Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [42]
“Excellent. I should reassure you immediately, of course, that there is absolutely no need to panic regarding the possibility of a random outbreak of homicidal flowers—less need, in fact, than even I had feared. This particular weapon will never be used again, because it was designed expressly to consume the flesh of Gabriel King. It is what the parlance of the old plague wars called a smart agent—far smarter, in fact, than any agent then devised. It may well qualify as the most narrowly targeted weapon in history.” Hal and Lowenthal absorbed this information silently. Even Charlotte knew enough about genetics to be astonished by it.
“Perhaps I ought also to say,” Oscar went on, “that although I remain absolutely convinced that the plant’s designer was Rappaccini, it appears to have been derived from a natural template that Rappaccini has never actually used—a temporarily extinct species that was recovered from a twenty-first-century seed bank by another person, and which has so far been developed for the marketplace exclusively by that person.” “Which person?” Hal asked—although Charlotte presumed that he must already have guessed.
“Me,” said Oscar Wilde. “Although the finished product bears little enough resemblance to its model, the gentemplate makes it clear that the original was a globoid amaranth of the genus Celosia-once popularly known, my research assures me, as the cockscomb. That is as far as facts can take us. If I am to make more of the information I have gleaned, I shall have to make use of intuition—and I intuit far more effectively on a full stomach. There is nothing like good food and a bottle of fine wine to liberate the power of the imagination.” Hal Watson would undoubtedly have protested that what was required of an expert witness was scrupulous attention to fact rather than indulgence of the imagination, but he was distracted by two beeping sounds, which immediately entered into competition for his attention. While he tried to deal with both of them, a third commenced its siren song, and he was forced to begin juggling all three data streams.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll be listening.” “It’s good to know,” Wilde observed as Charlotte led her two companions toward yet another elevator, “that there are so many silvery recording angels sorting religiously through the multitudinous sins of mankind. Alas, I fear that the capacity of our fellow men for committing sins may still outstrip their best endeavors.” “Actually,” Charlotte observed as she pressed the button to summon the car, “the crime rate is still going down—as it always has while the number of spy eyes and bubblebugs embedded in the walls of the world has increased.” “I spoke of sins, not crimes,” said Wilde as they moved into the empty car.
“What your electronic eyes do not see, the law may not grieve about, but the capacity for sin will lurk in the hearts and minds of men long after its expression has been banished from their public actions.” “People can do whatever they like in the privacy of their virtual environments,” Charlotte retorted. “There’s no sin in that. The point is that what lurks in the darker corners of their hearts and minds shouldn’t—and mostly doesn’t—affect the way they conduct themselves in the real world.” “If there were no sin in our adventures in imagination,” Wilde said, evidently reluctant to surrender the last word even in the most trivial of arguments, “there would be no enjoyment in them. While we are as vicious at heart as we have ever been, and are encouraged to remain so by the precious freedom of virtual reality, we cannot be entirely virtuous even in the real world. The ever-presence of potential observers will, of course, make us exceedingly careful—but in the end, that will only serve to make all murders as intricate and ingenious as the