The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [155]
“All in all,” I said out loud, figuring that I could be forgiven for laboring the point, “we’re utterly and absolutely fucked, aren’t we? Cutting through all that bullshit about imponderables, the simple fact is that there’s nothing up top capable of taking us aboard—nothing, at any rate, that could possibly get to us before we spring another leak or run out of oxygen, whichever happens first. We’re going to die.”
“While there’s life, sir, there’s hope,” the silver insisted, with heroic stubbornness.
I suppose, given the circumstances, that it too could be forgiven for laboring the point. I could easily imagine Emily Marchant saying exactly the same thing, and meaning it.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Are you scared of dying?” I asked the silver, dispiritedly, when an admittedly brief silence became too oppressive. High-grade AIs often express emotion, but philosophers remain divided as to whether their words actually signify anything. I knew that the navigator’s answer couldn’t possibly settle the matter, but it seemed reasonable enough to ask the question.
“All in all, sir,” it said, copying my phraseology in order to promote a feeling of kinship, “I would rather not die. In fact, were it not for the philosophical difficulties that stand in the way of reaching a firm conclusion as to whether or not machines can be said to be authentically self-conscious, I would be quite prepared to say that I am scared—terrified, even.”
“I’m not,” I observed. “Do you think I ought to be?”
“It’s not for me to say, sir,” my ever-polite companion replied. “You are, of course, a world-renowned expert on the subject of death and the human fear of death. I daresay that helps a lot.”
“Perhaps it does,” I agreed. “Or perhaps I’ve simply lived so long that my mind is hardened against all novelty, all violent emotion, and all real possibility. Perhaps, in spite of all my self-protective protestations in The Marriage of Life and Death, I’ve become robotized. Perhaps, in spite of all their self-deluding protestations, all emortal men really are bound to kill off alternative pathways in the brain to the extent that they become mere machines, or at least something less than truly human. Perhaps I’ve become even more robotized than you. Perhaps all my mental activity during these last few hundred years has been little more than a desperate attempt to pretend that I’m more than I really am. What, after all, have I really accomplished?”
“If you think you haven’t accomplished much,” the silver said—and this time it was being sarcastic—”you should try navigating a snowmobile for a while. I think you might find your range of options uncomfortably cramped. Not that I’m complaining, of course. We machines are programmed never to complain.”
“If they scrapped the snowmobile and re-sited you in a starship,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be you any more. You’d be someone else.”
“Right now, sir,” the machine replied, with devastating logic, “Pd be happy to risk those kinds of consequences. Wouldn’t you?”
“Somebody once told me that death was just a process of transcendence,” I commented, idly. “Her brain was incandescent with fever induced by some tailored recreational disease, and she wanted to infect me with it to show me the error of my life-bound ways.”
“Did you believe her, sir?” the silver enquired, politely.
“Certainly not. She was stark raving mad.”
“It’s perhaps as well,” the silver said, philosophically. “We don’t have any recreational diseases on board.