Free Sum by David Eagleman Page A

light. We are the biggest devices they could build: to them we are giants, large enough to jump creeks and scale boulders, an impressive machine ideal for planetary exploration.
    The patient Cartographers pushed us out onto a spot on the surface and watched for millennia as we spread like ink over the surface of the planet until every zone took on the color of human coverage, until every region came under the watchful gaze of the compact mobile sensors.
    Estimating our progress from their control center, the mobile camera engineers congratulated themselves on a job well done. They waited for humans to spend lifetimes turning their data sensors on patches of ground, the strata of rocks, the distribution of trees.
    And yet, despite the initial success, the Cartographers are profoundly frustrated with the results. Despite their planetary coverage and long life spans, the mobile cameras collect very little that is useful for cartography. Instead, the devices turn their ingeniously created compact lenses directly into the gazes of other compact lenses—an ironic way to trivialize the technology. On their sophisticated sensory skin, they simply want to be stroked. The brilliant air-compression sensors are turned toward the whispers of lovers rather than critical planetary data. Despite their robust outdoor design, they have spent their energies building shelters into which they cluster with one another. Despite good spreading on large scales, they clump at small scales. They build communication networks to view pictures of one another remotely when they are apart.
    Day after day, with sinking hearts, the Cartographers scroll through endless reels of useless data. The head engineer is fired. He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.

 
    Seed
    Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He’s not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He’s not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.
    He is as impressed by the gorgeous biological results as the rest of us, and He often spends slow afternoons drifting through jungle canopies or along the sea floor, reveling in the unexpected beauty.
    When our species stumbled into sentience, we became awed by His lightning-bolt experiments with electricity, His racing cyclones, His explosive fun with volcanoes. These effects generated more awe and perplexity among the beautiful new species than He had expected. He didn’t want to accept credit for something He did not deserve, but acclaim was tendered without request. He began to find humans irresistible with their unrestricted love. We quickly became His chosen species.
    Like us, He is awestruck when He ponders the perfect symphonies of internal organs, the global weather systems, the curious menagerie of marine species. He doesn’t really know how it all works. He’s an explorer, curious and smart, seeking the answers. But with enough of our adoration, the temptation overcame: we assumed the creation was planned, and He no longer corrected the mistake.
    Recently He has run into an unforeseen problem: our species is growing smarter. While we were once easy to awe, dragging knuckles and gaping at fire, we have replaced confusion with equations. Tricks we used to fall for have been deduced. Physical laws predict the right answers; the intellectual territories we once gave away now convene under the banner of better explanations. We command theories of physics so strange and complex that God gets blood pressure