The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [134]
“That’s absurd!” I protested—but it would have take far more than that to put him off.
“You pretend to be standing aside from the so-called war against death, as a painstaking chronicler and fair-minded judge,” he went on, “but you’re actually fully engaged in the final campaign of that war, and the army to which you’ve been conscripted is death’s. You’ve railed in the past against those who sought to restore a proper recognition of death’s reality and utility to human affairs, but you posed as an enemy of death merely to further death’s cause. You attacked Thanaticism, but you were yourself the most extreme and most insidious kind of Thanaticist. You purported to fight the devil by pretending that he did not exist, but what greater service could you do the devil than to persuade his victims that he was a mere mirage?
“In fact, Mortimer, you knew all along that death had not been banished from human affairs. You knew all along that what we choose to call true emortality is merely a postponement of the final reckoning. You knew all along that even so-called true emortals age physically, albeit very slowly, and that even if they didn’t, they would still age mentally by virtue of being trapped in the same physical matrix: becalmed, crystallized, and ultimately sterilized. Cyborganization is robotization by another name, you say. Very well—I accept the assertion. The time is long past for the idea of robotization to be reclaimed from those who use it unthinkingly as a mere insult. Let us call it by its proper name: androidization—for what we are talking about is, after all, a petrifaction of the flesh, a death-in-life, a silverization of the living personality.
“If we are truly to live forever, Mortimer, then we must be forever open to the possibility of change, and in order to do that, we must be prepared not merely to transform our flesh by genetic engineering but augment and enhance it by mechanical supplementation. Mere humans cannot live forever; the best they can ever hope for is to exist forever—but a cyborg is an evolving being, a being for whom future possibilities are infinite. Whoever opposes cyborganization opposes life itself. Whoever condemns cyborganization is not merely a historian but a champion of death, a Thanaticist in the truest and most sinister sense of the word.
“I was a Thanaticist myself, in my youth, but all I ever advocated was the right of human beings to complete the processes of death that shaped their bodies and their personalities, to follow through its patient artwork. When you argued with me then you refused to concede that you or I or anyone should exercise that right, lest we should sacrifice greater and more wonderful opportunities—yet here you are again, refusing to concede that you or I or anyone human should exercise the right to explore those greater and more wonderful opportunities, lest we should sacrifice the privilege of dying as we are. You have immersed yourself so deeply in the history of death, Mortimer, that you have become death’s last and best ally on Earth.”
And so on. Insult after stinging insult—but never to the point of actual injury. It was, after all, only a game. It was all nonsense, but it washed over me like an irresistible tide. I couldn’t fight it within the limitations of the live debate. I went down to ignominious defeat, and I went gracelessly.
I had to admit that Wheatstone did what he had come to do with a certain flair—and he looked magnificent, especially in close-up. He had made further modifications to his skull fixtures, and his mechanical eyes had the most remarkable stare I had ever encountered.
Afterward, he said: “I don’t suppose you’ll thank me for all the money you’ll make this time around either, but I don’t mind. All I need is the knowledge of a kindness done, a generous impulse served. All I ask in return is that when you finally get around to the history of the twenty-eighth and thirty-first centuries, you grant me a couple of modest footnotes.”
I promised him that if