The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [77]
Alas, even casters have to be right sometimes.
FORTY
It was the followers of a movement that had flourished at the very end of the twenty-fifth century and the beginning of the twenty-sixth who had actually coined the term Thanaticism. It had been an early folly of the last generation of false emortals, whose last representatives were now in the process of quitting the Earth. Some of those unlucky enough to have been born after the advent of Zaman transformations, resentful of the disastrous choice made by their foster parents not to take advantage of the new technology, had perversely elected to reject the benefits of rejuvenation too, making a fetish out of living only a “natural” life span.
At the time, the Thanaticists had often been bracketed in common parlance—mistakenly, I think—with the earlier cult of Robot Assassins, who had themselves been mistakenly thought of as a revival of the twenty-second-century movement of self-styled Eliminators.
The Robot Assassins had taken the view that the progressive cyborgization of double and triple rejuvenates equipped with ever-more-sophisticated IT was transforming them into “robots” no longer capable of empathizing with “true” human beings: implicitly sociopathic individuals. The result of this progressive dehumanization of the old, the Robot Assassins contended, was that Earth was falling into the hands of unhuman individuals whose lack of fellow-feeling would eventually manifest itself as malevolence toward their feeling kin. In order to prevent the “robotic revolution” the Robot Assassins had embarked upon a campaign of murder, while swearing an oath that they would commit suicide before suffering “robotization” themselves. It was this last aspect of their credo that had caused contemporary commentators to put the first Thanaticists in the same bracket, even though the Thanaticists did not advocate assassination as a political means.
In the twenty-sixth century no one had thought it possible that genetically endowed emortals could ever embrace Thanaticism, and the cult was conventionally regarded as a petty and essentially futile rebellion against fate, whose adherents would swiftly eliminate themselves from the fabric of history. There were, however, a few Thanaticists who encouraged the view that they were closely akin to the Robot Assassins by arguing that in spite of their exclusive reliance on biological mechanisms of longevity, true emortals would suffer robotization nevertheless and that the inheritors of Earth would eventually become indistinguishable from programmed artificial intelligences.
When the TV current affairs shows of the early twenty-eighth century began their earnest debate as to whether all of this madness might be reborn, I assumed that it was just talk for talk’s sake. Perhaps I underestimated the influence of the pundits and the power of talk for talk’s sake to generate self-fulfilling prophecies, but I cannot deny that I was dead wrong.
Most of the people who had begun, like Ziru Majumdar, to question whether the technologies to which they owed their preservation from pain, disease, and aging were denying them something in terms of experience were content merely to dabble with pain and other sensations associated with physical injury. Once such dabbling began, there was an inevitable temptation to take it further and further, testing and extending its limits. Among these supposed “connoisseurs of human experience” there emerged a curious