Architects of Emortality

by Brian Stableford

  Intermission Three: A Mind at the End of Its Tether

  Michi Urashima was having trouble with time again. He had lost all sense of it and couldn’t remember what day it was, or what year, or how many times he had grown young and then old again. None of that would have been of much significance had he not had the vague impression that there was something he ought to be doing, some important project that needed attention. He could not remember whether or not he was still forbidden to leave his house, or whether or not there was anywhere else he might want to be.

  When he asked what year it was, the silken voice of his household sloth dutifully informed him that it was 2495, but Michi could not remember whether 2495 was the present or the past, so he could not tell whether or not he had suffered an existential slippage. There was no point in asking the sloth whether or not he had lost his mind, because the sloth was too stupid to know.

  Although he had lost touch with himself, Michi still had command of vast treasures of factual information. He knew, for instance, that sloths were called sloths because the Tupi word for the three-toed sloth was ai, and AI had stood for artificial idiot or artificial imbecile ever since the concept of artificial intelligence had been subdivided. A sloth could not possibly judge whether or not he had lost his mind; for that he would have needed a silver. Silvers were called silver because the chemical symbol for silver was Ag, which stood for artificial genius. There was no popular shorthand for “artificial individual of average intelligence” because the obvious acronym sounded like a strangled scream. Because AP had been claimed by artificial photosynthesis—LAP for liquid, SAP for solid—there was no such thing as a mere artificial person, and an acronymic rendering of artificial mind would have been too confusing by half.

  Actually, Michi thought, the attempt to possess an artificial mind of his very own had indeed led him into dire confusion.

  “I am,” he said, and giggled. “I am an AM, or am not an AM, or am caught like a half-living cat between the two. Perhaps I was an AM, and am no longer, or was not but now am, or would be if only I could think straight, like an AM. Perhaps, on the other hand, I am no longer an AM, and am no longer, but am merely an it, held together by IT.” He sat in his armchair and breathed deeply: in, out; in, out; in, out. Slowly but surely, his sense of self came together again, and his sense of temporal location returned. His IT was probably stretched to the limit, but he was not yet an it. Precarious though his grip on reality was, the Miller effect still had not obliterated him from the community of human minds.

  Morgan Miller must have been a kindred spirit, he thought. The first man ever to beat the Hayflick limit and discover a viable technology of longevity, and his reward for taking such infinite pains over the project had been two bullets in the back. Unfortunately—as Miller had understood, although his assassins had not—the method had worked far too well. It was so utterly irresistible in renewing the body that it wiped out the mind. Even internal nanotech did that eventually, but at least it gave a man time to breathe, time to play, time to work, time to be… and time, in the end, to lose himself.

  “I am,” he said again. “I am Michi still, at least for a little while. Do I have any appointments today?” “Yes,” said the sloth. Before Michi could rephrase the question, he remembered.

  Yes, indeed—today, he had an appointment.

  “Oh yes,” he said aloud. “I am, I am, I definitely am.” He reached up his hand to caress his skull, running his fingertips over the numerous sockets which sat above the main sites of his implanted electrodes. He wondered whether he ought to put on a wig, or a hooded suitskin. Did she wear a wig, or a hooded suit-skin? Could that luscious hair really be rooted in her skull? Maybe, maybe not. He would find out. But in the meantime—to obscure or not to obscure? He decided not. She was fascinated by what he was, what he had been; why try to hide it? A martyr should wear his stigmata proudly, unafraid to display them.

  They were, alas, mere relics of the past, but they were the remnants of a glorious endeavor.

  Michi still wondered, sometimes, whether he ought to make one more attempt to break through to the unknown. If he were to flush out all his IT and douse the sockets so as to flood the underlying electrodes with neurostimulators, the neurons further beneath would resume the business of forging new connections, further extending the synaptic tangles which already bound the contacts to every part of his brain. The removal of his IT would condemn him to death, of course, but he was dying anyway. Suppose he could trade a few months of not knowing what day it was for just one moment of enlightenment, one flash of inspiration, one revelatory proof that everything he had tried to achieve was possible, was within the grasp of contemporary humankind, if only people were willing to try, to take the risk.

  Just suppose… It would be his triumph, and his alone. Official sources of finance had bailed out on him a hundred years ago, and he had been forbidden to call for further volunteers. The funds channeled from the Pharaohs of Capitalism by way of Gabriel King and his fellow buccaneers had dried up fifty years ago. The private backers had held out a little longer, but the law had built walls around him to keep their funds out. Like Kwiatek, he had been left high and dry—but Kwiatek had at least avoided the indignity of a show trial and subsequent house arrest.

  If Kwiatek eventually ended up in susan, it wouldn’t be the law that had put him there; he would go of his own accord, unbranded and uncondemned.

  “I was the only one prepared to go all the way,” Michi said aloud. “If they hadn’t abandoned me, I might even have got to where I wanted to be. Do you hear me?” “Yes,” said the sloth, as pedantically terse as ever.

  “How long is it before my visitor’s due?” Michi demanded, determined to make the stupid machine do a little work to justify its keep.

  “Thirty seconds,” replied the conscientious machine. Doubtless, in some abstract and ideal sense, it was absolutely right—but even as it spoke, the door chime sounded.

  The woman was early.

  “Let her in,” said Michi, levering himself up from his armchair, hoping as he did so that he would not lose himself again before she left.

  “I’m sorry,” Michi said to the young woman as they lay in bed together. “I’ve grown unused to visitors of any kind, let alone lovers. All the old skills…” “I understand,” the woman said very gently. “Fifty years of solitary confinement is a very harsh penalty to pay for trying to push back the frontiers of human understanding.” “Most people thought of it as getting off lightly,” Michi said morosely. “They don’t realize. There are millions of people in the world who spend days on end—weeks on end if they’re VE addicts—cocooned in their apartments, and there are millions who routinely protect their privacy by filtering all their electronic communications through clever sims. They don’t know the true value of the power of choice, which allows them to break the pattern anytime they wish.

  They don’t understand how demeaning it is to be forbidden the use of credit, of the most elementary privacy screening. Everybody nowadays thinks that they’re under observation, but they don’t really know what it means to have ever attentive eyes trained so intensively on the minutiae of one’s everyday life.” “I can’t pretend to know how it feels to be withdrawn from human society for fifty years, after having lived in it for over a hundred,” the young woman told him as she eased herself from his embrace and reached for her suitskin, “but I have spent a good deal of my own brief life in enforced solitude. I’ve learned very quickly to appreciate the worth of being in the world.” “Part of the problem,” Michi observed, grateful for the opportunity to mumble on, hoping thereby to cover his embarrassment, “is the ongoing debate about the susan long-termers. They’re the ones whose punishments attract all the public attention. Everybody carps about the unreasonableness of the jurists of the past, who just wanted to get supposedly dangerous individuals off the streets during their own lifetimes and didn’t care about the ethical problems they were handing down to their descendants. House arre
st is seen as a more reasonable alternative—but communication control ensures that the victims don’t have a voice. When the sentence ended… I was a hundred and eighty-three years old, and I hadn’t talked face-to-face with anyone for fifty years. Most of my former acquaintances were dead, and most of the rest had forgotten me. Even the ones who had stood by me and helped me as best they could, had to impersonalize the communication process. The ones who wanted to carry forward my work—the ones who did carry it forward, insofar as the law allowed them to, had to do so without any input from me—I wasn’t even allowed to help. By the time it ended, it was impossible to pick up the fifty-year-old threads, and there was no hope of changing everything back again. The only real relationships I’ve been able to form in the last thirteen years have been new ones, but so many of the authentically young seem to think of me as some kind of monster or demon… sometimes I feel like the Minotaur made by Daedalus, lost in the labyrinth of Minos.” Michi knew that he should not be running on and on in this ridiculous manner, but he couldn’t help himself. He had lost the knack of conversation as well as the knack of making love. His social skills had atrophied.

  Had he gone to the freezer he’d have emerged into an altered world, but this wasn’t the twentieth century; the pace of technological change was much less fierce than it had been at its peak. He could have adapted readily enough—but actually having to live the fifty years of his sentence, aging at a normal rate, had turned him into an old man in every sense of the word: a social and sexual incompetent, hovering on the brink of mental incompetence.

  It would probably be best for everyone, he thought, if he were to flush out his IT and stick his head into a bath of neurostimulators—or perhaps to attempt a third rejuve, disregarding the 90 percent probability that the Miller effect would wipe his mental slate clean.

  “The time will come,” the young woman assured him as she adjusted her suitskin and ran her fingers lightly through her hair, “when you will be recognized as a great man. When brain-cyborgization technology is finally perfected, you’ll be remembered as a bold pioneer, tragically frustrated by the enemies of progress.

  You are a great man, and there are people in the world who know it now.” “I’m not a great man,” he told her uncomfortably. “I never pretended to be. I never did anything for the benefit of future generations. It was all for my own self-gratification. The people whose brains were wrecked were the victims of my ambition. No matter how resentful I may become about my punishment, I have to remember that I was guilty.” As he spoke, reflex lifted his wrinkled hand and passed it over the hairless dome of his skull, the gnarled fingers dancing on the sockets embedded in the bone as if they were dancing on a keyboard. The continued presence of the sockets was oddly reassuring, despite their uselessness. While they were there, he could never entirely forget who and what he was. Those who had set out to punish him had not dared to remove the apparatus lest they kill him in the process. His neurons had forged too many synapses with the compound electrodes; it was no longer possible to say with any exactitude where he ended and the brainfeed apparatus began.

  “You are a great man,” the woman insisted, her eyes flashing with uncanny brilliance. Michi lowered his hand. “One day, we will be able to make productive use of encephalic augmentation. Then, no matter how long each of us may live, there will be no limit to what we might become. Evolution will be the prerogative of the individual.” If only, Michi thought.

  When the cruel sentence had first been passed upon him, revoking the prerogative of future individual evolution, Michi had thought that the sockets would be his greatest asset. He knew a thousand combinations whose stimulation created pleasure—and he did think of it as a primal process of creation—and a thousand patterns of varying intensity which made inner music of the ebb and flow of elemental ecstasy. He had been a connoisseur of fundamental self-stimulation, then. The superficial mock experiences available in commercial virtual environments had been of no interest to him at all, and he had taken leave to despise them. What arguments he and Kwiatek had had! He had been arrogant enough to think that nothing that the people of the real world could do to him could hurt him so long as he had power over his own inner being. He had thought himself complete as well as competent.

  Fifty years had been more than long enough to reduce pleasure and ecstasy to tedium and mechanism, and to inform him how woefully incomplete he was. Long before the further growth of his new synapses had spoiled the messages with noise, they had lost their intrinsic existential value.

  That had been the worst punishment of all.

  Once, Michi had thought that the fear of robotization by cyborgization was a mere phantom of the frightened imagination, a grotesque bugbear unworthy of the anxiety of serious men. In those days, he had been convinced that the so-called Robot Assassins were mere lunatics. Now, he was not so sure… and yet, the flatteries heaped upon him by this remarkable young woman were anything but unwelcome. The knowledge that there were still a precious few among the newest generation who counted him a hero was very precious.

  The woman was probably not a Natural; in two hundred years’ time she would run into the crucial limitation of nanotechnological repair exactly as his own generation had. There must, however, be Naturals who thought as she did, who would carry his memory into the fourth millennium—perhaps even to the fifth if the limited research in encephalic augmentation that was still permitted eventually solved the problem of forgetfulness without eroding the capacity for empathy… “I don’t have much time, Michi,” the woman told him. “I’ll have to go.” “Of course,” he said, hauling himself from the bed into an upright position, ignoring her pantomimed protest.

  “Don’t get up,” she said when she realized how determined he was. “Please—stay where you are. I’ll let myself out.” “Will you come again?” he asked, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to risk another possible humiliation.

  “Yes,” she said. “I promise.” For some reason, he couldn’t even begin to believe her—and it was that, rather than the mere instruction, which made him sink back onto the bed and wait, supine, until he was sure that she had left the house.

  When he finally managed to rouse himself, Michi went back into the outer room, without bothering to put his own suitskin on. He slumped upon the settee, drained and dejected, staring at the golden flowers that the woman had brought for him and mounted in his wall. They were garden flowers, but they were products of modern genetic art rather than ancient selective breeding. According to the young woman, they were one of Oscar Wilde’s designs—but for some reason he could not quite fathom, they reminded Michi of the kind of flowers one might put in a funeral wreath.

  He wished that he had not lost his grip on the artistry of actual life. Like the soft caresses of data suits and the visual illusions of virtual reality, the rewards of ordinary “sensation” now seemed to him so remote from authentic intimacy as to be utterly worthless. In his first youth, which had all but disappeared into the oblivion of forgetfulness, he had devoted a great deal of time to the enhancement of the visual illusions deployed by VE technology. Even in his second youth, he had contrived to devote a certain amount of attention to the lucrative businesses of VE education and VE entertainment, but by then he had been determined to become a pioneer of experiential augmentation, and he had succeeded in that mission to the extent of becoming an outlaw. In doing so, he had lost his appetite for the ordinary. Perhaps that was why he seemed to be perpetually on the brink of losing his unfortunately ordinary mind.

  The young woman was right, of course—all true pioneers so far outstripped the ambitions of their contemporaries that they were condemned to perdition for their bravery—but she could not know the true cost of his abandonment of the phenomenal world, any more than she could know the real effect of his long imprisonment.

  “One day,” Michi had actually said to the judge who had pronounced sentence upon him from the conventional safety of a virtual courtroom, “the world will d
espise the kind of cowardice whose representative you are. Michi Urashima, the men of the future will say, was demonized by those too dull to see that he was the seed of the Afterman. Those future men will not be prisoners within their own skulls, rotting in the dungeons of their incompetent wetware. The crude paths which I have hacked out will be built by future generations into the roads of freedom.

  Our children’s children will live forever, and they will wear the crowns of Emperors of Experience: crowns of silicon which will give them the memories they will need, the calculative capacities they will need, and all the ecstasies that they will not be ashamed to demand. Our children’s children will be properly equipped for eternal life.” Even now, he was certain that he had been right—but still he was forced to count the cost of his martyrdom.

  Michi was wise enough to understand the kinds of fear which his experiments had inspired in those who condemned him. He knew now that there was real cause for anxiety in their nightmarish visions of people made into robotic puppets by external brainfeed equipment, either by operant conditioning or straightforward usurpation of the command links to the nervous system. He had responded to those fears in the same speech, appropriating the defense offered by the pioneers of the Genetic Revolution. “All technologies can be used for evil ends as well as good ones,” he had said, “but willful ignorance is no protection. Biotechnology provided the means for hideous wars, but it also provided the defenses which prevented their devastations from becoming permanent and freed humankind from the oppressions of the Old Reproductive System. What we require, as we face a future of limitless opportunity, is not blind fear and denial but a clear-sighted sense of responsibility, and the means to undo all the evils of oppression—including the oppressions of our imperfect evolutionary heritage.” That too had been true—but it had not been sufficient then to lay the fears of others to rest, and it was not sufficient now to quell his own anxieties.