The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [164]
He grinned, in apparent approval. And why shouldn’t he, if he really were a friend? “Why do you think they’ve got the argument backwards?” He asked.
I wondered briefly whether he even existed, or whether he was just a puppet that la Reine des Neiges was using to speak to me while pretending, for her own mysterious reasons, that she wasn’t.
“I may not have been an Eliminator,” I told him, “but I read the bulletin boards. I knew the theory, and all the catchphrases. Quote, the first prerequisite of immortality is the ability to move beyond good and evil, unquote. Throughout history, people had mostly defined good in terms of the absence of evil: the amelioration of hunger, the end of war, the conquest of disease, and above all else the avoidance — for as long as possible — of death. In a world without death, so the argument went, we would have to think in different terms. We would have to take the absence of all the evils for granted, and would have to define good in positive terms: in terms of achievement. Instead of thinking in terms of good and evil we would have to learn to think in terms of good and bad, where bad was the negative term, signifying an absence of good.
“We had already made a start, in aesthetics: bad art wasn’t an active evil, it was just the absence of any of the qualities that could make art good. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any universal consensus as to which works of art actually were good, or why. The principle remains, though: emortals shouldn’t define the goodness of their lives in terms of the absence of manifest evils which have been stripped of all their power; they’re supposed to do it more constructively.
“That’s what the Eliminators thought a thousand years ago, and that’s what they’d think today if they could eavesdrop on Lowenthal and Ngomi the way we just did. They’d assert that the threat of the Afterlife isn’t sufficient to justify the perpetuation of posthuman life, and that if we’re to justify our continued existence convincingly, we ought to do it in terms of positive goals.
“It’s not enough for us all to be on the same side against a common enemy — we need to know what the side will play for once the enemy’s dead and gone. Hardinism doesn’t qualify as an answer because it’s an implicitly defensive philosophy: a matter of protecting the commonweal from the evils of unchecked competition. The owners of Earth are stuck in a rut, and they’d be fools to think that the ultrasmart machines will simply jump in along with them to help dig it deeper. The real question is: what do we intend to do after the Afterlife is defeated? What’s the grand prize we’re all working towards?”
When I stopped, my mechanical friend merely waited, as if he expected me to provide definitive answers to those questions. It might have been flattering, if I hadn’t understood the game as well as I did.
“I’m not an Eliminator,” I insisted, again. “I’m not about to deny anyone their right to exist because they can’t come up with an answer to a question like that. Nor am I fool enough to imagine that you’d be interested in my particular solution to the existential challenge when you have real experts like Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray on hand. What you’re really challenging me to do — again — is to guess your answer. You want me to be a part of this because you want me to serve as a human mouthpiece for your own ideas. I don’t think it will work. I don’t think the ditherers will listen.”
He seemed surprised by that, and a trifle perturbed — both of which suggested that he really was an independent entity, not a puppet. “That might be a dangerous assumption,” he said, blandly. He meant dangerous to me, and to everything I might hold