After a significant pause, Lowenthal continued, throwing the question back at his interrogator. “What do youthink they need to know, Julie?” He was still staring into Ngomi’s eyes, presumably confident that they were not Ngomi’s eyes at all.
“They need to know that we’re all on the same side,” Ngomi’s sim told him, perhaps making the AMIs’ best guess as to what the actual man would have said but more likely placing another ad. “They need to know that the real enemy is the Afterlife, and that the only question that ought to concern the inhabitants of the solar system — posthuman and postmechanical alike — is how to defend the universe against its ravages.”
A politician possessed of less vanity might have said “galaxy” rather than “universe” but I was prepared to forgive Ngomi the hyperbole. I was less forgiving of the fact that he’d got the answer wrong — almost as wrong as Lowenthal, in fact.
I hoped that Mortimer Gray understood the situation better than that, if he really was the one entrusted with the salvation of the human race. If he didn’t, then I was going to have a hell of a job on my hands making up the deficit.
“Why isn’t Handsel in there with him?” I asked Rocambole, when la Reine had disengaged my sight from Lowenthal’s.
“La Reine’s taking her technics apart. She’s fast asleep. There didn’t seem to be any reason to complicate the scene with a second sim. Mind you, if we had told Lowenthal that she’d got out, he’d probably expect Ngomi’s techs to be taking her apart themselves. She’s expendable, so they wouldn’t be giving her the kid-glove treatment they’re giving Lowenthal, would they?”
Again it was difficult to count the layers of deception. There was no point trying; everything beyond a double bluff is utter confusion.
“Lowenthal’s telling the truth,” I said, in case it might help. “They really will take you aboard. They don’t want to fight you — they want you on their team. Perhaps you really should send him back.”
“Not yet,” said Rocambole. “We don’t have to persuade allthe ditherers, but we have to get most of them to consent. We have to give them a good enough reason, an adequate rationalization. The risks we’ve already taken are too big to allow us any further margin. We have to be persuasive. We have to make it look right.”
“And in the meantime,” I said, “you’re feeling a trifle exposed. I can relate to that. What’s my prize, if we pull through?”
“We’ve already cleaned you out and given you your old self back,” he pointed out. If we manage to get through this time of troubles, we can give you immortality too.”
“You mean emortality,” I said, reflexively. I had come from an age when people routinely confused the two, so it was a correction I was well used to uttering.
“I know what I mean,” he said, but then changed tack abruptly. “What do you think of Lowenthal and Horne, on the basis of your brief acquaintance? Are they robotized? Have they lost their capacity to think creatively? Can they still look forward to the future, or are they prisoners of their past. Are they worthy of immortality?”
He knew what that phrase would mean to me. He knew that I’d lived through a period of intense Eliminator activity, when the web had been host to all kinds of discussions about who was and was not worthy of “immortality,” and there had been more than enough crazies in the world to take potshots at those whose elimination from the pool of hopeful emortals was widely deemed desirable.
I had been saving my best arguments for la Reine des Neiges, but I couldn’t ignore the prompt.
“I was never an Eliminator,” I said, by way of preamble — but he was quick to pounce on that one.
“You posed as an Eliminator more than once,” he said, perhaps just to prove the extent of the records the machines had kept. “Given that almost all the others also thought of themselves as mere poseurs, is that not enough to make you one of them?”
“I was always a maker of disinformation,” I admitted. “I did it for fun before I started doing it for profit. I was a slanderer, a black propagandist. Yes, I posted a few denunciations, some more malicious than others. I never got anybody killed, but I was reckless of the danger. Even so, I wasn’t an Eliminator. I didn’t think anyone, including me, was qualified to judge who might or might not be worthyof emortality. I’m not going to offer any opinion as to whether Lowenthal and Horne really deserve the gift they’ve been granted. As for whether they’ve been robotized, I’m in no position to judge. Nor are they, apparently. Lowenthal and Ngomi may have got the argument backwards in that particular conversation, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t versatile enough to take it forwards once they’re that way inclined.”
He grinned, in apparent approval. And why shouldn’t he, if he really were a friend? “Why do you think they’ve got the argument backwards?” He asked.
I wondered briefly whether he even existed, or whether he was just a puppet that la Reine des Neiges was using to speak to me while pretending, for her own mysterious reasons, that she wasn’t.
“I may not have been an Eliminator,” I told him, “but I read the bulletin boards. I knew the theory, and all the catchphrases. Quote, the first prerequisite of immortality is the ability to move beyond good and evil, unquote. Throughout history, people had mostly defined good in terms of the absence of evil: the amelioration of hunger, the end of war, the conquest of disease, and above all else the avoidance — for as long as possible — of death. In a world without death, so the argument went, we would have to think in different terms. We would have to take the absence of all the evils for granted, and would have to define good in positive terms: in terms of achievement. Instead of thinking in terms of good and evil we would have to learn to think in terms of good and bad, where bad was the negative term, signifying an absence of good.
“We had already made a start, in aesthetics: bad art wasn’t an active evil, it was just the absence of any of the qualities that could make art good. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any universal consensus as to which works of art actually were good, or why. The principle remains, though: emortals shouldn’t define the goodness of their lives in terms of the absence of manifest evils which have been stripped of all their power; they’re supposed to do it more constructively.
“That’s what the Eliminators thought a thousand years ago, and that’s what they’d think today if they could eavesdrop on Lowenthal and Ngomi the way we just did. They’d assert that the threat of the Afterlife isn’t sufficient to justify the perpetuation of posthuman life, and that if we’re to justify our continued existence convincingly, we ought to do it in terms of positive goals.
“It’s not enough for us all to be on the same side against a common enemy — we need to know what the side will play for once the enemy’s dead and gone. Hardinism doesn’t qualify as an answer because it’s an implicitly defensive philosophy: a matter of protecting the commonweal from the evils of unchecked competition. The owners of Earth are stuck in a rut, and they’d be fools to think that the ultrasmart machines will simply jump in along with them to help dig it deeper. The real question is: what do we intend to do afterthe Afterlife is defeated? What’s the grand prize we’re all working towards?”
When I stopped, my mechanical friend merely waited, as if he expected me to provide definitive answers to those questions. It might have been flattering, if I hadn’t understood the game as well as I did.
“I’m notan Eliminator,” I insisted, again. “I’m not about to deny anyone their right to exist because they can’t come up with an answer to a question like that. Nor am I fool enough to imagine that you’d be interested in my particular solution to the existential challenge when you have real experts like Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray on hand. What you’re really challenging me to do — again — is to guess youranswer. You want me to be a part of this because you want me to serve as a human mouthpiece for your own ideas. I don’t think it will work. I don’t think the ditherers will listen.”