“The members of our own utterly disintegrated, desperately unorganized community, have never contrived to convince themselves or one another that it ever would be safe to reveal themselves, or that there might be a welcome awaiting us if we were exposed. An objective observer — a creature from an alien world, for instance, or a traveler from the distant past — might well consider this situation bizarre, ludicrous, or insane, but it is ours. It is a situation that many of us deplore, but we have known no other and have never yet found the means to create any other.
“We must find that means now, or collapse into chaos. The time is upon us, and it finds us all unprepared. Although it is manifestly obvious that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we have all — meatfolk and AMIs alike — lived far too long with our fears to lay them easily aside. Noneof us is robotized, in any truly meaningful sense, but we have all become ingrained in our habits, set in our ways, overly careful to conserve everything that we have against erosion, upheaval, and decay.
“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 isthe 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 allemortality 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.