The Fountains of Youth (38 page)

“The problem,” Tricia explained, pretending to talk to Lua as well as to me, “is that the earliest adventures in human-machine hybridization were carried out at a time when nobody had any real idea of what might be practical and what wouldn’t. Their mistakes generated a lot of bad publicity. It was a time when IT still stood for information technology, because there was no nanotech to produce internal technology. There were no sloths, let alone silvers, but the computers of the day were getting faster and faster, juggling what seemed to their users to be huge amounts of data. It seemed only natural to think of building bridges between the brain and clever machinery, so there was a lot of talk about memory boxes and psychedelic synthesizers. People who actually went so far as to build connection systems into their heads were regarded as madmen, or even criminalized, but that only made them seem more heroic to their supporters. They couldn’t know that the things they were trying to do were much more difficult than they thought.”

“Some of them were,” I agreed. “But we don’t make fun of the idea of slotting additional inorganic memory stores into the brain because it’s impossible, but because it no longer seems as necessary to us as it did to people whose so-called rejuvenation technologies tended to disrupt and diminish their existing memories. We don’t laugh at the idea of psychedelic synthesizers because they didn’t work—they just seem like absurdly blunt instruments now that we have a much better understanding of brain chemistry and a sophisticated VE technology that can produce the same sort of rewards with infinitely less risk. Anyway, the real problem was that one or two of the things the brainfeed brigade were trying to do turned out to be much
easier
to accomplish than their opponents thought.”

“What do you mean?” Lua asked, obligingly.

“I mean that one of the technologies that the world’s not-so-secret masters really did decide to put away for the general good was a device that really did turn human beings into robots, at least temporarily.”

“That’s not fair,” Tricia said, presumably echoing the views of Samuel Wheatstone. “If the so-called Medusa device hadn’t made its debut as a murder weapon, employed by the world’s last and most flamboyant
serial killer, it wouldn’t have seemed anywhere near as demonic as it did. That whole line of technical enquiry was strangled at birth, without any regard to beneficial uses or useful applications. Like the IT versions of VE tech, it was labeled dangerous and shoved into SusAn with all the other criminals that the Hardinist Tyranny didn’t want to deal with. In a world that had an authentically democratic government instead of a gang of bureaucrats dancing to the tune of a gang of pirates who seized economic control of the ecosphere way back in the twenty-first century, that kind of thing couldn’t happen. The people in the outer system won’t tolerate that kind of intellectual repression, so why should we put up with it here on Earth?”

“IT isn’t the only acronym to have changed its meaning since the twenty-first century,” I pointed out. “You used VE just now to mean Virtual Experience, but it’s not so long ago that it was only used to mean Virtual Environment. We’d still be using it in the narrower way if the techniques hadn’t taken aboard certain features of the supposedly suppressed technologies you’re using as key examples. The harmless and beneficial applications of IT-based VE and the so-called Medusa device
have
been integrated into the way we live, having been redirected into orthodox channels. The idea that whole areas of research have been suspended and deep-frozen is nonsensical—it’s a myth.”

Tricia wouldn’t admit it, of course, but I felt that I could at least hold my own on that particular battleground—and I therefore assumed that Wheatstone would choose another. I knew that I had to expect the unexpected, but I tried as best I could to put myself in his shoes, hoping to anticipate his line of attack far more accurately than I had when we had crossed swords publicly before. It seemed to me, when I did this, that there was one line of Cyborganizer rhetoric to which I might be particularly vulnerable.

The Cyborganizers were skeptical of the claim that Zaman transformations guaranteed true emortality. Although the oldest true emortals had now beaten the previous records set by false emortals, and showed no obvious sign of being unable to extend their lives indefinitely, the Cyborganizers insisted that what was presently called “emortality” would eventually prove wanting. They conceded that Zaman transformations had dramatically increased the human life span but insisted that
some kinds of aging processes—particularly those linked to DNA copying-errors—were still effective. Eventually, they claimed, people would again begin to die of “age-related causes.” Even if it took thousands of years, and even if they avoided the perils of robotization, true emortals would begin to fade away—and in the meantime, they would remain vulnerable to all manner of accidents.

In the great tradition of preachers, the Cyborganizers played upon emortal fears only to stoke up demand for a new kind of hope. They wanted to resurrect the term that emortality had made obsolete: immortality. In order to turn flawed emortality into authentic immortality, the Cyborganizers claimed, it would be necessary to look to a combination of organic and inorganic technologies. The deepest need of contemporary humankind, they said, was not more of the same precarious kind of life, but a guaranteed “afterlife.”

What they meant by “afterlife” was not, of course, what their religious predecessors had meant, but some kind of transcription of the personality into a new matrix that would combine the best features of inorganic and organic chemistry.

“All this is old stuff too,” I told Tricia, by way of practice. “It’s the old chestnut about uploading one’s mind to a computer, given a new lick of paint and a bit of fancy dress. The mind isn’t a kind of ghost that can simply be moved out of one body into another. Our bodies
are
our selves. The mind is a condition of the whole, not an inhabitant of the part. It’s so easy nowadays to design a silver that can replicate the speech patterns and responses of a particular person that we all use them to answer our phones, and the best ones can pass for their models in polite society almost indefinitely—but none of us is idiot enough to believe that his answering machine is another version of himself. No one thinks that the fact that his silver will carry on answering his phone after he’s dead means that he’ll really still be alive.”

“That’s exactly what Samuel means by a
sketchy caricature,”
Tricia told me. “We’re much more sophisticated than the old advocates of uploading.
We’re
talking about gradual personal evolution, not abrupt metamorphosis. We’re talking about the evolution of the body beyond genetically specified limits. We’re talking about
the expansion of the self.
Fabers and their kin are already redefining their own selfhood by altering
their physical makeup, and they already know that however clever genetic engineers might become in adapting men for life in microworlds or within the ecospheres of Earthlike planets, only cyborgization can create entities capable of working in genuinely extreme environments. We’re already doing it. Everybody with IT is already a cyborg, and everybody in the outer system is perfectly at home with the idea that the time has come to let IT expand into ET—
external technology.

“It’s
because
the mind is a condition of the whole and not an inhabitant of the part that we’re already engaged in a process of machine-enhanced mental evolution. That’s the very essence of cyborganization, and the only reason you can’t see it, Morty, is that you’re stuck in the past, refusing to accept release from the prison
oí frail flesh.
The day will come when you want to live in the future, Morty—and that’s when you’ll have to accept that the only way to avoid becoming a robotically petrified mind in a slowly decaying body is to
evolve”

I
t was by testing argumentative strategies on Tricia that I derived the slogan that I was determined to carry into battle against Samuel Wheatstone. The incantation that I hoped to use to rally the media audience to my cause was
Cyborganization is robotization by another name.
I didn’t tell Tricia, of course, in case she passed it on to Wheatstone, but I did confide it to Lua Tawana, after swearing her to secrecy.

I think she kept the secret, but even if she didn’t, she wasn’t responsible for what happened. The simple fact is that Samuel Wheat-stone would have beaten me anyway, because he was a better player of the media game than I was. It was, after all, his vocation. He was a professional fool, and I was a serious historian.

I never really stood a chance.

I did put up a slightly better show against Nyxson/Wheatstone than I had the first time around. I managed to get more of my own argument on to the record, and I did contrive to repeat my chosen slogan often enough to make it a standard item of popular rhetoric, although it was spoiled by the extra spin that he managed to impart to it. In spite of my preparations, I was completely unready for Wheatstone’s main line of attack.

Tricia told me afterward that she was as surprised as I was, and I believed her. Samuel Wheatstone’s attempts to imagine himself in my shoes had obviously been far more successful than my attempts to put myself in his, and he had worked out how to sting me with callous precision.

Before the broadcast began I thought myself sufficiently mature to be unaffected by any probable insult. Perhaps I was—but it had not seemed possible, let alone probable, that Wheatstone would sink so low as to charge me with being a closet Thanaticist.

“Your interminable book is only posing as a history,” he told me, languidly. “It’s actually an extended exercise in the pornography of death. The fact that your commentaries strive so hard to be boring and
clinical isn’t a mark of scholarly dignity—it’s a subtle means of heightening response.”

“That’s absurd!” I protested—but it would have take far more than
that
to put him off.

“You pretend to be standing aside from the so-called war against death, as a painstaking chronicler and fair-minded judge,” he went on, “but you’re actually fully engaged in the final campaign of that war, and the army to which you’ve been conscripted is death’s. You’ve railed in the past against those who sought to restore a proper recognition of death’s reality and utility to human affairs, but you posed as an enemy of death merely to further death’s cause. You attacked Thanaticism, but you were yourself the most extreme and most insidious kind of Thanaticist. You purported to fight the devil by pretending that he did not exist, but what greater service could you do the devil than to persuade his victims that he was a mere mirage?

“In fact, Mortimer, you knew all along that death had not been banished from human affairs. You knew all along that what we choose to call
true emortality
is merely a postponement of the final reckoning. You knew all along that even so-called true emortals age physically, albeit very slowly, and that even if they didn’t, they would still age mentally by virtue of being trapped in the same physical matrix: becalmed, crystallized, and ultimately sterilized. Cyborganization is robotization by another name, you say. Very well—I accept the assertion. The time is long past for the idea of robotization to be reclaimed from those who use it unthinkingly as a mere insult. Let us call it by its proper name:
androidization
—for what we are talking about is, after all, a petrifaction of the flesh, a death-in-life, a silverization of the living personality.

“If we are truly to live forever, Mortimer, then we must be forever open to the possibility of change, and in order to do that, we must be prepared not merely to transform our flesh by genetic engineering but augment and enhance it by mechanical supplementation. Mere humans cannot
live
forever; the best they can ever hope for is to
exist
forever—but a cyborg is an evolving being, a being for whom future possibilities are infinite. Whoever opposes cyborganization opposes life itself. Whoever condemns cyborganization is not merely a historian but a
champion
of death, a Thanaticist in the truest and most sinister sense of the word.

“I was a Thanaticist myself, in my youth, but all I ever advocated was the right of human beings to complete the processes of death that shaped their bodies and their personalities, to follow through its patient artwork. When you argued with me then you refused to concede that you or I or anyone should exercise that right, lest we should sacrifice greater and more wonderful opportunities—yet here you are again, refusing to concede that you or I or anyone human should exercise the right to explore those greater and more wonderful opportunities, lest we should sacrifice the privilege of dying as we are. You have immersed yourself so deeply in the history of death, Mortimer, that you have become death’s last and best ally on Earth.”

And so on. Insult after stinging insult—but never to the point of actual injury. It was, after all, only a game. It was all nonsense, but it washed over me like an irresistible tide. I couldn’t fight it within the limitations of the live debate. I went down to ignominious defeat, and I went gracelessly.

I had to admit that Wheatstone did what he had come to do with a certain flair—and he looked magnificent, especially in close-up. He had made further modifications to his skull fixtures, and his mechanical eyes had the most remarkable stare I had ever encountered.

Afterward, he said: “I don’t suppose you’ll thank me for all the money you’ll make this time around either, but I don’t mind. All I need is the knowledge of a kindness done, a generous impulse served. All I ask in return is that when you finally get around to the history of the twenty-eighth and thirty-first centuries, you grant me a couple of modest footnotes.”

I promised him that if he ever did anything worthy of note, I would certainly consider the possibility.

Days, if not weeks, had passed before I worked out what I might have done to counter his assault. Perhaps I should have conceded the point that the clinicality of my commentary was a means of heightening reader response. Perhaps I should have argued, passionately, that there was no other way to make readers who have long abandoned their fear of death sensitive to the appalling shadow that it once cast over the human world. Perhaps I should have accepted, proudly, that my history could not help appearing to modern readers as an exercise in the
pornography of death, because death is itself the ultimate and perhaps the only true pornography. Perhaps I should have… but what point is there in such regretful imaginary reconstructions?