The Fountains of Youth

by Brian Stableford

  At the most elementary level, the Cyborganizers were merely the newest generation of apologists for cyborgization. They adopted a new title purely in order to make themselves seem more original than they were. In fact, there had always been such apologists around, but the increasing use of cyborgization in adapting people to live and work in space and the hostile environments of other worlds within the solar system had given new ammunition to those who felt that similar opportunities ought to be more widely explored on Earth.

  The progress of the “new” movement followed a pattern that had now become familiar to all serious historians if not to the present-obsessed media audience. All the old controversies regarding “brain-feed” equipment surfaced yet again, refreshed by controversy, and all the old tales about wondrous technologies secretly buried by the world’s paternalistic masters began to do the rounds, neatly varnished with a superficial gloss of modernity. TV current-affairs shows initially treated the propaganda flow with amused contempt, but as the stream built toward a tide the casters began to feed off it more extravagantly, and hence to feed it, thus accelerating its ascent to fashionability.

  The gist of the the Cyborganizers’ argument was that the world had become so besotted with the achievements of genetic engineers that people had become blind to all kinds of other possibilities which lay beyond the scope of DNA manipulation. They insisted that it was high time to reawaken such interests and that recent technical advances made in the field of functional cyborgization should be redeployed in the service of aesthetic cyborgazation. There was much talk of “lifestyle cyborganization.” The introduction into the latter term of the extra two letters did nothing to transform its real meaning but contrived nevertheless to generate a host of new implications. The Cyborganizers were, of course, very anxious to stress that there was all the difference in the world between cyborganization and robotization, the former being entirely virtuous while the latter remained the great bugbear of emortal humankind.

  I would have been perfectly content to ignore the Cyborganizers had they only been content to ignore me. I am reasonably certain that they would have done exactly that if Tricia Ecosura had not agreed to meet face-to-face with Samuel Wheatstone, one of the movement’s most enthusiastic propagandists, while he was visiting Neyu in 2924. Even that occasion might have passed off harmlessly had I only had the good sense to stay out of the way—as I certainly would have done if I had known that Samuel Wheatstone had not always been content to wear the name his parents had given him. Because I had not, there seemed to be no harm at all in accepting Tricia’s invitation to take a stroll on the beach behind our hometree and say hello to her guest.

  She had obviously mentioned me to him—why should she not?—and he was fully prepared to take delight in my confusion. I did not recognize his face, of course, because it had been so radically transformed by cyborgization. His eyes were artificial and his skull was elaborately embellished with other accessories—most of them, I presumed, ornamental rather than functional.

  “It’s a great honor to meet you in the flesh at last, Mortimer,” he said to me, beaming broadly. “I’ve never forgotten our discussion, although I’ve not kept up with your work as assiduously as I should have.”

  While I was still trying to work out the import of this greeting, Tricia said: “You didn’t tell me that you and Morty knew one another, Samuel.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. “I was using a different name when we last encountered one another. I fear that Mortimer still has no idea who I am—but it was two hundred years ago, and although our contest was transmitted in real time the space we shared was virtual.”

  “You’re Hellward Lucifer Nyxson?” I guessed, tentatively.

  “I was,” he admitted, blithely. “A youthful folly. It seemed inappropriate to retain the name once the heart had gone out of Thanaticism, so I reverted to my former signature.”

  “Of course you did,” I countered, bitterly. “After all, you wouldn’t want the reputation of your present insanity to be tainted by the legacy of past insanities, would you?”

  His smile grew broader still. “That’s it!” he said, feigning pleasure. “That’s exactly the expression I remember. I thought you might have forgiven me—after all, I did make you a lot of money—but I’m delighted to find that you haven’t. Principled adversaries are so much more interesting and rewarding than cynical fellow travelers, don’t you think?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” I asked him, packing as much sarcasm into my tone as I could. “Common decency surely required you to join the martyrs you inspired?”

  “Don’t be so stubbornly literal, Mortimer,” he said. “You know full well that I was only trying to stir things up. I’m a showman, not a suicidal maniac. It’s what I do. You should try it some time. It’s fun.” For one eerie moment he sounded exactly like Sharane Fereday—and I reacted almost as if he were.

  “Fun!” I echoed, with bitter contempt. “You should be in some antique SusAn chamber along with all the other murderous bastards—human litter that dare not speak its name.”

  “You stole that,” he charged, with deadly accuracy. “That’s one of dear old Julius’s catchphrases. That’s the wonderful thing about Earth-bound humanity, don’t you think? There might be billions of us, but we’ll all be around long enough for everybody who’s anybody to meet everybody who’s anybody else. You ought to be careful about repeating other people’s bon mots, though. That way lies robotization. I worry about that, as you’ll doubtless remember—but I worry far more about people like you than people like me.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about me,” I said, coldly. “I think I’ll go back inside now. I have better things to do than talk to you.”

  “But I do worry about you, Mortimer,” Wheatstone/Nyxson assured me, refusing to consent to the end of the conversation. “I gave you an audience, and you frittered it away. I gave you a cause, and you fumbled the ball. You never have been able to make up your mind about the issues I raised, have you? I put you on the map, but you meekly removed yourself again because you didn’t know exactly where you wanted to be located. It was Mare Moscoviense you ran away to, wasn’t it? You probably came to Neyu because you expected it to be a similarly stagnant backwater—but I’m surprised you didn’t move on as soon as Mica and her friends told you that they intended to make it the central crossroads of a new continent. Do you really think your ideas, motives, and actions are those of a man who’s ready to live forever, Mortimer?”

  I had to grit my teeth for a moment lest a reflexive tremble set them chattering. “You gave me nothing,” I told him, when I was sure that I could frame the words properly. “I found my own cause and my own audience long before I heard your stupid pseudonym, and I’m still on the only map that matters. Within a hundred years I’ll have finished my history, and it will be definitive. It will be good. It will command attention because it’s important, not because I once got sucked into a moronic publicity stunt by a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience. You’re not important. You’re just a clown, an exhibitionist, a fool. If you’re behind the Cyborganizers, they’re even more intellectually derelict than I thought. I’m astonished that anyone as intelligent as Tricia should even have condescended to talk to you. I won’t.”

  I turned my back then, absolutely determined to go—but Hellward Lucifer Nyxson was never a man to concede the last word.

  “You’re beautiful, Mortimer,” he called after me. “A pearl beyond price. I’d forgotten just how precious you are—but thanks for reminding me. Tricia’s a very lucky woman, to have you as a co-parent.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  I ignored it all, of course. I rose above it and put it behind me, for all of seven days. When Tricia accused me of being rude to her guest I refused to rise to the challenge. When Lua asked me why Mama Tricia was angry with me I claimed that I didn’t know.

  Unfortunately, seven days was all the time it required for the Cyborganizers to
launch an all-out media attack on The History of Death, selecting it out as a “typical example of modern academic research,” guilty of “de-historicizing” cyborgization.

  The commentary I had provided to the The Last Judgment actually contained only three brief references to early experiments in cyborgization, but none of them were complimentary and they swiftly became the Cyborganizers’ favorite example of the “sketchily caricaturish” attitude to cyborgization fostered by the world’s “Secret Masters.” Like all of my kind, the Cyborganizers alleged, I was in the pocket of the Hardinist Cabal. I was producing bad history, warped to the service of their hidden agenda, deliberately falsifying the past so as to to make it seem that organic-inorganic integration and symbiosis were peripheral to the story of human progress rather than its very heart.

  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 easier to 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 have been 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 are our 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’re talking 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.

  “It’s because the mind is a condition of the whole and not an inhabitant of the part that we’re already engaged in a process of machine-enhanced mental evolution. That’s the very essence of cyborganization, and the only reason you can’t see it, Morty, is that you’re stuck in the past, refusing to accept release from the prison oí frail flesh. The day will come when you want to live in the future, Morty—and that’s when you’ll have to accept that the only way to avoid becoming a robotically petrified mind in a slowly decaying body is to evolve”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  It was by testing argumentative strategies on Tricia that I derived the slogan that I was determined to carry into battle against Samuel Wheatstone. The incantation that I hoped to use to rally the media audience to my cause was Cyborganization is robotization by another name. I didn’t tell Tricia, of course, in case she passed it on to Wheatstone, but I did confide it to Lua Tawana, after swearing her to secrecy.