The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [140]
Off-world examples had prompted the Cyborganization fad but from the point of view of most off-worlders the wayward tides of Earthly fashion were the whims of the irredeemably decadent. The highkickers were serious about the possibilities of cyborgization, and there were many among them who felt that if cyborgization was the price they would have to pay to establish authentic Utopias in the ice-palace cities that awaited them on Titan and the Uranian moons, then it was a price well worth paying. There were not quite so many who felt that the work of galactic exploration ought to be the province of cyborgized humans rather than silver-piloted probes, but there were enough of them to force the progress of human-machine hybridization into ever-more-adventurous channels.
Every message I received from Emily Marchant in the thirtieth century seemed to come from a different person. Before 2900 even the high-kickers had been careful to retain their own faces, but Samuel Wheatstone’s extravagant reconstruction of his own appearance had accurately reflected the demise of that particular taboo. Emily was never one to support ornamental cyborgization, but she lost her former inhibitions about letting her artificial augmentations show. Her first set of artificial eyes was carefully designed to resemble the ones they replaced, but her second wasn’t, and the parts of her suitskin overlaying the flesh of her face gradually abandoned their attempts to reproduce the appearance that had once lain “beneath” them.
I asked Emily many questions about her metamorphosis, but she rarely thought them worth answering, and the long time delay between exchanges made it easy for her to ignore them. Her transmissions were always full of her own news, her own hopes, and her own fears—among which the fear of robotization and the fear of losing her identity did not seem to figure at all.
I found all this rather disturbing, but Emily seemed to find my own priorities equally strange and became increasingly insistent that the entire population of the Earthbound had become dangerously insensitive to the situations developing outside the system.
“It’s as if the hard-core Hardinists have washed their hands of the whole affair,” she complained in one message, delivered from the heart of one of her finest virtual ice-palaces. “Having despaired of exercising any control over the terraformation of Maya they seem to have decided that Earth is their only concern. I know they don’t censor the news, but they do exert an enormous influence on its agenda, and Earth’s casters seem to have followed their lead in dismissing almost all of the information-flow from outside the system as irrelevant and uninteresting. It’s not irrelevant, Morty. It’s infinitely more important than 99 percent of what happens on the Earth’s surface.
“No one on Earth seems to be in the least troubled by the attrition rate of the kalpa probes. People down there seem to think that because so many of the old Arks went missing it’s not surprising that so many of the kalpas have lost contact, but the cases aren’t similar at all. Something’s happening out there, Morty, and it has consequences for all of us. The Fermi paradox has been around so long that it’s lost its power to amaze or frighten the Earthbound, but we can still feel its urgency. Given Earth, Ararat, and Maya, the galaxy ought to be full of mature civilizations broadcasting away like crazy, but it’s not—and the search for possible Type-2 civilizations has drawn a complete blank. The discovery of Ararat and Maya tells us that we can’t be alone, but it’s no longer a question of where the hell are they. The question we ought to be asking—all of us, Morty, not just the highkickers—is what the hell are they?
“Whoever’s out there is much less like us than we’ve been prepared to assume, and the one thing we can be sure of is that contact is just around the corner, even if