Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [77]
When the cruel sentence had first been passed upon him, revoking the prerogative of future individual evolution, Michi had thought that the sockets would be his greatest asset. He knew a thousand combinations whose stimulation created pleasure—and he did think of it as a primal process of creation—and a thousand patterns of varying intensity which made inner music of the ebb and flow of elemental ecstasy. He had been a connoisseur of fundamental self-stimulation, then. The superficial mock experiences available in commercial virtual environments had been of no interest to him at all, and he had taken leave to despise them. What arguments he and Kwiatek had had! He had been arrogant enough to think that nothing that the people of the real world could do to him could hurt him so long as he had power over his own inner being. He had thought himself complete as well as competent.
Fifty years had been more than long enough to reduce pleasure and ecstasy to tedium and mechanism, and to inform him how woefully incomplete he was. Long before the further growth of his new synapses had spoiled the messages with noise, they had lost their intrinsic existential value.
That had been the worst punishment of all.
Once, Michi had thought that the fear of robotization by cyborgization was a mere phantom of the frightened imagination, a grotesque bugbear unworthy of the anxiety of serious men. In those days, he had been convinced that the so-called Robot Assassins were mere lunatics. Now, he was not so sure… and yet, the flatteries heaped upon him by this remarkable young woman were anything but unwelcome. The knowledge that there were still a precious few among the newest generation who counted him a hero was very precious.
The woman was probably not a Natural; in two hundred years’ time she would run into the crucial limitation of nanotechnological repair exactly as his own generation had. There must, however, be Naturals who thought as she did, who would carry his memory into the fourth millennium—perhaps even to the fifth if the limited research in encephalic augmentation that was still permitted eventually solved the problem of forgetfulness without eroding the capacity for empathy… “I don’t have much time, Michi,” the woman told him. “I’ll have to go.” “Of course,” he said, hauling himself from the bed into an upright position, ignoring her pantomimed protest.
“Don’t get up,” she said when she realized how determined he was. “Please—stay where you are. I’ll let myself out.” “Will you come again?” he asked, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to risk another possible humiliation.
“Yes,” she said. “I promise.” For some reason, he couldn’t even begin to believe her—and it was that, rather than the mere instruction, which made him sink back onto the bed and wait, supine, until he was sure that she had left the house.
When he finally managed to rouse himself, Michi went back into the outer room, without bothering to put his own suitskin on. He slumped upon the settee, drained and dejected, staring at the golden flowers that the woman had brought for him and mounted in his wall. They were garden flowers, but they were products of modern genetic art rather than ancient selective breeding. According to the young woman, they were one of Oscar Wilde’s designs—but for some reason he could not quite fathom, they reminded Michi of the kind of flowers one might put in a funeral wreath.
He wished that he had not lost his grip on the artistry of actual life. Like the soft caresses of data suits and the visual illusions of virtual reality, the rewards of ordinary “sensation” now seemed to him so remote from authentic intimacy as to be utterly worthless. In his first youth, which had all but disappeared