Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [21]
“Just remember,” Madoc Tamlin said as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step toward immortality.”
Like the Eliminators, street slang always spoke of immortality rather than emortality—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could ever hope to provide. Not that anyone expected current technology to guarantee them more than a hundred and fifty years—but in a hundred and fifty years’ time, current technology would be way out of date. Those who got the very best out of today’s IT would still be around to get the benefit of tomorrow’s—and might, if all went well, eventually arrive at the golden day when all the processes of aging could be arrested in perpetuity.
According to the ads, today’s young people were solidly set on an escalator that might take them all the way to absolute immunity to aging and disease. As the older generation—who had already aged too badly to be brought back permanently from the brink—gradually died off, the younger would inherit the earth in perpetuity. Not that anyone believed the ads implicitly, of course—ads were just ads, when all was said and done.
Five
D
amon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit was more than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template precision with thinner webs. As the two moved together, though, he deliberately looked away at the ruined buildings to either side of the street.
His eye was caught by one of the items of graffiti sketched in luminous paint on a smoke-blackened fragment of wall. It read: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. It was an antique, so old that Madoc must have found it in a history book. In fact, he could imagine Madoc chuckling with glee when he discovered it, immediately appropriating it as part of the backcloth for his dramatic productions. No child of today, however dangerously he or she might want to live, would ever have come up with such a ridiculous slogan—although there were plenty of centenarians who might like to believe it of them.
Centenarians loved to see themselves as the survivors of the Second Deluge. Those who had made no effective contribution to the world’s survival were worse than those who had, swelling with absurd pride at the thought that they had endured the worst trial by ordeal that nature had ever devised and proved their worth. Such people could not imagine that anyone who came after them could possibly value the earth, or life itself, as much as they did—nor could they imagine that anyone who came after them could be as worthy of life as they were, let alone of immortality. No one knew for sure, but Damon’s suspicion was that a hundred out of every hundred-and-one Eliminator Operators were in their dotage.
He wondered what the neighborhood must have been like in the bad old days of the early twenty-first century, and what angry words might have been scrawled on the walls by boys and girls who really were condemned to die young. Throughout that century this neighborhood would have been crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for a revolutionary spark which had never come, thanks to the two plague wars—the first allegedly launched by the rich against the poor and the second by the poor against the rich. In the short term, of course, the rich had won both of them; it had taken the Crisis to restore a measure of equality and fraternity in the face of disaster. Now the Crisis was over and the New Utopia was here—but the neighborhood was still derelict, still host to darkness and to violence, still beyond the reach of supposedly universal civilization.
When the fight began in earnest, Damon couldn’t help looking back. He couldn’t refuse to watch, so he contented himself with trying to follow every nuance with a scrupulously clinical