The Gentle Seduction

by Marc Stiegler

  There was clapping, but it was perfunctory: the audience, the congress, was stunned into rare speechlessness. Max saw that even his fiercest enemies now looked at him with respect, transfixed as Jason might have transfixed them.

  Max smiled bravely, shaking hands with a few as he proceeded to the door. Still his weakness didn't show. He climbed into the presidential limousine surrounded by well-wishers and flash-popping cameras. He pulled the curtains as the car swung into motion.

  The trembling began. "No, no," he moaned, curling into a foetal position, all alone with the ghosts. "No!" He coughed, the same hacking cough that had sent him to the doctor just three short weeks ago.

  "What's the verdict, Dr. McFarley? Will I survive my cough?" Max asked playfully. He rebuttoned his shirt. It was cold in the doctor's office; but then, it's always cold in a doctor's office.

  Dr. McFarley looked back at Max grimly.

  The chill in the room deepened. "Is it bad?" Max asked, no longer playfully.

  Dr. McFarley sat down next to him. "It's lung cancer, Max. Mutant II lung cancer."

  Max's heart skipped, skipped, skipped. "It can't be!"

  There was a long pause. The doctor cleared his throat. "You have nine months. Maybe a year." The doctor looked away. After a moment of meticulous study of his fingernails, he continued, still not looking at Max. "Only Steve Felman can help you now. I'm sorry."

  A tear squeezed from his closed eyes. "I want to Live! Please, let me live!"

  The ghosts had no answer save silence.

  The Gentle Seduction

  In February of 1988, I held a quiet but nonetheless remarkable conversation with a close friend. She had many questions about nanotechnology, and I had many answers—answers that I had not even known I had, before she asked the questions.

  What made the conversation remarkable, however, was my realization of the place our discussion held in human history. I saw how our casual exchange, still not complete when last I saw her, would unfold over the years. I witnessed the last words I hope she will one day speak, words that will at last draw our dialogue to its proper close. Those words, her final remark, are meant to be spoken ten thousand years from tomorrow.

  For a month after our discussion a white-hot image of the future consumed me, growing inside, forcing me to let it out. Twice while driving down freeways I had to pull to the shoulder, stop my car, and copy down the passages that gripped my mind. Whole pages came out in photocopy quality. I hardly existed as a person; often I felt I was merely the instrument used by the story to create itself. I came to understand how a writer in earlier times might have believed that he was under a geas, that he was inhabited by another's spirit.

  "The Gentle Seduction" itself has been accused of being a fantasy, so full of hope for mans future that any modern person (at least, any modern cynic) must surely reject it out of hand. But what man, two centuries ago, would have believed that one day we would totally eradicate smallpox from the earth? What man, just a few months ago, would have believed that common wisdom would be upended and that the Berlin Wall would come down? Perhaps at this moment more than any other moment in history, people have the clearest reasons to believe in a hopeful future.

  The scientific underpinnings of the future described in "The Gentle Seduction" are quite real. Astonishing and unbelievable as that future is, the main reason we may fail is if we fail to try.

  The Gentle Seduction

  He worked with computers; she worked with trees, and the flowers that took hold on the sides of the Mountain.

  She was surprised that he was interested in her. He was so smart; she was so . . . normal. But he was interesting; he always had said something new and different to say; he was nice.

  She was twenty-five. He was older, almost thirty-three; sometimes, Jack seemed very old indeed.

  One day they walked through the mist of a gray day by the Mountain. The forest here on the edge of Rainier glowed in the mist, bright with lush greens. On this day he told her about the future, the future he was building.

  Other times when he had spoken of the future, a wild look had entered his eyes. But now his eyes were sharply focused as he talked, as if, this time, he could see it all very clearly. He spoke as if he were describing something as real and obvious as the veins of a leaf hanging down before them on the path.

  "Have you ever heard of Singularity?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "What is it?"

  "Singularity is a time in the future as envisioned by Vernor Vinge. It ll occur when the rate of change of technology is very great—so great that the effort to keep up with the change will overwhelm us. People will face a whole new set of problems that we can't even imagine." A look of great tranquility smoothed the ridges around his eyes. "On the other hand, all our normal, day to day problems will be trivial. For example, you'll be immortal."

  "She shook her head with distaste. "I don't want to live forever," she said.

  He smiled, his eyes twinkling. "Of course you do, you just don't know it yet."

  She shuddered. "The future scares me."

  "There's no reason to fear it. You'll love it." He looked away from her. His next words were bitter, but his tone was resigned. "It pisses me off that you'll live to see it and I won't."

  Speaking to the sorrow in his voice, she tried to cheer him. "You'll live to see it, too," she replied.

  He shook his head. "No. I have a bad heart. My father died young from a heart attack, and so did my father's father. If I'm lucky, I have maybe thirty more years. It'll take at least a hundred years for us to get to Singularity."

  "Then I'll be dead before it happens, too. Good," she said.

  He chuckled. "No. You'll live long enough, so that they'll figure out how to make you live long enough so that you can live longer."

  "You're still only seven years older than I am."

  "Ah, but you have your mother's genes. She looks very young."

  She smiled, and changed the subject. "I'll have to tell her you said that. She'll like it."

  There was a long pause. Then she confessed, "My grandfather is ninety-two, and he still cuts the grass every week."

  Jack smiled triumphantly. "See?"

  She was adamant. "I'll live to be eighty or ninety. I don't want to live longer than that."

  "Not if you're crippled, of course not. But they'll find ways of rejuvenating you." He laughed knowingly. "You'll look older when you're sixty than when you're one- hundred-twenty," he said.

  She just shook her head.

  Another time, as they walked in the sun along the beach of Fox Island, he told her more about the future. "You'll have a headband." He ran his fingers across his forehead; he squinted as the wind blew sand in his eyes. "It'll allow you to talk right to your computer."

  She frowned. "I don't want to talk to a computer."

  "Sure you do. At least, you will. Your computer will watch your baby all night long. If it sees something wrong, it'll wake you." Wicked delight widened his smile, and she knew he would now tell her something outrageous. "While you're lying in bed with your eyes closed, you'll look at your baby through your computer's TV camera to see if it's something serious."

  "Ugh."

  "Of course, there's a tiny chance, really tiny, that an accident could scramble your memories."

  The thought made her dizzy with horror. "I would rather die." She grabbed his arm and pulled him under the bridge, out of the wind. She shuddered, though unsure whether her chill came from the wind or the fear.

  He changed his tack. Pointing at a scattering of elaborate seaside mansions across the water, he asked, "Would you like to live in one of those?"

  She studied them. "Maybe that one," she said, pointing at a beautiful old Victorian home. "Or that one." She pointed at another, very different from the first, a series of diagonal slashes with huge windows.

  "Have you ever heard of nanotechnology?" he asked.

  ''Uh-uh."

  "Well, with nanotechnology they'll build thes
e tiny little machines—machines the size of molecules." He pointed at the drink in her hand. "They'll put a billion of them in a spaceship the size of a Coke can, and shoot it off to an asteroid. The Coke can will rebuild the asteroid into mansions and palaces. You'll have an asteroid all to yourself, if you want one."

  "I don't want an asteroid. I don't want to go into space."

  He shook his head. "Don't you want to see Mars? You liked the Grand Canyon; I remember how you told me about it. Mars has huge gorges—they make the Grand Canyon look tiny. Don't you want to see them? Don't you want to hike across them?"

  It took her a long time to reply. "I guess so," she admitted.

  "I won't tell you all the things I expect to happen," he smiled mischievously, "I'm afraid I'd really scare you. But you'll see it all. And you'll remember that I told you." His voice grew intense. "And you'll remember that I knew you'd remember."

  She shook her head. Sometimes Jack was just silly.

  They fell asleep in each other's arms often, though they never made love. Sometimes she wondered why not; she wondered if he also wondered why not. Somehow it just didn't seem important.

  He seemed so at home in the deep forest, he so clearly belonged on the Mountain, she first thought they might stay together forever. But one day she went with him to his office. She watched as he worked with computers, as he worked with other people. He was as natural a part of their computer world as he was a part of her Mountain world.

  Working in that alien world, he was a different person. In the woods, he was a calm source of sustaining strength. Here, he was a feverish instructor. His heart belonged to the forest, but his mind, she realized, belonged to the machines that would build his vision.

  One day he received a call. A distant company gave him an offer he could not refuse. So he went to California, to build great computers, to hurry his vision to fruition.

  She stayed by the Mountain. She walked the snows, and watched the birds fly overhead. Yet no bird flew so high that she could not climb the slopes of Rainier until she stood above it.

  He would come to visit on weekends sometimes, and they would backpack, or ski cross-country. But his visits became less frequent. He would write, instead. That too decreased in regularity. One letter was the last, though neither of them knew it at the time.

  A year passed. And by then, it just didn't seem to matter.

  She married a forest ranger, a bright, quiet man with dark eyes and a rugged face. They had three small children and two large dogs, friendly dogs with thick soft fur. She loved all the members of her family, almost all the time; it was the theme that never changed though she thought about different things at different times.

  Her children grew up and moved away.

  Erich, the beautiful red chow, went to sleep one night and never awakened.

  A terrible avalanche, from a seemingly safe slope, fell down the Mountain and buried a climbing team, her husband among them.

  Haikku, her mighty and faithful akita, whimpered in his old age. He crooned his apology for leaving her alone, and that night he joined Erich and her husband.

  She was eighty-two. She had lived a long and happy life. She was not afraid to die. But she stood outside in the snow and faced a terrible decision.

  Overnight, a thick blanket of new white powder had fallen, burying her sidewalk. Standing in the snow, she stared at a mechanical beast her children had given her years before. It represented one possible choice.

  In one hand she held a shovel. In the other hand she held a small capsule. The capsule was another gift her children had given her. They had begged her to take it. Until now, she had refused. The capsule represented another choice.

  Her back was aching. It was an ache that sometimes expanded, shooting spikes of pain down her legs. Today the pain was great; she could not shovel the sidewalk.

  The mechanical beast was a robot, a fully automatic snow remover. She could just flip a switch and it would hurl the snow away, but that seemed grotesque; the noise would be terrible, the mounds of thoughtlessly discarded snow would remain as an unseemly scar until late spring.

  She opened her hand and looked at the capsule. It was not a pill to make her younger; that much her children had promised her. They knew she would reject such a thing out of hand. But the millions of tiny machines tucked inside the capsule would disperse throughout her body and repair every trace of damage to her bones. They would also rebuild her sagging muscle tissue. In short, the pill would cure her back and make the pain go away.

  The thought of all those little machines inside her made her shudder. But the thought of the automatic snow remover made her sick.

  She went back inside the house to get a glass of water.

  In a few days her back felt fine; her healthy muscles gave her a feeling of new vigor, and the vigor gave rise to a yearning to go out and do things that she had not considered for many years. She started to climb the Mountain, but it was too much for her: she huffed and puffed and had to go home. Annoyed, she went to the drug store and bought another capsule, one that restored her circulatory system and her lungs. Her next assault on the Mountain carried her as far as she dared, and the steady beat of her heart urged her to go on despite the crumbling snow.

  But she was getting increasingly forgetful. Things that had happened years earlier were clear in her mind, but she could not remember what she needed at the store. One day she forgot her daughter's telephone number, and found that she had forgotten where she had misplaced the phone book. The store had another capsule that tightened up her neural circuitry. After taking it, she discovered a side effect no one had bothered to mention. The pill did not merely make her memory effective again; rather, it made her memory perfect. With a brief glance through the pages of the phone book, she found she no longer needed it. She shrugged and continued on with her life.

  One day as she skied across the slopes, a stranger passed her going the other way. He was tall and rugged, and he reminded her of her husband. She was annoyed that he did not even look at her, though she had smiled at him; when she looked in the mirror upon returning home, she understood why. She was ninety-five years old; she looked like an old woman. It was ridiculous; fortunately it was easily fixed.

  When she turned one-hundred-fifteen she stabilized her physical appearance. Thereafter, she always appeared to be about the age of thirty-two.

  She still owned the snug little house she thought of as home. But she slept more often in the tent she carried in her pack. Built with nanomachined equipment, the pack was lighter than any other she had ever owned, yet it was impossibly strong. All her tools performed feats she would once have thought miraculous, and none weighed more than a pound. She lived in great comfort despite the inherent rigors of the glacier- crusted slopes.

  One day, she was climbing along the ancient trail from Camp Muir toward the summit, crossing the ridges to reach Disappointment Cleaver. As she stepped over the last ridge to the broad flat in front of the Cleaver, she saw a man standing alone. He was staring up the steep ice flows overhead. He stepped backward, and backward, and turned to walk briskly in her direction. She continued forward to pass him, but he cried out, "Stop!"

  She obeyed the fear in his voice. He paused, and his eyes came unfocused for a moment. He pointed to the right of the ridge she had just crossed, a fin of rock rising rapidly along the Mountain's edge. "Up there," he said. "Quickly." He broke into a hobbling run across snow that sometimes collapsed under his heavy step. She followed, her adrenalin rising with her bewilderment.

  A massive Crack! filled the air. Far above the Cleaver, an overhanging ledge of ice snapped off and fell with an acrobat's graceful tumbling motion to the flat where they had just been standing. The mass qualified as a large hill in its own right. When it landed it broke into a thousand huge pieces. Some of the pieces ground each other to powder, while others bounced off the flat, down another precipice of several thousand feet, to crash again in a duller explosion of sound.

  The ice
fall was an extraordinary event to witness under any circumstance; the narrowness of escape from death that accompanied it overlaid the experience with a religious awe.

  She heard the man panting next to her. She turned to study him more carefully.

  He was unremarkable for a mountaineer; his lean form supported long straps of hard muscle, and the reflected sun from the glaciers had given him a coffee-colored tan. Then she noticed the sweatband across his head. It was not just a sweatband: she could see from the stretch marks that a series of thin disks ran across within the cotton layers. She realized he was wearing a nection, a headband to connect his mind with distant computers.

  She recoiled slightly; he smiled and touched his forehead. "Don't be too upset," he said, "my headband just saved your life. "

  She stuttered. "I wasn't upset," she said, though she knew that he knew she was lying. "I've just never seen one up close before."

  It was true. Her grandchildren told her that nections were quite common in space, but on Earth they were almost illegal. It was socially unacceptable to wear one, and when the police saw a nection-wearing person they would use any excuse to hassle the individual. But there were no specific laws against them.

  When her grandchildren had told her that they wore headbands all the time, she had tried only briefly to dissuade them; she had spent more time listening to their descriptions of the headband's capabilities. Her grandchildren's descriptions sounded considerably different from the list of dangers usually described on the news.

  The man who had saved her life watched her for several more seconds, then apparently made up his mind about something. "You really ought to get one yourself, you know. Do you realize how dangerous this mountain is? And it's getting more dangerous every year."