Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [75]
They were, alas, mere relics of the past, but they were the remnants of a glorious endeavor.
Michi still wondered, sometimes, whether he ought to make one more attempt to break through to the unknown. If he were to flush out all his IT and douse the sockets so as to flood the underlying electrodes with neurostimulators, the neurons further beneath would resume the business of forging new connections, further extending the synaptic tangles which already bound the contacts to every part of his brain. The removal of his IT would condemn him to death, of course, but he was dying anyway. Suppose he could trade a few months of not knowing what day it was for just one moment of enlightenment, one flash of inspiration, one revelatory proof that everything he had tried to achieve was possible, was within the grasp of contemporary humankind, if only people were willing to try, to take the risk.
Just suppose… It would be his triumph, and his alone. Official sources of finance had bailed out on him a hundred years ago, and he had been forbidden to call for further volunteers. The funds channeled from the Pharaohs of Capitalism by way of Gabriel King and his fellow buccaneers had dried up fifty years ago. The private backers had held out a little longer, but the law had built walls around him to keep their funds out. Like Kwiatek, he had been left high and dry—but Kwiatek had at least avoided the indignity of a show trial and subsequent house arrest.
If Kwiatek eventually ended up in susan, it wouldn’t be the law that had put him there; he would go of his own accord, unbranded and uncondemned.
“I was the only one prepared to go all the way,” Michi said aloud. “If they hadn’t abandoned me, I might even have got to where I wanted to be. Do you hear me?” “Yes,” said the sloth, as pedantically terse as ever.
“How long is it before my visitor’s due?” Michi demanded, determined to make the stupid machine do a little work to justify its keep.
“Thirty seconds,” replied the conscientious machine. Doubtless, in some abstract and ideal sense, it was absolutely right—but even as it spoke, the door chime sounded.
The woman was early.
“Let her in,” said Michi, levering himself up from his armchair, hoping as he did so that he would not lose himself again before she left.
“I’m sorry,” Michi said to the young woman as they lay in bed together. “I’ve grown unused to visitors of any kind, let alone lovers. All the old skills…” “I understand,” the woman said very gently. “Fifty years of solitary confinement is a very harsh penalty to pay for trying to push back the frontiers of human understanding.” “Most people thought of it as getting off lightly,” Michi said morosely. “They don’t realize. There are millions of people in the world who spend days on end—weeks on end if they’re VE addicts—cocooned in their apartments, and there are millions who routinely protect their privacy by filtering all their electronic communications through clever sims. They don’t know the true value of the power of choice, which allows them to break the pattern anytime they wish.
They don’t understand how demeaning it is to be forbidden the use of credit, of the most elementary privacy screening. Everybody nowadays thinks that they’re under observation, but they don’t really know what it means to have ever attentive eyes trained so intensively on the minutiae of one’s everyday life.” “I can’t pretend to know how it feels to be withdrawn from human society for fifty years, after having lived in it for over a hundred,” the young woman told him as she eased herself