Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [70]
“The young used to outnumber the old, but they don’t now and never will again; the young are rare now, a protected species. Although the future which stretches before them seems limitless, it doesn’t seem to them to be theirs. Even if they can still envisage themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the earth, the age at which they will come into their inheritance seems a very long way off and likely to be subject to further delays. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the young are more resentful now than they have ever been before. It is the old who now have the more enthusiastic and more constructive attitude to the future; they expect not only to live in it, but also to own it, to be masters of its infinite estates.”
“I know all this,” Silas said sullenly, wishing that his itches were not so defiantly unscratchable.
“You know it,” said the man masked as Conrad Helier, “but you haven’t understood it. How, if you understood it, could you ever have thought of retirement? How, if you understood it, could you waste your time in pointless and undignified sexual encounters with the authentically young?”
“I can live my own life any way I choose,” Silas told his accuser coldly. “I’m not just old—I’m also free.”
“That’s the point,” said the ersatz Helier. “That’s why you’re here. You’re not free. Nobody is, who hopes and wants to live forever. Because, you see, if we’re to live forever, we have to live together. We’re dependent on one another, not just in the vulgar sense that the division of labor makes it possible to produce all the necessities of life but in the higher sense that human life consists primarily of communication with others, augmented, organized, and made artful by all the media we can devise. We’re social beings, Silas—not because we have some kind of inbuilt gregarious instinct but because we simply can’t do anything worthwhile or be anything worthwhile outside of society. That’s why our one and only objective in life—all the more so for everyone who’s a hundred and fifty going on a hundred and fifty thousand—ought to be the Herculean task of making a society as rich and as complex and as rewarding as we possibly can.”
“The only reason I’m not free,” Silas replied tersely, “is that I’ve been strapped to a fucking chair by a fucking maniac.”
Conrad Helier’s face registered great disappointment. “Your attitude is as stupidly anachronistic as your language,” he said—and went out like a switched-off light, along with the virtual environment of which he was a part. Silas was left entirely to himself.
Silas was stubbornly glad that he had had an effect on his interrogator, but the effect itself was far from rewarding. In the darkness and the silence he was alone with his discomforts, and his discomforts were further magnified by lack of distraction. He was also acutely aware of the fact that he had failed to obtain answers to any of the questions which confronted him—most urgently of all, what would happen to him now that Operator 101 had released his slanders onto the Web?
Mercifully—although mercy may not have been the motive—he was not left in the dark and the silence for long.
His senses of sight and hearing were now engaged by a kaleidoscopic patchwork of fragments excerpted from old and nearly new VE tapes, both documentary and drama. If there was any pattern of relevance in the order in which they were presented to him, he could not discern it—but he became interested in spite of that, not merely in the individual snatches that had been edited together but in the aesthetic experience of the sequence.
He “walked” on the surface of Mars, surveying the roseate desert and looking up into the tinted sky at the glaring daystars. He saw the rounded domes where the human Martians lived and watched the glass facets sparkle and glint as he changed his position. Then, on the horizon, he “saw” the