Rachel implemented her Scout ‘Be Prepared’ motto as she ticked off her action plan. She had already had her secretary find a small round table and chairs so she could sit there with those visitors she wanted to, and to have ready access to coffee and tea. Computer and email were already set up, but she needed IT to connect her personal email address and contacts.

Her next task was to meet Emusa informally before formally meeting him and the other commissioners. She planned to meet them all informally, but most she could not until after Friday’s press conference, as many did not arrive until then. Some she knew of, but she did not personally know any of them. She knew Emusa peripherally and that he would be disappointed in not securing the role as chair. She needed Emusa onside, personally for her agenda, and to steer each commissioner’s agenda. To make the each of those agenda symbiotic and parallel was her major task, and Emusa must be onside if that was to happen smoothly.

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When they met that same afternoon, Rachel tried not to be daunted by her trepidations. His grip was firm, and his more than two metre, muscular black frame dwarfed Rachel. She ushered him to the round table, and sat near him. He accepted her offer of coffee, and she let him start the conversation. She was in testing mode herself now.

‘Long time no see,’ opened Emusa as he stirred his coffee. ‘What have you been doing? Not heard of you for a couple of years.’

‘I’ve been in jail.’

‘You’ve WHAT?’ He gave her an incredulous look.

With a smile on her lips, Rachel turned on her charm button. ‘Sorry. European settlement in Australia was by convicts, and so we retain a few old convict idioms. Just means I have not been around, been busy, that type of thing.’

‘Obviously without having to say what or where,’ Emusa said, revealing his quick intellect.

Rachel pressed her charm button. She needed his personal loyalty to her and not just his commitment to the commission. ‘This commission has been in the offing for some time – hopefully not so much time that events have overtaken it to make it just wallpaper. I was keen to have it established, so kept myself as free as I could.’

‘I was very disappointed not to be chair, and then annoyed that it went to someone similarly qualified. My works and my qualifications are as least as good as yours,’ Emusa frankly replied. ‘I could more readily have accepted someone of a different background and with different qualifications. I must admit your appointment burnt a bit.’

Rachel gulped. She wondered at her decision to let him start the conversation.

‘Then,’ he looked directly at Rachel and she knew she must return his gaze and not blink, ‘as I read through the draft terms for the Commission and the backgrounds of the commissioners and of the delegates …’ His arms and shoulders shook, but not his gaze. ‘Maybe I was not the person to be able to balance and guide them through what the Commission has to and will achieve.’ His gaze relaxed, and it seemed to Rachel that it was he who was now turning on the charm button. ‘I can be a bit intense, a bit black and white and not grey. I live by Lord Reith’s famous dictum: There are some people whom it is one’s duty to offend, and I have also been known to retaliate first when I see conflict coming. But of course I hoped against hope I would be chosen.’

Rachel chuckled, and was engaged by his frankness. She was right to let him start. He wanted to offer support and loyalty – not have it extracted from him. Her gut feel was right.

‘Nothing wrong with conflict,’ she said. ‘It is just how you handle it that counts. You can never hope to avoid conflict, even if you did not want to achieve anything. All strengths are weaknesses, and all weaknesses are strengths – just depends on when and how they are applied.’

Erasmus smiled. ‘I do so believe in this Commission, and the results we must achieve. While no doubt you will have some role, some job description for me, I have been thinking of ways I can assist.’

Rachel was delighted. He was going to be very handy indeed, and clearly had given thought not only to the Commission, but also to what it was to achieve and how he would help. Would his offer match her expectations?

‘What I can offer to you is to be the link between you as chair and the other commissioners, as well as between you and the delegates – and anyone else.’ He laughed. ‘You are the chair, and influences will be flowing to you as thick and as fast as rats up a drainpipe.

‘So …’ he numbered off on his surprisingly slender fingers, ‘this is what I can and,’ his eyes looked up at her from his fingers to make sure she got the point, ‘cannot do.

‘Number one: I will sift and pass on what needs to be passed on, to assess whether I am really being told in confidence or whether it is expected that I break that confidence.

‘But I have to make value calls as to what I do pass on if you wish to avoid the flood. On that, you just have to accept the calls I make.’

Rachel nodded. She would have other sources anyway but he was right that she needed a filter.

‘Number two: I know how to formulate the right questions.’

‘What do you mean?’ enquired Rachel.

‘Well. Try this. Question: When is the last time you had fruit? Answer: Two weeks ago. Question: When is the last time you had fruit salad? Answer: About three months ago.’

Rachel smiled. A neat point indeed.

‘Number three: You,’ he pointed straight at her, ‘need to write the draft.

‘I,’ he turned his finger back to himself, ‘need to have the majority of the commissioners accept it, albeit with some tweaking so they all can claim some ownership. Their claiming ownership of it is critically important.

‘I heard that there can be only one dissenting report. I hope there will be none – unanimity must be our aim – but damn good move to create discord amongst the dissenters.’

Rachel nodded again – again storing away that he must have very ready access to the secretary general to know of the amended terms.

‘Number four,’ he said as his right index finger slammed down on his left-hand little finger, ‘however, the acceptance of the report outside the commission is something I cannot deliver!’ His eyes twinkled. ‘I am only your Thomas Huxley after all.’

‘My bulldog does not seem to be a fair name for you,’ Rachel smiled. She had immediately warmed to his generosity of spirit. She knew from bitter experience that most people needed private and public praise, and for leaders not to simply keep that praise and acknowledgement in their own heads.

‘Thank you. It is not a matter of negatively being aware of our limitations, but rather positively playing to our strengths.

‘What you have told me you can achieve are the very things I need, but in turn I could not deliver them