When the TV current affairs shows of the early twenty-eighth century began their earnest debate as to whether all of this madness might be reborn, I assumed that it was just talk for talk’s sake. Perhaps I underestimated the influence of the pundits and the power of talk for talk’s sake to generate self-fulfilling prophecies, but I cannot deny that I was dead wrong.

Most of the people who had begun, like Ziru Majumdar, to question whether the technologies to which they owed their preservation from pain, disease, and aging were denying them something in terms of experience were content merely to dabble with pain and other sensations associated with physical injury. Once such dabbling began, there was an inevitable temptation to take it further and further, testing and extending its limits. Among these supposed “connoisseurs of human experience” there emerged a curious kind of hierarchy, in which those who explored further and more complex extremes of discomfort and distress won considerable praise and prestige from the less daring.

The revival of Thanaticist ideas was at first purely theoretical. Although many hobbyist masochists became fond of asserting that the ultimate human experience must be the one that emortals had postponed indefinitely, there was no immediate rush to put aside the delay. There was, however, extensive experimentation with increasingly elaborate exercises in “recreational torture.” As time went by, and these activities became increasingly ingenious and daring, the leading proponents of the new philosophy of extreme experience began to look around for “martyrs,” who might be prepared to go all the way.

There had always been suicides in the true emortal population—indeed, once a firm line had been ruled beneath the death toll of the Decimation, suicide became the commonest cause of death in three-quarters of the Earthly nations, outnumbering accidental deaths by a facto of three in the most extreme cases. Such acts were, however, motivated by personal idiosyncrasy. None of the first dozen Thanaticist martyrs, all of whom were posthumously hailed, had committed suicide for any reason remotely linked to the cause of sensation seeking. I daresay that they would all have been horrified to be hailed as heroes and potential role models, but they were not around to object.

I would have been unpleasantly surprised by the developments of the 2710s and 2720s even if I had remained a mere spectator, but I did not. The new Thanaticists would probably have taken a considerable interest in my work anyway, simply because I was now well established in the scholarly sectors of Labyrinth as the leading historian of death. As chance would have it, though, they rose to prominence within twenty years of the publication of the third part of the project: the one that dealt so extensively, and so sympathetically, with the ancient martyrs of Christendom.

My interpretation of the myth of Christ and those who had followed him to horrible and ignominious destruction was publicly hailed by the prophets of the new Thanaticism as a major inspiration, and it was publicly claimed as proof of the respectability of their philosophy. The so-called Thanaticist Manifesto of 2717, which carried the ridiculous and obviously pseudonymous byline “Hellward Lucifer Nyxson,” quoted from The Empires of Faith—though not so extensively as to be in breach of copyright—and held up my work as an example to everyone interested in recovering the full range of sensations that early humans had been “privileged to enjoy.” The claim that anything I had written could be taken as support for the absurd manifesto was nonsensical, but it was read and heard by millions more people than ever bothered to look at the history itself.

My ideas were swiftly usurped, horribly perverted and lasciviously adopted—in their perverted forms—as key items of Thanaticist lore. The Thanaticists claimed that their own expeditionaries to the extremes of human experience were, like the Christian martyrs and their model, suffering and dying on behalf of others.According to Nyxson and his more vociferous followers, Thanaticist martyrs were nobly crucifying themselves so that the New Human Race would not lose touch with the more exotic possibilities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of self-knowledge.

I tried to protest, of course, but at first I protested privately and entirely in vain. I sent messages to people who misquoted and misrepresented me, begging them to desist, although I could not contrive to discover the real identity of Hellward Lucifer Nyxson. Such replies as I received were content to assure me that I had misunderstood the import of my own work. It quickly became clear that I would need to react more forcefully if I were to have any effect at all—but I had no idea how to go about it.

While I dithered, events moved on rapidly and relentlessly. Thanks to false advertisements by the most outspoken Thanaticists, I became a hero of the movement: not merely an inspiration but a guiding light. The trails I had laid down in the Labyrinth to collate data regarding the myriad forms of Christian martyrdom and make them more easily navigable became a handbook for young Thanaticists bent on innovative self-mutilation. For a while, they all drew back from the brink of the ultimate sacrifice, but the 2720s saw an epidemic of “recreational crucifixions” whose willing victims vied to set new records for self-suspension by ropes or nails, in various different positions.

It would have been bad enough had the crucified only claimed Christ for their inspiration, but the majority made the specific claim that it was myaccount of the meaning of the Christ myth that had inspired their adventures. Connoisseurs of other kinds of torture were equally enthusiastic to declare that it was my reinterpretation of the Golden Legend that had given multifarious examples of the various saints to the emortals of the twenty-eighth century and made them newly meaningful.

Invitations to crucifixions, scarifications, and burnings began to pile up in the files of my answering machine. I refused them all, but they kept on coming.

One side effect of the unwanted publicity was that my history began to produce a decent income. Unfortunately, the money that poured into my account seemed to me to be steeped in blood, tainted by torture. I was reluctant to spend it and stopped trying to give it away when many of the intended recipients refused it on exactly the same grounds.

I hoped for a while that the fad would soon pass, preferably before any lives were actually sacrificed, but the cult continued to grow, feeding vampirically on the naive fascination of its emortal audience. Gaea’s latest fever was cooling as the new Ice Age began, its crisis having passed, but the accompanying delirium of human culture had evidently not yet reached and surpassed what Ziru Majumdar called “the cutting edge of experience.”

FORTY-ONE

From the very beginning, I found notoriety inconvenient. At first, I attempted to keep a low profile, programming my answerphone AI to stall all inquiries, whatever their source or nature. But I soon realized that the strategy was assisting others to misquote and misrepresent me, and that my private protests were futile.

I had previously assigned the duty of answering my phone to a low-grade sloth, but I had been dissatisfied with its service for some time. I suspected that it was at least partly to blame for the fact that Emily’s message telling me that she was in Antarctica had gone astray. Now I had the perfect excuse to replace it. I obtained a clever silver, although I begrudged the weeks of hard work that I had to devote to its education.

By the time I had equipped my new servant to put my side of the story, however, there had grown up a considerable clamor demanding that if I objected to the Thanaticists’ view of my work I ought to plead my own case and submit to proper cross-examination. No matter how cleverly my new sim could be equipped to argue on my behalf it remained a sim, and therefore a sham, whose employment was easily made to seem like cowardice.