Inherit the Earth

by Brian Stableford

  “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.”

  Twenty-seven

  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 rehabilita
tion. There won’t be a full trial, of course—just a formal hearing to determine the sentence.”

  “I’m sure that Inspector Yamanaka is very grateful to you,” the red-haired woman said. “If you hadn’t resisted so valiantly when they came after you a second time. . . .”

  “Actually, it was all Lenny Garon’s doing. When he heard them say that they weren’t police, he leaped to the conclusion that they were Eliminators enthusiastic to execute an enemy of mankind. Hero worship eclipsed his sense of probability for a few vital moments. I’m grateful to him, of course, but I think Inspector Yamanaka still has a lurking suspicion that he’s been fobbed off with a few disposable scapegoats. He doesn’t believe that it was all their own idea. On the other hand, he doesn’t really want to look too hard for evidence of the involvement of a man like Frederick Saul, in case his career runs onto the rocks.”

  “People who have careers do have to be careful, Mr. Hart,” she pointed out.

  “True—and I certainly don’t want to jeopardize yours. In fact, I rather hoped that you might be able to help me out with my own career decisions. I seem to have reached something of a crossroads.”

  “The Ahasuerus Foundation isn’t interested in employing you,” she told him.

  “PicoCon is.”

  “In that case,” she said, “you should count yourself very fortunate.”

  “I’ve heard that they have a great future ahead of them,” Damon admitted, “but I’m not sure that their optimism would be shared—at least not wholeheartedly—by an unbiased observer.”

  “I’m flattered that you consider me an unbiased observer,” she assured him, “but I’m not sure that I have enough facts at my disposal to make a reasoned analysis of your career prospects with PicoCon or any other company.”

  “But you do know something about the Saul family, don’t you? One of the men who financed the foundation was a Saul, wasn’t he?”

  “The Ahasuerus Foundation was set up by Adam Zimmerman, entirely funded from his own resources.”

  “Resources which he earned, if earned is the right word, by masterminding a coup which turned a stock-market crash into an economic holocaust—and left a few dozen men with effective possession of two-thirds of the earth’s surface. The possession in question then made inexorable progress to the point at which those men’s heirs—who are even fewer in number than they were—are now the effective owners of the whole earth.”

  “That’s a slight exaggeration,” Rachel Trehaine protested.

  “I know,” Damon said. “But the point is that it’s only slight. As long as they’re united, and as long as they can keep buying up innovators like PicoCon and OmicronA, the gods of New Olympus really do own the earth—and they’re busy reinventing the laws of trespass.”

  No reply was forthcoming to that observation, but Damon hadn’t expected one. “I looked at the background material Madoc dredged up for me,” he said. “Adam Zimmerman’s so-called confession is a remarkable document—as remarkable, in its way, as the charter he set up for the foundation. His penultimate will and testament poses an interesting philosophical question, though. You’re supposed to bring him out of suspended animation when you have the technology available to make him young again and keep him that way forever—barring the usual accidents, of course—but what would qualify as reasonable grounds for believing that the latter criterion had been achieved? Some might argue that a man of his age—he was forty-eight, wasn’t he, when he was consigned to the freezer?—already has a good chance of riding the escalator all the way, but you’d undoubtedly take the view that he’d want the benefit of much better rejuve technology than the current market standard—technology that could be guaranteed to beat the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect.”

  “With all due respect,” said the red-haired woman, “the internal affairs of the foundation are none of your concern.”

  “I understand that. I’m only talking hypothetically. I’m intrigued by the question of how we could ever know that we were in possession of a technology of rejuvenation that would stop aging permanently, preserving the mind as well as the body. How could we ever know that a particular IT suite was good for, say, two thousand years, without actually waiting two thousand years for the results of the field tests to come in? What sort of data analysis would allow us to reach a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the technology ahead of time?”

  “It wouldn’t be easy,” Rachel Trehaine admitted warily. “But we now have a very detailed knowledge of the biochemistry of all the degenerative processes we lump together as aging. At present, we arrive at estimates of projected life spans by monitoring those processes over the short term in such a way as to produce an extrapolatable curve. That curve has to be adjusted for rejuvenative interruptions, but we can do medium-term experiments to monitor the effects of repeated rejuvenative treatments.”

  “Do you still use mice for those experiments?” Damon asked.

  “We use live animals in some trials,” she countered rather stiffly, “but most of the preliminary work can be done with tissue cultures. I assume that what you’re driving at is the impossibility of getting rid of the margin of uncertainty which arises from dealing with any kind of substitute for human subjects. You’re right, of course—we’ll never be sure that a treatment which multiplies the lifetime of a cell or a mouse by a thousand will do the same for a human being, until we’ve actually tried it.”

  “As I see it,” Damon said, “we’ll never be able to tell the difference between a technological suite that will allow us to live for a long time and one which really will allow us to live forever. Most people, of course, don’t give a damn about that—they only want the best there is—but you have to decide when to wake Adam Zimmerman up. You have to decide, day by day and year by year, exactly how to balance the equation of potential gain against potential risk—because you can’t leave him in there indefinitely, can you? Nor can you keep waking him up to ask his advice, because every journey in or out of susan multiplies the risks considerably, and even the nanotech you pump into him while he’s still down and out can’t fully compensate for the fact that the first susan technology he used was pre-ark.”

  “You’re right,” she admitted. “For us, if for no one else, nice statistical distinctions are important. What’s your point?”

  “For a long time, Ahasuerus must have been field leaders in longevity research. Your heavy investment in biotech put you on the crest of the wave—and you presumably had a healthy and mutually supportive relationship with other researchers, all the way from Morgan Miller to Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal. You were all on the same side, all trading information like good team players. Then PicoCon and OmicronA came at the problem from a different angle, with a different attitude. They’re the field leaders now, aren’t they? While they’ve been forming their own team, yours has broken up. Nowadays, it must require serious industrial espionage to discover what the boys across the street are up to, and exactly how far they’ve got.”

  “The Ahasuerus Foundation is not involved in industrial espionage,” she informed him as stiffly and as flatly as she was bound to do.

  “It’s not simply a matter of there being a new team in town, is it?” Damon went on softly. “The real problem is that they’re trying to redefine the game. They’re moving the goalposts and rewriting the rules. They’re worried about your willingness to play by the new rules because they’re worried about the terms of your charter—about the responsibility you owe to Adam Zimmerman. Is it possible, do you think, that they’re anxious that letting Adam Zimmerman out of the freezer might be tantamount to letting the cat out of the bag?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Hart?”

  “Let me put it this way, Dr. Trehaine. It might well be that the people with the very best internal technology would consider it desirable, or even necessary, to play down its power: to maintain the belief that what people insist on calling immortality not only isn’t immortality but isn’t even true emortalit
y. It might well be that the people who control the IT megacorps consider it desirable or necessary to persuade their would-be heirs that patience is still the cardinal virtue—that in order to inherit the earth they only have to wait until their elders lose their memories, their minds, and, in the end, their lives. If that reality were mere appearance and illusion—if all the patience in the world wouldn’t be enough to allow the young to come into their inheritance—what hope would there be for people like me? What is there to wait for, if my generation can never become the inheritors of Earth?”

  “If you think that we already have true emortality, Mr. Hart,” Rachel Trehaine said drily, “you’re mistaken. I can say that with certainty.”

  “I’m not sure how much your certainty is worth, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon told her bluntly, “but even if you’re right—what about the escalator? If IT really is advancing quickly enough to put true emortality in the hands of people now alive, what will it be worth to the young? While each generation thinks that it has a chance to be the first to the top of the mountain, the philosophy of Elimination will remain the province of outsiders—but as soon as it becomes generally known that the summit has been claimed, and claimed in perpetuity, the Eliminators might become a valuable asset to those whose uneasy heads are only a few funerals away from the crown.

  “You’re the professional data analyst, Dr. Trehaine—you’re in a far better position than I am to balance all the variables in the equation. How do you like the Eliminators? How far away are we, in your estimation, from an undeclared war between the young and the old? And what, if you were a rising star in the Pico-Con/OmicronA constellation, would you want to do about it?”

  “I think you’re being ridiculously melodramatic,” said Rachel Trehaine calmly. “We live in a civilized world now. Even if everyone knew that they were truly emortal, they’d have better sense than to go to war for ownership of the world. They’d know perfectly well that any such war might easily end up destroying the prize they were fighting for. Wouldn’t it be better to live forever, happily and comfortably, in a world you didn’t own than to risk death in order to possess a handful of its ashes?”