The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [131]
Unfortunately, seven days was all the time it required for the Cyborganizers to launch an all-out media attack on The History of Death, selecting it out as a “typical example of modern academic research,” guilty of “de-historicizing” cyborgization.
The commentary I had provided to the The Last Judgment actually contained only three brief references to early experiments in cyborgization, but none of them were complimentary and they swiftly became the Cyborganizers’ favorite example of the “sketchily caricaturish” attitude to cyborgization fostered by the world’s “Secret Masters.” Like all of my kind, the Cyborganizers alleged, I was in the pocket of the Hardinist Cabal. I was producing bad history, warped to the service of their hidden agenda, deliberately falsifying the past so as to to make it seem that organic-inorganic integration and symbiosis were peripheral to the story of human progress rather than its very heart.
It was the most blatant nonsense imaginable, but it emerged into the media marketplace at a time when anything connected to the cause of Cyborgization was newsworthy, and it became news.
If I had any defense to offer, Samuel Wheatstone ringingly declared to the world, he would be only too pleased to debate the matter in public.
I could not refuse the challenge, not because it would have seemed cowardly but because it would have been seen by the public at large as a tacit confession that I was a bad historian.
I didn’t want to rush into anything without preparing my ground, but time was of the essence. I had to find out what the Cyborganizers were all about in a tearing hurry, and to do that I had to wheedle my way back into Tricia’s good books. I shamelessly exploited the fact that the twelve-year-old Lua was genuinely distressed by our estrangement, and I managed to avoid getting sidetracked into mere technical discussion by including Lua in our educational discussions.
“The problem,” Tricia explained, pretending to talk to Lua as well as to me, “is that the earliest adventures in human-machine hybridization were carried out at a time when nobody had any real idea of what might be practical and what wouldn’t. Their mistakes generated a lot of bad publicity. It was a time when IT still stood for information technology, because there was no nanotech to produce internal technology. There were no sloths, let alone silvers, but the computers of the day were getting faster and faster, juggling what seemed to their users to be huge amounts of data. It seemed only natural to think of building bridges between the brain and clever machinery, so there was a lot of talk about memory boxes and psychedelic synthesizers. People who actually went so far as to build connection systems into their heads were regarded as madmen, or even criminalized, but that only made them seem more heroic to their supporters. They couldn’t know that the things they were trying to do were much more difficult than they thought.”
“Some of them were,” I agreed. “But we don’t make fun of the idea of slotting additional inorganic memory stores into the brain because it’s impossible, but because it no longer seems as necessary to us as it did to people whose so-called rejuvenation technologies tended to disrupt and diminish their existing memories. We don’t laugh at the idea of psychedelic synthesizers because they didn’t work—they just seem like absurdly blunt instruments now that we have a much better understanding of brain chemistry and a sophisticated VE technology that can produce the same sort of rewards with infinitely less risk. Anyway, the real problem was that one or two of the things the brainfeed brigade were trying to do turned out to be much easier to accomplish than their opponents thought.”
“What do you mean?” Lua asked, obligingly.
“I mean that one of the technologies that the world’s not-so-secret masters