Authors: Brian Stableford
“Like the viruses which caused the Crash, Conrad intends para-DNA to be nonlethal weaponry—nothing more than a nuisance. It’s supposed to attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’s supposed to make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It wouldn’t attack people, and it certainly wouldn’t murder people wholesale, but it would always be
there:
a sinister, creeping presence that would keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing—
nothing
, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, Earth, the solar system . . . all these things have to be managed, guarded, and guided. According to Conrad, we ought to be looking toward the
real
alien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra. Whatever you or I might think of his methods, he’s
not mad
.”
“I can see why PicoCon thinks it’s necessary to rein you in, though,” Damon observed. “I can understand why the people who actually
own
the earth and all the edifices gantzed out of its surface would like the right of veto over schemes like that.”
“Maybe,” said Silas. “But I think Conrad
might
argue that the current owners of the Gantz patents ought to be down on their bended knees thanking him for introducing an element of built-in obsolescence to their endeavors. Mr. Saul would presumably prefer it if the meek inherited the earth, because he thinks that a meek consumer is a good consumer. He and his kind are interested
in what people
want
, and the more stable and predictable those wants become, the better he’ll like it—but Conrad’s more interested in what people
need
.”
Damon looked at Saul, who seemed quite untroubled by anything Silas had said.
“At the end of the day, though,” Damon pointed out, “Pico-Con calls the shots, here
and
in outer space. The secret couldn’t be kept—and now that it’s out, Conrad, Eveline, and Karol have no alternative but to abandon the plan.”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Silas said obdurately. “I’m not here to negotiate.”
“Of course not,” said Saul with a hint of malicious mockery. “But you can carry an olive branch, can’t you? One way or another, now that you’ve joined the ranks of the unsleeping dead, you’ll be able to transmit our offer of a just and permanent peace to Conrad Helier?”
“Just and permanent?” Silas echoed, presumably to avoid giving a straighter answer.
“That’s what we want,” Saul said. “It’s also, in our opinion, what we all
need
. We don’t want to bludgeon Conrad Helier—or the Ahasuerus Foundation for that matter—into reluctant and resentful capitulation. We really would like them to see things our way. That’s why we’re mortally offended by their refusal even to
talk
to us. Yes, we do have the power to impose our will—but we’d far rather reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I think Conrad Helier has seriously mistaken our position and our goals, and the true logic of the present situation here on Earth.”
All Silas said in reply to that was: “Go on.”
“Your anxiety regarding the possibility of people giving up on the real world in order to live in manufactured dreams is an old one,” Saul said mildly. “The corollary anxiety about the willingness of their effective rulers to meet the demand for comforting dreams is just as old—and so is Conrad’s facile assumption that the best way to counter the trend is to import new threats to jolt the meek inheritors of Earth out of their meekness and expel
them from their utopia of comforts. Frankly, I’m as disappointed by Conrad’s recruitment to such an outmoded way of thinking as I am by the Ahasuerus Foundation’s retention of
their
equally obsolete attitude of mind.
“I can understand the fact that you don’t approve of me, either personally or in terms of what I represent. One of my grandfathers was part of the consortium which funded Adam Zimmerman’s scheme to take advantage of a worldwide stock-market crash—one of the men who really did
steal the world
or
corner the future
, according to your taste in clichés. The other was the man whose pioneering work in biotechnological cementation made it possible to build homes out of desert sand and exhausted soil that were literally
dirt
cheap, thus giving shelter to millions, but you probably think that the good he did was canceled out by the enormity of the fortune that flowed from the generations of patents generated and managed by his sons—my uncles. I am the old world order personified: one of a double handful of men who really did own the world by the end of the twenty-first century.
“Oddly enough, the fact that we still own it today has a good deal to do with Conrad Helier. Had he not put the New Reproductive System in place so quickly, the devastations of the Crash might have extended even to us; as it was, his efficiency allowed rather more of the old world order to be saved than he might have thought ideal. Nor has he put an end to the ancient system of inheritance, as his own legacy to Damon clearly demonstrates. When I and my fellow owners die—as, alas, we still must, in spite of all the best efforts of the Ahasuerus Foundation—we shall deliver the earth into safe hands, which can be trusted to keep it safe for as long as they may live. Eventually, there will arise a generation who will keep it safe forever.
“You may think it terrible that effective ownership of the entire earth should remain forever in the hands of a tiny Olympian elite, but ownership is also stewardship. While the earth was effectively common land it was in the interest of every individual
to increase his own exploitation of it at the expense of others—and the result was an ecocatastrophe which would have rendered the planet uninhabitable if the Crash had not been precipitated in the nick of time.
“We cannot and will not tolerate further threats to the security of Earth, because Earth is too precious to be put at the smallest risk. Our news of the arks is old, and the news sent back by our more ambitious probes is hardly less recent, but the fact is that we have so far found no sign of any
authentic
extraterrestrial life. There is no threat in that discovery, but there is no
promise
either: no promise of any safe refuge should any extreme misfortune befall Earth. The pre-Crash ecocatastrophe might well have caused the extinction of the human species, and nothing like it can ever be permitted to happen again. If our outward expansion into the universe is to continue—and I agree with Conrad Helier that it ought not to be the exclusive prerogative of clever machinery—then it must continue in response to
opportunity
, not to threat.
“True progress cannot be generated by fear; it has to be generated by
ambition
. You may well dread the prospect of a wholesale retreat into artificial worlds of custom-designed illusion, but it’s pointless to try to drive people from their chosen refuges with whips and scorpions; they’ll only try all the harder to return. The
real
task is to offer them real-world opportunities that will easily outweigh the rewards of synthetic experience.”
“When your new nanotech VEs hit the marketplace, that isn’t going to be easy,” Damon observed. “Or did the Mirror Man’s little lecture about products not being made for the market mean that you intend to bury the technology?”
“What my colleague was trying to explain,” Saul said, “is that we’re not developing such technologies solely with a view to putting new products in the marketplace. We have much broader horizons in mind, but we’re not going to bury
anything
—not even para-DNA. We have more faith in humankind than Conrad Helier does. We don’t believe that the people of Earth, however
meek they may become, will want to retreat into manufactured dreams twenty-four hours a day. We don’t believe that people will settle for cut-price contentment when they still have the prospect of real achievement before them—and we
do
believe that they still have the prospect of real achievement. We think Conrad Helier’s aims can better be served by a carrot than a stick—and
that’s
why we’re so very anxious to bring him to the conference table. We never wanted to bury para-DNA; what we’d really like to do is to investigate the contribution it might make to our own methods of breaking down the distinction between the organic and the inorganic.”
“You want to
buy
it?” Silas said in a tone which implied that he didn’t believe that a man like Conrad Helier—unlike the inheritors of the Gantz patents—would ever sell out to PicoCon.
“Not necessarily,” said Saul wearily. “In fact, I have grave doubts as to whether it has any potential at all that our own people don’t already have covered—but I do want to talk about its potential, and its appropriate uses. It’s not impossible that we might actually be able to assist in Conrad’s great crusade. In fact, I think it’s more than likely that we can. If only he would condescend to listen, I think we can show him a future far brighter and infinitely more promising than the one he presently has in mind.”
Damon could see that this was not what Silas had expected. He had had no clear idea what to expect on his own account, but he had to admit that Saul’s line of argument had taken him by surprise. Like Silas, he had been thinking entirely in terms of threats—who could blame either of them, after the violent farce of the last few days?—and he was not quite willing to believe, as yet, that there was nothing within the iron glove but a velvet fist. He was, however, prepared to listen—and so, it appeared, was Silas, both on his own behalf and that of Conrad Helier.
“All right,” said Silas, flushing slightly as he glanced at Damon—as if he were in search of approval, or at least of understanding. “Tell me what you’re offering. If it seems worthwhile,
I’ll do everything within my power to make sure that Conrad, Eveline, and Karol pay proper attention—but it had better be good.”
“It is,” said Frederick Gantz Saul. “It certainly is.”
D
amon eased his car through the midmorning traffic, which was flowing normally through well-behaved control lights. He couldn’t help feeling a slightly exaggerated sense of his own mortality, in spite of the profuse official denials that had been issued to confirm that he was
not
Conrad Helier, enemy of mankind. While there were people around who worked on the assumption that everything on the news was likely to be a lie, such denials were likely to be less effective than sly denunciations of the kind that Saul’s people had put out while they were still playing rough.
He knew that it was well within the capability of any twelve-year-old or hundred-and-twelve-year-old Webwalker to discover his address and car registration. He knew too that one of the problems of longevity was that it preserved a substantial fraction of the madness to which people were subject alongside the sanity which only the majority achieved. The downside of efficient IT was that it did a far better job preserving the body than it did preserving the mind—and some kinds of madness, albeit not the nastiest kinds, really were
all
in the mind.
At present, that downside was limited; the most powerful nanotechnologies were so recent in their provenance that even under the New Reproductive System less than a sixth of the population of California consisted of centenarians. In fifty years’
time, however, that percentage would have trebled, and most of the 15 percent of current centarians would still be alive. Nobody knew how many of those would still be compos mentis; Morgan Miller had been dead for nearly a hundred and eighty years, but the effect named after him had not yet revealed the full extent of its horror. True emortality required more than the continual revitalization of somatic cells; it required the continued revitalization of the idiosyncratic neuronal pathways that were the foundation of every individual self, every unique personality.
According to Frederick Gantz Saul, there would be crazy people around for some time yet—but not forever. In time, according to Saul, sanity would prevail; foolishness, criminal behavior, and disaffection would fade into oblivion and everyone would be
safe
. Damon still had not made up his mind whether to believe that, let alone whether to believe Saul’s further assertion that the sanity and safety in question would not be a kind of stagnation.
The heightened sense of mortality should have worn off once he was off the street, but it didn’t. It accompanied him in the elevator and didn’t let up when he stepped out into the LA offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Damon hadn’t made an appointment, and he wouldn’t have felt utterly crushed if he’d been told to go away by the AI receptionist, but Rachel Trehaine didn’t even keep him kicking his heels for the customary ten minutes of insult time. He had expected to find her in a frosty mood, but she was positively welcoming—presumably because she was curious.
“How can I help you, Mr. Hart?” she asked.
“I hoped that you might be able to offer me an expert opinion,” he said. “I’m not sure that I have anything to offer in trade, but you might be interested in some of what I have to say.”
“I can’t speak on behalf of the foundation,” she was quick to say. “I’m only . . .”
“A humble data analyst,” Damon finished for her. “That’s okay. You’ve heard, I suppose, that the three men Yamanaka arrested have pleaded guilty to all the charges—kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,
etcetera. They’ll be put away for at least twenty years—but I dare say that when they come out of suspended animation they’ll walk straight into jobs with PicoCon, who’ll bear the full responsibility and cost of their rehabilitation. There won’t be a full trial, of course—just a formal hearing to determine the sentence.”