“It’s useful to have some authentic footage on which to build,” said the man in the Conrad Helier mask, in Conrad Helier’s voice, “but the only thing I reallyneeded from you was your absence from the world for the three days which it would take to flush out your IT and reduce you to the common clay of unaugmented human flesh.”
“Why have you bothered to do that,” Silas wanted to know, “if you didn’t intend to use real screams in your little melodrama? Doyou intend to interrogate me under torture, or are you just making the point that you could have if you’d wanted to?”
“There you are,” said the man who was not Conrad Helier. “You arebeginning to understand. I knew you could. If only you’d been able to understand a little earlier, all this might not have been necessary. The world has changed, you see—a whole century has passed since 2093. It may have been unlike any other century in history, by virtue of the fact that many of the people who really matteredin 2093 are still alive in 2193, but it still packed in more extravagant changes than any previous century. Whatever the future brings, it will never produce such sweeping changes again. You’vechanged too, Silas. You probably seem to yourself to be exactly the same person you were at twenty-six, but that’s an understandable illusion. If you could only look at yourself from a detached viewpoint, the changes would be obvious.”
“So what?”
The fake Conrad Helier was already standing at ease, but now he put his hands into his pockets. In the sixty years that he had known him, Silas had neverseen Conrad Helier put his hands into his pockets.
“It used to be reckoned that people inevitably became more conservative as they got older,” the man in the white coat said, with only the faintest hint of irony in his earnest expression. “Young men with virile bodies and idealistic minds, it was said, easily embraced utopian schemes for the radical transformation of society. Old men, by contrast, only wanted to hang on to the things they already had; even those who hadn’t made fortunes wanted to hang on to the things they were used to, because they were creatures of habit. The people who spoke out against technologies of longevity—and there werepeople like that, as I’m sure you can remember—often argued that a world ruled by the very old would become stagnant and sterile, fearful of further change. They prophesied that a society of old people would be utterly lacking in potency and progressive zeal, devoid of any sense of adventure.
“They were wrong, of course. Their mistake was to equate getting olderwith nearing the end. The old became conservative not because of the increasing number of the years they’d lived but because of the dwindling number of the years that still lay before them. The young, whose futures were still to be made, had a strong vested interest in trying to make the world better as quickly as was humanly possible; the old, who had little or no future left, only wanted to preserve what they could of their old and comfortable selves. Things are very different now. Now, the prospect of true emortality lies before us, like the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. Not everyone will make it all the way to the light, but many of us will and we alllive in hope. The old, in fact, understand that far better than the young.
“The young used to outnumber the old, but they don’t now and never will again; the young are rarenow, a protected species. Although the future which stretches before them seems limitless, it doesn’t seem to them to be theirs. Even if they can still envisage themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the earth, the age at which they will come into their inheritance seems a very long way off and likely to be subject to further delays. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the young are more resentful now than they have ever been before. It is the old who now have the more enthusiastic and more constructive attitude to the future; they expect not only to live in it, but also to ownit, to be masters of its infinite estates.”
“I know all this,” Silas said sullenly, wishing that his itches were not so defiantly unscratchable.
“You know it,” said the man masked as Conrad Helier, “but you haven’t understoodit. How, if you understood it, could you ever have thought of retirement?How, if you understood it, could you waste your time in pointless and undignified sexual encounters with the authentically young?”
“I can live my own life any way I choose,” Silas told his accuser coldly. “I’m not just old—I’m also free.”
“That’s the point,” said the ersatz Helier. “That’s why you’re here. You’re notfree. Nobody is, who hopes and wants to live forever. Because, you see, if we’re to live forever, we have to live together. We’re dependent on one another, not just in the vulgar sense that the division of labor makes it possible to produce all the necessities of life but in the higher sense that humanlife consists primarily of communication with others, augmented, organized, and made artful by all the media we can devise. We’re social beings, Silas—not because we have some kind of inbuilt gregarious instinct but because we simply can’t do anything worthwhile or be anything worthwhile outside of society. That’s why our one and only objective in life—all the more so for everyone who’s a hundred and fifty going on a hundred and fifty thousand—ought to be the Herculean task of making a society as rich and as complex and as rewardingas we possibly can.”
“The only reason I’m not free,” Silas replied tersely, “is that I’ve been strapped to a fucking chair by a fucking maniac.”
Conrad Helier’s face registered great disappointment. “Your attitude is as stupidly anachronistic as your language,” he said—and went out like a switched-off light, along with the virtual environment of which he was a part. Silas was left entirely to himself.
Silas was stubbornly glad that he had had an effect on his interrogator, but the effect itself was far from rewarding. In the darkness and the silence he was alone with his discomforts, and his discomforts were further magnified by lack of distraction. He was also acutely aware of the fact that he had failed to obtain answers to any of the questions which confronted him—most urgently of all, what would happen to him now that Operator 101 had released his slanders onto the Web?
Mercifully—although mercy may not have been the motive—he was not left in the dark and the silence for long.
His senses of sight and hearing were now engaged by a kaleidoscopic patchwork of fragments excerpted from old and nearly new VE tapes, both documentary and drama. If there was any pattern of relevance in the order in which they were presented to him, he could not discern it—but he became interested in spite of that, not merely in the individual snatches that had been edited together but in the aesthetic experience of the sequence.
He “walked” on the surface of Mars, surveying the roseate desert and looking up into the tinted sky at the glaring daystars. He saw the rounded domes where the human Martians lived and watched the glass facets sparkle and glint as he changed his position. Then, on the horizon, he “saw” the crazy-tale castles of the Mars of obsolete dreams, the skycars riding the imagination-thickened air—and dramatic music crashed through the brief, golden silence. . . .
He saw earth-moving machines on the fringe of the Australian superdesert, laying out the great green starter plane which would begin the business of soil manufacture, bridging the desiccation gap which had deadened the land in spite of all life’s earlier attempts to reclaim it. A sonorous voice-over pumped out relentless adspeak about the technical expertise behind the project: glory, glory, glory to the heroes of the genetic revolution . . ..