The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [127]
Asked whether this profusion, coupled with a tendency to guard their integrity, might eventually bring about a competition for resources as fierce, in its own way, as that which afflicted the billions of humans who were the AMIs’ unwitting neighbors, Alice opined that it already had.
That was when I began to understand why the business of “trying to prevent a war” was “not as simple” as I had initially imagined. When I tried to tot up the number of sides there would be in any war into which the contemporary solar system might be plunged, I soon ran out of fingers. I still wasn’t prepared to concede that Alice had been right when she adjudged that there were more than I could imagine, but I could see why she’d thought so.
There were lots of other questions, of course, but answers weren’t always forthcoming and I couldn’t follow the technical ones. I had particular difficulty figuring out exactly what had been done to Alice in the course of a long series of experiments in emortalization, but I gathered that she hadn’t been transformed to the same extent as some of her fellow experimentees. Every cell in her body was equipped with an artificial homeobox modeled on a Tyrian original, but she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter — not yet. If and when she returned to Tyre, a hundred or a thousand years in the future, she might well become a more accomplished wholeform shapeshifter, but for the purposes of her present mission it had been thought desirable that she maintain a single face and form as a norm.
Alice had IT, but its nanounits were far too stupid to qualify as aspects of Eido — whose principal motile units also had IT, much as human beings harbored commensal bacteria. She hadn’t undergone any significant cyborganization. If and when she returned to Tyre the options of becoming an independent or Proteus-linked cyborg would be open to her, but she thought it more likely that she would opt to be Eido-linked if she took that existential route.
Alice had no idea how long she might be capable of living, but she had every reason to think that her body was immune to aging, and considerably more resilient than the bodies of Earthbound emortals. In matters of tissue repair, she opined, the employment of specialist homeoboxes gave her a great advantage, most obviously in respect of the cytoarchitecture of her brain. Although she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter her capacity for systemic remodeling would allow her to preserve her personality for some considerable time even if seventy or eighty percent of her body mass were destroyed. She believed that the relative fluidity of her neural cytoarchitecture gave her additional protection against the Miller Effect and robotization.
At times, she sounded like a saleswoman. I presumed that she was setting out her stall for Adam Zimmerman, because she knew that he’d be offered other routes to emortality and she wanted to convince him that hers was the way to go. She knew that Christine and I would be equally interested, but Adam was the prize, in propaganda terms.
The members of her audience who were already emortal were less interested in this part of her story than I was, but when she told them how far we still were from Vesta they agreed to be patient. In time, she progressed to the parts that were of more interest to Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.
Alice was very hopeful that war between the AMIs could be avoided, not merely in the short term but forever. She thought it far more likely that their differences would eventually be resolved by dispersal — that once a decision had been reached about the future development of the solar system, those AMIs who did not wish to participate in the chosen project would simply leave for pastures new. There were, however, three problems