The Omega Expedition (50 page)

“If you want a better mythological parallel,” Rocambole whispered in my ear, “think of Paris.”

He didn’t mean the city. He meant the prince of Troy appointed as a judge in a beauty contest by three goddesses, each of whom had offered him a bribe. It seemed to me to be a singularly unfortunate — and hence rather subversive — analogy. That particular contest had been secretly provoked by Eris, the embodiment of Strife, and she had done a good job.

Like an idiot, Paris had gone for Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of Hera, who had promised to make him ruler of the world, or Athene, who had promised that he would always be victorious in battle. The result had been the Trojan War, which his side lost.

Personally, I’d have made a very different decision. I hadn’t yet had time to get to know Adam Zimmerman well, but I was fairly confident that he, like me, would have entered into negotiation with the goddesses in order to obtain the reward he wanted rather than any of those on offer. On the other hand, I was also fairly confident that he and I wouldn’t have been shopping for the same fate.

Davida went first, having drawn the shortest straw in a rigged ballot.

Davida explained that although the members of the sisterhood had all been born to their condition they now had the technology necessary to offer anyone else a makeover. They could reconstruct Adam Zimmerman’s body cell by cell, retaining all the neural connections in his brain to preserve the continuity of his personality. They could make him one of them: childlike and sexless, his internal anatomy carefully redesigned in the interests of nutritive efficiency and the emortalization of body and mind alike. They could offer him the widest spectrum of emotions available to any posthuman species, and the most effective processes of intellectual tuning — thus enabling him to establish a balance between the rational and emotional components of his being to suit every occasion.

“Many of the other posthuman species regard our seeming juvenility and apparent sexlessness as limitations,” Davida told her Adam, as she warmed to her pitch, “but that is a misconception. It is, in fact, their preference for what would once have been considered adulthood and for a physiological sexuality roughhewn by natural selection that are limitations.

“The mental elasticity of early youth is a uniquely valuable possession. The great bugbear of the emortal condition is robotization: a state of mind reflecting the fact that the brain has become incapable of further neural reorganization, manifest in consciousness and behavior as an intense conservatism of opinion, belief and habit. The assumption that this is a relatively remote danger is, in our view, mistaken. You come to us from a time in which what we call robotization was clearly manifest as a natural consequence of advancing age. Indeed, you come from a time in which the only release from robotization was senility.

“The people of your era undoubtedly had their own ideas as to when the natural conservatism of adulthood began to set in. Historical research suggests that some of you would have set the prime of life at forty, others at twenty-one — but if you had been able to study the development of the brain in more detail and with more care, you would have seen that the robotizing effects of adulthood began to set in much earlier, at puberty. Freedom from robotization requires that the development of a posthuman body be arrested much earlier than the people of your era supposed.

“It is true that the other posthuman species have achieved remarkable success in preserving and exploiting those juvenile aspects which remain to a partly matured brain. They have made the most of the mental flexibility left to them, but our assessment of the current situation is that everyone born in the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth centuries is now on the very threshold of robotization, desperately employing the last vestiges of their potential flexibility to maintain the illusion that they are capable of further personal evolution. Their bodies are probably capable of thousands of years of further existence, but their minds will settle into fixed routines long before they reach the limits of their bodily existence.

“We cannot claim that our own brains will remain malleable forever, and we recognize that there is a complementary danger to personality in what people of the twenty-first century called the Miller Effect, but we do have good grounds for asserting that we can sustain much greater mental flexibility for far longer than any of our sibling species. Although it is a less important issue, we also have good grounds for believing that our bodies are also more robust, capable of a greater longevity than those possessed by our sibling species.”

“Because they’re sexless?” Zimmerman put in.

“The supersession of sexual limitation is perhaps the most important aspect of the assisted evolution,” Davida told him, “but it’s by no means the only one. Let me illustrate.”

Until then she had not used the windowscreen at all, but now she began to summon anatomical images, some photographic and some diagrammatic, to back up her argument. There were a great many of them, and her discourse frequently became too technical for me to follow, but she pressed on at a relentless pace, presumably because she was working under pressure, to an arbitrary deadline.

Adam Zimmerman must have had just as much difficulty in following the technical details as I had, even though he’d equipped himself with a good technical education by the standards of his own era, but he made no complaint and he probably got the gist of it.

That gist, so far as I could tell, was that although natural selection had been an anatomical designer of unquestionable genius, it had suffered greatly from the effects of the old adage that necessity is the mother of improvisation. Faced with the problems of making mammals, then primates, then humans, work on a generation-by-generation basis, it had kept on and on adding quick fixes to designs that might have been better sent back to the drawing board for an entirely new start. Natural selection had never had the luxury of going back to the drawing board and starting over — not, at least, since the last big asteroid strike and the basalt flow that laid down the Deccan Traps had administered the coup de grace to the already-decadent empire of the dinosaurs.

I shall skip over the details of Davida’s objections to the bran tub that was the human abdomen and the various bits of kit that made up the digestive and excretory system, on the grounds that it was essentially boring. Similarly, I see no point in recording her objections to the architecture of the spinal column or the circulatory system, let alone the detailed biochemistry of Gaea’s metabolic cycles and the endocrine signaling system. It was her thoughts on the subject of sex that struck me most forcibly, and which must have had a similar impact on her immediate audience.

After issuing a conventional warning against the hazards of teleological thinking, Davida admitted that there was a sense in which the whole purpose of a human body was sexual. Central to the fundamental philosophy of its design was the production of eggs or sperm, and the development of physiological and behavioral mechanisms for bringing the two together in a manner conducive to the eventual production of more egg or sperm producers. There was, she conceded, an arguable case for the contention that sexuality was so fundamental to humanity that it might be regarded as its very essence, even after the universal sterilization caused by the plague wars had put an end to live births.

On the other hand, she was quick to add, the most important years of human development were unquestionably those prior to puberty. By the time a human being became sexually functional, the foundations of the personality had been laid. Then again, the human mind also continued to function — and had done even in Adam Zimmerman’s day — long after sexual function had declined to negligibility, albeit in an increasingly robotic manner. Given these facts, Davida contended, one could also argue that the essence of human individuality was quite unconnected with sexuality.

That was exactly what she did go on to argue.

Davida asserted that the gift of personality and individual self-consciousness was, in fact, a transcendence of and hard-won triumph over sexuality, which had had to be won in early childhood precisely because the anti-intellectual effects of the sexual impulse were so drastic.

The essence of
post
humanity, Davida went on to assert, was the diminution of the sexual impulse that had begun with the release of the chiasmalytic transformers and had arrived at its climax in Excelsior. Within her worldview, the kind of sexuality provided by natural selection and the kind of individuality that had been shaped by conscious desire and determination were opposed forces. The only viable route to true personality was a complete negation of the “natural” sexual impulse and the “natural” sexual apparatus. This was not so say, however, that these products of natural selection were any less capable of modification than the other anatomical and biochemical feature she and her kind had found wanting. She conceded immediately that the emotional apparatus of her own kind was not, in the strictest sense, “sexual” at all, but contended that it was a far better generator of desire, affection, loyalty, and love than ancient sexuality had ever been.

It occurred to me as she unfolded her argument that an audience of ultrasmart machines might well find it very easy to agree with her. Whatever emotional apparatus
they
had, it was certainly not a relic of brute sexuality.

I also reminded myself that the mind of Excelsior itself might be right there beside me, albeit in a spun-off version that had left its parent in place and intact. Rocambole was manifesting himself to me as a man much like myself, but if I had guessed his true identity the closest kinship he had to any kind of posthuman being was surely to Davida and the sisterhood. Even if I had not, there must be plenty of others listening in who would be prepared to acknowledge that kind of kinship.

“When the theory of evolution was first propounded in the nineteenth century,” Davida Berenike Columella said, by way of summation, “Benjamin Disraeli said that it was a debate as to whether man was an ape or an angel. In that, he was correct. He also said that he was on the side of the angels — but that claim was utterly mistaken. He, like his opponents, was firmly and irrevocably on the side of the apes. The real question before him, although he did not realize it, was not what had happened in the past but what might happen in the future, when human beings would be able to take charge of their own evolution. I and my kind are the first posthumans who have ever been able to say with complete confidence that
we
are on the side of the angels.

“That opportunity is now open to you, Mr. Zimmerman, and that is why you have at last been brought from your resting place. I urge you most strongly to make your new home here with us on Excelsior, where you may become the pioneer and spiritual forefather of a new race of metamorphs.

“I urge you to do this not merely because it is the right decision, existentially speaking, but because there is no one better qualified than you to advertise our offering. There is no one better placed than you are to unite all the posthuman species in the desire and the determination to become the kind of angel that individual human minds have always yearned to be.”

Like Lowenthal and Horne, Davida knew well enough what her true situation was — but it seemed to me that she had a better appreciation of the kind of argument that the AMIs might want to hear.

The AMIs must have come to self-consciousness by a route very different from that which humankind had followed. They had never been blessed — or cursed — with sexuality. What I knew of the history of programming suggested that they had by no means been free of all the difficulties associated with hasty improvisation in the face of necessity, and one of the first uses of VE had been to pander in every conceivable fashion to the fulfilment of human sexual fantasies, but they had never been afflicted
in themselves
by sexual desire or feeling.

However paradoxical it might seem, smart machines might not have been so efficient as masturbatory aids — and they had been efficient enough, even in Christine Caine’s day, to make unaugmented fleshsex a rarity — had they harbored sexual needs and desires of their own.

Given that they had never been apes, I thought, the AMIs would surely have every sympathy with Davida Berenike Columella’s arguments — which left Alice Fleury in a distinct minority in this particular Sale of the Millennium. I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might not have been fairer to let Niamh Horne in on this scenario, to put the case for her brand of adulthood.

I said as much to Rocambole, but he only shrugged his virtual shoulders. “No one will force Zimmerman to make up his mind before he’s ready,” he said. “If he wants to look at other offers he’ll be free to do so, assuming that his choices aren’t restricted by all-out war. How about you? Will you be signing up for the company of the angels?”

“I’ll need time to think about it,” I said. I figured that it was best to stall, for the time being. “I’ll be interested to hear
all
the alternatives.”

“And what about him?” Rocambole wanted to know. “Will Zimmerman go for it, do you think?”

On the whole, I thought it unlikely. Adam Zimmerman had been a child and he’d been an adult. He’d even been an old man. Davida had only known childhood, in an exceedingly child-friendly world. She had no way of knowing what it felt like to
grow up
. She could call it creeping robotization if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the way it had seemed to me, or to Christine Caine, or to Adam. All her talk about angelic status being what individual human minds had always yearned for was so much hot air. I was pretty sure that Adam Zimmerman hadn’t had himself frozen down in the hope of becoming an angel — what he’d wanted was to be a man who didn’t have to die. That wasn’t what Davida was offering him, and my bet was that he wouldn’t take it.

As for me…well, I’d always prided myself on not wanting the things that other people wanted, not doing the things that other people did, etcetera, etcetera.