The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [129]
At the most elementary level, the Cyborganizers were merely the newest generation of apologists for cyborgization. They adopted a new title purely in order to make themselves seem more original than they were. In fact, there had always been such apologists around, but the increasing use of cyborgization in adapting people to live and work in space and the hostile environments of other worlds within the solar system had given new ammunition to those who felt that similar opportunities ought to be more widely explored on Earth.
The progress of the “new” movement followed a pattern that had now become familiar to all serious historians if not to the present-obsessed media audience. All the old controversies regarding “brain-feed” equipment surfaced yet again, refreshed by controversy, and all the old tales about wondrous technologies secretly buried by the world’s paternalistic masters began to do the rounds, neatly varnished with a superficial gloss of modernity. TV current-affairs shows initially treated the propaganda flow with amused contempt, but as the stream built toward a tide the casters began to feed off it more extravagantly, and hence to feed it, thus accelerating its ascent to fashionability.
The gist of the the Cyborganizers’ argument was that the world had become so besotted with the achievements of genetic engineers that people had become blind to all kinds of other possibilities which lay beyond the scope of DNA manipulation. They insisted that it was high time to reawaken such interests and that recent technical advances made in the field of functional cyborgization should be redeployed in the service of aesthetic cyborgazation. There was much talk of “lifestyle cyborganization.” The introduction into the latter term of the extra two letters did nothing to transform its real meaning but contrived nevertheless to generate a host of new implications. The Cyborganizers were, of course, very anxious to stress that there was all the difference in the world between cyborganization and robotization, the former being entirely virtuous while the latter remained the great bugbear of emortal humankind.
I would have been perfectly content to ignore the Cyborganizers had they only been content to ignore me. I am reasonably certain that they would have done exactly that if Tricia Ecosura had not agreed to meet face-to-face with Samuel Wheatstone, one of the movement’s most enthusiastic propagandists, while he was visiting Neyu in 2924. Even that occasion might have passed off harmlessly had I only had the good sense to stay out of the way—as I certainly would have done if I had known that Samuel Wheatstone had not always been content to wear the name his parents had given him. Because I had not, there seemed to be no harm at all in accepting Tricia’s invitation to take a stroll on the beach behind our hometree and say hello to her guest.
She had obviously mentioned me to him—why should she not?—and he was fully prepared to take delight in my confusion. I did not recognize his face, of course, because it had been so radically transformed by cyborgization. His eyes were artificial and his skull was elaborately embellished with other accessories—most of them, I presumed, ornamental rather than functional.
“It’s a great honor to meet you in the flesh at last, Mortimer,” he said to me, beaming broadly. “I’ve never forgotten our discussion, although I’ve not kept up with your work as assiduously as I should have.”
While I was still trying to work out the import of this greeting, Tricia said: “You didn’t tell me that you and Morty knew one another, Samuel.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. “I was using a different name when we last encountered one another. I fear that Mortimer still has no idea who I am—but it was two hundred years ago, and although our contest was transmitted in real time the space we shared was virtual.”
“You’re Hellward