The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [133]
“That’s exactly what Samuel means by a sketchy caricature,” Tricia told me. “We’re much more sophisticated than the old advocates of uploading. We’re talking about gradual personal evolution, not abrupt metamorphosis. We’re talking about the evolution of the body beyond genetically specified limits. We’re talking about the expansion of the self. Fabers and their kin are already redefining their own selfhood by altering their physical makeup, and they already know that however clever genetic engineers might become in adapting men for life in microworlds or within the ecospheres of Earthlike planets, only cyborgization can create entities capable of working in genuinely extreme environments. We’re already doing it. Everybody with IT is already a cyborg, and everybody in the outer system is perfectly at home with the idea that the time has come to let IT expand into ET—external technology.
“It’s because the mind is a condition of the whole and not an inhabitant of the part that we’re already engaged in a process of machine-enhanced mental evolution. That’s the very essence of cyborganization, and the only reason you can’t see it, Morty, is that you’re stuck in the past, refusing to accept release from the prison oí frail flesh. The day will come when you want to live in the future, Morty—and that’s when you’ll have to accept that the only way to avoid becoming a robotically petrified mind in a slowly decaying body is to evolve”
SIXTY-SEVEN
It was by testing argumentative strategies on Tricia that I derived the slogan that I was determined to carry into battle against Samuel Wheatstone. The incantation that I hoped to use to rally the media audience to my cause was Cyborganization is robotization by another name. I didn’t tell Tricia, of course, in case she passed it on to Wheatstone, but I did confide it to Lua Tawana, after swearing her to secrecy.
I think she kept the secret, but even if she didn’t, she wasn’t responsible for what happened. The simple fact is that Samuel Wheat-stone would have beaten me anyway, because he was a better player of the media game than I was. It was, after all, his vocation. He was a professional fool, and I was a serious historian.
I never really stood a chance.
I did put up a slightly better show against Nyxson/Wheatstone than I had the first time around. I managed to get more of my own argument on to the record, and I did contrive to repeat my chosen slogan often enough to make it a standard item of popular rhetoric, although it was spoiled by the extra spin that he managed to impart to it. In spite of my preparations, I was completely unready for Wheatstone’s main line of attack.
Tricia told me afterward that she was as surprised as I was, and I believed her. Samuel Wheatstone’s attempts to imagine himself in my shoes had obviously been far more successful than my attempts to put myself in his, and he had worked out how to sting me with callous precision.
Before the broadcast began I thought myself sufficiently mature to be unaffected by any probable insult. Perhaps I was—but it had not seemed possible, let alone probable, that Wheatstone would sink so low as to charge me with being a closet Thanaticist.
“Your interminable book is only posing as a history,” he told me, languidly. “It’s actually an extended exercise in the pornography of death. The fact that your commentaries strive so hard to be boring and clinical isn’t a mark