Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [135]
“You’re right,” she admitted. “For us, if for no one else, nice statistical distinctions are important. What’s your point?”
“For a long time, Ahasuerus must have been field leaders in longevity research. Your heavy investment in biotech put you on the crest of the wave—and you presumably had a healthy and mutually supportive relationship with other researchers, all the way from Morgan Miller to Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal. You were all on the same side, all trading information like good team players. Then PicoCon and OmicronA came at the problem from a different angle, with a different attitude. They’re the field leaders now, aren’t they? While they’ve been forming their own team, yours has broken up. Nowadays, it must require serious industrial espionage to discover what the boys across the street are up to, and exactly how far they’ve got.”
“The Ahasuerus Foundation is not involved in industrial espionage,” she informed him as stiffly and as flatly as she was bound to do.
“It’s not simply a matter of there being a new team in town, is it?” Damon went on softly. “The real problem is that they’re trying to redefine the game. They’re moving the goalposts and rewriting the rules. They’re worried about your willingness to play by the new rules because they’re worried about the terms of your charter—about the responsibility you owe to Adam Zimmerman. Is it possible, do you think, that they’re anxious that letting Adam Zimmerman out of the freezer might be tantamount to letting the cat out of the bag?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Hart?”
“Let me put it this way, Dr. Trehaine. It might well be that the people with the very best internal technology would consider it desirable, or even necessary, to play down its power: to maintain the belief that what people insist on calling immortality not only isn’t immortality but isn’t even true emortality. It might well be that the people who control the IT megacorps consider it desirable or necessary to persuade their would-be heirs that patience is still the cardinal virtue—that in order to inherit the earth they only have to wait until their elders lose their memories, their minds, and, in the end, their lives. If that reality were mere appearance and illusion—if all the patience in the world wouldn’t be enough to allow the young to come into their inheritance—what hope would there be for people like me? What is there to wait for, if my generation can never become the inheritors of Earth?”
“If you think that we already have true emortality, Mr. Hart,” Rachel Trehaine said drily, “you’re mistaken. I can say that with certainty.”
“I’m not sure how much your certainty is worth, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon told her bluntly, “but even if you’re right—what about the escalator? If IT really is advancing quickly enough to put true emortality in the hands of people now alive, what will it be worth to the young? While each generation thinks that it has a chance to be the first to the top of the mountain, the philosophy of Elimination will remain the province of outsiders—but as soon as it becomes generally known that the summit has been claimed, and claimed in perpetuity, the Eliminators might become a valuable asset to those whose uneasy heads are only a few funerals away from the crown.
“You’re the professional data analyst, Dr. Trehaine—you’re in a far better position than I am to balance all the variables in the equation. How do you like the Eliminators? How far away are we, in your estimation, from an undeclared war between the young and the old? And what, if you were a rising star in the Pico-Con/OmicronA constellation, would you want to do about it?”
“I think you’re being ridiculously melodramatic,” said Rachel Trehaine calmly. “We live in a civilized world now. Even if everyone knew that they were truly emortal, they’d have better sense than to go to war for ownership of the world. They’d know perfectly well that any such war might easily end up destroying the prize they were fighting for. Wouldn’t it be better to live forever, happily and comfortably, in a world you didn