Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [71]
He saw earth-moving machines on the fringe of the Australian superdesert, laying out the great green starter plane which would begin the business of soil manufacture, bridging the desiccation gap which had deadened the land in spite of all life’s earlier attempts to reclaim it. A sonorous voice-over pumped out relentless adspeak about the technical expertise behind the project: glory, glory, glory to the heroes of the genetic revolution . . ..
He saw a gang fight in the derelict suburban wasteland of a city he couldn’t name: young men costumed and painted like crazy fetishists, wielding knives and razors, eyes wild with adrenalin and synthetic ecstasy, living on and by the edge. He watched the vivid blood spurt from wounds, and he winced with sympathy because he knew full well that these would-be savages must be equipped with relatively primitive internal technology, which provided elementary protection against permanent injury but left them horribly vulnerable to pain and the risk of death. He heard their bestial cries, their wordless celebration of their defiance of civilization and all its comforts, all its protective guarantees . . ..
It was as if the virtual aspect of the life of modern man were being condensed into a stream of images. Silas couldn’t help but feel annoyed about the fact that his captors seemed hell-bent on educating him, but the process had a curious fascination of its own. Much of the imagery was, of course, “reality-based”—videotapes of actual events reformatted for VE playback, sometimes in 2-D, sometimes in 3-D—but even in the documentary material, reformatted footage was juxtaposed and mingled with synthesized material produced by programmers. Today’s programmers were almost good enough to synthesize lifelike fictions, especially when they used templates borrowed from reality-based footage which could be mechanically animated and subtly changed without losing their photographic appearance.
With only a hood at his disposal, Silas couldn’t obtain the full benefit of such illusions, most of which were designed to provide tactile sensations with the aid of a full-body synthesis suit, but the detachment that was heir to limitation made it all the more difficult to tell the reformatted real from the ersatz.
Silas saw himself standing by Conrad Helier’s side, listening to the older man saying: “We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge. It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. . . .”
He saw two women, naked and oiled, caressing one another sinuously, engaged in carefully choreographed mutual masturbation, first with fingers and then with tongues, moving ceaselessly, putting on an ingeniously artful and tantalizing display for voyeurs. The soundtrack was soft music, overlaid by heavy breathing and gasps of simulated ecstasy, and the flesh of the two women seemed to be taking on a life of its own, a strange glow. Their faces were changing, exchanging features; they seemed to flow and merge, as though the two were becoming one as the carefully faked climax approached. . . .
Silas recognized this as one of his foster son’s compositions, as crudely and garishly libidinous as one might expect of a young man’s imagination. He was glad when it was replaced by scenes from a food factory, where tissue cultures were harvested and processed with mechanical efficiency and hygiene by robot knives and robot packagers.
After that there was more Conrad Helier, this time in closeup—which meant that it was probably faked. “We must be sure,” the probably fake Conrad was saying, “that our motives are pure. We must do this not to secure an advantage for ourselves, but for