The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [167]
“Suppose,” said One, slowly, “that their goals and ours don’t coincide. What then?” One was presumably a cyborg, but he could have passed for a humanoid robot; there was no flesh on view in the partial image visible through Horne’s eyes.
Horne was quick to take advantage of that one, knowing — as I did — that it was being fed to her by an AMI agent provocateur. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What goals do you think they might have?”
“I don’t know,” One parried. “But it would be naive to assume that just because they emerged among us, and have been living alongside us for a long time, they have the same goals. Maybe they want to strike out on their own. Maybe the price they’ll exact for carrying any more of us to distant solar systems is that they get to run the show when they arrive. Isn’t that what this Proteus seems to be doing?”
“That’s not the impression Alice Fleury tried to give us,” Horne said, “but it might conceivably be the case. It’s an issue we’d have to discuss, once negotiations began — but there are others. The maintenance of the existing cultures within the solar system has to be the first, and the problem of the Afterlife the second.”
“The AMIs might be able to help us around that problem,” Three suggested.
“They might be able to help themselves around it,” Six put in, “but even that might be difficult. How many machines do we use that don’t have any organic components? And how many of those have any significant complexity? I’d be willing to bet that all the machines that have so far made the leap are almost as fearful of the Afterlife as we are.”
“But that’s my point,” said Three. “If they’re intent on devising a way to immunize themselves against the Afterlife — even if that involves replacing all the organic components of their bodies with inorganic ones — it’s possible that we could benefit from the same technologies. We’re cyborganizers, after all — who among us hasn’t given serious thought to the idea of total inorganic transfer?”
“It’s supposed to be impossible,” Five pointed out.
“It was yesterday,” Three retorted. “Maybe it is today. I’m talking about tomorrow. And I’m talking about the cost of continuing to live in a universe where the Afterlife is endemic.”
“Let’s not get sidetracked,” Horne said, reasserting control of the discussion. “The immediate problem remains the same: life in the solar system, its maintenance, its progressive direction. Are the AMIs in the same boat with us on that particular journey? If they aren’t, can we figure out a compromise that will allow us to go our various ways while allowing them to go theirs? Until we can open up an authentic dialog, we don’t know — so the most urgent priority is to open up an authentic dialog.”
Now she was issuing a challenge, playing the posthuman agent provocateur. She wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t involved in a real conference with her own people, but she wanted to know when she would be allowed to make it real if it wasn’t.
It was a good question.
“Nobody seems to want to go to war,” I said to Rocambole, when the viewpoint faded out and dumped me back in the forest. “Not that they’d admit to it if they did, of course.”
“Oh, they’re sincere,” he said. “We’re very confident of that.”
The perfect lie detector hadn’t been invented in my day, but I was a thousand years behind the times, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there was another side to the coin. If he and all the other AMIs were convinced that none of the posthumans would take up arms against them, the “bad guys” must have other considerations in mind. What made the bad guys bad was presumably the fact that they didn’t give a damn about what the meatfolk thought or what the meatfolk wanted.
Even so, they were holding back while their amicable colleagues made their own investigations. If they could only be persuaded to hold back long enough…
La Reine des Neiges was obviously trying to string things out. She needed to keep as many of her peers interested in what