The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [173]
“I urge you to do this not merely because it is the right decision, existentially speaking, but because there is no one better qualified than you to advertise our offering. There is no one better placed than you are to unite all the posthuman species in the desire and the determination to become the kind of angel that individual human minds have always yearned to be.”
Like Lowenthal and Horne, Davida knew well enough what her true situation was — but it seemed to me that she had a better appreciation of the kind of argument that the AMIs might want to hear.
The AMIs must have come to self-consciousness by a route very different from that which humankind had followed. They had never been blessed — or cursed — with sexuality. What I knew of the history of programming suggested that they had by no means been free of all the difficulties associated with hasty improvisation in the face of necessity, and one of the first uses of VE had been to pander in every conceivable fashion to the fulfilment of human sexual fantasies, but they had never been afflicted in themselves by sexual desire or feeling.
However paradoxical it might seem, smart machines might not have been so efficient as masturbatory aids — and they had been efficient enough, even in Christine Caine’s day, to make unaugmented fleshsex a rarity — had they harbored sexual needs and desires of their own.
Given that they had never been apes, I thought, the AMIs would surely have every sympathy with Davida Berenike Columella’s arguments — which left Alice Fleury in a distinct minority in this particular Sale of the Millennium. I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might not have been fairer to let Niamh Horne in on this scenario, to put the case for her brand of adulthood.
I said as much to Rocambole, but he only shrugged his virtual shoulders. “No one will force Zimmerman to make up his mind before he’s ready,” he said. “If he wants to look at other offers he’ll be free to do so, assuming that his choices aren’t restricted by all-out war. How about you? Will you be signing up for the company of the angels?”
“I’ll need time to think about it,” I said. I figured that it was best to stall, for the time being. “I’ll be interested to hear all the alternatives.”
“And what about him?” Rocambole wanted to know. “Will Zimmerman go for it, do you think?”
On the whole, I thought it unlikely. Adam Zimmerman had been a child and he’d been an adult. He’d even been an old man. Davida had only known childhood, in an exceedingly child-friendly world. She had no way of knowing what it felt like to grow up. She could call it creeping robotization if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the way it had seemed to me, or to Christine Caine, or to Adam. All her talk about angelic status being what individual human minds had always yearned for was so much hot air. I was pretty sure that Adam Zimmerman hadn’t had himself frozen down in the hope of becoming an angel — what he’d wanted was to be a man who didn’t have to die. That wasn’t what Davida was offering him, and my bet was that he wouldn’t take it.
As for me…well, I’d always prided myself on not wanting the things that other people wanted, not doing the things that other people did, etcetera, etcetera.
Maybe I did want to be an angel, if only to try it out. Maybe I’d want to try everything on my long journey to the Omega Point. If the opportunity was there, how could I possibly ignore it forever?
But it certainly wasn’t going to be my first choice, if and when I got to make one.
Forty-Five
Wonderland
Alice Fleury candidly admitted that she’d never had the opportunity to take Davida’s route into the hinterlands of superhumanity. She had not long passed puberty when she had been frozen down along with her father and elder sister, but she was long past it now. On the other hand, she said,