Damon quelled a reflexive response to deny the possibility. He knew that research into the mechanisms of dreaming had been going on for more than a hundred years, attended all the while by speculations about taped dreams that would one day be bought off the supermarket shelf just like VE paks, but he’d always believed the sceptics who said that such speculations were unreasonably wild, and that the plausibility of the notion was just an accountable illusion, like the plausibility of telepathy. “You’re right about one thing,” he said drily. “If you can do that, I ought to be able to work out who you are. There can’t be more than a handful of research teams who’ve got within a light-year of that kind of device.”
“It’s all done by IT,” the mercury man told him equably. “It’s easy enough to operate the switch in the hypothalamus which prevents instructions to the motor nerves generated in dreams getting through to the body, while preserving the illusionthat you’re acting and reacting as you would in everyday life. Sensory information is filtered through a similar junction whose functions can be just as easily usurped. It doesn’t require millions of nanomachines to colonize the entire structure of the brain—it only requires a few thousand to stand in for the neuronal gatekeepers that are already in place. The whole set up isn’t that much more complicated than a synthesuit—but it’s so much neater to wear the suit inside instead of out, and it saves a small fortune on your electricity bill. As you can see, it gives the VE a texture much more like reality, even if the information is incredible. It also allows the programmers to build in facilities which reproduce things you can sometimes do in dreams but never in real life. As I told you earlier, the realtest of your psychological adaptability is whether you can step off that ledge believing that you can fly.”
Damon was uncomfortably aware of the fact that his chosen career—the design of virtual environments for use with ordinary commercial hoods and synthesuits—had just been revealed to be a blind alley. Unless he could adapt his skills to the coming regime of manufactured dreams, everything he’d ever done and everything he currently planned to do would be consigned to the scrap heap of obsolescence.
“When will this hit the market?” he whispered.
“That’s an interesting question,” said the mirror man. “In fact, it’s a question which cuts to the heart of the emergent philosophy of the new world order. For hundreds of years, people have been developing products for the market:for the purposes of getting rich. Even artists got sucked into it, although the motive forces involved in their creativity—as I’m sure you understand very well—usually went far beyond the vulgar necessity of making a living. The sole raison d’être of the so-called mothercorps was to make as much money as possible as rapidly as possible. The defining feature of the Age of Capital was that money became an end instead of a means. The richest of men became so very rich that they couldn’t possibly spend what they had, but that didn’t stop them trying to make more and more. Money ceased to be mere purchasing power and became a measuring device—a way of keeping score of the position and prestige of individuals within the great competition that was the world. Every new discovery was weighed in the balance of the market, assessed according to its power to make money. Do you understand why that age is now over, Damon? Do you understand why everything has changed?”
“Has it changed?” Damon asked sceptically. “Maybe the people you know are so rich they no longer bother keeping score, but everyone I know needs all the money they can lay their hands on, because the purchasing power of money is their only hope of staying one step ahead of the Grim Reaper and riding the escalator to eternity.”
“Exactly,” said the mirror man, as if Damon were agreeing with him rather than disputing what he’d said. “That’s exactly the point. Money has retained its power because the ultimate product isn’t yet on the market. Until we have authentic emortality at a fixed price, the pursuit goes on and on—and while even the richest of men knew full well that he couldn’t take his money with him when he died, all the money in the world could be nothing to him but a means of keeping score. But that’s no longer the case, as Adam Zimmerman was the first to understand and demonstrate.
“Now every rich man—perhaps every man of moderate means—understands perfectly well that if he can only hang around long enough for the appropriate technologies to arrive, he willhave the chance to live forever. Thatbecomes the end, and money merely the means. We’re already living in a postcapitalist society, Damon—it’s just that many of our fellows haven’t yet noticed the fact or fully understood its significance. Your father understood the fundamental point long ago, of course—which makes it all the more frustrating that he doesn’t seem to be able to grasp its corollaries. I suppose it’s because he prides himself on being a scientist, too fine a man to dirty his hands with mere matters of economics. We have to make him take those blinkers off, Damon. We can’t let him go ahead with what he’s doing while he’s still wearing them.”
“What ishe doing?” Damon wanted to know.
“I’d rather not be the one to fill you in on the details,” the mirror man told him blithely. “As long as you’re curious, I know you’ll keep niggling away at Kachellek and Hywood. We might need you to do that if our latest moves don’t do the trick. If Helier stillwon’t come to the conference table we’ll need you to keep nagging away on our behalf until he does.”
“And if I won’t?”
“You won’t be able to help yourself,” the mirror man told him, with insulting confidence. “You can’t kill curiosity—it has nine lives. In any case, your father will have to take you back into the fold. He can’t leave you alone and exposed after all that’s happened. We’ve called attention to you—whatever they believe or don’t believe, the Eliminators are interested in you now. Your worthiness is under examination. We don’t approve of the Eliminators, of course—not officially—but we like the fact that they take things seriously. We like the fact that they raise the important question: whois worthy of immortality? That’s what this is all about, you see. What kind of people ought to inherit the earth, in perpetuity? What kind of people must we become, if we intend to live forever? Eliminator violence is just childish jealousy, of course—but the question remains to be answered. We don’t want to eliminate Conrad Helier, or the Ahasuerus Foundation, but we dowant them to understand that if they want to play games they have to play by the rules. If we’re going to live forever, we all have to play as a team.”
Damon had found it so uncomfortable to stare into the apparition’s reflective face that he had spent most of the conversation staring into space or at his own hands, but now he looked directly at the convex mirrors which were the mercurial man’s robotic eyes.
“You don’t seem to me to be much of a team player,” he said. “You seem to me to be trying to play God, just as you’ve accused Conrad Helier of doing. ‘As flies to wanton boys—’ ”
“We haven’t killed anyone,” the mirror man said, cutting him off in midquote. “Like Conrad Helier, we take a certain pride in that. As for playing God—well, there wasa time when your father could say ‘If we don’t who will?’ but that time is over. This is Olympus, Damon—the place is positively lousy with would-be gods, and that’s why we all have to work together. That’s what your father has to understand. You have to persuade him that it’s true, if no one else will.”
“I can’t.”
The mirror man dismissed his stubbornness with a casual gesture. He stood up, his movement impossibly fluid and graceful. No real body could have moved like that. “Are you ready to fly?” he asked, implying with his tone that Damon wasn’t.