Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [69]
“I don’t understand,” Silas said. “The trial tape even looks like a fake. You didn’t need me at all. You could have put that farce together without any of the snippets of actual speech that you borrowed. If you already knew what you were going to put in my so-called confession, why did you bother throwing all those questions at me?”
He knew, even as he made this speech, that it was ridiculously optimistic to suppose that the fact that he had not been hurt yet meant that he was not going to be hurt at all, but he was telling the simple truth when he said that he didn’t understand.
“It’s useful to have some authentic footage on which to build,” said the man in the Conrad Helier mask, in Conrad Helier’s voice, “but the only thing I really needed from you was your absence from the world for the three days which it would take to flush out your IT and reduce you to the common clay of unaugmented human flesh.”
“Why have you bothered to do that,” Silas wanted to know, “if you didn’t intend to use real screams in your little melodrama? Do you intend to interrogate me under torture, or are you just making the point that you could have if you’d wanted to?”
“There you are,” said the man who was not Conrad Helier. “You are beginning to understand. I knew you could. If only you’d been able to understand a little earlier, all this might not have been necessary. The world has changed, you see—a whole century has passed since 2093. It may have been unlike any other century in history, by virtue of the fact that many of the people who really mattered in 2093 are still alive in 2193, but it still packed in more extravagant changes than any previous century. Whatever the future brings, it will never produce such sweeping changes again. You’ve changed too, Silas. You probably seem to yourself to be exactly the same person you were at twenty-six, but that’s an understandable illusion. If you could only look at yourself from a detached viewpoint, the changes would be obvious.”
“So what?”
The fake Conrad Helier was already standing at ease, but now he put his hands into his pockets. In the sixty years that he had known him, Silas had never seen Conrad Helier put his hands into his pockets.
“It used to be reckoned that people inevitably became more conservative as they got older,” the man in the white coat said, with only the faintest hint of irony in his earnest expression. “Young men with virile bodies and idealistic minds, it was said, easily embraced utopian schemes for the radical transformation of society. Old men, by contrast, only wanted to hang on to the things they already had; even those who hadn’t made fortunes wanted to hang on to the things they were used to, because they were creatures of habit. The people who spoke out against technologies of longevity—and there were people like that, as I’m sure you can remember—often argued that a world ruled by the very old would become stagnant and sterile, fearful of further change. They prophesied that a society of old people would be utterly lacking in potency and progressive zeal, devoid of any sense of adventure.
“They were wrong, of course. Their mistake was to equate getting older with nearing the end. The old became conservative not because of the increasing number of the years they’d lived but because of the dwindling number of the years that still lay before them. The young, whose futures were still to be made, had a strong vested interest in trying to make the world better as quickly as was humanly possible; the old, who had little or no future left, only wanted to preserve what they could of their old and comfortable selves. Things are very different now. Now, the prospect of true emortality lies before