It sounds like an organization for old men who like to sit around smoking cigars, drinking expensive brandy, and watching skin flicks—but it wasn’t that at all.  The Club more resembled the Star Chamber courts, that medieval institution comprised of a few elite know-it-alls intent on improving things.  To get the job done, the Courts used extreme punishment for minor infractions of arcane laws based on superstition.  They knew what was up and what was down and they didn’t mind sacrificing a few members of the rabble to effect their ideas of order. 
       The Club was like that in a way, with the “elite” being the leading technocranks of the day.  The superstition was gone, naturally, replaced by undying faith in technological development and progress. They believed the manifest destiny of mankind was not just to inherit the Earth, but to fix it.  To refashion it in our own image.
       The members of the Club were fanatical in their worship, blind to the needs of the unbelievers, and ruthless in their methods.  I joined as soon as I was invited.
       I’ll never forget the circumstances.  I was experiencing an excruciating evening in the Karaoke bar of the Continental Hotel, where I happened to be attending a convention for emerging technologies.  Evening was supposed to be my time to relax: my break from the daytime clamor of the hawkers of the “new” and the “wonderful.”  My Beefeater’s time.
       For the most part, the convention had been lukewarm.  Same ol’ whiners and complainers were there: NGOs questioning GMOs, newbie geologists questioning the moon operations, theosophists questioning everything.  Same ol’ chanters outside the hotel pissed about the climate change.  Same ol’ cheerleaders inside promising world peace through stem cell research. The usual futurists urging everyone to remain calm, while frightening them with their predictions of eternal life and digitized minds.  In other words: no serious participants in any corner.
       My own poorly-attended panel (“Styrofoam in the Diet”) had concluded that afternoon and I planned to leave the mess behind in the morning—a full day before the conclusion of the convention. 
       But it was evening now; my time for a well-deserved rest.  My Beefeater’s time. Or so I thought, as I sat in the Karaoke corner of the Continental bar, listening to the seventh version of “Crazy,” a little off-key and a little ahead of the beat.  At one point the bartender and I exchanged rolling eye glances.  We silently agreed that enough was enough.  I paid my bill and he downed his fourth shot of Tequila sans lemon and salt.
       Just as I was heading for the Gent’s, a solid voice called my name. 
       “Jack,” I heard.
       I turned and saw George Dorffman, the futurist of the futurists, sitting alone at the far end of the bar, the closest seat to the stage. 
       “I missed your panel today,” he said.  “My own on life extension was held at the same time.  I’m sorry I missed it, I like your ideas.  I’m wondering if you’d talk to me about them.”
       Wow.  That blew me away.  Here was the world’s leading expert on immortality wondering about my chelate-polystyrene glycolysis.  I sat down next to him and he bought me a martini.
       “Don’t you just love Patsy?” he asked.
       “Sure,” I answered, not sure if I actually did.  I certainly had before I entered the bar, but now, after all these versions of “Crazy”…
        I grunted.
       “So let’s hear about your esterification,” he said. 
       Glycolysis, actually,” I corrected him, and then went into detail about the process.  We talked long after the last Patsy Cline-wannabe had sung her little heart out.  (Actually, I believe the bartender clandestinely unplugged the Karaoke machine at midnight.)  At any rate, the disco lights went out and the parade of singers stopped.  Prior to that, Dorffman had been only half-heartedly talking to me.  Once the “entertainment” was over, however, he became animated and focused on the conversation.
       I explained my process to him and he talked about how it would be a breakthrough in the cure for poverty.
       “Yeah, but no one’s interested in eating Styrofoam,” I said. 
       “That’s because you’re going about it all wrong,” Dorffman said.
       “I’m not really going about it at all,” I said.
       “You should,” he said.  “You could make a lot of money.”
       “How?” I said.
       “Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.  Just do it.  Start a small company, get me on board.  We’ll attract some investors, make a million, and then go on to the next thing.”
       “You want to start a company with me?”
       “Sure, why not?”
       “I’m a scientist, not a businessman.”
       “I’m a businessman first, then a scientist,” he said.  “We’ll make a good couple.”
       “I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it before.”
       “Well, think about it now.  Get out of the University.  Get down to Wall Street.  See me tomorrow if you’re interested.”
He finished the last of his seltzer, swung his suit jacket onto his shoulder and headed for the exit, waving a goodbye without turning around.
       You can bet I pretty much decided to stay on for the duration of the convention after all.
       The next day I went to a demonstration on replacement brain therapy, a talk on a new strain of e-coli bacteria useful for curing cancer, and a discussion on the use of asbestos composites in the fashion industry: all yesterday’s breakthroughs cloaked in an edgy promise of a brighter tomorrow.
       Towards the end of the day, Dorffman came up to me while I was in heavy discussion with a couple of Caltech groupies on the subject of recycling Lake Michigan for all the goo dumped there by Dow.  They were convinced it was pure genius.  I didn’t bother telling them that the feds were already attached and had assigned contracts to their favorite corporations for the very project they were pissing all over themselves about.
       Dorffman mumbled something about having a couple of investors that wanted to meet me. 
       Naturally I excused myself.  At that point I would have excused myself if it had been Ralph Nader inviting me to a Greenpeace rally, but this was George Dorffman inviting me to my future.  I hastened in my excuse.
       The investors turned out to be none other than Mike Gluhince, head of Chopper, Inc.(need I say more?), and Bill Johns, owner of just about everything else.  These boys were waiting for me up in Dorffman’s suite.  They were drinking brandy in snifters and they offered me one.  I eagerly accepted.
       “Jack,” Dorffman said.  “This investment deal that we’re talking about isn’t exactly why you’re here.”
       “Oh?” I said, my heart sinking.  I saw all the fantasies I’d been dreaming during the day fading.
       “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Dorffman added, sensing my crest falling.  “Bill’ll set you up, you can talk about that later.  We’ve got something more important now.  We’d like you to dump that Texas University gig you’ve got and go legit.”
       “Yeah, yeah,” I said, eager but confused.  Wasn’t that what the business deal was about? Going legit in a businessman’s world?
       “What we really want right now is to invite you to join The Club.”
       “Okay,” I said, still eager and still confused.
       “The Club is an organization designed to effect the Singularity.”
       “Uh huh,” I said, less confused, less eager.
       “We believe that once Singularity is achieved, poverty, war, and mortality will disappear.”
       “Okay,” I said, drawing it out slowly.  I hated questioning the world’s smartest people.  I hadn’t paid much attention to the Singularists.  Certainly I believed that once artificial intelligence bypassed human intelligence, things would definitely change, but cure poverty?  I don’t know.  It’s one thing to spend a weekend with a bunch of fanatics and fortune tellers repeating three decades of catch phrases involving world peace (not to mention centuries of scientific promise resulting in a reshuffling of the globe, a robbing Peter to pay Paul while winding up with the same set of cards that were dealt in the first place, just in different hands), but Dorffman, Gluhince, and Johns.  You don’t question their beliefs.  The proof is in the pudding.  They developed the software.  They ran the world.  Looking back, I can see it was a mistake to put so much confidence in so few individuals, but at the time, everything was just so heady.
       “We like your ideas,” Gluhince was saying.  “Your chemistry is sound.  It’s radical and requires drastic measures to get it implemented.  We can’t wait for the FDA and public sentiment to get behind it.”
       “We need it now,” Johns picked up the thread.  “In our current lifetime.  To extend our current lifetime.”
       “This breakthrough is key to solving numerous problems,” one of them said, I don’t remember now just who.  I was too giddy to pay attention.  The futurist’s futurists were inviting me to join with them in saving the world.  What would you do, walk away? I don’t think so.  Especially because the scientific realm I lived and worked in was so lukewarm to my own research—and now here was a small group of believers.  And they had money.
       The noise of the day, the incessant cheering and jeering rattling around in my head, juxtaposed with this new offer, and mixed with cigar smoke (somebody had lit one up) was too much for me.  I passed out.
       When I came to, I said, “yes.”
       There was no hazing, no purple robes, no masks, no blood rituals, no chants, no candles, no weird hex signs.  Just a simple oath: “I promise to effect the Singularity in whatever way I can, but not tell anybody about it.”
       Not very poetical, I thought to myself as I repeated the phrase with my right hand raised.  But we’re not artists here.  We’re industrialists.  The beauty of the word is incidental as well as expendable.  What’s important is efficiency and getting the job done.  And we can do that part.  It’s up to others to sort it out, find the love in it.
       I worked for a number of years with the group.  Johns set me up in a breakfast cereal enterprise.  You’ve heard of us.   You invite us to your table every morning: “Jabberfoam: Breakfast for Life!”
       We did wonderful things.  I’ve never felt more satisfaction in my life.  Three years in The Club was more fulfilling than twenty years of research back at Texas U.
       Dorffman headed up a team that worked out a hormonal replacement scheme.  They came up with a formula for a substance that binds to the brain’s antagonistic center, rendering it ineffective.  They got the formula incorporated into the most popular pharmaceuticals and foods.  Viagra, Prozac, and Jabberfoam all had enough of the hormone to be effective.  Within a year, the public became complacent.  No one argued about self-replicating nanobots anymore.
       Once that was done, Johns and his business partner, Bob Samson, put together a scheme for a nanobot military.  The buggers injected the little buggers into the environment.  Every leaf, twig, microbe in the country became infected with tiny men o’ war.  At the flick of Johns’ or Samson’s wrist, a whole town could implode, explode, dissolve, or otherwise dissipate, depending on the code carried in the prevalent ’bots in the area.
       “They want to protect the environment?” Johns joked.  “How about the environment protecting us?”
I clapped him on the back for that one.
       Things were going swimmingly.  Eternal life was on the horizon, absolute security had become a reality.  You wonder why I am submitting this deposition to the committee at this time, after so much upward progress has been made.
       I’ll tell you:  Dorffman finally went too far.  Everything would have been perfect if he’d just kept his idiosyncrasies to himself.  His insanity, maybe.  His extreme bad taste for sure.  But he didn’t.
       Fooling people into thinking they were eating food when it was just plastic, terraforming an already terraformed and some say “perfect” planet, foisting hormone therapy on an unsuspecting population, those were all courageous and forward-thinking ideas.  What bothers me is Dorffman’s personal project.
       See, he announced one day his plan to reanimate dead people. 
       “People we all miss,” he said.  “People that made a contribution and can continue to do so.  Using the Jurassic Park method, we’re going to regrow our heroes from the past.  Our geniuses.”
       “Should that be genii?” Gluhince asked, not joking.
       “Fabulous,” the rest of us said.  We were thinking Newton, Maxwell, Salk, maybe even Abraham and Moses if their bones were really still around.  But Dorffman’s thoughts were elsewhere. 
       “I have a certain someone else in mind,” he said.  “Someone we all miss dearly.  Someone I’ve worshipped all my life.”
       We couldn’t think who it could be—Einstein, Dyson, Shannon?  This certain someone was Dorffman’s idol.  The one he channeled for his bigger-than-life ideas, his creativity, his muse.
       Imagine our disappointment when we all went to see the culture’s progress and saw the label, “Baby Patsy Cline” on the Petri dish.  It wasn’t so much his “muse” as his “music.”  Good God, I thought to myself, what are we coming to?
       I turned my back on The Club the next day and made this trip to Washington.  You see, the personal has no place in the progress of mankind.  Once you get personal, the whole thing just breaks down.