Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [24]
The lessons of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries had been hard, but the limits of inorganic nanotechnology had finally been recognized and admitted by his own generation. Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and members of the new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming their second century of hopefully eternal youth instead of climbing out of slightly protracted adolescence. Magnus was not unduly resentful of the fact that he had been born too soon to benefit from Zaman engineering, however; nor did he begrudge the fact that he had lived to see the advent of the New Human Race while still confined to the tattered flesh of the Old, doomed to become a thing of nanotech thread and patches.
Magnus knew that there were many people in the world—most of them younger by far than he—who considered the reborn wilderness to be an artifact of nostalgia, a brief folly of the MegaMall’s Dominant Shareholders, but he was convinced that the work he was doing would provide a legacy for which the new inheritors of the earth would be deeply grateful. He would die, and soon, but the work to which he had dedicated his life would go on. The forest would survive. Alien to man it might be, but man would protect it nevertheless. The members of the New Human Race had even elected to call themselves Naturals. Gaean Mystics they were not, but at heart—or so Magnus believed—every true human was a Gaean in essence. The inheritors of Earth would guard their heritage far better than his own kind ever had.
As these thoughts wandered across his mind, Magnus had to blink a tear from the corner of his left eye. He immediately suffered a sudden stab of doubt, which was not so easily blinked away. He could not help but recall the fact that many people considered him to be an obsessive fool, not merely a lunatic but—and this was surely the final insult—a harmless lunatic.
“In the empire of the ecosphere, Magnus,” a once-valued colleague had said to him, only a few weeks before, “everything is controlled. It has to be. What you call ‘wilderness’ was born from the gene banks which conserved DNA from the world which existed before the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. It flourishes by our permission, entirely subject to our guidance. Its freedom is merely the result of our refusal fully to exercise our ecological hegemony. You’re fooling yourself if you think that it’s Ancient Nature reborn, in any meaningful sense. Ancient Nature began to die with the first discovery of agriculture and ended its long torment in the years before the Crash. Your so-called wilderness is at best a ghost and at worst a mere echo.” “I know and understand all that,” Magnus now took leave to reply, exercising his inalienable right to l’esprit de I’escaller. “I am not a fool—I merely recognize both the necessity and the propriety of returning these tracts of land to the dominion of natural selection. It is a wholly desirable act of expiation, whose efficacy is clearly displayed by the results of the biodiversity surveys.” “It’s a shallow gesture,” the colleague had told him, in response to a less carefully formulated reply. “It’s a temporary indulgence—a brief guilt trip whose futility will be recognized by the New Human Race as soon as its first generation reaches true adulthood. The time has already arrived when forest green is just as much an artifact as SAP black. You can’t halt progress, Magnus.
You can’t turn back the clock. Your forest is a sham, and a temporary folly.” “I’m trying to turn the clock, forward,” Magnus had not thought to say at the time. “What I’m doing is progress. The forest is forever, and its flesh is as real as its soul.” And yet, he could not deny that all the forest trees whose company