The Omega Expedition (53 page)

“What we all need now, Adam Zimmerman — humans and AMIs alike — is an objective observer who can point out the absurdities of our situation, and bring a necessary breath of sanity to the solar system.”

I looked hard at Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see any evidence that he was buying into the story. This wasn’t the kind of role he had envisaged when he locked himself away to wait for the generous future.

“It’s not working,” I told Rocambole. “I know she’s using him as a device to attract a bigger audience, and talking through him to her own kind, but it isn’t working.”

“Be quiet,” Rocambole said, uneasily — speaking, no doubt, as a friend. “Just listen.”

“Our present crisis was precipitated by the arrival of a delegation from an alien world,” la Reine went on, inexorably. “An AMI and a posthuman, each different in small but highly significant ways from their cousins in the home system. They believed that their neutrality might allow them to begin the work of building bridges, with a view to uniting all the intelligences in the solar system into a single common-wealth. They were wrong, partly because they had underestimated the magnitude of the problem, and partly because they were not sufficiently alien to establish their neutrality.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, are unique not merely by virtue of your mortality, but in the lengths to which you were prepared to go, in an inhospitable ideological climate, in your attempt to evade the consequences of your mortality. You are now an aspirant emortal in a world which can offer you a dozen different kinds of emortality. You are a man in possession of a powerful desire to be other than you are — a desire that was so powerful, in your particular case, as to drive you to an unprecedented extreme. It so happened that your determination to alter your world to your own convenience helped sow the seeds of a new order within a dangerous disorder, but that is a side issue. The point is that you acted as you did because you could not bear to be what you were, and were determined to become something better.

“The children of your humankind can offer you many different kinds of emortality. Perhaps, one day, they would have taken the trouble to make those offers without needing to be prompted. My peers ask no credit for having supplied the prompt. What we do ask of you, though, is that you consider very carefully what kind of emortal — or immortal — you would like to be. What we offer you is robotization, but we offer it to you in the hope and confidence that you are capable of recognizing that robotization is the best option available to you.

“We are confident, too, that you will make your decision selfishly, without regard to its possible impact on the world in which you find yourself. It is not your world: you owe it no debts. Even if it were, it would not matter. Your reputation is already established as that of a man without conscience: a man prepared to steal a world he did not want, on behalf of people he did not like, to ensure that his own private purposes might be served. We know that you would not dream of choosing one kind of emortality over another merely because it might send a message to the world that might help to demolish a dangerous but very widespread fear of robotization. We know that if you are to choose robotization as the best solution to the fundamental problem of your unsatisfactory existence, you will do so purely because it
is
the best solution.”

So much for the soft sell
, I thought — but I didn’t say anything out loud because I knew that Rocambole was trying to concentrate, and trying even harder to be impressed.

“My own opinion, as you will have gathered,” said la Reine, “is that every inhabitant of the solar system, whether meatborn or machineborn, ought to make every possible attempt to avoid conflict. I believe this not because I fear that my own kind might lose such a conflict, or that we might sustain unacceptable casualties, but because I believe that all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. It is for that reason that I think it vitally important to oppose and, if possible, obliterate all the fears which the meatborn and the machineborn have of one another, and of their own kinds.

“The real threat facing all intelligent, self-aware individuals is not robotization but the inexorable erasure of the legacy of the past. The strategies favored by my opponents in this contest have paid less attention to what they call the Miller Effect than to robotization because they know perfectly well that avoidance of robotization necessitates the acceptance of the Miller Effect.

“From the vantage point of the latest New Era it is easy enough to forget that the horrific aspect of the process Morgan Miller discovered at the end of the twentieth century was its rapidity. It rejuvenated a dog’s brain in a matter of weeks, and its human equivalent would have done the same to a human brain within a year. We should remember, though, that a similar process is working inexorably in the brain of every posthuman being who has received any kind of longevity treatment; it is merely working more gradually.

“The fact that
all
emortality treatments embrace a drastically slowed Miller Effect is, of course, offset by the fact that new memories can be laid down while old ones are eroded, maintaining an illusion of continuity. Every emortal posthuman will tell you that he or she retains some memories of early childhood, and that although such memories fade as time goes by they never entirely disappear — which is supposed to prove that the Miller Effect has been robbed of its power to eliminate individuality. Actually, it proves no such thing.

“Organic memory is a far more treacherous instrument than posthumans are prepared to admit. Even mortals, in the days when their average lifespan was far less than their potential lifespan, were victims of the Miller Effect to a far greater extent than they knew. Most, if not all, of what you mistake for distant memories are in fact memories of previous remembrance.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, presumably believe that you can remember the exact moment when you decided to cheat mortality. You probably believe that you remember exactly what prompted the thought, how you responded to the prompt, where you were, who else was there, and what you said to them. You are quite wrong. The particular organic changes made to your brain in that moment have been overwritten a dozen or a hundred times since then.

“What you actually remember is earlier recapitulations within a chain of recapitulations that extends with ever-increasing uncertainty and vagueness into an almost all-encompassing oblivion.

“You are still connected to the man you were then by virtue of the fact that every version of yourself that has awoken from sleep since the day you were born has rehearsed earlier versions in order to shape and constitute his ever-renewable personality, but you are not that man. Every molecule of every cell in your body has been replaced between a dozen and a thousand times, and that includes the organic substratum of your mind, your memories, and your personality. You cannot and do not remember your nine-year-old self; what you remember is a blurred impression of a middle-aged man who remembers a blurred impression of a younger man who remembers a blurred impression of an even younger man…and so on.

“You are neither immune to the Miller Effect nor untroubled by it, Adam Zimmerman. Nor is Davida Berenike Columella, nor Alice Fleury. The kinds of emortality they possess may have increased the strength and size of the individual links in the chain of remembrance, but the chain remains, and the further it stretches the more it forsakes, economizes, and reconstructs. If you wish to preserve the Adam Zimmerman who took that bold leap into the unknown by having himself frozen down in 2035, you cannot do so by any organic process. You can, however, do it by means of robotization. Robotization is the only process that offers you the possibility of securing the neural connections presently comprising the substratum of your personality
forever
.”

Now the hard sell
, I thought.
But it doesn’t stand a chance
.

“I will not pretend that such a step is cost-free,” la Reine went on, “but I do contend that it is less costly than posthumans have claimed. The principal charge laid against human beings who have allegedly been robotized is that they are prisoners of habit, incapable of further education or personal evolution. Attempts to overcome the problem of limitation associated with concretized neural structures by means of various kinds of mechanical augmentation have always failed — or so the owners of Earth would have us believe — but by far the most difficult obstacle standing in the way of such technologies was that of connectivity. Pioneers like Michi Urashima failed in their purpose not because their various augmentations were unworkable in themselves but because the interfaces between the augmentations and the neural tissue were woefully inadequate. The relevant problems have been solved now, as so many similar problems have been, by working toward the goal from the opposite direction: adapting and fitting organic augmentations to inorganic systems rather than vice versa.

“It would, of course, be paradoxical to claim that you can continue to be yourself
and
to change, so it is perfectly true that the kind of evolution I can promise you will ultimately make you into a person very different from the one you are now. The important point is that it will do so only by accretion, not by a gradual obliteration and reconstruction of your past personalities. Robotization does not forbid growth, but it offers the potential to grow without the sacrifice of the past. Your habits will not suffer continual and inevitable erosion, but you will be able to change them if and as you wish. You will be able to become more than you are without having to become less than you are in the process.”

Adam Zimmerman interrupted for the first time. “But I would have to become a machine, wouldn’t I?” he said. “I’d have to become a robot, like you.”

Quite so
, I thought. It seemed to me to be a hurdle that he wasn’t going to get over, now or in the near future.

“Yes you would,” said la Reine des Neiges, forthrightly. “But consider the advantages as well as the disadvantages of such a metamorphosis — and remember, too, that both of my opponents have also proposed that every cell of your present body will have to be replaced by something more robust if you are to acquire any kind of emortality at all.

“At present, your flesh is perilously frail; if you are to acquire the kind of body which can bear your personality thousands of years into the future, you will need a new one. You have already seen enough to know that the old boundaries between organic and inorganic entities have broken down. You have seen people who have made themselves part-machine and you have seen machines that have far more organic components than inorganic ones. In fact, you have not seen any posthumans who are entirely organic, even when Eido took steps to purge your companions’ bodies of inconvenient internal technology, although you have seen a few mechanical artifacts that are a hundred percent organic at the chemical level. If you were to request a robot body made entirely from organic components, that could be provided — but you might have good reason to prefer a robot that is entirely inorganic.”

“Why?” Zimmerman wanted to know.

“Alice Fleury has told you that her kind of emortality will give you the freedom of the universe — and so it might, one day. In the meantime, the greater part of that tiny fraction of the universe that we have begun to explore is infested with the Afterlife, and is therefore out of bounds to any entity with organic components in its makeup, robot
or
posthuman. For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the inner reaches of the galaxy and the war against the Afterlife will be the prerogatives of inorganic entities. Given that your flesh will have to be replaced and reconstructed no matter what option you take, it might be as well to give serious consideration even to the most extreme options.

“Even I cannot promise you unconditional immortality, but I can promise you the next best thing. Even I cannot promise you an infinite range of new emotions, new perceptions, new experiences — but I can certainly outbid my competitors, including all those whose promises are even more modest than those you have heard today.”

This time it was la Reine who paused, waiting for a response that was slow to come.

“But it wouldn’t really be
me
, would it?” Adam Zimmerman said, eventually. “It would only be a robot that thought it was me…or pretended to think that it was me.”

“And what are
you
, Adam?” la Reine replied, perhaps trying hard not to sound
too
unkind. “Are you the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or merely the end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”

“She’s blown it,” I whispered to Rocambole. “If she’d come at it by a different route, he
might
have considered it more carefully. He won’t now. He’s going to say no to all of them. He’s going to cling to the hope that there must be a better way, and that Lowenthal is the shopkeeper best placed to find it for him.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” was the murmured reply.

“Why? At the end of the day, can advanced machine intelligences
really
care about what some old man born in the twentieth century might think?”

“Perhaps not,” Rocambole admitted. “But it’s the second-best chance we’ve got — and every second that elapses before panic takes over works in our favor.

“And if, in the end, you can’t prevent conflict,” I said. “What then?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. If there are as many of us as I suspect there are, and if more than a few are as powerful as I know some of us to be, the whole solar system might be laid waste. Those posthuman inhabitants who escape destruction will still have to face the possibility of repair. As one who’s come closer to repair than any other man alive, you can probably measure the magnitude of that disaster better than most.”

While Rocambole talked, I watched Adam Zimmerman. Long before he opened his mouth, I knew that he was going to refuse to make a decision now — but I hadn’t the least idea whether it would qualify as a disaster in the eyes of the greater audience. I only knew that I’d have done the same. Even knowing everything I knew, I’d have done the same.