Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [78]
The young woman was right, of course—all true pioneers so far outstripped the ambitions of their contemporaries that they were condemned to perdition for their bravery—but she could not know the true cost of his abandonment of the phenomenal world, any more than she could know the real effect of his long imprisonment.
“One day,” Michi had actually said to the judge who had pronounced sentence upon him from the conventional safety of a virtual courtroom, “the world will despise the kind of cowardice whose representative you are. Michi Urashima, the men of the future will say, was demonized by those too dull to see that he was the seed of the Afterman. Those future men will not be prisoners within their own skulls, rotting in the dungeons of their incompetent wetware. The crude paths which I have hacked out will be built by future generations into the roads of freedom.
Our children’s children will live forever, and they will wear the crowns of Emperors of Experience: crowns of silicon which will give them the memories they will need, the calculative capacities they will need, and all the ecstasies that they will not be ashamed to demand. Our children’s children will be properly equipped for eternal life.” Even now, he was certain that he had been right—but still he was forced to count the cost of his martyrdom.
Michi was wise enough to understand the kinds of fear which his experiments had inspired in those who condemned him. He knew now that there was real cause for anxiety in their nightmarish visions of people made into robotic puppets by external brainfeed equipment, either by operant conditioning or straightforward usurpation of the command links to the nervous system. He had responded to those fears in the same speech, appropriating the defense offered by the pioneers of the Genetic Revolution. “All technologies can be used for evil ends as well as good ones,” he had said, “but willful ignorance is no protection. Biotechnology provided the means for hideous wars, but it also provided the defenses which prevented their devastations from becoming permanent and freed humankind from the oppressions of the Old Reproductive System. What we require, as we face a future of limitless opportunity, is not blind fear and denial but a clear-sighted sense of responsibility, and the means to undo all the evils of oppression—including the oppressions of our imperfect evolutionary heritage.” That too had been true—but it had not been sufficient then to lay the fears of others to rest, and it was not sufficient now to quell his own anxieties.
The simple fact was that he had not, in the end, succeeded in freeing himself from the oppressions of his imperfect evolutionary heritage. His purpose had been to add to the sum of human freedom by increasing the power which individual consciousness had over its own recalcitrant wetware, and he had indeed added to that sum, but his own freedom had been lost, and not merely by imprisonment. He had never been intimidated by the fears of those who believed that brainfeed equipment would provide new technologies of enslavement and new technologies of punishment, preferring to concentrate his own efforts on the pursuit of empowerment and pleasure—but in the end, he had lost more than he had expected, and gained less than he had hoped.
Whatever the woman said, and whatever she believed, he was what he was, and it was not enough.
In the hope of shaking himself out of his lachrymose mood, Michi stood