Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [52]
He did not, of course, have time to reply to any of his mail, but no one who knew him even slightly would be expecting a rapid response. His meal was whole diet manna, as uncomplicated as possible, but he followed it with hot black coffee, as authentic in taste and texture as his dispensary could contrive.
While he drank the coffee he reflected that although his lifestyle might have appeared frugal to anyone who had cause to consult the record stored by the mechanical eyes which had him under observation, they would have been wrong.
“Only those with extensive experience of the unreal,” he murmured, “can properly appreciate the real.” It was one of his favorite aphorisms; he could no longer remember from whom he had stolen it.
“That’s not what most people say,” the beautiful woman had observed when he had quoted the saw on the occasion of their first meeting. “Some reckon that the near perfection of virtual reality can only devalue actual experience, by proving that it is—at least in principle, and nowadays very nearly in practice—reducible to a mere string of ones and zeroes.” “That’s absurd,” Paul had told her. “Even if one were to ignore the hardware whose structures are animated by the digital programs, it’s as grossly misleading to think of the programs merely as a string of ones and zeroes as it is to think of living organisms merely as a string of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts threaded on a DNA strand. In any case, how can it be a devaluation to know that everything, in the ultimate analysis, can be reduced to the pure and absolute beauty of abstract information?” The beautiful woman had been as deeply impressed by his eloquence as she was by his originality. There had been a spark between them from the very first moment: a spark that was emotional as well as intellectual. The fact that he was a hundred and ninety-four years old while she could hardly be more than twenty—twenty-five at the most—was no barrier to empathy. On the contrary: the difference between them actually increased the quality of their relationship by marking out complementary roles. She had so much to learn, and he so much to teach. She had such bright eyes, such fabulous hair… and he had such a wealth of experience, such a wonderful elasticity of mind.
“The professions of information technology have generated many derisory nicknames over the centuries,” Paul had explained to his new lover when she wondered aloud whether she ought to follow a career trajectory in Webwork, “but those of us who have a true vocation learn to bear them all with pride. I’ve never been ashamed to be a chipmonk, or a bytebinder, or a cyberspider. I’ve devoted my life to the expansion of the Web and its capabilities. It is, after all, the mind of the race. In my youth I found it tattered and torn, ripped apart by the Crash, and in my middle years I had to fight with all my might to preserve its scaffolding from the vandalistic activities of the new barbarians—but in the end, I saw the triumph of the New Order and felt free to move on to further fields, searching for the road that would lead to the ultimate upload. That’s the way to true immortality, after all. No matter what the so-called New Human Race is capable of, it can only be emortal; if we’re to look beyond the very possibility of death, it’s to the Web that we must look in the first instance, because it’s the Web that will ultimately be fused with the Universal Machine, the architect of the omega point. It’s a pity that so many of the people whose souls