It was the most blatant nonsense imaginable, but it emerged into the media marketplace at a time when anything connected to the cause of Cyborgization was newsworthy, and it became news.
If I had any defense to offer, Samuel Wheatstone ringingly declared to the world, he would be only too pleased to debate the matter in public.
I could not refuse the challenge, not because it would have seemed cowardly but because it would have been seen by the public at large as a tacit confession that I was a bad historian.
I didn’t want to rush into anything without preparing my ground, but time was of the essence. I had to find out what the Cyborganizers were all about in a tearing hurry, and to do that I had to wheedle my way back into Tricia’s good books. I shamelessly exploited the fact that the twelve-year-old Lua was genuinely distressed by our estrangement, and I managed to avoid getting sidetracked into mere technical discussion by including Lua in our educational discussions.
“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 easierto 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 havebeen 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 areour 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’retalking 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.