Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [48]
“Michi Urashima’s just been found dead in San Francisco,” she reported. She knew that it wasn’t necessary to tell either of them who Michi Urashima was. For the sake of completeness she added: “He was murdered. Same method as King.” “Michi Urashima!” Lowenthal repeated incredulously.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Wilde. “Michi was a better man by far than Gabriel King.” Lowenthal had snatched up his own handset by the time Wilde had finished his sentence, and had turned away to speak into it. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in deducing that Michi Urashima’s was not one of the names Lowenthal’s employers had feared or expected to hear in this context—although there was one item of their discussion downstairs which had pointed to a pattern into which Urashima fit as snugly as a hand into a glove.
Before his trial and imprisonment, Michi Urashima had been one of the world’s foremost pioneers of “encephalic augmentation”: brainfeed research. Gabriel King must have known him well. So must Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.
On the other hand, it was difficult to imagine anyone less in tune with the MegaMall’s economic and social philosophy than Urashima. Even in the earliest phase of his career, when he had been an expert in computer graphics and image simulation, widely celebrated for his contributions to synthetic cinema, he had been a political radical. If the Hardinist Cabal feared that King’s assassination had been the first move in a conspiracy directed against their ownership of the world, Michi Urashima was the last person they would expect to find on the hit list.
“Not everyone would agree with you about his being a better man,” Charlotte said to Wilde speculatively, “but he must, I suppose, have been of the same generation. In any case, there’s no need for you to take the midnight maglev now.” “On the contrary,” said Oscar. “Even if this revelation is, by Rappaccini’s reckoning, premature, I feel that he would still want me to visit the scene.
This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further phases of its unfolding we really ought to follow the script laid down for us.” “You think there will be more murders?” Charlotte asked.
“I always thought so,” said Wilde. “Now, I am certain of it.”
Intermission Two: A Pioneer on the Furthest Shore
As if it were caught by the surge of a fast-flowing black river, the soul of Paul Kwiatek was hurled upon its wayward course through the warp of infinity. It was outside the universe of atoms, beneath the wayward play of nuclear interaction forces, having been reabsorbed into the implicate order itself. Paul knew that his fleshy envelope must be dead and that his body must already be in its coffin, borne through the streets of Bologna on a black-draped bier—but his soul was free, miraculously inviolate.
Tossed as he was by the whim of the reckless current, Paul could see nothing of the river’s shore, the Land of the Dead. Perhaps it was only his imagination which assured him that he could hear the whispering voices of the spirit legions, welcoming him with gossip as they marveled over the achievements of his life.
The guardian at the entrance to an older heaven might have stopped him at the gate, for his life had not been entirely without sin, but he had always worked in the cause of Mind and the further evolution of the human intellect. In the reckoning of cowards, he had committed crimes—crimes from whose legal consequences the agents of the MegaMall had fortunately condescended to shield him—but everything he had done he had done for the sake of increased understanding of the last and greatest of the ancient mysteries: the nature of consciousness, the fundamental phenomenon of the human mind. In any case, the heaven of tradition was now a virtual theme park owned and operated by the MegaMall, through which silver